Vichy France (50 page)

³⁶
Marcel Peyrouton,
Du Service public à la prison commune
(Paris, 1950), 120; Yves Bouthillier,
Le Drame de l’armistice
(Paris, 1950), I, 13, 177; II, 256.
Ministère public c/Bouthilliey
, 36.

³⁷
La réforme de l’état
, Conferences organisées par la société des anciens élèves et élèves de l’Ecole libre des sciences politiques (Paris, 1936). Most of the conservative blueprints for constitutional reform provided a larger role for experts or functional representatives than in traditional French republican practice. See Jacques Bardoux,
La France de demain. Textes du comité technique pour la réforme de l’état
(Paris, 1936).

³⁸
See Robert K. Gooch,
The Trench Parliamentary Committee System
(New York, 1935); Jacques Soubeyrol,
Les Décrets-lois sous la quatrième république
(Bordeaux, 1955). Denis Bichelonne, future Vichy minister of industrial production, appeared already as Dautry’s
chef de cabinet.
Dautry himself, an apostle of the preeminence of expertise over representation between the wars, was excluded from office under Vichy and was thus available to continue this tradition as the Fourth Republic minister of reconstruction. See his
Organisation de la vie sociale
(Cahiers du redressement français, 1924), and his
Métier d’homme
(Paris, 1937), which calls for a “revolution of order,” planning, and elite leadership, with admiring references to Lyautey and Rathenau.

³⁹
Peyrouton, 84.

⁴⁰
Bouthillier, I, 13. The number of
Conseillers d’Etat
detached for outside duty grew from two in 1937, four in 1939, seventeen in 1941, to nineteen in 1943. After a decrease to 11 in 1946, it continued to rise after the war: 15 in 1947, 26 in 1953. See Conseil d’Etat,
Annuaire.

⁴¹
Hilaire wrote a defense of Laval,
L’Homme qu’il fallait tuer
(Paris, 1949), under the pseudonym of Julien Clermont. See also Pierre Cathala,
Face aux réalités
(Paris, 1948), and
Ministère public c/Bonnefoy.

⁴²
Urban
, in the categories of the French census, meant a commune whose chief town had more than 2,000 inhabitants.

⁴³
Michelet,
Origines du XIXe siècle
, quoted in Daniel Halévy,
La Fin des notables
(Paris, 1937), 69. Lucien Romier,
Problèmes économiques de l’heure présente
(Montréal, n.d. [1932]). Romier was trained as a historian but worked as a publicist for businessmen’s associations. He edited
La Journée industrielle
and was on the editorial board of
Le Figaro.
Although he believed in industrial rationalization [see the
Idées très simples pour les français
(1928), written for Ernest Mercier’s “Redressement Français”], his dominant theme was fear and contempt for mass consumer society. See
Qui sera le maître: Europe ou Amérique
(1927). He was thought to be Pétain’s closest adviser in 1941.

⁴⁴
The best example is probably Gustave Thibon, host of Simone Weil in 1941 and frequent guest of Marshal Pétain at Vichy. See Victor-Henry Debidour, “Un Défenseur des communautés organiques au XXe siècle, Gustave Thibon,” in Claude Bernardin et al.,
Libéralisme, Traditionalisme, Decentralisation: Contribution à l’histoire des idées politiques
(Paris, 1952), 125–27. Another example is René Gillouin, who wrote Pétain’s most traditionalist policy statement, the speech of 13 August 1940. See his doctrinal articles in
Revue universelle
, 25 July and 10 August 1941. Barrès’ novel
Les déracinés
(1897) and Proudhon were points of departure for this school.

⁴⁵
Romier,
Problèmes
, 162–63. See also Alfred Sauvy,
Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres
(Paris, 1967), II, 22, for others who rejoiced that France’s old-fashioned economy was “timide et prospère.”

⁴⁶
General Emile Laure,
Pétain
(Paris, 1941), 433.

⁴⁷
Gustave Thibon,
Diagnostiques
(Paris, 1942). See also Léon Liebman, “Entre le mythe et la légende: ‘L’Anti-capitalisme’ de Vichy,”
Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie
(Institut Solvay), 1964.

⁴⁸
I have examined the officer corps more fully in
Parades and Politics at Vichy
(Princeton, N.J., 1966). For Charles-Roux, see
Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde querre mondiale
(Vatican City, 1967), IV, 174–75.

⁴⁹
Gaston Bergery, “Conditions de la France nouvelle,”
La Flèche
, no. 133, 26 August 1938; “Gouvernement de salut public,” ibid., no. 141, 21 October 1938.

⁵⁰
Ministère public c/Lagardelle.

⁵¹
Gaston Bergery, “Le Pacte Franco-Russe” (Paris, 1935); André Delmas,
A Gauche de la barricade
(Paris, 1950). H. W. Ehrmann,
French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation
(New York, 1946). Christian Pineau,
La Simple vérité
(Paris, 1969), I, 67.

⁵²
Delmas, 106, 154–55, 169; Ehrmann, 102.

⁵³
Georges Lefranc, “Bilan de notre socialisme,”
Esprit
, no. 92, June 1940. See also P.-A. Touchard, “L’Evolution du syndicalisme,”
ibid.
, no. 89, February 1940.

⁵⁴
Ministère public c/Belin
; Georges Lefranc,
Les Expériences syndicales en France de 1939 à 1950
(Paris, 1950); for Dumoulin, see
Figaro
, 25 June 1942,
Ministère public c/Marquet
, 78, and Ehrmann, 71, 103, 105, 203, 220, 247–48. For Marcel Roy, see
Le Temps
, 2–3 May 1941, Ehrmann, 102, and Lefranc, 24.

⁵⁵
T-120/221/119666, 199826; T-120/587/243422.

IV / Collaboration—1942–44: Between Liberation and Revolution

I
N RETROSPECT
,
THE WINTER OF
1942–43
WAS THE
war’s turning point. On 23 October 1942 the great tank battle began at El Alamein, hardly two hundred miles from the Suez Canal, which turned back Rommel’s deepest advance in North Africa. During the night of November 7–8, Allied forces landed on the south shore of the Mediterranean in Morocco and Algeria. Rommel was now taken from behind, and the dream of some German strategists, particularly navy men like Admiral Raeder, of making that sea an Axis lake was at an end. Although the Germans quickly occupied the rest of France, fortress Europe was now vulnerable from the south. On the eastern front, General Paulus’ Sixth Army—twenty-two divisions—was encircled and cut off by a Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad in the days after November 20. Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943. Besieged Leningrad had finally been relieved early that same month. The German high tide on the eastern front had passed.

During the same weeks, Vichy France also lost its main elements of independence. Responding to the Allied landing in North Africa, German forces moved into the southern zone on
November 11. All of France was now directly occupied (the Italians occupied those areas east of the Rhône that they had previously inspected under the armistice terms; Germans occupied the rest). Although the armistice remained in effect and although Hitler carefully maintained the useful fiction of Vichy French sovereignty,
¹
the practical conditions of life in the Vichy zone were now little different from those in the north. A German officer, General von Neubronn, resided at Vichy as the representative of the senior German commander in the west, General von Rundstedt (
Oberbefehlshaber West
). The Armistice Army’s dissolution on November 28 freed French officers from direct military discipline but not from their oath to obey Marshal Pétain’s orders of inaction. The two trump cards in Vichy’s hand now vanished: the French fleet, scuttled on November 28 as the Germans prepared to seize it, and the empire, now largely in Allied hands. Of Vichy’s bargaining counters (fleet, empire, and the threat of joining the Allies), the first two were gone, and by remaining in Vichy even after a total German occupation, Marshal Pétain had shown that he would never use the third.

Domestic conditions in France also grew much worse in 1942–43. Laval’s old pleas for striking improvements in the conditions of life, concessions “die ins Auge fallen,” seemed more fruitless than ever after the summer of 1942. This was the period, we now know, in which Germany finally began to subject its civilian population to the rigors of a war economy nearer the sort endured in England since 1940.
²
The occupied countries were explicitly intended to have it worse than the Germans. French food rations were reduced in July 1942. Massive Jewish deportations began in the same month. Volunteer labor from the west was replaced by Laval’s “relève” system in September, whereby a prisoner of war was released for every three skilled
French workers sent to Germany, and finally in February 1943 French workmen were drafted for German factories. By this point Vichy had irrevocably lost its mass base of acceptance.

A few highly placed figures began to join the Allied cause after November 1942. Most of these were simply overtaken by the Allied landing in North Africa. Admiral Darlan was the most eminent. Having served loyally as commander in chief of the armed forces after Laval replaced him as head of the government in April 1942, and having just finished an inspection tour of Vichy defenses against Allied invasion in Africa, he had been called back to Algiers on November 5 by the news that his son Alain had been hospitalized there with polio. Surprised and enraged by the Allied landing, Darlan commanded the Vichy defenses in North Africa and then accepted a cease-fire on November 11 only after the Germans had entered the unoccupied zone of France and there was nothing left to save by observing the armistice. He tried for the next week to get the Allies to accept a neutral Pétiniste regime in North Africa. Only after General Mark Clark had threatened to institute direct Allied military government, and after General Barré’s Vichy forces in Tunisia had actually entered into combat on 17 November against German reinforcements arriving there, did Darlan agree to commit French resources in North Africa to the Allied side. There arose in North Africa a sort of “inverse Vichy” under Allied occupation. At the top, Darlan served as high commissioner of the “État français,” claiming secret approval of Marshal Pétain whose public orders for continued resistance against the Allies were attributed to German pressure. “The Marshal is no longer free,” said a Darlan proclamation of 21 November. Around him, Darlan formed an “Imperial Council” of the senior Vichy officials and officers present and willing to participate in the war against Germany: General Bergeret, Vichy aviation minister; General Noguès, high commissioner of Morocco; Governor-General Boisson of French West Africa, Governor-General Yves Châtel of Algeria, and General Henri Giraud, who had been brought off from occupied France in a British submarine in order to head pro-Allied French military forces in North Africa. Under this regime, the bulk of the
French Army and administration in North Africa, ardently Pétiniste, returned to war against the Axis. Vichy legislation remained on the statute books, including Jewish disabilities, even after Darlan’s assassination on December 24. That courageous handful of French officers in North Africa who had conspired in advance to help the Allied landing instead of to repel it (General Mast, Colonel Béthouart, and others) were quietly penalized. In this fashion, a large number of loyal Vichy officers and civil servants switched to the Allied side in perfect legality and without abandoning the National Revolution. For example, the commander of French troops in Algeria, General Alphonse Juin, who had only eleven months earlier negotiated with Marshal Goering in Berlin about what the French would do if Rommel had to fall back into Tunisia, now set out to earn his Marshal’s baton as commander of French forces in the Italian campaign in 1943.
³