Vichy France (25 page)

V
ICHY WAS NOT A
“
BLOC
.” I
NFLUENTIAL WRITERS HAVE
reduced it to imported nazism, to the triumph of Maurras, or even to an outgrowth of 1930’s Personalism.
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But no single-factor account of the National Revolution gets us very far. Vichy was as complex as the various groups that stepped from the
wings onto the stage vacated by the Third Republic’s “middlingness.” Disparate as they were, however, the competing visions of the Good France were not altogether lacking in pattern in 1940. While any classification of human feelings does some violence to their rich variety, it helps to sort out the Vichy tendencies around several sets of alternatives: integral Catholic moral order—the pagan nationalist moral order of some prewar protofascist leagues; federal state—centralized state; communal economy—capitalist economy; persuasive means—coercive means.

An integral Catholic vision of the moral order summoned France to return to the traditional faith of her years of glory, with its acceptance of authority and social hierarchy and its solution of social conflicts by charity. At the opposite pole was a post-Christian ethic of self-realization in group action proclaimed by some younger fascist intellectuals like Robert Brasillach.

We have thought for a long time that fascism was a kind of poetry, the poetry of the twentieth century (along with communism, no doubt). I tell myself that it cannot die. Little children who will be boys of twenty later will marvel to learn of the existence of this exaltation of millions of men, the youth camps, the glory of the past, parades, cathedrals of light, heroes struck down in combat, José Antonio, vast red fascism.… I shall never forget the radiance of the fascism of my youth.
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A Tocquevillian federal vision of the state attributed defeat to the sloth of a passive citizenry and wished to replace a numbing centralization with a revitalized local self-administration. The local
notables
would regain their old influence from both the encroaching bureaucrats and the Third Republic’s Paris-oriented cliques of deputies. At the other pole, a Napoleonic vision, equally impatient with what Robert de Jouvenel called the “republic of pals,” wanted to replace the ignorant amateurs of a parliamentary system with trained expert civil servants, operating
a state apparatus ever more centralized as required by the pace of modern life.

A communal vision of the economy dismissed laissez-faire capitalism as a harmful “foreign product, imported from abroad, which France, herself again, spontaneously rejects.”
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One form of this vision, derived from syndicalism, found a solution to the alienation of workers and the class conflicts of modern capitalism in the formation of joint worker-employer organizations to run the economy. A more traditionalist form simply “declared war on the world of money” and longed to revive a preindustrial world in which “the fields were plowed, sown, planted and harvested; and the organization of life did not separate men into categories, but they were all engaged in living on this earth as a single community.”
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Although partisans of this vision were not agreed on whether to reform or abolish the factory system, they all sought to restore some kind of personal wholeness to an atomized way of life. An opposite vision, with far less fanfare, simply adapted the business world to modern crises by allowing businessmen to organize for their own protection, under the umbrella of a benevolent state. Its partisans accepted the division of labor, the factory system, and the almost unlimited power of owners without question. They rejected only the free-swinging competition of 19th-century liberal capitalism.
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Finally, there were competing means of realizing these visions. On the one hand were the technicians of persuasion: organizers of mass rallies, youth and veterans’ movements, stagers of ceremony, purveyors of a sentimental propaganda about the marshal greeting schoolchildren. At the other pole were the partisans of increased police power and tougher courts.

The National Revolution was not totally paralyzed by these polarities of vision. Action was possible because the visions overlapped at a number of points. They fought the same enemies,
though for different reasons: laissez-faire economy, parliamentary government, mass society. All sought a more elitist social order, though their candidates for the elite differed. None challenged the sanctity of property, and all believed that class harmony was natural when agitation was suppressed. All defended the virtues of social order, which they agreed was best maintained by authority and hierarchy at home and caution abroad. They saw more danger than hope in a liberation from the Germans by force. And so they could work together. On many points, of course, the Vichy visions clashed irreconcilably. The history of the National Revolution is, therefore, a history of the gradual gathering around one set of poles: integral Catholicism, Napoleonic centralism, more concentrated capitalism, and coercion.

One major misapprehension remains to be corrected. The National Revolution was not Hitler’s project. It was not “imported on German tanks” in any direct sense.
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After the war, Vichy participants tried to shift the blame for their domestic programs to German pressures, as it was expedient to do in 1945. Pierre Laval, for example, the star witness at Pétain’s trial on 3 August 1945, agreed that the laws discriminating against Freemasons went too far but said that the Germans had insisted upon strong measures. Marcel Peyrouton traced the anti-Jewish legislation of 1940 to German pressures and said that the Germans threatened 10,000 hostages in 1942 if the French did not tighten those laws even further.
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This alibi runs through all the postwar trials and memoirs, and it has rooted itself successfully in general opinion about Vichy. The archives of the German occupation contradict it. Neither diplomats nor soldiers at Berlin cared a fig for Vichy’s internal acts as long as order was maintained and French wealth poured into the German war machine. In most of the embryonic German postwar plans, France was not “honored” with a place in the New Europe. The Germans cared little enough about France’s internal composition to “dump” German Jews there in the fall of 1940. A few ideologues in the German embassy
at Paris, notably Abetz himself and Dr. Friedrich Grimm, took the creation of a national socialist France seriously, but their office had barely begun to function in the summer of 1940. I have been unable to turn up any direct German order for French anti-Masonic, anti-Semitic, or other legislation during the most active period of Vichy legislation in 1940. There were strong indirect pressures upon the content of French legislation when Resistance sabotage increased sharply in August 1941 and when Vichy tried to substitute its own legislation about Jewish property for German decrees in the Occupied Zone in June 1941. Direct pressures to apply the Final Solution to Jews and to draft young Frenchmen to work in German factories began in the summer of 1942. By then the National Revolution was two years old. Even at their most brutal, German exigencies focused narrowly upon anti-Semitism, public order, and the provision of maximum resources for the German war effort. Hitler ignored or scorned the rest of the National Revolution. The National Revolution tells us about France, not Germany. It was the expression of indigenous French urges for change, reform, and revenge, nurtured in the 1930’s and made urgent and possible by defeat.

Emmanuel Berl errs in the other direction. He has asserted that Vichy and the Resistance were a ritual quarrel that can be studied without reference to the course of the war.
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The German occupation did shape the National Revolution, even if German officials did not dictate its concrete form.

First, Germany shaped the National Revolution by a mounting requisition of French goods, services, and manpower. “Kollaboration” meant booty. French wealth was harnessed to the German war effort by several reins. The tightest economic curb was occupation costs. By Article 18 of the armistice, a mirror image of Article 9 of the armistice of 1918, France bore the costs incurred by the occupying army. These were set in August 1940 at 400,000,000 francs per day (20,000,000 marks at the imposed rate of exchange), payable retroactively to 25 June 1940. In all, France paid 400,000,000 francs a day from the armistice until 10 May 1941, 300,000,000 francs a day from 11 May 1941 to 11 November
1942, and 500,000,000 francs a day from the full occupation of France until 3 September 1944: a grand total of 631,866,000,000 francs, amounting to about 58 percent of the French government’s income between 1940 and 1944. To this were added the costs of quarters and the burden of clearing the foreign exchange deficit with Germany, which raised the total occupation costs by another fourth.
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In addition, there were piecemeal agreements for the delivery of foodstuffs and strategic raw materials to Germany, and a number of French factories produced goods for Germany under contract. By the beginning of 1944, France had shipped 4,127 tons of magnesium and 518,684 tons of bauxite to Germany. Through the end of 1942, when the French colonies were cut off by Allied military action, a little over 10 percent of French colonial imports—phosphates, vegetable oils, coffee, etc.—went on to Germany. Eighty-five percent of the French automobiles produced during the occupation went to Germany. The Germans used the income from occupation costs to buy heavily in French agricultural markets, so that by 1944 the annual drain had risen from 6 to 8 million quintals of grain, from 2 to 3 million hectolitres of wine, and from 135,000 to 270,000 tons of meat. The Germans got 4,320 of some 16,000 locomotives in France. And with their surplus of francs, they purchased some 121,000,000 marks’ worth of shares in French companies and overseas holdings. As Franz Richard Hemmen, chief economic delegate to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden, put it in January 1942, “French workers in industry, railroads, internal shipping, and most overseas shipping are working almost exclusively for Germany.” “No other European country,” he reported, “contributes nearly as high a balance [as France] for German armaments and even goods imports.… German orders in France are the dominant factor in the French economy.”
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The French economy was on short rations, and French finance had to support a massive hemorrhage of francs to Germany. Part of the National Revolution, therefore, was simply a particularly stringent war economy. Strict control and planning were unavoidable, though some public officials such as Bichelonne made that necessity into a virtue: an experience in the guided economy that would continue to practice in affluence the lessons it had learned in penury.

Growing German security needs also influenced the National Revolution directly, as we shall see in more detail, when Resistance acts began to multiply in 1941.

Ideologically, German influence upon the National Revolution was only indirect. No doubt there were temptations to share the opinion of Camille Chautemps quoted in the Prologue, that France would get more lenient peace terms if she conformed to the victor’s style. Others, it can not be denied, were impressed by the successes of fascism contrasted with the lamentable performance of liberal democracy in all the tests of the 1930’s: depression, diplomacy, and war. The dominant note struck in National Revolution propaganda at Vichy, however, was the return to French roots and the search for another way between fascism and communism. There were no Germans to object to, and few even to notice, such a position.

We shall examine the various programs of the National Revolution in turn, therefore, as the product of indigenous grievances and interests.

An Answer to Decadence

I am a fascist because I have measured the progress of decadence in Europe. I have seen in fascism the sole means of limiting and reducing that decadence.

—
Drieu la Rochelle, February 1943
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A F
RENCH CITIZEN DID NOT HAVE TO SHARE
D
RIEU
’
S
fascism to feel a sense of decadence, a running down of the mainsprings of civilization, in the modern world. Nowhere else in Europe, except perhaps in Vienna, had the Enlightenment faith in progress been so widely replaced by premonitions of decline by the end of the nineteenth century. The new conservative nationalism of that generation was, as Raoul Girardet observed, “a meditation upon decadence.” The spread of such premonitions is not surprising in an increasingly elderly population in a nation whose real power position fell increasingly short of its sense of world mission between 1890 and 1940. The victory of 1918 had only deepened the gloom by proving too expensive ever to repeat. The decline of France made sense only as part of a cosmic decline. It was the whole modern world that was going wrong, a modern world often identified in interwar France with American mass production and Soviet statism. Between the rising empires of regimented uniformity, France seemed to count for less and less. After a war of bombed cities and poison gas, Georges Bernanos was already sure in 1931 that the next peace would belong not to Lenin but to

some little Yankee shoe-shine boy, a kid with a rat’s face, half Saxon, half Jew, with a trace of Negro ancestry in his maddened marrow, the future King of Oil, Rubber, Steel, creator of the Trust of Trusts, future master of a standardized planet, this god that the universe awaits, god of a godless universe.
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The battle of France was an appropriate moment to reflect even more bitterly upon French decline in an uglier world. Paul Valéry entered a “stock market report on the values of civilization” in his notebooks during May 1940. Rising values were force, statism, the masses. Declining values were trust, leisure, perfection, comprehension, knowledge, humanity, measure, proportion, individualism, and law.
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France and humanistic civilization were going bankrupt together.