Vichy France (60 page)

It was inevitable that the purge should affect the Inspectorate of Finance more than the Cour des Comptes, for more than a third of the inspectors normally spent some time lending their expertise to the ministries, in policy-making jobs. This makes the essential continuity of this distinguished group of experts even more remarkable. The Vichy purge removed four men from the Inspectorate of Finance: Leca and Devaux, who had been caught at the Spanish border in June 1940 with the papers and secret funds of Paul Reynaud; André Diethelm, who joined de Gaulle; and Hervé Alphand, who was Jewish (later Ambassador to the U.S., 1956–65); four others “resigned.” The postwar purge was little larger. Some nine inspectors of finance who had served the Vichy regime in capacities more political than technical were
expelled: ministers like Bouthillier and Baudouin, secretaries-general of ministries like Barnaud and Guérard, diplomats like François Piétri. In addition, both purges interrupted the normal promotions of some men or placed them on inactive duty without expelling them from the inspectorate. These included Joseph Avenol, shunted aside by Vichy because he had been secretary-general of the League of Nations, or Henri Culmann, who lost seniority after the war for having served as a leading figure in creating Vichy corporative institutions. But the dominant impression, as one leafs through the yearbooks, is still that of continuity.

The same holds for the Council of State, another prestigious agency whose talented members continue to be much in demand for sensitive posts in government and industry. Indeed so many of the councillors of state were placed on leave after 1940 to take important posts in the new regime that the total number of active members of the council dropped from 113 in 1938 to 105 in 1942.
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At the same time, the Council of State, like the other
grands corps
, saw its functions expanding. The council’s juridical function as a court of law for private persons seeking redress of administrative grievances went on as before. Its consultative function in lawmaking, preeminent under Bonapartist regimes but attenuated under the Third Republic, was revived by Vichy. The law of 18 December 1940 reestablished a fifth section (legislation) that examined all legislation in the drafting process and that even gave legislative initiative to the Council of State. The secretary-general of each ministry was automatically attached to the council. The Council of State rose to these new demands by more rapid promotions of its younger members, which enlarged the upper ranks and provided a kind of professional fulfillment, as in the Cour des Comptes.

Only those who left the Council of State to serve as prefects, ministers, or secretaries-general of ministries after 1940 were removed from the corps in the postwar purge, however. Even in
this somewhat more politicized
grand corps
, 80 percent of the section presidents, 76 percent of the conseillers d’état en service ordinaire, and 70 percent of the maîtres des requêtes serving in 1942 are still found in the 1946 yearbook (two more reappear in the 1949 yearbook, having been reinstated).
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What is striking in all these
grands corps
was their resistance to replacement of professionals by amateurs forced upon them for political reasons. The yearbooks show that vacancies created in senior posts by either Vichy or the Liberation were filled largely by promotion from within.

We come now to
grands corps
which have a stronger political coloration. The judiciary, the diplomatic corps, and particularly the Prefectoral Corps carry out a regime’s policy in such conspicuous ways that one would expect substantial turnover of personnel here through the years of war, occupation, and Liberation.

The judiciary performed the extraordinary feat of enforcing the law of successive regimes virtually without personnel change. Judges were given prominent roles in the regime, like all experts: judges like Frémicourt and law professors like Joseph Barthélemy, dean of the Paris law faculty, replaced politicians in the office of minister of justice. In return, judges were required like other public officials to take an oath of allegiance to Marshal Pétain, and a circular of Minister of Justice Barthélemy in 1942 warned that career advancement in the magistracy depended upon “devotion to the new order and to the person of the Head of State.” The fact that special courts had done the dirtiest work of the regime helped the regular magistracy to retain some vestige of independence. The judges of the Section Spéciale of the Paris Cour d’Appel, set up in August 1941 to mete out swift punishments after the assassination of a German serviceman in Paris on August 14, were sentenced on 8 June 1945 to terms ranging from a few years in prison to hard labor for life (Judge Benon, president of the section). Not all the members of the Tribunal d’Etat were career magistrates. De Gaulle himself and other leading Resistance figures had been sentenced in
absentia by courts-martial. The regular judges, therefore, had been spared the most sensitive cases. Having applied Vichy’s law for four years, the magistracy went on applying the Fourth Republic’s law from the august heights of a bench that seemed to have preserved its Olympian purity. This state of affairs produced not a few ironies during the postwar trials. There was, for example, old André Mornet, who had prosecuted Mata Hari and who came out of retirement to prosecute Laval and Pétain with evangelical fervor, shouting “there are too many Germans in this room” when the audience muttered during Laval’s travesty of a trial. Mornet’s righteous wrath was tempered somewhat when Pétain’s trial was reminded that Mornet had taken the oath to Pétain like all judges, that he had been named to the Riom court that had tried the Third Republic leaders (he had apparently not served), and that he had served on the denaturalization commission which revoked the citizenship of many recent immigrants. No wonder Mornet called his book about Vichy
Four Years to Strike from Our History.
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The diplomatic corps was more stable than might be imagined, considering the pitfalls awaiting ambassadors at changes of regime. The legal forms by which the Vichy regime was installed in July 1940, its recognition by other governments ranging from the Vatican to Moscow, maintained the existing diplomatic corps virtually intact up through 1942, with the exception of a few Jews and Masons purged by Vichy and a handful of dissidents. A large part of the embassy staff in Washington resigned when Laval returned to power in April 1942. There was a genuine wave of resignations in November 1942. Moreover, the diplomatic corps, with its highly political function of representation, could not resist outside amateur appointments. Vichy named more politicians (Senator Henry-Haye as ambassador to Washington, Senator Léon Berard as ambassador
to the Holy See, Deputy François Piétri to Madrid, Deputy Gaston Bergery to Moscow and then to Ankara) and military men (Admiral Bard to Switzerland) as ambassadors than the Third Republic had done.

Even with these elements of discontinuity, more than half the diplomatic corps survived the years of turmoil. The 1947 yearbook of the diplomatic corps contains some 1,100 names. Approximately 450 of these are older career men who were already present in 1939 and who had served at least some time under Vichy. Another 200 had entered the diplomatic service under Vichy. A final group of about 450 are new men, mostly recruited by the traditional examination, but some apparently brought in more irregularly from the Free French forces and Resistance groups. In these rather summary terms, nearly two-thirds of the diplomatic corps served both Vichy and the Fourth Republic. The impression of continuity is enhanced when one remembers that even in peaceful times there is a substantial turnover in any eight-year period by retirement, death, and resignations.
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The Prefectoral Corps had the closest political identification and the least highly developed professional structure of all the
grands corps de l’état.
A prefect is, in the words of the law of 23 December 1940, “the sole representative of the government in the department.”
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As the chief executive official in each district (
département
), a prefect was an essential link in the application of government policies at the local level. New regimes usually found old prefects too closely identified with the policies of predecessors and insisted upon naming new ones. French practice still recognized a government’s right to a free choice of prefects, even though the Prefectoral Corps had become a professional body with its own system of recruitment and advancement from within which, increasingly, a minister of the interior was expected to choose his prefects. The Second Republic’s
minister of the interior in 1848, Ledru-Rollin, changed all the prefects; all the Second Empire’s prefects were removed in 1871. After the 16 May 1877 constitutional showdown had been won by republicans, 87 prefects and 267 subprefects were changed. Against this background, the Vichy purge of Third Republic prefects was relatively modest. Interior Minister Adrien Marquet, the Neosocialist mayor of Bordeaux, retired 35 prefects under the law of 17 July 1940 permitting more or less arbitrary removal of civil servants and named 67 new ones in Vichy’s grandest prefectoral reshuffle. Eventually some 40 men were made prefects from outside the service (mostly military officers and councillors of state), but only 9 of those were still there in 1944. Thus professionalism continued to gain ground. Vichy seems to have had less trouble finding sympathetic men in the prefectoral corps than did the Liberation, representing, as it did, the continuity of administration. The liberation purge was as sweeping as those of the nineteenth century. The French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers named new prefects in advance to all 87 mainland departments, only 20 of whom were drawn from the Prefectoral Corps. Another 67 were outsiders “delegated” to their functions by governmental authority (“préfets délégués”). Over time, however, these new men of the Liberation period drifted back to their original jobs, so that by 1947 the Prefectoral Corps had become an amalgam, about half from the old Prefectoral Corps, many of whom had come up through the ranks holding junior posts under Vichy, and about half Liberation prefects “integrated” into the corps. The postwar prefects were also younger men, as is normal in a time of rapid personnel turnover; the same was true of the Vichy prefects.
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Here is a genuine breach of professionalism and an array of new faces that comes closer to matching the reputation of the period 1939–46 as one of massive personnel change.

The overall impression created by a look at the personnel of the
grands corps
is one of basic stability. Continuity varied according to the political and professional functions of each
corps
, but even at the unstable end of the spectrum, nearly half the
professionals in the Prefectoral Corps survived the years 1939–46.

Outside the professional corps of senior administrators of the upper civil service lie the more general forms of expertise. Businessmen and engineers, for example, probably experienced very little personnel change during this period. No businessman was tried for collaboration after the war, although there were actions against illicit war profits or tax evasion, the extent of which is still privileged information. Louis Renault, whose automobile works built tanks for the Germans, died in prison before he could be tried. Renault was the only manufacturer whose plants were confiscated permanently by the state, and indeed the Renault works, like the Berliet truck factory at Lyon, might have been returned to private hands had M. Renault lived as long as M. Marius Berliet, who built 2,330 trucks for the Germans but who stubbornly refused to recognize legal actions against him after the war. He died in 1949, and his firm remained in family hands.
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It is difficult to study personnel changes among leading businessmen, for they are not members of a closed professional corps like upper civil servants with their names and ranks in a promotion list. But just as the prewar leaders of business and trade associations tended to become the heads of Vichy’s Organization Committees, so the leading industrialists of the Vichy period retained control of their sources of social power through the Liberation. Nationalization touched some of them: in addition to M. Louis Renault, there were the executives of the insurance companies, banks, coal mines, and gas and electric works that were taken over by the state in 1945–46. But one would find far more continuity than change in the upper industrial, commercial, and engineering ranks, swelled further by Vichy figures who found postwar careers in business. Officials of the Peasant Corporation, too, were the backbone of postwar agriculture pressure groups.
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By contrast, other sections of the French elite were permanently
changed by the catastrophes of 1939–46. Significantly, it was the traditionalists, who had had less influence at Vichy in the long run than the experts, who were much more vigorously uprooted at the Liberation than the experts. Although they had exerted a diminishing effect on Vichy policies, they had been men of the word. They had commanded newspaper pages, radio hours, and public platforms. When innovations like regionalism were discussed, it was the traditionalists who had done all the talking about provinces and tradition, while the experts had quietly gone ahead and established regional prefectures in a way repugnant to them. But the traditionalists had provided the words and voices of Vichy, and they were marked men.

Those traditionalists who had occupied policy-making positions came before the High Court of Justice: some, like Raphael Alibert, Jacques Chevalier, and Pierre Caziot, went to prison and lost their property and civic rights (the vote). Henry Moysset died in 1949 before he was to come up for trial. Those traditionalists whose duties involved mostly youth work, like Georges Lamirand and General de la Porte du Theil, were acquitted. Jean Borotra, who had been deported by the Germans later in the war, like General de la Porte du Theil, was a member of the Haut Comité des Sports in the 1960’s without having lost any of his fervor for Marshal Pétain’s efforts to save French youth through athletics. Gustave Thibon remained isolated and ignored in a country retreat despite the publication of an occasional book. Some Pétiniste traditionalists made a form of comeback by being elected to the French Academy: notably Thierry Maulnier in 1955 and Henri Massis in 1960. By that time, however, few Frenchmen knew even the names of France’s forty immortals. A more serious revival crystallized around the campaign for Algérie française in the late 1950’s and the early 1960’s. General Weygand and René Gillouin, who had been together in 1937 in the Rassemblement National pour la Reconstruction de la France, found themselves together in a new authoritarian nationalist movement to defend the empire from the world Communist conspiracy in the 1960’s, the CEPEC (Centre d’Etudes Civiques et Politiques) of Georges Sauge. The high point of that revival around the Algerian issue, abetted by fears of the burgeoning
new youth culture of the 1960’s, was the presidential candidacy of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt in December 1965. Tixier had been commissioner of press and radio briefly in late 1940 and an official of Pétain’s Rassemblement pour la Revolution Nationale in 1941. He received 1,250,000 votes in December 1965. An outpouring of sympathetic Pétain biographies beginning in 1966 argued that the marshal would have known how to deal with dissident youth. By and large, however, the traditionalists were condemned to obscurity along with the whole social nostalgic attitude. The vision of old France, surviving her flashier neighbors through balance and thrift, was almost totally replaced by the more dynamic vision of a new France competing in growth, vigor, and material power with her neighbors. Postwar conservatives, whether growth-conscious businessmen or Mao-reading colonels fresh from Indochina or Algeria, had little in common with the social traditionalists of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Vichy was the traditionalists’ last stand.
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