Vichy France (51 page)

Other senior Vichy and ex-Vichy figures rallied to the Darlan-Giraud regime in North Africa. Pierre-Etienne Flandin had already gone to North Africa from his retirement in Cap St. Jean Ferrat in October 1942; Pierre Pucheu, who had been Darlan’s minister of the interior up to April 1942, left for
North Africa through Spain in February 1943 expecting to be mobilized as a reserve officer; Marcel Peyrouton, who had been returned after 13 December 1940 to his prewar post as ambassador to Argentina as a punishment for his role as minister of the interior, resigned in April 1942 when Laval came back to power. He went to Algiers in January 1943 and was made governor-general of Algeria. There were a few upper civil servants, like the director of the foreign exchange section of the Finance Ministry, Maurice Couve de Murville, who crossed to North Africa through Spain in May 1943. The Darlan-Giraud regime also drew a few general officers from France after November 1942, in contrast to the Free French. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had been imprisoned in November 1942 for trying to move his unit of the Armistice Army into the mountains as the Germans entered the Vichy zone, escaped with the aid of his wife and son. He was to become marshal of France for commanding the French advance into Bavaria and Austria in 1945. General Alphonse Georges, former commander of the northeastern front in May–June 1940, arrived in Algeria in June 1943 but took little part in subsequent events. The Darlan-Giraud neo-Vichy regime in North Africa offered a way back to power for some Vichy outsiders. It offered a legitimate way back to the war for some genuine
attentistes
for whom the wait was now over.

What needs explaining is how few major Vichy figures left seats of power in November 1942. Only two men left the cabinet: Admiral Auphan, minister of the navy, and Robert Gibrat, secretary of state for communications, who had been in North Africa inspecting construction work on the Mediterranean-Niger Railway and who returned to Vichy before deciding to resign. Neither joined the Allied cause. Except for Couve de Murville, the high civil servants continued by and large to serve the state. Only the diplomatic corps, whose members were already overseas and open to another perspective, suffered substantial defections after November 1942. Some members of the public services, of course, were working secretly for the Resistance at their posts, including such celebrated Resistance figures as Jacques Chaban-Delmas, inspector of finance and future general in the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, and future prime minister in the
Fifth Republic. If the civil service resistance assumed the same proportions as that of the general population, however (and we have no evidence that it was either lower or higher), it ran around 2–3 percent. In the activist organizations, some militant patriots such as Biaggi shifted after November 1942 from the Veterans’ Legion to such conservative resistance movements as the OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire). The general impression at Vichy after November 1942 remained one of continuity. Secessions were the exception rather than the rule.

Even for those Frenchmen studying the course of the war for signs, the turn of the tide was not yet obvious. The very scope of the 1940 defeat nurtured a faith in German invincibility that was slow to weaken. Even in 1943 some signs still pointed to German progress. On the eastern front, they retook Kharkov in March 1943 and continued to hold vast tracts of Russian soil until the Soviet counterattacks of late 1943 pushed them back once more. It was in the spring of 1943 that Allied shipping in the North Atlantic suffered its heaviest casualties of the whole war. Even after the Allied landing of November 1942, it was tempting to believe that the Allies would be incapable of gathering a preponderance of force anywhere at the perimeter of fortress Europe. Even if one believed that Hitler could no longer defeat England, it was a vast leap from there to believing in 1943 that the Allies could defeat Hitler. Thus people like Gaston Bergery, now Vichy’s ambassador to Turkey, told German Ambassador Franz von Papen in Istanbul in September 1943 that Pétain’s position was growing stronger. Admiral Bléhaut, minister of colonies, could still write a sentence in August 1944 beginning with the words “whatever the outcome of the war.”
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Vichy leaders, not unintelligent men, could imagine a stalemate or a compromise peace far into 1944.

Some may have held on at Vichy because they felt they faced only execution from the other side. That burned-boats feeling took on some substance when Pierre Pucheu found himself arrested and put on trial in May 1943 instead of welcomed quietly into the army as a reserve officer as he anticipated. When
Pucheu crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in early 1943, he could suppose that his old colleagues like General Bergeret who were still influential in North Africa would make the transition easy. When he arrived in Casablanca on 9 May 1943, however, the climate in “liberated” North Africa was already switching from neo-Pétinisme to Gaullism. By the time General de Gaulle himself arrived from London to make Algiers his headquarters on May 30, Pucheu had already been consigned to forced residence on May 11 in an outpost at the edge of the Sahara. He was the first Vichy minister to be tried under the 3 September 1943 decree of the French Committee of National Liberation at Algiers charging all Vichy ministers with treason, promising them trials after the Liberation, and ordering public servants not to obey their orders. He was shot on 20 March 1944. Already, reported German intelligence, collaborators knew they had to win or die.
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At bottom, however, the decisive reason holding men to the Vichy solution was an instinctual commitment to public order as the highest good. Public servants continued to obey the state. Even more, as the state came under challenge by Resistance vigilantism, a commitment to the ongoing functioning of the state reinforced the weight of routine. Other members of the elite chose the known over the unknown: the possible future risks of discredit over the certain present risks of resistance. Resistance was not merely personally perilous. It was also a step toward social revolution.

Allied victory could seem an even greater threat to social order than continued German occupation after 1942. Personal considerations aside, the promise of violent liberation at Allied hands held more risks than advantages. For one thing, Allied invasion meant a return to war, perhaps another long bloodbath on French soil like the one that had led France to the brink of revolution in May–June 1917. Secondly, an Allied invasion threatened to trigger an internal rising by a Resistance movement that
in 1942–43 was assuming ever more clearly the dimensions of domestic social revolution. With its major Communist participation and its pronouncements about the new republic of the future, the Resistance could seem directed more at the French social status quo in 1942–43 than against the German Army. The priorities were clear for many Frenchmen of status and property. German occupation might be bad, but liberation by force would be worse. By late 1943, the prospects of Russian expansion in Europe were adding a further specter.

Even as Hitler seemed to lose the initiative in the winter of 1942–43, therefore, and even as the conditions of life in occupied France grew more unbearable, threats to order grew simultaneously more ominous. Those threats helped drown out other signals that might have made deliverance at Allied hands seem more feasible and more desirable by 1943. Conditions were growing worse in 1943, but that was not necessarily a signal to throw oneself into the cauldron of renewed war. The worse things became, the more precious was the French island of neutrality.

General de la Porte du Theil, who had been caught on an inspection trip in North Africa by the Allied landing, returned to preach duty and unity to his Chantiers de la Jeunesse in metropolitan France. The conflicting orders, confused loyalties, and incipient civil war he had seen among French authorities there during the painful evolution from opposition to association with the Allies between November 8 and November 17 tormented his straightforward soldier’s heart. The “moral crisis” produced by the “American attack” could very well repeat itself soon in France, he warned the staff of the Youth Camps. When that day came, “the only way to maintain internal peace” would be to adhere to “the most absolute loyalty toward the marshal, the sole responsible figure … and sole guarantor of national unity.… He has received a mandate to lead us, and the enlightenment for that will never fail him.” Since the authorities were the only source of accurate information, the only result of following individual promptings would be chaos. “The problem facing France,” he wrote, “is essentially a problem of internal order.” No disinterested help could be expected from outside. The Free French of London and Algiers were no “more
free” than the marshal. “Unfortunately, they egg us on from outside, knowing that is the only way to reduce us to their will.” France’s only real salvation is to continue to work on her own salvation from within, “to save what we still have, which is not negligible: an administration and a university that express French thought and that carry on the education of French youth according to the traditional line.”

Some dreamers might think, wrote General de la Porte du Theil, that France could be liberated “in a few months” by resolute action. Such hotheads “forget to what an extent the defeat has damaged us.”

There is no lack of doctors who offer violent prescriptions. Violence leads to nothing durable. No outsider will help us for our own reasons: a dangerous illusion fostered by softness and lethargy of too many Frenchmen. Only we can make some place for ourselves in the Europe which will have to be reconstructed some day. Whatever way you turn the problem, there are peoples of 30 to 80 millions who cannot simply be removed from the map or reduced to slavery without sowing the causes of future wars. On condition, of course, that they are really nations and not undisciplined masses divided into rival bands.
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In the period following November 1942, a return to war was no more palatable to many Frenchmen than before. Indeed, the values and priorities that had recommended the armistice in June 1940 seemed more compelling than ever. What had been called “Moscow’s War” in 1939 now promised to become a
guerrilla
as well. Pétain and Laval advocated a compromise peace with mounting urgency in 1943. Their conversations with high-ranking Germans in 1943 returned over and over to two fixations: avoidance of any more fighting on French soil and French mediation of a compromise peace.

Pétain’s “main goal,” he had already told Prince Rohan on 20 October 1942, was to “keep France from becoming a battleground.” He came back to the same words repeatedly in 1943. His “greatest worry,” he said to General von Neubronn on 15 July 1943, was that France would again “become a battleground.” All he wanted was peace for fear of Bolshevik expansion, he told the German Consul-General Roland Krug von Nidda, whom he encountered in the park in Vichy on 23 August.
⁷

Pétain grasped at straws in his yearning for a compromise peace. In October 1942, talking with Prince Rohan, he expected the defeat of Russia and Britain that would lead the United States to a compromise peace. Then Hitler, he thought, could turn to making the New Europe in which Germany, Italy, Spain, and France could all play leading roles. With General von Neubronn in July 1943, he found it possible to hope that when Giraud and de Gaulle had worn each other out squabbling in North Africa, his many supporters there would help restore Vichy authority. The worst enemy was fanaticism. In August 1943 he held forth to Krug von Nidda on the virtues of a common German-Anglo-Saxon front against bolshevism. The virtues of such an alliance would be apparent to all Europeans, he thought, if only Britain were not led by the fanatical Churchill and the United States by the Jews. It would be far more preferable, for example, than “a renewed German-Bolshevik compromise.” Nettled by this sly reference to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, Krug assured Pétain that “in spite of temporary reverses” Germany would accept only a “final solution” and no compromise settlements with either side. Krug must have deepened Pétain’s despair by showing that the Germans were no less blindly “fanatical” than Churchill.

Despite such discouragements, Pétain and Laval kept trying to thrust France forward as the possible mediator of a compromise peace. On 9 February 1943 Pétain drew Krug von Nidda
out on the Russian campaign, a subject in which he expressed great interest and considerable knowledge. Then he suggested that France would be a convenient go-between if Germany ever needed to come to an understanding with the western Allies in order to concentrate all her forces on the Communist enemy. In March Laval reminded Schleier that Germany was unlikely to be able to march simultaneously into Moscow, London, and Washington. A more ideal future, he suggested, was “cooperation between America and Europe in which France is to be the connecting link.” France could play this role, he explained, if “the Axis powers declare their readiness to secure for her a future in the New Europe which corresponds to her continental and imperial past.” The dream of neutral France stepping forward as the sole remaining arbiter among the exhausted giants must have been a very tempting one in the otherwise bleak and helpless position of 1943. Mediation was perhaps the only way back to French influence without war, and France could perhaps purchase more independence by proving her usefulness in that role. It was only a pipe dream, but some of the less skillful character witnesses in Pétain’s trial were still talking about it in 1945. The ancient General Lannurien recalled that Pétain believed that only he would be “strong enough to talk to both the Germans and the Allies when the day of the green baize tables” had come. The only trouble was that the Allies were no more interested in green baize tables than the Germans.
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Marshal Pétain and his cabinet members whose 1943 language survives were not
attentistes.
They were not waiting for the moment to jump back into the war. They were dead set against an Allied landing that could only provoke total German occupation on the one hand or internal civil war on the other.
They wanted France to evolve back to continental and imperial power within the new European status quo, even in 1943. They still longed for the compromise peace they had hoped the United States would mediate in 1941. They chose the apparently lesser risks of continued collaboration over the risks of revolution that armed liberation seemed to entail.