It was a demonstration to all that the young interloper’s power did not lie in his modest rank, but in the fact that Bömelburg was his high-level protector in Paris. It was because of this, as one colleague later said of Dohse, that ‘everyone in KdS feared him’.
4
André Grandclément was born with everything – except steadfastness of purpose, good judgement, and a father who loved him.
Captain Raoul Gaston Marie Grandclément, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, was serving as a staff officer to the French Second Naval Squadron in Rochefort-sur-Mer, 150 kilometres northwest of Bordeaux, when his son, André Marie Hubert François, was born in the local hospital on 28 July 1909.
In his father’s absence (the future admiral was posted to Morocco two years after André’s birth), the boy was brought up by his mother, Amélia, the daughter of a colonel of infantry. When André was seven, Amélia died and his father married again. Care of the young boy passed to his stepmother, Jeanne, who he loved greatly. The couple lived in a grand house in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris, an area famously known as ‘the invisible ghetto’ because of the many members of the French establishment who lived there. Often criticised as being immune and insensible to the social upheavals that rocked France in the 1930s, the prevailing culture of the invisible ghetto during André’s early years was one of conservatism, a firm belief that national order depended on the preservation of the national hierarchy, and a fierce and unshakeable belief, come what may, in La gloire française.
André, like many of the sons of France’s military, was sent to the Franklin Jesuit College just a few hundred metres from his home. Here the values of the invisible ghetto were as much part of the curriculum as the rote learning of mathematics, foreign languages, French history and literature. It was at Franklin that the young Grandclément met and befriended a fellow student, Marc O’Neill. Descended from one of the ‘Wild Swans’ who had fled an oppressed Ireland in 1688 and subsequently fought for revolutionary France in the eighteenth century, O’Neill would, in the years to come, show that the family instinct for fighting oppression had not diminished in the intervening centuries.
In what was to become something of a pattern in André Grandclément’s young life, he failed to finish his studies at Franklin College, leaving at the age of twelve to join his father, now an admiral and Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur, who had been posted to command a French naval division in Syria in 1921. Admiral Grandclément had won acclaim in the First World War, including two terms as naval attaché to President Raymond Poincaré, and in action at the battle of Verdun, where he was wounded while ‘showing the greatest dynamism and a superb disregard for danger’. Grandclément senior spent his time in Syria, adorned with medals and a feathered hat, saluting everything military that moved as they passed him in review. Grandclément junior, meanwhile, looked on in distant admiration from first Beirut and then Tunis, where he continued his studies under the Jesuits. Finally, in his late teens André changed schools for the fourth time and returned to Paris to take his Baccalauréat.
Grandclément senior, whose brother and cousin were also admirals, had long made it clear that he expected his son to follow the family tradition and join the navy. It was now time for André to do his duty and prepare for the entrance exams for France’s naval college, the École Navale, at Brest. But something seems to have snapped in young André during his period of preparation for the great naval school. One day, he peremptorily resigned his place and joined up as an ordinary soldier in a Senegalese rifle regiment in Sfax, North Africa. Writing to a friend he said: ‘So now I am going to be with the negroes, with whom, if truth be told, I find a greater affinity than with the whites.’ André Grandclément had become – and would remain for the rest of his life – the outsider who longed to be inside.
Explaining his sudden and perplexing flight from a naval career, Grandclément junior later wrote: ‘At eighteen, I rejected my father as a result of a foolish row. If that had not happened I would have maintained the family tradition … [but then] I would have ended up less human – like my father.’
A little later, on a weekend visit to the Bizerta home of one of his father’s friends, the twenty-year-old André, ever romantic, ever impetuous, fell in love with the colonel’s daughter, Geneviève Toussaint, known as ‘Myssett’. Almost immediately he announced his intention to marry his new sweetheart. The admiral was predictably furious, but his son was adamant.
The couple married in Bizerta on 6 November 1929. Though he did it with bad grace and complained of the expense, the old admiral made the journey from Paris to join a small flotilla of senior naval Grandcléments who sailed into the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-France in Bizerta for the ceremony, complete with clanking swords, heavy encrustations of medals, elegantly trimmed naval beards and, of course, the inevitable feather-festooned cocked hats.
André and Myssett had five children in quick succession. Three died young, leaving two daughters: Ghislaine, paralysed as a result of brain damage at birth, and Francine, four years her junior.
A year after the wedding, André suddenly announced yet another change of course: he was thinking of leaving the army. The young Grandclément family, now feeling the pinch financially (another regular feature of André Grandclément’s life), transhipped to Toulon. Here, in 1932, André declared that he was not after all leaving the army, but would instead attend the officer school at Saint-Maixent in the Somme valley. As ever, full of hope and resolution, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am very happy … and well aware of the value of two years of engagement once again in the business of learning and study.’
All seemed set fair once more. But then, fate again intervened – this time in the form of a serious riding accident which left him unfit for military service as a result of a damaged lung and, according to his doctor, tuberculosis as well. A short period of work in the wine business on the Côte d’Or followed. Then thanks to the patronage of a cousin, he was offered a job as a salesman with the insurance company Mutuelle Vie in Bordeaux. He and his family moved into a cramped first-floor apartment above a garage on the Rue Basse, a narrow street set back from the Pont de Pierre. It was all a long, long way from the pomp, gilt and glitter of the Bizerta cathedral wedding, just six years previously.
The twenty-six-year-old Grandclément who arrived in Bordeaux in 1935 was tall, slim, elegant, suntanned and clean cut. Though he had a curiously expressionless face, he was considered handsome, with blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, a prominent chin and meticulously coiffured hair. Many who knew him commented on his verbal dexterity and his ability to carry an audience, albeit with a tendency, on occasion, to sound pompous. This together with a certain grace made him impressive – even beguiling – on first acquaintance: ‘intelligent, amiable, sensitive, good looking and with considerable presence,’ said one contemporary. Others were less enamoured. ‘He greatly overestimated his own importance. He was a kind of [ideological] gigolo,’ remembered one close colleague, while another described him as carrying ‘himself badly with a stooping head and shoulders as a result of some chest affliction. He has a pale face and a prominent nose.’
André Grandclément’s early opinions were those of his class and upbringing: Catholic and conservative, but not active in either cause. Later, preparing for the navy, he apparently shared the royalist sympathies of his classmates. After his marriage to Myssett the couple affected a bohemian lifestyle; there are even some suggestions of