Vichy France (3 page)

No doubt, if Hitler had been defeated in his daring and overexposed tank thrust across northern France, those doubts would have been dispersed as quickly as they were in England. But with France defeated, doubts came flooding back magnified into a vengeful “I told you so.” The prewar fear that Stalin’s war would spawn revolution took on terrifying concreteness. French society began to come apart at the seams.

In the north and east of France, half the country turned nomad. “All Belgium and Artois are on the road,” wrote Paul Valéry, who left Paris for Dinard ahead of the Germans around
June 10. “The impression of living, poignant disorder. Every possible conveyance, carts stuffed with blond children in the straw. They don’t know, nobody knows, where they are going.”
²⁰
Perhaps the most familiar image of that hellish June was the millions of refugees, Belgian and French, military and civilian, who clogged the roads in the last days, strafed by Italian fighter planes, harassed by each other’s desperation. Their lemminglike swarm for survival reduced them to a Hobbesian war of all against all. Sartre’s description in
La Mort dans l’âme
of Sarah and her child, browbeaten and cheated by their taxi driver who has run out of gas on the jammed road, was not contrived. The Norman town of Evreux scattered before the invader, leaving only 172 persons out of a normal 20,000 there on June 11. A week later there were only 218, and on June 30, still only 6,800. Even on July 15, nearly three weeks after the armistice, the population was about half of what it had been before the “exodus.” This example could be repeated many times over, except that refugees from Alsace-Lorraine and from the “forbidden zone” adjacent to those provinces were not allowed to go home at all.
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While some public officials clung to their posts as the German tide rolled over them, others joined the exodus. René Bousquet, second-ranking official in the Prefecture of the Marne at Reims, recalled that his whole office had “fallen back” to Albi, within sight of the Pyrenees, by the end of June 1940
²²
—one example among many. Essential services ground to a halt.

As soon as the French government itself vacated Paris on June 10, rumors of a Paris Soviet began to spread. No one knows today for certain whether General Weygand’s report to the cabinet meeting on June 13 at the Loire chateau of Cangé that the Communists had seized Paris and installed Jacques Duclos in the Elysée Palace was a ruse or a “genuine” rumor. It is clear enough that the desire to save the French Army as a guarantee of order had a lot to do with Weygand’s pressing arguments for
an armistice. But it was not merely officers who expected a repeat of 1871. “Shall we escape revolution?” wrote Father Teilhard de Chardin on 18 June. “Everything is possible after such a shock.”
²³

The German occupation of Paris on June 14 was not altogether reassuring on this point. After all, Hitler and Stalin were allies, and there were national socialist ideologues like Dr. Friedrich Grimm among the first German occupation authorities who dabbled with winning over the French Communist party by stressing their shared enmities: priests, Jews, and the upper middle class.
²⁴
German Ambassador Otto Abetz himself seems to have encouraged these contacts. In Berlin, however, the rumors of good Nazi-Communist relations at Paris were as scandalous as they were at Vichy, and the Germans soon rejected the party’s efforts to resume publication of
Humanité
and to continue its neutralist propaganda of 1939. But not until June 1941 did Vichy really abandon a vague uneasiness about some strange Nazi-Soviet combine in Paris.
²⁵

It was Marshal Pétain who won fervent gratitude as “the leader who saved us from the abyss.”
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In truth, there was rather an instinctive shrinking from chaos that made war to the end against Germany simply unthinkable. The final weapon of a people whose conventional army has disintegrated is chaos. Fighting on from abroad would mean not only the agonies of
total occupation for mainland France (and every Frenchman was nurtured on stories of German atrocities in Belgium during World War I). It also meant accepting reprisals upon mainland Frenchmen for acts of war committed by other Frenchmen overseas. It meant guerrilla warfare on the mainland, the conscious provocation of disorder, the replacement of established administration by vigilantes, and a deliberate policy of making the occupation costlier for everyone. It was probably the right choice. But it would be a hard choice for any comfortable people. It was an unthinkable choice for a people fighting its second war in less than a quarter century, haunted by the specter of revolution behind every crisis: 1871, 1917, 1936.

To use chaos itself as the ultimate weapon, a people must have been stripped of the comforts of property and the solace of routine irrevocably enough to have renounced them, but not quite to the point of passivity. When the United States Air Force studied the effectiveness of its World War II bombing of civilian populations in Germany, it discovered that after Hamburg had been reduced to rubble, its productivity actually increased—unessential, labor-wasting frivolities had been burned away. France, by contrast, had been stunned and demoralized but not spartanized by the quickest but least destructive of her twentieth-century home wars. French cities had not been systematically bombed, as London was about to be, nor had wide areas of her soil been reduced to a no-man’s-land, as in 1914–18. As a complacent German officer remarked to Jacques Benoist-Méchin in July 1940, “The offensive was so rapid that it killed the war.”
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Like householders after an earthquake, Frenchmen turned to salvaging their shaken affairs and keeping thieves out.

The men who made the armistice were quite explicit about the dangers of disorder if the war went on. Chaos was something to be prevented, not exploited as the ultimate weapon against Hitler. The danger of moving the government overseas, Marshal Pétain told the cabinet at Cangé on June 13, when he was still
minister without portfolio in Reynaud’s government, was that an émigré government “might not be recognized as such.” What might fill the vacuum in mainland France?

To deprive France of her natural defenders in a period of general disorder is to deliver her to the enemy, it is to kill the soul of France—it is, consequently, to make her revival impossible.… We must expect French revival much more from the soul of our country, which we will preserve by staying in place, than by the reconquest of our territory by allied cannon, under conditions and after a delay impossible to foresee.
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By “natural defenders” of French society, Marshal Pétain meant the administrative carapace of France, from ministry down through prefect to village mayor, buttressed by police and army. The personnel of these agencies made it a matter of professional honor to serve. The new regime was the lawful successor of the old, and there was work to be done. Moreover, according to a Hobbesian-Napoleonic view deeply rooted in French public service, the state was no mere instrument of a sovereign general will nor an arbiter among people but a positive good in itself, the bearer of values greater than the sum of individuals who made it up. It had to be kept running. To what horrors would Frenchmen be exposed by the eclipse of the state? Loyal service to the state was a frequent Vichy alibi at the postwar trials, of course, but it permeates Vichy participants’ arguments so disingenuously that it is obviously an unfeigned reflection of priorities at work in 1940.

At his trial, René Bousquet, prefect of the Marne in 1940 and later Laval’s chief of police, defended his efforts to restore France’s “armature” in the summer of 1940. He didn’t touch politics, he asserted in a typical civil servant’s denial that administration is support of a policy. Insisting that it was “not heroic to flee,” he argued that it was necessary to work with the Germans to restore the necessary order for survival. His pride was evident when he claimed to have “restored normal functions” in the Marne by July 17. Pierre Angéli, prefect of the Finistère in 1940 and later regional prefect at Lyon, praised the
loyalty of the prefects of 1940, not one of whom resigned. They understood, he said in his final defense in the trial at Lyon in November 1944, that prefects have a sort of “cure of souls” [
charge d’âmes
]. The “pride of the prefectoral corps” was their constancy in safeguarding the essential elements of national sovereignty and easing the physical rigors of the occupation.
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Yves Bouthillier, senior treasury official whom Paul Reynaud brought into his war cabinet in May 1940 and who went on to be Pétain’s finance minister for the first two years, put the civil servants’ case succinctly in his postwar memoirs. “Orderly activity in the presence of the occupying authority was the best kind of civic spirit.”
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Civil servants’ sense of the state was reinforced by a general thirst for normalcy in the summer of 1940. Many who would later become the very antithesis of Vichy supporters were still sorting out the wreckage of their lives in the summer of 1940. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, describes vividly the emotional daze in which she hitchhiked back to Paris in July. She achieved some feeling of control over her life only by going back to teaching in a girls’
lycée
in Paris, even though that meant eventually taking the teachers’ oath to Pétain.

For three weeks now I have been in a sort of limbo: vast public events brought their own individual, physiological agony, but I wanted to become a
person
again, with a past and a future of my own. Perhaps here in Paris I shall achieve this aim. If I can draw my salary, I shall stay for a long time.
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Jean Guéhenno, for whom the regime’s values were anathema, found solace in his lycée professorate in Paris, even submitting to taking the oath to Pétain, until Education Minister Abel Bonnard demoted him to other duties in September 1943.
³²

Nearly everyone tried to get normal life going again. Refugees
made their way home or sought shelter in a safer place. Families tried to get in touch. Around two million young Frenchmen in prisoner-of-war camps on French soil anxiously awaited release. A flood of job applicants wrote to Marshal Pétain. Alarmed at the level of unemployment, French economic officials worked to revive the economy. Businessmen turned to German Army contracts. Gaston Bruneton, for example, went to the German military headquarters in Paris in July and got an advance for making airfield matting for the Luftwaffe.
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Le Temps
and
Le Figaro
made temporary arrangements to use printing presses in Lyons and Clermont-Ferrand, while
Action française
borrowed the presses of the
Courrier du Centre
at Limoges.

The government itself struggled to get out of provisional quarters and back to Paris. It never expected to be stuck permanently in the southern mountain spa of Vichy. Having remained one jump ahead of the German armies through the chateaux of the Loire to Bordeaux, the government had to move again. Bordeaux was threatened by the German advance guard by June 18 and was bombed on the 20th. When the armistice was signed, Bordeaux was in the Occupied Zone. More suitable temporary quarters had to be found. Something was wrong with all the major southern cities. Some, like Marseilles and Perpignan, were too close to the temptations of emigration. Others were the fiefs of powerful Third Republic figures. Lyons had been under the thumb of its mayor, Radical leader Édouard Herriot, since 1905, as was Toulouse under the Radical Sarraut dynasty. Pierre Laval owned the newspaper and radio station of Clermont-Ferrand. Vichy was a negative choice: the most hotel rooms in the center of France and no dominant political fiefdom. It was to this rococo cure center for liverish bourgeois, then, that the ministers, deputies, and senators straggled after the armistice took effect on June 25.

At Vichy, government offices commandeered the hotels,
packed filing cabinets into baths and dressing rooms, and replaced beds with desks. There was no need to arrange central heating, however, for the government was sure to be back in Paris before the frost. The armistice agreement said so (Article 3), and in any event the armistice arrangements would soon give way to peace negotiations. American representatives following the government were told on July 14 that the government would move to Paris around the 20th.
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The government, no less than its citizens, itched to get back into some settled routine.

So there was a kind of tacit accord between Hitler’s hopes for an economical armistice and French longing for a quick return to orderly life. The armistice rested upon that shared interest. “Collaboration,” the word and the thing, already appears in the armistice document. Article 3 provides that the French government assist the German authorities in exercising the “rights of an occupying power” in the Occupied Zone. In particular, it orders French officials and public services to “conform to the decisions of the German authorities and collaborate faithfully with them.” Fateful word.
Collaboration
, a banal term for working together, was to become a synonym for high treason after the occupation had run on for four years. The most elementary promptings of normalcy in the summer of 1940, the urge to return to home and job, started many Frenchmen down a path of everyday complicity that led gradually and eventually to active assistance to German measures undreamed of in 1940. Delivering the mail, repairing bridges, teaching school, relocating refugees—everything that restored France to tranquillity and order fulfilled the tacit Franco-German bargain to withdraw France from the war, socially intact, and to turn her energies inward.