Vichy France (44 page)

As late as the great demonstrations of 6 February 1934, conservative criticism of the Third Republic centered on the German menace. France had won the war and lost the peace, according to nationalist and veterans’ groups. In their diagnosis, parliamentary government lacked the authority, and the Radical and Socialist parties (which had won electoral majorities in 1924 and 1932) lacked the will to maintain the dominance France had won in 1918. In 1918 French armies occupied parts of the Rhineland, the Balkans, and Russia. By 1934, the army had been reduced to training cadres and military service had been reduced to one year (law of 1928), Allied troops had been withdrawn early from the Rhineland (1930 instead of 1935), reparations had been abandoned (1932), reports of German clandestine rearmament had been suppressed and ignored by the Allied control commissions (1928), and the principle of arms parity for Germany had been recognized (1932).

The scorn of nationalist and veteran groups for the republic was sharpened to paroxysm by two other developments of the early 1930’s: the beginnings of the Great Depression in France, met by deflationary measures (veterans’ pensions were cut in 1934 and 1935), and a wave of scandals implicating members of parliament in financial deals and payoffs, most notoriously the widespread suspicion that political leaders had shielded the fraudulent financial promoter Stavisky from prosecution.

Nationalist and veterans groups took matters into their own hands with the street demonstrations of 6 February 1934, the wildest night Paris had seen since 1871. It no longer seems as certain as it did at the time that the organizers of this mass demonstration sought to overthrow the republic. But they coordinated their plans for a mass move on “la maison sans fenêtres,” the Chamber of Deputies, with slogans like “throw the deputies in the Seine.” Action Française, the largest veterans’ organization, the Union Nationale des Combattants, the Croix de Feu, and other middle-class nationalist direct-action groups massed some 40,000 demonstrators in a march on the Chamber. Although the Croix de Feu on the Left Bank didn’t try very hard, the Action Française and UNC groups crossing the bridge from the Place de la Concorde pressed for hours against
police barricades until finally the police fired into the crowd (it is still not clear what orders had been given by Eugène Frot, the minister of the interior), killing 16 and wounding 655. The Chamber was kept inviolate, but Edouard Daladier’s government resigned the next day without being voted into a minority. That act recognized that the street had at least a veto power on the composition of the government of France.

The demonstration of 6 February 1934 and its repression began the virtual French civil war of the mid-1930’s. It was the Right’s Dreyfus Affair. A whole generation of conservatives who had scorned political participation now became politically active. Pierre Pucheu, bright young director of the Comité des Forges’ international steel sales organization and twice Vichy minister, dated his entry into politics to February 1934. It was time, he said, to “shake off our apathy at all costs.” A number of young intellectuals made 6 February the base of an action cult on behalf of race, blood, nation. For Drieu la Rochelle the street-fighting was proof “that this people is not dead … has not entirely lost pride in its own blood.” Lucien Rebatet found in the fighting “an undreamed-of opportunity for our country to recover its health, and its fortune within, its independence abroad.” Robert Brasillach looked back on this “exalting night” when there were “no more opinions,” only feelings; workers and bourgeois talked to each other as equals, and revolution was again possible. “That divine couple, Courage and Fear, had joined again and stalked the streets.”
¹⁶

It was not only men of the Right who were aroused against the decadent “république des petits” by the killings of 6 February 1934. Daniel Halévy, who had been one of the first Dreyfusards and a founder of
L’Humanité
before World War I, but more recently disillusioned by the uprooting of old values and by the petty futility he found in republican quarrels, was described by his nephew early the next morning

striding the streets alone … gesticulating as if crying vengeance: my uncle Daniel Halévy who, beside himself, losing all restraint,
throwing down the mask, publicly proclaimed himself a man of the extreme right.
¹⁷

This aroused militancy began to be redirected against a different target after February 1934. The accusation of weakness remained, but the source of the threat was transferred from the
boches
to the Bolsheviks. Fear of revolution was, of course, a constant of French conservative politics. In the 1930’s, however, men of impeccably republican background joined the conservative crusade against the Left, as their fathers and grandfathers had in 1917, 1871, and 1848. They were frightened this time by the depression, by the possibility of another war with its attendant revolution, and by the Communist party’s efforts to emerge from its isolation. Their frantic antibolshevism began to prepare the alignment of 1940.

The French Left had indeed reacted to the nationalist demonstrations of February 1934 by an “opening to the left,” in the form of a socialist and radical rapprochement with the previously isolated Communist party. Some Communist militants had marched against the republic with the nationalists on February 6. Over the succeeding months, however, an antifascist front united them with the democratic Left. The formation of the Popular Front coalition in time to win the elections of May–June 1936 is too familiar a part of the history of the Third Republic to need retelling here. The point is that in a popular vote divided nearly fifty-fifty, the left parties profited by their union to win a majority of seats in the Chamber and Senate. The Communist delegation, in particular, grew from ten to seventy-two seats. Conservatives felt unrepresented and turned more willingly to direct action. Furthermore, the wave of sit-down strikes that began in the aircraft factories of Paris on 26 May 1936 and that surged in a wave of postelectoral jubilation across the country until more than a million men were on strike, heightened a climate of civil war. French conservatives believe to this day that a Bolshevik takeover had begun, although it is quite clear that the leaders of both the Communist party and the CGT were
taken by surprise by that spontaneous wave of jubilation and by the occupation of factories. Indeed, the workers were good-humored, damaged nothing in the occupied factories, and hadn’t the remotest idea what to do next. But their demonstration of the fragility of owners’ control threw owners into panic.

Left successes had already sent the Right into the streets before 1936. The victory of the “Cartel des Gauches” in 1924, combined with France’s humiliating failure to gain anything by the military occupation of the Rhineland in 1923, produced a rash of direct-action nationalist groups, of which Les Jeunesses Patriotes of the champagne magnate Pierre Taittinger and the Federation Nationale Catholique of General Curières de Castelnau, Xavier Vallat, and Jean Le Cour Grandmaison were the most conspicuous. But between 1934 and 1936, antirevolution definitively took precedence over foreign grandeur and traditional anti-Germanism as the fuel of right-wing activism.

The heightening shrillness of the conservative press between 1934 and 1936 is very revealing. Colonel de la Rocque’s
Flambeau
, for example, the newspaper of the Croix de Feu, acquired larger and larger headlines and repeatedly pronounced the revolution at hand in the spring of 1936. The normally understated
Temps
habitually called the moderately reformist Popular Front program “revolutionary” during the winter of 1935–36. Daniel Halévy was still writing in 1937 that the Chamber elected in 1936 was “revolutionary.” That kind of hyperbole led straight to the later assertion of Vichy propagandists that “Moscow ran France for years.”
¹⁸
In effect, the National Front, the Popular Front’s electoral opponent in the elections of April–May 1936, had already drawn up the alignment of those conservatives and fearful liberals whose expectation of imminent revolution subordinated everything else to antibolshevism. In their eyes, the Third Republic had lost its legitimacy by failing to protect them from Stalin in 1936 long before it failed to protect them from Hitler in 1940.

That alignment helped prevent Frenchmen from forming another 1914 “union sacrée” as war with Hitler loomed in the late 1930’s. Internally, the traditional partisans of national defense feared war more than they feared Hitler while the most vigorous anti-Hitlerians stood on the traditionally pacifist Left. There was simply no political basis for a national defense coalition, even when the political temperature moderated somewhat after the end of the first Blum government in June 1937 and the vigilantism of 1934–37 abated. Externally, the most militarily obvious alliance, the Franco-Russian combination, was excluded, because, as the opponents of the Franco-Soviet Pact said in the Chamber in February 1936, official cooperation with the Soviet Army would encourage and legitimize the French Communist party at home. Behind that was the less openly stated support for Hitler as the best barrier to Stalin and the fear since 1917 that any war meant revolution. The other possible alliance, with Italy, was more welcome to French officers. In this case, it was Mussolini rather than the French who put ideological hostility above common geopolitical interests. War against Hitler, under these conditions, became “Moscow’s War” to conservatives because it could hardly be waged without Russian aid.

When war actually broke out, conservatives’ fears of the Left were the reverse of those of 1914. The planned arrests of pacifists (including Pierre Laval) did not have to take place in 1914, for the Left by and large rallied to the national war effort. By contrast, conservatives feared the Left in 1939 for its bellicosity. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 25 August 1939 provided an unexpected pretext for police action against the Communist party. With the declaration of war on 3 September, the party, which conservatives had accused of dragging France into a war against Hitler, was now dissolved for opposing that war. During the war itself, the Communist left seems to have been more vigorously pursued than the pro-German fringe groups that were also proscribed when the war broke out. Certainly no other deputies were unseated.

Long before 1940, therefore, an important group of Frenchmen had come to regard revolution as the main threat to France
and war with Hitler as a regrettable diversion from the main task of preventing that revolution. The antibolshevists of the 1930’s formed a major ingredient of the Vichy notables. They extended all the way from traditional conservatives through disillusioned liberal participants in the Popular Front to socialist and trade union leaders whose positions had been threatened by Communist growth in 1936. Indeed, antibolshevism is the nearest thing to a Vichy common denominator.

The Revenge of the Minorities

T
HOSE EXCLUDED FROM POWER BY THE
P
OPULAR
F
RONT
were obvious candidates for its succession. Participants in the nationalist demonstrations of 6 February 1934 were a leading case. Jean Chiappe, whose removal as Paris prefect of police had helped provoke the demonstrations, reappeared as governor-general of the French Levant (only to have his plane shot down near Cyprus on his way to Beirut in December 1940). Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, president of the Association of the wounded of 6 February 1934, and perhaps the most virulent anti-Semite of the interwar years, earned unexpected power and influence as French commissioner for Jewish affairs (1942–44). Another member of the association, Charles Trochu, became president of the Paris city council in November 1941. Jean Ybarnégaray held the Ministry of Youth and Health in 1940, and Philippe Henriot became the regime’s radio spokesman in 1944. Veterans of those demonstrations were a kind of fraternity, and one finds job-seekers during Vichy being recommended as “good 6 February men.”
¹⁹

There were also those who had lost power or influence after the elections of 1936 or who had been removed from office by the Popular Front. The year 1940 was a kind of homecoming
for men like Laval, frequent minister in the early 1930’s and out in the cold after the elections of 1936. Laval reveled quite frankly in his revenge against the Popular Front. He told U.S. Charge d’Affaires Freeman Matthews in November 1940 that the Popular Front had been a “vile and criminal demagogy” that had “turned Frenchmen against democracy.”
²⁰

Former deputies who had been defeated in 1936, like Pierre Cathala, now returned to public life. So did others who had run for election and failed, like Raphael Alibert and Joseph Barthélemy. A few top appointive officials returned to high office as well; prominent among these was Marcel Peyrouton, who had been removed in 1936 from his post as high commissioner in Morocco, and now became minister of interior in 1940.

There were the leaders of interwar veterans’ organizations. Divided by personal rivalry and conflict of interest into a plethora of small pressure groups between the wars, the two major veterans’ organizations (the UNC and the UFC) had managed only partially to compose their differences in a National Veterans’ Confederation in the early 1930’s. An inflated rhetoric according to which the “generation of the trenches” was supposed to run the country that it had saved clashed badly with the mediocre achievement of the veterans’ movements. They could agree only to protest against the deflationary cuts in pensions of 1934 and 1935. They blamed their inefficacies on the Third Republic and assailed the republic bitterly for frittering away the fruits of their victory.

A number of interwar veterans’ leaders stepped up to assume that role which the “generation of the trenches” had claimed to have been cheated of by the Third Republic. The single Légion Française des Combattants offered them an end to internal rivalries, unity under authority, and an official mission to “extend [the new order] to the remotest village and make the new order prevail.”
²¹
While some interwar veterans’ leaders like Jean Goy took a fascist stance in Paris and served on the Paris municipal council, and others like Georges Lebecque and Henri Pichot
served quietly in legion posts, others—most notably Georges Scapini and Xavier Vallat—took leading positions at Vichy.