tionale_, and the hundreds of steel
and concrete fortresses and the arms found in them point to a
membership of at least 100,000. The way the fortresses were built and
their strategic locations (blowing down the walls of the buildings
where the fortresses were hidden would have given them command of
streets, squares and government buildings) indicate supervision by
high military officials.

When contractors buy enormous quantities of cement for dugouts, when
butchers' and bakers' lorries rattle over ancient cobblestones with
enormous loads of arms smuggled across German and Italian borders,
when thousands of people are drilled and trained in pistol, rifle and
machine-gun practice, it is impossible that the competent French
Intelligence Service and the _Surete Nationale_ should not get wind of
it.

As far back as September, 1936, the _Surete Nationale_ knew that some
leading French industrialists with the cooperation of the German and
Italian Governments were building a military fascist organization
within France. Nevertheless it quietly permitted fortresses to be
built and stocked with munitions. The General Staff of the French
Army, from reports of Intelligence men in Germany and Italy, knew that
those countries were smuggling arms into France, but they permitted it
to go on. The General Staff knew that some eight hundred concrete
fortresses were being built under the supervision of M. Anceaux, a
building contractor of Dieppe, and that skilled members of the Secret
Committee for Revolutionary Action had been recruited for the building
and sworn to secrecy under penalty of death. They knew that these
fortresses were equipped with sending and receiving radios, knew that
some were within the shadow of military centers, knew that the
Cagoulards had a far-flung espionage system. But the French General
Staff made no effort to stop it.

The Popular Front Government was in power at the time, and heads of
the Supreme War Council apparently preferred a fascist France to a
democratic one. In fact, officers and reserve officers of the French
Army cooperated with secret agents of their traditional enemy,
Germany, to build up this formidable secret army.

The investigating authorities, stunned by their discoveries and the
high officials and individuals to whom their investigations led,
either did not dare go further with it, or, if they did, suppressed
the information. Some of it, however, came out.

At the top of the Cagoula