Daniel Cordier
Daniel Cordier (born August 10, 1920 in Bordeaux ) is a French resistance fighter, art dealer and historian.
As a former member of the right-wing Camelots du roi , he joined General de Gaulle's Forces françaises libres in June 1940 . In 1942 and 1943 he was Secretary to Jean Moulins , under whose influence he turned politically to the left. He later wrote an extensive, historically significant biography of Moulins. In 1944 he was appointed Compagnon de la Liberation ; after the war he was a painter, later a gallery owner and historian.
Life
Daniel Bouyjou-Cordier comes from Bordeaux , from a family of traders and followers of the royalist Charles Maurras . He is named after his stepfather Charles Cordier († 1976), the second husband of his mother Jeanne Gauthier († 1968).
Cordier studied at various Catholic universities.
Member of Action française
At the age of 17 he became an activist for Action française and founded the Cercle Charles-Maurras in Bordeaux .
As he writes in his autobiography Alias Caracalla own view, he was at the beginning of World War II fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti democrat and ultra-nationalist and wished even after its accession to the Forces Françaises Libres that Léon Blum , the socialist Prime Minister of the Popular Front ( Front populaire ), who was shot after a quick trial at the end of the war. He writes that without the articles by Maurras, the theorist of “ integral nationalism ”, he would never have joined the Resistance. But in contrast to his mastermind, he rejected the armistice out of patriotism.
The defeat of June 1940
In June 1940 he was with his family in Bescat in the south of France and was expected to be drafted on July 10th.
On June 17, he heard the first speech by Prime Minister Philippe Pétain on the radio and assumed that the Verdun winner would continue the war. He was outraged by the demand for a ceasefire. After gathering sixteen volunteers and hoping that France would continue the war, he embarked on June 21 in Bayonne on the Belgian cargo ship Léopold II , which was supposed to go to Algeria but eventually went to England .
The Resistance
Cordier reached Falmouth in Cornwall on June 25, 1940 and joined with his comrades on June 28 the first free French troops of the Légion de Gaulle . On the way he spent a few days at the Hotel Olympia, where he was assigned to the newly formed hunter battalion. He went through a training camp at Delville Camp throughout July . The battalion was stationed first in Camberley and then in Camp Old Dean , where Cordier completed his military training.
He joined the BCRA ( Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action , German Central Office for Reconnaissance and Action ), the foreign intelligence service of the Forces françaises libres in London, and was parachuted on July 26, 1942 in France near Montluçon . In Lyon arrived, he joined Jean Moulin, one of de Gaulle secretly appointed a member of the Comité national français , which was in fact the only member of this committee in France. Cordier adopted the code name Alain , based on the philosopher Émile Chartier , who had also called himself that.
He founded and ran Jean Moulin's secretariat and was his closest collaborator for eleven months. He managed its post and radio links to London, helped him to set up organs and services of the Resistance, and supported its efforts to unite the French internal resistance and put it under the direction of De Gaulle in London.
In Lyon, Cordier recruited Laure Diebold (secretary), Hugues Limonti (post), Suzanne Olivier, Joseph Van Dievort, Georges Archimbaud, Laurent Girard, Louis Rapp and Hélène Vernay one after the other . He later took most of them with him to Paris; Jean-Louis Théobald, Claire Chevrillon and Jacqueline Pery d'Alincourt joined them. In Lyon, Cordier was replaced by Tony de Graaff, with Hélène Vernay as secretary and Laurent Girard as courier .
This work led to the founding of the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR: National Council of Resistance) on May 27, 1943 . To do this, much friction and differences had to be overcome with the leaders of the Resistance and with Pierre Brossolette , another of De Gaulle's ambassador and competitor of Moulin.
After Moulin's arrest and death in July 1943, Brossolette demanded that Cordier be recalled to London. Cordier remained in the service of Moulin's successor, Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles (1912-2000), with the General Delegation until March 21, 1944 . Then he went over the Pyrenees to Spain, was interned there by Franco's people in the Miranda camp and only then returned to Great Britain.
BCRA White Paper
At the end of 1944 Cordier was commissioned to write a BCRA white paper, an official story with which u. a. Allegations that the BCRA committed serious crimes during the war should be refuted. The order came from André Manuel (1905–1988), one of the founders of the BCRA. Cordier laboriously obtained the BCRA files and set up a provisional archive in Paris. He began evaluating the material and, with the support of Vitia Hessel (1939–1986), Stéphane Hessel's wife , whom Cordier knew from both the Resistance, wrote the BCRA's white paper. At the end of November 1945, the first three parts were presented to General de Gaulle, who agreed to publication in the Éditions Gallimard , but had previously wanted the text to be validated by André Diethelm , Pierre Billotte and Geoffroy Chodron de Courcel . After de Gaulle's resignation in January 1946, the project fell into oblivion. The BCRA White Paper (French: Livre blanc du BCRA ) was never published; but it is kept in the French National Archives under the number "3AG2 / 1-3".
Suspicions
The historian Jacques Baynac (* 1939) writes in his book Présumé Jean Moulin (1940–1943) that Cordier might have been arrested by the Germans around June 14, 1943, a week before Moulin was captured (and thereby implies Moulin could have been betrayed by Cordier). Official files of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) also report Cordier's capture. For his part, however, Daniel Cordier declared: "I've never been arrested, otherwise I would have said it."
At the first trial of the railway worker René Hardy in Lyon in 1947, in which he was accused of having betrayed Moulin in Caluire to the Gestapo , Cordier spoke out for his guilt. And even decades later, after extensive historical research, he stuck to this view. Hardy was acquitted in two trials, 1947 and 1950. However, at his own trial in 1987, Klaus Barbie stated that Hardy had worked for him as a double agent.
Political beliefs
In collaboration with the radical socialist Jean Moulin, Cordier abandoned his right-wing extremist views and later professed his support for a humanist and non-Marxist socialism. At the end of the 1950s, together with Stéphane Hessel , he helped found the left-wing liberal Club Jean-Moulin . In 2017, between the two votes for the presidential election in France , Daniel Cordier opposed Marine Le Pen and considered her possible choice as "monstrous" designated.
Painter and art dealer
Soon after the end of the war, Cordier began a career as a painter, enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1946 and bought his first work in the Salon des Réalités nouvelles , a painting by Jean Dewasne .
For ten years he painted and collected: Arman , Braque , César , Chaissac , Dado , de Staël , Hantaï , Hartung , Hundertwasser , Kline , Mathieu , Ossorio , Reichel , Réquichot , Reuterswärd , Rouault , Sonnenstern , Soutine , Stankiewicz , Takis , Tàpies , Tinguely , Tobey , Villon , Viseux , Wols .
In November 1956, Cordier opened his first gallery in the eighth arrondissement of Paris and from then on worked as an art dealer . After a first exhibition on Claude Viseux, he exhibited together with Jean Dewasne , Jean Dubuffet and Roberto Matta . For eight years he exhibited many artists, many of whom he had discovered himself and supported. In 1964 he had to close the gallery; for economic reasons and because of the lack of interest in contemporary art in France. Cordier also ran a gallery in Frankfurt am Main between 1959 and 1963 , at Taunusanlage 21; he presented there u. a. from: Carl Buchheister , Dado, Karl Otto Götz , Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux , Manolo Millares , Louise Nevelson and Bernard Schultze . From 1964, Cordier organized large exhibitions.
In the exhibition Daniel Cordier. Le regard d'un amateur (1989) at the Center Pompidou presented artists: Art premier , Jim Amaral , Dieter Appelt , Arman , Bernard Bazile , Hans Bellmer , Pierre Bettencourt , Julius Bissier , Brassaï , Aristide Caillaud , César , Gaston Chaissac , Philippe Comar , Robert Combas , Dado, Thierry De Cordier , Fred Deux , Jean Dewasne, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp , Erró , Öyvind Fahlström , Claire Falkenstein , Yolande Fièvre , Eugène Gabritschevsky , Dominique Gauthier, Georgik , Simon Hantaï , Hans Hartung , Hessie , Horst Egon Kalinowski , Karen, Joël Kermarrec , Michel Lablais , Jean Le Gac , Augustin Lesage , Robert Mapplethorpe , Roberto Matta, Jean-Michel Meurice , Henri Michaux , Roland Michenet , Manolo Millares , Robert Morris , Michel Nedjar , Louise Nevelson , Christian d ' Orgeix , Alfonso Ossorio , Robert Rauschenberg , Jean-Pierre Raynaud , Bernard Réquichot , Yves Reynier , François Rouan , Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern , Bernard Schultze , Charles Simonds , Souki Sivalax , Richard Stankiewicz , Takis , Jean Tinguely , Gérard Titus-Carmel , Ursula , Nicolas Valabrègue , Bernar Venet , Claude Viallat , Claude Viseux, Joel-Peter Witkin , Christian Zeimert
Historian and biographer Jean Moulins
At the end of the 1970s, Daniel Cordier was shocked: Henri Frenay , also formerly a leading member of the Resistance, accused Jean Moulin, the first president of the CNR, of having been a communist agent. Cordier then decided to defend the memory of his former boss.
He was in the possession of Jean Moulin's archive and, after years of meticulous research, published a three-volume biography of Jean Moulins. It fundamentally renewed the history of the Resistance and rejected the accusations of Moulin's opponents.
methodology
Daniel Cordier emphasizes the unreliability of human memory and, as a historian, relies exclusively on written documents. He does not use oral statements and uses his own memories as a contemporary witness only to a very limited extent.
Many resistance fighters have erased important episodes from their memories. In 1983, during a symposium on the Conseil national de la Résistance (CNR) , Cordier had to present Christian Pineau with the written document that proved that he, Pineau, was the first (at the end of 1942) to think of a project for a Council of the Resistance. Pineau did not remember this episode and steadfastly refused to believe it.
Assessment of his historical work
After the war, many former Resistance leaders took a harmonizing view, preferring to keep quiet about the disputes, rivalries and differences they had had among themselves and with London, although these are abundantly documented. Therefore Cordier's work was often ignored or criticized by his former comrades; they accused him of undermining the unity of the former resistance fighters.
Others pointed out that under the guise of scientific objectivity, he aims to defend and justify Jean Moulin's work and positions; Just like the de facto control of the entire Resistance by France Libre when it was merged into the CNR (March 21, 1943); at the expense of those who disagreed with Moulin and supported competing projects. For the journalist Thierry Wolton , Cordier's books are a settlement with Henri Frenay and a hagiography of Jean Moulin instead of a biography.
Even so, Cordier's work is widely praised by historians for its wealth of information, perfectionism, and writing and analytical skills. In addition to defending a heroic and important figure of the Resistance and the history of France, she is considered a milestone in the history of the struggle of the "Army of the Shadows".
Autobiography
Daniel Cordier published his autobiography in 2009 under the title Alias Caracalla: Memoirs, 1940-1943 .
In the same year he revealed his homosexuality and announced that it would be a topic in the second volume of his memoir.
Les Feux de Saint-Elme , published in 2014, is the story of his emotional and sexual awakening at the Saint-Elme school in Arcachon , a religious boarding school for boys where he spent his youth. He was subject to the contradicting influences of André Gide and the Catholic Church in the person of his confessor , who persuaded him to renounce his love for a boy named David Cohen . This episode would shape his whole life.
Awards
- Bearer of the Croix de guerre 1939–1945 ( War Cross 1939–1945 )
- Compagnon de la Liberation , November 20, 1944
- Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor , December 31, 2017
Works
- Jean Moulin. L'Inconnu du Panthéon , Volume 1 of 3. Une ambition pour la république. Juin 1899 - Juin 1936 . Paris, J.-C. Lattès, 1989. 896 pp.
- Jean Moulin. L'Inconnu du Panthéon , Volume 2 of 3. Le choix d'un destin. June 1936 - November 1940 . Paris, J.-C. Lattès, 1989. 762 pp.
- Jean Moulin. L'Inconnu du Panthéon , Volume 3 of 3. De Gaulle capitale de la Resistance. November 1940 - December 1941 . Paris, J.-C. Lattès, 1993. 1480 pp. ISBN 2-7096-1291-7
- Jean Moulin. La République des catacombes, I . Paris, Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07-034974-6
- Jean Moulin. La République des catacombes, II . Paris, Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07-035519-8
- Alias Caracalla: mémoires, 1940-1943 . Paris, Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-2-07-074311-7
- Together with Paulin Ismard. De l'Histoire à l'histoire . Paris, Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-014184-5
- Les Feux de Saint-Elme, recit . Paris, Gallimard, 2014, 194 pp. ISBN 978-2-07-078634-3
literature
About the Resistance
- Jacques Baynac, Présumé Jean Moulin (1940–1943): esquisse de la Résistance , Paris, Grasset, 2007. ISBN 978-2-24-662811-8
- François Bédarida, Jean Moulin et le Conseil national de la Résistance . Paris, CNRS, 1998. ISBN 978-2-22-203428-5
- Laurent Douzou, La Résistance française, une histoire périlleuse . Paris, Seuil, 2005. ISBN 978-2-02-054112-1
On the Cordier-Frenay controversy
- Charles Benfredj, L'Affaire Jean Moulin: la contre-enquête , Paris, Albin Michel, 1990, 256 pp. ISBN 978-2-22-604908-7
archive
Daniel Cordiers' personal archive is located in the French National Archives under number 674AP21.
Movies
- Bernard George and Régis Debray , Daniel Cordier, La Résistance comme un roman , France 5, 2010.
- Alain Tasma, alias Caracalla , TV film based on the book of the same name by Daniel Cordier, 2013, played by Jules Sadoughi.
Web links
- The Guardian : For sale: treasures of wartime French spy who used art as his cover story , September 8, 2018
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stéphane Hessel: Dance with the Century. Memories . Piper, Munich, 2000. ISBN 3-492-22852-6 , pp. 219-226
- ^ Sébastien Albertelli: Des archives du BCRA au Livre blanc (French)
- ↑ Sébastien Albertelli: From the archives of the BCRA to the white paper (Ger.)
- ^ Naissance du Club Jean Moulin, Juillet 1958 , at Live2Times. Le passé vous appartient , online archive at wikiwix .
- ^ L'ex-secrétaire de Jean Moulin: "Leur revendication du gaullisme est une imposture" , interview of April 30, 2017 in the Journal du Dimanche
- ↑ Helmut Mayer: The works have to draw from delicate sources . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 2018-09-22, p. 17
- ^ Henri Frenay: L'Énigme Jean Moulin . Laffont, 1977
- ↑ Thierry Wolton: L'histoire interdite . JC Lattès, 1998. ISBN 978-2744115424 . Pp. 25–26, in the chapter "Une belle histoire de la résistance"
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cordier, Daniel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French resistance fighter, art dealer and historian |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 10, 1920 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bordeaux , France |