From Hate to Heroism

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

 

Daniel Cordier, when he was young and getting started in life, did not seem like a candidate for heroism. Born in Bordeaux in 1920, he was a rich kid who summered at Biarritz and wintered in the Alps, raised under the influence of an industrialist stepfather, an Action Française man who taught him to love monarchy and hate Jews. His teenage passions were André Gide and fascism. But just as his idol, Gide, turned his back on communism after experiencing it firsthand on a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Cordier was liberated from his romantic attachment to fascism by the facts of the case, beginning with his country’s invasion and occupation by the forces of Adolf Hitler.

 

Cordier’s family bribed the captain of a Belgian cargo ship to take him to North Africa, but he was instead redirected to the United Kingdom, where he met Charles de Gaulle, received some military training, and was sent back to France, parachuting in with documents for the Resistance leader known as “Rex.” “Rex” was, in fact, de Gaulle’s lieutenant, Jean Moulin, who immediately took Cordier on as his personal assistant. Service in the French Resistance was not very much like association with modern political tendencies that have hijacked its name and drafted on its moral stature: Moulin survived less than two months as president of the National Council of the Resistance before he was captured by the Gestapo and tortured to death by Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon,” dying on a transport train before it crossed the border into Germany.

 

Moulin and Cordier had been posing as art dealers, and Cordier would continue in that profession after the war, collecting works by Antoni Tàpies and Georges Braque.

 

Cordier, who died on Friday at the age of 100, is remembered as a hero of the Resistance, and as an advocate for gay rights later in life. Because we 21st-century Americans live in less serious times with considerably smaller stakes — no, Cupcake, freaking out about Donald Trump on Twitter is not the same as setting up a covert communication network in Nazi-occupied France — we have no such figures, although we have no shortage of people who would like to be thought of as the modern equivalents, functional or moral, of Resistance agents. It is hard not to laugh at them, even if they mean well.

 

As the New York Times tells the story, Cordier and other refugees had been greeted in the United Kingdom by de Gaulle, who said: “I will not congratulate you for coming here. You did your duty.” Back in France, Cordier was scandalized by the sight of German soldiers posing for photographs in front of the Arc de Triomphe — and by the sight of French Jews wearing yellow stars. He described feeling “unbearable shame” at the sight, but also realizing: “I am not in Paris to care for my conscience.” There was work to be done, and some of that work fell to him to do. His politics gave way to his patriotism, and his philosophical inclinations gave way to the practical business of saving his country.

 

If there had been a French Resistance equivalent of “cancel culture” in the 1940s, it surely would have set upon Cordier, who as a teenager in Bordeaux had not been a passive anti-Semite and quasi-fascist but an active and positive one, establishing the Cercle Charles-Maurras, a kind of fascist fan club dedicated to the man who would later criticize Nazi policy toward French Jews as too lax. We have grown in technological sophistication since then, but have regressed, at least in some ways, in our social sophistication, in the subtle art of being human beings. In their pettiness and hatred, many of those who believe themselves to be the heirs to the French Resistance have come to more closely resemble the other guys, compiling blacklists and dreaming of putsches. The perverse fact is that the viciousness of our own political culture comes as a consequence of, not in spite of, the smallness of our times.

 

Who could say, with an altogether straight face, of our own conflicts, that our fellow countrymen

 

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us.

 

For us, there is no blaze of glory. Only work to be done, most of it tedious and thankless, most of it done in obscurity, most of it to be forgotten. If the childish part of us dreams of greatness and heroism, the mature part of us should be grateful that we live in times that require so little of that. Daniel Cordier lived in different times, for better and for worse, with the gift of eyes that could see and a heart that could feel shame when shame was appropriate. Shame is a gift, too, like courage.