Vichy France (48 page)

Before looking at them, however, we must clear away a group of renegades from the Socialist and Radical parties who had already moved outside them before the war. In other words, we must deal with the ex-left first in order to avoid all confusion with the minority left of 1940. Evolution of politicians from youthful socialism to an opportunist parliamentary centrism, as in the case of Pierre Laval, was too frequent a Third Republic phenomenon to cause confusion here. In addition, however, there was a set of heresies of the Left in the 1930’s that moved some Socialist and Radical politicians not into expedient centrism but into marginal new movements. Vichy offered opportunities to some of these. First, there was a kind of Jacobin concern for a “pure, hard” republic that alienated some younger Radicals from that party, the very personification of the “republic of pals.” Gaston Bergery’s “frontiste” movement of the late 1930’s was an effort to escape party altogether in a new mass movement by which France could “catch up” and cease to be an “island of mediocrity” in the face of fascism and communism. By October
1938, he was calling for a “Government of Public Safety” capable of leaping beyond the sterile combinations of Popular Front and National Front to be both anticommunist and antitrust.

To struggle against the trusts without struggling against the Stalinists is to lose the middle classes and peasants who represent nearly three-fourths of France. To struggle against the Stalinists without struggling against the trusts is to throw into opposition the working class, without whose cooperation social peace and any effort of reconstruction are myths.
⁴⁹

Bergery was active behind the scenes in the summer and fall of 1940, drafting Pétain’s message of 11 October 1940 on controlling the excesses of capitalism, for example. He then became Vichy ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Another route away from the traditional left parties passed through economic planning and the attendant need for national authority. The Neosocialists of Marcel Déat broke with the SFIO at the annual congress of November 1933 on that ostensible point.

Some ex-left deputies passed directly into new authoritarian parties. It is remarkable how successfully La Rocque’s Parti Social Français, in particular, drew upon disaffected Radicals as well as upon conservatives. Paul Creyssel, for example, passed from Radical in 1932 to “independent radical” (i.e., opposed to the Popular Front) in 1936 to PSF in December 1936. He was to be secretary of state for information at Vichy in 1943. As the more moderate PSF recruited among disillusioned Radicals, some renegade Communists passed directly from one militancy to another, as in the case of Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français and the other former young Communists, such as Paul Marion, who joined it. Others, like François Chasseigne and L.-O. Frossard, who left the Communist party in 1929 and 1923 respectively, returned to the SFIO before becoming disillusioned with parliamentary solutions altogether.

Most of these ex-leftists were young, frustrated by the domination of the SFIO and the Radicals by elderly leadership that
had emerged during the Dreyfus Affair. A final ex-leftist at Vichy was more a relic of an earlier form of left heresy. Hubert Lagardelle had been a leading spokesman of syndicalist hostility to parliamentary socialism before World War I as editor of
Le Mouvement socialiste.
He had published the works of leading European antiparliamentary revolutionaries and had introduced a leading syndicalist theorist to a leading practitioner: Georges Sorel to Benito Mussolini. Having then followed Mussolini’s route from syndicalism to nationalist corporatism, Lagardelle had been called to Rome by Ambassador Henry de Jouvenel in January 1933 as “social councillor of the embassy,” where he remained until 1940 without having, it seems, aided Franco-Italian relations by that remote and perhaps embarrassing acquaintance with Mussolini. When Lagardelle was made minister of labor in April 1942, replacing Belin, he had become a sixty-eight-year-old relic and the Labor Ministry largely an instrument of coercion.
⁵⁰

The ex-leftists at Vichy are perhaps less surprising than the minority leftists. From the trade union movement came a number of union officials ready to participate in the National Revolution. Although Léon Jouhaux, president of the CGT, was unwelcome at Vichy even if he had wanted a public role, his assistant director, René Belin, who had worked his way up through the ranks of the telephone union, felt released from a hostile majority. Belin’s followers had set themselves apart in the 1930’s around the review
Syndicats
, to defend a pure syndicalist conception of the CGT’s role: its complete separation from party politics. Union hostility to middle-class parliamentary socialists was traditional in the CGT, but in 1936 syndicalism had become a code word for opposition to Communist power in the unions. When the CGT and the Communist unions (CGTU) were reunified in the spring of 1936 after fifteen years’ separation, the Communist unions brought with them a tight subjection to the parliamentary party and its electoral tactics. A number of unionists resented this, on both traditional and ideological grounds. The
Syndicats
group also marked its distance from the Communist party after 1936 by opposing rearmament as a threat to
peace, by urging concessions to Hitler over Czechoslovakia, and by remaining skeptical of parliament as an avenue of social reform.

The men around
Syndicats
gathered some quite impressive force in French trade unionism in the late 1930’s. One minority had become infatuated with economic planning, to which the syndicalist doctrine of replacing the state by workers’ associations was theoretically adaptable. Georges Lefranc, for example, head of the CGT’s night-school program in the 1930’s and editor of the syndicalist planned-economy journal
Révolution constructive
, found himself in a minority as the SFIO parliamentary leadership in the 1930’s rejected economic planning as a device to prop up capitalism.

A much larger minority reacted to the growing threat of war with more militant pacifism. The Left, remembering its role in 1914, had good reason to fear another “union sacrée” that, as Bergery said, would prevent continuing the struggle against “our own economic aristocracy” by diverting workers’ energies into war. André Delmas’ teachers’ union (Syndicat National des Instituteurs) and Mathé’s union of postal and telegraph workers were leaders in efforts to refuse war on behalf of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and to oppose rearmament. They organized the strike of 30 November 1938 and the “Immediate Peace” petition of the fall of 1939, signed by intellectuals as well as such labor leaders as Pierre Vigne, head of the mineworkers’ federation. The French left was genuinely divided as to whether preparing for war against Hitler would deter war or encourage it. The two founders of the Comité des Intellectuels contre le Fascisme, ancestor of the Popular Front, reacted in opposite ways: Paul Rivet for pacifism, Paul Langevin for rearmament. André Delmas’ pacifist motion received over a fourth of the votes at the November 1938 CGT congress. As the old syndicalist and pan-European Francis Delaisi said to Christian Pineau in June 1940, why should any more Frenchmen die for the City of London?
⁵¹

The largest left minority were the anti-Communists. As war against Hitler came to seem “Moscow’s War,” pacifism enhanced anticommunism. So did the ancient syndicalist tradition that rebelled at close union ties to a political party. There were also practical reasons for CGT disgruntlement with the Popular Front. When the Communist unions were reintegrated into the CGT in 1936, a number of union locals found themselves with a Communist majority and a number of CGT local leaders were voted out of office. Georges Dumoulin, for example, longtime CGT head for the Nord department, lost his place. Marcel Roy similarly lost his position as head, of the metalworkers’ federation. Raymond Froideval was forced out as head of the construction workers’ federation. These displaced union officials, and more like them, gravitated to the
Syndicats
group. Even those who continued to control their unions after the Popular Front reunited them, such as André Delmas, were full of denunciations for Communist “colonization” since the “disaster” of 1936. These men formed the “Independence of Syndicalism” tendency at the CGT congress of November 1938, which received 7,221 votes against the 16,582 votes for the official position and 1,280 abstentions.
⁵²

The war itself completed the process by which some union officials arrived at Vichy. As Bergery had predicted, another “union sacrée” (with the Communists underground) led the CGT to accept wartime arbitration and cooperation with the regime, an infringement of peacetime syndical liberties that it seemed normal to continue in June 1940. The war also exposed the failure of traditional socialism, as seen by such figures as Georges Lefranc. His article in
Esprit
in June 1940 sums up all the disillusion of the left minorities of the 1930’s. Traditional socialism had played its cards and lost in 1936. In 1936, the Left had passed from a minority to a mass, and Rousseau had been proven wrong. The mass was mentally inferior and morally weak. Efforts to convert them to economic planning went over their heads. It was a time to run socialism by an elite, authority, and faith. Communist betrayal further proved that workers’
liberties must be defended in a national rather than an international context. The old ideals were now “a pile of ruins.” Quoting Belin, he said it was time to accept the integration of workers into the economy and cooperation with such state machinery as arbitration. Workers must bury what is dead and move forward.
⁵³

The elimination of communism followed by parliamentary socialism opened the way for these outsiders of the Left. René Belin became minister of industrial production and labor from 14 July 1940 to 23 February 1941 and remained minister of labor until 18 April 1942. Raymond Froideval and Georges Lefranc served on his staff. Some of the anti-Communist union officials had already gotten their pre-1936 jobs back with the suppression of the Communist party in September 1939. Antibolshevism carried Georges Dumoulin, Marcel Roy, and others as far as cooperation with Abetz’ labor propaganda newspapers in Paris,
La France au travail
and
L’Atelier.
Dumoulin went on to serve as inspector-general of the Comités Sociaux, those stillborn local mixed committees of workers, administrators, and employers foreseen under the Charte du travail, when Henry Lagardelle became minister of labor in 1942. Marcel Roy was named a workers’ delegate to the Organization Committee for the automobile industry. Even a number of more circumspect union leaders cooperated for a time with the new labor machinery, if Georges Lefranc’s memory is correct.
⁵⁴

Naturally enough, the antiparty bias of Vichy made it easier for selected union officials than for SFIO leaders to participate. A few SFIO leaders had broken with Blum in 1936, however, over rearmament and pacifism. Paul Faure, secretary-general of the SFIO, was the most prominent of these. Paul Faure, son of a socialist and himself a Guesdist from his school days, retained
a virulent anticommunism from the split at Tours in 1920, which he continued between the wars with a brusque abruptness proper to a party functionary rather than to a deputy. He was also a leading proponent of pacifism in the party. Although the views he expressed in
Les Marchands de canon et la paix
(1924) were orthodox in the 1920’s, only a minority followed Faure in continuing to oppose rearmament after 1936 in the face of Hitler. Although Paul Faure expected to become a minister in 1940, he served only as adviser to Laval. He reappears briefly in the German documents as an emissary between Vichy and the Germans after Laval’s dismissal on 13 December 1940.
⁵⁵
The other major SFIO renegade was Charles Spinasse, Blum’s Minister of National Economy in 1936. He belonged less to Vichy than to the journalistic world of Paris, where he edited
Le Rouge et le bleu
in 1941–42.

The outsider-left at Vichy casts some light on quarrels in the CGT and the SFIO before the war. More importantly, it shows the breadth of Marshal Pétain’s following, at least for the first year or two. Far from being new men, or leaders of the 1930’s radical right, the collaborators were a selection of Third Republic notables from one end of the political spectrum to the other. It is now time to see how long this elite remained collaborators.

¹
Monthly digests of prefects’ reports for the Occupied Zone for March–May 1941 are published in
DFCAA
, IV, 385–96, 491–503. Monthly digests of prefects’ reports for the Vichy zone for January–April 1943 may be consulted at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, dossier CCCLXXXIII, items 2–9. Jacques Baudot,
L’Opinion publique sous l’occupation
(Paris, 1960), makes use of official material for one department, the Eure.

²
Military inspection teams of the Armistice Commission submitted regular public opinion reports to Wiesbaden. See T-77/OKW-1432, OKW-1434, OKW-1436–39, and OKW-1605.

³
One can moderate the romanticized account of the Paris visit in works like Jean Tracou,
Le Maréchal aux liens
(Paris, 1948), 217 ff., without denying the extraordinary range and longevity of faith in Pétain himself.

⁴
Charles de Gaulle,
Mémoires de guerre
, vol. 1,
L’Appel
(Paris, 1954). The Brazzaville manifesto of 27 October 1940 declared the Vichy regime “unconstitutional and subject to the invader” and announced that in the absence of a “government properly French,” a “new power” must assume the French war effort.