The 40s: The Story of a Decade (64 page)

FEBRUARY 12, 1944 (ON MARSHAL PÉTAIN)

F
rom the beginning, Vichy was a hotel government. One reason Marshal Pétain’s capital was set up in this pretty, provincial Allier town was that Vichy, since the time of Julius Caesar France’s most populous spa, possessed enough hostelries to accommodate, on short notice, a modern French autocracy. The Ministries moved into establishments formerly occupied by rich invalids with bad livers. The Ministries of Justice and Finance settled down in the Carlton; War was at the Hôtel Thermal. Foreign diplomats were appropriately quartered in the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. The Marshal established his own headquarters amid the de-luxe imitation period furniture and Lyons hangings indigenous to the third floor of the Hôtel du Parc. The elegant and spacious old Parc was built for service by leisurely chambermaids, not by secretaries, and the Marshal, to speed up government, worked out the system of pounding on his floor with his cane when he wanted Pierre Laval to hurry up from his office below.

Pétain called his government the government of National Revolution, which certainly sounded new to French ears, but the Vichy régime almost immediately took on nostalgic forms. Relics of the dead France of Louis XIV and Richelieu, or indeed from any epoch anterior to the authentic French Revolution, began to turn up in Vichy terminology and even on its money. A portrait of Henri IV appeared on a treasury bond-selling poster; Jacques Cœur, fiscal servant to Charles VII, was commemorated on the new bank notes. The Ministers were renamed Secretaries of State, as they had been known under the monarchies, and
they functioned among such dusty nomenclature as
commanderies, intendants
, and even
compagnonnages
, straight out of the good old
moyen âge.
Vichy was marked by leftovers from everything except France’s three republics.

It had taken the Third Republic five years, from 1870 to 1875, to get around to writing its Constitution. This Constitution Marshal Pétain wiped out at Vichy in two days, July 10 and 11, 1940. It had probably already been doomed several weeks before by the simple, ominous, generous offer accompanying his announcement that he had asked the Germans for an armistice: “I make to France the gift of my person to lessen her misfortune.” The so-called legal arrangements for the receipt of this gift by some twenty million Unoccupied French people were more complicated. On July 9th, those members of the Paris Senate and Chamber of Deputies who had not been stranded on the road as refugees met at Vichy—preliminary to the National Assembly to be held the next day—to cast their first vote on the fate of the Republic. There the supposedly democratic Chamber of Deputies voted three hundred and ninety-five votes for, to three against, the motion that there was need “to amend the constitutional laws.” The conservative Senate voted two hundred and twenty-five for, one against. The unique dissenting senatorial vote, registered against what was obviously Pétain’s plan for autocracy, was cast by the aged Marquis Pierre de Chambrun, one of the elegant descendants of La Fayette but nevertheless unrelated in political sentiments to his nephew, young Count René de Chambrun, son-in-law to Pierre Laval. The elderly aristocrat, when it came to his vote, shouted
“Je suis un fils de La Fayette. Vive la République toujours!”
and wept.

On July 10th a
Loi Constitutionnelle
, co-signed by Albert Lebrun, the President of the Republic, and Pétain, handed the Republic’s powers over to “the authority and signature of Marshal Pétain.” The next day he started to use them. In what he bluntly called his
Acte Constitutionnel
No. 1, a brief paragraph of six lines, so stark that the last line consisted only of the date and the first line only of “We, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France,” he plurally declared that he was
chef
of something new called
l’Etat français
and that Article 2 of the 1875 Constitution was abrogated. Since Article 2 referred solely to the existence of a President, and since the lachrymose Lebrun had refused to resign, Pétain had simply abrogated him along with a piece of the old Constitution. Later that day Pétain issued Act No. 2 and Act No. 3, both of which opened in a more modest titular fashion, “We, Marshal of France,” but continued the abrogations.
Of these two, Act 3 was the more destructive. In it Pétain paralyzed democracy and made himself an active dictator. This famous Act 3 stated (a) that the Chamber and Senate would continue to exist until the formation of new assemblies as previsioned by Pétain’s and Lebrun’s original
Loi Constitutionnelle;
(b) that they were adjourned till further order; and (c) that the 1875 Constitution law which established a Chamber and Senate was abrogated. The
Loi Constitutionnelle
, furthermore, specified that it itself had to be “ratified by the nation and applied by the Assemblies it will have created.” Since Pétain up to now has never consulted the nation or assembled anything, his authoritarian revolution has been just as illegal as any ever made in the name of liberty.

Act No. 4, issued by Pétain on July 12th, named Pierre Laval to be Vice Premier and the Marshal’s dauphin in the governmental succession. The initial Vichy hierarchy of two was now complete.

· · ·

It was during this first summer of France’s defeat that there sprang up throughout both the Unoccupied and Occupied Zones the widespread, worshipful cult of the Marshal which was known as
la mystique autour de Pétain.
It was only slightly offset by the rarer but more martial emotion in France for General de Gaulle, who on August 2nd was tried—
in absentia
, naturally, since he was busy in London organizing his new Free French to keep up the fight against the Germans—and condemned to death by Vichy as a traitor. To many millions of the French, especially in Vichy France, the Pétain
mystique
became a sort of strange, esoteric state religion. The defeat, the fall, and the cutting up of France had produced in the French people the same sort of profound physical shock that might be experienced by an individual, far from young, who had been cruelly beaten, had had a violent concussion, and had also suffered the agony of amputation. In that shock something French in France came close to dying. Gradually, as they recovered, the people became wracked with penitence and fell into a daze in which the Marshal confusedly figured both as a healer who seemed to have saved life and as a holy man whose intercession with the higher powers had saved the soul. Pétain became a sort of spa saint, an image at a sacred watering place. Vichy turned into a kind of political Lourdes. Iconography and hagiography set in. Just as Napoleon Bonaparte’s ardent face had stamped the costly bibelots of his reign, so the Marshal’s becalmed features appeared pasted on the cheap brooches and paperweights which were all a conquered nation could afford.
On farms, pious peasants hung his photograph in the parlor; shopkeepers placed it among their diminishing wares in the window; men and women to whom the garrulous politicians of the Third Republic now figured as the voice of the tempter began going to mass again to honor the taciturn Hero of Verdun and to meditate on a regenerated France; children prayed that the Marshal might continue to live and marched the streets singing Vichy’s favorite juvenile song, “Maréchal, Nous Voilà!” Soldiers wounded in the brief Battle of France kept, in vigil over their cots, postcard portraits of the Marshal who had built his government on their defeat. Pétain’s official Vichy biographer, General Auguste Laure, wrote, as if issuing a revelation, “Here, as I see it, is the truth. The Marshal was preserved by God for France during two generations so that he might receive her, expiring, in his arms.” On Good Friday of 1941, prayers were read in the churches, as in the old days of kings and emperors, for the country’s sovereign,
“pro duce nostro Philippo.”

The more worldly implications of the Pétain
mystique
soon began to show up in certain Teutonic touches as the Nazis, at first at long distance, gave the Vichy propaganda desk the benefit of their experience. The interest in youth movements which Pétain had evidenced before expressed itself in what looked like an imitation of the Hitler
Jugend
movement, called Les Clubs des Amis du Maréchal. One of the organization’s tracts told its adolescent members, “If the Marshal said to you, ‘Help me,’ you would walk in his footsteps to the end of the world.” In August, 1940, by Vichy decree, the veterans of both world wars were organized under Pétain’s patronage into La Légion Française des Combattants, a French version of Hitler’s S.A. In 1942 its youngest zealots were placed in a special group, the counterpart of the S.S., called Les Services d’Ordre Légionnaires, or S.O.L. According to an organization report on a monster S.O.L. meeting in the Rhône district at which forty-five hundred members were enrolled, a legion
Gauleiter
, “after reading the oath of allegiance to the triumph of the National Revolution, ordered the men to kneel as a sign of humility and devotion to the Marshal, then cried, ‘Rise, S.O.L.!’ As one man the forty-five hundred members rose, stood at attention, and shouted, ‘I swear!’ ” Two of the members’ duties were to propagandize for Vichy and to report on “intrigues against Vichy doctrine,” which meant to spy. One folksy, rural S.O.L. order from the Vichy Minister of Interior read, “Urgent!…Everybody must be gathered round the town square music kiosk at four o’clock. The presence of all section members is compulsory at this protest meeting against Great
Britain. One or two groups of three or four legionaries will be designated who will have to applaud vigorously and shout with all necessary strength, ‘Death to the British!’ At a certain moment they will also have to approve with clamors the revindication of Canada,” this last a queer conquered-French scheme to free French-Canadian Quebec from the yoke of the English.

The selection of members for the S.O.L. was guided by a questionnaire of twenty inquiries, aimed at winnowing the wheat from the chaff. Among them were “What are the political opinions of your family? What were your feelings when the armistice was signed? How do you judge England’s attitude toward France since the armistice? What do you think of de Gaulle? Of the role of Stalin? Of Freemasonry and the Jews? If the Marshal were to disappear, what ought we to do? If Germany were to win the war, what would you think of the situation?”

In 1941 an
Almanach de la Légion Française des Combattants
, the bulkiest piece of Pétain propaganda ever published, came out. It was obviously for family consumption, since it contained a brief blessing by the Marshal, who said, “I hope the hearth of each veteran will be enriched with a copy of this work.” This book, a hundred-page mélange, was a high propaganda point in masochism, defeatism, and sickly praise of the chill charms of the Marshal. “There is in our present distress a source of joy,” the
Almanach
’s leading editorial morbidly crowed. “Our misery is great but greater the moral misery we had been living in.” The
Almanach
’s poetry also twanged the melancholy Vichy note in a verse that declaimed, “
Monsieur le Maréchal
, Your Army is dissolved, Your planes lie dead in the aerodromes.” A dubious religious slant was supplied by a sprinkling of anti-Semitic jokes.

One of the strangest portraits of a hero ever drawn by a subordinate was contributed to the
Almanach
by a private who had served in Pétain’s Verdun headquarters. He wrote with admiration, “He is
un grand timide;
he knows it and suffers from it. To avoid being taken in by others and to protect his personality, he has created a façade, a shell of ice, and from behind this he attacks. His biting words, sometimes brutal or cruel, stop any interlocutor and make him also timid, and the general finds himself on equal terms. However, if you see him intimately, you see cracks in his façade, revealing a heart profoundly human and a touching sensitivity. But how few have seen those flashes!”

After thirty pages devoted to revivifying the Verdun legend came some remarkable notes on how the Marshal’s health in Vichy was holding
up (the constant worry about so venerable a leader): “His sight is intact. He is sometimes hard of hearing, but he hears what he wants to. If life is a matter of slow combustion, his lamp must be the best-regulated in the whole world. As a young second lieutenant, he swam the harbor of Villefranche-sur-mer with calm, slow strokes, which is better,
n’est-ce pas
, than to sink from having breathed too quickly?”

The tag-end pages of the
Almanach
were generously given over to the legionnaires’ wives and kiddies. A recipe column started with “Ersatz: The word is new for us, the thing also. But”—and here the propagandist showed his teeth—“isn’t this the time for new words and new formulas?” A household-hints department finished up with a suggestion for a fuelless Wednesday dinner menu: “Add salt to raw vegetables, celery, shredded turnips, etc.” Then the final, faltering
gourmet
touch: “If one finds them insipid, they may be seasoned with lemon juice.”

· · ·

From the outset, in his National Revolution, Marshal Pétain shouldered, like a sacred burden, the entire weight of his autocracy. It would seem clear that at least at the start—before disappointments, office-seeking, cabals, intrigues, palace politics, the machinations of Pierre Laval, and the Teutonic Machiavellianism of the seven-year-old Nazi régime had befogged the eighty-four-year-old Marshal’s Vichy scene—he had clearly in mind a half-dozen ideas on which to build his Revolution.

His Idea No. I was that France was utterly defeated. “A nation has to be whipped sometimes,” he insisted in an early speech, adding later, “The country ought to know we have been beaten. For two years I have been repeating it to myself every morning.”

Second, although he had often mistakenly insisted, in the last war, that the Allies were lost, he was sure the Germans were victorious in this one. “The war was practically won by Germany as soon as Italy entered the campaign,” he broadcast for historians to mull over. As a loyal French officer, he agreed that a Germany which had swiftly dismembered France would certainly, as someone had said, “wring England’s neck like a chicken’s.” Judging by his experience, Pétain figured that the United States would, as usual, enter the war late, or maybe never.