A range of fresh information about Manuel Huet and the Underground in France

Such is life. Having completed the first edition of my book, Blind spot and several months having passed since it hit the streets and after its launch in Madrid, all of a sudden there came a bolt from the blue! Throughout my research I had not managed to unearth or contact anybody from his family and then, on February day in 2024, I had some post from the publishers. Since I had failed to make contact with the family, it would have to be the family that got I touch with me. No sooner said than done. I had correspondence from Adela, Paquita’s daughter, Paquita being Manolo Huet’s niece. So at last, with the book having been under correction for some time, I now had the contact that enabled me to banish certain doubts, with some fresh information emerging. 

In the wake of initial meetings with Paquita and Montse, Huet’s nieces, I discovered that Maria Piera (their mother) had died young, which was most likely the reason that led the family to leave town. 

Manuel Huet senior, by then based in Barcelona, met and married Elvira Ares, by whom he had a daughter by the name of Irene and it was her daughters that were now offering me information. Irene Huet Ares was born in 1924. This was a part of the family of which I had been unaware.

Having established contact and blessed with the opportunity to put questions to them directly, I was itching to know whether they had any information to offer about a range of matters. In fact, seizing the opportunity, I started to press them about things of interest to me. Was the Huet family well to-do or bourgeois, as some have suggested? Response: there was nothing bourgeois about this family who were as poor as church mice. What could they tell me about how Manolo came by his taxi cab and, if nothing, what could they tell me about Rosa’s family? Their answer was that the Curt family was as poor as the Huet family. So my doubts were not resolved there but now I was inclined to think that the cab was bought using cash from some expropriation by one of the groups with which Manolo worked and I concluded that that was the likeliest, simplest answer. Had they any photos? They had. What did they know? The family was to tell me of its official family life and I would give them the low-down on its “other” life.

With the loss of the civil war, the entire family made for France. But whilst Huet managed to dodge the camps, his relatives did not. His own father (Manuel Huet senior), plus Elvira, his brother Pepe and Irene ended up on the barbed-wire fenced-off beaches as did so many thousands more. Shortly after that they were to be separated. The men were sent to Canet Plage and the women to camps in the north. A lot of time was to pass before they were reunited. Two years after their arrival in France, Manolo senior, Elvira and Irene returned to Spain. Initially they arrived in Galicia before later heading back to Barcelona. There, in the capital of Catalonia, they were unpleasantly surprised to find that their home lay empty and had been stripped of all contents. And to make matters worse, before they could recover their belongings, the landlord made them pay the back rent for the two years when they had been away. 

Thanks again to the family’s recollections, be it in the form of information or photographs, I now have something upon which we can speculate. Paquita, “the niece of Uncle Manolo”, as he was fondly described family members, regaled me with a batch of snapshots, including one of Pepe Huet, Manolo’s brother. The snapshot in question is unremarkable; it is just a snapshot. The interesting thing is written on the back of it. And what it states is: José Huet. The snapshot was taken in Vienna on 1 September 1943. During the years when Manolo and Segunda were in that city, working and posing as French citizens in order to hide from the Nazis. And as Adela (Paquita’s daughter) pointed out to me, those were not exactly times to go touring. Which opens up a few quite interesting hypotheses. For one thing, Paquita tells me that people from the Resistance in Toulouse wanted him to join it because, given his appearance – fair-haired, rather pale complexion – he might not raise suspicions on the part of the Germans. Let us remember here too that the man who dispatched Manolo and Segunda to Vienna was Picard, an important member of the Resistance and, as Dani Capmany notes in his book Quemar a Troncoso: “It looks as if this Picard was high up in the French Deuxième Bureau” (French Secret Services). 

It would therefore not be strange for Picard to want them both to work with him in order to pass information to the French secret service, whether about the situation inside the arms plants, or any other information that might be of use to the Allies, whilst keeping tabs on saboteur groups and so on. If, as we know, the pair arrived in Vienna in June, less than three months had passed before they were receiving instructions and, as expected, an avenue of communications had been opened up. 

Gender is another of my themes. So the “mere” fact that I can now put a face on Rosita gives me a warm glow that I would be hard pushed to explain. 

Rosa Curt i Carrió was born in Barcelona on 21 April 1911 and was four years younger than Manolo Huet. When Manolo and Rosa first met, I have no idea, but what we do know is that they were married on 4 April 1932 in the Santa María parish church in Poble Nou, the barrio in which they lived. Then again, their only daughter – María – was born on 9 January 1933, to Manolo’s disappointment as he had been hoping for a boy. Thanks to the Huet family, I have two photographs from Toulouse and 1948, in which Rosa appears. In one of these she is with Manolo himself and in the other she is with her daughter María, reunited at last. Patience and perseverance bring their own rewards. 

Something else that intrigued me but about which I had not been able to turn anything up related to his carpet shop. The family did not know much about it, but naturally they knew more than I did. The told me that “Uncle Manolo” then opened up a store in Andorra near the main street and close to the bullring, specializing in Persian textiles and carpets. The store was called Reflect de Paris (Reflections of Paris). I have yet to come up with a photograph or a precise location, but, from experience, I am sure this will turn up if I persevere. 

So much for family matters. Now back to the underground side of things of which Huet was such a fan.

I now have the link to Gallica, the French digital newspaper library and of course a few things have been coming to light. Lots of things in fact. Because – and it could scarcely have been otherwise – “Uncle Manolo” is starting to pop up all over the place. Sometimes he is named but on other occasions he gets just a glancing reference. The first reference I have found was thanks to the recent discovery made through Elvira Ares, when I asked after the masculine side of the family after family members had been split on the basis of gender between camps, following the family’s worrisome removal to French soil. There were requests made for news and contact details regarding Manuel Huet senior and both his sons, Manolo and Pepe. Those requests appeared in a number of French newspapers in late February 1939.

But let us jump ahead to February 1946. If we look into Blind spot for details of what was going on that month we will soon come across Cerrada and Huet making plans for an armed robbery. So I turned to the Gallica site, typed in “Crédit Lyonnais” (that being the bank held up) and skimmed over the findings for the winter of 1946 linked with post office vans subjected to armed hold-ups in Paris. And, after a while, there it was. I scanned through the details set out by Pons Prades and it all fitted perfectly. The numbers involved, the cars used, the modus operandi. … it looked as if the only thing that the libertarian historian Eduardo Pons Prades had exaggerated was the swag. Or maybe it was the bank that played down its losses. Maybe.

It all happened at around 11.00 a.m. on 8 February 1946, near the Faubourg du Temple district. Within three jam-packed minutes, two cars that had been stolen in advance, cut off the cash van. Five robbers armed with sub-machineguns appeared menacingly and grabbed what they wanted and took off. They made off with a haul that over the ensuing days was estimated at three million francs. The same pattern was repeated in Paris virtually item by item and a further 8 million was seized from another cash van, but in regard to the second raid, all of this is mere speculation, so I just mention it but have no information at all regarding the identity of the possible perpetrators.

If we go through things chronologically the next interesting item we come upon is the establishment in Paris in October 1946 of a sandal-making firm and its formally changing hands in January 1947. What are we talking about? Well, I delved into the economic side of the libertarian underground in France and have been coming up with a few things related to Cerrada’s business dealings. I quickly came upon the setting up and subsequent change of ownership of a footwear firm in Paris in the name of Aline Semel. Nothing unusual in that, so far. The odd thing is that one of the people who set up the firm and then traded it away was none other than a certain Manuel Huet who, as we know, had been pretty active in Paris in 1946. Just in case there was any suggestion that this might have been a different Manuel Huet, I have just found out that the address given for him was the premises of the committee of the CNT’s Local Federation in Paris. 

And just to round off this second expansion upon what is mentioned in the book, in Paris on 31 August 1949, in the Rue Crimée, there was the attempted robbery of a taxi driver, one that went awry. It turned out badly, especially for the police, because one officer died and another was left seriously wounded. For a few months the forces of repression were without any leads, but eventually they caught an Italian car thief. He was caught in possession of the pistol used in the killing of officer Albert Neufcort the previous August. Following up this lead and turning up the heat, they ensured that some details and names were brought to light. They found out, among other things, that on occasion the car thief had done a few jobs for the FAI and some of the names that surfaced had a familiar ring to them. For one thing, there was Wences (Wenceslao Gimenez Orive) from the ‘Los Maños’ group; he had recently been murdered in Barcelona by the Political-Social Brigade (BPS). Then there were the names of Manuel Soto Suárez and Angel Soto Ortiz. Angel was a member of Manuel Huet’s affinity group and had been active alongside Manuel Huet in 1930s Barcelona and later as part of the Pat O’Leary network. The other person involved and the main accused was no one other than his cousin Manuel Soto, the son of a great pal of Huet’s and likewise a member of his affinity group – Manuel Soto Ortiz. Manuel was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour and Angel to 5. How much had Manolo known about the whole matter? We can only guess.

Finally, Paquita told me a couple of things. The first relates to the health of her “Uncle Manolo”. She mentioned to me that he had contracted a sort of silicosis caused by inhalation of tiny fibres from the cloth and textiles with which he had been working. Secondly, that behind the Huet family’s change of residence in 1983, at the time of his fatal accident, the likelihood was that the reason was the very severe coughing fits to which Huet was prone and he was on his way to pay a visit to Rosa’s siter. 

So much, then, for this second addendum to what I set out in the pages of Blind spot. I am eternally grateful to the family of “Uncle Manolo” for their cooperation and the kindly manner in which they have dealt with me. I am grateful to Dani [Capmany] for pointing me in the direction of the French link that I eventually had sight of. And to all those who have helped and collaborated with me in one way or another, plus all those who have chosen to while away a little of their time on reading about these things which happened during the previous millennium. 

El Salto, 24 January 2025 https://www.elsaltodiario.com/ni-cautivos-ni-desarmados/nueva-variada-informacion-manuel-huet-clandestinidad-francia

Image: Maria Huet and Rosa Curt strolling through the streets of Toulouse in 1948. [Huet family via Imanol]

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.