Vichy France (59 page)

Breaks and Continuities

O
FFICIALLY
,
THE
V
ICHY REGIME AND ALL ITS WORKS
were simply expunged from history when France was liberated. The acts of the “de facto authority,” as the Comité Français de Libération Nationale called Vichy, were declared null and void by an ordinance issued in Algiers on 9 August 1944. The purge of collaborationist officials had already been announced with the formation by the CFLN of a purge committee on 18 August 1943. The ministers of all successive governments since 16 June 1940 were arraigned before a specially created High Court of Justice by a decree of 18 November 1944. The first Vichy minister to be prosecuted, Pierre Pucheu, had already been condemned to death by a military court in Algiers and shot in March 1944.
¹

In law, things were supposed to go back to the moment just
before midnight on 16 June 1940, when President Albert Lebrun had summoned Marshal Pétain to form a government replacing that of Paul Reynaud. In practice, the clock would not turn back, nor did the liberators of France really want it to. In fact, the architects of postwar innovation could not always avoid building upon Vichy legislation or legislating in parallel directions. For good or evil, the Vichy regime had made indelible marks on French life.

Long after the Liberation, the ruptures and breaks of that passionate time were far more apparent than the continuities. Liberation writers talked about “four years to strike from our history.” Former Vichy ministers reflected bitterly upon the “revolution of 1944.” Highly exaggerated figures placed the toll of Frenchmen killed by Frenchmen during the Liberation as high as 120,000, though the total was probably closer to 4,500. Over 100,000 Frenchmen were jailed, facing trial, confiscation of property, or loss of jobs, if not death. The creators of the Fourth Republic set out to make all things new. No wonder change and discontinuity seemed the dominant mode of late-1940’s France.
²

It is now time to correct the balance with more attention to the continuities that link Vichy to postwar regimes. The breaks were real enough, and anyone who spends much time in France has met outcasts like the embittered Chantiers de Jeunesse veteran Roland Oyarzun in Jean-Louis Curtis’ novel
Les justes causes
, flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked cause. In a long view, and in social rather than personal terms, however, continuities probably prevail over breaks between Vichy and subsequent regimes.

For one thing, the Resisters’ new parties, newspapers, leaders, and programs turned out to be far more ephemeral after the war than anyone would have predicted in 1944. The resisters expected to govern. What Sartre called “the Republic of silence,” however, did not survive its transformation into an everyday
administration. The coalition of the three great Liberation parties—left Catholic MRP, Socialists, and Communists—was exploded by the beginnings of the Cold War (the Communists were excluded by Ramadier in May 1947 after they had refused to continue to support wage austerity) and by the revival of the issue of state aid to Catholic schools in 1951. By then the new parties derived from Resistance movements—MRP, UDSR—were losing their electorate to reviving conservative parties or surviving Third Republic parties. Although a few Resistance newspapers—e.g.,
Combat
—and weeklies—e.g.,
Témoignage chrétien
—hung on, the vast majority succumbed to mass circulation dailies built upon prewar establishments, like
France-Soir
and
Le Figaro.
Only
Le Monde
, the great daily that received the confiscated presses and offices of
Le Temps
, was a lasting innovation in the postwar press. It was the work of Hubert Beuve-Méry, whose Resistance days had been preceded by ardent service in the Ecole de Cadres at Uriage. The elaborate innovations expected in the Fourth Republic constitution boiled down to compromises in the text and a revival of Third Republic practices in the application. The Resistance proved ephemeral as government.
³

At the same time, important elements of the Vichy regime survived. On the surface, there were striking reappearances. Three associates of Pétain, including his lawyer Jacques Isorni and former staff member Roger de Saivre, were elected to the Chamber in 1951. The conspicuous diminution of purging zeal after 1950 was followed by a general amnesty in 1953, allowing others to return to public life. Fourteen former Vichy officials sat in the French parliament by 1958. René Coty, elected president of the republic in 1953, had voted “yes” in July 1940. During that same year two former Vichy officials became ministers: André Boutemy, former Vichy prefect, became minister of health, and Camille Laurent, former official of the Peasant Corporation, became minister of agriculture. The Académie Française, which had expelled Abel Hermant and Abel Bonnard in 1945 and left the seats of Pétain and Maurras unfilled until their deaths, elected Vichy intellectuals Jacques Chardonne
(1950), Thierry-Maulnier (1955), and Henri Massis (1960) in the following decade. Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, director of the Vichy radio in 1940, received over a million votes as a presidential candidate in December 1965. The important survivals lay under that more conspicuous surface, however. With much less fanfare, whole sectors of Vichy personnel and policies continued to function after the Liberation.

In the most elementary human terms, many Frenchmen who had served Vichy continued to do their jobs under the new regime. It would have been both unjust and impractical to punish those average Frenchmen who had merely gone on filling some job, obeying the instructions of an apparently legitimate regime, and whose skills were just as essential as before to the orderly functioning of society: postmen, clerks, engineers. Like other Liberation regimes and like the Allies at Nuremberg, the French CFLN and provisional government punished the makers and shapers rather than the executors of policy except where underlings had sinned by excess of zeal for the occupying power. Indeed, liberated France punished a smaller proportion of its total population with prison terms than any other occupied Western European country and executed a smaller proportion than Belgium.
⁴

The postwar trials and purges did not visit all sectors of the Vichy leadership with the same severity, moreover. Some portions of the French elite survived almost intact across the entire war, occupation, and Liberation, while others suffered extensive turnover of personnel or even permanent loss of power or prestige. The patterns of leadership survival and discontinuity are in themselves a revealing lineament. Experts, businessmen, and bureaucrats survived almost intact; intellectuals and propagandists were much more heavily purged; Third Republic deputies were rejected nearly as totally by the Liberation as they had been by Vichy.

The Liberation’s pretended administrative revolution had
relatively little impact upon personnel in the long run. Reviving proposals from the Second Republic of 1848 and from the Popular Front, Liberation leaders proposed to democratize recruitment and advancement in an upper civil service alleged to have undermined the Third Republic and to have participated eagerly in the authoritarian system of Vichy. They meant to make the purge permanent from below by nationalizing the old elite Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques and by setting up a single Ecole Nationale d’Administration to train a new breed of republican experts. On its twentieth anniversary, however, the ENA was clearly just another rung in the traditional elitist educational ladder up which advanced the most favored and hardest-working of future top public administrators, more homogeneous than ever. The Liberation set out to destroy the “chapels” of the upper bureaucracy, commented
Le Monde
, and it created a cathedral.

Even in the short run, the high civil servants came through a hostile Liberation remarkably intact. No doubt, those senior civil servants who lost seniority or rank or were retired early after screening by purge commissions in each government branch would find that remark ludicrous. At the very top, notably, those high civil servants who had accepted ministries or secretaryships of state at Vichy were automatically charged before the High Court of Justice with crimes against the state. Their vacancies, however, were filled from below by promotion from within the
grands corps.
Professionalism resisted dismantling of the bureaucratic system and encroachment by nonprofessionals with almost total success.

The survival of bureaucracy in modern states hardly needs explaining, but there were special reasons in liberated France for that survival. The enemies of professionalism were divided. The proponents of a return to amateur public administration, the replacement of central authorities by Tocquevillian local notables, were mostly Pétiniste social nostalgics who were themselves more discredited at the Liberation than even the high civil servants. The proponents of a total replacement of high civil servants with Resistance cadres, mostly Communists, were opposed in this endeavor by the non-Communist Resistance
parties. With the enemies of professionalism canceling each other out, the
grands corps de l’état
survived one more change of regime virtually intact. It was no moment, of course, for amateurs, however heroic. The economy of penury, that feature of Vichy life which had required the most total economic control in French history, continued without much relief into the late 1940’s. Indeed, the bread ration of the winter of 1947 was lower than it had been under Vichy. The Resistance itself was as strongly marked by a preference for
dirigisme
over the chaotic “liberal” economy of the 1930’s as Vichy had been. And finally, all French parties, including the Communist party, chose order over revolution in 1944. Like Vichy, the Liberation wanted to control the administration, not abolish it.
⁵
The
grands corps
carried their enhanced influence and their new experience from Vichy planning forward into the postwar regimes’ experiments in
dirigisme
and rule by experts.

A look at the yearbook (
annuaire
) of each
grands corps de l’état
gives an impressive display of continuity across the tormented years between 1939 and 1946. Most stable of all was the most purely technical body, the Cour des Comptes, which audits public accounts. No less than 98 percent of the active 1942 personnel still figure in the 1946 yearbook, and indeed 99 percent in the 1949 yearbook, two of the wartime presidents, MM. Amet and Brin, having been restored to the rolls as presidents emeritus.

What is more, new men brought into the Cour des Comptes by the Vichy regime remained after the war, with the same apparent seniority. The Cour des Comptes enlarged during the war as the public sector expanded. In particular, a law of 16 May 1941 submitted the accounts of all public funds, including organizations subsidized by the state, to the Cour des Comptes’ scrutiny automatically and not case by case as before. Thus the total membership of the Cour des Comptes grew by 4 percent,
from 201 to 209, between 1938 and 1942, then by 2 percent to 214 in 1946, again by 4 percent to 223 in 1949, and by 8 percent to 242 in 1952.
⁶
Under these conditions of rapid expansion, the Cour des Comptes could fill its highly expert ranks only by rapid promotion of junior men and by adding outside experts at the top. The largest number of outside experts was added in 1941 (four
conseillers-maitres
and three
conseillers-référendaires de
2
e classe
), in 1943 (three and two), 1945 (three
conseillers-maitres
), and in 1950 (seven
conseillers-référendaires de
2
e classe
). All the men recruited during Vichy continued after the war at the same level. Thus the shape of the hierarchical pyramid of the Cour des Comptes changed from the broadly based structure with many junior men of the prewar years to the postwar structure top-heavy with many senior men. Only by the early 1950’s does a look at the yearbook show that the Cour des Comptes’ younger ranks were filling up to match the scale of the upper ranks. Not only continuity, then, but a certain professional ascent and fulfillment is apparent in the Cour des Comptes through the Vichy period, whatever the members’ individual griefs and sufferings as French citizens and consumers. They not only endured, they prospered professionally.
⁷

Next come two
grands corps
whose continuity is slightly less than that of the Cour des Comptes, for their professionalism was tainted by the service of many members in ministries: the Council of State and the Inspectorate of Finance. In the prestigious Inspectorate of Finance, some 97 percent of inspectors-general active in 1948 had also been serving in 1942, along with 75 percent of the inspectors-second class (some of these were too young to have served in 1942).
⁸

The Inspectorate of Finance also expanded during the war to keep up with increased tasks. To its traditional responsibility of reviewing state financial accounts was added a mission of financial information for the growing planning and
dirigiste
functions of the Ministry of National Economy.
⁹
Recruitment classes nearly doubled, a reflection of both the increased prestige and the increased responsibilities of the inspectorate. In place of the five or six new members that had been normal before the war, the class of 1941 contained ten and the class of 1942 nine. Thus after the purge of 1940, the inspectorate remained about constant, having had 202 members in 1938 and 200 in 1942, and then grew to 214 by 1948. Furthermore, every one of the 32 recruits of the Vichy years, including two postwar prime ministers, Félix Gaillard (1957) and Jacques Chaban-Delmas (1969), continued after the war. Some of these young members of the
grands corps
, of course, had brilliant Resistance records. Chaban-Delmas, who was already active in the Resistance before passing the entrance examination for the Inspectorate of Finance in 1943, became a military delegate of Free France shortly afterwards, and eventually brigadier general in the Liberation army. In general, however, professional continuity counted for more than Resistance activity in the postwar survival of the Vichy recruits to the
grands corps.