Vichy France (24 page)

¹⁴⁸
DFCAA
, IV, 642–50. Even Admiral Darlan accused Germany on July 9 of leaving France “in the lurch” in Syria. Furthermore, the recent United States occupation of Iceland was a further warning of possible Allied counteraction if the Germans used Dakar. Vogl-Darlan conversation, 9 July 1941 (T-77/OKW-1444/5,594,826).

¹⁴⁹
Maxime Weygand,
Rappelé au service
(Paris, 1947), 428–40.
FRUS
, 1941, II, 368.

¹⁵⁰
See the Supplementary Protocol of 28 May 1941, printed in
DFCAA
, IV, 479–80.

¹⁵¹
DFCAA
, IV, 589. Darlan handwritten note, T-120/3485H/E019480; T-120/368/211199.

¹⁵²
OKW/2012, frames 5,596,029–034, contains the Ribbentrop-Keitel letters.

¹⁵³
Because Darlan was assassinated in December 1942 and therefore not tried after the war, this climactic French offer has been lost from view. DFCAA, IV, 564, reports the delivery of the
note verbale
without any text, which the French editors were apparently unable to locate. A damaged German photocopy of the text is filmed in T-120/F10/462–78, and the text as wired to Abetz (then in Berlin) is contained in Achenbach (Paris) 2101 to Abetz, 15 July 1941 (T-120/386/211214–28). It is also published in
DGFP
, Series D, XIII 142–49, along with a footnote reference to additional documents found in Abetz’ papers: a draft revision of the Armistice terms, a draft Franco-German treaty, and a draft French declaration of adherence to the Tripartite (Anti-Comintern) Pact. I have not seen these additional documents.

¹⁵⁴
OKH. Abt. Fremde Heere West, 5296/41, 16 July 1941 (T-120/855/285093);
Mémorandum d’Abetz
, 107–10; Abetz (Paris) 2274 to Ribbentrop, 31 July 1941 (T-120/386/211278–80); Ribbentrop note to Hitler, 16 July 1941, forwarding the
note verbale
(T-120/F10/460–61).

¹⁵⁵
Abetz (Paris) 2274, 31 July 1941 (T-120/386/211278); OKW Abt. Ausland 106/41, 26 July 1941 (T-77/OKW-999/5,632,895);
Mémorandum d’Abetz
, 110, 116; Ribbentrop (Berlin) 830 to Abetz, 13 August 1941 (T-120/386/211336); Woermann draft, T-120/587/243648–9.

¹⁵⁶
In particular, announced reduction of occupation costs on May 6.
Le Temps
, 9 May 1941, 4. Months of haggling followed.

¹⁵⁷
For army hostility to Darlan, General Emile Laure, “Des Fronts de 1939–40 à la Haute Cour de 1948 (Notes militaires et politiques),” 10 August 1941.

¹⁵⁸
Le Temps
, 9 May 1941, 4; T-120/386/211317–18; T-120/1217/33009.

¹⁵⁹
T-120/386/211346, 211426; T-120/405/213935–36, 214059–61 for the Pétain-Hitler letters of October 1941. The first assassination of a German serviceman in France had occurred in Paris on 21 August 1941.

¹⁶⁰
For various meetings with Pétain and Darlan on Nov. 16–17, T-120/405/214056–65. Both General Vogl and Welck commented on Pétain’s freshness and vigor.

¹⁶¹
DFCAA
, V, 387–401, dossier of Colonel Vignol on French efforts to reopen talks, July–Dec. 1941. For German reluctance for political talks, T-120/405/214186–88.

¹⁶²
T-120/405/213982–85, 214071–72, 214082–83.

¹⁶³
For the French retraction, T-120/405/214111–12, 214118. Dönitz’ copy is T-120/852/284443–503. Ribbentrop’s order may be found at T-120/852/284537–38. So much for the somewhat exaggerated story that continues to circulate, e.g., Georges Blond,
Pétain
(Paris, 1966), of Pétain’s getting the best of Goering.

¹⁶⁴
This is entirely misleading in Juin’s memoirs, which obscure the relation of his Berlin mission to Part II of the protocols. German minutes of the visit are found at T-77/OKW-2012/5, 595, 950 ff. See also T-120/F9/264–66.

¹⁶⁵
Lucien Romier told Roland Krug von Nidda on December 19 that France, fearing the loss of her colonies, must pursue an attitude of “watchful waiting” toward war with the United States. Schleier (Paris) 4049 to Abetz (Berlin), 19 December 1941 (T-120/405/214177–78). Darlan’s attitude, as explained to Schleier on 29 January 1942, was that Germany would gain nothing by a French declaration of war on the Anglo-Saxons. Schleier (Paris) 423 to Abetz (Berlin), 30 January 1942 (T-120/405/214294–95). The Germans seem to have agreed.

¹⁶⁶
The Greenslade-Robert agreement of 6 August 1940 and the Horne-Robert agreement of 17 December 1941 may be found in
FRUS
, along with the exchanges of notes of February–March 1942. The Franco-German side to this controversy appears most fully in the Weizsäcker papers, T-120/112. Laval faced even tougher pressures in May. See
this page
.

¹⁶⁷
Achenbach’s report on this is found in T-120/5586/E401095–98. Du Moulin de Labarthète,
Le Temps des illusions
(Paris, 1946), 398–99, has a totally different list.

¹⁶⁸
U.S. Dept. of State Serial File 851.00/2727. Admiral Leahy (Vichy) 866 to Dept. of State, 24 March 1942.

¹⁶⁹
Dept. of State Serial File 851.00/2727. Leahy’s information as of April 15 thus supports Du Moulin on this point. Aron, 478 ff., argues the more traditional view that Laval’s return followed months of German pressure.

¹⁷⁰
FRUS
, 1942, II, 297.

¹⁷¹
The Journals of André Gide
, translated and edited by Justin O’Brien, vol. IV (New York, 1957), 30. For Pétain’s desire to be the continent’s neutral west wall, see
chapter 4
.

II / The National Revolution

The total revolution of France has been prepared by twenty years of uncertainty, discontent, disgust, and latent insurrection.… The war has burst open the abscess.… This possibility of doing something new thrills men of every walk of life.

—
Paul Baudouin, July 1940
¹

We Frenchmen must try something new.

—
Paul Valéry, June 1940
²

Reform was possible only through catastrophe.

—
Frédéric Le Play
³

T
HE
F
RENCH QUEST FOR A SETTLEMENT WITH
G
ERMANY
was only one side of collaboration. Collaboration is not seen as a whole without its domestic dimension. Externally, the armistice position rested upon a certainty of German victory and a preference for peace and stability over a last-ditch resistance to the finish. Internally, the armistice position offered a historic opportunity for change such as France had not seen since 1870—indeed, perhaps not since 1789.

Even if few Frenchmen had wanted change before the defeat, the loss of the war would have turned jaundiced eyes upon the. Third Republic. Discredit to the regime was bound to be no less than in 1870. Even more than in 1870, France had seethed already with dissatisfactions and proposals for change before the war, change which had been largely frustrated by the incoherence of oppositions and the negative balance that held the Third Republic
in stalemate. The defeated republic, so substantial in its inertia only a few days before, evaporated like the dew. The pent-up frustrations of the 1930’s burst out into the exhilaration of one of those rare moments when things are malleable. Even those dedicated to the status quo thought it could be preserved only by radical change. In their excitement, Frenchmen committed the most elementary imprudence. In their impatience to avenge old wrongs and transform the conditions that had led to defeat, they made major structural changes during an enemy occupation.

It is hard to remember today how intense and how widespread was the excitement of these projects. For some it was the exhilaration of vengeance: the hated republic, “la gueuse,” was dead. But that sense of exhilaration extended far beyond the old antirepublicans. Some of it was a sense of liberation from encrusted procedures and political immobility. It had taken more than two hundred bills between 1871 and 1909 to get an income tax adopted in France on 15 July 1914.
⁴
Some twenty-four bills had proposed old-age pensions since 1936, the latest of which had passed The Chamber on 14 March 1939 only to fail in the Senate.
⁵
How much easier it was simply to issue an old-age pension law by government authority on 14 March 1941, with Marshal Pétain declaring that “we keep our promises, even those of others.”

“Reform is in the air,” wrote Louis Rivière of the Cour d’Appel of Rouen in 1941. “The National Revolution has done in one year what the former regime failed lamentably to do in more than a century,” wrote Professor de Nesmes-Desmarets of the law faculty at Montpellier, referring to the Civil Service Statute of 1941 that had been in the political mill for a generation. “We accused the old regime, with justification, of obstructing major reforms,” wrote Paris law professor Georges Ripert in the
Revue de droit commercial.
“That obstacle has disappeared.”
⁶

For still others, it was a heady “ferment of technical progress,” the “insertion of the future into the present,” as it was put by Jean Bichelonne, Laval’s minister of industrial production and the enthusiastic partner of Albert Speer in 1943 in projects of Franco-German economic integration. Railroad engineer and Communications Minister Jean Berthelot, who had been frustrated by entrenched bureaucrats in his efforts to rationalize the Paris municipal transportation agencies in the late 1930’s, recalled in 1968 how satisfying it had been to create the unified Paris municipal transit system (the R.A.T.P.) in 1942 by the unfettered application of technical good sense. Senior civil servants, such as André Bisson, a postwar president of the Cour des Comptes, rejoiced at how much easier budget-making had become without the punctilious scrutiny of the parliamentary finance committees—a sentiment that American presidents might secretly share.
⁷

Conservatives had the power that universal suffrage had denied them since 1924; technicians had power that politicians had never given them. The genuine excitement aroused by those possibilities has to be reasserted now after so many postwar efforts to pretend that Vichy was merely a caretaker regime of “presence.” Pétain himself could assert in his one statement at his trial in July 1945 that “France may change words and labels. She is building but she can build usefully only on the bases I have laid down.”
⁸

Indeed the Resistance was no less determined to sweep away what de Gaulle called “the anarchic abuses of a regime in decay.” Léon Blum wrote to him on 15 March 1943 about the future France, as socialists saw it. France must be democratic. “That doesn’t mean—any more for us than for you—that the Constitution and prewar institutions must be restored in their integrity, that after this long interval the old machine must simply start up again.” It was a “new republic,” not the old one, that
glimmered in the various postwar blueprints of Resistance movements.
⁹

Another measure of the intensity of those prewar frustrations and resentments that emerged in 1940 in a geyser of change can be found in a comparative look at other occupation regimes. No other defeated state set out as ambitiously during World War II on fundamental changes. To find a similar exploitation of defeat, one would have to turn to formerly stateless peoples like the Croats of Yugoslavia and the Slovaks of Czechoslovakia for whom Hitler’s destruction of the eastern European status quo meant the chance for ethnic statehood. Charles Maurras’ remark that the events of 1940 were a “divine surprise” is too authentic not to be quoted one more time out of context.
¹⁰

But in what direction would these released energies flow? What forms would the new France take? Which of the multiple interests clamoring for attention would be served? Those who make a revolution are often not those who reap the benefits. We shall look first at the Vichy programs and then at the personnel who created them and who profited by them.

Competing Visions