Vichy France (26 page)

Everything done at Vichy was in some sense a response to fears of decadence. More particularly, the defeat gave cause and opportunity for more radical measures designed to reverse that long moral decline.

The more naive the diagnosis of moral decline, the more simple-mindedly direct were the proposals for legislating a new moral climate. Like every sudden promotion to power of outsiders, the National Revolution had its share of puritanical zealots. Some at Vichy simply tried to root out modern mass culture. The veterans’ movement, the Légion Française des Combattants, denounced the corruptions of “swing” and managed to prevent that prophet of hedonism, André Gide, from giving a lecture on the poet Henri Michaux at Nice in May 1941. The obligatory forest work camps for all young men of twenty, the Chantiers de Jeunesse, preached austerity to blasé city youths around a thousand campfires.
²⁴

Vichy waged a serious campaign against alcoholism, some of whose legislation is still in effect. The alcohol lobbies, the sugar beet growers and the home-distillers or
bouilleurs de cru
, had been untouchable under the Third Republic. The tax exemptions of the
bouilleurs de cru
were suppressed on 7 August 1940, and on 24 August 1940 apéritifs stronger than 32 proof (16°) were forbidden, and all apéritifs were forbidden to persons below twenty. Later no one below fourteen could be served in a bar at all. The law vigorously denied any prohibitionist purpose, but
Le Temps
pointed out how much healthier Frenchmen
had been in periods when alcohol was limited (as in 1913–19) and linked defeat to the fact that France had a bar for every 80 persons, as compared to 270 in Germany, 430 in Britain, and 3,000 in Sweden.
²⁵

Much of Vichy’s promotion of a better moral order was a whited sepulcher. Cynics had no trouble noticing its care for the outward signs over the inward substance. One thinks of Marshal Pétain, twenty-one years after his civil marriage ceremony to a divorcée, going through an annulment and a church wedding (by deputy) before the Archbishop of Paris in 1941. Far more important was Vichy’s attention to two bulwarks of the social order, the church and the family, and its effort to surround young people with a different climate.

Moral Order: The Church

If we had remained victorious, we would probably have remained the prisoners of our errors. Through being secularized, France was in danger of death.

—
Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon
²⁶

Our Father
,

Who art our leader
,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done

On earth, so we may live.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Give France back her life.

Let us not fall back into vain dreams and falsehoods
,

But deliver us from all evil
,

O Marshal!

—
Georges Gérard
²⁷

• • •

T
HE CATASTROPHE OF
1940
HAD BEGUN TO LIFT
F
RENCH
eyes to heaven even before the Third Republic came to an end. On May 19 the next-to-last cabinet of the republic attended a special high mass at Notre Dame. Relics of the saints of France were carried in procession before these predominantly freethinking worthies while Monseigneur Beaussart prayed, “Come, saints of France, expel the enemy attacking this nation which belongs to Christ and wishes to remain in Christ.” The Marseillaise concluded this incongruous ceremony. The new regime practiced a religiosity that went far beyond foxhole prayers, however. As the old godless Third Republic lost its legitimacy, few groups found revenge sweeter than the French clergy and the faithful, nursing long grudges against the results of the French Revolution and against sixty years of official republican anticlericalism.

Although traditional Catholics and the small Catholic left had quarreled bitterly before the war, they agreed in loathing the secularism of the Third Republic and in rejoicing at the possibilities of change. Most Catholics longed for official support for religious values and for undoing old wrongs that still smarted: the “expulsion of God” from public schools in the 1880’s, the quarrel over church property at the time of the separation of church and state in 1905, laws that discriminated against religious orders. The new Catholic left, while it horrified traditional Catholics by its denunciations of capitalism and the laissez-faire state, was if anything more hostile to the secular republic than the others. And so Monseigneur Delay was speaking for most Catholics when he told Pétain at the end of 1940 during one of the marshal’s triumphal tours, “God is at work through you, M. le maréchal, to save France.”
²⁸

The Pétain governments, at least the early ones, were eager to reciprocate. Maurras had accustomed conservatives to value the church as an instrument of social conservatism whether they were believers or not. Religion also seemed to promise to
reverse the long decadence of the secular years. Only a return to traditional Catholic values, said one witness at Pétain’s trial, could restore a greatness that had been lost not in 1940 but long before. Such people were “grateful because the marshal permitted the restoration of spiritual values.”
²⁹

The result of this meeting of minds was the closest church-state harmony since the “moral order” regime of the Duc de Broglie and Marshal MacMahon in 1873–74, the era when the Sacré Coeur was built on Montmartre and pilgrimages to Lourdes became big business. Pétain would have “crushed the church under the weight of his favor” if he had had time, said Education Minister Jérôme Carcopino. The church’s response is usually described in friendly works as the traditional obedience due any legitimate regime. But one has no trouble telling the difference between the alacrity of obedience to this friendly regime and relations with the republic.
³⁰

Vichy’s policy toward the church was shaped by reaction to Third Republic acts. The main battlegrounds had already been laid out by Robespierre, Jules Ferry, and Emile Combes. Vichy restored; it did not innovate in church policy.

Education and influence over the young had been the sorest point since the Revolution had taken schooling from the church and made it a state monopoly. The nineteenth century had bequeathed two hermetically separated parallel school systems: the “free” or parochial schools, permitted since the Falloux law of 1850 (1,300,000 pupils in 1939), and the state schools, made free and universal by Jules Ferry in the 1880’s (5,800,000 pupils in 1939). The state schools had been made militantly secular by republican teachers. The two school systems had been forward
posts in a long battle of values and life styles. Just as the republic had stopped short of enforcing an absolute state monopoly of education, so Vichy merely made changes in both systems.

Most striking was the end of the “godless school.” On 6 December 1940, Education Minister Jacques Chevalier, philosophy professor at the University of Grenoble and Pétain’s godson (Chevalier’s father had been a general), restored religious instruction to the state schools. During Darlan’s more technocratic regime in 1941, however, this forward position was judged to be too exposed at a time when there was so much else to affront public opinion. Darlan, anti-clerical himself, was willing to sacrifice Catholic policy to ease his regime’s other efforts. Education Minister Jérôme Carcopino, the great Sorbonne classicist, merely allowed free time in the school program for voluntary religious instruction off school premises, claiming to have “won religious peace by the neutrality of public schools.”
³¹
But the old republican schoolroom laicism had lost ground it would never regain.

Catholics had more success with state subventions to parochial schools, one of the earliest and most pressing requests of the church hierarchy. They had worked eagerly for state aid in the 1920’s; immediately after June 1940 they returned to the charge. The clergy proposed a system of “bonds” granted each head of family that would permit him to send his children to the school of his choice. Marshal Pétain urged quick action on his government. The eventual law issued on 2 November 1941 by Jérôme Carcopino fell somewhat short of these hopes. State aid was granted directly to the bishops for educational purposes, and it was explicitly an emergency grant, not a recognition of the principle of permanent state aid to parochial schools.
³²
But another sacred republican principle had been breached for good.

Many members of Catholic orders had been prevented from teaching, and the orders themselves required to obtain governmental authorization by the legislation of Emile Combes in 1901. Minister of Justice Raphael Alibert, “a convert who burned with the ardor of a neophyte,” permitted members of religious orders to teach by the law of 3 September 1940. Somewhat more cautiously, a further act on 8 April 1942 permitted religious orders to exist under the same terms as any other organization, requiring state authorization only if they wished to enjoy legal personality. Church property that had been seized at the time of separation of church and state in 1905 and that was still unappropriated thirty-six years later was restored to the dioceses on 15 February 1941. For example, the Grotto at Lourdes was returned to the direct care of the Bishop of Tarbes. Thus some of the rancorous issues that had festered since the battles of the Separation, in which the French Army had been called out to help enforce the property inventories and in which several people had been killed, were settled in a way much more favorable to the church than could have been imagined a few months previously.
³³

The most important changes were matters of tone. The regime cultivated churchmen, sought their advice, and made the church’s teachings about the family, moral decadence, and spiritual values its own.

But although there was some talk of a new Concordat in the hierarchy and among some more traditionalist circles at Vichy,
³⁴
the eventual settlement was really a favorable resolution of questions arising out of the Separation of 1905 rather than a fundamental challenge to the Separation itself. Here, as in so many other areas, Vichy programs built upon a modified nineteenth-century liberalism, distorted by defeat and fear of communism, rather than upon Restoration or
ancien régime
doctrines.

Restitution to the church remained limited, also, because the Vichy-church embrace of 1940 loosened with time. Traditionalists lost ground at Vichy after 1940. On the church’s side, the universal delight of 1940 covered deep internal divisions. The Catholic left was soon disenchanted with the triumph of statist and big business influences over their communal hopes. Still wider Catholic discontent was aroused by the deportation of Jews, which became massive in the summer of 1942. This was the first issue upon which bishops (like Monseigneur Salièges of Toulouse, Monseigneur Théas of Montauban, and Cardinal Gerlier of Lyon) expressed open opposition to the regime. Henceforth, Vichy divided the church as much as it divided France itself.

Moral Order: Education and the Young

S
CHOOL IS A FREQUENT SCAPEGOAT FOR NATIONAL
setbacks. Sputnik produced major school reforms in the United States after 1957. The French generation of 1870 made more changes in schools than in any other civilian institution. Blame was even sharper in 1940, for it was mixed with antisocialism. André Delmas’ National Teachers’ Union (Syndicat National des Instituteurs) had organized teachers for socialism and for pacifism. Pétain, as we have seen, thought that France had lost the war because her reserve officers had been taught by socialist teachers.
³⁵
Vichy wanted not to dismantle mass schooling, however, but to capture it. The centralized nature of French education made that task easier. The republic’s teachers had already sought to create citizens as well as scholars. They brought a crusading fervor to the spread of a militant republican ideal: rationalist, progressive, freethinking, confident in the progress of
science, patriotic.
³⁶
Convinced that the public schools’ liberating efforts were threatened by church and monarchists, republican educational leaders like Ferdinand Buisson spiced their language with the metaphors of an antichurch and an antiarmy. Teachers were the “hussars of the republic,” schoolchildren were the “little missionaries” who would spread liberal republicanism back to their parents.
³⁷

This old but persistent quarrel was overlaid by more recent school disputes of the interwar period. These too worked themselves out in the new freedom to change after 1940.

Non-French readers must recall that the French primary and secondary education systems of the Third Republic were not sequential but parallel. Most children began in free primary school and continued there until the age of thirteen, finishing with a certificate. The most intellectually gifted among them could go on to an
école normale
to become, in turn, a teacher in the primary school system. But there was no access from the top of the primary system to the university or the liberal professions. The secondary school system led to these, and the secondary school system cost money. Parents who could pay started their children in the elementary classes of the secondary school system, which prepared them from the beginning for entry into a
lycée.
Graduated from a
lycée
at eighteen with a
baccalauréat
, they were eligible to enter a liberal profession through one of the
grandes écoles
or the university. About 2.5 percent of French schoolchildren passed through the secondary system. A handful of exceptional young scholars won transfer from the primary track into a
lycée
, and a few poor children were supported in the
lycées
by scholarships. But by and large, the secondary system, with its fee-paying boarding schools, was a preserve of the well-to-do. Teachers in the primary system (“instituteurs”) were produced by that system and had little more in common with the “professeurs” of the secondary system
than had the students of these “two separate worlds.”
³⁸
The great mass of French youth passed through the primary system, taught by “instituteurs” who were themselves products of that system.