Vichy France (35 page)

In the atmosphere of verbal hostility to big business, it was possible to think that labor would win a participating role in the new coordinated economy. In fact, every important decision about establishing corporatism turned in favor of business. Pétain had promised to outlaw strikes and lockouts in his 12 October speech. On 9 November 1940, all economic interest
groups, whether of workers or employers, were dissolved. Local unions continued to survive (except civil servants’ unions), but the national structures of the CGT and the Christian unions (CFTC) were abolished. The workers’ right to organize had been set back to before the 1884 law permitting labor unions.

The employers’ association, the Confédération Générale du Patronat Français, was of course also dissolved in this seemingly evenhanded measure. The previous August 16, however, each branch of industry and trade had been authorized to set up an Organization Committee (Comité d’Organisation), a planning group designed to be the building block of the corporatist “coordinated” economy. Each Organization Committee was empowered to make a census of the capacity of all enterprises in that sector of the economy, assess stocks, close down some enterprises, allocate scarce resources, fix conditions of operation and quality of products, and propose price schedules to the government. Its operations were financed by a levy on participating companies. The members were appointed by the minister of industrial production. While the old syndicalist René Belin was minister, one might have expected some care in appointments. After February 1941, however, representatives of heavy industry (Pucheu, Lehideux) held the ministry of industrial production. The personnel of prewar trade and industrial associations reappeared in the Organization Committees. The goverment had a major influence in the presence of a government delegate and in the fact that the last word in allocation of raw materials remained with government Allocation Committees (
comités de répartition
). Insofar as Organization Committees eventually applied the war economy to some 321 branches of French business, however, corporatism meant self-regulation by businessmen themselves.
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The Organization Committees had no trade union counterpart. Although there were supposed to be labor organizations within corporatism, and labor participation on various committees, these lacked the main guarantee of independence: the right to strike. Moreover, they were much slower to be formed. The Charter of Labor, promised by Pétain in his one speech to factory workers, at Saint-Etienne on 1 March 1941, finally saw the light only on 4 October 1941, fourteen months after the Organization Committees had been set up. It followed nearly a year of secret tugging and hauling at Vichy, between the Vichy syndicalists like Belin on the one hand, and cabinet members determined to root out unionism on the other. We have only the word of Georges Lefranc and Belin about the parallel worker organizations, the single but voluntary official labor union, and the workers’ participation at the unit of production which they envisaged. The final document, which Belin did not in fact sign (he had been only minister of labor since February 1941), forbade strikes and unions above the regional level and provided for worker participation only in some vague “social committees” (
comités sociaux
) at the local level. Their function was to “discipline” their members and to represent them in such matters as recreation and pension funds. No “political” function (dirty word to corporatists) was permitted.
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Despite its stated concern for labor welfare and its injunctions of charity upon entrepreneurs, the Charter of Labor was clearly designed to break the back of trade unions in France.

Insofar as some local mixed committees were in fact set up, Vichy carefully divided them three ways instead of two so that workers were in a permanent minority. Seizing upon the unions of “cadres” (engineers, middle management) that had sprung up during the depression, corporatists included them as a separate third category in mixed committees. However bitterly the unionized managers and technicians had quarreled with employers
n the late 1930’s, they had even less in common with labor.
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It is not surprising, therefore, that most workmen and especially union personnel were quick to go into opposition. Christian Pineau of the CFTC was distributing a mimeographed underground leaflet in the north by November 1940. The Jouhaux group in the CGT was clearly in opposition by early 1941. Even initially friendly observers like the former deputy of the Lot, Anatole de Monzie, complained about “this mercantile feudalism,” and Marshal Pétain had to promise in his 12 August 1941 speech to check abuses within the Organization Committees.
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Corporatism did not, however, mean that businessmen’s chosen representatives managed the economy as they wished. There were conflicting interests within corporatism. On one level, the interests of large and small businesses were not always identical, especially in a war economy. Traditionally the two had agreed to shelter from competition: big industry was happy to conform to the conditions of less efficient colleagues, in the famous “Malthusianism” denounced by critics of interwar French productivity. Under conditions of penury, however, differences arose. Who would get raw materials, labor, contracts with Germany, electricity? Which plants would be shut down in the interests of efficiency?

On another level, there was a conflict of power between businessmen and bureaucrats. Conservatives had wanted a regime that was “authoritarian but not statist”
¹⁶⁹
or, in other words, an economy run by businessmen. Upper civil servants preferred the impartial and expert control of highly trained bureaucrats like themselves.

These interlocking disputes were both settled in favor of bigness and state power. Successive ministers of industrial production were increasingly interested in efficiency and productivity. René Belin (June 1940–February 1941), who was interested in restoring full employment, gave way to Pierre Pucheu, former official of the steel cartel (February–June 1941), who was replaced in turn by François Lehideux, Louis Renault’s nephew. This was a movement toward those sympathetic to rationalization, concentration, and modernization. Three automobile firms produced almost all the French cars; textiles and shoes, by contrast, were produced by thousands of firms of varying efficiency. Policy plus wartime exigencies helped carry things in the direction of the automobile pattern and away from the textile pattern.

François Lehideux was genuinely interested in rationalizing an outmoded French industrial system and organizing European business specifically against what Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber twenty-eight years later called “le défi américain.” With Colonel Thönissen of the German automobile industry, when he was still head of the Organization Committee for the automobile industry, Lehideux discussed plans for combining French-German-Italian automobile production to reach “world supremacy.” As delegate for national equipment, he produced a Ten-Year Plan for National Equipment, forerunner at least in spirit of the Monnet Plan for ordered national investment in basic productive plant. Finally, as minister of industrial production, he passed, on 17 December 1941, a law permitting inefficient firms to be closed.
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The statists and rationalizers certainly held all the cards. German policy in the Occupied Zone was ever more ruthless in
diverting raw materials and electricity away from inefficient firms or firms not producing vital materials for them. Furthermore, they closed plants in France in order to free labor to work in Germany, at least until Albert Speer reversed German policy in 1943 and tried to raise French productivity at home. In the unoccupied zone, tight state control over the Allocation Committees and the law of 17 December 1941 both worked in the same direction. One can read the growing despair of small businessmen in the diary of their lobbyist at Vichy, Pierre Nicolle. He saw, rather simplistically, the triumph of “anonymous bureaucracy” and “international Synarchy.”
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France was being dragged through the occupation in the direction of concentrated industry and rationalization. The 1930’s emphasis upon preventing overproduction was already giving way to the postwar emphasis upon seeking higher productivity. Corporatism had become central planning and
dirigisme.

These developments reached their height during 1943, when Laval’s minister of industrial production, Bichelonne, struck a happy partnership with Hitler’s new economic tsar, Albert Speer. Bichelonne was one of the few people at Vichy to perceive clearly that wartime planning was more than a temporary necessity. He looked forward, as an engineer and a bureaucrat, to the application of planned state direction to the postwar economy. Speer, his equal in youth, bookish brilliance, and political naïveté, reversed the policies of Goering and Sauckel in 1943 in order to increase French production at home, away from Allied bombing, instead of bringing French workers to Germany. One more tool for combing out the inefficient was created. Major industries producing for Germany were designated
S-Betriebe
(Speer factories), and their workers were exempted from the German labor draft. Laval found this as politically useful as Bichelonne found it economically satisfying. The future was with bigness and the state.
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From Persuasion to Constraint: The Emerging Police State

The National Revolution has boiled down to the social advancement of the gendarmerie.

—
Anatole de Monzie
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N
O ONE EXPECTED THE ARMISTICE REGIME TO BE SOFT
. The republic had already suspended a number of civil liberties at the start of the war in 1939. Under the provisions of a “state of siege,” the army assumed the supervision of order in the departments and the judicial system was modified. The Communist party, technically Hitler’s ally since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 21, was dissolved on September 26, its newspapers shut down and its political leaders expelled from parliament the following January.
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The post of minister of propaganda was created, and the republic entrusted the business of wartime control of opinion first to playwright Jean Giraudoux and then to Jean Prouvost, textile magnate and newspaper owner. Vichy carried all of these republican emergency devices further and accepted their authoritarian implications more frankly.
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The new regime wanted to be loved as well as feared, however. An immense amount of Vichy effort went into group activities
and ceremonial designed to generate public fervor. Its style was the very antithesis of that prickly refractoriness to group discipline personified in Third Republic folk heroes like Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles cafetier César or the Chaplin of
Modern Times.
Frenchmen had not designed public ceremonies with such didactic zeal since David worked for the Committee of Public Safety, nor marched in such a profusion of uniforms since the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Jean Guéhenno, coming down from occupied Paris into the Vichy zone for the first time in 1942, found it

a strange land, a sort of principality where everyone from children of six on up, regimented into groups from “Youth” to “Veterans,” wearing Francisques or symbols of the Legion, seemed to be in uniform. Where is France?
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Vichy ceremonial and group spirit were firmly in the hands of traditionalists. Their symbols were clerical, rural or artisan, and patriotic. Masses in the Church of St. Philippe at Vichy, parades of the tatterdemalion Armistice Army, schoolgirls lisping “Maréchal, nous voilà,” young artisans with an elaborate wooden scale model of Chartres Cathedral, athletic contests among youth groups—all had some vision of
la Vieille France
behind them. Vichy’s techniques of mass enlistment owed something to a Jacobin-Napoleonic tradition and something to contemporary totalitarian practice, but in detail there was an air of the old-fashioned village fete that no one could mistake for a Nazi party rally.

Persuasion might well have kept the regime above water if its major assumption, an early peace, had been proven right. At the very beginning, acquiescence was normal. A handful of prominent Gaullists were tried in absentia by court-martial without incident. Everyone commented on how well the German troops behaved (they were shot by German courts-martial if they didn’t). What a relief that was, especially given the fear of disorder in the nearly abandoned cities of the north and east. Among Frenchmen, while the number of
criminal cases increased between 1940 and 1944, suicides declined strikingly, as they usually do in times of national emergency.
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But there was no peace. Instead, the makers of the National Revolution plunged unexpectedly down a darkening tunnel of extending war, tightening occupation, rising resistance, and finally, renewed combat on French soil. These somber developments exposed Vichy’s initial miscalculations and deepened material want. As popular support and acquiescence fell away, constraint replaced persuasion.

In any chronological account of Vichy, June–August 1941 should rank as a major turning point, perhaps more significant than the more standard 13 December 1940. The Communist party’s shift from “neither Pétain nor de Gaulle” to active resistance after Hitler’s attack on June 22, 1941, committed the party’s underground capacities to the Allied side. The party’s pent-up militancy burst forth in a series of assassinations that brought the law-and-order question to a head in the last half of 1941. Eventually, the Communists worked more closely with the Gaullists, but in the first anguished months of the German blitzkrieg in the east, terror was the order of the day. It called forth a German counterterror, with Vichy rushing to keep up.