Vichy France (32 page)

Through 1941, committees of the National Council set to work drafting major pieces of the new constitution. As Justice Minister Barthélemy reminded Frenchmen, even though the new constitution could not be ratified until the peace, the revival of French authority could not wait. The first committee met from 6 May to 10 June 1941 to draft a plan for reviving the
French provinces; the second committee discussed municipal government after 10 June 1941. The third committee discussed the political structures of the new constitution in July, and from September 16 to 18 a committee on “general information” sought ways of improving mutual understanding between country and government. Plans were laid for a Chamber of 200, entirely named by the head of state, and a Chamber of 300, half named by the head of state and half elected by the provincial assemblies from among war veterans, professional groups, fathers of large families, and other “real” organized social units. It is this last feature of functional representation that places Vichy’s traditionalist constitution-making closer to Tocquevillian “intermediary bodies,” Orleanist “best people,” or the Duc de Broglie’s scheme for an elite council in 1874–75 than to the complicated set of parliamentary bodies the Abbé Siéyès set up for Napoleon. Peace never came however, and these constitutional plans stand as a kind of monument to Vichy’s efforts to base its authority on elite councils of local notables.
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In the meantime, into the constitutional vacuum stepped provisional measures of wartime bureaucracy that became the real face of Vichy authority. Vichy, as Yves Bouthillier proudly said, was the primacy of public administration over politics. In the most elementary sense, there was the sheer numerical growth of bureaucrats. After remaining stable in the years of deflation, the total number of people in French public services grew by nearly 50 percent, from about 600,000 to about 990,000 between 1936 and 1947. There was also an expansion of function. The Third Republic’s war government of September 1939 had created a Ministry of Propaganda; Vichy created a Ministry of Industrial Production to assume new economic functions, as the Popular Front’s Ministry of National Economy had done in 1936. The
need to block prices, to ration and allocate scarce resources, to control production and the market through 321 Organization Committees (
comités d’organisation
), all increased the number of things civil servants were called upon to do. At the top, high civil servants stepped directly into positions of command, replacing the politicians whom they had once merely advised from behind the scenes.
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Civil servants were as ready as any interest group to exploit the new climate for change. They carried out long-discussed and long-deferred reforms in the structure of public administration. Steps were taken toward replacing the various examinations for entry into the various
grands corps
of the upper bureaucracy with a single examination. The knotty business of budget-drafting was taken from the powerful budget committees of Chamber and Senate and entrusted to a purely technical body on 18 November 1940, and men like Conseiller-maître André Bisson of the Cour des Comptes were delighted to see “the examination of precise facts” replace “politics” in these deliberations.
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A permanent secretary-general, formerly a normal feature only of the Foreign Ministry, was assigned to every ministry to provide bureaucratic continuity by a law of 15 July 1940. The Cour des Comptes, which audits public accounts, had its work rationalized by a law of 16 May 1941, under which the accounts of all public funds, including organizations subsidized by the state, were submitted to its scrutiny automatically, and not—as under the Third Republic—case by case. The Council of State, the highest administrative court in France, had resumed the legislative function it had enjoyed under Napoleonic regimes (and was to enjoy again under the Fifth Republic). The law of 18 December 1940 added a fifth section to the Council of State responsible for drafting legislative projects. The council had to be consulted on all new legislation, and it could initiate legislation by calling
attention to matters that needed settlement in law. The prefectoral corps, whose group spirit was enlarged by the exceptional independence it enjoyed during the moment of the defeat, was given wider responsibility. Under the Third Republic, local branches of specialized agencies had increasingly dealt directly with Paris, bypassing the prefects. Now the law of 23 December 1940 restored to prefects the role of “sole representative of the state” in the departments, with every public servant except judges under their express control. As Interior Minister Pucheu told them in February 1942:

They [the prefects] know that in the past the decay of our political institutions had bit by bit eroded the high character of their functions. Their role had been too degraded by temporary tasks of electioneering, without continuity, without grandeur. They know, too, how much you [Marshal Pétain] have insisted that their mission be restored in all its grandeur. And they have renounced with relief the game of short-run favors in order to consecrate all their force to the exercise of a supreme command.
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The regime also strengthened the authority of senior civil servants over the mass of lower civil servants. Public employees had been campaigning since before World War I for a “statute” regulating the conditions of their employment and recognizing the right to organize and strike. They got their Civil Service Statute on 15 October 1940, but action on this log-jammed issue had become possible only after the political climate had changed the meaning of such a step. Although civil service associations were recognized as legitimate, they were forbidden to strike or “demonstrate.” Civil servants were required to show active support for the regime and were subordinated to more direct control by their superiors. Promotion by merit gained ground on promotion by seniority.
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In general, Vichy freed the high civil
servants from the threat of mass action by their subordinates and enhanced their personal authority. As a final sweetener, the high civil servants, whose pay had been increasing less rapidly than that of lower civil servants since World War I as salary pyramids generally grew more truncated, had hopes of reversing that trend.
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Public officials encroached upon new functions all the way down to the lowest level of local government, the 90 departments and the 36,000 communes of France. On 12 October 1940 elected departmental councils were replaced by appointed administrative councils. As for the communes, “amateur mayors” presiding in their spare time, wrote Francis Ripert of the law faculty at Aix in 1942, were no longer adequate to the demands of public affairs.
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The greater a commune’s degree of urbanization, the greater the need for expertise and the greater the risk of civil disturbance. The regime was also interested in dispersing that fortress of Third Republic radicalism, the mayors of southern towns. Paris and the other great cities had never enjoyed the 1884 democratization that made mayors elected instead of appointed officials. The law of 16 November 1940 returned to appointed mayors for all towns with a population over 2,000. Municipal councils in such communes were named from a list supplied by the new mayor, and, furthermore, elected municipal councils in smaller towns could be dissolved at the discretion of the prefect.

We need more local studies to discover just which municipal councils survived and which were dissolved, and which prewar mayors survived. But it seems a safe bet that Interior Minister Marcel Peyrouton’s postwar explanations were special pleading. This was no Tocquevillian return to local-notable rule, “en père de famille,” as he claimed, nor a move dictated entirely by the need of larger cities for technical administration “independent
from private interests.” It was a purge of the Third Republic’s local cadres. Later, after 7 August 1942 when Laval tried to have more former elected departmental councillors named to the appointed departmental council, some Third Republic departmental councillors reappeared in departments with formerly conservative majorities (in Brittany or the east) or where there was strong personal influence of a Vichy leader (as in Adrien Marquet’s Gironde). By and large, however, the elected local officials of the classic Third Republic small-town Left—the radical and moderately socialist local schoolteachers, lawyers, and merchants who formed the “republic of pals” at the local level between the wars—either conformed or lost office.
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The march of “statism” was profoundly disturbing to the traditionalists at Vichy. The traditionalists had called for a restoration of the state’s authority but not for an increase in its attributes. They wanted a stronger night-watchman state, not a leviathan; they wanted protection, not
dirigisme.

Traditionalists as irreconcilable as Charles Maurras and Emmanuel Mounier thought that the National Revolution would reduce the number of state officials. The state shouldn’t meddle in everything; it should be absolute within its narrow domain, but that domain should contract. A “deflation of the state” should accompany a “restoration of the sense of the state.”
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Equally disappointed were the businessmen who wanted corporatism to be a form of businessmen’s self-regulation, and they complained bitterly at the economic constraints that tightened with every month. Anatole de Monzie saw the whole development as an inverted Jacobinism in which Vichy had simply replaced one set of masters by another. More naive and conspiratorially minded
men like Déat thought there had been a silent
coup d’état
by a secret society of “technocrats,” which he linked to a Masonic sect called Synarchie.
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There was no synarchic plot, but simply a clearer understanding by technical experts like Minister of Industrial Production Jean Denis Bichelonne that France’s wartime economic management in a period of penury was going to lead to a postwar managed economy of plenty.
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The traditionalists were equally disappointed by the outcome of regionalism at Vichy. Most of the propaganda about regionalism came from the traditionalists. There was talk in 1940 and 1941 of restoring the ancient provinces destroyed in 1789 and of appointing a governor to each, thus restoring links to the organic past. Behind the rhetoric lay a design to displace both the Third Republic “pals” and the encroaching Paris bureaucrats by revived local notables.
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Their efforts produced the nearest thing to a replacement of the department structure between the revolution and the Fifth Republic. The first committee of Pétain’s National Council convened on 6 May 1941 to draft the new regional constitution. Lucien Romier, the historian, economic journalist, and close advisor to Pétain, was chairman. Although the committee was supposed to be “functionally representative,” it was no cross section. No technical experts took part. One of the “farmers” was better known as Joseph de Pesquidoux of the Académie Française, the folklorist. There were also four conservative parliamentarians, a scattering of local government officials, two professors, and Charles Brun, “father of French regionalism,” who had been propagandizing for regional reform since 1901. Emulating Napoleon in the Council of State, Marshal Pétain himself visited its sessions on 16 May. A plan appeared on 18 August 1941 to set up twenty provinces based on economic
as well as historical considerations. Each province was to be run by a governor, assisted by an appointed “conseil des notables.” Shades of the Duc de Broglie’s “grand conseil” plan of 1874! Here we approach a genuine displacement of power from Paris-based administration to local notables.
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Words came from the National Council. Deeds, however, had already come from Admiral Darlan’s government. Official regionalism was based firmly on technical considerations. Darlan created the new office of regional prefect on 19 April 1941 to cope with two pressing practical problems: order and the food supply. Order, already causing concern in the spring of 1941, seemed to require the exchange of information and the movement of motorized gendarmerie over a larger area than the 1791 department. Smoothly functioning food supply required some means of overcoming departmental chauvinism and hoarding and of planning food distribution on a broader regional scale. Each regional prefect, therefore, was flanked by two assistants, one for police and one for food supply. This change moved no functions from the center outwards. It simply added a new bureaucratic level more convenient for an age of faster travel and communication than had been available in 1791. As we shall see, the regional prefect arrangement was continued after the Liberation.
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The final bitter disappointment was Vichy’s failure to realize its promise of stability and permanence. Failing to find any stable basis other than Pétain’s symbolism, suffering increasingly from the blame the regime assumed for mounting hardships, ministries came and went at speeds even more dizzying than at the worst moments of the Third Republic. German orders accounted for far less of the turnover than was claimed after the war, when every Vichy participant’s liberty or life depended upon proving that the Germans had thrown him out. Before the period of direct control in 1944, the Germans really removed
only Ambassador Léon Noel, General Weygand, possibly Xavier Vallat, and some of those most closely involved in Laval’s fall on 13 December 1940: General de la Laurencie, Alibert, Peyrouton. The quarrels of factions, sometimes playing upon German aid, accounted for most of Vichy’s transience. There were three major governmental shifts in the last half of 1940 (July 16, September 6, and December 13), two in 1941 (February and August), two in 1942 (April 18 and November), and two crises in 1943 (April and November). In the first year of Pétain’s regime, there were four ministers of foreign Affairs, five ministers of the interior, five ministers of education, and six ministers of industrial production. Propaganda functions wore out particularly rapidly; there were fifteen ministers-secretaries of state for radio and eight for information between 1940 and 1944. One would have to turn to the most hectic years of the Third Republic for a comparable display of instability (1925–26, for example, or the early 1930’s).