Vichy France (13 page)

Embryonic divergences of aim were already apparent at Montoire, however. Already on October 4, talking over the “new policy” with a reluctant Mussolini at the Brenner Pass, Hitler had promised Italy colonial satisfactions that could come only at the expense of France and promised that France should never again become a great power capable of another war of
revanche.
Hitler went to Montoire explicitly planning to conceal the harsh future from the French.
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Even at Montoire, he warned Laval that France had been the first Ally conquered and so “an enemy held primarily liable.” Moreover, nothing about the peace could be decided until the war was over. France could soften the blow only to the extent that she “mobilized everything against England.” Pétain, by contrast, asked for a
peace that “favored those who had tried to make a new start” and said that he anticipated as a result of cooperation “a more advantageous outcome of the war for France.”
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These divergent statements should have been an ominous warning to Vichy of the futility of the “new policy.”

Nonetheless the Vichy government tried earnestly in the days following Montoire to give concrete form to these new signs of German interest. Domestically, the most vital need was to reopen all those issues of internal order on which the Armistice Commission had overruled them in the discouraging days in August: Demarcation Line, occupation costs, return to Paris, liberation of prisoners of war. Externally, the possibility arose of using a well-disposed Germany to block the chief threats to French territorial integrity: Italy and Spain in North Africa, Japan in Indochina, and Britain in tropical Africa.

The Vichy government lost no time in prodding the Germans forward in both these areas. Five days after Montoire, on October 29, Laval returned to Paris with Minister of War General Huntziger and Minister of Finance Yves Bouthillier in tow. He told Abetz that Huntziger would plan the military follow-up with General von Stülpnagel at Wiesbaden, while Bouthillier would negotiate the domestic alleviations with Hemmen. By now Laval was foreign minister as well as vice-premier, the initiative in foreign affairs having clearly fallen from Paul Baudouin to the Laval-Abetz connection.
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Marshal Pétain demonstrated his solidarity with these efforts by sending Scapini off to Berlin again on October 29 to negotiate the early release of the prisoners of war.
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The crucial thing for Vichy was to get results. Public statements of the week after Montoire put the government far out on a limb of promises. Installed in the Matignon Palace for the first time (Abetz let him fly the French flag), Laval publicly announced on October 31 his “first contacts” with German officials since Montoire.

In all domains, and especially in the economic and colonial spheres, we have discussed and we will continue to examine in what practical form our collaboration can serve the interests of France, Germany, and Europe.

Pétain’s famous speech of the same day in which he announced that “I enter into the way of collaboration” included even more golden prospects. He assured his listeners that

In the near future, the weight of suffering of our country could be lightened, the fate of our prisoners ameliorated, occupation costs reduced, the demarcation line made more flexible, and the administration and supply of our territory easier.
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French officials kept up the pressure for results in private conversations as well. Over lunch with Abetz on October 31, Laval predicted that when they saw the results of collaboration, the French people would soon come around to accepting the new policy. They would, like Laval, desire the victory of Germany. But for this to happen, Vichy needed results that “strike people in the eye” (“die ins Auge fallen”), he told Marshal Goering during a two-hour conversation in Paris on November 9. If conspicuous benefits flowed from collaboration, he told Luftwaffe General Hanesse at a breakfast on December 3, he could “bring the French people with him” to the “German side.” There was a subtle blackmail in the pressure of other prominent Frenchmen for results. Passing through Paris on 30 October on his way to Berlin for the second time, Scapini discussed the early release of French prisoners of war with Abetz. Although he admitted it was not possible, or even desirable in a period of unemployment, for all the prisoners to
come home at once before the peace conference, he warned Abetz that some results from Montoire were essential for stability in France. Agriculture Minister Caziot and Finance Minister Bouthillier observed to a German official over lunch on November 9 that post-Montoire propaganda was building up fantastic hopes that might give way to dangerous despair. From outside the government, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the conservative Third Republic premier who had publicly congratulated Hitler for “saving the peace” at Munich in September 1938, told an unidentified informant for the German embassy on November 19 that he hoped for a new Franco-German relationship growing out of Montoire, but there was danger of “backfire” in public opinion if French hopes for the release of prisoners, economic revival, moving the government to Paris, and easing passage between the two zones grew too high.
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No wonder Abetz and the officials of the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden who were closest to this French barrage were more eager for results and concessions after Montoire than anyone in Berlin.

Results were to be denied, at least in the domestic sphere. Considering his eager remarks to General Hanesse about his forthcoming trip to meet Ribbentrop, Laval would have been devastated by Ribbentrop’s own plans for that meeting. Ribbentrop intended to “open French eyes.” Germany was not going to make any one-sided concessions, as Laval seemed to think.
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Nevertheless, the Vichy government went ahead at the end of November in a curious unilateral effort to act as if these domestic concessions had been granted. The French government
declined to make the occupation costs payment due December 1, alleging that continued payment at the rate imposed in August would prejudice the upcoming negotiations.
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In the continuing negotiation on replacing the Demarcation Line with some gentler security arrangement, the French were suddenly no longer willing to accept German customs inspection on the national frontiers as a substitute, except in return for satisfying a number of French requests overridden the previous July, such as abolishing the closed zone in the northeast and returning the Nord and Pas-de-Calais department from German military administration in Brussels to Paris. General Doyen explained that Pétain’s government was now stronger, that French needs in Africa were greater, and that Vichy could not afford to compromise her sovereignty in the face of Gaullist propaganda.
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Most dramatically of all, the Pétain government cut short the negotiations on the move to Paris that had been reopened fruitlessly on 30 October. On November 27 General Doyen notified the German Armistice Commission that “Marshal Pétain had decided to move the seat of government to Versailles” around December 10–15. German authorities were asked to vacate the palaces at Versailles so that Pétain could live in the Trianon. Fifteen hundred French Mobile Guards were supposed to accompany him. Public announcement of this move on December 2 cut off all retreat. The Americans were reassured that the permanent diplomatic services would remain at Vichy, free of direct German surveillance, and that Pétain would be back in a couple of weeks. In a “flutter of excitement,” plans were made to move Labor, Finance, Agriculture, Trade, and Public Works to Versailles, to
divide Justice, Education, Interior, and Colonies between Versailles and Vichy, and to leave the main staffs of the military ministries and Foreign Affairs in the unoccupied zone.
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What had come over Vichy? Had Abetz misled them on the likelihood of a German change of heart about the way the armistice was being applied? Had Vichy decided to present Berlin with a daring
fait accompli?
We still do not know, but it is clear that the German authorities firmly rejected all these unilateral Vichy actions. Internally, the French would have to be satisfied with a spectacle: the return of the ashes of Napoleon’s son, the Duc de Reichstadt, from Vienna to the Invalides, suddenly announced for the hundredth anniversary of Napoleon I’s burial there, 15 December 1940.

T
HE MILITARY HALF OF THE POST
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ONTOIRE FOLLOW
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went much more smoothly. Here German and Vichy interests overlapped. Germany wanted to keep the French Empire out of Allied hands. Vichy wanted to keep it intact, neutral, and out of both Allied and Axis hands. Vichy gained some ground when German policy evolved from envisaging direct Axis intervention in the French Empire (as in the bases demand of July 15) to Hitler’s statement to a skeptical Mussolini at Florence on October 28 that the best solution was for France to defend French Africa herself.
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This evolution gave some substance to the Vichy gamble that order was best maintained in the empire with Germany rather than against her.

Threats to the status quo in the French Empire in the fall
of 1940 came, in ascending order, from Spain, Italy, Japan, and the Anglo-Gaullists. Vichy sought the aid of Germany as the ally of the first three and as the enemy of the fourth. From the beginning, Laval tried to persuade Abetz of the joint Franco-German interest in the empire by proposing the sharing of tropical products in return for German help in getting colonial shipping going again.
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As for the risk of colonial aspirations on the part of Germany herself, the former German Cameroons seemed little enough to sacrifice in exchange for German help with more vital areas.
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The threat to French Morocco and the Oranais from Spain was never to materialize, thanks to Franco’s neutrality. Although Foreign Minister Serrano Suñer kept up a running drumfire of reports to Germany about the danger of French duplicity in North Africa and offered to have Spain replace France as the force of order there, in the end Spain abandoned the expansionist policy that her takeover of Tangiers on 14 June 1940 seemed to forebode.
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The French delegation at Wiesbaden was quite explicit in telling the Germans that it wanted French troops left intact in Morocco in order to guard the border with Spanish Morocco, and the Germans knew that French troops were moved to the Spanish Moroccan border in August 1940.
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The “new policy,” by allowing the French the forces to defend Morocco themselves against the British, amounted also to a tacit choice of France over Spain after the disappointing Hitler-Franco talks at Hendaye on October 23.

Vichy also played off Germany against Italy with some success under the “new policy.” Italian claims to Tunisia and eastern
Algeria were far more overtly expressed than Spain’s claims farther west, and they were now backed by two weeks of war. To be sure, Italian arms had been able to conquer only a few high Alpine valleys, and the Germans had contemptuously dismissed General Roatta’s plan to have Italian troops ferried into the Lyons region through German-occupied territory.
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The Pétain government had been forced to sign an armistice with Italy as the only way to bring the German armistice into effect, but General Huntziger carefully explained that France did not consider Italy a victor. In the fall of 1940, French delegates went out of their way to demonstrate in the Armistice Commission their contempt for Italy, to the point where the Italian government complained about hostility in Tunisia and rudeness at meetings. The Italian threat was real, however, and the French government used the “new policy” to postpone and then annul Italian demands to disarm the French in North Africa. French force levels in North Africa were raised from 30,000 to 125,000, the total French evacuation of Bizerte and Constantine was never achieved, and the French Navy and Air Force had more freedom of action in Africa than Italy wanted. The Italian government went along with the “new policy” only reluctantly—and under German pressure. This small Vichy success had its price, of course, in the expansion of German rather than Italian control inspection teams in the Mediterranean and Africa, such as the German team sent to Morocco under French protest in the spring of 1941. When Laval asked, as on December 10, for German support against Italian territorial claims, he tacitly accepted the replacement of Italy by Germany as the dominant Axis partner in French Mediterranean areas.
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The Vichy regime was less successful in getting German help against Japanese expansion into Indochina. Neither General Catroux nor his successor as governor-general, Admiral Decoux, had the power to oppose Japanese demands for bases by any
means other than diplomatic. A base rights agreement in exchange for Japanese recognition of French sovereignty was concluded on 22 September 1940, after Japanese troops had already violated the frontier. Germany, however, refused repeated French requests to permit arms shipments from France or the empire to Indochina in the fall of 1940 and after, although she later got a share of French rubber shipments from Indochina and hence had some interest in its remaining French.
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The Germans had no objections to France’s diverting to Indochina some of the arms bought in the United States before the armistice, however. Although Cordell Hull objected formally to the Franco-Japanese agreement of 22 September, he also forbade the shipment of any military equipment from the United States to the French in Indochina.
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The “new policy” won nothing in French Asia, therefore, and the French were left alone to slip steadily beneath Japanese influence in Indochina until the outright Japanese takeover of March 9, 1945.