Vichy France (2 page)

Nor was the new regime a mere cabal. I shall try to show that it enjoyed mass support and elite participation. Its programs drew less from German and Italian models than from long-festering French internal conflicts. It is easy to show, of course, that some Frenchmen had received German and especially Italian secret funds in the late 1930’s: impecunious journalists like Frédéric Le Grix, league leaders like Jacques Doriot, hired assassins like Jean Filliol and his accomplices who killed the Rosselli brothers for Mussolini in 1937. There were outspoken fascist sympathizers, like the young novelists Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. But those were not the men who made the decisions of 1940. Although it has been dramatic as well as expedient to treat the new regime of 1940 as an alien cabal,
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twenty years of access to the Axis archives have turned up little to substantiate a conspiratorial thesis. Even the prosecution in Pétain’s trial in 1945 quietly toned down the initial charge of “a plot formed long in advance against the Republic” to the more anodyne final accusation that he did nothing to stop the speculations around his name in the late 1930’s.
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Similar elements existed in England in the late 1930’s as well, and if the Battle of Britain had been fought with the same effect as the British land campaign in Flanders in 1940, no doubt these elements would be the subject of an equally popular conspiratorial history of the fall of England. The Third Republic background is vital to understanding the decisions of 1940, but that background has to do with more fundamental social, economic, and political matters than a few disgruntled novelists and foreign agents.

I have chosen to begin, then, with military defeat an accomplished fact in metropolitan France. The last government of the Third Republic was formed constitutionally, but not calmly, at Bordeaux around midnight of the night of June 16–17 for the purpose of asking what German peace terms would be. The Third Republic forms were observed, but once that threshold had been crossed, everything was bathed in a new light. Outgoing Premier Paul Reynaud proposed Marshal Pétain as his successor and prepared to serve the new government as ambassador to the United States. President Albert Lebrun gave Marshal Pétain his charge to form a cabinet. The new government’s composition was a recognizable example of Third Republic
union nationale.
It ranged from conservatives through socialists, with SFIO deputies Albert Rivière and André-Louis Février officially participating. Only those adamantly opposed to an armistice feeler were excluded, from conservative Georges Mandel to Radical Pierre Cot. The Pétain government’s formation on June 17 was a big step out of the war but a hardly perceptible step out of republican legality. By such modest steps, and not by conspiracy, a major part of the French masses and elite came to participate in an unforeseen new political world.

Defeat is a state of mind, however. To the last moment and beyond, some members of the Reynaud government had grappled with finding ways to continue fighting. The British and French troops brought off the beach at Dunkirk at the beginning of June had been brought back to man a “Breton redoubt,” but when General Alan Brooke arrived at Rennes on June 13 to oversee the deployment of British troops with the French command, German forces had already crossed the Seine between Paris and the sea, and the plans had been submerged by the torrent of events.

Far more promising was the project to continue the war from French North Africa. There, on soil reckoned an integral part of France, General Noguès’ forces were “burning” to fight, as he wired the commander in chief, General Weygand, on June 18. They expected powerful reinforcement from an intact French Navy, the new Dewoitine D520 fighter planes just coming into service, other planes and equipment already en route from the
United States, and whatever could be brought away from metropolitan France to create a vast Mediterranean Dunkirk. Even with Spanish and Italian help, and despite North Africa’s poverty as a supply base, it is hard to imagine the German Navy, ill-equipped for amphibious operations, transporting an army to Africa against the combined British and French fleets.
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The transfer actually began. Even after Pétain had been named premier to make a peace feeler, the cabinet voted on June 19 for part of the government and all the assemblies to go to Morocco, as Bordeaux was threatened with German capture even before the negotiations could begin. Then the climate shifted and the epithet “émigré” began to be heard. Eventually a diehard remnant of twenty-nine deputies and one senator sailed from Bordeaux aboard a chartered liner, the
Massilia
, on June 21. The Mediterranean squadron was at Mers-el-Kebir, on the Algerian coast, and nearly a thousand pilots flew their planes across in the last days.

There were valid alternatives to an armistice, therefore, and they were Hitler’s nightmare. A belligerent French Army in North Africa would have dangerously dispersed Axis military efforts in the summer of 1940, offsetting the advantages of total occupation of the continent. Indeed, Hitler saw that total occupation as a liability. His lenient armistice proposals, he told Mussolini on June 17, were intended to forestall “the situation in which the French government might reject the German proposals, then flee abroad to London to continue the war from there, quite apart from the unpleasant responsibility which the occupying powers would have to assume, among others, in the administrative sphere.”
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Hitler was spared those pains. The alternatives to an armistice
were not so much decided against as they became unthinkable. The Reynaud government never voted formally on the choice between armistice and a fight to the finish. The hawks probably feared putting things to a vote. The proposal around which a consensus formed at Bordeaux, Vice-Premier Camille Chautemps’ suggestion on June 16 that they inquire about German terms in order to have more information, was in fact a decision not to decide. The heart was out of it, and it would have taken a miracle of inspiration or coercion for Reynaud or anyone else to have led a fight to the finish. In the absence of any clear decision, the deepest priorities came into play. At bottom, a fight to the finish was unthinkable in terms of those priorities, and they formed the general climate in which the new regime could germinate.

Or what king, going to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and take counsel whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends an embassy and asks terms of peace.

—
Luke 14:31–2
(
the Gospel for Sunday, 23 June 1940
)
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F
OR THERE IS SIMPLY NO MISTAKING THE JOY AND
relief which came flooding after the anguish when Marshal Pétain announced over the radio, shortly after noon on June 17, that the government he had formed the night before was seeking an armistice. “With a heavy heart, I tell you today that it is necessary to stop the fighting.” Without waiting for the actual negotiations, soldiers and civilians simply made peace themselves. General Erwin Rommel, plunging toward Brittany almost unopposed that day, found French soldiers standing along the road thinking that the armistice had taken immediate effect (the negotiators didn’t even set out from Bordeaux until June 20; the armistice took effect on June 25). Those who wanted to fight on suddenly seemed to threaten awakened hopes of survival. When all cities over twenty thousand were declared “open” on
June 18 to avoid useless destruction, smaller towns and their mayors eagerly followed suit. The soldiers and civilians in Sartre’s novel
La Mort dans l’âme
who tried to keep Mathieu from his last-ditch resistance had plenty of historical counterparts. At Vierzon, at the crossing of the Cher River, the populace killed a tank officer who wanted to try to hold the bridges. A Colonel Charly, who ordered his troops to fight their way out of an encirclement near the Maginot Line on June 20, was shot by his men, who feared that “he’s going to have us all massacred.”
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As for opponents of the armistice at the top, Reynaud (if he still opposed the armistice at all) had been in an automobile accident on his way to Spain, and Georges Mandel was in Morocco trying to get in touch with the British. Charles de Gaulle recalled bitterly in his memoirs that “not a single public figure raised his voice to condemn the armistice.”
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These painful memories are worth reviving only to emphasize that the armistice was no minority plot.

It is easy, of course, to contemplate the sterner alternative of last-ditch resistance years later in the safety of an academic study. In retrospect, it was almost certainly the correct policy to fight on. Those who would have paid the cost had been scorched by Blitzkrieg, however, and wanted no more of the fire. War to the finish seemed to make no strategic sense at the time. It was easy to believe that the German forces that had smashed the proud French Army were not likely to be stopped by the British, whose army had contributed far less in 1940 than in 1914. Most of the leading figures in France were convinced that the final peace conference was a matter of weeks or months away,
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whatever
the remnants of French forces did. The Germans had rediscovered the short war of movement so sought after in World War I, and the war was over. French actions spoke even louder than words about their expectation of an early peace. After all, Pétain’s government had inquired about peace terms, not just armistice terms, when Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin relayed his message through Spanish Ambassador Lequerica shortly after midnight on the night of June 16–17.
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A mere armistice was second best, but it in no way changed expectations of a peace conference later that summer in which France would receive somewhat more lenient terms than if she had fought to the finish. As Pétain was to tell Hitler on October 24, he hoped the peace would “favor those who had tried to make a new start.”
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Texts of French armistice legislation also obviously anticipated a brief armistice and an early peace. The pension arrangements for officers who could not serve in a small temporary “Armistice Army,” for example, were scheduled to last only three months. Wladimir d’Ormesson, French ambassador to the Vatican, was trying to interest the Papacy in a peace plan based upon a Catholic Latin bloc, including France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. On their side, German Foreign Office officials were at work on quite different Franco-German peace terms.
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Despite postwar claims that the armistice was intended as a brief respite before
returning to war against Germany,
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every contemporary sign points to overwhelming acceptance of two strategic assumptions: the war was over, and Germany had won.

Fighting to the finish was worse than militarily futile, moreover; it seemed socially suicidal. Frenchmen had gone to war in the first place, in September 1939, with anything but enthusiasm. Since the German menace had first taken clear form, with the denunciation in March 1935 of the arms limitations provisions of the Versailles Treaty and the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, the possibility of war against Hitler aroused mixed emotions. To several groups in French opinion, the putative cure seemed worse than the disease. Broad groups of conservatives whom Charles Micaud has called “resigned nationalists”
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believed that war against Germany could only serve Stalin, by destroying his main enemy in the West and by undermining the European social structure. After the strike wave of May–June 1936 and the electoral victory of the Popular Front had raised fear of Communist revolution in France to hysteria, fighting Hitler came to seem “a war where the interests of France are not at stake but only those of International Communism.”
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The “resigned nationalists” were supplemented by two marginal groups with little else in common: a few outright Nazi sympathizers (a very small group indeed, and not necessarily part of the traditional Right), and some traditional pacifists on the Left who had not swung with Blum and Thorez from antimilitarism to armed antinazism. Still others felt a non-ideological dread of war spurred by new weapons and the frightening dynamism of the new Germany. War meant poison gas and the bombing of cities. Paris would be worse than Guernica.

Further, any Frenchman over thirty remembered the blind wastage of young men in 1914–18, which had made France a
nation of old people and cripples. That stark fact was brought home daily by the sight of mutilated veterans in the street. It took on particular urgency in the middle 1930’s with the advent of the “hollow years,” the moment when, as demographers had predicted, the annual draft contingent dropped in half because so few boys had been born in 1915–19. One more bloodbath, and would there be a France at all? Céline simply put it more crudely than the others. He predicted twenty-five million casualties and the “end of the breed.”

We’ll disappear body and soul from this place like the Gauls.… They left us hardly twenty words of their own language. We’ll be lucky if anything more than the word “merde” survives us.
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That was why France did not declare war on Germany until several hours after the British, on 3 September 1939. There were two negative votes on the Conseil supérieur de guerre (Generals Condé and Prételat) and massive gloom among civilians. The declaration of war came only after agonizing days of negotiation, in which Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet and his supporters clung passionately to the hope of another Munich through the good offices of Mussolini. The nagging suspicion remained that the war was not necessary.
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