Vichy France (61 page)

The fate of the overtly fascist intellectuals and party leaders in occupied Paris was even more final. Men of public platforms, their words condemned them to suffer at the Liberation. The lucky ones escaped into exile, like Déat to an Italian monastery and Céline to Denmark. Drieu la Rochelle managed to commit suicide. Robert Brasillach, Georges Suarez, and Jean Luchaire were executed. Philippe Henriot, Minister of Information and the voice of Radio Vichy, had been assassinated on 28 June 1944. Jacques Doriot had been killed when Allied aircraft strafed his car on a German highway in 1945. Darnand, who had entered the government at the last, as Secretary-General for the Maintenance of Order in December 1943, had the blood of the Resistance on his hands as commander of the Milice. He was executed on 10 October 1945. Officers and members of the Milice, as the most conspicuous collaborators in the battle against the Resistance, were dealt with very severely by Liberation courts.
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That the intellectuals, propagandists, and anti-Resistance militants of Paris and of Vichy’s last stage in 1944 should have come to violent ends at the Liberation is not surprising. What is curious is how fully the parliamentarians of the Third Republic were also eliminated from the postwar world, not by violence but by scorn. Frenchmen of the Liberation were as hostile to the deputies of 1940 as Vichy had been. Of all sections of the prewar French elite, deputies display the least continuity across the period 1939–1946.

It was the deputies of the Third Republic, after all, who had voted exceptional powers to Marshal Pétain on 10 July 1940. They bore a heavy responsibility for giving Vichy far more than mere caretaker powers. The decree of April 1944 that made ineligible for reelection the 569 deputies and senators who had voted “yes” on 10 July 1940 was to be expected.
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It was the whole Third Republic parliamentary system, however, and not merely the 569, that Frenchmen wanted to punish at the Liberation. Some resistance groups, such as the heavily bureaucratic and military OCM (Organisation Civile et Militaire), wanted to exclude all Third Republic leaders without exception from postwar roles and to continue Vichy’s Riom trials.
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In this climate, even the 80 who had voted “no” in July 1940 found no automatic return to public life after 1944. The survival rate of the 80 across the war years is far lower than that of any of the
grand corps.
Of 623 members of the Assemblée Nationale (the new lower house) in 1949, only 88 (14 percent) had been members of either house in 1938. Communist parliamentarians, who had been expelled from Parliament by Daladier in January 1940, survived the war better than their colleagues: there were 31 Communist deputies in 1949 who were veterans of 1938. The other veterans were divided among some who had been taken to
North Africa aboard the
Massilia
and therefore missed the vote of 10 July 1940, 7 who had voted “yes” and whose ineligibility had been lifted, and some 30 who had been among the 80 “no’s” of July 1940. In the Conseil de la République (Senate) of 1949, only 23 of 318 (7 percent) were veterans of either house in 1938, and since 8 of these were former senators who had voted “yes” (only one senator had voted “no” in July 1940), one finds few of the 80 here either. In all, less than half of the 80 returned to public life after the war, a far lower survival rate than any of the
grands corps
, even allowing for the greater age of parliamentarians.

The postwar rejection of Third Republic political figures, indeed, was nearly as vigorous as Vichy’s had been. Frenchmen voted twenty-five to one in the referendum of 21 October 1945 to consider the Third Republic dead and to empower the new National Assembly to draft a new constitution.
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Indeed, considering the major steps taken outside parliament by Fourth Republic governments (the establishment of the Commissariat au Plan, for example) and the enhanced role of executive and experts intended in the Fourth Republic and achieved in the Fifth, one sees that the postwar French rejected more than the personnel of the Third Republic. They rejected its style and decision-making techniques as well. On the single issue of satisfaction with the Third Republic, postwar French voters felt closer to the “yes” men of 9–10 July 1940 than to the “no’s.”

In terms of personnel, therefore, Vichy experts and technicians survived into liberated France more widely than did the less influential social nostalgics or the Paris fascists or even the Third Republic deputies.

The same holds for the survival of Vichy legislation, programs, doctrines, and attitudes. Upon closer inspection, the Liberation did not actually abolish all Vichy legislation. Although the ordinance of 9 August 1944 began by declaring null all acts of the “de facto authority,” it actually nullified only a list
of acts appended to the ordinance. The rest of Vichy legislation remained, at least for “a period of transition” required, for example, by the practical working of economic agencies. Furthermore, declared the ordinance, some advancements in career during Vichy might prove to have been merited, business transactions were presumed valid, and indeed some Vichy acts were inspired only by “the interest properly understood of the good functioning of services.”
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One can scan the criminal, civil, and commercial codes, for example, and find a scattering of legislation from the early 1940’s. The statute books were not swept clean at the Liberation.

Vichy left some mark in the areas where traditionalists had been most active: family law and public morals. The old-age pensions law of 1941 was incorporated bodily in postwar social security legislation, and indeed it had been, in Pétain’s own words, a “promise made by others,” unfinished business from the 1930’s. Family allowances, subsidies for large families, remained the policy of postwar governments as it had been the policy of both Daladier and Pétain. Although Vichy’s “exceptional and involuntary experiment in alcoholic disintoxication” vanished with the end of scarcity, one still sees in bars posters proclaiming the age limit set in 1940.
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In a curiously roundabout way, the work of Vichy traditionalists survived most conspicuously in church-state relations. Although the church hierarchy was so discredited by its support of Vichy that General de Gaulle refused to permit Cardinal Suhard of Paris to attend the Te Deum at Notre Dame when Paris was liberated, the church as a whole was less subject to attack by the Fourth Republic than it had been by the Third. Traditional radical republican anticlericalism of the Gambetta-Clemenceau-Combes persuasion was going the way of the Masonic “republic of pals.” The Catholic left, marginal in the 1930’s, found that
the same anticapitalism and rejection of the atheist radical republic that had made it Pétiniste in 1940 put it in harmony with the Resistance in 1944. Many priests and Catholic laymen had, of course, served actively in the Resistance, where the fusion of Communists and priests in the
maquis
became one of the clichés of Resistance history. Social experiments such as the worker priest movement grew not only from this Resistance amalgam but from the Catholic anticapitalism of early Pétain supporters like Father Godin and from the selfless volunteers who went under Vichy auspices to minister to French laborers working in German war plants. Into the vacuum left by a discredited conservative hierarchy stepped a vigorous Catholic left ready to take predominance in the postwar French church. Postwar political developments also helped make the church less controversial after the Liberation than it might have been. Communist leader Maurice Thorez’ “hand extended to the Catholics” in the early Popular Front days of May 1934 was extended again in the period of Communist participation within the system between 1944 and May 1947. A Catholic left party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, found itself splitting the electorate three ways with the other two major parties of the Resistance, the Communists and the Socialists. Under these conditions, a quiet shift of power within the French Catholic church took the place of a purge, and it was politically impossible to undo all the church’s Vichy gains. Seven bishops were quietly retired. By 1951 state aid could be voted again to Catholic schools in France.

By contrast, the traditionalists’ social policy came to seem less wrong than simply irrelevant. Labor unions returned stronger than ever at the Liberation, of course, and although the principle of a labor statute for the civil service, battled for between the wars and obtained under Vichy, was retained, the postwar statute was totally devoid of Vichy’s prohibitions upon unions and strikes in the civil service. As for the vision of a harmonious balanced society with a large role for artisans and peasants, Vichy itself had long departed from that course.

It is in the areas of public administration, economic modernization, and planning that the survival of Vichy measures—like
personnel—is most marked. The descent was not always lineal, of course, but the evolution we have seen at Vichy, away from traditionalist values toward administration by experts and planned modernization, conformed with the longer-term trend in French politics and society.

The links are closest, naturally, in the most technical realms, such as rationing and price controls. Here the basic problem of penury imposed its own logic upon Vichy and Fourth Republic administrators alike, until the beginning of the 1950’s. Here technical considerations had a certain neutrality, the flower of the French civil service had put its expertise to work, and abrupt new starts would have been paid for in chaos. Vichy war economy structures survived for some time, sometimes under different names. Even the Organization Committees, the corporative regulatory structures within the business world, survived until April 1946 under another name (
offices professionnelles
). At least one chairman of an Organization Committee entered a postwar government. Aimé Lepercq, head of the Organization Committee for the coal industry, became minister of finance in the provisional government following the Liberation of Paris in August 1944.
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Even when the need for wartime economic management had ended, it was clear that the ground gained by experts over elected representatives at Vichy would never be lost. Such significant measures as the Monnet Plan for managed economic growth under sustained government control were created by executive decree rather than by parliamentary statute. Although the Fourth Republic gravitated in this as in so many ways back toward the practices of the Third, subjecting some of the later Five-Year Plans to greater parliamentary scrutiny, the role of public administrators in the national economy remained nearer to Vichy practice than to traditional republican practice. The vital process
of budget-drafting under the Fourth Republic, in which the old parliamentary haggle over each item gave way to professional drafting in the Finance Ministry’s Direction du Budget that neither minister nor deputies could fully evaluate, resembled Vichy practice more closely than Third Republic practice.
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The total number of civil servants maintained the steep climb begun in the late 1930’s and continued under Vichy. And the brief and disastrous renaissance of parliamentary supremacy in the Fourth Republic eventually gave way to the Fifth Republic’s administrative state. De Gaulle and his former mentor and adversary Pétain resembled each other in many respects, but in none so closely as when they talked contemptuously of the “regime of parties.”

Vichy had also broken the ice for regional reorganization. Unless one counts the comparatively unimportant economic regions set up shortly after World War I, Vichy made the first significant departure from the department as the unit of local administration since the Napoleonic “Year VIII” (1799). The super-prefects of 1941, with their special authority over police and supply problems for a whole region, were an innovation whose practical merits outweighed a tainted origin. The ordinance of 10 January 1944 by which the French Committee of National Liberation appointed
commissaires de la république
to assume local authority in each region as it was liberated matched their circumscriptions to the Vichy super-prefectures. It was essential, after all, for Liberation forces to have administrators ready for each existing level of local government. Beyond that pragmatic necessity, however, lay a clear choice by the CFLN of regions as a more effective level for maintaining order than departments in the automobile age. The
commissaires de la république
functioned only until March 1946. In March 1948, however, Minister of the Interior Jules Moch revived the super-prefect
concept in the I.G.A.M.E. (inspecteurs-généraux administratifs en mission extraordinaire), created to deal with the strike wave of 1947–48.
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Like Vichy regionalism, postwar regionalism was administrative rather than federal. The best measure of central authority is financial. Vichy had further tightened the “tutelle,” the control exercised by the central government over local spending. The central budget grew much more rapidly than local budgets, further reducing the ability of the latter to take local initiative. Whereas the budgets of departments and communes had reached about 33 percent of the national budget between the wars, they amounted to only 17 percent of the national budget in 1946. Despite some intentions to the contrary, postwar regionalism, like its Vichy predecessor, has meant a net increase of central authority where it has functioned at all.
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Vichy and French Society

A
LTHOUGH SOCIAL TRADITIONALISTS OCCUPIED CONSPICUOUS
positions, enjoyed the preference of Marshal Pétain, and influenced the rhetoric and style of the Vichy regime, the occupation years moved France decisively away from their vision of France: balanced, rural, personal. For a variety of reasons, conscious and unconscious, Vichy moved France significantly toward the technicians’ vision: urban, efficient, productive, planned, and impersonal.