Voices from the Dark Years (16 page)

As when Hitler became Reichskanzler, quite legally in 1933, so all the constitutional forms had been duly observed by the National Assembly. The new French state was accordingly recognised by most foreign powers, with the exception of the United Kingdom. France was a dictatorship, as Laval had been saying for days it must be in order to survive in Hitler’s New Europe – and he more than any other man had made it so.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Facsimiles of Sir Ronald Campbell’s memoranda to Pierre Laval dated 18 and 19 September 1931, reproduced in
The Unpublished Diary of Pierre Laval
(London: Falcon Press, 1948), pp. 187–98.

  
2.
  Laval,
Unpublished Diary
, p. 29.

  
3.
  
1940: La Défaite
, p. 500.

  
4.
  Ibid.
,
p. 502.

  
5.
  Ibid., p. 502.

  
6.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 28.

  
7.
  
‘C’était vraiment un marécage humain dans lequel on voyait à vue d’œil se dissoudre, se corroder, disparaître tout ce qu’on avait connu à certains hommes de courage et de droiture.’
Quoted in
1940:
La Défaite
, p. 492.

  
8.
  Ibid.

  
9.
  Laval,
Unpublished Diary
, p. 54.

10.
  
1940: La Défaite
, pp. 494–5.

PART 2

LIFE, LOOT AND
LOVE UNDER
PÉTAIN’S NEW
ORDER

8

C
LEARING
UP
THE
MESS

Calculated ambiguity about the long-term future was a psychological device used repeatedly by the Nazis. ‘Do this to our satisfaction,’ they told their victims, ‘and you’ll get the best possible treatment afterwards.’ It worked, even with lawyer-politician Laval, who decided on no evidence at all that the Armistice agreement would soon be replaced by a definitive Franco-German peace treaty, and devoted himself to achieving the most favourable bargaining position at the coming peace conference – which never came.

To carry through the intrigues necessary for this, he needed Pétain as a figurehead or, as he put it in one unguarded moment, ‘he’s the vase on the mantel-piece’. As to why the marshal needed Laval, the two men are widely believed to have shared an exchange, whichmay be apocryphal. Laval is reported to have said at one time when Pétain was reluctant to tie the knot of their alliance more tightly,
‘Monsieur le maréchal, nous sommes dans la merde. Laissez-moi être votre vidangeur
’
.
(‘Marshal, we are in the shit – let me do the shovelling.’)

In Pétain’s view, France had tried feudalism, monarchy and three democratic republics – in the last of which the changing governments of the 1930s had schemed themselves to death – so it was now time for a Platonic benevolent dictatorship because no other form of government could weld together a people rent by political and religious differences, demoralised by crushing military defeat, deserted by its allies and allowed a semblance of national identity only so long as that suited the traditional enemy now occupying three-fifths of its territory.

The marshal, as he himself once remarked, had been invested with more power than even Louis XIV. But a dictator must have a policy. What was Pétain’s? Whether to avoid alarming Berlin and/or the French people by declaring himself in one fell swoop, or because it was actually evolved piecemeal, this was never enshrined in any formal constitution of the new French state, but proclaimed in a sporadic series of
Paroles aux Français
– printed tracts, broadcasts and publicly delivered homilies addressed to the people in the tone of a stern but caring paterfamilias.

Major General Doumenc wrote a brilliant analysis of the military mistakes that led to the collapse of the French armies, which few people ever read because it was easier to blame everything on a few scapegoats – this despite Pétain telling his subjects as early as 20 June that the defeat was due to the mistakes of their former leaders ‘and to the moral corruption of the nation’. By this, he meant the grab-all-you-can mentality encouraged by the Popular Front. While Germans had been labouring fifty or sixty hours a week east of the Rhine, French workers had enjoyed paid holidays and a forty-hour week. The marshal saw the pursuit of pleasure and material comfort as the cause of France’s moral decline, which had to be eradicated from the national psyche, so back-to-the-land honest toil was a recurrent theme of his speeches, with the peasant-farmer epitomising the masculine ideal. On 23 June he likened the defeated nation to a hard-working farmer whose fields had been devastated by a freak hailstorm, but did not despair. Instead, he reploughed and replanted to ensure a good harvest.

Already on 25 June, as the last shooting died away, except on stretches of the Maginot Line, where local commanders fought on pointlessly for several days, the marshal was talking of the New Order then beginning, and which would bring about a healthier moral climate. ‘I hate the lies that have done us so much harm,’ he said. ‘Yet the earth does not lie.’ Repeating often that the worst immorality was to hide the truth, he avoided acknowledging the awful cost of the occupation: France was paying 400 million francs a day and suffering widespread spoliation.

On 11 July he announced a plan to rebuild France’s destroyed infrastructure, avoiding the mistakes of both socialism and capitalism under a slogan to replace the Republic’s
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
‘Work, family and country,’ Pétain declared, ‘are the eternal verities, so from now on our slogan is
Travail, Famille, Patrie!
’ To a population fed up with being deceived by its smart-arse politicians, this home-spun philosophy came like a breath of fresh air.

The following day, Pierre Laval was officially appointed Pétain’s successor – the
dauphin
to France’s uncrowned king – after which triumph he divided his time between Vichy and the official residence of French prime ministers, the Hôtel Matignon in Paris. There, he lived in style, fostering the personal relationships with the blond, blue-eyed German Ambassador Otto Abetz – a former biology teacher turned art historian from Karlsruhe – and other leading German military and political figures, whom he courted as important for France’s future. The only outward difference between his lunch parties and those of profiteers
¹
and black marketeers entertaining their cronies in the same restaurants was a respect for form: at one lunch in the Café de Paris, Laval insisted that all his bemused guests hand over to the waiter that day’s bread coupons.

The great secular holiday of the year in France is the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, but that 14 July was a glum travesty. Everyone knew that within a few days 1 million men would be demobilised in the Free Zone and thrown onto a job market in chaos with a gratuity of 1,000 francs, which would not go far. The Armistice provided for Vichy to keep an emasculated symbolic army of eight divisions comprising 100,000 regular soldiers. For transport they had bicycles and just eight Bren-carriers per cavalry regiment. No tanks, no heavy artillery, a few anti-aircraft batteries. To reduce the officer corps to the 3,768 allowed, a special
congé d’armistice
granted extended leave to all who applied for it.
²
Under cover of this, Minister of War General Colson penned a personal letter to the commander of each military region, suggesting that he actively camouflage materiel and stores against the day when …

The results were sometimes surprising. By the following spring, 65,000 rifles, 9,500 machine guns and automatic rifles, 200 mortars, 55 75mm cannons and anti-tank guns had been administratively ‘lost’. Several thousand trucks were ‘leased’ to civilian transport contractors, who agreed to maintain them ready for return to the army at six hours’ notice. The owner of one small trucking company thus saw his fleet rise from five vehicles to 687! Sadly, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Free Zone in November 1942, all the hidden arms were useless to stop it.

In the Marseille garrison, escaped POW Captain Henri Frenay, known for his anti-Nazi sentiments before the war, pretended to have clandestine links with London when recruiting a number of like-minded friends to his own underground group named Combat
.
Among its activities was
Le Bulletin
– a weekly digest of news from the BBC and Swiss press reports published under a quotation from Napoleon: ‘To live defeated is to die every day
.
’
³
However, by July 1940 your average Jacques Dupont had had enough of life in uniform. If lucky enough not to be stuck in a German POW camp for the foreseeable future, he was as unlikely to ‘continue the fight underground’ as to be seduced by the time-worn inducements used in appeals for volunteers to serve in the Army of the Armistice: ‘Continue the glorious traditions of the … .regiment. An interesting career with regular pay rising for privates from 3,600 to 5,700 francs. More ample rations than for the civilian population.’
⁴

The marshal’s
Paroles aux Français
became progressively more specific, with decrees reforming education, social security and regional government. One subsequently much-criticised aspect of this reorganisation was inaugurated by a statute of association deposited on 25 July at the Sous-Préfecture of Lapalisse, 20km north-east of Vichy. Although ostensibly a private initiative, the Compagnons de France movement was the result of an interview General Weygand had been asked to grant earlier that month by Paul Baudoin to the crippled French Chief Scout Henry Dhavernas.

Moved by the plight of homeless children and youths separated from their families during the retreat, Dhavernas wanted to do something for them. Weygand immediately had telegrams sent to a number of suitable officers, recalling them to participate in this initiative. Together with André Cruiziat, another top scouting figure, the diplomat Étienne de Croÿ and others, Dhavernas aimed to form a youth movement that would embrace all male adolescents of whatever class, whether or not they were church-goers, Scouts or members of any political party. It would therefore have to be acceptable to all existing youth organisations, in order to enlist their co-operation, and not replace them, lest Vichy be tempted to create a monolithic youth movement on the model of the Hitler Youth.

From 1 to 4 August a conference was held in the forest of Randan, near Vichy, where thirty men and eight women representing both religious and lay youth movements agreed with Dhavernas on a structure like the Boy Scout movement, which was divided into troops and patrols to encourage
esprit de corps
.
Compagnons
were therefore organised in teams of ten boys each, five teams making a company and every three to six companies forming a
commanderie.