Daniel Cordier
Jean Moulin’s secretary who later corrected many inaccuracies in accounts of the French Resistance
DANIEL CORDIER, who has died aged 100, was the wartime secretary and radio operator for Jean Moulin, the political head of the French Resistance. Having been trained by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) Cordier was parachuted into France in July 1942 and spent 21 months under cover, running a fast-growing secret administration for “Rex” – the cover name for de Gaulle’s delegate to the French Resistance and the only name by which the young man ever knew
“le patron”.
While building this secret bureaucracy, Cordier had to keep moving around the country, evading German radio tracking squads and the Gestapo’s network of French informers. He was responsible for most of the radio and written communications with London and was among the most important members of Rex’s team.
He was also responsible for allocating the funds that the various resistance networks demanded – a task that made him as many enemies as friends. His efficiency enabled le patron to build a relationship with the quarrelsome chiefs of the interior Resistance and eventually unify them under the leadership of General de Gaulle in the CNR, the National Resistance Council, in May 1943.
The experience left Cordier with a low opinion of Resistance politicians who, he recalled, had been chiefly interested in preventing their separate groups from being “vampirised” by de Gaulle. At a time when unity in the face of the enemy was essential, trained and disciplined soldiers such as Cordier found this attitude contemptible.
After the war he preferred to describe himself as a “Free Frenchman” rather than a “Resister”, emphasising the difference between those who had left France and those who remained.
Daniel Cordier enjoyed three lives, none obviously leading on to the next. He was born in Bordeaux as Daniel Bouyjou on 10 August 1920 (Cordier was his stepfather’s name) and following the divorce of his parents he was raised by his father and sent to private Catholic schools.
As a teenager he was attracted by the royalist, nationalist and anti-semitic views of Charles Maurras and joined Action Française which, together with its sworn enemy the French Communist Party, was the largest political grouping in France.
It was with these convictions that at the age of 19, in June 1940, Cordier, a very young soldier, heard his hero, Marshall Pétain, broadcasting an order to French forces to surrender. Cordier rejected this order and managed to get on to one of the last ships leaving Bordeaux.
The one idea in his head was “to kill some Germans”. He said after the war that for those French men and women who joined de Gaulle in London in the summer of 1940 the bond “lasted for life”. But the fact that throughout the conflict he had never fired a shot in anger left him with “a deep sense of shame”.
On arrival in London Cordier was allocated to the BCRA – the Gaullist intelligence service.
On June 21 1943, the day Jean Moulin was arrested by the Gestapo in the Lyons suburb of Caluire, Cordier was in Paris, which was his principal base. Despite the fact that his own safety was seriously compromised, he stayed on to work with Rex’s successor for another nine months until he discovered that the Gestapo had obtained his photograph.
Before the war Moulin, a senior civil servant, had been an amateur artist and aesthete, and Cordier’s interest in modern art had been awakened by his commander, who in May 1943 took him to an art gallery on the Île Saint-louis in Paris where there was an exhibition of watercolours by Kandinsky. Cordier thought they were terrible but said nothing and set out to learn.
The experience led to his second life after the war, when his success as a dealer in abstract art allowed him to open galleries in Paris and New York. By then he had become ashamed of his wartime anti-semitism and had started to engage in Left-wing politics.
One evening in 1977 Cordier – by then a prosperous art dealer living in Cannes – took part in an episode of the television programme Les Dossiers de l’écran, devoted to the leadership of the French Resistance.
One of the other participants was the former leader of the Right-wing group Combat, Henri Frenay. By the time Frenay had finished speaking Cordier was so angry that he decided to set matters straight. The remark that he had found unacceptable was the suggestion that Jean Moulin, the symbol of French resistance who had died under Gestapo torture having refused to talk, had in reality been a Communist agent.
As secretary to Rex, Cordier had constructed an enormous archive of correspondence, secret signals and calendars, the records of the Free French operations between July 1942 and March 1944. Before escaping from Occupied France he had buried this securely and after the war he recovered it.
It was this archive that enabled Cordier to start his third life as a historian who would eventually rewrite French Resistance history.
His third career started at a time when conventional historical studies of the period were paralysed by national guilt over the wartime collaboration and the persecution of French Jews. It was also hindered by the merciless grip of pro-communist ideologues who had dominated and distorted the national memory since the Liberation.
History professors in France in the 1980s said it was extremely difficult to persuade their doctoral students to take an interest in the period 1940 to 1944. But Cordier’s status as one of the heroic minority who had fought on throughout the war gave him a clear moral authority, and his exceptional talent for detailed research earned him academic respect.
His first notable intervention came in 1989 when he published the first volume of a proposed six-volume life of Jean Moulin with the overall title of L’inconnu du Panthéon. Two more 1,000-page volumes followed.
Ten years later he published La Republique des Catacombes, a 1,000page replacement for the remaining three volumes.
Cordier’s work was marked by its detailed documentation, which led one professional colleague to complain that Cordier spent so much time checking the accuracy of previously published work, and so little in interpreting it, that his books were almost unreadable.
None the less, as source material they were invaluable in correcting the numerous inaccuracies disseminated in the memoirs of the leading wartime actors. He put paid to Frenay’s claim that Jean Moulin had been a Soviet agent and established that Frenay himself had been much closer to Pétain than he subsequently chose to admit.
Cordier also traced the internecine war that was waged among the leaders of the interior Resistance – and by them against the delegate of General de Gaulle. He established the political, as opposed to the military, significance of Resistance.
Cordier’s initial “correction” of the leader of Combat was followed in 1997 by a detailed critique of the post-war claims of two leading Left-wing resisters, Raymond and Lucie Aubrac. This took place at an extraordinary symposium, organised at the request of Raymond Aubrac after the Aubracs had won a libel action against a revisionist historian who had accused them of betraying Jean Moulin at Caluire.
Cordier, a friend of the Aubracs, played a leading role on a panel of academics who concluded that while the elderly couple had not been involved in the arrest of General de Gaulle’s delegate, they had even so failed to answer a number of important questions.
In 1944, following the liberation of Paris, General de Gaulle made Daniel Cordier Companion of the Liberation, the highest French decoration of the Second World War. In 2018 he was awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur.
Cordier came out as gay in a memoir published in 2009,
Daniel Cordier, born August 10 1920, died November 20 2020