5 - Free France, 1940–1941

Summary

René Cassin’s life in 1940 mirrored that of millions of other Frenchmen. First came the shock of the catastrophe; then the response. Most accepted the new situation as it then was; a small minority rejected passivity and accommodation. An even smaller minority – initially no more than a few hundred men and women – fled to England to start the fight again. René Cassin was one of them.

It is difficult today to put ourselves in their shoes. Those who left France to carry on the struggle arrived in Britain in a difficult state: sickened by defeat, disoriented, without family and friends; most were penniless and homeless. And, like René and Simone Cassin, most had absolutely no spoken English. Despite stirring talk of having lost a battle but not a war, how many of these people felt that they were living in a recurrent nightmare?

In the following year, René Cassin emerged from the shadow of this calamity. He knew periods of doubt and depression, periods of questioning as to whether both the cause and his life were lost. What is remarkable is not the anxiety of exile in a city under heavy aerial bombardment, but his ability, alongside an eclectic group of refugees, to weather the initial storm of German attacks from the air and official collaboration at home. By doing so, they managed to create what was to become de facto and then de jure a French Republican government in exile. In this effort Cassin played a major role.