Voices from the Dark Years (12 page)

Unfortunately Philippe Pétain was 84 when he became prime minister and subsequently head of state. His clothes were always immaculate and his bearing upright, but if at times his step was still sprightly and his wit razor-sharp, at others he was absent-minded, forgetful and unable to concentrate as his brain slowed down. He could easily be worn down by persistence and would doze off in afternoon meetings, losing the track of an argument and tending to cover the inattention by agreeing with the last person to speak, even when doing so contradicted himself. Unfortunately, circumstances obliged him to work in partnership with a man adept at taking advantage of these failings: the devious lawyer-politician and self-made millionaire Pierre Laval.

N
OTES

  
1.
  ‘
Nous avons eu un engagement assez meurtrier le 15. Une grande bataille se prépare, j’y vais sans arrière-pensée et sans appréhension, car j’ai fait le sacrifice de ma vie, les souffrances physiques qui peuvent m’être imposées sont peu de chose en comparaison des tortures morales subies á cause de toi
.’ Quoted by H. Amouroux, in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 482.

  
2.
  ‘
Quelques livres nous tiendront compagnie ainsi que quelques amis de choix, dont les anciens flirts, de part et d’autre, seront exclus
.’ Ibid., p. 483.

  
3.
  ‘
Français, vous l’accomplirez et vous verrez, je vous le jure, une France neuve surgir de votre ferveur
.’ Quoted by R. Aron in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 484.

  
4.
  D. Pechanski, in
Collaboration and Resistance
, tr. L. Frankel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 9.

6

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With France’s politicians dispossessed of their temporary capital in Bordeaux by the Germans requisitioning all the public buildings, on 29 June the impromptu convoy of private and official vehicles headed north-east for Clermont-Ferrand in the centre of France. Whilst its geographical position guaranteed good communications, this major manufacturing town was home to the giant Michelin rubber company and not equipped to accommodate the government and civil service with all their hangers-on and camp-followers. Ministers and their staffs were spread out in surrounding towns, without even a working telephone system to communicate with each other. It was a recipe for chaos, had one been needed.

The country was in turmoil with 8 million displaced people. Lack of motor fuel caused havoc with food distribution. Public transport for those who wanted to return home was non-existent. Even the police and gendarmerie had no clear idea who was in charge of what. Where it existed at all, the postal service was reduced to a few cyclists carrying official communications. Shops of all kinds had been broken into and pillaged, mostly by refugees desperate for food. Abandoned French army horses and farm animals roamed loose in the fields and ownerless dogs scavenged the streets. Everywhere there were queues for food, shelter, news and vital papers that had been lost in the panic.

As so often, a single-minded and ambitious man took advantage of everyone else’s confusion. On 16 June in Bordeaux, when the marshal agreed his handwritten list of cabinet ministers with President Lebrun, the name of Pierre Laval had not been on it because he had been offered, and refused, the Ministry of Justice. It was as Foreign Minister that Laval saw his role in Pétain’s government because that brief would embrace relations with Germany, whose leaders he already knew personally. Informed by the marshal that Foreign Affairs had been given to Paul Baudouin, Laval’s unbridled fury was such that he stormed out of the marshal’s borrowed office, slamming the door.

France’s diplomats heaved a collective sigh of relief, the ministry’s secretary-general having indicated to Pétain that making foreign minister a man with Laval’s anti-British reputation would destroy the tattered remnants of the Entente Cordiale. Despite Britain’s unilateral withdrawal at Dunkirk, a surprising number of influential French people were still anglophile at this stage. Having drawn a line in the sand by stipulating that he wanted the Quai d’Orsay or nothing, Laval therefore played no part in the negotiations for the Armistice – a fact that was often subsequently overlooked by his denigrators. Nevertheless, Pétain knew Laval too well to leave him out of the new government, where he could foment trouble, and therefore brought Laval into his government as one of two vice-presidents of the Council of Ministers or cabinet.

Pierre Laval’s solution to his country’s woes was simple: he proposed the abolition of the Third Republic on the grounds that it was responsible for the defeat. On the morning of 30 June a poorly attended cabinet meeting in Clermont debated his proposition. Not every minister was in favour, some arguing that the best way to put the country back on its feet was to give Pétain six months to govern without parliamentary oversight. Using a battery of courtroom lawyer’s tricks that would have worn down the resistance of men far stronger than the senescent marshal, Laval returned to the attack in the afternoon cabinet meeting. When Pétain argued that such a radical step should await their return to a free Paris after the conclusion of a definitive peace treaty, Laval riposted that only a strong France could negotiate the treaty to replace the Armistice with Germany on equal terms

Back in March he had said to British politician Robert Boothby:

If we had come to terms with Mussolini, as I wanted to do, we might have held Hitler ... That is no longer possible. Let us try to hold on to what we have left. I am a peasant from the Auvergne. I want to keep my farm, and I want to keep France. Nothing else matters now.
¹

Weakening in the face of Laval’s sustained arguments, Pétain protested that only a National Assembly of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies had the power to alter the constitution. Calling that assembly required the assent of the President of the Republic. It was the moment for which Laval had been waiting. Scattering cigarette ash – he was a chain smoker – over his trademark white tie, he leaped up from the conference table and drove to the nearby town of Royat, where President Lebrun was quartered. An hour later he returned with Lebrun’s assent to the National Assembly. Overwhelmed by Laval’s
fait accompli
, Pétain gave way.

As to where the assembly could meet, the nearest suitable place lay 50km to the north-east of Clermont. Some guessed that Vichy was chosen because it suited Laval, whose home lay only 20km from there; others more poetic averred that it was because its famous Celestins spring was the only one in the world that gushed water tasting exactly like tears. The true reason was that Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin suggested Vichy to the marshal because the prosperous spa resort had 15,000 hotel rooms, a modern telephone exchange and a direct railway link with Paris.
²
Thus it was to Vichy that the ministers, senators and deputies made their way on the afternoon of 1 July.

Its unsought role as capital of the divided country was to cost the town dearly. Such is the stigma of having been the capital of collaboration that over half a century later few people want to be seen taking the cure there and many hotels never re-opened after the war. The many bedrooms barely sufficing to accommodate and afford office space for a government that historian Robert Aron described as ‘a comic opera government adrift in a cataclysm’,
³
many top civil servants had to use their bedrooms as offices. The secretary of Minister for Ex-servicemen Xavier Vallat took dictation sitting on his bidet. Files were stacked in open drawers between monsieur’s underpants and madame’s lingerie. The chairman of a meeting would get up from time to time to check the vegetables boiling on a camping stove atop the dressing table. Nobody worried at first that most of the hotels habitually closed for the winter season and had no heating because Article 3 of the Armistice agreement was taken to mean that the government would soon be returning to Paris.

The phoney war had been a period of exceptional prosperity for Vichy, filling its hotels with middle-class families displaced by the armies in the north-east, but the brief hot war in June saw them in turn displaced by trainloads and road convoys of wounded soldiers. The Germans installed themselves briefly and left again, apart from a few liaison personnel. When the government moved in on the first day of July, the last
curistes
and tourists who had been turned out of their rooms at a few minutes’ notice were left gaping at cars and trucks of all sizes and conditions disgorging ministers, their staffs, wives and secretaries, filing cabinets and trunks of documents – all the paraphernalia of state.

Weygand’s Ministry of Defence moved into the Thermal Hotel; Darlan’s navy into the Helder, with the army taking the Hôtel des Bains; Justice and finance requisitioned the Carlton; the diplomatic corps took the aptly-named Ambassadors Hotel, with each mission being allocated a nearby farm for food supplies. Baudouin’s Foreign Ministry moved into the Hotel du Parc with Pétain and Laval staked his territory there after arriving in a muck sweat, his official car having broken down with clutch trouble some way out of town.

President Lebrun was allotted the elegant Pavillon Sévigné at the far end of the central park and the Ministry of Education was lodged in the prestigious Casino itself. The Majestic Hôtel, which shared a common entrance with the Parc, swiftly filled with senators and deputies, who continued to arrive long after the blackout, searching by the light of pocket torches for a bed in the overcrowded rooms and corridors. Only 200 of them had made it to Bordeaux, yet a week after the marshal’s arrival three times as many had reached Vichy.

French and foreign journalists and broadcasters, businessmen in search of government contracts or fearing their loss, and gamblers like the Egyptian
khedive
who sought the throne of Damascus, which was then in the French giving – they all came to Vichy in that first week of July. Well, not quite all. Among the foreign journalists who did not come was a correspondent of the London
News Chronicle.
While reporting the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler had narrowly missed being executed by Franco’s forces and had no wish to be handed over to the Germans. On 17 June he walked into a Foreign Legion recruiting office that in the general chaos had received no instructions to cease operations and there reinvented himself as Albert Dubert, a Swiss taxi driver. Persuading the recruiting sergeant to issue him with papers as a
volontaire étranger
in that name, he used them to find food and lodging in military barracks on a journey right across France. Reaching Marseille after six weeks of meanderings, he eventually escaped from there to Britain.
⁴

The town of Vichy, enclosed in a circle of low hills, sweltered moistly in the stifling midsummer heat as people fought for a bed, status and recognition. Among the politicians scrambling for advantage, only Pétain preserved the appearance of authority. On his morning promenades through the town, accompanied by his aide Dr Ménétrel, and at the salute to the flag on Sunday morning the marshal moved with dignity among the people, gravely acknowledging their salutations or hushed respect and always finding time to greet children in their Sunday best on his way to Mass at the church of St Louis.

With normal communications almost non-existent, news travelled mostly by word of mouth in the traumatic summer of 1940. And news there was, all of it bad. The border
départements
of Alsace and Lorraine were not merely occupied by the Wehrmacht, but annexed directly into the Reich as an integral part of German territory on 7 August. In the schools of the two former
départements
the curriculum changed overnight, with all textbooks and exercise books collected and burned. At the start of the new term, schoolchildren learned in their first geography lesson that they now lived in Elsass, not Alsace. Although German propaganda was trying to make all Alsatians conscious that they spoke the Germanic dialect Alsässisch and were therefore German, speaking the dialect was discouraged in school, with French totally forbidden. Lessons were all in high German from then on. The biggest surprise for the pupils was learning the Nazi version of European history.
⁵
However, the pull of home is strong and two-thirds of the 420,000 Alsatian refugees decided to return after months of living on handouts in temporary accommodation, although the thought of becoming German citizens if they returned home decided others to stay in the southwest, somehow surviving on daily handouts of 10 francs per adult and 6 francs for a child.