CFLN Schéma participation française—Très Secret—Free French Liberation plan 1944
£1,300
SKU
Schéma participation française [Diagram of French participation] — Très secret — Personnel—No. 6
A secret blueprint for France's part in its own liberation: copy No. 6 of a Très Secret diagram issued in a small numbered run to named recipients, prepared in spring 1944 within de Gaulle's French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN), the Free French government then based in Algiers. It shows how French authority was to go ashore alongside Eisenhower's armies, so that liberated France would be run by the French rather than by Allied military government. From Great Britain, the CFLN's delegate and its military delegate 'F' (the post held for the northern theatre by General Koenig, hero of Bir Hakeim and commander of the Resistance's French Forces of the Interior) reach across the Channel through three links: administrative liaison teams to restore French civil government behind the front; liaison with the Resistance and its 'foyers de résistance', the pockets of armed Resistance behind German lines; and French units fighting within an Allied army, 'Armée X'. Stamped 'Personnel', warned against copying and duplicated in red and blue, it carries a candid pencil note: Koenig sees things from afar, across the Channel, while the writer will cross the Mediterranean and enter France among the liberated population and the troops in combat. It is the voice of someone bound for the Provence landings. Wartime paper economy shows on the back: it is duplicated on a quartered US military map of Spanish Morocco, stock readily to hand in Allied North Africa, which points to its production in Algiers. We have found no other copy recorded in commerce.
Size 44 x 31 cm | 17.0 x 12.0 inches
Date Published: 1944
Type: Vintage duplicated diagrammatic map in red and blue (probably hectograph), with manuscript ink and pencil additions and stamped classification, on the back of a quartered US military map sheet
Author: Comité français de la Libération nationale—CFLN
Publication: Comité français de la Libération nationale—CFLN
Condition: Good |
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