Vichy France (10 page)

C
OLLABORATION WAS NOT A
G
ERMAN DEMAND TO
which some Frenchmen acceded, through sympathy or guile. Collaboration was a French proposal that Hitler ultimately rejected. Put so baldly, of course, the statement needs qualification. Hitler was not passive either. He insisted upon a docile and amenable France, a secure base for his assault upon England and the richest source of supplies in occupied Western Europe. It was from the Pétain regime, however, that a stream of overtures came for a genuine working together: for a broad Franco-German settlement, for voluntary association as a neutral with Hitler’s efforts to keep the Allies out of Europe and the empire, and eventually for full partnership in the new European order. Briefly, in October–December 1940 and again in May 1941 when a free and willing associated France seemed useful for German aims in the Mediterranean, Hitler was tempted. Other senior German advisers, particularly military men like Admiral
Raeder and General Walther Warlimont and some high Foreign Office people like Ambassador Ritter (but never Ribbentrop), were enthusiastic about the idea. In the end, Hitler rejected the proffered hand. In the end, “Kollaboration” meant only booty, a cheap way to get the French to keep their own people quiet, and an eventual peace of revenge.

The armistice was presumed by both sides to be a temporary arrangement, removing France from the war and maintaining order there during the final battle for Britain. The ink was hardly dry on the signatures, however, when the situation began to evolve in ways neither party had foreseen. The war did not end. Churchill did not sue for peace in Pétain’s wake. Nor was Germany capable of launching a cross-channel invasion until she achieved air superiority, which was eluding her grasp in the fall of 1940. Northern France remained a war zone. The armistice was transformed from an instrument for overseeing an orderly French disarmament into an instrument for continuing active war against Britain from French soil. The letter of the armistice began to matter less to German authorities than the spirit of the preamble, that statement by General Keitel which had not been part of the document itself: France was expected to do anything required for Germany’s prosecution of the war against Britain.
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“Germany could have thought, even as recently as two weeks ago, that negotiations with England would be possible,” General von Stülpnagel told General Huntziger at Wiesbaden on August 1. “That hope has been disappointed, and the Reich has been obliged to take security measures which are dictated by circumstances and by the need to continue the war.” Thus, with the blame placed squarely upon recalcitrant England (General Huntziger said on August 7 that “we are once more victims of the continuation of the war”), the Germans began interpreting the armistice with the utmost rigor.
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During the first week of
August, French military equipment, originally stockpiled in France under Article 5 of the armistice, began to be taken to Germany.
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On 26 August, after weeks of fruitless negotiations, the French government acceded to a figure of 20 million marks a day for the occupation costs payable under Article 18. This meant 400 million francs a day under the exaggerated exchange rate of twenty to one. Then the prisoners of war, whose liberation “even before the peace talks begin” had been requested by General Huntziger, began to be moved in early August from temporary encampments in France to German Stalags.
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The first French plans for the armistice army were sent back for further pruning.

Most ominous of all, the Demarcation Line between occupied and unoccupied zones became a virtual sealed frontier. Only three hundred letters a day were allowed to cross at a moment when millions of Frenchmen were trying to relocate their families; in August Laval and Abetz worked out a bland postcard on which the correspondent crossed out the messages which did not apply (“I am well”; “I am not well”), the sole fragile contact across the line. Frenchmen authorized to cross the line were allowed after September 13 to carry no more than two hundred francs.
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And very few Frenchmen could cross it. Government officials, in particular, found their travels impeded. At the moment when Vichy was trying desperately to establish its authority, local administrations in the Occupied Zone hardly had word of its existence. Although Article 3 of the armistice recognized
French sovereignty over the whole of France except for “the rights of the occupying power” and explicitly recognized the right of the French government to return to Paris, French requests to return the government to Paris, starting with Paul Baudouin’s proposal of July 7, were all denied.
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The Demarcation Line was becoming a garrote.

German authorities were also beginning to explore longer-range possibilities of exploitation going beyond the armistice arrangements. Already at the end of July a group of German officers and industrialists had insisted upon visiting French aluminum plants in the unoccupied zone (France was, before the German conquest of Yugoslavia, the richest European source of bauxite available to the Axis).
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It seemed probable that they planned to demand the supply of bauxite or aluminum to Germany. At the same time, German industrial representatives began approaching French industrialists directly in the Occupied Zone about accepting German war contracts. At first, Minister of Industrial Production René Belin and Léon Noël, the French government representative in Paris, seem to have urged French industrialists not to accept. On July 27, however, the French government, perceiving that French industrialists were accepting anyway and hoping to negotiate the issue, agreed provided that German contracts with French industry in the Occupied Zone were funneled through a central French office and that French manufacture were limited to “passive,” not “aggressive,” matériel. In the end, General von Stülpnagel simply asserted in a letter on 2 September that “the German High Command has the right to call upon French industry [in the Occupied Zone] in the form and to the extent that the continued war against Britain makes necessary.”
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Next, on 4 September, the German economic delegate to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden first proposed that French aircraft and airplane engine plants in the unoccupied zone also
work for German account.
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It was clear that the German economic authorities were pressing far beyond the letter of the armistice for concrete material gains in France. Control over industry in the Occupied Zone had escaped French government hands, but, as General Huntziger observed on 6 September, “the situation appears much more favorable as concerns the industrialists of the free zone.”
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All the more reason to try to win some striking concessions for these new German proposals outside the armistice.

Even more frightening German acts exceeding the armistice pointed to their intention to annex Alsace-Lorraine. The French learned on July 15 that customs control had been set up on the old frontiers of 1871. On October 19 the Armistice Commission demanded that all natives of Alsace and Lorraine be freed from the Armistice Army and the Chantiers de la jeunesse. Then, on November 18, over the objections of Abetz and in conflict with the new era of good relations opened at Montoire three weeks before, Gauleiter Bürckel of Lorraine expelled some 100,000 Lorrainers who wanted to keep French citizenship. Gauleiter Wagner of Alsace did the same with some 4,000 refugees in early December. Until mid-December trainloads of refugees with little more than the clothes they were wearing were dumped into an already impoverished France. Many of them gathered around Clermont-Ferrand with part of the faculty and the archbishop of Strasbourg, where they made the Germans nervous with recollections of Sainte-Odile, the patron saint of Alsace, and her prophecies of the evils to come from “The Antichrist from the Danube.” Reacting more sharply than to any other incident except perhaps the shooting of hostages in August 1941, Marshal Pétain issued a public statement denying that the current Franco-German negotiations had anything to do with “a measure of this kind.” The communiqué was censored in the Occupied Zone.

Other territorial worries were raised by the closed zone of the northeast, on the frontiers of Alsace and Lorraine, where no French refugees were permitted to return, by the administration
from Brussels of the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, and by local German hints of favor to Breton and Flemish separatists.
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As a provisional arrangement, the armistice was galling; as a permanent one, it was unbearable. As General Huntziger told General von Stülpnagel at Wiesbaden on August 21, it was “leading France to ruin.”
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A parallel evolution brought France and Britain almost to the brink of war with each other in the days following the armistice. Franco-British relations had already been strained to snapping by discordant priorities during the battle in northern France.
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A struggle for control of the French Navy shattered them. Article 8 of the armistice provided that French warships, the second most powerful fleet of Europe, return to home ports, most of them in the Occupied Zone. Unmollified by promises that Admiral Darlan might be unable to keep even if he were willing, Churchill reckoned that the French fleet was about to fall into Hitler’s hands. Early on July 4, after a British ultimatum to the French Mediterranean squadron either to join the British, go to distant French colonial ports, or scuttle itself had been rejected, British ships opened fire on the French ships in the harbor of Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria, killing 1,267 sailors and sending a hot spasm of anger through France. On the same day the British seized French ships in British ports. Marshal Pétain’s government considered a joint Franco-Italian naval operation against Alexandria and issued orders on July 8 for preparation of an
attack from Dakar upon Freetown, Sierra Leone, but in the end contented itself with a minor air raid upon Gibraltar on July 5.
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A de facto Franco-British war had begun that was to pit French forces against Anglo-Gaullist forces at Dakar in September 1940, in French Equatorial Africa in September–November 1940, and in Syria in May–July 1941.

The prospect of a break with England was not necessarily a bleak one. In the colonial realm, after all, Britain had been a more serious rival than Germany. In a world in which Germany seemed to be rising and Britain declining, France might be compensated overseas for what she was losing on the continent. Fertile minds at Vichy, drawing bold geopolitical conclusions from the wave of Anglophobia that swept France after Mers-el-Kebir, even glimpsed opportunities for expanding overseas at British expense.

The imperial visions unfolding at Vichy in the summer of 1940 were built, like so many Vichy positions, upon a current of late Third Republic opinion. After Munich, a
repli impérial
—falling back on the colonies—seemed to many the only way for French policy to be both active and safe. On the mainland, France stood athwart German ambitions without any real prospect of help from Italy, sharing a common anti-German interest only with dangerous Soviet Russia. After the war scare of September 1938, the empire was the only direction in which a Frenchman could brandish the flag without appearing to advocate war alongside Stalin against Hitler. “Once and for all,” wrote the nationalist Radical Pierre Dominique in October 1938, “let us look out towards the sea and turn our back on the
continent.” Jean Piot, in the Radical newspaper
L’Oeuvre
, urged France to replace the
revanche
policy of Clemenceau with the colonialist policy of Jules Ferry.
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After the defeat of 1940, such ideas came even more naturally. France was hemmed in altogether on the continent. The colonies had become simultaneously even more precious and even more vulnerable. The colonial realm was also more fluid than it had been for fifty years, holding out the possibility of imperial gains at British expense. Those heady possibilities, however, were overbalanced by the probability that Germany would reclaim her former African colonies (France held part of the former German Cameroons) and the possibility of intensified colonial rivalry with Italy, Spain, and Japan. Vichy faced the dual challenge of keeping a colonial empire intact after military defeat and of using her colonial leeway to compensate for the losses of 1940.

Vichy went about the first of these two tasks with the utmost urgency. General Weygand brought the governors-general into line for the armistice and then, after September 1940 as delegate-general for French Africa, personally oversaw the checkmating of Gaullist infiltration in all of French Africa except part of the Congo basin by the end of 1940. Conversely, Vichy also tried to keep German inspection teams in the colonies to a minimum and, except for Syria in May 1941, denied direct Axis use of bases in the French Empire. The aim was to seal the empire against encroachments by both Allies and Axis lest the two belligerent sides split it between them.

Vichy colonial aims were not purely defensive, however. Both Laval and Darlan, as we shall see, tried to interest the Germans in making France the colonial and maritime link to an African
“hinterland” for the New Europe. The first sounding in this direction came almost at once, in July 1940. A staff study found by German intelligence on the desk of General Huntziger, French representative to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden, dated 10 July 1940, proposed that the French Middle Eastern Army seize the Iraqi oil fields of Mosul and Kirkuk, together with the pipelines leading to Syria and the Mediterranean coast, “for the account of France, Germany, and Italy at the same time, and with the agreement of these latter two.” Germany and Italy would then join France among the stockholders of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, which would then be required to increase its oil output substantially for the benefit of continental Europe. “This program presents probably the greatest advantage ‘Fortress Europe’ can draw from the present war.” Since oil production would henceforth be governed by “business needs” rather than by the rules of the “Anglo-Saxon trusts,” “that will be the revenge of the consumers upon the producers.” For France in particular, “all of these services rendered to Germany and Italy would permit us counterservices in the drawing up of the Peace Treaty.”
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