CONSERVATIVES WHO JOINED THE RESISTANCE

SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND JEAN MOULIN, DID FIGHT THE OCCUPIERS

As well, in the cemetery reserved to families of noble victims of the guillotine, plaques honor Resistance members who died in concentration camps...

The Picpus cemetery: please click and scroll down. 

...and others left memories alone.

To be sure, the left-right alliance was ambiguous

De Gaulle is accused of betraying Communist fighters at the end of the war.* Conservative fighters had nothing to do with that drama, but they shared the Left's patriotism, not its vision of social justice. 

* Wikipedia, which follows the mainstream, says he only abandoned them. 

Fighting alongside people whose ideals were entirely different

must have made it still harder.

By wrenching themselves away from the prejudices and interests 

of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect for walking the extra mile.

Plaque at the Picpus cemetery

Remember before God

Jean Marie Philibert Victurnien

Marquis de Laguiche

Croix de Guerre 14-18

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

Born July 9 1889

Deported to Buchenwald and Neu-Strasstrier *

Killed by the SS at Shildau on April 17 1945

and his son

Claude Pascal Marie de la Guiche

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

S/L de la 1er R.M.S.M. de la Div. Leclerc * *

Fallen in Haute-Sarthe * * *

on August 11 1944 at age 22

*Salt mines: "...we left Buchenwald for a destination unknown to us, which turned out to be the salt mines of Neu-Strassfurt." Most of the 459 French prisoners who were sent there died.

-- Text found thanks to information provided by Michael Zwerger, German manager

** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, including Alamein in 1943, landed in Normandy with the Leclerc Division in June '44 and fought on until the end of the war. 

-- Marc Ambrose-Rendu, military historian, personal communication

*** Haute-Sarthe: the Loire Valley

# # #

After the war,
certain survivors from both sides

became well-known politicians.

They might meet for dinner 

in the private salon of a restaurant

known for its discretion.

Sure not to appear together in the next day's press,  
they would recall the time 
when they were brothers in arms. 

-- Told me by the late gastronomical critic Henri Viard

So ends Part IV.

It has shown the importance

of France's 19th-century insurrections

which the Resistance continued

and whose traces remain.

*     *     *

Part V, next and last,  
When observation and the usual story clash