Vichy France (31 page)

The fact remains that the Vichy government had tried to single out a group for special contempt and for measures of discrimination. Those measures were a great help to the Germans when the more bestial program of the Final Solution began.

The State: Liberty and Authority

In a world growing harder, the democracies … must tighten their spring.

—
Paul Baudouin, 1938
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I won’t hesitate to agree that the French governmental system suffered excessively from internal ills, that it bore within itself inherent elements of instability, discontinuity, inefficiency.

—
Léon Blum, 1941
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M
ARSHAL
P
ÉTAIN DID NOT SEIZE AUTHORITY IN THE
summer of 1940. It descended upon him like a mantle. Within
the Third Republic itself a movement for a stronger executive had been frustrated but not diminished between the wars. Then the war governments of 1939–40 set up authoritarian machinery within the republic that an occupation regime could not dispense with. Finally, Pétain’s symbolic meaning for Frenchmen—a paternal substitute for politics—simply left no room for a legitimate opposition.

The Constitution of 1875 had proven remarkably resistant to amendment after the primacy of parliament over president had been established with the crisis of 16 May 1877. Neither of the partisans of further revision—monarchists on the one hand, intransigent radicals unreconciled to the existence of a Senate on the other—still had significant parliamentary support by the turn of the century. Then a new revisionism appeared, dedicated to strengthening the executive. It fed upon the experience of World War I and upon the crises of the interwar years. No one could argue that French parliamentarism had responded well to the major problems of the interwar period—military, diplomatic, or economic. Shorter-lived ministries and longer tractations around the formation of new ones were the clearest external signs of powerlessness at the top at just the moment when decisive action was needed. While the average length of Third Republic ministries was about a year, it fell during periods of economic crisis (1925–26, 1931–36) to six months. There was a caretaker ministry or no ministry at all at such moments as the German remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the Anschluss in 1938. Twice in the 1920’s and nine times in the 1930’s parliament voted “pleins pouvoirs” to permit ministers to dictate unpleasant actions on which the deputies would prefer not to vote, but these exceptional measures usually followed prolonged periods of emergency and were themselves recognition that the system wasn’t working. The “system” had let France slip from the heights of 1918 to the depths of 1939.
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Proponents of a stronger executive came from all quarters of
the political spectrum. Léon Blum, as a young councilor of state fresh from a sobering experience as
chef de cabinet
to the Socialist Minister of Public Works Marcel Sembat, wrote an elaborate plan for providing the French premier with more staff and an office of his own, like a British prime minister. On the other side of the chamber, André Tardieu, who had tried and failed to form a strong ministry in 1931, wrote of the “captive sovereign” and of the “revolution to do over again.”
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Technicians and senior civil servants found their lives complicated by frequent changes of direction and the necessity for political maneuvering instead of arguing for programs on their technical merits. The technical efficiency argument could be heard from a
président de section
at the Council of State, Henri Chardon (France has been “out of balance for fifty years. She has given an excessive preponderance to political powers”); from a
conseiller-maître
at the Cour des Comptes (“Whereas politics dominated the deliberations of [the Finance Committees of the Chamber and Senate], only technical considerations and conclusions drawn from the examination of precise facts inspire the judgments of the Budget Committee [set up on 16 November 1940]”); and even from a republican
lycée
professor, Jean Guéhenno (“electoral politics continued to forbid great projects and long-term designs”).
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For most proponents of a stronger executive, however, authority was an answer to social fears. A regime that permitted the strike wave of May–June 1936 and the Popular Front government was, as the
Action française
had been telling its readers for years, “established disorder.” Constitutional reform was, for some, an escape from an electorate turned dangerous. The electorate had made the Socialist party the largest in France by 1936, and the Communists had grown from nothing to one voter out of five. Even the Radicals, who had come close before
World War I to winning the absolute majority that only the Gaullist party has actually managed to attain in French history, watched nervously as the SFIO passed them in 1936 and the number of Radical seats declined. For some of the most traditionally solid republicans, the bloom was off the rose of election. A stronger executive would no doubt be in more reassuring hands than a parliament.

The movement for strengthening the executive produced a massive literature between the wars. But its authors worked mostly outside the world of established political parties: in veterans’ movements, labor unions, or intellectual study groups like the “X-Crise” of Ecole Polytechnique alumni. The Chamber, comfortable in its old ways, gave serious attention to constitutional reform only during the emergency government which followed the right-wing demonstrations of 6 February 1934. The constitutional reform plan of 1934, however, like the others, fell into oblivion with the Doumergue government at the end of that year. Thus France went to war under a constitution that was already strenuously criticized and that seemed unreformable from within. Defeat raised those voices to a roar: down with “la démocrassouille.”
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Beyond the mere “pleins pouvoirs” of his predecessors, therefore, Marshal Pétain received the charge from the National Assembly on 10 July 1940 in the Casino at Vichy to draft a new constitution. There can be no doubt that legally and actually Pétain had a very broad mandate to draft a new constitution for France.

It was clear from the first that parliament would play an effaced role. Unlike World War I, when the committees of the chambers reasserted their authority over the nearly absolute war government of the first months, the war government set up by Daladier and Reynaud in 1939–40 continued under Vichy without any parliamentary share at all. Parliament was not abolished; the deputies and senators continued to draw their salaries (until August 1941, at any rate), and the permanent bureaux of the two chambers remained in operation (until September 1942). A few
favored deputies even entered the new regime. Some were named
chargé de mission
to report on the state of the provinces.
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Others (Parmentier, Potut) followed the prevailing wind from legislation to administration and became prefects. Some deputies were even still ministers. The general antiparliamentary drift was clear, however. Deputies most closely connected to the Popular Front (Blum, Zay), the defeat (Daladier, Reynaud), or the proposed move to North Africa (Mandel) were imprisoned. Most strikingly of all, in a return to Bonapartist practice, a constitution was about to be drafted by commissions of experts instead of by a national assembly.
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That the new constitution would restore “authority and hierarchy,” a “sense of the state,” became a cliché. The new regime’s style, under the guidance of neomonarchist Justice Minister Raphael Alibert, set out to prove it at once. The government legislated by fiat, beginning each new law with the quasi-royal “We, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France, Head of the French State, decree …”
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The creation of specific new governmental institutions, however, was bound to open up the latent conflicts within the appeal for authority.

A major problem was how to balance that authority with some kind of link to the public. The single party idea, that stock-in-trade of authoritarian regimes of the 1930’s, was frequently mentioned in the summer of 1940, both by Laval and by people closer to Pétain, like Ambassador to the United States Gaston Henri-Haye. But it was soon quietly abandoned. The very word
party
sounded more factious than national to everyone except those likely to control such a party, and, in practice,
all the contending groups at Vichy feared that a single party would be controlled by someone else.
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Veterans’ organizations as a more broadly based “transmission belt” between regime and population seemed an even better idea than a single party to Pétain himself and to some of his more traditionalist advisers. The interwar veterans’ organizations, fragmented and ineffectual, had persuaded themselves that the “generation of the trenches” had been done out of their victory after 1918 by the old political crowd. Under Xavier Vallat as first minister of veterans’ affairs, the rival interwar veterans’ organizations were forcibly united into a single Veterans’ Legion (Légion Française des Combattants) intended to play the civic role that had eluded them before 1939. Veterans “must form groups down to the uttermost village in order to have the wise counsels of their leader of Verdun heeded and carried out.”
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This appeal to vigilantism did in fact produce local incidents in which legionnaires took it upon themselves to denounce prewar leaders to the authorities, to forbid public appearances that displeased them, and in general to act like a pseudogovernment. It was the local Legion that prevented André Gide from giving a lecture at Nice in May 1941. The Legion claimed to be agents of patriotism and loyalty to the new regime in the provinces. Jean Guéhenno gave a sourer description of one Legion chief, “the local pharmacist getting his revenge for having exerted no influence for the rest of his life,” joined in a patriotic ceremony by the ex-radical mayor, “who doesn’t want to miss his legion of honor award,” and the schoolteacher, “fearful of losing his
job.”
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Guéhenno’s version probably comes closer to the web of local pressures and interests that lent force to the Legion in many localities than does the Legion’s own overblown propaganda.

These officious and impetuous local initiatives soon antagonized the prefects, however. A subterranean tug-of-war between the Legion’s spontaneity and the prefectoral corps’ system surfaced in early 1941 in sterner and sterner orders to the legionnaires to keep out of the official administration’s hair. Instruction No. 1 of 26 February 1941 reminded the legionnaires that the “representatives of the central power are the only responsible repositories of the central power’s constitutional authority” and that the Legion must perform its vital role in close cooperation with the official administration and “at its request.” Instruction No. 2 of 30 April 1941, designed to “appease” legionnaires who had apparently complained of a diminution of their role, nevertheless reminded them that their role was “moral and social” and warned them against an “exaggerated” use of that role in “direct civic police actions” in their localities.
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The prefects had clearly won game and set—a forecast of the professional administrators’ eventual victory over all of Vichy’s various experiments with functional representation.

At stake was a dim groping toward another conception of representation to replace the Third Republic’s equal and atomized voters. According to the traditionalists’ theory there was a fatal conflict in parliamentarism between getting elected and serving the country.
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Some kind of advisory or consultative body was essential, however, and the traditionalists wanted to people it with another kind of representative, those who excelled in certain functions prized by the regime: veterans, those “aristocrats of courage”; fathers of large families; spokesmen for patriotic and religious values; prominent members of “real” social groups (artisans, peasants, professions). Elites were the only real representatives, according to René Gillouin. As Pétain himself
explained on October 18, 1941, he needed “continuous circuits between the authority of the state and the confidence of the people, … intermediaries who will discover the express wishes of their constituents, make known their needs, and will answer to the leaders’ need to be informed.” He wanted to “bring forward competences and to replace the power of mere number by the notion of value.” War veterans were not enough. The regime was still groping for some other alternative to elections as a way to enlist the loyalties of local notables and to manufacture public support for the regime.
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The final attempt to create some new form of representative body was the National Council. The creation of a “consultative assembly” was announced on 24 January 1941 during the Flandin interregnum.
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The government chose its members, whose roster reads like an honors list of “la vieille France.” There were Alfred Cortot, the pianist, the physicist Prince Louis de Broglie, three Third Republic ministers (Georges Bonnet, Germain-Martin, Lucien Lamoureux), two members of the French Academy (Joseph de Pesquidoux, Abel Bonnard), Monseigneur Beaussart, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of Paris, and Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the French Protestant Federation, along with some presidents of local chambers of commerce, some Third Republic deputies and senators, heads of agricultural societies, and cooperative union officials.
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