Vichy France (42 page)

¹⁶⁴
René Gillouin,
J’Etais l’ami du maréchal Pétain
(Paris, 1968), 220–22; Marius Coulon,
L’Artisan devant l’impôt
(Lille, 1943), 105; Jacques Desmarest,
La Politique de la main-d’oeuvre en France
(Paris, 1946), 142; Alain Silvera,
Daniel Halévy
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 201; Robert O. Paxton,
Parades and Politics at Vichy
(Princeton, N.J., 1966), 194.

¹⁶⁵
H. W. Ehrmann,
Organized Business in France
(Princeton, N.J., 1957), has worked out the continuity of personnel between prewar trade and industry associations and the Organization Committees. The basic work from a more legal point of view is J. G. Mérigot,
Essai sur les comités d’organisation
(Paris, 1943). See also Robert Catherine,
L’Economie de répartition
(Paris, 1943). A similar conclusion is drawn by Léon Liebmann, “Entre le mythe et la légende: ‘L’anti-capitalisme’ de Vichy,”
Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie
(Institut Solvay), 1964, 110–48. While the Germans did block the creation of an organization committee in the aircraft industry, preferring to deal more freely with individual companies (see
DFCAA
, IV, 68–72), the main motive in creating the Committees was corporatism and not anti-German obstructionism.

¹⁶⁶
Georges Lefranc,
Les Expériences syndicales
, chap. 4.
Ministère public c/Belin.
The author was also able to hear M. Belin discuss these matters in March 1970.

¹⁶⁷
On manager-technicians’ unionism in the 1930’s and under corporatism, see Pierre Almigeon,
Les Cadres de l’industrie et notamment dans la métallurgie
(Paris, 1943), 140 ff. This doctoral thesis, directed by Edouard Dolléans, stresses the bitterness of managers and technicians in the face of “leveling” salaries and “déclassement” in the late 1930’s.

¹⁶⁸
La Saison des juges
, 108. Minister of Industrial Production Lehideux announced plans in September 1941 to prosecute officials of
Organization Committees
who acted in the interests of trusts. Ministère de l’Intérieur,
Informations générales
, no. 53 (2 September 1941), 625. I owe this reference to Professor Richard F. Kuisel.

¹⁶⁹
Le Flambeau
, 18 July 1936.

¹⁷⁰
For an expression of Lehideux’ desire to organize Europe “en face du bloc américan,” see François Lehideux, “La Lutte contre le chômage,” Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques,
Conférences d’information
, no. 1, 7 February 1941. The plans with Colonel Thönissen are found in
Ministère public c/Lehideux
, 16, 31, and are referred to in Auswärtiges Amt, Richtlinien Pol. II, Bundle 5/1: “Kartel Frankreich, M-Z” (T-120/5584H/E401074 ff.). For the Ten-year plan and 17 December 1941 law, in addition to the trial, see
Le Temps
, 5 and 15 May 1941, and Lehideux’ own statement in Hoover Institution,
France during the German Occupation, 1940–44
(Stanford, Calif., 1959), I, 36–38.

¹⁷¹
Pierre Nicolle,
Cinquante mois d’armistice. Vichy, 2 Juillet 1940–26 août 1944. Journal d’un témoin
(Paris, 1947), I, 305, 372, 374. Nicolle worked for the organized “Petites et Moyennes Entreprises.”

¹⁷²
Bichelonne’s views of the postwar economy are most clearly expressed in his preface to Robert Catherine,
L’Economie de répartition
(Paris, 1943). The Germans were convinced of his will to Franco-German economic integration (see T-120/5584H/E401074). For the Speer-Bichelonne agreements of December 1943, see
Ministère public c/Chasseigne
, 114; Alan S. Milward, “German Economic Policy Towards France, 1942–44,” in D. C. Watt,
Studies in International History
(London, 1967), who finds Bichelonne and Speer “kindred spirits”; and Speer’s own memoirs. Bichelonne left neither trial records nor memoirs. The only technocratic minister to hang on even after Pétain’s move to Germany in August 1944, he died in Germany in December 1944.

¹⁷³
La Saison des juges
(Paris, 1943).

¹⁷⁴
J.O., Lois
, 27 September 1939, 11,770. Moscow and Vichy revived diplomatic relations after the armistice and continued them until the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.

¹⁷⁵
On propaganda at Vichy, see Philippe Amaury,
Les deux premiéres expériences d’un Ministère d’Information en France
(
1939–49
) (Paris, 1969), and the forthcoming work on Marcel Marion by Graham Thomas.

¹⁷⁶
Jean Guéhenno,
Journal des années noires
(Paris, 1947), 17 July 1942.

¹⁷⁷
Ministère de la justice,
Compte général de l’administration de la justice civile et commerciale et de la justice criminelle
, Années 1944–47 (Melun, n.d.), xvii–xxii, xxiv.

¹⁷⁸
Lageberichte des Verwaltungsstabs (Centre de documentation juive contemporaine, Paris, dossier LXXV).

¹⁷⁹
Abetz gives the figure of 600 in his telegram No. 3325 from Paris, 25 October 1941 (T-120.405/213950 ff); Jean Guéhenno,
Journal des années noires
(Paris, 1947), 24 October 1941, 25 October 1941.

¹⁸⁰
Although this bizarre gesture was first revealed in Du Moulin de Labarthète’s
Le Temps des illusions
(Geneva, 1946), a book as tendentious as it is delightful, it is verified in German telegrams. See especially Abetz (Paris) 3325 of 25 October 1941 (T-120/405/213950–52) and a report by Walter Schellenberg on 10 November 1941 (T-120/685/259187–88). Schellenberg says Pucheu ridiculed the plan of General Laure and Du Moulin, but he thought the Germans should be informed so that they would grasp the intensity of the French reaction.

¹⁸¹
Ministère de la Justice,
Bulletin officiel
, 1941, 99–102. In the Occupied Zone, where there were no courts-martial, a “Section Spéciale” was attached to the Paris Cour d’Appel.
Ministère public c/Dayras.
See also Guy Raïssac,
Combat sans merci
(Paris, 1966), 327
n.

¹⁸²
Most of this legislation is found in
Journal officiel
, 12 August 1941, 3364–67, and 16 August 1941, 3438, 3450. See also
Le Temps
, 11 September 1941.

¹⁸³
This is one of the few internal Vichy disputes for which there is good contemporary evidence. Barthélemy’s views were learned in a German telephone tap. See a briefing by Colonel Hans Speidel, No. 2495/41, of 9 September 1941 (
CDJC
, document no. CCXXVII-50). Pucheu’s intentions were stressed by the defense at his trial, in Butin,
Le Procès Pucheu
(Paris, n.d. [1948]), 304–5. His complaints to Abetz are contained in Paris telegram No. 3486 of 6 November 1941 (T-120/405/214002–3). This is analogous to Vallat’s June 1941 efforts to assert Vichy sovereignty over Jewish matters in the Occupied Zone. See
this page
.

¹⁸⁴
Ministère public c/Dayras
has the most information on the Paris Special Section. See also Paris telegram 3486, 6 November 1941 (T-120/405/214002–3).

¹⁸⁵
See
chap. 4
.

¹⁸⁶
Bourget,
Un Certain Philippe Pétain
(Paris, 1966), 235. The pun loses in translation: “Work, Family, Nation” had given way to “Bother, Hunger, Surveillance.”

¹⁸⁷
The latest influential example is William L. Shirer,
The Collapse of the Third Republic
(New York, 1969), 21, 557, 900, where the ideas of men like Baudouin and Weygand “derived mainly from Rome and Berlin” and from “reading
Mein Kampf
” and where the new regime “attempted to ape” the conqueror’s doctrine.

¹⁸⁸
For “middle way” conservatives of the late 1930’s, see Jacques Bardoux,
Ni Communiste, ni hitlérien: La France de demain
(Paris, 1937). Robert Brasillach described his reaction to Nazi ritual in “Cent heures chez Hitler,”
La Revue universelle
(1 October 1937). Thierry-Maulnier, “L’Avenir de la France,”
La Revue universelle
(1 February–10 May 1941).

¹⁸⁹
Pétain’s Saint-Etienne speech on labor, 1 March 1941. He was also, of course, reassuring businessmen that the anticapitalist rhetoric of the regime was not dangerous.

III / The Collaborators

I
T IS HARD TO MEASURE SUPPORT FOR AN AUTHORITARIAN
regime. Not only are the usual reflections of public opinion missing: a relatively unfettered press, elections, parliamentary debate, some degree of tolerance for expressions of dissenting opinion. The regime also distorts those measures of opinion one has. Rulers equate silence with support, acquiescence with enthusiasm, and participation with loyalty. Any assessment of support for the Vichy regime is further complicated by the almost universal joy of liberation in 1944 and by Frenchmen’s failure to remember—for conscious or unconscious reasons—quite different earlier moods more in keeping with the apparently hopeless days of 1941 or 1942.

A crude graph of French public opinion from 1940 to 1944 would show nearly universal acceptance of Marshal Pétain in June 1940 and nearly universal acceptance of General de Gaulle in August 1944, with the two lines, one declining and the other rising, intersecting some time after the total occupation of the hitherto “free zone” of Vichy in November 1942.

But the two lines would not be straight lines, and a number
of refinements are both possible and necessary. First, one must distinguish between active participation in the regime and mere favorable opinion. Within favorable public opinion, one can further distinguish among varying degrees of warmth and among varying grounds for support: personal faith in Marshal Pétain, fear of war and revolution, enthusiasm for the National Revolution. Even those who grumbled at the regime without doubting its basic legality or doing anything positive against it helped swell the tide of acquiescence. All these groups, from lukewarm to fervent, were “collaborators” in a functional sense, for they provided the broad public climate of acceptance that lent legitimacy to a more active participation.

There remain two important contemporary sources for public opinion in the two zones of France, occupied and unoccupied. Although French prefects’ reports for this period are still closed to scholars, fragments of them can be found here and there.
¹
The other main contemporary source is German intelligence reports, based upon intercepted mail, the statements of informers, and overheard conversations.
²
Both sources are subject to caution: official samplers of opinion often hear what they want to hear and tell their superiors what they think those superiors want to know. These sources are much more revealing than the press, however, and they have the great advantage over diaries and memoirs of not having been retouched after the war. They must suffice for drawing in some of the corrections on this crude graph of public opinion.

The most striking feature of public opinion about Vichy was the clear distinction most people drew between Pétain and his ministers. Both chief Vichy ministers were targets of assassins. Laval was wounded by a would-be assassin at Versailles on 27
August 1941, while out of office. Darlan was shot to death in Algiers on Christmas Eve, 1942. Pétain, by contrast, could still draw sympathetic crowds long after the total occupation of France in November 1942, not only in traditionally nationalist towns like Nancy (26–27 May 1944), but even in
frondeur
Paris just four months before the Liberation, on 26 April 1944.
³
The presence of Pétain, the World War I victor, the cautious hoarder of French blood, the bulwark against revolution, the wise father, provided a moral cover for the regime long after all its other members had been widely discredited.