Vichy France (11 page)

Was this curious document meant to fall into German hands? Perhaps so. In any event, all the ingredients of a positive imperial policy are there: the expectation of early peace, the hope for easier terms for France, the lure of British spoils, all clothed in demagogic jargon attacking the “Anglo-Saxon trusts” on behalf of continental consumers.

These multiple evolutions after June 1940 gave the Pétain government both the incentive and the opportunity to try to buy its way out of the harsh armistice into some less restrictive, more normal arrangement. It is only half true to argue, as General Weygand did after the war, that Vichy policy in the fall of 1940 had been strict interpretation of the armistice, no more, no less.
¹⁸
The French delegation to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden did indeed employ arguments of strict construction in 1940–41 to oppose details like the rate of occupation costs, transport to Germany of prisoners of war and matériel, and the tightening of the Demarcation Line. In those early months, it was the Germans who used the loosely worded preamble to the armistice and Article 10, in which France agreed “not to undertake any hostile action whatsoever against the Reich” and to prevent her citizens from going abroad to do so, to justify going beyond the armistice where war needs demanded it. It was France that had something to gain by strict construction of such armistice provisions as Article 3, which acknowledged French “administration from Paris of occupied and unoccupied territory.” It was French spokesmen who repeatedly affirmed their loyalty to the armistice, and it was German officials who had to admit that France was obeying the armistice more scrupulously than they had anticipated.
¹⁹

At the same time, however, Marshal Pétain’s government began asking to go beyond the armistice. If a peace treaty was impossible, summit talks might at least establish more normal, comfortable relations in anticipation of a final settlement. In the white heat of anger that followed Mers-el-Kebir, and even before the National Assembly had convened at Vichy to vote full powers to Marshal Pétain, General Huntziger proposed at Wiesbaden on July 7 that France and Germany step beyond the armistice relationship.

Normally, an armistice is an intermediate stage between war and peace.… but our armistice is irregular, for defeated France finds
herself almost at war with the same enemy as her victorious adversary.

The regular procedures are no longer sufficient. They ought to be supplemented by additional contacts between persons not belonging to the Armistice Commissions. For new situations, new measures!
²⁰

This was no bizarre personal initiative on General Huntziger’s part. Two days later, Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, stating that he spoke with Marshal Pétain’s authorization, relayed word through Madrid (the same channel used three weeks earlier for the French armistice message) that he wanted to come to Germany to meet Ribbentrop. France, he said, wanted to become an “associated power.”
²¹
Hardly two weeks after the armistice, the last government of the Third Republic was already asking for a Franco-German summit meeting.

Hitler responded to the new situation arising out of Mers-el-Kebir not by grasping the profferred French hand but by asking on July 15 for German base rights in North Africa. Pétain’s letter of refusal tends to be cited as Vichy’s first “resistance” to German demands. Indeed Pétain wrote Hitler that he was “painfully surprised,” after France had shown its loyalty to the armistice above older loyalties (a reference to Mers-el-Kebir), to receive “new demands” in “flagrant contradiction” to the armistice signed a mere three weeks before. But Pétain went on to say that the bases demand created “an entirely new situation” going beyond the Armistice Commission’s competence. He then made a frank bid for wider negotiations.

I believe that only a new negotiation can solve these problems. In expressing this opinion, I think that my country can usefully make
its voice heard.… I have a sincere desire that after so many quarrels our countries grow to understand each other better.
²²

Pétain was clearly understood in Berlin to be asking for a new Franco-German relationship. Otto Abetz, newly attached to the German occupation forces as Foreign Office representative, thought that the French were ready for a “renversement des alliances” in the aftermath of Mers-el-Kebir,
²³
But then Abetz always fell victim to optimistic exaggerations about Franco-German conciliation. Cooler heads at the Foreign Office, however, like Otto Grote and Unterstaatssekretär Ernst Woermann, understood that Pétain was trying to set the bases issue in a new context of “free negotiation among equal partners.”
²⁴

Pétain’s hint was followed up in early August. On August 7 General Huntziger told his opposite number at Wiesbaden, General von Stülpnagel, that he wanted to meet the German chief of staff, General Keitel. The following day, Ernest Lagarde, director of political affairs at the Quai d’Orsay and a member of the French diplomatic delegation to the Armistice Commission, told the German Foreign Office representative Hencke that the French government wanted to discuss broad European and colonial questions “outside the narrow realm of the armistice.” France had great experience in the Mediterranean and colonial areas, he said, and she could play a useful role in solving problems there in the interest of both nations. It was nothing less than a French bid to be the Mediterranean and colonial partner of the New Europe.
²⁵

From the first days after Mers-el-Kebir, therefore, both French and German authorities were groping for some new arrangement beyond the armistice. German authorities wanted tighter security, French economic spoils, and base rights in the French Empire. Vichy wanted normalcy, a promise of territorial integrity, and a chance to start making the New France. Every French official with some access to a German ear was lobbying for a broader Franco-German settlement in July–August 1940. But it was Pierre Laval who won the race to good German contacts.

Pierre Laval and the Paris Connection

W
HILE
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ÉTAIN AND
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OREIGN
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INISTER
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AUDOUIN
were trying to reach Ribbentrop via Madrid, and while General Huntziger was trying to reach General Keitel through Wiesbaden, Pierre Laval turned his eyes to Paris. It was for domestic utility that Laval had been brought into the cabinet in late June. It was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs he had wanted, however, and it was in diplomacy that he now proceeded to make himself indispensable. Laval had, after all, been foreign minister in the early 1930’s longer than any Frenchman since Briand, and it was with an interpellation against Daladier’s wartime alliance system in March 1940 that he had broken his long silence in the Senate and begun his political comeback. Laval, like most conservatives, wanted to build a “Latin bloc” with Italy and Spain; unlike most conservatives, he could actually claim some personal contact with Mussolini.
²⁶
By July 1940, however, it was too late to work for Italian neutrality, and Laval’s main challenge was to break the wall of silence in Berlin.

Laval decided to cultivate Otto Abetz. He sent three unofficial messengers to Paris to work for “the resumption of normal
relations with Germany”: Fernand de Brinon, an old companion of Abetz in the 1930’s Comité France-Allemagne; Jean Luchaire, editor before the war of the proappeasement weekly
Notre temps
, whose secretary had become Mme. Abetz; and Jean Fontenoy, a journalist of fortune who had fought the Soviets in the Finnish campaign of 1939–40. On July 14 Abetz reported to Berlin that Laval wanted to come to Paris and that he wanted to meet Goering. The necessary passes were provided, and on July 19 Laval became the first French minister to return to the capital, and for several months the only one with a working relationship there. Foreign minister Baudouin didn’t get to Paris for the first time until September 13. Laval was full of optimism when he discussed his visit to Paris with the American diplomat, Robert Murphy, on July 29.
²⁷

Laval’s efforts to meet Goering differed in no way, of course, from the efforts of Pétain and his other colleagues to meet their German opposite numbers. Furthermore Paris could hardly seem a very fruitful channel at that stage. Laval was vice-president of the Council, but he was not foreign minister and he had no authority in foreign relations. Otto Abetz, a former drawing teacher and then Ribbentrop’s agent in Paris in the 1930’s, was still merely the German Foreign Ministry’s representative to the German military authority in Paris, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, General von Brauchitsch. Abetz did not become ambassador and acquire some independent authority until August. The real German authority in France was military, and all negotiations were supposed to pass through military channels at the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden.

In time, however, Laval’s Paris connection was to become the chief avenue of Franco-German relations, partly because Paris was the capital, partly because intergovernmental relations slipped from the Vichy-Wiesbaden military channel to the Paris-Berlin civilian channel as the war went on beyond anyone’s anticipation,
and partly because Abetz and Laval found each other useful to expand their respective roles.

Abetz and Laval found much in common. Laval’s socialist origins and his earthy contempt for the clerical, traditionalist circles at Vichy appealed to Abetz’ vestigial early-Nazi radicalism.
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Tactically, both men wanted to establish civilian channels of authority outside the military channels of the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden, whose competence was limited to applying the armistice and which, by definition, was forbidden to rise to the new occasions offered by Mers-el-Kebir and the French efforts to achieve a wider settlement. Ribbentrop, too, was eager to assert a Foreign Office role in Franco-German relations. Thus Abetz returned from his first trip home on August 5 as ambassador (though not officially accredited to a French government, since the two states were still officially at war). Laval followed up his July 19 visit with another on August 10, and in the interval Brinon and Luchaire shuttled back and forth with messages. Laval also met General von Brauchitsch and Dr. Friedrich Grimm, an international lawyer on Abetz’ staff, on August 28. The most serviceable contacts outside the Armistice Commission were falling into Laval’s hands.
²⁹

Laval’s August 1940 conversations in Paris, especially his two-and-a-half hour talk with Dr. Friedrich Grimm, unfolded a reasoned argument why Germany should reach a generous final settlement with France on the basis of shared interests. France, he told Dr. Grimm, now had more interests in common with Germany than with Britain. He recognized that France had been defeated and must pay a penalty. The final peace, however, could not be arranged until Britain had been defeated too. The more totally Britain was defeated, the less France would have to bear the brunt alone. For example, the French loss of Alsace (Laval conceded Alsace to Germany, but not Lorraine) could be compensated with parts of British Africa. While
Germany had it in her power to impose a harsh victor’s peace on France, a peace of reconciliation would end the era of “revanche” and usher in the age of Franco-German cooperation for which Laval said he had been working since he voted against the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. He foresaw chances of “beautiful Franco-German collaboration in British Africa.”

In the meantime, Frenchmen must be given something to hope for. The peace must not offend French pride, or Europe would fall back into a renewed cycle of war. The most “pressing problem,” he told Dr. Grimm, was the Demarcation Line’s choking grip between occupied and unoccupied France, which obstructed a unified administration. Laval was particularly eager to obtain a German guarantee of French territorial integrity, so that Frenchmen would know they had everything to gain by an early settlement with Germany. Simultaneously, the French delegates at Wiesbaden were working to reach endurable levels of occupation costs, the early release of prisoners of war, and the return of the government to Paris. The point, Laval was to tell Luftwaffe General Hanesse at a breakfast in Paris in early December 1940, was that “with the fruits of collaboration in hand” he could “bring the French people with him” to “Germany’s side.”
³⁰

Laval had something more immediate to offer in August 1940 than long-range goodwill. At the end of July he sent a colonial ministry official, Paul Devinat, to Wiesbaden to offer Germany a share of French colonial products in exchange for German help in getting French colonial trade started again, in the face of British and Japanese threats to the empire. Laval, Devinat said, needed German support in order to dampen internal opposition to his policy of reconciliation with Germany. He was very eager to meet the German leaders.
³¹
He also stressed Vichy’s plans for anti-Masonic, antiparliamentary, anti-Jewish legislation. Laval began to offer “volunteers” against England. He told Abetz on August 10 that Colonel René Fonck, the World War I ace, had
assembled two hundred French pilots who were ready to participate in the war against England.
³²

Laval’s August conversations in Paris raise several vital questions about Vichy’s overtures. The postwar memoirs tried to depict Laval as a lone wolf, spending long periods in Paris and keeping his colleagues in ignorance of promises which “overcommitted” the regime to Germany.
³³
Contemporary German archives, however, suggest a much more broadly shared and concerted Vichy policy of preparing to step beyond the armistice to an accommodation within Hitler’s Europe. We have already seen the July–August efforts for a Franco-German summit meeting. The military relaxations in the armistice to permit French defense against Britain were the work of Weygand and Huntziger. Finance Minister Yves Bouthillier, whose postwar memoirs try to establish his distance from Laval, got to Paris himself on September 30 and proposed that instead of stripping French industries, Germany give war contracts to French industry, even in the unoccupied zone. This policy would revive the French economy and end unemployment. At the same time, Bouthillier promised, France was ready to embark on a new social and economic order.
³⁴
Laval struck a somewhat more aggressive note than the others about military aid against Britain, but in September, as we shall see, others, including Baudouin and Admiral Darlan, supported active reconquest of French Equatorial African holdings from the Gaullists. Laval was exceptional in August 1940 more for his success in meeting German officials and his growing link with Abetz than for the substance of his overtures.