THE NETWORK - The last secrets of the Resistance

At the age of 100, Edgar Morin makes one final request of his biographer: to investigate the Charette resistance network, to which he belonged alongside Mitterrand, Jankélévitch, Clara Malraux and many others. A network entirely forgotten, yet decisive in the history of the Resistance, and compellingly novelistic. The Charrette network was an extraordinary resistance network — Gaullist-Communist, Franco-German, inventive and rigorous, scattered yet united, founded as early as 1941 by a handful of prisoners of war in Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel.

At its head, Michel Cailliau, known as Charette — after the Vendéen hero — the nephew of Charles de Gaulle, son of his eldest sister Marie-Agnès, the most secretive member of that family. The Charrette network, more precisely the Mouvement de Résistance des Prisonniers de Guerre et des Déportés (MRPGD), was one of the most substantial resistance organisations in those troubled early years.

From 1942 onwards, the young Edgar Nahoum, the future Morin, joined the network of Michel Cailliau and its other founders — Philippe Dechartre, André Ulmann, Charles Bonnet and Pierre Le Moign'. Edgar Nahoum does not yet know it, but through his experience in the Charette network he will definitively become Edgar Morin. Although this resistance network is cited by historians, it tends to be treated as a footnote; in practice it is very poorly known, if not neglected, or even entirely forgotten.

The author thus set out in search of magnificent ghosts in the depths of the night.