Vichy France (12 page)

The other notable point is the lack of German interest in July
and August 1940 in voluntary association with France. German peace treaty preparations during this period were strikingly punitive.
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Even Laval’s most startling offers of French pilots for the British campaign seem to have aroused no interest in German circles. The French resistance to Britain at Mers-el-Kebir had, to be sure, resulted in some temporary suspensions of the military armistice provisions so that French forces in the colonies could defend themselves, but these were not yet expected to be permanent.
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General von Stülpnagel observed at Wiesbaden that despite the armistice “we are still at war with France.”
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The Armistice Commission continued to rule by Diktat. By September, Laval’s constant probings for a summit meeting had got nowhere. He told an American diplomat, with discouragement, that the Germans apparently held him in low esteem and didn’t want to negotiate. Yves Bouthillier lamented on 23 October that “up to now the Germans haven’t shown the slightest sign of a desire for collaboration.”
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The Archimedian Point from which Vichy finally interested Berlin in collaboration was the issue of how to defend the French Empire against British-Gaullist encroachment. The Gaullist takeover of French Equatorial Africa, which was first reported in Berlin on August 28 and which threatened to spread to West Africa with the British-Gaullist naval expedition that reached Dakar on 20 September, suddenly made Vichy’s authority and independence seem vitally useful to Germany.

The “New Policy,” September–December 1940

H
ITLER HAD LONG SUSPECTED SOME SECRET
Pétain-de Gaulle deal, he told Mussolini at Florence on October 28, 1940. After hearing details of the French defense against Anglo-Gaullist forces at Dakar on September 23–24 and hearing Pétain tell him at Montoire on October 24 that de Gaulle was a “blot on the honor of the French officer corps,” and having recently seen films of the French defense at Mers-el-Kebir, back in July, he had now come to the view that Vichy was sincerely hostile to the British and the Gaullists. The best policy, Hitler told Mussolini, was for Vichy France to defend French Africa herself.
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It was a decisive turning point in French-German relations. Dakar had brought Hitler himself around to seeing some utility in voluntary assistance from an autonomous France.

The Anglo-Gaullist raid on Dakar was the climax of de Gaulle’s second attempt to bring the French Empire back into the war. The first attempt after the armistice had brought away a few individual officers—Colonel Edgard de Larminat from Syria, General Catroux from Indochina, General Paul Le Gentilhomme from Djibouti—but had left the colonies intact under Vichy control. It is well to remember how hard Vichy had worked to assert its sovereignty in July and August in order to win its right to speak for France under the armistice. Vichy feared losing both the metropole to Germany and the empire to England if it did not do so.

At the end of August, the handful of Gaullists in London tried again. With the support of the black Governor-General Félix Eboué in the Chad and a few local officers, Colonel de Larminat, René Pleven, and a few others visited the capitals of French Equatorial Africa during August 24–28 and tipped most of the area into the Gaullist camp by a bloodless coup. Simultaneously,
a sea-born Anglo-Gaullist force with de Gaulle himself aboard sailed on August 31 for Dakar in an effort to swing the balance in West Africa too. With the first news, Vichy had obtained German and Italian permission to send three cruisers and three destroyers out of Toulon to reassert her shaking authority in tropical Africa, and with these reinforcements, Governor-General Pierre Boisson at Dakar stood off the Gaullists on September 23–24 with a vigorous show of force. British and French ships exchanged fire again, as in July, and once again the French armed forces fought off the Allied “aggressor.”

De Gaulle’s discomfiture (“The following days were cruel,” he wrote in his memoirs [I, 137]) was Vichy’s opportunity. French spokesmen redoubled their efforts to gain a general settlement from Germany with a unity of language that argues once again for the basic accord between Laval and the rest of the government.

At Wiesbaden, where he had been keeping General von Stülpnagel informed of the fighting, General Doyen (the new French chief delegate) wrote on September 25:

We find ourselves in a situation without precedent in history. You are making war on England, but we are too, and we are in a state of war with you.

The striking proof at Dakar of French loyalty to the armistice, Doyen said, “demands in all equity an equivalent gesture on your part.” He asked that Germany come to French aid materially, by allowing the French military a free hand to defend the empire and master the “dissidence,” and morally, by guaranteeing that in the peace treaty to come, the French Empire would remain French.
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General Huntziger, now minister of war, tried to make the same point to General von Brauchitsch on September 26.

It is a fact that France and Germany have an armistice, but it is also a fact that France is fighting with Germany against Britain. This anomalous situation must be settled.

Stressing France’s determination to resist the attacks of Britain and the Gaullists on the empire, Huntziger said that France must be given the means to do so—not only the military means, but some clear promise that the empire would remain French in the peace, some easing of the Demarcation Line, and improved economic conditions.
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French planes dropped some six hundred tons of bombs on British installations at Gibraltar in three raids on September 24 and 25, lending some weight to the two generals’ assertions that France was virtually at war with Britain.

Laval had already rushed to Paris on September 24 to see Abetz. “He wished and hoped that France could make her modest contribution to the final overthrow of Britain.” That language goes further than that of his colleagues, but his main point was the same. France was determined to resist the British attack on West Africa, but only a German declaration that West Africa would remain French in the peace treaty would refute de Gaulle’s propaganda that the only way to save the empire lay through Allied victory.
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Yves Bréart de Boisanger, governor of the Bank of France and chief French economic negotiator at Wiesbaden, also struck the new note in his daily struggles with the chief German economic delegate, Richard Hemmen. France was ready to cooperate economically “to a greater extent than previously,” he said on 23 September, provided some political concessions were made. France wanted to get out of the present “state of suspense under the armistice” and “into settled conditions.” The following day, arguing with Hemmen about the new risks to which German war contracts would expose French industries in the unoccupied zone, he insisted that German concessions must be political, not merely economic. “Now I understand your position,” Hemmen said finally. “It is an altogether new question which is before us.”
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Pétain took part himself in this urgent Vichy campaign of late September. He had already told a German industrialist on September 22 that if he still had military means and were not limited by the armistice, he would not refuse, “before my conscience and before history,” to order active operations against England. With the news of Dakar, he sent the blind conservative deputy and war veterans’ leader Georges Scapini, a man who had been received by Hitler in the 1930’s and who had been a co-founder of the Comité France-Allemagne with Brinon and Abetz in 1935, to Berlin as his personal emissary. Scapini spent September 27–30 visiting top German officials: Ernst von Weizsäcker, the permanent secretary-general of the Foreign Office, and two diplomats, Emil von Rintelen, and Roland Krug von Nidda. We do not know what Scapini’s instructions were, but after painting a black picture of economic hardship in France and Vichy’s fear of revolution, he told his German auditors that France wanted to swing sharply around (“umwälzen”) to the European sphere. France, he said, was “ready to enter the continental front.” He foresaw a valuable role for France as the leading colonial power of the New Europe, provided, of course, that she kept those colonies. As for continental peace terms, he proposed a plebiscite in Lorraine. He led his hearers to believe that he, Scapini, would be ambassador when relations were normalized.
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Then, on 11 October, Pétain broadcast a major policy address containing a foreign policy section. The new regime must “liberate itself from traditional friendships and intimacies.” Although France was prepared for good relations with all her neighbors, Franco-German relations dominated her future. The victor, Pétain said, could choose “a new peace of collaboration” or a “traditional peace of oppression.” If Germany knows how to “rise above her victory, we will know how to rise above our defeat.”
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Whatever different nuances were contained in this flood of Vichy overtures, Berlin could hardly fail to receive the essential signal. The Vichy regime wanted to negotiate a general settlement with French territory intact in exchange for active defense of the French Empire against the British. Set us free, and we will cooperate with you. The German archives of late September and early October 1940 are preoccupied with debates about a “new policy” toward France. Halder’s diary, for example, changes tone strikingly. On September 16, he observes that Abetz’ function is to install a cabinet in France that will accept a harsh peace. By September 28 he is talking about the “new policy.” In the afternoon of September 24, Hitler decided to reverse an earlier distrustful decision to deny further reinforcements to the French forces in Africa, by releasing French air forces in Africa from armistice restraints.
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On September 26 Hitler told top military advisors that he wanted to try to “hook France to the German wagon” and mentioned a possible meeting with Pétain.
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While Ribbentrop remained skeptical as always, some top German military agencies seized the “new policy” as a major new strategic alternative to the increasingly dubious cross-channel invasion of England. Admiral Raeder was a permanent supporter of an active Mediterranean strategy. The German Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden forwarded a plan to Berlin on October 4 for the “active inclusion of France in the war against England.” In closer touch with French spokesmen than with other German officials, the Germans at Wiesbaden were sure that the French would defend their empire against the British and even expand it (for example, by helping to take Gibraltar), contributing economically as well as militarily to the German war effort, if they were given “assurances of favorable peace terms.”
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A new Mediterranean-naval-colonial strategy pointing southward opened up a Pandora’s box of rival claims, however; Spain wanted Morocco and Italy wanted not only Tunisia but the Constantine area of Algeria. Laval, General Doyen, and Yves Bréart de Boisanger had all insisted that Vichy couldn’t fight French “dissidence” if the Axis was going to take the French Empire away anyway. Hitler’s efforts to reconcile these conflicting aims took him on a tour of Latin Europe, starting with a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on October 4. There he admitted that the attack on England had been “postponed,” proposed the seizure of Gibraltar, promised Mussolini Tunisia, Corsica, and Nice, and tried to balance out the various claims to North Africa by compensating France from conquered British colonies. The main thing was to postpone this redistribution of spoils to the peace, for if French officers found out, instead of defending the empire from the British, they would turn Morocco over to the British and join the other side. Fortunately, Hitler thought, the Pétain government could be influenced, which would not be the case if the French government fled abroad.
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Then on October 20 Hitler set out in his special train “Amerika” to Hendaye to try to bring Spain into an attack on Gibraltar. Stops were planned in France going and coming: October 22 and October 24. An obscure village railroad station near Tours, Montoire-sur-Loir, with a convenient tunnel nearby for air raid protection, was hastily embellished with potted palms, red carpets, and antiaircraft batteries. It was there that Pierre Laval, expecting he was about to get his long-requested meeting with Ribbentrop, was brought to Hitler on October 22, 1940. Two days later, returning from a frustrating meeting with a stubbornly neutral Franco, Hitler met Pétain at the same spot.

The Montoire meetings came as such a total surprise to the French government that they usually intrude brusquely, as a pure German invention, into the history of Vichy. Indeed, there had been little diplomatic homework even on the German side. Even so, the Montoire meetings were the culmination of months
of French entreaty. The July–August appeals already mentioned did not abate in September. Pétain told a German industrialist on September 22 that he wanted to meet Hitler. He sent Colonel René Fonck to Abetz in mid-September to make the same request. Scapini had taken the same message to Weizsäcker in Berlin on September 30, and Professor Burckhardt and the ex-Khedive Abbas Hilmi reported to Abetz on October 11 that Pétain had repeated this wish to them.
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What had changed by October 22 was German receptivity.

The two Montoire talks were more remarkable for public effect than for anything said there. Hitler, Laval, and Pétain agreed that the war had been a French blunder and that France and Germany must now work together. Pétain said he was in no position to define the exact limits of the cooperation he hoped for, and Laval pointed out that Pétain could not declare war without a parliamentary vote. Hitler did not ask for a formal French alliance or war against Britain, nor did he advance any of the concrete proposals to be found in German Foreign Office working documents prepared just before the trip. No joint document was signed at the end.
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