Vichy France (46 page)

Another minority failed to get equal “revenge” in 1940: conservative deputies. Even though the conservative minority in the parliament since 1936 had led the attack upon what they liked to call Blum’s “Marxist experiment” in France,
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and although they had voted almost unanimously for Pétain’s full powers on 10 July 1940, they did not have the role under Vichy that they would have obtained in a lesser swing of the pendulum. One thinks of Jacques Bardoux, Laval’s fellow senator from the Puy-de-Dôme and the author of numerous works in the 1930’s
on the need for a stronger state and for a middle way between communism and fascism. Or of Anatole de Monzie, a leader of the pro-Munich lobby of 1938, whose disappointment with Vichy is spelled out in his
La Saison des juges
(1943). Henri Lémery, Pétain’s closest friend in the Senate, was minister of colonies briefly in the summer of 1940, along with seven other parliamentarians, including Ybarnégaray, Marquet, and other conservatives. Most of these went out on 12 July 1940. Pierre-Etienne Flandin, bringing in Senator Georges Portmann, gave a more parliamentary cast to things briefly in early 1941. But in general, Pierre Laval was the regime’s exceptional parliamentarian; he helped justify his own survival by a frank animosity toward parliament. Of the thirty-five men who held posts of minister or Ministre-secrétaire d’état at Vichy between 25 June 1940 and August 1944, only eleven were parliamentarians, including six (Laval, Flandin, Chautemps, Marquet, Cathala, and Déat) who had been Third Republic ministers. Of the eleven, seven were already out by 12 July 1940, another (Marquet) in September, and Déat did not get office until 1944. Among the eighteen men who held posts of Secrétaire d’état between 1940 and 1944, with access to full cabinet meetings but not to ministerial meetings, only four were former Third Republic parliamentarians. The profound revulsion against deputies, even conservative ones, excluded from power at Vichy an important segment of the prewar conservative leadership.

Experts

“W
E HAVE THE
R
EPUBLIC ON TOP AND THE
E
MPIRE
underneath,” Paul Deschanel said around the turn of the century. In fact none of the successive French Republics has wanted to dismantle the centralized, professional bodies of public administration, rooted in enlightened despotism and systematized by the Jacobins and Napoleon, which form one of the proudest and most highly trained senior civil service leaderships in the
world. The Second Republic used the prefects to impose the new regime on a reluctant countryside in the spring of 1848 and planned to create a loyal civil service through a single Ecole d’Administration. The Third Republic, born in counterrevolution, preferred to replace the personnel of Napoleon III’s imperial bureaucracy rather than to abolish it. In the nineteenth century, while such British agencies as the Treasury and the India Office were establishing professionalism in the civil service, and while the Prussian civil service built upon a professionalism already well-established, the top French bodies of public administration also became professionalized, without interruption by revolutions or successions of regime. This meant creating special schools, entrance examinations, and strict regulations concerning advancement in such bodies as the Council of State, the Inspectorate of Finance, the Cour des Comptes, the prefectoral corps, the diplomatic corps, and the military officer corps. At the very period when universal manhood suffrage became applied to parliamentarians (1848) and to local government (1884), therefore, a less conspicuous parallel evolution created bodies of experts wielding increasing real powers in the state, beyond the reach of electoral control.
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It would be wrong to overlook the mutual interdependence of experts and elected officials in Third Republic public life, but toward the end of the Third Republic the dominant note was antagonism. Two common stereotypes in French literature reflect that antagonism. On the one hand, the deputy: a self-made man, provincial, often a garrulous southerner, raffish, eloquent, and not above backstairs deals and combinations. He was trained for no discipline or skill except getting elected, creating a clientele, and perhaps becoming ministerial material by knowing when to support a government and when to begin cultivating the opposition. One thinks of the politicians Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe met at the home of the deputy Achille Roussin: “brilliant talkers, mostly southerners, they were astonishingly
dilletantish.” On the other hand, the cool, superbly trained Parisian upper-class members of the
grands corps de l’état
, more likely to have lunch with the Duchess of Guermantes than with Achille Roussin. The hostile literary stereotype portrayed them as a permanent “wall of money” against ineffectual electoral representatives, men who had the real power to buy and sell France, like Ferral’s brother in André Malraux’
La Condition humaine
, an official of the Finance Ministry who helped Ferral create a business empire in Indochina.

Behind these two literary stereotypes stood two social realities. On the one hand, the social origins of deputies grew markedly more modest over the course of the Third Republic. Country lawyers were the largest group, with teachers, country doctors, modest landowners, and store owners following along. This tendency was encouraged by the fact that the French parliament overrepresented small towns and rural France under the Third Republic. Many a deputy, even a prominent and successful one like Waldeck-Rousseau, could admit that he “never got used to Paris.” Insofar as they had attended any of the
grandes écoles
, deputies were likely to have been trained in literature or philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, like Jaurès and Blum.
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Recruitment to the
grands corps
, by contrast, grew more and more centered upon cultivated and wealthy Parisians. This mandarinate was the elite of an elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools. For the ultimate test, the written examination (concours) for entry into one of the
grands corps
, it became almost essential to attend the private Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in Paris. In 1934–35, 113 of the 117 successful candidates for the Council of State, 202 of the 211 who passed the exam for the Inspectorate of Finance, 82 of the 92 who passed the exam for the Cour des Comptes; and 240 of the 280
accepted into the diplomatic corps were graduates of
sciences po.
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It is not surprising that these two social groups—deputies and experts—belonged to almost separate worlds under the Third Republic. The only prominent deputies who came from the
grands corps
in the later Third Republic were Joseph Caillaux and François Piétri (inspectors of finance) and Léon Blum (councillor of state), although one also finds a few backbenchers drawn from the
grands corps
, diplomacy, or the military. There were twenty-seven such “experts,” for example, out of nearly a thousand deputies and senators in 1902.
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Few graduates of the elite schools cared to risk their careers in the rough and tumble of politics. One finds only four deputies among some 2,500 members of the alumni association of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1938.
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As for passage the other way, from deputy to high civil servant, schooling and professional rules of advancement virtually precluded it. At work, of course, local elected officials and prefectoral officials played each other off in a complicated symbiosis. At the top, experts worked for parliamentary committees and staffed the ministries. But the two types of career were remarkably separate in origins and attitudes as well as in literary stereotypes. The evolution was toward closed careers.
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Interwar stresses increased antagonisms between experts and deputies. As seen from the
grands corps
, the deputies seemed at best dilettantes, at worst ignorant bumpkins. Their decisions seemed to be made on the basis of political expediency rather than knowledge and efficiency. In contrast to this “jeu du forum,” according to senior public administrators like Peyrouton and Bouthillier, trained experts had no reason to indulge in political intrigue. They saw public service as a “realistic”
process of “doing,” rather than a “political” process of “making an impression.” At his trial, Bouthillier boasted that “I never played politics, neither as student nor as public official. I never belonged to a political party or sought elective office. My activity was purely administrative.”
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Bouthillier’s contempt for “politics” needs no further comment, but few deputies would have accepted his claim that administration was politically neutral. In particular, the Cartel des Gauches government of 1924 and the Popular Front of 1936 accused this closed elite world of erecting a “wall of money” against the economic reforms of Left governments, of quietly sabotaging economic policy by their permanent, uncontrollable influence in favor of an interlocking network of banks, corporations, and powerful families.

Each side in this underground tug-of-war thought the other side was gaining ground in the 1930’s. Senior public administrators were discreet, but occasionally they spoke their minds. Henri Chardon, section president in the Council of State, could tell an audience of alumni of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1936 that France had been “out of political equilibrium” for fifty years: “She has given an excessive preponderance to political powers.”
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The left parties were much franker about their fears that permanent conservative administrators stood between parliament and the actual application of public policy. The Popular Front’s education minister, Jean Zay, revived the 1848 idea of a single national school of public administration whose recruitment would produce a more democratic senior civil service. Nothing had been enacted, however, when the Popular Front ran out of steam.

Regarded more dispassionately, it was the experts who actually gained ground in the twentieth century. As elected legislatures
were confronted by more complex financial and technical matters, elected nonspecialists became less and less qualified to take well-informed decisions. The replacement of temporary legislative committees with permanent legislative committees in 1910 was already a major step away from the concept of all-competent elected representatives of a single national will. Not only did permanent committees encourage deputies and senators to specialize; they hired staffs from the
grands corps de l’état
who actually understood such matters as budget drafting, money management, and social insurance. A more ominous signal of legislative inadequacy between the wars was the new practice of voting full powers to a government to enact unpopular but necessary legislation by decree, without parliamentary vote, during economic crises. There was a tendency to appoint professional experts instead of members of parliament to ministerial posts, visible first in the military ministries, with Marshal Pétain as minister of war after the February riots of 1934 and General Maurin as minister in 1935–36. It was only a matter of degree, then, when Daladier and Reynaud named such nonelected experts to the war cabinets of 1939–40 as railroad engineer Raoul Dautry as minister of armaments (13 September 1939), playwright Jean Giraudoux and later newspaper magnate Jean Prouvost as ministers of information, Inspector of Finance Yves Bouthillier as minister of finance (5 January 1940), and Pétain again as minister without portfolio (18 May 1940).
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Pétain’s first ministry (17 June–12 July 1940) could be considered a mere quantitative expansion of war government, about half deputies and half experts, many of them having already
served under Reynaud. The experts did not simply administer the state in an emergency, however. They entered public office like conquering heroes, with an alacrity and an explicit sense of vindication that shows how frustrated they had been behind the scenes in the later Third Republic. Even after the war, Marcel Peyrouton was willing to write that after the “bureaucratic revolution” of 1940, “the French administration had never been so useful, so respectable, so vigilant.”
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The men who had exercised shadow control over Third Republic ministries, from senior administrative positions in the ministerial departments, now became ministers themselves. The professional senior public administrators, high civil servants, and members of the
grands corps de l’état
held major ministries: Alibert (former councillor of state) as minister of justice; two inspectors of finance, Baudouin and Bouthillier, as minister of foreign affairs and minister of finance. By the law of 15 July 1940, moreover, every ministry had a permanent secretary-general who was simultaneously a member of the council of state. The practice of detaching members of the
grands corps
to other prestigious posts continued at an even higher rate than under the Third Republic. For example, there were Inspectors of Finance François Piétri as ambassador to Spain in late 1940, Henri Dumoulin de Labarthète on Pétain’s staff, Jacques Barnaud as chief economic negotiator for the regime (Délégue-général du gouvernement français pour les relations economiques franco-allemandes, February 1941–November 1942), Yves Bréart de Boisanger as head of the economic delegation to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden, Fournier as head of the French national railroads, and still others as prefects (Donati, Roger-Machar), heads of Organization Committees (De Carmoy, Jacques Guérard), and secretaries-general of ministries (Henri Culmann). Councillors of state were even more frequently assigned to outside posts, such as the new permanent offices of secretary-general in each ministry. One thinks also of André Lavagne on Pétain’s staff and a number of prefects (Chéneau de
Leyritz, Olivier de Sardan, François Ripert). Yves Bouthillier could well call the regime “the primacy of administration over politics.”
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