Vichy France (47 page)

Experts included more than simply high civil servants, of course. Vichy conceptions of good governance meant not only that inspectors of finance should administer the economy and councillors of state manage ministerial departments, but that doctors should administer public health, farmers agricultural policy, engineers public works, and veterans and prolific fathers patriotism. Among Vichy ministers there were such other experts as six military officers in defense and colonial posts, a career colonial administrator (Peyrouton), engineers (Jean Berthelot, Denis Bichelonne, Robert Gibrat), executives of major corporations (Pucheu of the Comité des Forges’ international sales branch, and Renault’s nephew Lehideux), a judge (Frémicourt), law professors (Barthélemy, Georges Ripert), agricultural experts (Caziot, Achard), and academics (Carcopino, Chevalier). Broadly understood, experts and professionals in various fields made up eighteen of the thirty-five ministers of the Vichy regime as against eleven parliamentarians, and seven of the eighteen secretaries of state as against four parliamentarians.

The influx of experts and professionals brought impressive talents into the new regime. There was nothing marginal about the new expert ministers. They had been important men before 1940. In scholarly terms, at least, they were a much more impressive group than the ministers of the late Third Republic. Denis Bichelonne was the “gros major” of the Ecole Polytechnique, the man with the highest scholastic record in the school’s history. Jean Berthelot had stood first in his class at both the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines. Robert Gibrat had stood first in his class at the Ecole des Mines and high at Polytechnique. The high civil servants were products of the most rigorous series of diplomas and examinations in any public administration
in the world. In American terms, this was a brain trust; in British terms, a regime of double firsts.

The experts came into their own in the fall of 1940. The first Pétain government, with its substantial number of parliamentarians, gave way to the 12 July 1940 government with two parliamentarians, (Laval and Marquet) and the 6 September cabinet with one (Laval). December 13 was, at least in part, an attack upon the sole remaining Third Republic parliamentarian. Following the Flandin interlude (in which another parliamentarian, Georges Portmann, served briefly as minister of information), Darlan’s regime was the experts’ high noon. Such men as Lehideux, Pucheu, Barnaud, Berthelot, and Gibrat worked seriously for a united and modernized European planned economy. The experts’ decline began with Laval’s return in April 1942. More suspicious than ever and determined to keep tight control over the government, Laval surrounded himself instead with cronies, often former parliamentarians like himself. Pierre Cathala, a school friend, ex-Radical politician, and twice minister in Laval governments during the Third Republic (interior in 1931, agriculture in 1935), replaced the professional Bouthillier at the Ministry of Finance. René Bonnefoy, who had run Laval’s newspaper
Le Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme
since 1927, took over press affairs at the Ministry of Information. Cronies even replaced high civil servants in some posts of secretary-general of ministries, such as Georges Hilaire of the prefectoral corps, an old interwar friend of Laval, who became secretary-general of the Ministry of the Interior.
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A further erosion of professionalism occurred with the total German occupation in November 1942. The two ministers who resigned at that point came from the expert contingent: Robert Gibrat and Admiral Auphan. By 1944 even technicians could see that the regime was finished and it was finally essential to call on strong-arm men like Darnand and Paris ligueurs like Déat. At its height, however, Vichy was more the creation of experts and professionals
than of any other social group, and to judge Vichy is to judge the French elite.

Traditionalists

N
O
W
ESTERN COUNTRY MOVED INTO THE URBAN AND
industrial era without regretful backward looks. Since France moved only slowly and incompletely into this era, argument was still possible in 1940 about the place of cities and heavy industry in the national future. England, too, had her William Cobbetts and John Ruskins during the most optimistic period of industrial growth; the antimodernist rebellion was even stronger in France and still very vigorous in 1940.

It was only in the census of 1931 that the French population had been declared half “urban.”
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This was a stage passed by Britain early in the nineteenth century and by Germany, the United States, and Japan before the beginning of the twentieth. Thus France had known her greatest world role as a mercantilist and rural nation. Industrialization and urbanization had accompanied the long decline from the most powerful and populous state in the world under Louis XIV to the uneasy and doubting status of one major power among many in 1939. It was only natural that many Frenchmen attributed their past greatness to a balanced society and economy, the virtues of craftsmen and peasants, and essentially preindustrial values, and they attributed their decline to departures from these values. Even France’s most recent great effort—holding Verdun in 1916—was credited by many more to peasant doggedness than to coal and steel. From this perspective, the defeat of 1940 was a punishment for whoring after modernity.

Modernity was, first of all, ugly. Daniel Halévy quoted with approval Michelet’s remark that every age has its monuments
and that those of the twentieth century would be barracks and factories. More to the point, modern economic structures were vulnerable. There exists a whole depression literature by economic observers later close to Marshal Pétain, such as Lucien Romier, who insisted that the French balanced society, with its large elements of self-sufficient small farmers, was much more resilient than the overspecialized British, American, and German economies. Those more highly industrialized economies, with their heavy reliance upon credit, advertising, and mass consumption, fell victim to speculative excesses and wild fluctuations. The depression, Romier thought, would be a healthy purge for overinflated luxury economies.
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Modernity was, finally, socially unstable. The city and the industrial division of labor eroded the national moral fiber. Urban and industrial populations were notoriously less fecund than rural populations. The decline in the French birthrate, the rot at the heartwood of French national life, seemed directly attributable to the modern abandonment of the countryside. The city and the industrial division of labor also produced the class struggle. By replacing organic communities of “whole” people with anonymous anthills of antagonistic proletarians and bourgeois, an industrializing country sowed unrest within its own walls.
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Traditionalists worked from an equilibrium model of both economy and society. Like a healthy free economy, a healthy society should return to its natural stable balance after any shock. “Progress” was a will-o’-the-wisp, more likely to make a society sick and vulnerable, just as enticing people into debt for new consumer products made an economy vulnerable.
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To the traditionalists, the defeat of 1940 reflected France’s divergence from the social patterns of her age of greatness. That diagnosis was itself a blueprint of reform. The very suffering of defeat could be portrayed as a first step toward moral regeneration. France had sinned by riches, class antagonism, and easy living. She would be healthier purged of debilitating urban and industrial excesses. “The French renaissance will be the fruit of that suffering,” Pétain had already said on 13 June 1940 at Cangé.
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Beyond that, the traditionalists talked seriously about reversing recent French social evolution. Pétain publicly declared “family agriculture” the “principal economic and social base of France” in his message of 11 October 1940. Agricultural, family, and regional proposals came wrapped in a language praising a simpler, more organic society. Vichy was to be the last stand of men who believed a nation could exert world influence without passing through the industrial revolution.

The traditionalists’ critique of the division of labor led some of them to anticapitalism. Gustave Thibon argued that both capitalism and Marxism, for different reasons, rested upon fullest development of economic man, the division of labor carried to its furthest possibility, and the perpetuation of large structures. The genuinely revolutionary path, he felt, lay not through the industrial revolution but away from it. Thibon attempted to enlist French socialist tradition in his return to preindustrial values by drawing upon Proudhon, not the Proudhon of “Property is theft” but the Proudhon who wanted to replace state authority by free associations of independent artisans. The trouble, of course, was that replacing the state by self-regulating
economic associations led not to the guilds of printers or carpenters of 1840 but to the Organization Committees of giant corporations in 1940. Ironically, the very devotion of such traditionalists to the liberties of a simpler society left them defenseless against the craftier businessmen who quickly turned Vichy to privileged cartelization.
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This inner incoherence helps explain why the traditionalists made so little of their powerful position at Vichy. At first glance, they seem to have occupied the center of the stage. Pétain himself was a traditionalist. So was General Weygand, defense minister until 6 September 1940 and thereafter Vichy proconsul in French Africa, and a large proportion of the senior officer corps.
Secretaires d’État
Lucien Romier and Henri Moysset, professor at the Centre d’Études Navales before the war and editor of the collected works of Proudhon, took major roles in preparing the labor charter, the regionalism plan, and the constitutional drafts of the National Council. Traditionalists were in charge of the Ministry of Education and the Vichy youth movement (Lyautey’s disciple, Georges Lamirand). They predominated in Vichy mass organization: General de la Porte du Theil’s Chantiers de la Jeunesse and the veterans’ movement, the Légion Française des Combattants (Xavier Vallat, followed by another Lyautey disciple, François Valentin, conservative deputy representing Barrès’ old constituency at Nancy). Traditionalists like Gillouin, Thibon, and Thierry-Maulnier filled the columns of
Le Temps
and
Le Figaro
, the main newspaper voices of the unoccupied zone. Traditionalists were the public face of Vichy.

Traditionalists helped reconcile several major overlapping social groups to the new regime. The officer corps remained almost entirely loyal to the regime through a combination of traditional obedience, professional rewards, and enthusiasm for a more hierarchical and authoritarian social order. French Catholics had every reason to be enthusiastic. Other traditional conservatives with misgivings about the break with England found the regime’s religious policy reassuring. The Protestant
François Charles-Roux, for example, permanent secretary-general of the Foreign Office in the fall of 1940 and suspected of pro-Allied leanings, still talked with delight to the Nuncio, Monsignor Valerio Valeri, about the regime’s return to religion.
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Even the small but vocal Catholic left felt that it had more in common with the precapitalist and antisecular policies of Vichy than it had had with the individualist, secular republic. Emmanuel Mounier’s
Esprit
continued to appear until late 1941 with a doctrinal position that overlapped with Vichy pretensions of ending the class struggle and finding a more organic replacement for political democracy.

The traditionalists’ apparent power at Vichy was misleading, however, not only to contemporaries but to historians. They were conspicuous for their role in ceremony and their control over the written and spoken word at Vichy. The less visible and audible experts and professionals, however, actually set Vichy social policy, as I hope has been apparent in the
chapter 2
discussions of agricultural and industrial affairs. Furthermore, the traditionalists’ position eroded over time. They were most conspicuous in 1940, with Weygand at Defense, Baudouin as minister of foreign affairs, Xavier Vallat organizing the Veterans’ Legion and General de la Porte du Theil the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, and Jacques Chevalier restoring religious instruction to public education. Even the experts of the early ministries—the monarchist Alibert as minister of justice, the paternalist colonial official Peyrouton as minister of the interior—belonged to the Vichy of hierarchy and authority more than to the Vichy of industrial rationalization and progress. Catholics began to give way to irreligious figures like Pucheu, even in propaganda functions (Paul Marion), in 1941. Radical Catholics broke with the regime over social policy in 1941 and a large cross section of Catholics over anti-Semitism when the deportations started in July 1942.

It is ironic, then, that the conspicuous but ineffectual traditionalists
were so much more thoroughly purged at the Liberation than the experts, as we shall see. In a very real sense, their futility had already been abundantly demonstrated during the Vichy regime itself. Looking back from the France of the 1960’s, the traditionalists of twenty years ago seem totally irrelevant. They had not seemed so in 1940. It was the Vichy experience itself that stripped the veil from French antimodernism by letting it come to power.

The Left at Vichy

T
HE
V
ICHY ELITE CAME BY NO MEANS EXCLUSIVELY
from the Right. The earthquake of 1940 also sprang open rifts and fissures within the Left. The vacuum of power opened opportunities for several sets of losers in 1930’s quarrels within the non-Communist left. During the most active period of the National Revolution, a few leaders of the Socialist party (SFIO) and a number of leaders of the French trade union movement participated actively in the regime of Marshal Pétain.