Vichy France (36 page)

Terrorist acts against the occupation authorities climbed steeply after June 1941. Colonel Hans Speidel, chief of staff of the German military command in Paris (and later West German NATO commander), reported 54 acts of sabotage in July 1941, 73 in August, 134 in September, and 162 in October, a figure not to be reached again until May 1942.
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Among them were a number of spectacular assassinations. The first German soldier killed in France after the armistice was the naval cadet Moser, shot in the subway station of Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris on 21 August 1941. He was followed by the NCO Hoffman, shot in the Gare de l’Est on 3 September, an army major and a
civilian official shot in Bordeaux on October 22, and—highest-ranking of all—the Feldkommandant of Nantes on October 20. The Germans reacted with exemplary ferocity. Taking common-law prisoners and Communists already in jail as hostages, they shot them in large batches as various deadlines passed without the capture of the assassins. By October 25, six hundred French hostages were threatened, and over a hundred had been shot, 50 at Bordeaux, 48 in one group at Nantes: the most massive execution there since the Representative-on-Mission Carrier’s mass drownings in 1793. “The students of my school are devastated,” wrote Jean Guéhenno. “The horror overwhelms us.”
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In the face of this horror, Marshal Pétain proposed to present himself at the Demarcation Line at Moulins at 2
P
.
M
. on October 25 as a hostage, considering himself a prisoner until the Germans responded to his protest. Interior Minister Pucheu showed Pétain’s draft speech to Abetz the night of the 24th, and although Ribbentrop dismissed the whole scheme as a bluff, Abetz urged the suspension of further executions. Pétain’s bluff was not called, but Vichy was under intense pressure to stop French terrorism itself.
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The Darlan government had already begun to react in August to the rise in Resistance terrorism with the busiest burst of legislation since the first days. This time, however, the theme was order and not the National Revolution: a sign of evolving priorities. “Special Sections” of the departmental courts-martial were set up under a new law empowering the government to act with exceptional rigor against “Communists and anarchists.” Justice Minister Barthélemy asked the Cours d’Appel to choose
judges “known for the firmness of their character and for their total devotion to the state” for the civilian component of these courts, applied the new procedures retroactively to current cases, and singled out the “Third International” as the “first-ranking target.”
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Laws regulating political meetings were extended to cover private meetings as well as public ones. The decision was taken to start publishing the names of prominent Freemasons in the
Journal officiel.
The pay of deputies and senators was stopped and the two chambers’ permanent bureaux dissolved. The oath to Marshal Pétain was now required of military officers, judges, high civil-service officials. Darlan solidified his control of the military by reestablishing the Ministry of National Defense. A few sops were thrown to public opinion. “Commissaires du pouvoir,” roving ombudsmen, were created to check up on bureaucratic abuses. The government promised to change the Organization Committees to blunt charges that businessmen were profiting from the guided economy. Food Supply Minister Achard was replaced by Paul Charbin, a Lyons silk manufacturer. Pétain created the Francisque, an emblem combining a Gallic axe and a marshal’s baton, to reward loyal service. Finally, on September 10, another special court—the Tribunal d’Etat—was created to “permit the state to strike wherever acts occur which endanger its unity and security.” It was designed to “escape” the limitations of the penal laws by giving the state a weapon against the planners and helpers of terrorism as well as against the actual perpetrators, and it had the power to execute an immediate death sentence without any recourse to the appeals court.
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Marshal Pétain set the tone of the new program by a radio address on August 12, the day the new legislation appeared in the
Journal officiel.

I have grave things to tell you. From several regions of France, I have felt an ill wind rising for some time.… The authority of my government is contested; its orders are poorly executed.… A genuine malaise is gripping the French people.

Pétain’s speech, the press, Justice Minister Barthélemy’s orders to the courts, all firmly identified opposition to regime in August 1941 with communism.

The crisis of August 1941 also shows how the armistice entrapped the Vichy regime into ever closer complicity with German repression. Germans were not the only victims. Former Vice-Premier Laval and Marcel Déat were injured by a would-be assassin at Versailles on August 29, and Marcel Gitton, former secretary-general of the Communist party who had followed Doriot into fascism, was shot on September 5. Furthermore, all the assassinations took place in the Occupied Zone. The issue of French sovereignty there, promised in Article 3 of the armistice but never effectively exercised by Vichy, came to a head also. Pétain had promised in his 25 June 1940 speech that “France will be administered only by Frenchmen.” Now, over a year later, with the government still holed up in a southern mountain spa, it was more urgent than ever to seize every opportunity to reestablish French administrative sovereignty in the Occupied Zone. The Germans were demanding that the French find the assassins of its soldiers—a tempting chance to increase French police authority in the Occupied Zone. But they were also executing innocent men as hostages. Should Vichy get involved?

Justice Minister Barthélemy, professor of law dating back to precorporatist laissez-faire days, wanted Germany to choose and sentence hostages if anyone did, not French courts. Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu—steel executive and former militant in La Rocque’s Croix de Feu and then Doriot’s PPF—whose anticommunism was as single-minded as his care for legal niceties was slight, saw a chance to “take the police [of the Occupied Zone] back into our own hands.” Pucheu was also concerned about the random nature of the German hostages. In French hands, only Communists would be killed; the Germans were using anyone as hostages, including youths caught sneaking
across the Demarcation Line and even, at Nantes, three members of the Legion, as he complained to Abetz on November 6.
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Pucheu’s view carried more weight, and the French government tried to execute enough people itself to get the Germans to stop. The Paris “Special Section” was hurried into existence on August 23 in time to sentence three Communists to death for infraction of the decree of 26 September 1939 dissolving the party (Bréchet, Tzebrucki, and René Bastard). But the German taste for vengeance was not slacked by such paltry numbers. In November Pucheu also produced a Communist terror group headed by an Alsatian Jew who he said had carried out the Nantes assassination, but one never knows how accurate the police are when they need an accused so badly. In the end, the Germans went on choosing their hostages, to Pucheu’s great regret. It is ironic that Pucheu was shot in 1944 largely for something he tried to do but failed.
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The logic of the armistice position thus drew Vichy into trying to do the Germans’ dirty work for them. Better execute the innocent yourself than let the Germans usurp the law-and-order function completely in the Occupied Zone. That logic was to lead one step further in the summer of 1942, when the SS took over German police functions in France from the Army. At that time, Laval negotiated a still larger role for the French police in the Occupied Zone.
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With the growth of the Resistance, Vichy was locked into an ascending spiral of repression on behalf of Germany.

After August 1941 it simply took more police to keep the
Pétain regime in place. Having shed blood, the regime now had to shed more and more of it to keep alive. “Travail, Famille, Patrie,” said Léon-Paul Fargue, had given way to “Tracas, Famine, Patrouilles.”
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The only common denominator was order.

The National Revolution and Fascism

W
ELL PAST THE HALFWAY POINT OF THIS BOOK
,
THE
term
fascism
has hardly appeared. That omission is not meant to deny any kinship between Vichy France and other radical right regimes of the twentieth century. The trouble is that the word
fascism
has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our time. For the French case in particular, lumping Vichy casually with fascist regimes in Germany and Italy
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dismisses the whole occupation experience as something alien to French life, an aberration unthinkable without foreign troops imposing their will. This mental shortcut obscures the rich variety of groups competing for influence at Vichy, conceals the deep taproots linking Vichy policies to the major conflicts of the Third Republic, and facilely passes the whole thing off as a mere foreign import.

Fascism does mean something quite specific, however. The word is not a mere bludgeon with which to belabor conservatives. Strictly speaking, as an ideal type, fascism is a mass antiliberal, anticommunist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force and in its contempt for the upper-class values of
the time, sharply distinct not only from its enemies on the left but also from its rivals on the right, traditional conservatives. Where conservatives want social structure to be hierarchical, fascist mass rallies in uniform colored shirts display a leveling egalitarianism before the leader. Economically, fascists make their appeal to the solitary “common man” against the organized “interests” of society, from bankers and landlords to trade unions. Where conservatives show distaste for mass participation and prefer government by a few established families, fascists—children of the era of mass politics instead of survivors of elitist nineteenth-century Europe—attempt to marshal mass affirmations. Fascists often prefer a Dionysiac pagan vigor to the social bulwark of established churches. They mock the softness, the conformity, the empty manners of conservatives. Totally devoid of any sentimental conservative attachment to the vanishing Europe of grandpapa, fascists revel in dynamism, change, and a “new order.” There are common points, of course: authoritarianism, hatred of liberals as weak-kneed harbingers of leftist social revolution, defense of property. But that common ground tends to be drowned out by discordant clashes of tone and value, especially among fascists enjoying the freedom of those out of power.

The study of fascism is complicated by the fact that no fascist movement has ever reached power on its own terms. None has come to power without being assisted by conservatives, under conditions in which fascists and conservatives mute their differences and undergo a certain amalgamation in the face of higher interests: achieving office and staving off a communist threat. Conservatives have frequently found the organized mass support and private armies of fascism a welcome ally against the Left; fascists have frequently found conservatives holding the keys to power. Mussolini was financed by industrialists and landowners when his nationalist-syndicalist
squadristi
turned their attention to beating up reformist socialists. It was King Victor Emanuel III, with the advice of parliamentary leaders, who summoned him to form a government in 1922. Mussolini threatened to march on Rome, but he arrived in fact by Pullman car. Hitler received conservative money and support and
was called to power by President von Hindenburg, on the advice of conservatives like Franz von Papen and General von Schleicher. Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera’s Falange had only a minor and diminishing role in Franco’s military-clerical group that destroyed the Spanish Republic. All these leaders, upon taking power, headed coalitions of fascist and conservative elements joined together in the common endeavor of obtaining office and preventing communist revolution. All of them, moreover, had to put down opposition from purer-minded fascist ideologues whose radical frenzy had helped them acquire a mass following in the first place. Mussolini had to get rid of his early syndicalist followers like Massimo Rocca. Hitler cynically liquidated Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser along with other inconvenient past allies and accomplices in the Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934. Franco gradually muted the Falange. No undiluted fascist regime has wielded power.

It helps to set up a spectrum of radical right regimes, ranging from those in which fascists dominated the partnership to those in which conservatives dominated the partnership. Hitler’s Germany clearly occupies one end of the spectrum. The Nazi party and the paramilitary organizations eventually broke the power of even such conservative elite groups as the diplomatic corps and the army. In Italy, by contrast, king, church, and army retained sufficient autonomy to regain their independence and overthrow Mussolini and the party in order to make a deal with the advancing Allies in July 1943. Dr. Salazar’s Portugal perhaps occupied the other end of the spectrum, in which conservative, Catholic authoritarianism was almost untinctured by mass antitraditional authoritarianism.

The Vichy National Revolution clearly occupied a place on such a spectrum nearer the conservative than the fascist end. Pétain felt himself closer to Franco and Salazar than to Hitler. Before the war, conservatives were groping for a “third way” between communism and fascism as a substitute for the parliamentarism and market economy that they judged dead; even fascist ideologues like Robert Brasillach found Nazi party rallies foreign and slightly ludicrous. After 1940, Vichy theorists like Thierry-Maulnier continued to insist upon indigenous solutions rather
than “pure and simple imitation of the victors.”
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In personnel, as we shall see in the next chapter, Vichy began in the hands of French traditionalists. Even as they lost ground over time, however, traditionalists gave way not to fascist ideologues but to technicians, professional administrators, and businessmen already prominent during the Third Republic. Although fascist figures gained some ground in propaganda functions, in official anti-Semitism, and, eventually in 1944, in the Vichy paramilitary counteroffensive against the Resistance, whole vital areas of the National Revolution—finance, foreign relations, the armed services—were never in their hands.