Vichy France (16 page)

At the heart of Laval’s failure to achieve post-Montoire domestic concessions was the move to Paris. Although Article 3 of the armistice had acknowledged that Paris was the seat of the French government, Foreign Minister Baudouin’s official request of July 7 for a return to Paris was answered by secret Ribbentrop instructions on August 19 for German services to treat this
question “in a dilatory fashion.”
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Furthermore, major neutral powers with embassies accredited to Marshal Pétain’s government, chiefly the United States and Switzerland, objected to a “Vatican City” arrangement at Versailles that would subject their diplomatic communications to passage across a German military zone of occupation.
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In the eager days of the “new policy,” however, the Vichy government came up with a two-capitals compromise that they proceeded to put into effect unilaterally at the end of November, without admitting any need to negotiate with the Germans. They were simply told on November 27 that Pétain would be moving to Versailles.

Laval was opposed to Pétain’s move. On November 29, when he was in Paris to meet with General Warlimont, Laval privately told Abetz’ deputy, Rudolph Schleier, that Pétain would probably be satisfied with a temporary trip into the Occupied Zone. In Berlin, Vichy’s “sudden” announcement aroused prompt counterorders. Hitler ordered the Armistice Commission to drag out the matter on technicalities, and then on December 3 Ribbentrop vetoed the move on the ground that the whole Occupied Zone was an operations area. Was Laval trying to keep the Paris connection to himself? Otto Abetz, reporting Laval’s opposition to Vichy plans, saw some advantage for Germany in establishing Pétain at Versailles, away from his entourage and under German influence.
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This humiliating veto of Pétain’s publicly announced visit to Paris on December 3 was followed by Flandin’s summons to Vichy and Pétain’s first letter to Hitler announcing Laval’s removal from office. That letter was countermanded, but the issue
came up again when it was learned suddenly on December 12 that Pétain was supposed to go to Paris on German conditions, to participate in the reburial of Napoleon’s son at the Invalides.

Otto Abetz always believed that the Paris trip dispute was a mere pretext and that Laval’s removal was a gesture of defiance at Germany—and at his own growing share in Franco-German relations through Laval’s special position at Paris.
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Beginning with Abetz, the story has circulated that Pétain thought Laval was trying to get him to Paris where he would be powerless. It seems rather the reverse: that Pétain was trying to get to Versailles and that Laval was failing to win this concession, as well as all the other post-Montoire domestic concessions. Darlan stressed the Paris visit issue in his explanations to Hitler at Beauvais on December 24.
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Pétain had other reasons to dislike Laval. Their personal styles and manners were antithetical. The marshal’s complaint that Laval blew smoke in his face stands for a host of grating minor irritations. But most of all, Laval was arrogating to himself the whole post-Montoire negotiation.

The leaders of the anti-Laval movement also had personal or internal reasons for opposing him. After all, men like Alibert and Peyrouton were hardly partisans of the Allied cause. Peyrouton suspected, rightfully, that Laval wanted his strategic position of minister of the interior, with its control over the national police network. Bouthillier also seems to have suspected that he was going to lose office.
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Authoritarians like Alibert may have noticed that Laval was the only Third Republic parliamentarian left after the new government of 6 September. Without accepting Abetz’ ideological view that the reactionaries of army, church, and high capitalism were out to get Laval, one can find plenty of domestic rivals and opponents in the cabinet.
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Vichy policy afterward was an attempt to undo the damage.
The urgent first priority was to salvage the “new policy.” Flandin tried and failed during January–February 1941. Darlan tried and, for a time, succeeded. Vichy policy after December 13, therefore, was not an expression of the motives that had led to Laval’s removal but the expression of efforts to undo the damage that his removal had unexpectedly created. The major point remains. Vichy policy in the fall of 1940 had been an effort to win autonomy, to cooperate as an equal within the European status quo. December 13 did nothing to change that. December 13 made a change most clearly in German policy. The harsh German reaction only made it more urgent for Vichy to win back the “new policy” that had seemed so promising in October.

The Cold Shoulder: Flandin and Darlan

G
ERMANY
,
WROTE
G
ENERAL
H
ALDER IN HIS DIARY IN
January 1941, was now maintaining a “cold shoulder” toward France.
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That had not been Marshal Pétain’s intention. Whatever the motives for removing Laval, every Vichy effort was devoted now to trying to appease the tantrums and to open up good relations again.

Pierre-Etienne Flandin, the new foreign minister, was a good choice to develop normal and cordial relations with Berlin—or would have been, if Abetz had not identified his own growing role with Laval’s primacy. Flandin was a leading prewar conservative deputy of a rather imposing patrician mien—Peyrouton said he would have made an excellent Victorian statesman—who had reacted to the Popular Front and the dread of war with an active campaign for accommodation with Hitler. He had split his party, the Alliance Démocratique, in September 1938 by writing a public letter of congratulation to Hitler over Munich. He had opposed the declaration of war in 1939 and
was known in Berlin during the phony war as an opponent of the Reynaud war government. After the defeat, he lived quietly in the Yonne, carefully maintaining good contacts with the German embassy in Paris. To his German contacts he denounced the “war party” in London as the tool of international Jewry, attributed French decline to Freemasons and Jews, and “dropped his political reserve” on August 30 to accuse the Vichy government of holding back on necessary reforms. On December 6, when Marshal Pétain summoned him to Vichy, Flandin sent a message to Abetz promising loyal support to Laval and to the policy of collaboration. Flandin, Abetz reported to Berlin on December 18, had a procollaboration reputation and had been chosen as the new foreign minister in an attempt to appease German feelings.
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Flandin did indeed make restoring normal relations with Germany his main business after December 13. He sent messengers to Abetz and to the Armistice Commission asking to reschedule the interrupted summit conference with Ribbentrop that had been planned for Laval. He let the word spread that he was in touch with Hitler and that he would get much more effective results than Laval. He formed a governing triumvirate with Admiral Darlan and General Huntziger, who had been leaders of the post-Montoire military negotiations.
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As before, the whole government joined in these overtures. Pétain sent Admiral Darlan to Hitler at Beauvais on Christmas Eve with a handwritten note insisting that Laval’s dismissal was a purely domestic affair that made no change in Vichy’s relations with Germany. Scapini, who had been sent to Berlin at the end of October to negotiate the release of some prisoners of war, was instructed on December 18 to work for a general settlement (“Vertrag”). As the quarantine of Vichy spread to the Armistice Commission and showed no signs of abating in the new year, General Doyen managed to meet General von Stülpnagel on January 6. In Marshal Pétain’s name, he explained that Laval’s removal had not “the slightest” effect on the fullest French
loyalty to the “agreements” of Montoire. He urged the renewal of contact between ministers and, above all, a meeting between Flandin and Ribbentrop. Collaboration could continue if the Germans wanted it.
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War Minister Huntziger was supposed to deliver the same message on the same day to Richard Hemmen, chief German economic delegate at the Armistice Commission. Finally reaching him on January 16, Huntziger asked Hemmen to tell Ribbentrop that Pétain would cooperate as in the past and regretted that “practical relations did not exist any longer.” Meeting General Studt of the Armistice Commission inspection team on February 5, Huntziger assured him that France would obey the armistice. The Germans should strengthen Pétain, he said, by making the necessary concessions. He volunteered that France was ready to manufacture war matériel for Germany as a gesture of loyalty.
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Vichy’s first priority was clearly the restoration of normal relations with Germany.

Washington and London wanted to believe that Flandin, as a leading 1930’s republican statesman, was more friendly to them than Laval had been, and from those hopes was born the legend that Flandin’s arrival signaled a Vichy return to “attentisme,” awaiting the favorable moment to rejoin the Allied war effort. Churchill wrote Flandin on 14 November 1945 that “I was delighted when you came to power in 1940.”
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His accession to the Foreign Ministry coincided with the arrival of Admiral Leahy as U.S. ambassador. Furthermore, the long-stalled Franco-British negotiations at Madrid over the blockade now seemed to move forward. The British government, which had been urged all fall by Washington to let consumer goods into the Vichy zone, was ready to take up the matter at Madrid. The talks were scheduled to open on January 8. The French had long agreed to the Allied
condition that foodstuffs imported in this way must not be transshipped to the Occupied Zone, and the British government now appeared to accept these assurances.

Flandin, keeping Laval’s promise of 16 November 1940 to inform the Germans of developments in its Madrid contacts with the British, notified the Armistice Commission on January 6 that the food crisis had forced France to enter into negotiations with the British at Madrid over the blockade. Then, as Sir Llewellyn Woodward found in the British records of these talks, they broke off unaccountably at the end of January. When the Germans ordered these talks stopped on February 13, after Flandin’s resignation, Darlan could truthfully answer that the Madrid negotiations had already ceased.
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On the other side, Flandin seems to have suspended or canceled none of the pending projects for economic collaboration. For example, the plan for joint construction of fighter aircraft for both Germany and France in the unoccupied zone, first proposed by General Huntziger on 30 October 1940, was pressed forward by Flandin, Darlan, and Air Minister General Bergeret at an “armistice meeting” on January 29, as a means of refloating the French economy, keeping control of French industrial production for the Germans, and obtaining more planes for France. There are no striking signs of redirecting French policy back toward clandestine aid to the Allied war effort, nor should that have been expected of a man who had opposed the war altogether in September 1939 and who now, like Pétain, clung even more tightly to neutrality and social safety.

Much of the contemporary evidence for secret pro-Allied leanings on the part of Flandin comes from friends of Laval and Darlan who were trying to damage Flandin’s reputation with Abetz. The writer Alphonse de Chateaubriant and two deputies, Spinasse (SFIO) and Montagnon (Neosocialist, close personally to Laval), all told Abetz in January 1941 that Flandin was the
main barrier to Laval’s return and that he was working closely with Allied agents. Darlan proposed in February that the Germans allow Flandin to go home to the Yonne so they could trace his Allied contacts in the Occupied Zone. Abetz refused altogether to deal with the man who had replaced Laval. These kinds of German hostility, Allied wishful thinking, and the letters of intercession that Churchill, Roosevelt, and Leahy wrote in December 1943 when Flandin was imprisoned in Gaullist North Africa all helped acquit him of the charges leveled against him in the High Court of Justice in 1946. Flandin was able to convince the court that he had resigned in February 1941 rather than assent to renewed contacts with the Germans.
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In fact, it seems to have been the other way around. Flandin resigned on February 9 because he failed to reopen the German contacts upon which Laval’s preeminence had rested. We do not know what Flandin would have done with such contacts, but he did his best to raise the quarantine imposed on Vichy after December 13. It would be tiresome to describe all the Byzantine transactions of January–February 1941 over whether Laval should return. On the one hand, Abetz insisted upon a Vichy “investigation” of what had happened, the removal of those responsible for the affront to Hitler, and the formation of no new cabinet until Hitler had replied to Pétain’s explanations. On the other hand, Flandin tried to go ahead unilaterally with forming a new cabinet. In a note countersigned by Pétain on January 8, he announced that Vichy would announce the composition of the new cabinet on January 10, without awaiting further German response. Abetz threatened to cut off Radio Vichy from the Occupied Zone and seal hermetically the already closed Demarcation Line. From that moment on, Flandin functioned in a kind of vacuum: a foreign minister unable to talk to the representatives of the chief foreign power. Informally, there were various proposals for Laval’s return in various cabinet positions and, on January 18, a meeting between Laval and Pétain in the Randan Forest near Vichy that solved nothing. If
Fernand de Brinon can be believed, there were strong partisans of Laval’s return at Vichy, including General Huntziger, who grew so unnerved at the diplomatic blackout that he urged on January 31 “in the name of the army” that Laval be recalled immediately.
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