The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (74 page)

impossible to seize even ten percent of Dutch Jewry without them.”29

While some of the functionaries who made themselves useful to the

imperial regime were fanatics, more often than not the policemen

who collaborated with the Nazi security services were motivated by

duty and bureaucratic ambition. The Germans’ success in co-opting

defeated police forces further demonstrated how centralized nationstates were often more vulnerable to imperial conquest and domination than seemingly less advanced stateless societies.

Nevertheless, France should have been more resistant to Nazi

imperial domination. Sustainable empires required suffi ciently cooperative local allies, and in theory French patriotism was so strong

that no Frenchman would betray his or her homeland by aiding an

occupying power. This seemly dominant nationalism was actually an

optimistic fi ction that papered over signifi cant economic, social, religious, and ethnic divisions. The Third Republic that emerged out of

the chaos resulting from Bismarck’s 1871 victory over the Second

French Empire dedicated itself to turning peasants and ethnic minorities into Frenchmen, but it never put to rest the various feuds that had

divided the French people since the revolution of 1789. Consequently,

380 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Frenchmen continued to debate whether the dominant national order

should be secular or Catholic, aristocratic or popular, centralized or

regional, and urban or rural. Although France seemed strong and

uniform under the Third Republic, the disaster of June 1940 brought

all of these tensions to the surface, thereby creating an opening for

Nazi empire builders.

The Third Republic was already under considerable internal strain

well before the German victory. The prime ministership changed

hands thirty-two times between 1924 and 1940 as various ideological

and political factions vied for power. On the left, Radicals (who were

essentially centrists), Socialists, and Communists fell out among

themselves over questions of how much control the government

should assert over the economy and the degree to which it should

seek to make French society more egalitarian. Maurice Thorez’s

Communist Party was particularly strident in branding rival leftist

parties “social fascists.” The French right, which ranged from moderate conservatives to extreme reactionaries, was so divided in the

interwar era that it largely conceded control of the government to

the Socialists and Radicals. Frustrated, the rightists formed various

paramilitary leagues and secret societies such as the Action Française

(French Action), Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire), and Union Nationale

des Combattants (National Combatants’ Union) that advanced their

agendas in the streets rather than at the polls.

In addition to these factional divisions, Frenchmen also continued to argue over the religious character of French society. Rural

notables, clergymen, and lay Catholics never accepted their loss of

infl uence under Napoleon and blamed the Third Republic’s problems

on immorality, decadence, and above all atheism. Conversely, republicans and secularists remained committed to traditions of the revolution, and many infl uential politicians and civil servants embraced

Freemasonry as a counterweight to the Church. Deeply alarmed by

the Masons’ secrecy and unconventional religious beliefs, the French

right believed their lodges were the sinister force behind many of the

problems of the interwar era.

The lasting trauma of the Great War was the root cause of much

of this political and social turmoil. The loss of 1.4 million soldiers

and the wounding of 6.5 million more destroyed an entire generation. The result was an enormous gender imbalance and steadily

falling birth rates. In the near term, immigration from eastern and

France under the Nazis 381

southern Europe fi lled the population gap, and by 1931, 8 percent of

the population was foreign-born. While these foreigners defused a

labor shortage in the 1920s, they provoked a xenophobic backlash

during the depression, when nearly one and a half million jobs disappeared and the fl ow of refugees from Nazi Germany increased. As

the various political factions blamed each other for these problems,

Frenchmen were largely unifi ed in their determination to protect the

blood of the nation by avoiding another continental war. They were

much more deeply divided on how to manage the depression, resolve

confl icts over immigration and women’s rights, or cope with the twin

threats of international fascism and Bolshevism.

These disputes nearly led to another revolution in 1934 when the

right-wing leagues used a series of corruption scandals as an excuse

to try to bring down the government through violent street protests.

Calling for the elimination, if not murder, of foreigners, Jews, and

leftist politicians, a mob numbering in the tens of thousands forced

the police to open fi re by charging the Chamber of Deputies. The

result was fourteen rightists and one policeman dead and fourteen

hundred injured, making it the worst outbreak of French political violence since the social strife that gave birth to the Third Republic in

1871.30

The riots brought down Edouard Daladier’s Radical government

and helped advance Pierre Laval to prominence as fi rst the foreign

minister and then the prime minister in a conservative unity government. But the street fi ghting also galvanized the left. Putting aside

their differences temporarily in 1935, the Socialist, Radical, and Communist parties formed the Popular Front to deal with the right-wing

leagues at home and the foreign fascist menace posed by the Nazi

military buildup and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The Communists also found it easier to come to terms with their Socialist rivals

after Stalin signed a fi ve-year alliance with France.

Running on a platform promising bread, jobs, pensions, national

unemployment insurance, women’s rights, disarmament, and international peace, the Popular Front won a narrow parliamentary majority in the 1936 elections. Léon Blum became both the fi rst Socialist

prime minister and the fi rst Jewish one, but with only 50 percent of

the popular vote, his administration lacked the electoral muscle to

make good on its promises. Although the Popular Front banned the

rightist leagues, it was far less able to stand up to its own constituents.

382 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Bowing to national workers’ strikes, it forced employers to accept

unionization, collective bargaining, a forty-hour workweek, paid holidays, and signifi cant pay increases. While the French right detested

these policies, it was too divided to mount a signifi cant electoral threat

to Blum. With the various leagues now outlawed, an extreme faction

led by Eugène Deloncle formed the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire, more popularly known as the Cagoule (the hood), to use

murder and political terror against what they saw as a communist

menace. More sober conservatives, particularly bankers and industrialists, backed Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (French

Popular Party), which was a fascist outgrowth of the banned Croixde-Feu.

These rightist groups often took to the streets to advance their

goals, but the Popular Front actually fell due to its own constituents’

dissatisfaction with Blum’s policies. In early 1937, Communists and

Socialists broke with him over his refusal to ban the Parti Social Français, and price increases and the devaluation of the franc alienated

both the working class and the middle class. Faced with intractable

opposition on both the left and the right, Blum resigned in June 1937

when the French Senate refused him further emergency powers. He

returned to offi ce for a brief spell in 1938 and remained an extremely

polarizing fi gure in French politics. The Communists and radicals castigated him for failing to rescue the republicans in the Spanish Civil

War, while the extreme right detested him as a socialist Jew.

It is therefore hardly surprising that France was unprepared to

deal with the Nazi threat. Consumed by internal squabbling, Frenchmen could agree only that they wanted to avoid war and that they

despised the Third Republic. In 1937, the pacifi st and World War I

veteran Jean Giono declared: “What’s the worst that can happen if

Germany invades France? . . . Become Germans? For my part, I prefer

being a living German to being a dead Frenchman.” Alternatively,

rightists swore: “Rather Hitler than Blum.” Or as the Nazi sympathizer Marcel Deat asked during the tense months of early 1939:

“Why die for Danzig?”31 Instead of sympathizing with the Jewish

refugees who fl ooded into the country as victims of Nazi aggression,

many Frenchmen blamed them for provoking the Germans.

Ever mindful of the need to protect French blood, the various

Third Republic governments of the 1930s favored appeasement over

confrontation and defense over offense. Blum initiated a military

France under the Nazis 383

modernization and rearmament program, but French strategists

believed that they could best counter German advances in armor and

airpower with a massive network of fortifi cations, known as the Maginot Line, on the Franco-German border. Budget shortfalls prevented

them from extending it to the English Channel, which opened the

way for the German blitzkrieg to skirt the French defenses by attacking through Luxembourg and Belgium.

When war broke out the Radical prime minister Edouard Daladier

tried to repair France’s deep political and social divisions by forming

a coalition government with the conservatives. But Deat and many of

the other right-wing extremists opposed honoring France’s defense

obligations to Poland, and the Communist Party shifted from promising to defend France to condemning “the imperialist and capitalist

war” after Stalin signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Communist Party

leader Maurice Thorez deserted the French army and escaped to

Moscow, and the French government responded to rumors of Soviet

subversion by jailing six thousand French communists, including

twenty-three members of the Chamber of Deputies. This infi ghting continued during the Phony War period between the Polish surrender and the Nazi assault on the Low Countries and eventually

brought down Daladier’s government in March 1940. It fell to the

moderate Paul Reynaud, who had resisted his predecessor’s appeasement policies, to surrender to Hitler four months later, but there was

more than enough blame for France’s greatest military disaster to go

around.

The Nazis exploited these mutual recriminations effectively. The

immediate pressures of war meant that the victorious German army

did not have the time or the resources to rule France directly. In the

short term, Hitler needed to keep the French obedient and complacent

as he plundered their national wealth to fund his campaigns against

Britain and the Soviet Union. As in all empires, the key was to induce

a suffi cient number of Frenchmen to play an active role in the new

imperial regime.

In occupied France, the German military administration leaned

heavily on French bureaucrats and policemen to run the country. Based

at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich

(Military Command in France, MBF) consisted of a relatively small

cadre of administrators and lawyers drawn from the army and Reich

ministries. The civilian staff of the MBF totaled fi fteen hundred in

384 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

1941, and roughly eighty thousand additional German businessmen,

workers, and civil servants served in the occupation. The military garrison was one hundred thousand strong right after the armistice but

declined to forty thousand second-rate troops in 1942. By comparison,

the police forces for the Paris region numbered over thirty thousand,

and the population of occupied France was twenty-three million.32

Lacking the manpower to rule the French directly, the Nazis

attached the strategically important northern departments of Nord

and Pas-de-Calais to the military regime in Belgium, but in the rest

of occupied France, which consisted of forty-nine departments, they

followed the existing French administrative template. This meant that

provincial military governors and district commanders supervised prefects, subprefects, and mayors in the departments,
arrondissements
,

and towns. French bureaucrats still answered to Pétain in Vichy, but

as in colonial Kenya, German offi cers had full judicial authority and

could appoint, fi re, and transfer subordinate French bureaucrats.

Like all empires, this Nazi imperial regime parasitized the French

economy. Demonstrating that an industrial nation-state was particularly vulnerable to imperial exploitation, they used the Reich Credit

Bank certifi cates, currency manipulation (which overvalued the

reichsmark by 50 percent), one-sided clearing advances, and grossly

infl ated occupation costs to wring roughly nine hundred billion francs

out of France by the end of the occupation in 1944. This enormous

sum, which amounted to nearly 60 percent of French governmental

income, unquestionably made France the Third Reich’s most valuable imperial acquisition.33 As a result, the French suffered crippling