Vichy France (56 page)

Hitler, irrevocably interpreting Laval’s removal in December 1940 as a personal affront to himself, wrote Pétain on 29 April 1943 that he would “not permit another 13 December 1940” and that Laval “alone was capable of assuring to France the place she deserves in the New Europe.” Pétain replied that he remained faithful to the “policy of entente” but that it would work only if built upon “sound bases.” Nothing could be done unless France was restored to order and broke definitively with the political errors of prewar France. “I will not tolerate that anyone in France keep me from pursuing internal revival according to the national and social program defined in my messages, in
harmony with a foreign policy which is the only reasonable one, but which will not be crowned with success without the help of a new internal order.”
⁶¹

Pétain tried again in the late fall of 1943. Internal disorder had increased, and even the Germans recognized that Laval was “universally detested.” Vichy’s mass following had vanished, and the Paris collaborators waited in the wings for power. On 12 October 1943, while Pétain and General von Neubronn were talking about the need for increased police forces, Pétain burst out on a new tack. The trouble was, Pétain said, that Laval had no popular appeal. The prefects didn’t listen to him. He was trying to do everything himself, which was beyond his power. Pétain suggested he should reassume the prime ministry himself, as before April 1942. “I will lead domestic policy energetically, and we will align foreign policy with Germany without him.” As Pétain’s plan ripened, he proposed to make a public address on 13 November 1943 in which he would announce that Laval was dismissed, that succession would be settled in case of his death by the Council of Ministers, but that the constitutional authority voted Pétain by the Third Republic’s National Assembly on 10 July 1940 should go back to that body. This attempt to root the regime more deeply in constitutionality was an acknowledged effort to compete with de Gaulle’s step toward parliamentarism with the convening on November 3 of a Consultative Assembly in Algiers. But in addition, there remained Pétain’s old personal antipathy toward Laval, Pétain’s military scorn for the old republican politician, and a growing concern that the domestic changes since 1940 might be endangered unless someone less unpopular than Laval managed the country’s internal affairs.

Hitler was determined that both Pétain and Laval should remain in their present offices “under all conditions.” Not only
was Pétain forbidden to go through with the constitutional changes in his regime, but he was assigned a German shadow in the person of the diplomat von Renthe-Fink. It was from this point on—December 1943—that all French legislation had to be submitted to German scrutiny. Pétain was required under direct German pressure to take Marcel Déat and Joseph Darnand into his government to answer his own complaint that internal disorder was increasing. Although Pétain went on “strike” for a few days in mid-November, refusing to exercise the prerogatives of his office as head of state, he went no further into opposition. His threat to make the French government a purely administrative regime like Belgium—the proper solution in June 1940—was self-defeating in November 1943. Having grasped for sovereignty in 1940, and always having put domestic order above all else, Pétain was condemned to exercise that wisp of sovereignty under German surveillance to the bitter end.
⁶²

Let no one imagine that these two feeble attempts to replace Laval in 1943 betrayed any secret sympathy on Pétain’s part for the coming Allied Liberation. Every contemporary evidence of his views in 1943 reinforces an impression of an old man clutching at order, neutrality, and a compromise peace as a way around the approaching invasion. By late 1943 he was laying plans for keeping internal order if the Allies landed, as expected, in mainland France. On 27 August 1943, Pétain and Laval together met with Marshal von Rundstedt at the Chateau de Charmes, near Vichy, for this purpose. It was agreed that Pétain would issue orders in the event of an enemy landing that would keep the French population “quiet and orderly.”
⁶³

That was indeed the policy followed when the long-dreaded landing took place in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Pétain issued a proclamation calling upon all Frenchmen to remain neutral. French blood was too precious to waste, he said. By the Liberation, regular French forces had never fought the Allies side-by-side with German forces. Vichy France had never declared war on the Allies. Pétain’s neutralism had prevailed over Laval’s more aggressive proposals. In the last analysis, however, it was Hitler rather than the French government who had rejected the voluntary association of France in a German-dominated Europe.

1944: The Dream of Peaceful Transition, the Nightmare of Civil War

B
Y EARLY
1944
EVERYONE BUT A FEW FANATICS KNEW
the end was at hand. Vichy had become a shadow regime. The marshal himself, still standing for some fixed point in the turmoil, did remain disassociated in the public mind from his ministers. He could still be cheered in Nancy, Rouen, and even in Paris in the spring of 1944. But he was surrounded now by a German guard, and after the Paris visit on 26 April, he spent most of May 1944 in the Occupied Zone, at the Chateau of Voisins near Rambouillet, a few miles west of Paris. That was Pétain’s return to Paris, at long last, when it was meaningless. At the administrative level, government officials quietly prepared for a change of regime. Some areas of government—food rationing, for example—hardly functioned at all. Most of the history of that Merovingian court in 1944 is without real significance.
⁶⁴

Vichy could still influence the transition to a postwar regime, however, and its efforts to do so show once more where its priorities lay. The dreaded civil war was at hand. There remained one chance to evade it, however, if the activist Resistance could be prevented from becoming a de facto civil power and if
a peaceful transition could be arranged between anticommunist “moderates” on both sides. The approaching German evacuation presented the same frightening void of administration as the proposed French evacuation overseas had done in June 1940. The permanence of an orderly state had to be assured at all costs.

The interesting feature of Vichy in 1944, therefore, is the effort to effect an orderly transfer of state authority. Those hopes, and the bitterness aroused by de Gaulle’s refusal to accept the mantle from Pétain, are the lasting value of memoirs of 1944, such as Jean Tracou’s
Le Maréchal aux liens
, a book otherwise tendentious and unreliable.
⁶⁵

In Algiers, General de Gaulle’s circle was also grappling with the problem of orderly transition. When the Vichyite local authorities were dispossessed or vanished, de Gaulle wanted them replaced neither by anarchy, Communist
francs-tireurs
partisans from the hills, nor an American military government. His plan, worked out in detail by Michel Debré, was to designate loyal and able administrators in advance who were prepared to step into place immediately as Gaullist super-prefects, Commissaires de la république, similar in regional scope and in police powers to Darlan’s regional prefects of 1941. In retrospect a certain harmony of interest in an orderly transition appears in both Algiers and Vichy, a harmony drowned out at the time by more conspicuous discords.
⁶⁶

There were groups on both sides eager in 1944 to arrange a peaceful transition between Vichy and the non-Gaullist opposition. One such effort was made by followers of General Giraud, the conservative anti-Germans who had wanted to bring the regular French Army back into the war legitimately, who had agreed secretly in advance to help the American landing in North Africa in November 1942, and who had run liberated North Africa along National Revolution lines from November 1942 until mid-1943. A leader of this group, the wealthy vegetable-oil producer Jean Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a leader of the
pro-Allied conspiracy in Algiers in November 1942, tried to establish contact between Laval and Washington in July 1944, through Vichy Ambassador François Piétri at Madrid. Lemaigre-Dubreuil, along with Jules Sauerwein, a French journalist in touch with German intelligence in Lisbon, thought that a compromise peace might be acceptable to the United States as the Russians seemed about to sweep into Europe. Ribbentrop found out about it on 14 July 1944 and ordered German officials to break off all contacts with these men.
⁶⁷

As the Allied armies moved toward Paris, Laval made a better-documented attempt to set up a constitutional alternative to the Free French. On 12 August 1944 he appeared suddenly at the asylum near Nancy where Edouard Herriot was being held in forced residence and took the former Chamber president and Radical party leader back with him to Paris. Laval wanted Herriot to reconvene the National Assembly, a proposal reminiscent of Pétain’s plan of the previous November. It is not clear whether Herriot took the idea seriously or not, and in any event, on August 16 the Germans rearrested him.
⁶⁸

Pétain was making a parallel effort on his own to ensure some kind of orderly transfer of authority. It seems likely that he never ceased to believe in the virtues of the National Revolution, for in his one statement at the trial in 1945 he declared that France could build only upon the lines which he had laid down. On 11 August 1944, he empowered Admiral Auphan to contact de Gaulle in order to negotiate whatever “political solution” would “prevent civil war” and safeguard “the principle of legitimacy which I embody.” No doubt he thought that Auphan, who had left the government in November 1942 without joining the Resistance, would be acceptable to both sides. Auphan also carried sealed instructions ordering him, in case Pétain himself
were prevented from exercising office, to summon the regency council foreseen in Pétain’s plans of November 1943.
⁶⁹
De Gaulle, whose claim to legitimacy was based on quite different grounds, naturally refused to see anyone offering to anoint him in Pétain’s name.

All of these plans for an orderly continuity were so much writing on the water. Determined to keep the Vichy loyalties alive, the Germans removed both Laval and Pétain eastward under protest, ahead of the liberating armies. Laval refused to serve as prime minister after being taken to Belfort on the night of 17 August. Pétain wound up with a shadow court in the old Hohenzollern castle of Sigmaringen. He too refused to exercise his office of head of state. Only Doriot, on top at last, tried to give orders as a French government in exile. The Liberation advanced in a climate very like civil war. Direct executions by the Resistance, mingled with all sorts of obscure settling of scores, produced at least 4,500 deaths. During the more formal purge processes that followed, 124,750 persons were tried, 767 were executed under sentence of treason or contact with the enemy in time of war, and over 38,000 were sentenced to some form of prison term. Thousands were expelled or demoted in the public service.
⁷⁰
It will not do, of course, to blame de Gaulle’s intransigence for the passions and breakage of the Liberation. Pétain’s followers had elected to use the occupation not merely for day-to-day administration but for a domestic revolution directed against their internal enemies. They had grasped for the full exercise of French sovereignty under German occupation. In the name of order, they had put all the resources of the state to work upholding an obsolete armistice. In the end, they reaped the divisions they sowed and the disorder they had compromised everything to avoid.

¹
This issue was settled on 22 December 1942. See German Foreign office account, Pol. 1 M. 3503 g.Rs., 23 December 1942 (T-120/4634H/E208777–84).

²
Alan S. Milward,
The German Economy at War
(London, 1965); Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
(New York, 1970), 222, 256. At the beginning of 1942, production of civilian consumer goods in Germany was still only 3 percent below peacetime levels. The Germans took real austerity measures only after Stalingrad.

³
The complicated evolution of Admiral Darlan is most reliably followed in
FRUS
, II, 1940, in the absence of a trial. Although his aide Major Dorange made discreet contact with Robert Murphy in October 1942, he did not expect an Allied landing so early, and Major Dorange was instrumental in helping crush the pro-Allied coup at Algiers military headquarters in the early hours of November 8. See
FRUS
, II, 1942, and Yves-Maxime Danan,
La Vie politique à Alger de 1940 à 1944
(Paris, 1963), 103–6. Without citing any contemporary American sources, Danan claims that American authorities preferred to deal with Vichyite authorities in North Africa in November 1942 because the Resistance would have made the American “take-over” harder. The Vichy authorities were, of course, the only available force capable of controlling the French officer corps. I have analyzed the officers’ evolution from defense to neutrality to association with the Allies against the Germans during the period November 8–17 in more detail in
Parades and Politics at Vichy
(Princeton, N.J., 1966), chap. 11. General Bergeret won acquittal in 1948 by an apparently fictitious claim that he knew in advance about the Allied landing and went to Algiers to join it. Haute Cour de justice, Arrêt de non-lieu: General Bergeret. The most useful accounts of November 1942 from the point of view of the few French officers who tried to facilitate the Allied landing by a simultaneous coup are an article by Colonel Jousse in
Esprit
, 1 January 1945, and the memoirs of General Béthouart,
Cinq années d’espérance
(Paris, 1968).