Editing Jean Moulin (section)

== Theories about who betrayed Moulin ==
The question of who betrayed Jean Moulin has attracted a great deal of research, speculation, judicial scrutiny and media coverage. Many members of the [[French Resistance]] who could have provided a first-hand account of what happened died during the War. Furthermore, internecine tensions within the Resistance movement are well documented and have left fertile ground for speculation about who within the movement might have provided the information to the Nazis.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Perrier|first=Guy|title=Le Général Pierre de Bénouville|publisher=Edition du Rocher|year=2005|isbn=2-268-05631-7|pages=101–107}}</ref> 

Regarding Moulin's arrest, suspicions have focused on Resistance member [[René Hardy]], who, prior to accusations that he betrayed Mouline, was known to be a reliable Resistance fighter. Hardy was arrested on 7 June 1943 by the Sicherheitsdienst on the Paris-Lyon night train. This arrest took place in the context of a wave of arrests of resistance fighters, including Resistance leader General [[Charles Delestraint]]. After his arrest, Hardy was subjected to torture or threats of torture. It is suspected, and some Nazi documentation supports this, that he became a Nazi agent after his arrest. In any case, at the insistence of many of his colleagues in the Resistance, Hardy was present at the house in [[Caluire-et-Cuire]] at the time of Moulin's arrest.<ref name=":5" /><sup>:404–409</sup> However, either Hardy escaped or was allowed to flee.<ref name=":1" />  He was injured during the escape (though some suspected that the wound was self-inflicted), and he also managed to escape from his hospital, scaling a high wall despite having his arm in a cast. In two post-war trials that examined his alleged role in the arrest, Hardy was acquitted for lack of evidence.<ref name=":5" /><sup>:404–409</sup>

Communists have also been the target of allegations, though no hard evidence has ever backed up that claim. Marnham looked into these assertions but found no evidence to support them (although Communist Party members could easily have seen Moulin as a "fellow traveller" because he had communist friends and supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War). As ''préfet'', Moulin even ordered the repression of communist 'agitators' and went so far as to have police keep some of them under surveillance.<ref>{{Cite book | last=Marnham | first=Patrick | title=The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost | publisher=Pimlico | isbn=978-0-7126-6584-1 | year=2001 }} p. 104</ref> At the trial of [[Klaus Barbie]] in 1987, his lawyer, [[Jacques Vergès]], made much out of speculation that Moulin was betrayed by either Communists and/or Gaullists as part of an attempt to distract attention away from the actions of his client, by making the true authors of Moulin's arrest his fellow ''résistants'', rather than Barbie.<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, pp. 203–204.</ref> Vergès failed in his effort to acquit Barbie but succeeded in creating a vast industry of various conspiracy theories, many very fanciful, about who betrayed Moulin.<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 204">Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p. 204.</ref> Leading historians, such as Henri Noguères and [[Jean-Pierre Azéma]], rejected Vergès's conspiracy theories under which Barbie was somehow less culpable than the supposed traitors who tipped him off.<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 204" />

The British intelligence officer [[Peter Wright (MI5 officer)|Peter Wright]], in his 1987 book ''[[Spy Catcher]]'', wrote that [[Pierre Cot]] was an "active Russian agent" and called his protégé Moulin a "dedicated Communist".<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 205">Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p. 205.</ref> Clinton wrote that Wright based his allegations against Moulin entirely on secret documents that he claimed to have seen but which no historian has ever seen, and on conversations that he is supposed to have had decades ago with others long dead, which made his case against Moulin very "dubious".<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 205"/> Henri-Christian Giraud, the grandson of General [[Henri Giraud]] (who had been outmaneuvered by de Gaulle for the leadership of the Free French movement), hit back in his two-volume work ''De Gaulle et les communistes'', published in 1988 and 1989, which outlined a conspiracy theory suggesting that de Gaulle had been "manipulated" by the "Soviet agent" Moulin into following the PCF's line of "national insurrection" and thereby eclipsed his grandfather, who, he maintained, should have been the rightful leader of [[Free France]].<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, pp. 205–206.</ref> Taking up Giraud's theories, the lawyer Charles Benfredj argued in his 1990 book ''L'Affaire Jean Moulin: Le contre-enquête'' that Moulin was a Soviet agent who had not been killed by Barbie but allowed by the German government to go to the [[Soviet Union]] in 1943, where Moulin supposedly died sometime after the war.<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 206">Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p, 206.</ref> Benfredj's book was published with an introduction with [[Jacques Soustelle]], the archaeologist of [[Mexico]] and wartime Gaullist whose commitment to ''[[Algérie française]]'' had made him a bitter enemy of de Gaulle by 1959.<ref name="Clinton, Alan page 206" /> The essence of all theories about Moulin, the alleged Soviet agent, was that because de Gaulle had agreed to co-operate with the Communists during the war, all of which was Moulin's work, he had set France on the wrong course and led to him granting Algeria independence in 1962, instead of keeping Algeria in France.<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p. 201.</ref>[[File:Jean Moulin commemorative plate, Metz.jpg|thumb|Tribute to Jean Moulin in the [[Gare de Metz-Ville|Rail station]] of [[Metz]].]]

It has also been suggested, principally in Marnham's biography, that Moulin was betrayed by communists. Marnham points the finger specifically at [[Raymond Aubrac]] and possibly his wife, Lucie. He alleges that communists at times betrayed non-communists to the Gestapo and that Aubrac was linked to harsh actions during the purge of collaborators after the war. In 1990, Barbie, by then "a bitter dying [[Nazi]]", named Aubrac as the traitor.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9198381/Raymond-Aubrac.html|title=Obituary:Raymond Aubrac|newspaper=Daily Telegraph|date=11 Apr 2012|access-date=11 Apr 2012}}</ref> To counteract the accusations levelled at Moulin, [[Daniel Cordier]], his personal secretary during the war, wrote a biography of his former leader.<ref name="Clinton, Alan pages 202-203">Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, pp. 202–203.</ref> In April 1997, Vergès produced a "Barbie Testament", which he claimed that Barbie had given him ten years earlier and purported to show the Aubracs had tipped off Barbie.<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p.209.</ref> It was timed for the publication of the book ''Aubrac Lyon 1943'' by Gérard Chauvy, who meant to prove that the Aubracs were the ones who informed Barbie about the fateful meeting at Caluire on 21 June 1943.<ref name="Clinton, Alan pages 202-203" /> On 2 April 1998, following a civil suit launched by the Aubracs, a Paris court fined Chauvy and his publisher, Albin Michel, for "public defamation".<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, pp. 209–210.</ref> In 1998, the French historian Jacques Baynac, in his book ''Les Secrets de l'affaire Jean Moulin'', claimed that Moulin was planning to break with de Gaulle to recognise General Giraud, which led the Gaullists to tip off Barbie before that could happen.<ref>Clinton, Alan ''Jean Moulin, 1899–1943 The French Resistance and the Republic'', London: Macmillan, 2002, p. 210.</ref>