Voices from the Dark Years (33 page)

In both zones, food was replacing money in the parallel economy. The prefect of Tarn-et-Garonne expressed concern at the growing rift between the poor town-dwelling consumer and the peasant producer, who was thriving in this time of universal shortages. So much so, that on 13 July 1942 he signed a decree requiring the gendarmerie to
force
producers to take their vegetables to open markets where prices were controlled. Like most such legislation, this was more honoured in the breach than the observance. Another area of social conflict which worried him was the growing xenophobia, directed not at the Italians who had arrived at the beginning of the century, but the Spanish refugees – especially those who did not work but lived off handouts from the Mexican legation, and therefore had both the money and the time to go hunting for extra food.

Yet, in the big cities some still ate very well. Widely criticised after the Liberation was the extravagant way top French executives wined and dined their German clients in the best restaurants when they came to France, and accepting reciprocal hospitality when in Germany. By the end of 1941, 7,000 companies were accepting and fulfilling German orders for both civilian and military products. It was a figure that would double before the end of the occupation, when virtually all firms with fifty or more employees and many smaller companies were working 100 per cent for the Reich. In around fifty major companies, German commissioners were appointed to intervene directly in management decisions.

What was the alternative? French industry was in a German vice. Since the occupation, German administration controlled the allocation of raw materials; any firm that refused their orders would have been obliged to lay off its workforce. Not only did working for the occupiers mean business, German contracts also made for a truce between management and labour, since the single-union representatives could literally see on which side their bread was buttered: the occupation authorities released extra food for factory canteens where the workers were behaving the way they wanted. A full stomach being a powerful argument, the initial reluctance of management and labour to deal with the only client in the market dwindled rapidly. Commercial giants like Paribas, Rhône-Poulenc, Ugine, Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale and many others were, according to historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, more than eager to do business with the Reich.
²²

A few refused to compromise. At the top of the scale, the enormous Michelin company had both the advantage of being based in the Free Zone and the clout to keep the invader at arm’s length. When Germany offered to release supplies of artificial Buna rubber to replace unavailable supplies of natural rubber from Indo-China in return for shares in the company and its subsidiaries in Belgium and other Axis-occupied countries, Michelin found a thousand ways to wriggle out of such a deal because its board foresaw the impossibility of a
final
German victory, whatever the next few years might bring. The price for such resistance was often harsh: when the president of Crédit Commercial de France refused to hand over 440,000 shares in Galeries Lafayette formerly owned by a Jewish shareholder, he was fired.

To understand the policies of the biggest companies requires sitting for a moment in their boardrooms, where the war and the occupation were seen as temporary complications that required only modification, and not abandonment, of long-term policies. Louis Renault, the shrewd head of the automobile empire, guessed wrongly that Germany and Britain would soon make peace to avoid weakening themselves by a prolonged conflict that would leave them both wide open to Soviet invasion or American economic domination. His decision to accept orders for vehicles from the Wehrmacht was to cost his life after the Liberation, but how could he have refused, after making trucks and tanks for the French army and having both the skilled work-force and the necessary machinery? Getting into bed with the enemy did not always mean love, however. The Peugeot family supported Pétain for the first two years of the occupation and accepted orders from Germany, yet refused such blandishments as extra food for its workers, because of the German propaganda that came with it.
²³

Aluminium Français advised Vichy in June 1941 that it had been approached to jointly build and operate a smelting factory out of range of RAF bombers in the Free Zone. Interestingly, in view of the early date, it argued that the new factory would have no effect on the outcome of the war because it could not be completed before the end of 1942! The board also advanced the long-term argument that failure to go along with this German initiative would result in the factory being built in another occupied country where
after the war’s end
it would be operating in competition with the output of Aluminium Français.
²⁴

In the dye industry, the German chemical giant IG Farben pressured French competitors to form a cartel in which it would own the majority shareholding, in return for which French companies ended up collectively the fifth largest shareholder in IG Farben. In a series of tortuous boardroom manoeuvres, the French chemical group Ugine saw its market value multiplied fifteen times in two years after becoming a partner in IG Farben’s pesticide manufacturing division that produced the Zyklon B gas for the extermination camps.
²⁵

N
OTES

  
1.
  It is now No. 4 Place du Vieux Pont.

  
2.
  L. Schindler-Levine,
L’Impossible Au Revoir
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), pp. 107–13.

  
3.
  WIZO is the Women’s International Zionist Organisation.

  
4.
  Names have been changed to respect the children’s privacy.

  
5.
  C. Lewertovski,
Morts ou Juifs
(Paris: Flamarrion, 2003), pp. 119–20.

  
6.
  For whatever reason, this one word was written in Hebrew,
oneg
; all the rest was in French.

  
7.
  Lewertovski,
Morts ou Juifs
, p. 121.

  
8.
  Ibid., p. 130.

  
9.
  Quoted in Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 120.

10.
  A. McCutchan,
Marcel Moyse, Voice of the Flute
(Portland Oregon: Amadeus, 1994), pp. 152–9.

11.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, pp. 71-4.

12.
  Ibid., pp. 79–81.

13.
  Ibid., pp. 93–7 (abridged by the author, the original being written in the third person).

14.
  
Semaine religieuse du diocèse d’Arras
, 11 September 1941
.

15.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, pp. 99–103.

16.
  L. Paine,
Mathilde Carré, Double Agent
(London: Robert Hale, 1976), p. 168.

17.
  Ibid., p. 85.

18.
  This was not done. Nor was a marked grave permitted.

19.
  Krivopissko (ed.),
La Vie à en mourir
, pp. 110–13.

20.
  L. Chabrun et al.,
L’Express
, 10 October 2005.

21.
  Personal interview with the author. Names changed.

22.
  G. Smadja, article in
L’Humanité
, 8 October 1996.

23.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, pp. 245–9.

24.
  Ibid., pp. 252–9.

25.
  Smadja, article of 8 October 1996.

14

T
HE
W
OMEN
’
S
O
RDEAL

On 13 January 1942 General Guibert of the Gendarmerie Nationale ordered all units in the Paris region ‘to adopt the system of repression practised by the Paris police, to give all assistance to the police in case of terrorist attacks, and to pursue the aggressors by all means, and capture them dead or alive.’
¹

Words, however, were not enough for the Germans or the government in Vichy. Two months earlier, in November 1941, La Légion des Combattants had been renamed Légion des Combattants et Volontaires de la Révolution Nationale, with membership open to all, whether ex-servicemen or not. This made it effectively the only political party in the Vichy state. To create an ultra force prepared to stamp out the left-wing Resistance using its own methods of kidnapping and murder, members of the Légion were invited in January to join a new Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, vaunted as a modern order of chivalry with uniforms like those of the SS (except for the inevitable French berets), torchlight oath-taking ceremonies and parades with waving banners. This forerunner of the Milice was set on course by the appointment of Joseph Darnand as its inspector-general.

In Paris, the trial of the Musée de l’Homme network ended with ten death sentences. His spirit undiminished by long confinement, Léon-Maurice Nordmann retorted to the judges, ‘We risked death every day on this battlefield. I consider that we have been at war with you from the beginning.’
²
Reflecting the political darkness, on 18 January the power cuts in Paris were so bad that twenty-four Metro stations had to be closed, adding to the misery of food shortages and restrictions.

Two months later, after travelling clandestinely to London to meet de Gaulle, Christian Pineau – socialist founder of Libération-Nord network and publisher of the clandestine weekly
Libération
– wrote:

I found de Gaulle’s thinking entirely military. When I explained that Pétain had substantial support, and that we were also up against the Communists playing their own game, he was unmoved by the dangers we were running. For him, it was normal for every combatant to risk his life whether in a tank in North Africa or posting handbills on walls in France.
³

It never occurred to de Gaulle that most of his compatriots then saw little difference between the LVF serving the Reich in German uniform and the Free French forces wearing British uniform with a shoulder flash reading
France.

One of his handful of agents on the ground was Jean Moulin, who had landed by parachute on 1 Jan or 2 Jan at Eygalières in Provence. His mission was not military like Rémy’s, but political. Like everything else in France, the existing Resistance organisations were, as Hitler had foreseen, divided by class, politics and religion. Moulin’s mission was to unite them all under an umbrella organisation, Le Conseil National de la Résistance. An accomplished sportsman with a reputation for socialist sympathies, Moulin was to prove the ideal man for the job, except for a fatal tendency to take unnecessary risks.

In the first days of February Jacques Doriot vaunted the prowess of the LVF on the eastern front, from which he had just returned, to a rally of PPF supporters in Paris’s massive indoor cycle track, le Vélodrome d’Hiver. The PPF claimed an attendance of 50,000; a Propaganda Abteiling report said 30,000; independent estimates reckoned 20,000 turned up, but the turn-out was still impressive, and bode well for the exhibition ‘Bolshevism against Europe’ that opened in Paris on 1 March.