Vichy France (20 page)

While the Tunisian problem was solving itself by Alexander’s failure to push Rommel west onto French territory, another embarrassment for Darlan’s Grand Design was opening across the Atlantic. Germany’s declaration of war upon the United States immediately following the Pearl Harbor raid posed once again the question of Vichy neutrality. Must France break the Washington connection, useful materially as well as diplomatically?

Darlan was explicitly opposed to any break. French interests were certainly linked to Franco-American neutrality, for in the event of hostilities, the United States could seize much of the French Empire (especially in the Caribbean), not to mention the French gold in the United States.
¹⁶⁵

Hitler does not seem to have been greatly interested in promoting a French declaration of war against the Allies in December 1941. But the subject was raised by subordinates on both sides: Abetz on the German side, Benoist-Méchin on the French, for example. It is here that one finds the curious tale of a Vichy cabinet meeting on January 9, 1942, in which a majority of ministers are alleged to have decided to declare war on the Allies. The real issue, of which the Benoist-Méchin-Abetz exchange was a distorted reflection, was whether France should break relations with the United States. She did not. (A detailed discussion of this episode and the issues and personalities involved will be found in
Appendix A
.) In any event, Hitler and Darlan got
their way, as was to be expected. Hitler had the status quo in France, and Darlan had neutrality. But Darlan had got no concessions.

Furthermore, a belligerent United States was much harder to get along with than the neutral one had been. Washington began putting pressure at once upon French shipping and bases in the Caribbean. The Greenslade-Robert agreement that had governed Franco-American relations in the Caribbean since August 6, 1940, was now changed to reflect American belligerent status and American concern that the Germans might use French bases in the area. American daily patrols in the French Antilles were the main innovation of the new Horne-Robert agreement of December 17, 1941. In February 1942, however, a damaged German submarine landed a couple of wounded crew members at Martinique, and Washington insisted that the French bar the Axis from her Caribbean possessions. The Vichy reply, barring
all
belligerents from French Caribbean possessions in a declaration of total neutrality, was rejected by Washington. On the other hand, Germans were putting pressure on Darlan to refuse any United States demands in the Caribbean. By late March, Darlan had managed to mollify both Hull and Abetz by making conflicting promises. He assured Abetz that no planes or ships from any belligerent could use the French Antilles and that French ships would be scuttled if Americans sought to use them. At the same time, he instructed Admiral Robert to keep negotiating with the United States. On this precarious basis, he kept a fragile neutrality between the ever more exigent belligerent coalitions, but it was clear that his ground for maneuver was greatly restricted. The French Antilles were sufficiently threatened by Washington to alarm even General de Gaulle about their eventual sovereignty. It was a measure of the narrowing possibilities of success for Darlan’s attempts at neutrality.
¹⁶⁶

By the spring of 1942, therefore, Darlan was caught in a tightening vise. One pincer was his failure to improve the conditions of French life by loosening the armistice constraints. He had failed to win any concessions from Hitler, despite the most dramatic offers of the whole Vichy period. The other pincer was the rising threat to French neutrality posed by escalating American and German pressures on the fleet and the empire. Darlan seemed likely to lose even those two bargaining cards that had so far proved inadequate but that were all France had to buy her independence.

Nor could it be said that French life was much easier in the spring of 1942 than it had been in the spring of 1941. In some senses, there was some reestablishment of normalcy. Production was rising. Unemployment had been turned into a labor shortage. But food was short, the prisoners were not home, and France remained cut in two. All the most galling aspects of the occupation remained unchanged. Darlan had failed in every positive test. His efforts to thaw German reserve had failed. Darlan’s successes were negative ones: France had not returned to war and had not yet been fully occupied. These were not enough to keep him in power.

Darlan’s Fall and Laval’s Return: April 1942

D
ARLAN
’
S FALL GREW OUT OF A
V
ICHY DECISION
,
NOT A
German demand. The basic Vichy calculation from the beginning had been built on successful negotiations with Germany. Darlan had been chosen because his contacts seemed better than anyone else’s in February 1941. Who else, Laval excepted, had talked to Hitler and had contacts with Abetz at that frightening time after Laval’s fall? Darlan had not made good on those hopes, however, and Marshal Pétain began casting about for somebody new. Although Pétain met Laval secretly in the Randan Forest near Vichy on March 26, 1942, he wanted to replace
Darlan not with the former foreign minister but with a cabinet of traditionalist, clerical, neutralist friends.

Personal relations between Pétain and Darlan were not bad; Darlan’s manners did not jar the marshal as had those of Laval. But Pétain is supposed to have been disgruntled by the admiral’s penchant for high living and his cynical scorn for the National Revolution. The deeper reasons for Pétain’s dissatisfaction, however, may be learned from the persons whom he wanted to include in a new government. Pétain wanted to make a new assertion of neutrality acceptable to both Hitler and Roosevelt, and he wanted to surround himself with a socially more reassuring crew than either Laval’s cronies or Darlan’s experts had been. These are the purposes that one can read between the lines of the ministerial list that Pétain submitted secretly to German security officials in Paris, bypassing the embassy, in March 1942.

As before, when Pétain wanted to approach high-ranking Germans unofficially, he turned to the World War I air ace, Colonel René Fonck. Fonck had already been the marshal’s messenger in the fall of 1940, when Pétain was trying to meet Goering or Hitler, in the days before Montoire. Fonck was on good terms with both Goering and Air Marshal Udet. He brought Pétain’s proposed cabinet list to Paris, and Achenbach checked it with Berlin and with the SD.

The leading figure of the new government, the vice-president of the Council, was to be Joseph Barthélemy, heretofore minister of justice, long-time professor of constitutional law at the University of Paris, and a laissez-faire liberal bitterly opposed to the Popular Front experiments. He had published a legal defense of the Munich agreements. His tenure as minister of justice had been an uphill effort to apply the rule of law to exceptional circumstances.

The other proposed ministers were a mixture of “experts” and old-fashioned patriots and clericals. There were five high-level civil servants who had been serving as secretaries-general of ministries: Deroy, Dayras, Charles-Roux, Terray, Arnoux. The royalist Catholic Jean Le Cour Grandmaison was proposed for a Ministry of Social Affairs, and François Charles-Roux (proposed
for Foreign Affairs) had been ambassador to the Vatican as well as Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry. The military posts were to go to Admiral Le Luc (who had signed the armistice) and General Revers (Darlan’s chief of staff and still, at this stage, a loyal supporter of the regime, although he was to become a distinguished Resistant by 1944). Pétain’s Senate friends Charles Reibel and Henry Lémery reappeared as prospective ministers, respectively, of the interior and of colonies.

The Paris collaborators were appalled. Fernand de Brinon described the candidates as “clerico-Gaullist” or “patriotarde-attentiste,” accolades that some of these gentlemen did not really merit. Darlan, Laval, and Benoist-Méchin all saw the proposal, the Germans reported to Berlin, as “Gaullist-reactionary.”
¹⁶⁷

The Vichy government also tried this list out on the United States. Du Moulin de Labarthète, Pétain’s
chef de cabinet
and a participant in drawing up the plan, conceded to Leahy the day after the Randan meeting that there was some German pressure to restore Laval, but he said the main intention was to clean house within the ministry.
¹⁶⁸
Du Moulin wanted Darlan removed too, because he was incompetent. Du Moulin mentioned Barthélemy to Leahy—the substitute ministry was being cleared in Washington indirectly.

Darlan’s counterattack sealed his own doom. The United States note of March 27, expressing displeasure at the possibility of Laval’s return, was shown to Benoist-Méchin, who told Abetz about it. Then there began a contest of wills between Abetz and Washington.
¹⁶⁹
Thus Laval entered the picture seriously again only after the question of replacing Darlan had already arisen, and German pressure (Abetz’ pressure, not Berlin’s) was applied only
after American pressure had already manifested itself. Darlan, after all, was not thrown out. He remained a leading figure of the regime as commander in chief of the armed forces.

The Laval government was formed on 26 April 1942. Pétain had thus got half of what he wanted: a new cabinet, with German contacts. But he lost much: although he wanted to keep good American contacts, Roosevelt called Leahy home. Laval now took the office of prime minister from Pétain, leaving the marshal only as head of state. Experts still dominated the government, joined now by some of Laval’s cronies. Pétain’s dream of a Catholic traditionalist cabinet was farther from reality than ever.

The first two years after the armistice form a kind of unity. Like Laval before him, Darlan had tried to win an autonomous neutral place in Hitler’s Europe. Both men had tried to interest Hitler in the useful role France could play if given her head: keeping the Allies out of the empire, contributing colonial and maritime weight to a new continental bloc. They were supported by the cabinet, in spite of postwar efforts by cabinet members to insist that the two late vice-premiers had worked alone. Marshal Pétain had also participated actively in the search for a settlement. Yves Châtel, governor-general of Algeria, once bragged to an American representative that Pétain was known to the Germans as “Marshal Nein,”
¹⁷⁰
perhaps in view of the Germans’ exalted expectations of how defeated peoples should behave. But there is no remark of that kind in the German archives. There Pétain appears rather as “Marshal Bitte”: Give us normalcy and hope for a generous peace, and we will participate in the New Europe.

It is salutary to reflect on Hitler’s blind arrogance. One can only speculate on what would have happened if he had been less vengeful, less wedded to forceful solutions, quicker to sense others’ needs and aspirations. If he had given France enough to eat, arms to defend her empire, and the promise of territorial integrity, France might well have become the neutral “west wall”
that Pétain was to talk about later in 1942. If German dominance meant abundance, Gide observed cynically on 9 July 1940, nine-tenths of Frenchmen would accept it, three-fourths of them with a smile.
¹⁷¹
Hitler’s arrogance of power never gave that speculation a test.

¹
Deutscher General Vichy,
“Akte 7a”
(T-501/120/412–16);
Ministère public c/Bouthillier
, 52.

²
For the preamble, see
DGFP
, IX, no. 512, p. 644. For its subsequent use to justify German demands beyond the armistice, see, for example, forced French delivery of gasoline to the Italians in January 1941. (T-120/378/209359–60).

³
The August 1, 1940, conversation is omitted from
DFCAA.
See Délégation française auprès de la Commission allemande d’armistice pour l’économie, “Comptes-rendus des réunions du 1er juillet 1940 au 5 août 1944” (consulted at the Bibliothèque de documentation internationale et contemporaine, Paris). For August 7, see
DFCAA
, I, 110.

⁴
“Mitteilungen über die Arbeiten der WaKo,” nos. 35 and 38, 2 and 6 August 1940 (T-120/365/206457, 206473). The French tried to have some of the matériel sent to the colonies instead (T-120/368/206878). By February 1941, 7,500 railroad carloads of French armaments had been removed to Germany (T-120/1067/313181).

⁵
Hemmen (Wiesbaden) no. 81 to Berlin, 23 August 1940 (T-120/365/206573–74);
DFCAA
, I, 167–74; “Mitteilungen über die Arbeiten der WaKo,” no. 35, 2 August 1940 (T-120/365/206457–58).

⁶
DFCAA
, I, 137, 140, 190–91; U.S. Department of State Serial File 851.00/2094. Gilbert Renaud (“Rémy”),
La Ligne de démarcation
, is a long collection of anecdotes about crossings. Jean-Louis Curtis,
Les Forêts de la nuit
, gives a most moving fictional account of clandestine crossing.

⁷
Paul Baudouin,
Neuf mois au gouvernement
(Paris, 1948), 227, 238, 270; T-120/121/119692.

⁸
For French reluctance and then acquiescence, see
DFCAA
, I, 73–75, 84.