Vichy France (7 page)

That left Charles de Gaulle high and dry in London, unexpectedly nearly alone, having burned his bridges by the radio appeal of 18 June. A look at the first Gaullists makes perhaps the best case for the marginal nature of Pétain’s early opponents. Their number was small and their status mostly obscure. Prominent prewar figures were virtually absent. The only deputy who joined de Gaulle was Pierre-Olivier Lapie, who happened to be in London anyway as a reserve officer with the returning Narvik force. There was only one admiral, Muselier, who had quarreled with Darlan in the late 1930’s. The only senior army officers were from the colonies. In addition to the two generals (Catroux and Le Gentilhomme) there was only one colonel, de Larminat, who left Syria after failing to bring his unit over to rejecting the armistice. The only high civil servants were men already in trouble with the new regime. Gaston Palewski and Maurice Dejean, who had been Paul Reynaud’s administrative aides, reached London in August 1940. The only inspector of finance was André Diethelm, who had been Georges Mandel’s administrative aide and whose fate was sealed when Mandel was arrested in Morocco in June and charged with trying to set up a rival antiarmistice regime with British support. Paris law professor René Cassin was the only leading academic, and the senior journalist was probably Maurice Schumann, former religion editor with the Havas news agency and future Fifth Republic foreign minister.

De Gaulle’s recruits came mainly from the outcasts of the new regime and from those already overseas. The outcasts were not automatically Gaullist, however. Many on the Left found de Gaulle’s following far too clerical, military, and nationalist for comfort. Warm relations between de Gaulle and the internal
Left resistance were a good two years in the future. So eminent an outcast as Léon Blum expected to settle quietly in the south of France. Few of those purged from government service joined de Gaulle, at least at first. Jean Moulin was the only dismissed prefect among the 1940 recruits. The only ambassador removed from his post at German insistence—Ambassador to Turkey René Massigli (de Gaulle’s eventual commissioner for foreign affairs), who was implicated when the Germans discovered a set of war plans for a Balkan operation—remained in France until early 1943.

Having to leave French soil was a serious obstacle. Vichy’s successful control of most of the empire was a major victory, for it meant that one could join de Gaulle only through the total rupture of normal life, through flight and exile. Only the soldiers and civil servants of colonies that swung integrally into the Gaullist camp, such as most of French Equatorial Africa in October–November 1940, had the luxury of becoming Free French while staying put. For the rest, one had to face criminal charges, physical danger, and the obloquy of emigration. Was not going abroad a kind of shameful escape? “I would be ashamed to leave my fellow countrymen when everything goes wrong,” wrote Jean Renoir to the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty on 8 August 1940.
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More particularly, going to London came to seem changing one enemy for another. On July 3–4, the British Navy carried out a preemptive raid on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir (Algeria) and seized French ships in British harbors, on the assumption that Vichy’s verbal assurances were insufficient guarantee that the Germans might not seize the French fleet whenever they wished. Over 1, 200 French sailors died in that painful act of Realpolitik. Thereafter, de Gaulle had to struggle against charges that his movement was a stalking horse for British imperial interests.

Not all of those already outside France were Gaullists, either. Many who were physically in a position to join him did not. Colonel Antoine Béthouart, de Gaulle’s military school classmate
and a man later arrested for helping the Allied landing in Morocco in November 1942, was in England in June 1940 on his way home from the Norway campaign. While giving his officers and men a free choice, Béthouart felt that duty required him to return to serve where his government assigned him. Naval recruitment was even smaller after the Mers-el-Kebir tragedy. Of some 500 officers and 18,000 sailors already in England in June 1940, all but 50 French naval officers and 200 sailors chose to go home rather than stay with de Gaulle.
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The one prominent businessman opposed to the regime, brandy merchant Jean Monnet, who had served as French purchasing agent for war matériel in Washington and London, preferred to remain in the United States, as did the ex-Secretary General of the Foreign Office, Alexis Léger. They were joined by a stream of refugees, from Popular Front Air Minister Pierre Cot through the Rothschilds to the Curies, journalist Henri de Kérillis and novelists Jules Romains and André Maurois. Anthropologist Jacques Soustelle, en route from Central America to London via the United States in the late summer of 1940, could well feel that he was swimming against the tide.
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The total Gaullist movement, then, amounted to only 7,000 in July 1940 and approximately 35,000 by the end of 1940, a figure around which it hovered until November 1942.
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The bulk of these numbers came from more or less “automatic” Gaullists among soldiers and government officials from Equatorial Africa, filled out by Gaullists of genuine decision such as whole villages of Breton fishermen. The leaders were mostly new men thrust into unanticipated prominence. The prewar obscurity of the Companions of the Liberation is a good measure of how few leading Frenchmen joined de Gaulle in 1940.

Most future Gaullists were still years away from making that commitment. A few future Gaullists had the misfortune to publish their thoughts white-hot in the summer of 1940. Those reminders
of the confused and intense emotions of that dreadful summer were a not inconsiderable embarrassment to them later. The quietist editorials of François Mauriac are one famous case. Another was Paul Claudel’s effulgent ode to Pétain, which cynics enjoy comparing to his equally breathless 1944 tribute to de Gaulle. Jean Maze amused the French reading public in 1948 with a collection of such awkward quotations entitled “A New Dictionary of Weathervanes,” named for a famous Restoration pamphlet exposing the tergiversations of celebrated turncoats during the Hundred Days of 1815.
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M. Maze had to use a pseudonym himself, however, for he had been assistant editor of the newspaper of Gaston Bergery, militant for the new regime in 1940 and its ambassador to the Soviet Union. Genuine “resisters of the first hour” were a rare breed indeed in 1940.

I
T TAKES MORE THAN THE USUAL LEAP OF HISTORICAL
thought to recapture the elusive moods of the summer of 1940. The stunning shock of defeat, which turned a proud and skeptical people briefly into self-flagellants craving the healing hand of suffering and discipline, passed as quickly as the daze of an automobile accident victim. The scraps of contemporary conversation and writing that survive are mostly the views of special people—writers, diplomats, propagandists—as the reader will have noticed in this prologue. Most misleading of all, one sees 1940 through the changed lenses of the Liberation, through the postwar trials and memoirs that have placed the stamp of their perspectives on a basically fictitious image of 1940. By 1944 the universe had so completely turned on its axis that the main strategic assumptions of 1940—short war, British defeat, danger of revolution, imminent peace—seemed nonsense. Vichy veterans had every incentive to produce a flood of selective, self-justifying prose designed to show that in 1940 they had already seen the world in 1944 terms. Their very lives depended on doing so.

Recapturing the moods of 1940 requires stripping away encrusted
layers of postwar perspectives. These have so permeated consciousness that fragments of new information tend simply to be assimilated into old patterns. This happens, for example, to the occasional stray German documents that appeared in French periodicals from time to time after the Liberation. In this book I have attempted the painful business of breaking up these old patterns and suggesting another way of looking at a controversial time. Wherever possible, I have relied upon contemporary materials rather than postwar trial testimony or memoirs where the two conflict.

One notion to strip away is the “double game.” It was tempting to claim in 1944 that one had foreseen the Liberation all along and had only apparently gone along with the Vichy solution in order to gain time. Hitler believed this, at first, and decided only in October 1940 after talking face-to-face with Pétain that the marshal and his former protégé de Gaulle had no secret connection. Indeed many Frenchmen who had supported Vichy for a time came to work heroically for Liberation, and thus they passed from a 1940 perspective to a 1944 one. But it will not do to telescope those successive stands into a simultaneous “double game.” The German and American diplomatic conversations with French leaders are all now available, and it seems quite clear that Vichy cabinet members said very much the same things to both. There was no official “double game.” The first and fourth chapters of this book try to show how earnestly Vichy sought neutrality, an early peace, and a final settlement on gentle terms with Germany.

An even more tenacious Liberation perspective is Vichy’s passivity. After the war, Vichy was treated by both friend and foe as a mere reactor to German initiatives. To sympathizers, Vichy was a brake, an obstacle, a device for delaying or mitigating limitless German demands and preventing total occupation (as if the Germans wanted that!). “Après nous, la Polonisation.” To opponents, Vichy seems a capitulation, either craven or corrupt, to insatiable German desires. From either perspective, motor energy was believed to come from Berlin. “Collaboration” seemed mere response.

We can now see almost exactly when this perspective was
skillfully planted, as an element of Marshal Pétain’s postwar trial defense. When the retreating German armies carried Pétain off in August 1944 to the old Hohenzollern castle of Sigmaringen, where the upper Danube comes out of the Black Forest, the marshal’s final proclamation set the tone of passive defense. “If I could not be your sword, I tried to be your shield.” He elaborated on this idea in his one statement at the trial in 1945. “Day after day, a dagger at my throat, I struggled against German demands.”
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This was not so much a lie as a half-truth. It obscured all the things Vichy had done without German pressure and all the things Vichy had begged and implored the Germans to do. Marshal Pétain’s prosecution, ill prepared and looking for conspiratorial gossip rather than calm historical judgment, let the trial slip away from what Vichy struggled
for
to what Vichy struggled
against.
Unable to prove that Pétain had conspired actively before the war for a German victory, the prosecution shifted its focus from sins of commission to sins of omission.

Subsequent defendants gladly followed the emphasis upon German initiative and Vichy passivity. When Laval was asked about the laws against Freemasonry, for example, he replied that the Germans had forced it upon him—an outright lie.
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Other defendants simply claimed that their role had been a subordinate or technical one, which left them ignorant of high policy. Among the makers of high policy, Darlan had been assassinated, and Laval’s trial was too hasty and too impassioned to reach substantive issues. Among the trials of subordinates before the High Court of Justice, only those of Jacques Benoist-Méchin and Fernand de Brinon, Vichy representatives at Paris, allow some glimpse of Vichy initiatives. Subtly but thoroughly, the trials helped implant the general assumption that public affairs under the occupation were a simple matter of German demand and Vichy response (wise or cowardly, according to one’s preference). Maître Isorni, Pétain’s lawyer, won his case with public opinion, if not with the court.

The principal act of historical re-creation, then, is to restore
Vichy’s initiatives to view. France, in fact, enjoyed a quite extraordinary range of freedom for a defeated and half-occupied state. German control of the Vichy zone was light for some time, for reasons both calculated and uncalculated. The calculated reasons were the economy and political astuteness of letting France keep herself out of the war and docile, as long as she seemed inclined to do so. This calculation meant that France was the only defeated nation allowed to treat state-to-state for an armistice
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and the only defeated nation divided into occupied and unoccupied zones. For uncalculated reasons, German political direction in Paris took time to form. At first, the real German authority in France was the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, located in Paris, and all dealings with French authorities were conducted through the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden. It was expected in those early days that Franco-German relations would be limited during the brief period before peace negotiations to technical questions of French demobilization and German security. Otto Abetz was at first a mere foreign office representative on the Militärbefehlshaber’s staff. For the first month after the armistice was signed, he saw only one member of the French government, Pierre Laval, on July 19. On August 8 Hitler made him ambassador, and gradually an independent German political office in Paris established its own identity outside the more pragmatic military men in Paris and Wiesbaden.
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Vichy’s first hundred days, then, took place without close, direct German political supervision. Long afterward, that influence remained essentially negative—vetoing things rather than imposing things—until the summer of 1941, when the assassination
of Germans began, and the summer of 1942, when forced labor and the deportation of Jews to the east started. Some of the most earnest Vichy concerns never interested the Germans very much. One of this book’s main intentions, therefore, is to restore Vichy’s initiatives to view. I want to restore Vichy to its rightful place in indigenous French history, a link between the incipient civil war of the 1930’s and the social transformations of the postwar years.