The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (81 page)

swiftly tried and executed Darnand without creating much attention.

Pétain and Laval, however, were another matter. Anxious to prove

they were not traitors, they welcomed the opportunity to defend

their actions in open court.

Pétain, who was the fi rst to stand trial in July 1945, depicted himself as a nationalist martyr who sacrifi ced his personal reputation

to protect fellow Frenchmen from the worst aspects of direct Nazi

imperial rule. This argument carried little weight with the French

tribunal that sentenced him to death for treason. De Gaulle, who

could afford to be merciful with his thoroughly discredited but still

widely respected rival, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment

after humiliatingly stripping him of his rank as a marshal of France.

The vanquished Vichy leader died broken and senile six years later

in a military fortress on a remote island off France’s western Atlantic

coast. Hitler’s telling dismissal of the Vichy regime under his leadership was Pétain’s most fi tting epitaph: “Because [the Vichyites] were

anxious to sit on every chair at the same time, they have not succeeded in sitting fi rmly on any one of them.”56

Laval, by comparison, mounted a far more passionate defense of

collaboration. After initially avoiding capture in Spain and Austria,

he faced trial for treason in October 1945. The specifi c charge accused

him of betraying France by conspiring to create a fascist state, dissuading the French government from escaping into exile in June

1940, making French resources available to the Nazis, and cooperating in the persecution and murder of French Jews. The former Vichy

premier laid out his defense in a prison diary that his daughter smuggled out for publication. It offered an unprecedented look into the

rationalizations that led a respected politician to become an imperial

client and auxiliary.

Far from seeing himself as a traitor, Laval echoed Pétain in arguing that his version of collaboration had protected the French from

Göring’s threat to treat them like Poles. He rebutted the various points

of the Gaullist indictment by denying a role in negotiating the armistice and blaming the Third Republic parliament for taking the unprepared nation to war without a formal vote. Parsing words, the Vichy

premier noted that the armistice agreement required him to meet

with Hitler and to “conform faithfully to the regulations issued by

the German military authorities and
to collaborate
with the latter in

416 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

a correct manner.”57 Laval acknowledged the authoritarian excesses

of the Vichy regime but blamed them on Pétain. By his account, the

marshal was the architect of a traitorous version of collaboration who

blocked his efforts to secure the release of French POWs, reduce the

occupation costs, and return the government to Paris. Moreover, he

claimed that the
relève
and STO had headed off a German demand

for two million conscripted French laborers and secured the release of

thousands of French POWs. As for the most damning charge, abetting the Holocaust, Laval maintained that his willingness to turn over

foreign Jews had blocked the Nazis from rounding up French citizens,

and he audaciously depicted himself as the primary defender of French

Jewry during the occupation.

In framing his fi nal defense, Laval echoed Pétain in claiming that

he sacrifi ced his personal honor and reputation to save France by grappling directly with the Nazi imperial regime while de Gaulle betrayed

the nation by fl eeing to the safety of exile. Correctly pointing out

that he had nothing to gain personally from collaboration because he

already had all the wealth and power he wanted, Laval summed up

his defense by arguing:

I have a different concept of honour. I subordinate my personal honour to the honour of my country. My ideal of honour was to make

every sacrifi ce in order to spare our country the fi nal indignity of

being ruled by a Gauleiter or by a band of adventurers, to avoid a declaration of war on the Anglo-Saxon powers and to obviate an alliance

with the German Reich. I achieved my goal. . . . Tens of thousands of

men and women, Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, owe me their lives.

Hundreds of thousands more can thank me for their freedom.58

In making this argument Laval glossed over the reality that imperial regimes cannot govern without allies from subject communities. His invocation of Göring’s threat to treat France like Poland was

effective in pointing out that there were far more brutal forms of

Nazi imperial rule, but it is unlikely that Hitler would have risked

the consequences of implementing his exterminationist
Lebensraum

policies in “civilized” western European nation-states.

The French judges certainly were not convinced by Laval’s excuses

and convicted him of treason. Unlike Pétain, who was a great military

hero of the First World War, Laval was so widely despised that de

Gaulle felt no pressure to commute the sentence of death. Resigned

France under the Nazis 417

to his fate, the Vichy premier wrote confi dently in his diary that

he would take cyanide to avoid the “stain of execution” and “die in

my own way like the Romans,” but the poison he had hidden in his

fur coat only made him sick. He faced a fi ring squad on October 15,

1945.

The Third Republic met its fi nal demise that same month when

French men and, for the fi rst time, French women voted overwhelmingly to convene a national assembly to write a new constitution for

the Fourth French Republic. The assembly, which was dominated by

resistance men belonging to centrist and leftist parties, chose de Gaulle

to be the provisional president, but the general resigned two months

later when it produced a draft constitution that favored legislative

power over executive power. Although they celebrated de Gaulle as

a hero of the resistance, many postwar politicians feared that he had

Bonapartist ambitions.

While the Fourth Republic was almost as unstable as its predecessor, de Gaulle largely succeeded in writing his unifying version of

the occupation and resistance into French history. For nearly three

decades the French successfully forgot the diffi cult choices they

made as Nazi imperial subjects. The occupation became an unpleasant but brief digression in the grand narrative of French history that

cast France as a great civilizing imperial nation in its own right. The

French learned little from their subjecthood, and they fought brutal

wars to keep the Malagasy, Vietnamese, and Algerians from leaving

their empire.

France settled instead into a premeditated collective forgetfulness

after the main collaborationist trials. Local offi cials destroyed documents dealing with embarrassing incidents during the occupation,

and the French government closed the national wartime archives

until 1979 and sealed more sensitive records dealing with conduct

of important individuals for a century. Pétain, Laval, and the Paris

fascists alone bore the weight of the national sin of collaboration, and

those who survived the trials and purges of the immediate postwar

years gradually found their way back into mainstream French society.

This national amnesia allowed fourteen senior Vichyites to sit in the

parliament in the 1950s, two of whom became government ministers.

The Vichy police chief René Bousquet escaped conviction for treason by claiming to have been a secret resistance supporter and suffered the
indignité nationale
for only fi ve years before returning to

418 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

political life. Maurice Papon, a senior bureaucrat who avoided having

to answer for his role in rounding up Jews for Laval by embracing

the resistance in 1944, also went on to have a distinguished career as

a civil servant, industrialist, parliamentarian, and government minister. Finally, many French conservatives, who never felt the need to

justify their support for Vichy, remembered Pétain as a legitimate

ruler who heroically sacrifi ced all to protect France.

The demands by French Jews for a more thorough accounting of

the Vichy deportation policies fi nally jarred the French out of their

comfortable collective amnesia in the 1990s. Global revulsion over

the Holocaust led President Jacques Chirac to acknowledge the role

of the French administration in sending Jews to the concentration

camps. Surviving offi cials such as Bousquet and Papon, who could

no longer use professional obligation and duty to justify their role

in organizing the deportations, now had to answer legally for their

actions. Bousquet was the fi rst scheduled to go to court, in 1993, but

he was murdered by a mentally unstable publicity seeker before the

proceedings could begin. Papon did stand trial, and in 1998 a French

court found him guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity.

Although he killed no one and was not a Nazi, the French newspaper

Le Monde
astutely editorialized: “He signed what he shouldn’t have

signed, carried out what he shouldn’t have carried out, organized

what above all he shouldn’t have organized.”59

There is absolutely no excusing the Holocaust and the enormous

crimes of the Nazis, but generations upon generations of imperial

subjects made similar choices in deciding to work with their conquerors. They too collected tribute and labor and maintained law

and order for their imperial masters. The only difference was that

they were accomplices to older and less virulent kinds of empires

that only sought to exploit their subjects rather than exterminate

them. Bousquet, Papon, and the other bureaucrats and policemen

who served the Vichy regime, and by extension the Nazis, did not

see themselves as monsters or traitors. Rather, they were relatively

average people who tried to come to terms with the consequences of

imperial subjecthood. The French collaborators deliberately looked

away from their masters’ depravity and never imagined that the

quick and sudden demise of the seemingly impregnable Nazi empire

would force them to answer for their conduct as imperial intermediaries.

France under the Nazis 419

Most historians of the Third Reich and the French occupation do

not consider Hitler’s European war to be part of the long history of

conventional empire. Instead, there is a tendency to view the Nazis

as exceptional in their criminality, racism, and barbarity. In one sense

this is unquestionably true. No other regime in history made mass

murder the central focus of state policy. Yet there is also no denying

that Nazism was born of the same extremist nationalism and social

Darwinism that drove the new imperialism in Africa and Asia. To be

sure, as the self-imagined heir of Napoleon, Hitler’s imperial ambitions were continental, not global. Moreover, he was openly disdainful of the new imperialism’s legitimizing humanitarian ideologies,

and he correctly recognized that most African and Asian colonies

were not particularly valuable. Nevertheless, the Nazis were inspired

by the same racism and naked self-interest that led the liberal western democracies to seize overseas empires in the late nineteenth century. The Nazis did not bother themselves with trying to uplift their

subjects, but in practice neither did most of the new imperialists and

settlers.

Hitler’s innovation was to systematically combine settler colonialism in the east with the standard template of imperial conquest and

extraction in the west. The British followed a similar dual policy in

Kenya and southern Africa, just not to the scope or the extremes of

the Nazis. Where Kenyan settlers sought to exploit Africans, Hitler

planned to exterminate eastern Europeans to create
Lebensraum
.

These two strategies are not as different as they might seem. Conventional empires justifi ed the conquest, domination, and exploitation

of subject peoples by depicting them as alien, barbaric, and primitive. Imperial subjects were not entitled to the rights of citizenship

because they were not fully human. The Nazis made the same arguments about their subjects, but they did not feel bound by a humanitarian conception of empire. Both Hitler and the new imperialists

in Africa and Asia shared a belief in a hierarchical scale of human

social evolution where some races were inherently superior to others.

They differed only in whether lower orders could move up the civilizational ladder. According to the Nazis’ extreme social Darwinism,

moral empire building advanced the interests of the racially superior

German
Volk
, who were the embodiment of western achievement

and culture. This thinking was repulsive, but ultimately so were the

hypocritical legitimizing ideologies of the new imperialism.

420 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Once an imperial regime stripped its subjects of their humanity, it

was not too great a step to move from extractive exploitation to murder, mass slaughter, and even genocide. In the late nineteenth century,

W. A. Jarvis, a former member of the British Parliament, explained

the necessity of eliminating the rebellious Ndebele to open southern Rhodesia for British settlers in a letter to his mother: “There are