Foreign News: Flood Tide

“The hour has come,” said BBC’s French-language broadcast to Europe.

French resistance to Vichy and to the Nazis over the conscription of French workers had brought on strikes, sabotage, demonstrations, civil fighting. Before this, British and French spokesmen had cautioned the French people, telling them to lie low, to hold their fire, to keep their heads down, to move away from Allied bombing targets, to sabotage safely, to resist passively . . . until the time came.

Now they urged the maximum expenditure of resistance. The change was significant. BBC urged the French Empire and the French fleet to “throw all their power into the balance of victory. . . . There is only one France, and a France at war.”

Apparently, too, the Allies were supplying arms for “the hour.” Vichy found it necessary to broadcast a warning that those keeping arms or munitions dropped by parachute would be punished summarily.

Perhaps it was the spontaneity and extent of French resistance which caused the British and the Fighting French in London officially to encourage the new outbreaks of violence. Reports and rumors poured into London that:

> Ten thousand workers in the industrial regions, including Lyon, were striking. (Vichy admitted some strikes had been “attempted.”)

> Several cars of a train being assembled to move workers to Germany were demolished by an explosion.

> French citizenship rights were given 500 Gestapo agents to be sent to Vichyfrance.

> Women lay down across tracks to prevent conscript trains from leaving for Germany.

> Pierre Laval’s Mobile Guards and French Legion storm troopers had fired rifles and machine-gun volleys, hurled hand grenades into crowds of French demonstrators at Lyon and Ambérieu. Fifty-five deaths (which Vichy denied) were reported.

Perhaps the exiled French and the British were sailing with a tide they could not turn. Or perhaps the United Nations had decided at last that revolt in Europe was at flood tide now.