GEORGES GUINGOUIN was one of the few Communists chosen by Charles de Gaulle to join the select order of Compagnons de la Libération for his outstanding role as organiser of the French Resistance in the Limousin area during the Second World War.

Known as “Le Préfet du Maquis”, he was never actually a prefect, nor did he long remain a Communist, at least in the official sense. His story is one of remarkable courage, but also attests to the infighting and bitterness during France’s postwar years of recrimination and vendettas on both sides of the political spectrum.

Guingouin was born in 1913 in the small village of Magnac-Laval, about 30 miles (50km) north of Limoges. His father, a professional soldier, was killed at Bapaume in the Somme only weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. His mother was a primary school teacher, and Guingouin chose a similar career. He trained as a teacher in Limoges and, after a brief period of National Service, began working at a school in Saint-Gilles-les-Forêts, in the hilly area of the Limousin near Mont Gargan. Already an active Communist, he was quickly promoted to the head of the party’s organisation in the eastern cantons of Haute-Vienne.

Mobilised in August 1939, Guingouin was wounded on June 17, 1940, during the last days of fighting on French soil, and sent to a hospital in Moulins. When the town came under German attack, he managed to escape and, having recovered from his wounds, returned to his home in what was then Vichy France. There he immediately set about organising resistance, establishing secret action groups, forging identity cards and producing tracts against the Vichy Government. Already, though, he was at odds with the party line. He refused to distribute Communist documents that insisted on opposition “to de Gaulle and the capitalist clan”.

Narrowly escaping arrest by the Vichy police in February 1941, Guingouin went into hiding in the Corrèze. Dubbed “the madman of the forest” by a local Communist leader, he lived in huts and abandoned houses or even underground, while running a clandestine print shop and distributing anti-Vichy tracts. Then, in May 1942, he set up his own armed groups, much to the distaste of the Communist command, which wanted to concentrate efforts in urban areas — and of course under its own structure. Controlling prices for commodities and banning black marketeering in the territory now under his control, Guingouin began to sign his circulars “Le Préfet du Maquis”.

Refusing party exhortations to cease operations, Guingouin was compelled to flee to London for fear of execution by his fellow Communists. But he was soon back in the Limousin, ordering and leading sabotage operations to handicap the German war effort — destroying facilities in a rubber factory in Limoges in May 1943, cutting communications between Berlin and the U-boat base in Bordeaux in July, and kidnapping the Franco-German armistice commission in March 1944.

By the end of the war, Guingouin had some 20,000 men under his command, and Haute-Vienne had become one of the toughest centres of resistance, known to the Germans as “Little Russia”. More significantly, their exploits prompted Hitler to divert the SS Das Reich armoured division from the Eastern Front down to the South of France to quell the Resistance. One result was the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, where women and children were burnt alive in a church. Another was the capture of a division commander, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, by Guingouin’s men. The two days spent searching for him meant that the tanks arrived late in Normandy to combat the Allied landing, thus crucially weakening the German resistance, for which Eisenhower himself was to thank Guingouin.

While battle raged in the north, Guingouin continued to harass German forces, and in the battle of Mont Gargan, from 17 to 24 July, his forces inflicted some 342 casualties, for only 97 dead and wounded on their own side.

On August 3 he was made departmental leader of the French Forces of the Interior and ordered to prepare the liberation of Limoges. Having gone against Communist orders to occupy the city in June, which he considered far too risky, he adopted a strategy of encirclement and managed to obtain the German surrender.

As well as being Compagnon de la Libération, Guingouin was appointed to the Légion d’honneur and was awarded the King’s Medal for Courage by the United Kingdom. After the war Guingouin was Mayor of Limoges from 1945 to 1947, then returned to his career as a teacher.

In November 1952, however, he was stripped of his Communist membership for his failure to toe the line of a party whose leader, Maurice Thorez, spent the war in Moscow, and no doubt found such heroes an encumbrance. The leader of “Little Russia” suffered his own “Little Moscow” trial. He was alone.

Worse, Guingouin also found himself being accused of all kinds of wartime crimes by two former Vichy policemen, who came out of the woodwork to pursue their own vendetta against the Resistance leader with the complicity of two judges known for their antipathy towards the movement. These grave accusations were enough to have him put in prison at Christmas 1953.

Meanwhile, a leading local Socialist, Jean LeBail, published a series of writings holding him responsible for all the violations and acts of revenge that accompanied the liberation of Limousin. Guingouin was tortured, and on February 22, 1954, an attempt was made to kill him in his cell. He was taken to hospital in Toulouse.

Defended now by two young lawyers, Roland Dumas and Robert Badinter (both known to any student of the Mitterrand years, the former as Foreign Secretary, the latter as the man who abolished the death penalty in 1981), Guingouin was released on bail, but the investigations continued until 1959. Only then did the public prosecutor conclude that: “in all conscience, I cannot understand why proceedings were taken against Georges Guingouin”.

Georges Guingouin, French Resistance leader, was born on February 2, 1913. He died on October 28, 2005, aged 92.