Vichy France (17 page)

The impasse was broken by two developments. Navy Minister Admiral Darlan became the leader most acceptable to both sides, and Hitler decided he would rather have Laval in Paris than as a member of the Vichy government. Darlan, who had been Pétain’s mollifying emissary to Hitler at Beauvais on Christmas Eve, now began to emerge as the figure most likely to restore collaboration.

One may follow in Abetz’ correspondence with Berlin the gradual acceptance of Darlan as a valid interlocutor. Abetz gradually subsided from pistol-brandishing fury on December 16 to support of the Darlan regime by late February 1941. After the January 10 veto of Flandin’s new government, it was Darlan who made himself the chief spokesman for concessions to German anger, devising formulas by which Laval might be brought back into the government without humiliating Marshal Pétain. An exploratory handwritten note of January 12 asked whether Laval’s return was an irreducible German requirement for restoring relations. If so, Pétain would take Laval back into the Directorate if Laval wrote a letter affirming his loyalty. Pétain would then get his sojourn at Versailles and would publicly reaffirm the policies of Montoire. As late as March 5 Darlan was still proposing to Abetz formulas for Laval’s return.
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This amenability was not the only thing that recommended Darlan to the Germans. He had been active in plans for French military operations against the Anglo-Gaullists in the summer of 1940. The sound anti-Gaullist record of Darlan’s navy was also reassuring: only 200 of the 18,000 sailors and 50 of the 500
naval officers in Britain at the moment of the armistice had remained there. General Halder thought that Darlan was so “flattered” by his growing authority that the Germans should support him. Abetz was sure that Darlan opposed a French government move to North Africa and thought he supported the plan for a French military operation against the Gaullists in French Equatorial Africa.
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By his special combination of assiduity, guile, and good credentials, therefore, Darlan managed to be the first French minister to get out of quarantine after December 13 and be received by a high German official. Abetz agreed to see him in Paris on February 3.
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With Flandin’s quiet withdrawal on February 9 and Darlan’s assumption of his positions the next day, the “triumvirate” or “Directorate” scheme of January at last gave way to a regular government. Ribbentrop sent Abetz a personal letter of inquiry on February 11 about conditions in France. Abetz replied that he thought the restoration of Laval was still possible and that Darlan agreed with Laval on reconquering Lake Chad from the Gaullists without actually declaring war on England (which, Abetz pointed out, had the same effect). Ribbentrop had suggested that Darlan would use the fleet against England and permit German use of bases in the empire “in exchange for peace with us.” Abetz seemed to agree. In fact this hypothetical deal discussed by Ribbentrop and Abetz on February 11 went further than the Germans were ever willing to go and so counted on concessions that Darlan was never willing to grant. But it suggests Darlan’s growing acceptability to Germans in high places.
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By February 27 Abetz declared that the government in which Darlan was vice-premier and held simultaneously four other ministries had lost its “provisional” character. He pronounced the French political situation “stabilized” again.
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At working levels in the Foreign Office, there had been regrets all along at the rupture. Staatssekretär Ernst von Weizsäcker feared as early as January 8 that the “nearly complete” German reserve (Zurückhaltung) was leaving a vacuum into which the Anglo-Saxons could enter, and Richard Hemmen, the head of the economic branch of the Armistice Commission, grieved that his vital negotiations for German arms and aircraft manufacture in the unoccupied zone had been interrupted.
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Eventually even Abetz, who had made the post-December 13 crisis something of a personal vendetta not always in step with Berlin, came to feel that Darlan, like Laval, was sufficiently “socialistic” in his bluff, anticlerical saltiness to satisfy those early national socialist atavisms that still moved him.
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The clinching argument, both in Berlin and in Paris, was the recognition that Laval could be more useful as a sword of Damocles in Paris than as a member of the Vichy government. If Vichy needed coercing, Abetz could always threaten to set up a rival Laval regime in Paris. This argument appealed to Hitler’s mood of rebound from the “new policy.” Hitler, who still ordered as late as the third week of January that there should be no direct contact with prominent Frenchmen, no longer wanted Laval in the government but in Paris as a threat. Abetz came to accept that argument as if it had been his own.
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Laval, at Abetz’ urging, set his terms for return so high he knew they could not be accepted: prime minister (i.e., kicking Pétain upstairs to the office of head of state alone).
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By February 9, when Flandin withdrew (and there had been no specific German order that he do so), he had never seen a German official except the enraged, pistol-waving Abetz on December 16. Abetz’ sense of personal affront and the diminishing interest in France at Berlin made Flandin useless for Marshal
Pétain’s major goal: the establishment of good relations with the occupier and the insulation of France from the conflict. Darlan turned out to be better able to renew those German contacts that had been the source of Laval’s power.

The “new policy,” however, was dead. Even upon acquiescing in the new Darlan regime, Abetz pointed out that France had “forfeited” all possibility of good relations with Germany by the exclusion of Laval.
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Darlan’s Grand Design

T
HE GOVERNMENT THAT HAD EMERGED BY LATE
F
EB
ruary 1941 was dominated by one man to a far greater extent than any of the several governments of late 1940. Already navy minister, Darlan assumed the posts of vice-president of the Council, foreign minister, and minister of information on February 10, minister of the interior on February 17, and minister of defense the following August 11. Compared to Laval’s two ministries in late 1940 and four in 1942–44, it was the greatest accumulation of offices during the Vichy regime. Much of what was to follow was shaped by Darlan’s world view and by his bargaining position, as well as by German pressures and the evolution of the war.

Like Laval, Admiral François Darlan had been a Third Republic eminence. Contrary to strong royalist and Breton traditions in the French Navy, Darlan came from an old republican family in the southwest. His father had been a small-town lawyer (Nérac, Lot-et-Garonne) and political figure, an
opportuniste
deputy, and minister of justice in the Méline cabinet, 1896–98; he had also been a close friend of Georges Leygues. When Georges Leygues served several times as minister of the navy in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Darlan enjoyed a succession of assignments as head of the minister’s staff. In effect, except for brief
interruptions, Darlan was “permanent Minister of the Navy” from 1926 to 1939.
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As rear admiral, he had also begun acquiring diplomatic experience in 1930 as a member of the French delegation to the London Naval Conference. In 1937, the Popular Front government named Darlan chief of staff of the navy and commander-designate in case of war. Although the famous witticisms about Darlan’s never having been to sea were erroneous, it is true that after midcareer he enjoyed far more political and diplomatic experience than any of his colleagues.

The main result of that career was Darlan’s considerable success in winning funds from a parsimonious Third Republic for naval construction between the wars. The French Navy was, in 1939, at its strongest point in history. Darlan’s navy played a limited role in the 1939–40 war, however. Darlan was a very active proponent of a northern operation against Russia in the Russo-Finnish war, ostensibly to seize the Scandinavian “iron ore route,” and after that war’s end in March 1940 cut short his plans, he threw his energies into the Norway campaign. When the German western offensive began in 10 May, however, none of the great European navies risked a sea battle. Against Italy after June 10, Darlan carried out only one hurried sea bombardment of Genoa.
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At the armistice, therefore, the French Navy was intact and relatively unbeaten. The fleet, France’s last major military resource, made Darlan inevitably a central figure in any future regime. More than any other individual except perhaps Pétain himself, Darlan could make or break the armistice. In June 1940, he committed the French Navy to the armistice position, while reassuring the British that the fleet would not be used against them and issuing secret orders to scuttle the ships if the Germans attempted to seize them.

The armistice released latent antagonisms toward Britain that had probably always simmered in Darlan. The frictions of the interwar naval conferences in which Britain tried to set French and Italian naval limits at the same level, the famous
“snub” at George VI’s coronation in 1936 when Darlan came, in his own words, “behind Siam and Ecuador” because the French did not use the rank of Admiral of the Fleet
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—all these accumulated irritations were magnified a thousandfold by the British shelling of the French squadron at Mers-el-Kebir on 4 July 1940. Darlan became the chief proponent of active military operations against Gibraltar and British Africa. Perhaps because Darlan had always been more a technician than an ideologue, the metamorphoses of 1940 carried him further into bold initiatives than even Laval. Whereas it is usually Laval who is treated as turncoat and opportunist, it was Darlan who actually was to move France closest to outright military cooperation with Germany in 1941 and then to find himself, perhaps accidentally, on the Allied side in November 1942. His opponents have called Darlan “l’amiral Courbette.”
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It was not the admiral’s spinelessness that explains his emergence in 1941, however, but his vigorous initiatives.

Darlan had assumed office as the man best suited to reopen the German connections snapped in the December 13 crisis. Furthermore, he came to power as the figure most closely identified with Laval’s policies, at least as seen by Abetz and Ribbentrop. He was the personification of the message he had taken to Hitler at Beauvais on Christmas Eve 1940: that nothing was changed in France’s external relations. Finally, Darlan took power under the constant menace of a rival Laval government in Paris. Despite these negotiating liabilities, Darlan was determined to make the most of France’s assets in order to make a place for her as a neutral member of the New Europe.

There were varying expectations about Darlan in the most interested capitals as he took office. As seen from Washington, good relations with Darlan were possible only if Vichy kept autonomous French resources, the empire and the fleet, out of Axis hands. Darlan began at least with the favorable impressions created in Washington by Laval’s removal, and even when Darlan’s tirades against Britain shocked U.S. Ambassador Leahy,
as at their first meeting on January 21, 1941, the two admirals found a certain professional common ground. Leahy found Darlan’a “well-informed, aggressive, courageous naval officer” even at that first meeting. Darlan was categorical in his assurances that fleet and empire would remain neutral.
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As seen from Berlin, Darlan’s role after February 1941 was to keep Britain and France apart. The British blockade, whose tightening in the early spring of 1941 raised the question of French armed convoys, was admirably suited for this policy. German officials in France were explicitly instructed to use it to sharpen and aggravate the Franco-British conflict. In more general terms, Darlan was supposed to keep the Allies from using French resources anywhere in the world and to keep order on the German flank and rear in Western Europe. He was expected to use force if necessary to do this, but France was still not to be allowed to become a full co-belligerent against England.
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Having France perform these services was far cheaper than occupying all of French territory and performing them themselves. But there were to be no concessions until the war was over, and France was not to buy her way out of a harsh peace. Hitler was relieved that his brief interest in a “new policy” in the fall of 1940 had led nowhere. He wanted docility, loot, and perhaps bases, not cooperation among equals.

Darlan’s own expectations differed from those of both Washington and Berlin. Darlan had visions of a French naval and imperial power within a new continental system. This role fitted into a German victory with less competition than into a British victory. If the British won, Darlan told a radio audience on 2 May 1941, France, stripped of her navy and empire, would become a “second-class Dominion, a continental Ireland.” The victorious
Germans would probably take less. But by the turning of the year 1940–41, Darlan saw victory by either side less likely. Although he no longer believed by the end of December 1940 that Germany could invade Britain, Britain on the other hand was “finished on the continent.” Her overseas empire was gravitating into American hands. The ensuing stalemate permitted France to realize the colonial and maritime role that the uncomprehending Third Republic and British jealousy had blocked for her before 1940.
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Darlan went out of his way to explain to Germans the advantages of his plans. When Brinon reported to Abetz on the Pétain-Franco meeting of February 1941, Darlan instructed him to observe that all of Africa should be reserved for continental Europe, making possible a friendly settlement between French and Spanish claims. In this perspective, it was in France’s interest to “cleanse” the Mediterranean of British influence. A policy paper submitted to Abetz in the spring of 1941 by some of the young technocrats and activists in Darlan’s cabinet (Pucheu, Lehideux, Marion) referred to France as Europe’s “Atlantic bridgehead.”
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