Vichy France (45 page)

On the other side of the coin, many of Vichy’s most prominent victims were the clearly marked enemies of the 1930’s right. It was not merely the wartime leaders (Daladier, Reynaud, General Gamelin) who were imprisoned and then tried. Marx Dormoy, the Popular Front minister of the interior who had prosecuted the underground anticommunist terrorists known as the “Cagoule” in 1937 and had removed Jacques Doriot from his perpetual office as major of Saint-Denis, was first expelled from office as a member of the
conseil-général
of the Allier in July 1941 and then murdered by Cagoulards later the same month. Jean Zay, charged with subverting French youth as Popular Front minister of education, and Georges Mandel, the leading antiarmistice minister of 1940, were murdered by Milice in the summer of 1944. Stanley Hoffmann was right to call Vichy “the revenge of the minorities.”
²²

On closer inspection, however, the prewar minorities did not all enjoy equal revenge. In particular, Vichy cannot be described as simply a takeover of France by the protofascist “Leagues” that had marched and demonstrated so noisily in the 1930’s. Few of the 1930’s league leaders got very far at Vichy. Colonel de La Rocque, whose Croix de Feu and its successor, the Parti Social Français, was by far the largest of the interwar leagues, expected a major role in any authoritarian successor to the Third Republic. There is a fascinating glimpse, in François Chasseigne’s trial, of PSF efforts to obtain four places in the city council of Issoudun, for example. At the top, however, La Rocque complained about “total ostracism” by Vichy, whose new Veterans’ Legion was controlled by “those most hostile to me and to our work.” In September 1940 he urged his followers to display “formal discipline behind Marshal Pétain” but “absolute reserve” toward all members of the government, while attempting to keep his movement going (now rechristened Progrès Social Français) as an independent force. The PSF was banned in the Occupied Zone,
and La Rocque was arrested there briefly in January 1941, where the colonel’s rivals from more militantly fascist prewar leagues persuaded the Germans that the PSF was “chauvinist” and under “Jewish influence.” Eventually, La Rocque accepted a “fusion” with the Veterans’ Legion in August 1941, at the high point of efforts to make veterans the main organized political support of the regime. This meant in practice that his approximately 350,000 members were swallowed up in the Legion. La Rocque himself was compensated with a post as
chargé de mission
attached to Pétain’s cabinet, where, American diplomats learned, he kept telephoning for something to do. This essentially colorless figure had thus gravitated to his proper level. A few of La Rocque’s followers enjoyed high office at Vichy. Jean Ybarnégaray had been leader of the party’s parliamentary group after 1936. Paul Creyssel, a former Radical deputy who joined the PSF group in December 1936, became secretary-general for propaganda in 1943. Félix Olivier-Martin, professor of law at Poitiers and prewar PSF militant, replaced Lamirand as secretary-general for youth affairs in 1943. Other PSF leaders, however, were bitterly disillusioned by their failure to dominate the new regime. Barochin, who could still tell an American diplomat in March 1942 that the PSF was the only organized force capable of running France, was by then deeply disillusioned by “collaboration” and contemptuous of Vichy. Charles Vallin, former vice-president of the PSF, escaped to London in the summer of 1942 expecting a cabinet position, but accepted simple mobilization as an officer in the Free French Forces. The PSF’s inconsequence at Vichy helped complete its dispersal as a political movement.
²³

The other major 1930’s league leaders gravitated to Paris, where they attacked Vichy for its old-fashioned clerical, patriotic air and its halfhearted association with the world fascist “revolution.” The most able and successful of these was Jacques Doriot, whose Parti Populaire Français was believed to have 30,000 members, 4,000 of them active, in 1941. Doriot’s personal magnetism permitted him to remain mayor of the Paris working-class suburb of Saint-Denis through his evolution from head of the young Communists in the 1920’s to creator of the fascist Parti Populaire Français in the 1930’s. He never held Vichy office, not even in 1944. He was remembered there with hostility as the organizer of resistance within the army to the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and the Rif War in 1925. Laval and Darlan both went out of their way to block Doriotist influence in Vichy organizations and won Abetz’ assistance in preventing Doriot from becoming an alternate German candidate for the office of prime minister. Laval tried, without success, to get the Germans to dissolve the PPF after the total occupation of France in November 1942. There were, nonetheless, active centers of PPF activity in the Vichy zone, especially in Tunisia and Marseille. Moreover, two major Vichy ministers and several high ministerial officials had spent time in the PPF in the late 1930’s. Paul Marion, who like Doriot moved from the Communist party to fascism, served as editor in chief of Doriot’s
Emancipation nationale
and as director of propaganda for the PPF until January 1939, when he broke with Doriot over “the Stalinist character of your relations with people” and “the weakness of your reactions in face of the pan-German surge since Munich and the recent Italian provocations.” He served as Darlan’s minister for information and, having helped undermine the Darlan government in March–April 1942, remained as head of propaganda
efforts under Laval. Pierre Pucheu, international sales director for the French steel industry, abandoned La Rocque for Doriot in 1936 because the former seemed too soft; he, too, left the PPF in January 1939 after Mussolini’s public claims to Tunisia, Corsica, and Nice. He became Darlan’s minister of industrial production and then of the interior in 1941. Similar evolutions were followed by Pucheu’s friends Yves Paringaux,
directeur du cabinet
in the Ministry of the Interior under Darlan, and Robert Loustau, coal mining entrepreneur who held high positions under Pucheu in the Ministry of Industrial Production in 1941 and in Gibrat’s Ministry of Communications, and by Emile Boyez, secretary-general in the Ministry of Labor in 1944. Those who remained with Doriot after the party split of 1939, however, circulated in the Paris world rather than the Vichy world. Doriot drew funds from Abetz, tried to get his followers lucrative places as provisional administrators of Jewish businesses, and occupied a leading role in the client journalistic and political life around the German presence. His main energies went into the Anti-Bolshevik Legion (Légion des Volontaires contre le Bolshevisme), the French volunteers who fought in German uniform on the Russian front after the summer of 1941. Doriot himself left for the Russian front on 4 September 1941. One could say that after April 1942 Doriot occupied the Damocles’ sword position against Laval that Laval had occupied against Darlan after February 1941. Laval, however, with Abetz’ support, was much more successful in shutting Doriot out than Darlan had been against Laval.
²⁴

In addition to Doriot, Paris swarmed with a rabble of marginal conspirators and journalists from the 1930’s radical right who enjoyed the security of German embassy pensions and a cardboard world of fictitious power. These included such raffish figures as the naval engineer Eugène Deloncle, linked to the prewar terriorist group the “Cagoule,” which had assassinated some of Mussolini’s enemies for him and whose main achievement in occupied Paris was blowing up seven Paris synagogues in the night of 2–3 October 1941, thereby getting his accomplices in the German security police into trouble with the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich. Deloncle’s Mouvement Socialiste Révolutionnaire was thought by German intelligence to have 1,385 members in 1941. He struggled for preeminence with Doriot and Déat within such Paris collaborationist organizations as the Anti-Bolshevik Legion and was executed by the Gestapo in November 1943. Alongside this edifying figure was a cloud of minor hate-mongering journalists for whom Abetz’ payments and an assured paper ration guaranteed their first regular appearance in print, if not any readership. There was the Corsican pilot and Bonapartist Pierre Costantini, who founded a Ligue Française D’Epuration, d’Entr’aide Sociale et de Collaboration Européenne and published
L’Appel.
He was charitably admitted to an asylum after the war. There was Henry Coston, the self-styled continuator of Drumont’s campaign against Jews and Freemasons. There were the young antibourgeois novelists of the 1930’s, such as Pierre Drieu La Rochelle who took over the
Nouvelle revue française
, Robert Brasillach of
Je suis partout
, Lucien Rebatet, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Some prewar radical right journals (
Je suis partout, Gringoire
) now turned their muckraking style against the chauvinism and social reaction they decried at Vichy. Other prewar journals were put into the hands of Abetz clients: Claude Jeantet, former diplomatic correspondant of Doriot’s
La Liberté
, became editor in
chief of Pierre Dupuy’s
Petit Parisien
, which Pétain had hoped to make his own organ in Paris. Marcel Déat became director of the paper for which he had written “Mourir pour Dantzig?” in 1939,
L’Oeuvre
, with some of the old staff remaining. Finally the German embassy created some new journals out of whole cloth, such as
La Gerbe
, for such writers as Henry de Montherlant and Count Clément Serpeille de Gobineau, a genetic racist without the style of his distinguished ancestor; and
La France au travail
, for those labor leaders like Georges Dumoulin and Marcel Roy for whom anticommunism had become more important than the survival of trade unions.
²⁵

The main point to make here is that none of the Paris
Ligueurs
achieved office at Vichy except Marcel Déat. Déat began as the kind of socialist willing to march in his captain’s uniform to Père Lachaise cemetery on 28 May 1917 in the annual demonstration for the dead of the Commune of 1871. By 1931 he had become national secretary of the socialist student organization, a
lycée
professor, co-editor with Henri Moysset of the complete works of Proudhon, and a prominent younger intellectual within the SFIO. In 1933, along with Adrien Marquet and Barthélemy Montagnon, Déat broke away from the SFIO’s Dreyfus-generation leadership to found the Neosocialist movement, a post-depression antiliberal heresy of socialism that emphasized a planned, autarkic economy and centralized authority within the nation. Although Déat was minister of aviation in the Sarraut cabinet of 1936, he had become a leading pacifist by the time of Munich. After the defeat, he was expected to be a major figure in Laval’s single party, and in that relationship with Laval
lies the reason for his participation in Vichy in 1944. Déat was the other person arrested in the 13 December 1940 move against Laval, and after Laval had joined him in Paris, Déat founded in January 1941 what Abetz no doubt thought was going to be the long-awaited single party: the Rassemblement National Populaire. Abetz thought it was going to be a “front of the ‘left’ and fascists” capable of bringing pressure upon the “reactionaries” at Vichy. In fact, it became merely one Paris splinter group among many. The RNP received Georges Mandel’s apartment as a headquarters, enjoyed money and support from the German embassy, and campaigned for European unity under Germany in the crusade against bolshevism. Darlan, as the main target of Déat’s attack upon Vichy’s technocrats, clericals, and “defeated and decorated military men,” told General Vogl in July 1941 that he would not sit at the same table with RNP leaders. After Laval returned to power in April 1942, Déat continued to receive his and Abetz’ support as the most useful Paris rival to Doriot. Déat carefully excluded Doriotists from the new Front Révolutionnaire National he founded on 28 April 1943. By December 1943, therefore, after Pétain had proven Vichy’s powerlessness by failing to remove Laval a second time, Abetz and Laval were able to introduce Déat into the government as minister of labor and national solidarity simultaneously with Joseph Darnand as secretary-general for the maintenance of order. By 1944, then, with the gradual using up and disappearance of the more regular notables who dominated Vichy’s most autonomous years, it was possible for some of the Paris radical right to come to power at Vichy. But the only man to do so was a former Third Republic minister who had been Laval’s key barrier to Doriot in Paris. Vichy was not the triumph of the prewar protofascist leagues.
²⁶

Of course, it can be objected that the league leaders of the 1930’s had triumphed in their ideas if not in their persons. There is no question that anti-Semitism, antiparliamentarism, and antiliberal reaction in all its forms were made easier by their long poisoning of public opinion. Charles Maurras, in particular, had already carried out “an intellectual and moral coup d’état.”
²⁷
By 1940, Maurras, always more interested in ideas than in action and now in his seventies, contented himself with an occasional lecture on Frédéric Mistral and the continued appearance until November 1942 in the Vichy zone of
Action française.
His damage had already been done. As Eugen Weber has said, many Frenchmen were Maurrassien without knowing it. The generation of 1940 was literally steeped in his ideas, from Pétain’s speech writer René Gillouin and his
chef de cabinet
Henri Dumoulin de Labarthète to Charles de Gaulle. Maurrassiens were important in the army, the higher civil service, business, and in the Resistance as well as at Vichy. German intelligence was uncomfortable with the
Action française
’s longing for the days of Richelieu, and they even discussed arresting Maurras in 1943. The point remains: the 1930’s league leaders did not move
en bloc
into Vichy office.
²⁸