Franc Tireur - World War II

World War II

Two major Résistance groups adopted the name Franc-Tireur during the German occupation of France during the Second World War. The first to be established was the Franc-Tireur (movement), founded in Lyons in 1940. The second was Francs-tireurs partisans (FTP, Partisan irregular riflemen), which were established as the military branch of the French Communist Party (PCF). They became active in the resistance after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The groups named themselves after the French irregular light infantry and saboteurs who fought the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War.

A number of smaller resistance groups united in the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) under Pierre Villon, the former editor of the magazine, l’Humanité. Their job was four-fold: to destroy rail lines carrying men and materials to the eastern front; to sabotage factories working for the Germans; punish traitors and collaborators and to kill the occupying soldiers. “A librarian called Michel Bernstein became a master forger of false documents.” And France Bloch, a young chemist with two science degrees, who as a Jew had lost her job in the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, was given the job of making explosives.” France Bloch was later captured, and afterwards beheaded with an axe in Hamburg.

Although individual communists opposed the German occupation of France, the official Communist position was not to offer resistance, as the Soviet Union was in a non-aggression pact with Germany. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, this position changed. (For more information on the Soviet Union during World War II, see the article titled "German-Soviet War".)

The PCF initially called their group the Organisation Spéciale (OS); a number of its leaders had served in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (notably, "Colonel" Henri Rol-Tanguy).

FTP became the first resistance group in France to deliberately kill a German. In February 1944, the FTP agreed to merge with the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur.

After World War II, the PCF called itself the "party of 80,000 executed people" (le parti des 80 000 fusillés); it had great electoral success due to the FTP's prestige as a major part of the Résistance.

The foreign workers' section of the FTP, the FTP-MOI (Francs-Tireurs Partisans—Main d'Œuvre Immigrée), became especially famous after the Manouchian Group was captured, its members executed, and ten of its members advertised as foreign criminals by the infamous Affiche Rouge. The Manouchian Group operated in the Paris metropolitan area, but other FTP-MOI groups operated in Lyons and the South of France, where they carried out armed resistance. Many of its immigrant members throughout the country were Jewish artists, writers and intellectuals, who had gone to France for the cultural circles in Paris. Others had taken refuge in France to escape Nazi persecution in their home countries. Alter Mojze Goldman, father of Pierre Goldman and Jean-Jacques Goldman, was a member of FTP-MOI.