The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (75 page)

infl ation as the French banking authorities printed millions of francs’

worth of unsupported currency to redeem the phony bank certifi cates and reimburse French suppliers for German “purchases.” To add

further insult to injury, the Germans used the proceeds of these onesided transactions to buy shares in French companies. Almost comically, Nazi offi cials even carried the dress designs and records of the

Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture back to the Reich as part of

a ridiculous plan to have Berlin and Vienna replace Paris as the center

of haute couture in Europe.34

While the French resented these exploitive policies, they dared

not resist them openly. As the American journalist Thomas Kernan

sympathetically observed: “The world’s best army is sitting on [the

Frenchman’s] neck. If he owns a business and won’t run it, it is taken

France under the Nazis 385

away and given to a stranger. If he doesn’t work, there is always the

danger that he will be drafted for a labor camp and end up in a beet

fi eld in Silesia.”35 Nazi imperial rule in France rested on updated

versions of the same inherent intimidation and brutality that were

the foundations of earlier empires. Martial law and military courts

allowed the Germans to ignore French law when it suited them. In the

early days of the occupation, they ordered French mayors to round

up local notables to live as hostages in requisitioned hotels until it

became apparent that there would be no mass resistance. The SS,

however, was not so lenient. With authority over all German police

forces and eventually the French police as well, they were a power

unto themselves. SS men and Gestapo offi cers in military uniforms

dealt viciously with all forms of opposition and had no reservations

about executing hostages.

As would be expected, Jews were particularly vulnerable. Numbering some three hundred thousand in 1939, the French Jewish

population was evenly split between citizens and relatively recent

migrants from central and eastern Europe. The latter group was most

at risk because many Frenchmen blamed them for the war. Nativeborn Jews, however, were better protected because most were well

assimilated into French society. The Nazis never succeeded in confi ning French Jews to ghettos, and the Générale des Israélites de France

(French Jewish Council) they created to enforce German orders and

collect a mass “atonement” fi ne of one billion francs was never as

effective or compliant as the eastern
Judenrats
(Jewish councils) that

helped round up victims for the concentration camps. Frustrated, the

Nazis worked to isolate Jews by making the French citizenry accomplices in their exploitation and eventual extermination. They coerced

French police offi cials to create a special section charged with carrying

out a census of French Jews as a fi rst step toward arrest and deportation. A 1940 MBF circular to military administrators explained: “The

object is, in principle, to replace Jews by Frenchmen, so that in this

way the French population can participate equally in the economic

elimination of the Jews, and so avoid creating the impression that

Germans alone wish to take the place of Jews.”

While the French police dragged their heels in carrying out the census, the Nazis’ aryanization program was far more effective in involving the French in their genocidal agenda. Rather than seizing Jewish

assets directly, the imperial regime forced Jews to sell their businesses

386 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and assets to French owners. Driven by greed rather than ideology,

Frenchmen scrambled to take advantage of this windfall. They turned

on Jewish partners and fl ooded the authorities with requests to purchase specifi c companies or enterprises at cut-rate prices. Profi ts went

into the French treasury, which in turn helped subsidize the larger

Nazi extractive agenda. The French role also made the aryanization

project appear permissible under the Hague Conventions. Although

Hitler had no respect for the niceties of international law, the Nazis

were careful to give their imperial agenda a legal veneer in France.

Mindful of Allied propaganda depicting them as brutal despots, in the

west they cloaked themselves in the same sorts of moral rationalizations that justifi ed earlier imperial projects.

To this end, the Nazi imperial regime turned misinformation into

an effective instrument of imperial control. The propagandists in the

MBF and the German embassy in Paris fl ooded France with press

releases, brochures, newsreels, and posters reminding the French

of their subjecthood, warning of the consequences of rebellion, and

highlighting Allied defeats. The French minorities were a primary

target of this propaganda. Building on the standard imperial template

of divide and rule, the Nazis sought to demoralize and split the French

by playing up the ethnic divisions that the Third Republic worked

so hard to eliminate. According to German propaganda, France was

actually a French-dominated conglomeration of Occitans, Alsatians,

Bretons, Corsicans, Flemings, Catalans, and Basques. The imperial

regime promised Alsatian and Breton separatists, whose leaders had

spent much of the interwar period in French jails, that it would sponsor their nationalist ambitions. The German military administration,

however, would only let the Bretons form a watered-down national

council, and Hitler dashed the hopes of the Alsatians by informally

annexing Alsace-Lorraine.

More subtly, the Germans went to great lengths to demonstrate

their cultural superiority and remind the French that their future

lay in a Europe ruled by the Third Reich. Hitler styled himself as

an heir of Napoleon and made an elaborate show of returning the

remains of the French emperor’s only son from Vienna for reburial

on French soil. The German embassy also organized well-attended

public exhibitions on the achievements of German agriculture, the

secret conspiratorial workings of Freemasonry, the threat of Bolshevism, and the exploitive role of Jews in France. The Nazi ambassador

France under the Nazis 387

to France, Otto Abetz, gave French authors large advances to produce

German translations of their works (most were never published) and

sent them on luxurious junkets to Germany along with prominent

French actors, musicians, and architects. In return, he arranged for the

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Chamber Orchestra of Berlin to

play the works of classical German composers in Paris.

The widespread and pervasive hopelessness arising from the military collapse of 1940 left many Frenchmen vulnerable to these sorts

of soft methods of control in the early days of the occupation. French

publishers voluntarily withdrew books that might provoke their

imperial masters, and in western France a school inspector ordered

Latin teachers not to assign Tacitus on the grounds that his depiction

of Germanic peoples as barbarians might cause offense.36 This sort of

paranoia was symptomatic of imperial subjecthood. Deeply troubled

by the scope and suddenness of the German victory, some people desperately sought stability and security.

Other Frenchmen viewed the conquest as an opportunity for social

advance or to redress past wrongs, which made it relatively easy for

the imperial regime to get them to report on each other. In some

cases this took the seemingly benign form of helping Abetz gauge

the effectiveness of the embassy’s propaganda campaign. But in other

instances Frenchmen denounced their neighbors to the French and

German authorities as black marketeers, spies, communists, or Jews.

French prefects and policemen usually discouraged such reports, but

the Germans paid thousands of francs for useful information. Most

denunciations took the form of unsigned letters and generally were

born of personal animosity rather than ideological conviction. The

ability to condemn a rival or enemy to arrest and deportation to a

German concentration camp was a powerful weapon that Frenchmen

used to break labor strikes, resolve neighborhood feuds, and even

punish cheating spouses. Subject Italians did much the same thing in

Napoleonic Italy.

This sense of traumatic dislocation was equally prevalent in the

unoccupied portion of France, where the weight of German rule was

much lighter. Although Pétain’s
état français
had the illusion of sovereignty, it was still a Nazi imperial puppet state. In surrendering

control of its diplomatic and military affairs in return for a measure of domestic and social autonomy, the Vichy regime resembled

the Indian princely states and northern Nigerian emirates that the

388 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

British sponsored to defray the costs of empire. Pétain would have

been deeply offended by such a comparison, and he certainly would

have countered that his government still had nominal control of the

French Empire, a lightly armed one-hundred-thousand-man army,

and most of the French fl eet. But in time, he discovered that he had no

more sovereignty than his African or Indian counterparts.

Although the Vichyites were shocked deeply by the collapse of

the Third Republic, they shed no tears over its passing. They instead

assured themselves that the Nazi victory was an opportunity to build

a new, stronger, and more moral France free from the infl uence of

secularists, Protestants, Jews, and Freemasons. In guaranteeing the

French people a quick return to national dignity, prosperity, and

normalcy, Pétain was part of a long millenarian tradition, in which

movements such as the Andean Taki Onqoy, the Sioux Ghost Dance,

the Chinese Boxers, and the Kenya Land Freedom Army promised

to create a new world free of imperial subjecthood. Yet where these

nonwestern peoples employed religion and local custom to imagine

a spiritually revitalized postimperial order, Pétain relied on politics,

diplomacy, and ultimately collaboration.

The Nazis actively encouraged this kind of wishful thinking.

Scheming to turn the French against Britain and reduce occupation

expenses, Hitler let Pétain believe that France would have a place of

infl uence in postwar Europe if it made itself suffi ciently useful to the

Third Reich. This was a total lie, but the Nazi imperial regime largely

fulfi lled its promise to leave the Vichyites to their own devices in

the fi rst two years of the occupation. The town of Vichy’s population of three thousand more than quadrupled as all the major ministries except for the Ministry of Finance and the Banque de France

relocated to the new center of French political power. Internationally,

some forty foreign governments recognized the
état français
as a

neutral sovereign state. Six, including the United States, even maintained embassies in Vichy.

Pétain drew his authority from a law passed by the Third Republic’s National Assembly in July 1940 vesting him with all governmental powers as the president of the Council of Ministers. French civil

and military offi cials swore an oath of loyalty to him as the chief of

state, and the regime’s propagandists built a fascist-style cult of loyalty around him as France’s great savior. The marshal’s photograph

hung in every school classroom, traveling exhibitions highlighted

France under the Nazis 389

his life and career, and towns throughout southern France renamed

streets after him. Some artists even substituted his image for that

of Marianne as the symbol of eternal France. Depicting himself as

above politics, Pétain made the military his primary base of support.

He amalgamated all prewar ex-servicemen’s organizations into the

Légion Française de Combattants (Legion of French Veterans), which

infi ltrated most every sector of Vichy society.

Pétain actually played a very small role in the day-to-day business of government, and there was a steady turnover in the Vichy

ministries during the German occupation. Pierre Laval, who harbored

a lasting grudge against the Third Republic over his downfall at the

hands of the left in 1936, was the fi rst Vichy minister of state. His

infl uence stemmed from his behind-the-scenes role in negotiating

the armistice and convincing the National Assembly to renounce

exile and disband itself. As a primary architect of collaboration, Laval

had close allies in the German military administration in Paris. This

is probably why Pétain removed him in favor of Admiral François

Darlan in early 1941. A profoundly anglophobic naval offi cer who

never forgave the British attack on the French fl eet at Mers-el-Kebir,

Darlan was even more willing to collaborate with the Germans than

his predecessor had been.

Laval and Darlan had considerable power because they were

unhindered by the constraints of representative democracy. In theory, Pétain’s fi rst obligation was to draft a new constitution, but this

was impossible while half of France was under German occupation.

Instead, Pétain engaged in what Robert Paxton called “Bonapartist

executive constitution-making.”37 In addition to appointing and dismissing ministers at will, he modifi ed the Third Republic’s administrative institutions to suit his needs. Bureaucrats in both the occupied