In Europe (77 page)

Most of the officials were young, and the atmosphere was one of excitement, often steamy and sensual. Marches were held regularly, and a concert was given each week by the
Garde Républicaine
. In 1940 Pétain was as popular with the average Frenchman as de Gaulle was at the time of the country's liberation in 1944. He signed his first laws in truly royal fashion, ‘We, Philippe Pétain …’, and the people loved it. From the very start he concentrated more power in his person than any French head of state since Napoleon. In old age he had his moments of weakness and confusion, but mostly he was clear-witted and full of vitality.

Pétain's ideal France was rural, personal, familial. It was the old, pre-revolutionary France that he hoped to resurrect in modern form, a France without individualism, liberalism, democracy and cosmopolitanism. Before me lies his credo,
La France Nouvelle
, a little booklet with a red, blue and white border that was read to tatters all over France during the war. The first lines of his manifesto: ‘Man has, by nature, certain fundamental rights. These can only be guaranteed him by the communities that surround him: the Family that raises him, the Profession that nurtures him, the Nation that protects him.’ I go on turning the pages, but nowhere do I find the language of Hitler or Mussolini. The book consists almost entirely of speeches and exhortations, and it is above all extremely Catholic: ‘The Social Politics of Education’, ‘On Individualism and the Nation’, ‘Message concerning the Pensioning of the Elderly’, ‘Message to the Mothers of France’, and so on.

The Vichy regime was not a National Socialist regime, it was not imposed by the Germans, it was home-grown. There were not very many French Nazis. There were, however, militant right-wing thinkers who hoped for a new, authoritarian order – a tradition present in France today. One of them, the author Robert Brasillach, wrote just before he was executed for collaboration in winter 1945: ‘We were bedfellows with the Germans and we must admit that we were fond of some of them.’ But above all, the regime was legitimised by respectable intellectuals and members of the upper middle class, upstanding French patriots who were none too willing to bow to their defeat, who desired no more war and were prepared to mould themselves to the Nazis’ new Europe.

In practice, their ‘collaboration’ meant that Vichy took a great deal of work off the Germans’ hands. The regime organised the country's own
colonisation: the plundering of industry, agriculture and national reserves, the forced labour in Germany and, not least, the deportation of the Jews. The Vichy regime took the first anti-Jewish measures on its own initiative, without instructions from Germany, and with remarkable vigour. On 17 July, 1940, only one week after the regime came to power, it decided that public functions were to be reserved for those of French parentage: a measure with immediate repercussions for the some 200,000 Jewish refugees who had sought asylum in France. On 22 July, a committee was set up to review all acts of naturalisation. On 3 October, the Jewish Statute was implemented, the start of an avalanche of measures – professional bans, mandatory registrations, greater and lesser forms of discrimination – directed against the Jews. By late 1940, some 60,000 people, mostly non-French Jews, were already interned in around 30 concentration camps.

France's long tradition of anti-Semitism returned to full bloom after July 1940. Who else was to bear the blame but the internationalists, the decadent intellectuals, those who had ‘sullied’ the republic with ‘modern’ views, who else but the Jews? In December 1940, the Parisian anti-Semitic weekly
Au Pilori
(In the Pillory) started a contest among its 60,000 (!) readers for the best answer to how one could be rid of the Jews. First prize: a pair of silk stockings. Best entries: drop them in the jungle among the wild animals, or burn them in crematoria.

Vichy built upon this mentality, but in a different way from the Nazis. The anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime was more nationalistic than racist; for Vichy, it was about the creation of second-class citizenship for French Jews and the removal of non-French Jews, but not about the destruction of the Jewish race. Second only to Denmark, France remains the country with the highest proportion of Jewish survivors: less than a quarter of the Jewish population was deported, as opposed to more than three quarters in, for example, the Netherlands.

In that part of France occupied by the Germans, however, the mass murders continued apace. The first trains loaded with deportees left Paris for Auschwitz in early 1942. On 16–17 July, 1942, more than 12,000 Parisian Jews were arrested during
La Grande Rafle
. Thousands of French policemen were involved in that razzia. Some sources speak of 9,000 policemen in total, but what is certain is that the SS could not have acted effectively without the assistance and organisational talent of the Paris
police. At the same time, this series of raids was almost certainly sabotaged by the police as well: the SS had hoped to make 25,000 arrests. Annette Kriegel, fifteen years old at the time, described the start of the round-up along her own street, the rue de Turenne: ‘I saw a policeman carrying suitcases in both hands and weeping. I will never forget the tears running down that rough, ruddy face, for you will agree with me that one rarely sees a policeman cry in public. He walked down the street, followed by a little group of children and old people, all carrying little bundles.’ Annette escaped, but did not know where to go. Finally she sat down on a park bench and waited: ‘It was on that bench that I left my childhood behind.’

In Vichy and the surrounding countryside, the rounding up of Jews was a matter for the French themselves. In an enormous razzia held between 26–8 August, 1942, at least 10,000 policemen combed the woods and neighbouring mountains in search of runaway Polish and German Jews who had considered themselves safe in non-occupied France. In Marseilles, Lyons, Sète and Toulouse, too, the French police mounted large-scale raids.

French cooperation in the deportations stood in stark contrast to the growing resistance in the country's Italian zone. In spring 1943, the Italian authorities in Valence, Chambéry and Annecy forbade the rounding up of Jews, both refugees and non-refugees, by French prefects. In Megève, the Fascist police chief blocked the arrests of 7,000 Jews. Under the watchful eye of the Italians, Nice actually became a blossoming Jewish centre. The refugees were issued their own identity cards, and the commander of the
carabinieri
announced that any French policeman who dared to touch a hair on their head would be arrested himself. In addition, on 21 March, 1943, the Italian occupation forces in France received an urgent personal missive from Mussolini: ‘The first priority is to bring to safety those Jews living in that part of French territory occupied by our troops, whether they be of Italian, French or any other nationality.’ The German and French authorities were enraged. As soon as the Italians withdrew in September 1943, huge razzias were held in the area they had occupied. Several thousand Jews were arrested, but the vast majority were able to escape into the mountains.

‘
WE FIND OURSELVES IN THE EXASPERATING SITUATION IN WHICH THE
fate of France no longer depends on the French themselves,’ Marc Bloch wrote in summer 1940.

It was a feeling he shared with many of his countrymen. ‘For my father, Vichy was synonymous with treason,’ Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Veterans of the Resistance in Picardy, told me. She was the daughter of André Gaillard, better known in the Resistance by his pseudonym ‘Léon’, watchman at the sugar beet processing plant in Saint-Blimont. He was a true French patriot, he abhorred all forms of collaboration. As soon as the surrender was signed he began, on his own at first, with small acts of defiance against the occupier: slogans on walls, the sabotage of machinery and transports. Later he and his comrades began attacking German outposts, mostly to obtain weapons. ‘They called my father and his friends terrorists and communists. But it was really a political mish-mash, they didn't belong to any political party,’ Lucienne Gaillard said.

And so began the Resistance: as an ad hoc grass-roots movement of French men and women of every background, a guerrilla group comprised of enthusiastic amateurs. Soon they were receiving weapons from England and training from British undercover agents, yet they remained autonomous and self-willed. The communists hesitated at first, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union they, too, joined the Resistance in numbers. Along with them came hundreds of thousands of refugees who often set up separate cells of their own, and quite frequently played a heroic role. In the south-western corner of the country the Spanish communists had their own 14th Corps, which had thirty-four guerrilla fighters by June 1944. The Poles ran their own intelligence service, the
R2, an important factor in the struggle. Spaniards were the first to set up a Maquis group in the Ardèche, German communists reinforced the groups in the Gard and Lozère. A British agent sent to help the Resistance at Villefranche-du-Périgord reported that his French was of no service to him there: the members of the group spoke only Spanish or Catalan.

The growing hostility – in which the clergy played an important role – towards anti-Semitic measures provided a major stimulus for the Resistance. In many other ways the Catholic Church remained loyal to the Vichy regime, but in summer 1942 a bitter conflict arose concerning the treatment of the Jews. On 23 August, the elderly Bishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard Saliège, had a pastoral missive read aloud from the pulpits of his diocese, in which he roundly condemned the hounding of Jews: ‘Jews are men. Jews are women. They are a part of humanity. They are our brothers, like anyone else. A Christian may not forget that.’

The letter caused a chain reaction: dozens of other bishops and church leaders followed his lead. An ecclesiastical resistance group began smuggling Jewish children out of Vénissieux, one of the worst transit camps, close to Lyons. A totally new source of resistance arose in this way: Catholics who sympathised in principle with Pétain but could no longer reconcile their consciences to the burgeoning manhunt by Vichy and the Germans. They arranged countless hiding places for Jews and others on the run, they provided food and protection, and gradually many of them came to join the armed resistance. The Protestants, who enjoyed a long tradition of resistance, had gone into action much earlier. Many Jewish families were given shelter in Protestant villages in the Cevennes, often with the tacit approval of the entire community.

During that same summer of 1942, André Gaillard and eight others set up their own combat group. They destroyed German lines of communication, took in Allied pilots who had been shot down and kept watch on all German activities in ‘their’ zone. ‘Almost everything happened in this house,’ Lucienne Gaillard told me. ‘Pilots, weapons, the wounded, everything.’ Wasn't she ever afraid? ‘Not at all. It was an ecstatic time, we all found it equally exciting.’ She gave me an overview of what their group did; I cite here only those actions which took place between August and December 1943.

On 3 August, her father and his men blew up a rocket launcher.

On 23 August, they derailed a German transport train; the Germans in their zone were always busy reinforcing the coastline in connection with a possible invasion.

On the night of 23 October they blew up a troop transport headed to Russia, causing great losses of men and equipment.

On 28 October they sabotaged the Paris-Calais line, causing a train full of troops and war materials to fly off the rails at top speed.

On 11 November – using pinpoint information from French railway personnel – they derailed another military train on the same line. They were pleased with the effects of these attacks, because they blocked German reinforcements for days and produced quite a few casualties and a permanent loss of German materials.

On 16 November, a huge load of flax that had been confiscated by the Germans was burned.

On the night of 10 December, with the help of the local police sergeant, they freed two Resistance fighters from the gendarmerie in Gamaches, just before they were to be transferred to the Gestapo prison at Abbeville.

On 16 December, they blew up a munitions train; when a German backup train arrived the next day, they pulled the engineer out of the engine, set full throttle and let the unmanned train crash at full speed into the wreck of the artillery transport they had derailed the day before.

On 28 December they blockaded the rails again, causing the crash of an engine and four carriages.

By 1944, André Gaillard's little group of amateurs had developed into an experienced guerrilla company of the
Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur
(FFI), with 7 officers, 22 non-commissioned officers and 160 soldiers. They now formed part of one large army: the Free French Forces, who fought alongside the Allies in Africa and Italy and the various Resistance groups, of the left and of the right, within France itself.

In the end, eighteen men and women from this group in Picardy – a group likes hundreds of others in France – were killed. Two of them died before the firing squad, six others were killed in skirmishes and fifteen were sent to concentration camps. Only ten of them came back.

Meanwhile, in faraway London, General de Gaulle was trying to save the French national honour. In June 1940 he had left for England, as he said
himself, empty-handed. ‘My father,’ Lucienne Gaillard said, ‘started his resistance work after an appeal by de Gaulle. The general was very important to us, he was a symbol, but at the same time he didn't really exist. He was not closer to us than Napoleon.’

Churchill, who had a weakness for France and initially for de Gaulle as well, could help him in only two ways: he gave recognition to his French National Committee as the only legitimate French authority, and he gave him the opportunity to speak to the French regularly through the BBC.

De Gaulle made the most of both opportunities. In June 1940 almost no one in France listened to his broadcasts. By 1941, according to estimates from his Vichy opponents, there were 300,000 listeners; by 1942 there were 3 million. He always spoke of the Resistance as though it were a regular standing army, rather than a guerrilla force of beginners that consisted at first of fewer than 7,000 men and women. He saw himself as its natural commander-in-chief. That the members of the Resistance themselves, particularly the communists and socialists, had different ideas about that did not seem to concern him. From the start he worked on a new national myth, a hopeful historical tale that was to resurrect the French morale. ‘In 1940, France lost a battle, but not the war,’ he kept repeating.