Vichy France (43 page)
Beyond faith in the person of Marshal Pétain, there were other positive grounds for mass approval of the new regime. After all, nearly half the voters had voted against the Popular Front in May 1936 although the play of electoral coalitions in multicandidate races had given the Popular Front a large majority in the Chamber. The number of Catholic families who had felt strongly enough about the Third Republic’s school to pay tuition in parochial schools (about one French secondary school pupil out of five attended a parochial school) is another measure of potential mass support for this ostentatiously Catholic regime. And no one can read much of the serious journalism of the 1930’s without sensing the massive contempt for the faltering Third Republic even before the defeat.
The main ingredients for mass approval of Pétain’s regime were negative ones, however: elements that simply removed any real alternative from public attention and left Vichy as the only apparently lawful French government. The circumstances of the regime’s creation in June and July 1940 allowed little doubt of its constitutionality. Even General de Gaulle rejected Vichy’s legitimacy on philosophical rather than legal grounds: that “France is not France without grandeur.”
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The administrative
apparatus of the state went on about its work, with an even higher commitment than before to doing its job. Vichy was accepted simply because it was all there was, or all there seemed to be for some time after 1940.
Vichy was assisted too, in a negative way, by the widespread apathy of public opinion after the shock of 1940. Never, wrote Anatole de Monzie in 1943, had the French public experienced so long a period of anesthesia. Léon Blum likened it to the shock of an accident victim. Political apathy born of gloom and disgust left the way clear for a controlled press and radio to manufacture public support out of what was much more often simply public lethargy. In a curious counterpoint to the official displays of ardent support—the triumphal tours of Marshal Pétain, the delegations of scouts, war veterans, and youth groups—both prefects and German intelligence agents agreed upon “the dominant political lethargy.” In 1941 and 1942 the refrain of both kinds of report is “the general sentiment of lassitude and fatigue,” the “great discouragement and infinite lassitude” of the population.
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Apathy was deepened by a growing focus of attention upon physical needs. The conditions of life in both zones of France declined from austerity in 1940 to severe want in 1944. Even the moral discomforts of a humiliated country, divided families, restrictions upon movement and information, and the presence of an occupying army eventually yielded place to physical concerns. The French had only about 35 percent of the coal of prewar years for their own use, since imports were impossible and the richest fields of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais were administered by the German army command in Brussels rather than from Paris. Oil supplies were at one-tenth their prewar level. Electric power fell unusually short because of a dry year in 1941. Shoes were soled in wood. “You get so cold you can’t think of anything else,” wrote Jean Guéhenno in his diary on 21 January 1942.
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The main concern was food. France was eventually the worst nourished of the western occupied nations. While rural populations were at least close to the source of supply, the urban poor suffered genuine malnutrition. Roger Martin du Gard wrote Gide that he had lost 19 kilograms (over 40 pounds) by May 1942. By September, he wrote that there was literally nothing in the markets.
There are whole families who have nothing but their daily bread ration each day. There is great unrest. You can see mothers of families weeping in the street.
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Even the ration allotments were hard to obtain in cities because of diminished production and transport, peasant hoarding, and German requisitions. Alfred Fabre-Luce decided that the real voice of France by 1942 had become the growling stomach.
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Under such conditions no one could expect very warm feelings toward Germany. Both German and French observers of French public opinion agreed that anti-German feelings were very widespread and growing. French prefects’ reports warned in 1941 that German requisitions and police actions were blocking the path to collaboration and inviting the spread of communism. The German inspection teams’ opinion reports were full of information about hostility to Germany, as they reported the first gestures in the spring of 1941 of public hostility: the “V” signs painted on walls and the ostentatious carrying of two bamboo fishing poles, “deux gaules.” The surprising thing is how much less virulent those anti-German feelings were than they might have been. During the early days, the German occupation forces’ behavior was unusually good for an occupying army. Savage reprisals against the Resistance were still far in the future. Furthermore, hopes for an early peace and the apathy of defeat helped limit anti-Germanism to grumbling. The German
inspection teams consistently overestimated the extent to which the armistice was violated.
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Growing animosity toward the Allies also smoothed the way for collaboration in French public opinion. French sympathy for the Allies was traditional, but even for those who could forgive Mers-el-Kebir, that sympathy after 1940 was closely geared to two variables. Allied war successes in distant theaters raised French hopes; Allied war measures in the Western European theater (and especially the bombing of targets in France) raised French apprehensions. German observers reported two flurries of French enthusiasm for the Allies during 1941: in April 1941, when the Yugoslavs and Greeks gave promise of soaking up German might in the Balkans, and shortly after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941. The Balkan resistances were quickly crushed in another dazzling display of German prowess in May 1941, however, and the Russian campaign also soon looked as if Hitler were stronger than Napoleon.
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After the midsummer of 1941, most Allied successes seemed in France to involve French losses. First, there was the British invasion of Syria in June 1941 and the loss of that area of ancient French influence to the ancient colonial rival. Franco-British conflicts at sea over the blockade reached their peak in the spring and summer of 1941. The Allies could be blamed for food and fuel shortages. On 3 March 1942 the bombing began, with a raid on the Renault works in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt that caused a large number of civilian casualties. Between the blockade and the bombing, it was clear that hostility to Britain was increasing no less than hostility to Germany in 1942. It was
possible for two thousand people to demonstrate in Toulouse on 16 June 1942 against British bombing and “Communist terrorism,” where a year earlier hopes of German defeat had been aroused by the new German-Russian war.
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Under these conditions, response to Gaullism was even less enthusiastic in 1941 and 1942 than it had been in 1940. Until General Koenig’s troops held off a German attack at Bir-Hacheim, in the Libyan desert, in June 1942, no Gaullist ground troops had been directly engaged against the Axis. Free French efforts to force parts of the empire back into the war lent color to charges that de Gaulle was simply giving the French Empire to the British. At the very time that the French internal Resistance was entering a more active stage in the summer of 1941, Gaullism was approaching its low point in French public opinion. The union of Gaullism and the Resistance and genuine hopes of liberation at their hands were still in the future.
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The United States, too, supplier of food and possible arbiter to end the war, lost some of its appeal to neutralist French opinion after it also became a belligerent in December 1941.
Public opinion, then, offered a broad basis of acquiescence within which active participation in the Vichy regime was made legitimate. Only in the spring of 1943, after the whole of France had been occupied and after young men began to be drafted to work in German factories, do the intelligence reports consider
opinion to have turned decisively against the regime. The monthly digest of prefects’ reports for the formerly unoccupied zone for February 1943 stressed the “contrast to previous months.” It went on to describe the “universal agitation” against forced labor and shortages, including “even merchants and businessmen to whom fraud had permitted a standard of living rare in our time.… In a word, never has the public been so agitated (
frémissante
).” There was, the prefects reported, still no “organized opposition.” Public opinion had definitely turned the corner, however, nearly three years after armistice and a little over a year before D-Day.
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Ins, Outs, and Notables
P
UBLIC OPINION DURING THE
V
ICHY YEARS CAN BE
estimated only in impressionistic terms. It is rather to the active participants in the regime that one turns to test the regime’s style, temper, and character. It is tempting to assume that there was a mass replacement of “ins” by “outs” in the summer of 1940 and that the radical right that had demonstrated and paraded so noisily in the 1930’s now came to power. At first glance, Vichy looks like the triumph of 6 February 1934 demonstrators, veterans’ leaders, Maurrassiens and followers of Colonel de la Rocque, and a whole 1930’s underworld of anti-Semitic, antiparliamentary agitators. Simultaneously, important parts of the Third Republic leadership—leaders of the Popular Front, all but a handful of deputies, a large proportion of the republican mayors and town councils—passed into obscurity. A few even went into exile or prison.
Purges of personnel at changes of regime are never as sweeping
as they seem, however, and the Vichy regime made no exception. There were in fact few genuinely “new men” in office at Vichy, men who had held no major responsibilities already under the Third Republic. Joseph Darnand, the Nice garage owner and hero of World War I guerrilla patrols who rose from veterans’ militant to the cabinet post of secretary-general for the maintenance of order in December 1943, was certainly a new man. One might also add Paul Marion, ex-Communist, ex-Doriotist, and radical right journalist who became minister of information in February 1941. Outsiders found places in the realms of order and propaganda, especially later in the regime. On the other hand, they never gained influence in the vital fields of finance, defense, or diplomacy. On the contrary, some elements of Third Republic leadership passed directly into the Vichy regime almost without change of personnel. Senior civil servants and the mass of public officials went on with their jobs, with the exception of Jews, officials of Masonic orders, some prefects too closely tied to the Popular Front, and a handful of top officials personally linked to Paul Reynaud, such as the Inspectors of Finance Leca and Devaux who had been caught on their way to Spain with the secret funds of the Reynaud ministry. The Third Republic’s business elite went on virtually unchanged. Jewish businessmen, of course, were penalized, along with those who joined de Gaulle, but no leading businessman comes to mind in that category.
Vichy was run to a large degree by a selection of what French political sociologists usefully call “notables”: people of already high attainment in the worlds of public administration, business, the professions, and local affairs. With deputies, senators, and local republican mayors and councils removed from center stage, the real power of the unelected French elite was made manifest. Daniel Halévy had written in 1937 with some regret of the “end of the notables” in the 1870’s, that replacement of Orleanist gentlemen by village teachers, doctors, and shopkeepers with which the Third Republic began. One can speak of 1940 as a return of the notables, or perhaps more accurately as a persistence of the notables: those men of experience and training who stepped into the foreground with the disappearance of a parliamentary
façade in 1940. It is not accidental that Daniel Halévy, though a Jewish intellectual, saw some good in it.
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The Third Republic notables did not, however, step into office at Vichy completely unchanged. Prefects, for example, were much more extensively purged than other civil servants. An important segment, but only a segment, of the prewar socialist and trade union leadership participated in Vichy. We must look back into the Third Republic to see what lines were already being drawn, what selection was beginning to operate, which would choose that portion of the Third Republic notables who remained on top after the cataclysm of 1940.
The French Civil War: 1934–37
“I
T IS THE REVENGE OF
D
REYFUS
!” C
HARLES
M
AURRAS
exclaimed when he heard his sentence to life imprisonment in the Court of Justice at Lyons on 27 January 1945.
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The defeat in 1940 sent shock waves through all of French society, reopening old fissures that went back at least to 1789: hierarchy vs. equality, secularism vs. religion, expertise vs. election, capital vs. labor. The most important of these reopened fissures in 1940 was the rift between “order” and “revolution,” still gaping from the virtual French civil war of the mid-1930’s. The antirevolution, anticommunist line was firmly drawn then, and most of those who were to become Vichy notables had already taken their position at that time.
A double change came over French conservatism between 1934 and 1936. Their main enemy was switched from Germany to Russia abroad, and from pacifists to the rearming Popular Front at home. Secondly, their militancy was vastly intensified. Losing faith in the machinery of the Third Republic to defend their interests, they turned to vigilantism.
