The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (76 page)

and free zones who rallied to the new regime kept their jobs, but the

Vichyites fi red anyone whom they considered politically or socially

suspect. They also ignored democratic election laws, appointing mayors and municipal councils directly. The Nazis were generally satisfi ed

with these developments and pretended that Pétain’s administrative

reach extended to the entire country so long as he did not threaten

their strategic interests and fulfi lled France’s fi nancial obligations to

the Reich.

For the most part, the Vichy regime rarely gave the Nazis any

trouble, for it focused most of its attention inward. In justifying

390 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

their collaboration, the Vichyites planned to restore the true France

through what it called a National Revolution. Dispensing with the

revolutionary virtues of
liberté, égalité, fraternité
(liberty, equality,

fraternity), they made
travail, famille, patrie
(work, family, fatherland) their watchwords. Out of the ashes of the morally bankrupt

Third Republic the National Revolution aimed to create a corporatist political and social order as an alternative to capitalism and communism. The Vichy social revolutionaries believed that they could

substitute state-directed corporations of employers, workers, and

peasants for the divisiveness of the free market and Marxist class

struggle. They also forged an alliance with the church by banning

Masonic lodges and repealing most of the Third Republic’s anticlerical laws. In return, senior cardinals and archbishops issued a decree

requiring Catholics to give their “absolute loyalty to the legitimate

power in France.”

Equally important, the National Revolution aimed to restore

moral order by returning women and children to their proper places

in society. Blaming France’s defeat on falling birth rates and domestic

chaos, Vichy ideologues stepped up their efforts to expel women from

the workplace. They banned divorce and advertisements for contraceptives, increased penalties for abortions, and gave nursing mothers

and women bearing more than four children medals and increased

rations. To make these children proper Frenchmen the regime fi red

leftist teachers, restored religious instruction in the state curriculum,

and subsidized private Catholic schools. Additionally, dour Vichy offi cials banned youths from cinemas on weekday afternoons and outlawed dancing and excessively strong alcoholic beverages. To make

sure young men spent their time properly, they created the Compagnons de France (Companions of France) for boys fi fteen to twenty

and the Chantiers de la Jeunesse (Youth Workshops) for those of

draft age who normally would have gone into the army. In the short

term, the members of these groups would serve France through their

labor. Eventually they would become the nucleus of a reconstituted

national army.

While the Vichyites looked forward in imagining a new France,

they also used the German victory as an opportunity for revenge.

Obsessed with the need for national unity to ensure that anti German resistance did not give the Nazis an excuse to interfere with

the National Revolution, they went to great lengths to suppress dis-France under the Nazis 391

sent. This effectively made Vichy France a police state. The Vichyites

took over and centralized municipal police forces into a new Police

Nationale (National Police) and supplanted the
gendarmerie
with the

paramilitary Groupes Mobiles de Reserve (Mobile Reserve Groups)

that swore loyalty directly to Pétain. A state spy network tapped

phones and read mail and telegrams to identify traitors and troublemakers who faced prosecution in “special courts.” In 1941, Pétain

and Darlan allowed Joseph Darnand, a decorated veteran and former

Cagoule member, to recruit a right-wing militia from the ranks of

the more moderate French Legion of Veterans. Known as the Service

d’Ordre Légionnaire (Legion Security Force, SOL), it specifi cally targeted the regime’s enemies.

The roster of people and groups who fell into this category was

quite extensive. It included communists, Freemasons, Jews, foreigners,

followers of the exiled general Charles de Gaulle, and the leftist leaders

of the Third Republic. The Vichy regime even prosecuted Blum, Daladier, Reynaud, and several other politicians and generals for leading

France into a disastrous war, but the Germans ended the trials when

they became nationalistic inquiries into the French defeat. Vichy offi cials had a much freer hand in dealing with their other enemies and

jailed them along with criminals and black marketeers in a network of

forty-nine detention camps. To control the immigrant contamination,

Pétain’s government revoked the citizenship of half a million naturalized Frenchmen to pave the way for their arrest and deportation.

Predictably, Vichy authoritarianism fell most heavily on Jews. Acting on their own initiative, Vichy offi cials enacted laws banning them

from public offi ce, the civil and colonial services, and the professions.

Although they grudgingly accepted well-assimilated Jews as Frenchmen, they created the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions

in response to German pressure and set about segregating all Jews

from greater French society. Only Jewish veterans, Legion of Honor

holders, and distinguished artists were exempt. Some Vichyites hated

Jews passionately, but their willingness to abet Hitler’s anti-Semitic

agenda was born as much from pragmatic self-interest as from ideology. In setting up their own version of the Nazi aryanization programs, they hoped to defend French sovereignty and keep the wealth

of French Jews out of German hands.

The Nazis approved, but they played no direct role in pushing the

Vichy regime to adopt these anti-Semitic policies. More important,

392 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

they had no interest in the National Revolution, and like all empire

builders, their primary concern was obedience and extraction. From

the German perspective, collaboration was a clever ruse to keep the

French divided and complacent. Hitler reportedly had trouble even

pronouncing the German version of the word,
Kollaboration
, and

made no secret of his true intentions for France in discussions with

his inner circle. According to Goebbels: “Talk of collaboration is only

designed for the moment. . . . [Hitler] said, should the war turn out as

he wished, then France must pay dearly, because it caused and inaugurated it.”38 In the short term, the
Führer
let the French believe that

collaboration was an escape from full subjecthood. From the Nazi

standpoint, the threat of direct military rule, German control of the

Vichy border, and the millions of French POWs in Germany ensured

that the
état français
did not become unmanageable.

Responding to the lure of restored sovereignty, the Vichyites were

actually the driving force behind collaboration in the fi rst two years of

the occupation. After the British attack on Mers-el-Kebir, an enraged

Pétain offered to give the Germans access to French bases in North

Africa, while Laval suggested fi ve hundred French pilots might help

fi ght the Battle of Britain. In October 1940, Pétain and Laval went a

step further by meeting directly with Hitler as he traveled through

France to confer with General Francisco Franco in Spain. Seeking permission to rebuild the armed forces and reinforce the overseas empire,

the Vichy leaders obligingly acknowledged that France was responsible for the war. They fl inched, however, when Hitler demanded that

France join the war as an Axis junior partner.

Laval’s successor Darlan was more willing to accept the inherent

risks of collaboration by accepting the German conditions. His primary objective was a formal peace treaty that would end Nazi occupation in exchange for France’s acceptance of a supporting economic

and strategic role in a unifi ed Nazi Europe. Vichy economic planners proposed a network of highways and canals linking the French

and German economies and offered to help develop the Reich’s

new eastern “colonies.” In promising to use the French navy and

empire to defend the continent as part of an “Atlantic shield,” Darlan implicitly signaled a willingness to fi ght the Allies and acknowledge permanent Nazi rule in Europe. This bellicose stance was in

part a response to the undeclared naval war in the Mediterranean

resulting from attempts by French ships to run the Royal Navy’s

France under the Nazis 393

blockade of continental Europe. In May 1941, Darlan even made

a radio broadcast accusing Britain of planning to seize the French

Empire and reduce France to the status of a “second-class dominion,

a continental Ireland.”

The Vichy premier’s offer to take a more active role in the fi ghting

was tempting, and the Nazis strung him along. Ignoring his plea for

a permanent peace treaty, they offered to reduce the occupation bill

and relax control of Vichy’s borders in exchange for tangible French

military aid. The draft of these Paris Protocols gave the Afrika Korps

access to French railways and military bases in North Africa, turned

over fi fteen hundred French trucks, and required the French fl eet to

escort German naval convoys in the Mediterranean. This was too

much even for Pétain. Signing the Paris Protocols would have alienated the United States and exposed France’s overseas territories to

Allied attack. Overruling his minister of state, Pétain only allowed

the Germans to use Syrian airfi elds to supply anti-British rebels in

Iraq. Darlan trumpeted the Syrian arrangement as an example of

successful collaboration, but Hitler’s paltry concessions damaged the

admiral’s credibility. However, the Vichy regime was stuck with collaborationism, and in August 1942 Pétain congratulated Hitler publicly for “cleansing” French soil by repelling an Allied raid on the port

of Dieppe. He then went on to offer to “open a French crenellation in

the Atlantic Wall” if the Nazis allowed the French army back into the

occupied zone.

While Hitler manipulated the Vichy leaders masterfully, earlier

generations of conquerors would have recognized his bait-and-switch

tactics as one of the most time-tested strategies of imperial rule. In

accepting a subordinate role in the Nazi empire, the Vichyites tied

their authority and status to the new imperial regime. Togodumnus, Theodemir, Prince Manqu, and Mir Jafar were in similar predicaments. While German offi cials were surprised at how closely the

French obeyed the terms of the armistice agreement, Pétain and his

allies cooperated with the Nazis primarily because they needed some

sort of concession to demonstrate that collaboration worked.

The Nazis were able to control France with a relatively small

cohort of troops and administrators by exploiting this Vichy quandary. The trauma of the French military collapse threw established

conceptions of French patriotism into question and opened the way

for Frenchmen to imagine alternative conceptions of France without

394 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

appearing overtly treasonous. For these ambitious men the Germans

became useful allies against rival nationalists.

The Nazis nurtured and profi ted from the resulting discord by

alternately supporting and abandoning the various French factions

who were still fi ghting the battles of the 1930s. Exploiting the partition

of France, the Germans allowed some leftists and many right-wing

extremists to operate relatively freely in Paris as a counterweight to

Pétain. Prominent fi gures in the latter motley group included Marcel

Deat, a former socialist turned Nazi sympathizer, Jacques Doriot, the

ex-communist founder of the fascist Parti Populaire Français, and the

Cagoulard leader Eugène Deloncle. All of these men founded new

collaborationist versions of their organizations, but Doriot’s Parti

Populaire Français had the widest following and was Pétain’s most

serious rival. There was also Marcel Bucard, whose Mouvement Franciste (Francist Movement) made the easy transition from one of the

most extreme interwar right-wing leagues to collaborationist party.

Finally, Abetz introduced another divisive element into Paris politics

by installing Laval in the French capital as a future bargaining chip

after the premier fell from power in Vichy.

Although all of these groups professed an ultranationalistic love

of France, they competed for the privilege of defi ning what form the

French nation would take in the new Nazi Europe. The Germans

indulged them by allowing them to recruit, organize, hold parades,

and fl y tricolor fl ags, but there were no elections to be won or political

spoils to be divided. They often fought each other in the Paris streets

and bars, and rumors fl ew that the “Gaullist agent” who tried to assassinate Laval and Deat at a public ceremony was really in the pay of

Deloncle. Ultimately, however, the Paris collaborationists competed

primarily by trying to outdo each other in proving their usefulness

to the foreign imperial regime. Each aspired to supplant Pétain, but

they all had to pay him public deference as one of France’s greatest

heroes. In practical terms, they understood that their fortunes were