And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (22 page)

This change also marked a turning point in Washington’s relations with Vichy. After France’s defeat, the United States was first represented in Vichy by a chargé d’affaires, Robert D. Murphy, who worked hard to bolster Pétain as a counterweight to the Germans. In early 1941, after Murphy was sent as President Roosevelt’s personal envoy to Vichy-ruled North Africa, Admiral Leahy took over as ambassador. The appointment to the post of a senior American naval officer was, of course, no coincidence: not only would he be dealing with another naval officer, Admiral Darlan, as Vichy’s de facto prime minister, but Washington was also eager to keep the French fleet in
the port of Toulon from being seized by Germany. In fact, until December 1941, when the United States entered the war, Washington and Vichy shared a common objective: each wanted the other to stay out of the conflict. And even after the United States entered the war, its relations with Vichy remained cordial. But the return of Laval to power signaled a change. Leahy was withdrawn and, barely six months later, the Allies invaded North Africa, prompting Vichy to break ties with Washington. By then, Laval, who had never believed in Pétain’s revolution, had embraced Nazi-defined collaboration as the only path left for Vichy.

Yet in some cultural and social areas, the National Revolution—while neither national nor revolutionary—spawned changes that would survive the end of the war. At first, the program seemed devoted entirely to the glorification of Pétain. And with Paul Marion, a former Communist and journalist, as information minister, the marshal found someone adept at effecting this. But once Pétain had been aggrandized and the usual suspects blamed for France’s defeat, Vichy identified the key ingredients of its new moral renovation: mothers, children, families, crafts and folk culture, farming and sports. And these, by no coincidence, were all categories closely associated with France’s deeply conservative Catholic church, which was still smarting over its loss of power since the “republican and secular” school reform of 1905. Pétain himself was hardly devout, but he enjoyed the backing of most Catholics, including many intellectuals, and he was happy for the Catholic hierarchy to believe that he was inspired by its values. One underlying theme was that “rural” was good and “urban” was bad, with nothing more patriotic than tilling the land. One song among many, “La Terre de France,” promoted this:

We work, we work
,
We work with confidence
.
We are putting right, we will restore
The prestige of France
.

The implicit message behind this propaganda was that the decadent leftist intellectuals of Paris—that is, those who supported the Popular Front—had also contributed to the country’s mess. Certainly, the proposition that the French would be better off using their bodies more than their minds was one that both Vichy and the church could endorse.

Vichy could equally count on church backing for the central role given to women in the “new” France, both as pillars of the family and as procreators of legions of much-needed French—and Catholic—babies. Thoroughly persuaded that a woman’s place was in the home, for instance, Vichy banned women from working in the public sector, although it did not consider how mothers with husbands in prison camps in Germany were meant to sustain their families. To keep women on a narrow path, Vichy also made divorce more difficult and threatened abortionists with death.
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At the same time, Pétain elevated women to near saintly status: reflecting France’s perennial alarm over its low birthrate, he encouraged them to have numerous children, offering a special medal, the Médaille d’honneur de la famille française, in different categories: bronze for at least five children, silver for seven or more, and gold for upwards of ten. He also instituted Mothers’ Day, to be celebrated on May 25 every year. On the first such fête, in 1941, a poster carried Pétain’s message to children: “Your mother has done everything for you. The Marshal asks you to thank her politely.” For the 1943 Mothers’ Day, Elyane Célis recorded an appropriately syrupy song, “Être maman,” with such heartwarming lines as “To be a mother is to be prettier.”

Pétain himself was now the nation’s new father, even though he had no children of his own. Soon, across the unoccupied zone, children began their school day singing “Maréchal, nous voilà,” Vichy’s unofficial anthem. Four stirring verses each ended with the refrain:

Marshal, here we are!
Before you, the savior of France
We swear, we your lads
To serve and follow your steps
Marshal, here we are
You have given us new hope
Our nation will be reborn
Marshal, Marshal
Marshal, here we are!

Later in the occupation, the resistance came up with numerous parodies of this song, one replacing the refrain with
“Général, nous voilà,”
referring to de Gaulle, another warning Pétain that he would pay for his collaboration,
“Maréchal, tu payeras.”
But elderly French people raised in the unoccupied zone still remember the song’s official words. Less well known is that its lyricists, André Montagard and Charles Courtioux, plagiarized the tune from a Polish Jewish composer, Casimir Oberfeld, who was later deported from France to Auschwitz, where he died.

Borrowing from both the Popular Front and the Third Reich, Vichy emphasized physical education for children and teenagers and quadrupled the prewar sports budget. Jean Borotra, the former Wimbledon tennis champion who was general commissioner for sports until ousted by Laval in April 1942, took the lead in promoting sports as a new nationalist creed. He organized athletics meetings in both Paris and the unoccupied zone, as well as cycling races in Vichy and rowing regattas on the Allier River. He even invited those active in sports to swear the Oath of the Athlete: “I promise on my honor to practice sports disinterestedly, with discipline and loyalty, in order to improve and thus best serve my country.”
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The regime’s greatest success was in giving sports and physical education a new status in schools and universities. Borotra himself fared less well after he lost his Vichy post. Known as an ardent Anglophile, he was suspected of secret contacts with British agents and arrested in November 1942. Deported to Germany, he was held at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and other camps before being freed by American troops at Itter, in Austria, in May 1945. After returning to France, though, he still had to answer for his association with Vichy.

The need to improve young people—or at least to keep them out of mischief—was evidently high among Vichy’s priorities. And here the example of the scouting movement run by the Catholic church proved vital. It had experience with recruiting teenagers, organizing them into teams, teaching them independence and, above all, inculcating them with moral and patriotic values. Unsurprisingly, then, it fell to former scout leaders to create and lead several youth organizations on behalf of Vichy. The first, Les Chantiers de la Jeunesse, or Building Sites for Youth, was founded in July 1940 to replace military service, which was banned by the armistice. Under a former scoutmaster, General Joseph de La Porte du Theil, Les Chantiers organized isolated camps across the unoccupied zone where twenty-year-old
men were required to spend eight months living under a regime of military discipline. Wearing uniforms, they learned to march, hold flag ceremonies and pay homage to Pétain. More usefully, they also did forestry and agricultural work. Somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 youths passed through these camps during the occupation. From 1943, though, Les Chantiers also served Germany’s interest since, upon completing their stints in the camps, many young men were automatically sent to Germany under a compulsory work program. In January 1944, when General La Porte du Theil resisted German orders to press-gang all those in the camps to work in Germany, he was arrested and himself interned in Germany. In practice, though, many youths escaped the camps and joined the rural resistance known as the maquis.
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A similar organization, Les Compagnons de France, also founded in July 1940 by a former scout leader, Henri Dhavernas, targeted boys between fourteen and nineteen. It, too, had a paramilitary structure, with tents, uniforms, flag ceremonies, campfires and the like. And Pétain himself attended its inaugural ceremony, applauding the movement’s intention of replacing peasants who were now prisoners of war by working on farms and repairing roads and bridges. Les Compagnons also engaged in cultural activities, including theater and music. And while the group was meant to be loyally
pétainiste
, it never excluded Jews and it often sheltered youths fleeing to the south from the occupied zone. In February 1941, Dhavernas was replaced by Guillaume de Tournemire, who by the end of 1942 was himself engaged in the resistance. Increasingly, Vichy sensed that it had lost control of the movement until finally, in January 1944, Les Compagnons were dissolved. Many of its members then joined the maquis. All that survived were Les Compagnons de la Musique, a choir that gained popularity around France. After the liberation, adopted by none other than Édith Piaf, it survived under a new name, Les Compagnons de la Chanson.

The experiment with quite the most lasting cultural impact, however, was Jeune France, or Young France, which was launched by Vichy’s Youth Secretariat in December 1940 with the idea of promoting cultural activities around the country, including in the occupied zone. What most distinguished the movement was that its
leaders were not only anti-Communist Catholics who believed that the National Revolution could serve a purpose, but they were also well educated and independent-minded. The man behind Jeune France was Pierre Schaeffer, another Catholic and former scout who had graduated from the prestigious École Polytechnique and had experimented in electroacoustical sound at Radiodiffusion Nationale before the war. Now, still only twenty-nine, seeing an opportunity to broadcast culture in a way of interest to young people, he proposed the creation of Radio Jeunesse, or Radio Youth, which by August 1940 already had a fifteen-minute daily slot on Radio Vichy. Its tone was thoroughly patriotic, including speeches by Pétain and readings of the nationalist poet Charles Péguy. But along with an inspirational message, it also presented live theater, choral music, poetry and interviews with artists.

The success of Radio Jeunesse enabled Schaeffer to win over Vichy to the more ambitious idea of Jeune France. Working with other former scout leaders, Schaeffer set out to mobilize artists of all genres—poets, painters, actors, movie directors and designers—under the banner of preserving “the great traditions” of French culture. Each of Jeune France’s sections—theater, literature, radio and cinema, music and visual arts—had representatives in Paris and in the unoccupied zone. New cultural centers, Maisons Jeune France, were also set up in Lyon, Toulouse, Marseille, Bordeaux and Le Mans, as well as Paris. These centers, forerunners of a similar network created around France in the 1960s, not only organized cultural events and debates but also held night classes on everything from choral singing to costume design.

The idea of bringing culture to the masses conformed with the philosophy of the National Revolution, yet in practice Jeune France’s very openness spawned a sense of freedom among many artists. In May 1941, under its aegis, the artist Jean Bazaine ignored official disapproval of “degenerate” art and organized a show of abstract art at the Galerie Braun in Paris under the deceptively innocent title of Vingt Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française (Twenty Young Painters of the French Tradition). That same year, Jeune France hosted the so-called Rencontres de Lourmarin, where poets and musicians were invited to work together on new projects. A great lover of theater, Schaeffer also used Vichy’s budget to finance Étienne Decroux’s mime school, which would have Marcel Marceau among its early students.

Schaeffer was particularly keen on theatrical and musical events held before large crowds, preferably outdoors. And who better to stir a patriotic audience than Joan of Arc? With a colleague, Pierre Barbier, he created a ten-tableau musical pageant devoted to the martyred heroine called
Portique pour une fille de France
(Portico for a Daughter of France), which on May 11, 1940, was performed simultaneously in Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse before crowds of upwards of twenty thousand in each city. Arthur Honegger’s oratorio
Jeanne au bûcher
(Joan at the Stake), based on Paul Claudel’s text, was first presented at the Lyon Opera on July 4, 1941, also sponsored by Jeune France. Other cultural events were organized around the Fête de Jeanne d’Arc, which took place annually on the second Sunday in May: the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française performed Paul Paray’s
Messe solennelle pour Jeanne
in May 1941 and Gounod’s
Messe pour Jeanne d’Arc
in May 1942.

Jeune France took seriously its commitment to tour productions and exhibitions. Here, its greatest impact was in theater, with some twenty different companies performing 770 times around France during the movement’s seventeen months of existence. The repertory tended to be rich in Molière, Racine and other French classics, but Greek drama was also popular. In Paris, again with Honegger’s music, Jean-Louis Barrault directed an outdoor performance of Aeschylus’s
The Suppliants
among the sprouting weeds of the abandoned Roland Garros tennis stadium, while Jean Vilar, who would become France’s leading postwar theater director, adapted Hesiod’s
Works and Days
outdoors in Melun, where peasants and artisans paraded with their work tools as extras. But the very enthusiasm that Jeune France awakened among young artists condemned it to failure. Under pressure from hard-liners in Vichy, Jeune France was closed down in March 1942, although its influence would survive the occupation.