The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (77 page)

tied to the Nazis.

The collaborationists therefore put aside their differences in the

summer of 1941 to form the Légion des Volontaires Français Contre le Bolchévisme (Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism,

LVF) for service in Hitler’s war with the Soviet Union. The unit was

well outside the mainstream French military establishment, and none

of the recruits came from the largely toothless Vichy armistice army.

France under the Nazis 395

While its collaborationist sponsors generally despised each other, they

agreed that they hated communists more. They also recognized that

the LVF offered the only hope for French rearmament and envisioned

that it would grow it into a full division. The unit drew recruits from

the Vichy and unoccupied zones, but it was never larger than a battalion. Still, many Frenchmen initially embraced it as a symbol of

French sovereignty. Pétain suspended the anti-Gaullist law banning

Frenchmen from serving in military units outside France and told

LVF members that they were participating in a great “anti-Bolshevik

crusade” to save France and western civilization. The rector of the

Catholic Institute in Paris, Cardinal Baudrillart, went even further in

giving them his benediction.

As a priest and a Frenchman, I venture to say that these Legionnaires

rank among the best sons of France. . . . These soldiers are doing their

part in helping to prepare the great French renaissance. . . . In its own

way this Legion constitutes a new chivalry. These Legionnaires are

the Crusaders of the twentieth century. May their arms be blessed.39

The LVF troops never lived up to this lofty praise and were little

different from the countless native auxiliaries that served in imperial armies throughout history. Far from treating them as sovereign

allies, the Nazis used them to patch their increasingly thin lines on

the Soviet front. When the LVF fought in Russia it did so wearing

German uniforms as the German 638th Infantry Regiment attached

to the Seventh Bavarian Division. The unit was ill-disciplined, and

when it took heavy casualties in the 1941 Soviet winter offensive

German military authorities fi lled out its ranks with two hundred

Algerian Arabs.

The collaborationist legionnaires were not the only Frenchmen

to remain under arms after the armistice. Pétain and his Paris-based

rivals faced a powerful adversary in Charles de Gaulle in their competition to defi ne the character and scope of postwar France. Initially,

the exiled general’s Comité National Français (French National Committee), which was essentially a self-proclaimed government in exile,

appeared of little consequence in the fi rst years of the occupation.

While he depicted himself as a patriot forced to defy his superiors

when they seized power illegally, only a single parliamentary deputy and a few colonial army offi cers backed him. Most of the French

soldiers that the Royal Navy rescued at Dunkirk chose to return to

396 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

occupied France rather than join his Free French forces. Technically,

to do so would have been desertion and treason given that the Vichy

government declared that Frenchmen who left the country without

permission automatically lost their citizenship. The British-sponsored

Free French attack on Dakar in September 1940 further reinforced

the impression that de Gaulle’s followers were traitors.

This meant that the General had to look to the French Empire for

allies against the Vichyites. This was problematical, for most imperial

governors and army offi cers were conservatives who sympathized

with Pétain, particularly after the British attack on Mers-el-Kebir. In

the French West Africa Federation, every single territorial government rallied to the Vichy regime. Its governor-general, Pierre Boisson, enthusiastically put his own version of the National Revolution

into practice by removing Jews, communists, and Freemasons from

the civil service and made plans to attack the British West African

territories. Renouncing the fundamental French legitimizing imperial ideology of assimilation, Boisson introduced racial segregation,

purged military veterans and westernized
évolués
from the voting

rolls, and placed all Africans under “native law” regardless of their

education or level of westernization.

These discriminatory policies help to explain why Félix Éboué, the

Guianan-born governor of Chad, offered de Gaulle a base of operations in French Equatorial Africa. Bravely acting without consideration for two sons in German POW camps, he used the support

of Jacques-Philippe Leclerc, one of the few French army offi cers to

join de Gaulle in exile, to convince his fellow equatorial governors

to renounce Pétain and join the Free French cause. Brazzaville thus

became Free France’s fi rst capital in exile, and it is worth noting that

most of its soldiers at this time were conscripted Africans.

As committed French imperialists, both de Gaulle and Pétain

exploited Africans because they agreed that France’s greatness

depended on its empire. The Vichyites were therefore outraged when

their German occupiers behaved like an imperial elite in France. In

doing so, they took their lead from Hitler, who considered the French

a lesser Latin people occupying a middle ground between the German

master race and the subhuman Slavs. In
Mein Kampf
, he declared

that France’s overseas empire had contaminated the French people

and warned that France’s reliance on African soldiers and obsession

with “Negroid ideas” was a “threatening menace to the existence of

France under the Nazis 397

the white race in Europe.”40 In his eyes the Third Republic’s quick

collapse in June 1940 confi rmed this view.

While Hitler may have considered the French to be racially tainted,

he still enjoyed the pleasures of Paris as he triumphantly toured

the city after the French surrender. Putting into practice the common phrase
leben wie Gott in Frankreich
(living like God in France),

Germans followed his example by taking advantage of the artifi cial

currency imbalance to go on shopping sprees and enjoy Paris’s fi nest hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, where window signs now read

Hier spricht man Deutch
(German spoken here). They even advanced

city clocks one hour forward to match “greater Reich time.” A military tourist agency called Jeder einmal in Paris (Everyone in Paris

Once) brought soldiers on leave to the city, where German-language

newspapers and tourist books produced by commissioned French

writers provided an introduction to the main attractions and French

history and culture. Enlisted men enjoyed well-stocked canteens,

reserved movie theaters, free rides on the Paris Métro, and their own

medically supervised brothels. Senior offi cers socialized with French

elites and dined on the best food and wine while being waited on by

white-gloved servants. The top Paris fashion designers held special

exhibitions for the wives and girlfriends of the Germans.

As was the norm in most empires, many of these women were

from the subject population. At a time when the mass incarceration of

young French men in German POW camps exacerbated the interwar

gender imbalance, the young, robust, and relatively well-disciplined

German soldier was appealing to many French women. The Germans’ high wages and special privileges also offered women a chance

to escape the more burdensome aspects of the occupation. Even a

young Parisian woman with a brother in the Free French forces gave

in to the temptation of dating a German offi cer: “He was all in white,

like Lohengrin, in a white linen jacket, shining eagle emblem, knight

commander of the Iron Cross, white cap and white gloves.”41 German

men took full advantage of these sorts of sentiments. Additionally,

German homosexuals also found willing partners and relatively little

persecution in Paris.

Ironically, imperial subjecthood meant that the French themselves could no longer live up to the German vision of stereotypically

decadent Frenchmen. The Nazis’ brutally effi cient extractive policies

meant that there was virtually no coal for heat in the fi rst winter of

398 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

the occupation, and freezing Frenchmen got around on bicycles or

in charcoal-fueled vehicles. Mandatory food exports and shortagedriven infl ation meant that the average person subsisted on fi fteen

hundred calories per day. There was a tuberculosis epidemic and outbreaks of diseases caused by malnutrition. Children were particularly

vulnerable. Infant mortality increased by 40 percent in the northern

departments attached to the Belgian military government, and the

average height of all French children dropped by seven centimeters

for boys and eleven centimeters for girls between 1935 and 1944.

Conditions were so bad that many French women, particularly those

with missing husbands, were driven to prostitution to support themselves and their children.42

The collapse of French political authority and the hardships of

imperial occupation forced the French to look out for themselves.

Parisian elites adapted particularly well and warmly feted leading

Germans at cocktail parties, concerts, horse races, and other society

events. Ambassador Abetz, who had an attractive French wife and a

French movie star for a mistress, became a leading society fi gure by

hosting glamorous parties at a confi scated rural estate. More common

Frenchmen were of course not invited, but they too looked for ways

to reach some sort of accord with the imperial power. The popularity

of German-language study increased in French schools as language

profi ciency became an asset for those seeking German business contacts or a job in the military administration. The imperial authorities

paid double wages for secretaries, and even housekeepers working

for the Germans earned more than a policeman with eight years of

service.

The nearly total Nazi dominance of the French economy meant

that Germans became both primary employers and customers in the

country. In the fi rst case, roughly 350,000 Frenchmen worked for the

MBF or military garrison in 1942, while an additional 184,000 voluntarily took jobs in metropolitan Germany even before the Nazis

demanded conscripted laborers. The Germans also accounted for

between 70 and 90 percent of factory orders in some French industries

during this period. This meant that the French willingly built ships,

radios, airplanes, and other sorts of essential war matériel for their

imperial masters. Marcel Michelin sold the Germans 80 percent of his

company’s tire production even though two of his sons were serving

with the Free French.43 Michelin supported de Gaulle enthusiastically,

France under the Nazis 399

but industrialists who refused to do business with the imperial regime

risked losing their factories and workers to confi scation and conscription. Less savory individuals helped the Nazis fence looted property

and launder profi ts. Black marketeers supplied them with foodstuffs

and luxury goods at prices well beyond the reach of the impoverished

French consumer.

Many of these people would answer for their choices after the

Nazi defeat, but their self-serving version of collaboration obscures

the larger reality that most Frenchmen did their best to avoid taking

sides during the fi rst two years of the occupation. Although the Nazi

victory seemed total and permanent, the changing fortunes of war

led many to withdraw inward to wait for a clearer indication of what

the new France would look like. In doing so, they stood aloof from the

Nazi imperial regime, the Vichy state, de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, and the embryonic domestic resistance movements.

This did not mean that Frenchmen accepted their subjecthood passively. Recognizing that armed action would have been suicidal, many

opted for the safer gambit of tweaking the occupiers. They pretended

not to understand German and kept necessary social interaction to a

minimum. More daring people sang “La Marseillaise,” wore tricolor

ribbons in their buttonholes, and observed Bastille Day and Armistice

Day. Others made fun of the Nazis and their Vichy allies. German

soldiers became “potato beetles” in popular slang, children in Nantes

peppered Pétain’s portrait with spitballs, and the illustrator and artist

Tomi Ungerer recalled Alsatians turning the Nazi salute “
Heil Hitler
”

into “
ein liter
” (one liter, presumably of beer). Angry German offi cials ordered that movie houses show fi lms with the lights on because

French audiences coughed and hissed at propaganda newsreels and

cheered at the wrong moments. Graffi ti turned
rauchen verboten

(smoking forbidden) signs on Paris Métro cars into
race verte ver-

boten
(“the green race forbidden,” a reference to German army uniforms). Scrawling the V-for-victory symbol popularized by British

radio broadcasts on walls was more subversive, and in some areas

anti-Vichy and anti-German graffi ti became such a problem that the

French police set up stakeouts to catch the perpetrators.