Moulin, Jean.

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Moulin, Jean, born born 20-06-1899 at 6 Rue d’Alsace in Béziers, Hérault, son of Antoine-Émile Moulin and Blanche Élisabeth, born Pègue. Jean was the grandson of an insurgent opposing the coup d’état of 02-12-1851. His father was a lay teacher at the Université Populaire and a Freemason at the lodge Action Sociale.,

 The coup d’état of 02-12-1851 was a self-coup staged by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III), at the time President of France under the Second Republic. Code-named Operation Rubicon and timed to coincide with the anniversary of Napoleon I’s coronation and victory at Austerlitz, the coup dissolved the National Assembly, granted dictatorial powers to the president and preceded the establishment of the Second French Empire a year later.

Moulin was baptised on 06-08-1899 in the church of Saint-Vincentin in Saint-Andiol (Bouches-du-Rhône), the village his parents came from. Jean spent an uneventful childhood in the company of his brother, Joseph, and his sister, Laure. Joseph died after an illness in 1907. At Lycée Henri IV in Béziers, Jean was an average student.

In 1917, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law of Montpellier, where he was not a brilliant student. However, thanks to the influence of his father, he was appointed as attaché to the cabinet of the prefect of Hérault under the presidency of Raymond Poincaré.

Moulin was mobilised on 17-04-1918 as part of the age class of 1919, the last class to be mobilised in France. He was assigned to the 2nd Engineer Regiment of Montpellier. At the beginning of September, after an accelerated training, he headed with his regiment to the front in the Vosges, where he was posted in the village of Socourt.

His regiment was preparing to go to the front lines as part of the attack planned by Foch for 13 November, but the Armistice was signed on 11 November

Although Moulin did not fight directly on the front lines, he was nevertheless in a position to observe the horrors of war. He saw its aftermath on the battle fields, the devastation of villages and the state of prisoners of war. He helped to bury the war dead in the region around Metz.

While still enlisted after the War, he was posted successively to Seine-et-Oise, Verdun and Chalon-sur-Saône. He worked as a carpenter, a digger and later a telephonist for the 7th and 9th Engineer Regiments.

He was de-mobilised in November and, on 04-11-1919, immediately resumed his post as attaché at the préfecture of Hérault, in Montpellier.

In January 1939, Moulin was appointed prefect of the Eure-et-Loir department, based in Chartres. After war against Germany was declared, he asked multiple times to be demoted because “[his] place is not at the rear, at the head of a rural departement”. Against the advice of the Minister of the Interior, he asked to be transferred to the military school of Issy-Les-Moulineaux, near Paris. The minister forced him to return to Chartres, where the War quickly made its way to him in the form of German air strikes and columns of distressed and sometimes wounded refugees. As the Germans approached Chartres, he wrote to his parents, “If the Germans — who are capable of anything — make me say dishonorable words, you already know, it is not the truth”. In mid-June, German troops entered Chartres.

 House where Moulin was tortured in La Taye, Saint-Georges-sur-Eure in the Eure-et-Loire department.

Moulin was arrested by the Germans on 17-06-1940 because he refused to sign a false declaration that three Senegalese tirailleurs had committed atrocities, killing civilians in La Taye. In fact, those civilians had been killed by German bombings.

Beaten and imprisoned because he refused to comply, Moulin attempted suicide by cutting his own throat with a piece of broken glass. This act left him with a scar he would often hide with a scarf, giving us the image of Jean Moulin by which he often is remembered today. The suicide attempt did not succeed because he was discovered by a guard and taken to a hospital for treatment.

Because he was a Radical, he was dismissed by the Vichy regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain on 02-11-1940, along with other left-wing préfets. He then began writing his diary, First Battle, in which he relates his resistance against the Nazis in Chartres, which was later published at the Liberation and prefaced by de Charles de Gaulle.

Death and burial ground of Jean Moulin.

 

He played a leading part in the organization of the Maquis (French guerrillas who fought the Germans) and in the development of the National Council of the Résistance, which coordinated all the noncommunist resistance groups in France and secured their loyalty to de Gaulle’s Free French movement. Moulin became the first chairman of this council in May 1943. His organizational abilities and political skills made him a legendary figure. In June 1943, however, the Gestapo arrested him at Caluire, near Lyon. Tortured in one prison after another,Moulin died in a train, near Metz, 08-07-1943, taking him to Germany.

Moulin was first buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. On 19-12-1964, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris..

Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster:    robhopmans@outlook.com

 

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