Civilians Escaping from Occupied France

Citizens of Occupied Lille Checking the War News

From James E. Connolly's The Experience of Occupation in the Nord, 1914-1918

The weight of occupation, especially being forced to work against one’s country, was too much to bear for certain individuals. They took evasion a step further and attempted to escape the occupied area entirely, mostly in order to join the Allied armies and aid the war effort. Such a response to occupation was fairly widespread and occurred throughout the conflict. In Douai, in just two months of 1917, about 150–200 men succeeded in crossing the Belgian then Dutch borders, for which the town was punished.  A Jesuit priest allegedly helped these men, giving them false laissez-passer – he was responsible for aiding 500 men to get to Holland before being denounced and imprisoned.  Denunciations of those involved in such resistance were relatively commonplace. 

Occasionally, the Germans used agents-provocateurs who claimed to be passeurs offering safe passage to Holland, only to arrest and imprison the men who took up the offer. This led to the arrest of over seventy Frenchmen in Denain. However impressive such numbers may be, they never reached the heights of the Belgian analogue. About 32,000 Belgians managed to reach the army of the Yser via Holland, despite similar problems of denunciations – although their journey was shorter. 

Priests also played a role in Denain,  and Cambrai, where, in February 1917, ‘lots of young people are trying to reach French lines via Holland; they travel at night. To this end there exists a secret organisation; these young people hide in the day in presbyteries and the priests receive them and help their evasion.’  These clergymen engaged in acts of national solidarity and resistance. Holland was central to any escape – apart from one story of forced labourers at the front making their way towards the British during an advance  – and was also one of the major territories for spies during the war.

German ordinances hint at an authority responding to and attempting to gain control of a genuine problem. In Valenciennes, a poster of October 1915 highlighted cases of attempted escape. The occupiers attributed such attempts to ‘the fear of exposing themselves, at the conclusion of peace, to severe punishments from French authorities for having failed to enter, presently, in the service of the army’. The German authority stated that no military tribunal could legally or morally make such a judgement and that it was ‘persuaded that the intelligence and good sense of the population will energetically oppose these erroneous and unreasonable ideas and serve to prevent any attempt to evade [German] inspection in the interests of those men called up for inspection’.  In reality, attempts to escape were likely motivated more by a genuine desire to join the French army or simply to reach unoccupied France than by a fear of post-war French judicial reprisals. Some men felt it was their duty to at least try to join the army; other occupés occasionally looked down on those who had made no attempt. Rapatriés from Caudry bemoaned that with the number of men of fighting age (mobilisables) remaining there, two whole army divisions could be formed.  Similarly, Blin noted in February 1918:

Too many mobilisables having not succeeded in leaving our region have  accepted too easily a situation that shelters them from the dangers of war […] The duty was to try to reach England via Holland. Cross [the border] or get captured; the means to evade have not been lacking and many ‘decided men’ have done so.

German Occupiers of a Damaged French Village

Further sources suggest that leaving the occupied area was easier than might be expected. The Times reported that its own correspondent left occupied France via Belgium and Holland in December 1914, by bribing Germans.  However, in 1917, rapatriés from Valenciennes, Saint-Saulve and Anzin complained that the copies of Le Petit Journal and Le Matin which occasionally appeared in the occupied area sometimes detailed the ruses people used to escape. These publications implied that doing so was easy, involving (like the Times journalist) a simple bribe to German sentries. The result was an increase in the number of sentries, making escape harder in reality.  Indeed, a clandestine letter sent to London in 1916 stated that although many men attempted to escape to Belgium, only some succeeded – the rest were ‘killed like rabbits’, every week.  Some certainly were: in Douai, a man tried to leave the occupied area by dressing as a woman but was shot dead at Hénin-Liétard.  A handful of people received (sometimes posthumous) honorary compensation from the French Government after the war for such attempts. 

Those wishing to reach unoccupied France were aided by passeurs, who were not always perceived as unequivocal resisters and who were often held in suspicion by the population, like fraudsters – some were fraudsters. This scepticism extended to non-occupied French authorities: M. Aliotte from Vieux-Condé helped young men reach Holland during the occupation and was subsequently nominated for the Médaille de la Reconnaissance Française after the war; his case was rejected, as, despite his courageous conduct concerning such men, he had also been imprisoned for fifteen months for theft!  Others were considerably more respectable, such as Princess Marie de Croÿ of Bellignies.  Whatever their motives, these guides also helped to transport an even more dangerous ‘cargo’: Allied servicemen.