Vichy France (55 page)

The arrival of Allied forces in Morocco and Algiers made it impossible for Vichy to keep German forces out of French North Africa any longer. Heretofore, successive German demands for bases had been rejected or postponed, and the Armistice Commission inspection teams were delayed and then restricted in their movements in Morocco. When the OKW offered German air support around midnight on November 7, the
French delegation to the Armistice Commission attempted to impose the condition that German planes not use airfields in French North Africa. Unlike the Syrian case of July 1941, however, the OKW insisted late on November 8 that the French open airfields to them in North Africa within an hour. At 1:15
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. on November 9, Laval accepted by telephone, and a massive German airlift and sea lift of forces into Tunisia began. Thus the Germans got Bizerte without concessions, fifteen months after the Protocols of Paris had been blocked. There still remained the unoccupied zone, however, and French officials such as Secretary-General Charles Rochat briefed German Consul-General Roland Krug von Nidda repeatedly on the vigor of French defenses in North Africa in hopes of persuading the Germans they were not needed. Hitler was no more willing to rely on French arms in November 1942 than he had been in earlier lesser crises, however, and he appears to have ordered the total occupation of France as early as November 8. Early on November 11, German troops moved across the Demarcation Line without opposition and proceded to occupy the French Mediterranean coast. All of France and the empire was now occupied either by Axis or Allied armies.
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On the other hand, Hitler had been forced to take an interest in France again. As long as an anti-Allied French force remained a possible bargaining agent, Laval had a chance to raise the subject of a broad general settlement once more. In November and December 1942 and in early 1943, Lavel received the high-level attention from Germany that no Frenchman had received since the Darlan-Hitler meeting of May 1941 and the Pétain-Goering meeting of December 1941. On November 8, in response to a series of precise questions from Hitler whose exact text we no longer have, Laval replied that while he, personally, favored a declaration of war against England and the United States, Pétain could not be brought to such a decision.
Laval then asked to come to Germany to discuss the questions of war and the “development of Franco-German relations” directly with Hitler.
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After a harrowing drive through the foggy mountains, Laval arrived at Munich at 4 in the morning on November 10 and spent two days trying to bargain an “active French role in the war against the British and the United States at the side of the Axis” in exchange for a “German declaration of the independence” of France within her 1914 frontiers (i.e., without Alsace-Lorraine) and a colonial empire equivalent to her 1939 holdings. A draft memorandum in French dated 11 November 1942 at Munich survives to attest to the kind of autonomous association Laval was working for. Hitler, however, cut him off when the conversation turned to political matters. He said he wanted only practical talk. When Laval said he had hoped to see Hitler earlier, Hitler said he had hoped to have Bizerte sooner. In the end the only concrete result of Laval’s trip was his pressure upon Vichy to keep up resistance in North Africa. Laval spent hours on the telephone with Vichy and it was at this point that Admiral Darlan, who had ordered a cease-fire, was removed from command in Algiers and replaced between November 11 and 13 by General Noguès. Defense to the end in North Africa was essential to Laval’s offer of collaboration.
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But Hitler went ahead and occupied the rest of France anyway.

Hitler still cared enough about Vichy’s existence to send Pétain a letter in the night of November 10–11 explaining why the total occupation had been necessary and offering the old man the return to Paris that he had so coveted in 1940. Marshal von Rundstedt came personally to Vichy the morning of the 11th to explain things. Pétain told Rundstedt that while his public protest was necessary to satisfy public opinion, his main hope was that there would be no incidents. He asked that Nice not be occupied
by Italians and that Toulon be left unoccupied to show the neutrality of the French Navy. He sadly declined the offer to return to Versailles in view of public opinion. If anyone thought that Pétain would take the total occupation as a signal to jettison the now-defunct armistice strategy, his fear of disorder and his clinging grasp upon the status quo must soon have disabused them.
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By contrast, Laval got back from Munich in the afternoon of November 11 boiling with projects to regain some Vichy autonomy. General Noguès had now replaced Darlan briefly as commander in chief in North Africa, and Laval tried to get the Germans to acquiesce in a cease-fire there with Giraud excluded and the “present organization” (i.e., Vichy personnel and institutions) left “intact.” The next day, with Darlan once more the supreme Vichy commander in North Africa, Laval tried to get the Germans to allow Vichy to accept another compromise by which the Americans would hold the coast and Darlan would retain French sovereignty over the interior as a neutral. The Germans saw the whole business as an attempt to cover up for inadequate French defense against the Allies.
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Tunisia was the nub of the German efforts to counterattack, and Laval sent Admiral Platon there to reassert an active French role in holding the Allies at bay. Platon told Roland Krug von Nidda on 15 November that although his orders had been phrased as a mere fact-finding mission in order to mollify dubious members of the cabinet, he expected to take military command in Tunisia and to “drive the Anglo-Saxons from Algeria and Morocco.”
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This was the moment, also, when the independent French defensive
enclave was being set up around the Toulon naval base. The same day, November 15, Laval told Krug von Nidda that he had got the cabinet to disavow Giraud publicly and to accept his proposal of a “clear course” for Germany “through thick and thin.”
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Finally, Laval got Pétain on November 17 to grant him full powers to issue laws and decrees. Laval told the Germans he intended to use his “dictatorial powers” to regularize and normalize Franco-German relations around a “reconciliation” and an “entente.” He held out the possibility of a French declaration of war and suggested that a French “Imperial Legion” be created to help reconquer North Africa. He asked to visit Hitler again in order to agree upon the “practical solutions” to Franco-German collaboration.
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The astonishing features of Laval’s efforts during the week after his meeting with Hitler at Munich were the Germans’ disinterest and Laval’s persistence. By this time, no one on the German side had much interest in French collaboration. The German diplomatic troubleshooter Rudolf Rahn, who had arranged the passage of German aircraft through Syria in May 1941, was now sent to oversee the German buildup of forces in Tunisia. “It is not your task to act on a basis of Franco-German collaboration,” he was instructed by Ribbentrop on November 17, for the Germans assumed “that all French forces in Tunisia had more or less gone over to the Americans.” Rahn was ordered to treat all French officials with “the greatest distrust” and to be as reserved as possible on all questions “until our forces in Tunisia are so strong that they preclude further movement of Tunisian forces into dissidence.” He was to black out all news to Vichy in order to keep the Allies from getting information about Axis troop movements.
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Nor did any of Laval’s efforts deter Hitler from abolishing the Toulon enclave on November 23, dissolving the Armistice Army on the 27th and attempting the same day to seize the
French fleet. Hitler wrote that the French Army in North Africa had violated the armistice and so its counterpart in the metropole must cease to exist.
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Laval, supported by Pétain, persisted anyway in the effort he had outlined in Munich on November 10 and in Vichy on November 15 to purchase a broad Franco-German settlement with the offer of full alliance. Pétain’s answer to Hitler’s November 26 letter begged permission to reestablish the French Army, without which Vichy’s autonomy was a sham. Laval wrote more concretely to Ribbentrop on December 5 offering to use his new powers to “share in the fight against communism” and the reconquest of the empire if a meeting with Hitler produced the kind of “visible results” likely to reconcile French opinion. Pétain assured Marshal von Rundstedt on December 10 of his readiness for a “positive French contribution to the war against bolshevism,” provided that France had “unimpaired sovereignty” and an army to keep internal order. Up to now, he said, French hopes had not been fulfilled. But he still hoped that France could take part “with honor and dignity” in the new European order.
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Laval was allowed to plead his case with Ribbentrop on December 19—the meeting with the foreign minister that he had been seeking since November 1940. The Germans acceded to only one substantial French request: the creation of new Vichy military forces for internal order and action in the empire. In particular, a volunteer Phalange Africaine authorized at this meeting eventually provided one company of Frenchmen within the German 334th Infantry Division in the Tunisian campaign of the spring of 1943. Beyond that, all Laval’s requests for “visible results” were rejected. There was no longer anything for the Demarcation Line to demarcate, but occupation costs were higher than ever since the total occupation of France in November;
the prisoners of war remained in Germany; the departments of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais remained under administration from Brussels; the Ostland company continued to settle German farmers in the closed zone of northeastern France. If the Germans ever really wanted France as an associated belligerent, they were never willing to pay the rather modest price Laval asked in November–December 1942. Hitler clearly preferred direct occupation to collaboration in any real sense.
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It would be tiresome to describe in much detail Laval’s continued efforts in 1943 to breathe some life into the Vichy system, deprived now of whatever elements of independence it once possessed in the unoccupied zone, the Armistice Army, the fleet, and large imperial possessions. His efforts reveal that unshaken conviction of the New Europe’s permanence and that single-minded antibolshevism that make it impossible to merely dismiss this last part of his career as rank opportunism. In May 1943 he was still telling Sauckel, come for more French workmen, that he wanted to fit such discussions into the negotiation of a larger agreement—an “Ausgleich.” On May 12, he actually saw Hitler once more to obtain authorization of the symbolic military unit, the “First Regiment of France” that was finally created in July 1943, and to ask for a similar symbolic navy unit. In July 1943 he was hoping that French contractors could play a major share in fortification work on the Mediterranean coast. On 4 October he implored Rudolf Schleier, Abetz’ assistant, to arrange another meeting with Hitler to work for building the New Europe and to settle the authority question in France.
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There were a few straws to grasp at in 1943. One was the increasing role of Albert Speer in German economic planning. As Germany’s war needs increased, France became her single richest supplier. Two conceptions of how best to tap French wealth
for the German war effort competed at Berlin. On the one hand, a pillaging school, led by foreign labor tsar Sauckel, attempted to move as many French workmen as possible to the Reich, without regard for the overall impact of piecemeal requisitions on the French economy. On the other hand, Albert Speer’s more sophisticated and technocratic approach proposed to stimulate French industry and agriculture and fit them into a larger European Common Producing Unit. By December 1943, Laval’s Minister of Industrial Production Denis Bichelonne had been able to negotiate with Speer the exemption of some 3,301 plants, with a total labor force of 723,124, from the Service du Travail Obligatoire. Production of consumer goods was actually increasing in France in 1944. The number of French laborers drafted to work in Germany declined accordingly.
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In the last analysis, however, the Germans maintained the fiction of Vichy autonomy only because it helped keep internal order. But they refused to allow Vichy the reality of associated status into which Laval, Bichelonne, busy French industrialists in such favored industries as automobiles and aluminum, and those terrified of the Resistance could still have led many Frenchmen. Laval himself summed up his experience of Vichy offers and German tightfistedness in a reproachful remark to General von Neubronn, Marshal von Rundstedt’s representative in Vichy, in June 1943. “Why have you never supported us? You even hindered the fortification and supply of our colonies.”
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Pétain’s two desultory efforts to get rid of Laval during 1943 should not suggest that the marshal was swinging with the pro-Allied tide. He was simply trying to reassert his neutralism and his traditionalist social philosophy more vigorously. The first
crisis boiled up in April. Pétain seems to have sent his old friend, the World War I fighter ace Colonel René Fonck, to sound out German intelligence officials in Paris about a change of government. Three major Pétain grievances recur in the rather fragmentary contemporary material. Diplomatically, Pétain did not think Laval had a foreign policy adequate to the world ideological struggle of 1943. According to Himmler’s aid Walter Shellenberg, on advice from Salazar, Pétain wanted to recover office as prime minister (he had been only head of state since April 1942) in order to pursue an active mediating role designed to bring the United States and Germany together in a compromise alliance against their real mutual danger, communism. Laval, however, talked less of mediation than of alliance with Germany. On the domestic side, as in April 1942, Pétain longed for a more actively traditionalist internal policy. Dr. Ménétrel had complained as early as January 1943 that Laval wanted to restore a “pre-1939 capitalist republic.” Lucien Romier complained to General von Neubronn that Laval was “too much an old-style politician,” insufficiently energetic against Freemasons and Jews, who tried to run everything himself. Pétain wanted to summon the National Council. He was also said to resent Laval’s large role in the efforts to re-create a new French Army. And Laval had succeeded neither in defending the empire nor keeping internal order. Running through it all was Pétain’s bitterness at having been kicked upstairs. He complained of not being kept informed and of not attending all cabinet meetings.