Vichy France (52 page)

Threats to the Social Order—1: Resistance

And now, set Europe ablaze!

—
Winston Churchill’s instructions to the Special Operations Executive, 1940

The Marshal … agreed to sign the armistice and to preside over this government in order to save his country from revolution and ruin.
…

—
General Huntziger to General von Stülpnagel, 7 August 1940
⁹

T
HE
V
ICHY REGIME CAME INTO EXISTENCE MASTERING
a movement of resistance to the armistice in the colonies. Its very credibility as a legitimate regime depended on its continuing ability to neutralize anti-German activists. From the moment it persuaded Generals Noguès and Mittelhauser in North Africa and the Middle East to accept the armistice on 25 June 1940 up through its first year of existence, Marshal Pétain’s regime had been quite successful. Although the internal Resistance had begun to trouble public order after the summer of 1941, the Gaullist movement was probably weaker in France after the loss of Syria to Britain in July 1941 than before.

Active opposition to an authoritarian and widely supported regime is a minority business at best. Resistance requires a clear target, and in the unoccupied part of France it was not altogether clear to a lot of anti-German Frenchmen whether Vichy was
an enemy too. Resistance also requires some hope, and until late in the war, throwing the Germans back across the Rhine seemed beyond mortal strength. Resistance, finally, means accepting lawlessness on behalf of a higher good and the replacement of routine by a life of relentless improvisation. Only the young and the already outcast can adapt easily to a life of extended rebellion, and that is why the Resistance in France contained a disproportionate share of the young, Communists, and old street-fighters from the prewar protofascist leagues. The active resistance’s outlaw status, in turn, magnified the fears it aroused in solid citizens.

It was with an act of assassination that active resistance first thrust itself upon French public consciousness. The shooting of the naval cadet Moser on the subway platform of Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris on 21 August 1941 has already been described, as has the sickening toll of hostages whom the Germans shot following the subsequent assassinations of that autumn. The point is that active resistance to the German occupation stepped upon the stage firmly linked to the Bolshevik menace. Marshal Pétain’s speech of August 11, 1941, and the extensive security legislation of that week cemented that identification, as did the German propaganda, label of “Communist” attached to the hostages they shot. Pétain, Darlan, and Goebbels tacitly agreed to link all active resistance to bolshevism.

While direct action by the Resistance subsided after the fall of 1941—1942 was the time at which the Gaullists and the internal Resistance began to coordinate their organizations—resistance took on a more militant and alarming cast again after November 1942. It was Hitler who did most to mobilize young people for the Resistance by trying to mobilize them for work in German factories. Laval’s efforts to placate Gauleiter Sauckel with volunteers having failed, the Service du Travail Obligatoire began summoning whole age classes of young Frenchmen in draft contingents to go to work in German factories in February 1943. Young men faced the choice of taking the train to Germany or the path to the mountains. Thousands who could get to remote areas chose the mountains, and encampments of young men, the
maquis
, sprang up in the Alps, the Massif central,
and the Pyrenees. The camps had, of course, to eat and to defend themselves. They supported themselves at least in part by raids on sources of money and supplies. They raided offices of the STO and burned draft files. It is not inconceivable that a few more sinister renegades joined them. The
guerrilla
, which Pétain and others had feared in 1940 would destroy France, had begun.

The issue of premature violence divided even the active Resistance. General de Gaulle publicly deplored the assassinations of 1941 for their waste of life for the sake of no immediate gain. The Resistance was always torn between those preparing for action on some still-distant D-day and those taking action at once. Deeper there lay the division between those who wanted only to chase the Germans out and those who wanted also to change French society root and branch. There was a muted civil war within the armed Resistance in 1943 and 1944 between those Resistance groups solidly staffed by army officers and the
francs-tireurs
partisans. Some of the postwar trials turned up the edge of the rug under which these distressing clashes have been swept, suggesting that the military resistance, the Secret Army, actually executed some of the “anarchical”
francs-tireurs
as “bandits.” A report by Joseph Darnand, secretary of state for the maintenance of order in 1944, indicated that it was not rare to see notices posted in the
Haute-Savoie
declaring that

We, members of the Secret Army, have this morning executed such-and-such, belonging to the
francs-tireurs
partisans, who committed acts of brigandage contrary to the mission which we imposed upon ourselves: to serve France honestly.
¹⁰

Small wonder, then, that the solid citizens of France reacted no less vigorously than the military Resistance against the “anarchy” and “brigandage” that threatened their property and called down German reprisals. Already in 1941 General Laure called the assassinations “gangsterism” and General Weygand deplored them to American diplomats. By 1943 the identification
of resistance with anarchy had become much more shrill. Jacques Chevalier, former minister of education and Pétain’s godson, wrote the marshal panicky letters from Grenoble, where the alpine
maquis
were a major force. In late 1943 and early 1944 Chevalier was proposing the establishment of armed groups of “sure men” to form a kind of anticommunist counter-
maquis.
It had taken no more than a couple of hundred men to hold Seville until Franco’s arrival in 1936, he pointed out to Georges Hilaire in a letter of 2 August 1943. “It is in that way, and not in any other way, that order can be saved in France as it was on 19 July 1936 in all the regions of Spain where such a solid secret organization existed.” Even after the war, before juries of Resistance veterans, some Vichy officials continued to maintain that they had known of no Resistance in 1943 except “brigands.”
¹¹

The prospect of liberation by the sword, under the auspices of “brigands,” was anything but alluring to many Frenchmen. Some 45,000 volunteered for the infamous Milice in 1944, partly, perhaps, to escape from labor service, partly for fanaticism, but at least in part to help defend “law and order.” Counting police and military guard units as well, it is likely that as many Frenchmen participated in 1943–44 in putting down “disorder” as participated in active Resistance. Almost every Frenchman wanted to be out from under Germany, but not at the price of revolution.

Under these conditions, the number of active Résistants was never very great, even at the climactic moment of the Liberation. After the war, some 300,000 Frenchmen received official veterans’ status for active Resistance service: 130,000 as deportees and another 170,000 as “Resistance volunteers.” Another 100,000 had lost their lives in Resistance activity. This brings the total of active Resistance participation at its peak, at least as officially recognized
after the war, to about 2 percent of the adult French population.
¹²
There were no doubt wider complicities. But even if one adds those willing to read underground newspapers, some two million persons, or around ten percent of the adult population, seem to have been willing to take even that lesser risk. Let nothing said here detract from the moral significance of those who knew what they had to do. But the overwhelming majority of Frenchmen, however they longed to lift the German yoke, did not want to lift it by fire and sword.

Perceiving the Resistance as a minority of outlaws, the Vichy regime was drawn ever closer into complicity with the German occupation authorities’ effort to crush it. The very logic of Vichy’s existence required it to keep order. The Vichy strategy of seeking to replace the Germans and restore French sovereignty in the police and military fields drew the strings of complicity even tighter. From the beginning, the Vichy regime had found German concessions easier to obtain in those areas that permitted a stronger Armistice Army and French police to help keep order. The security legislation of August 1941 and Interior Minister Pucheu’s efforts to restore French police initiative in the Occupied Zone, though not very successful, pushed the regime further down the same road. When German security in France was shifted from the army to the SS in the spring of 1942, Laval concluded a police agreement that by giving French police more autonomy in the Occupied Zone actually associated them even more closely with German security measures. SS General Karl Albrecht Oberg was named head of security in France on 11 March 1942, to take effect on June 1. Heydrich, who came in person on 7 May to install the new arrangements, had apparently been convinced by his experience in Czechoslovakia that local police cooperated more willingly when given some measure of independence (Heydrich’s faith in indigenous police control was misplaced, for he was assassinated by Czech patriots a few weeks later). By an exchange of letters in July 1942 between General
Oberg and René Bousquet, a prefect before the war and an old friend whom Laval had made secretary-general to the head of government for police affairs, the sovereignty of French administration and the independence of French police in the Occupied Zone were explicitly recognized, in “contrast to the preceding period.” German police were limited to combating “enemies of the Reich.” French police were given full independence in matters of internal order “against anarchism, terrorism, and communism, and generally against all foreign actions susceptible of troubling order within France.” All French citizens charged with crimes, even political crimes, would be dealt with exclusively by French authorities. The French police would not be required to take any role in designating hostages or to take part in any actions that went beyond the armistice.

René Bousquet seems at the time to have regarded this agreement as at least a partial victory: the end to direct German orders to French police in the Occupied Zone and the explicit recognition of French administrative sovereignty there in police matters.
¹³
In fact, greater independence for the French police in the Occupied Zone meant a larger role in measures against the Resistance and an entering wedge for German police measures in the unoccupied zone. The fall of 1942 was, of course, the period when French police rounded up some 8,000–10,000 foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone for deportation. Laval could report to the Council of Ministers on 23 October 1942 that recent French police actions had rounded up 400 leading terrorists, arrested 5,460 Communists, and seized 40 tons of illegal arms. General Heinrich von Stülpnagel received Bousquet to congratulate him and sent his congratulations to Laval via Fernand de Brinon. In the unoccupied zone, a joint French-German radio detection team equipped with fake French ID cards uncovered nine clandestine radio transmitters in the fall of 1942 and arrested 29 persons, including Major Faye and his accomplices at Marseilles who had provided the radio link between General Giraud and
the Allies. The price of limited “independence” for the French police was vigorous action against “dissidence.”
¹⁴

After the total occupation of France on 11 November 1942, the decision to continue the Vichy regime meant that French officials would continue to struggle for autonomy. René Bousquet engaged in new conversations on police powers in November with a “firm will to maintain and safeguard the principle of French government sovereignty.” An agreement on 2 April 1943 between Bousquet and General Oberg allocated police responsibilities in the formerly unoccupied zone along the same lines as the agreement of July 1942 in the Occupied Zone. The French police were solely responsible for French citizens charged with all crimes except direct actions against the German forces; German police, however, could intervene wherever they felt their security was threatened. That security indeed became perilous during 1943, and while the French police arrested some 9,000 persons in the course of that year for “Gaullism, Marxism, or hostility to the regime,” the German police arrested 35,000.
¹⁵
Bousquet’s efforts now seemed too lukewarm to the German authorities, and after Pétain had made one more effort in December 1943 to get rid of Laval,
¹⁶
they forced the Vichy government to accept Joseph Darnand as secretary-general for the maintenance of order on 15 December 1943.

Darnand’s period as Vichy police boss, on the very eve of D-Day, marked a turn from professionalism to vigilantism in police work, the final paroxysm of a moribund dictatorship. Darnand, a much-decorated World War I commando hero who had vegetated between the wars as a veterans’ militant and garage owner in Nice, came into his own again under Vichy as head of the Nice branch of the Légion Française des Combattants. His
strong-arm tactics there were something of an embarrassment to the early leadership of the Legion. In 1942 and 1943 Darnand was active in the Anti-Bolshevik Legion in Paris, and made a tour of the French volunteer units on the eastern front with Doriot. “Everything had gone soft around the Marshal” by 1943, he said at his trial, and “I was a revolutionary.” When Darnand was forced upon Vichy as secretary-general for the maintenance of order in December 1943, he raised the old paramilitary arm of the Veterans’ Legion, the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, known since January 1943 as the Milice, into a national parapolice force of volunteers against the Resistance. This body recruited some 45,000 toughs and fascist fanatics ready to shoot it out with the
maquis.
Under Darnand, Franco-German collaboration against the Resistance reached its climax with the campaign against the
maquis
of the Glières plateau, in the Haute-Savoie south of Geneva, in March 1944. There the most powerful of the
maquis
, strongly fortified in a natural alpine citadel and in close contact with London, launched a premature movement in anticipation, either by confusion or deception, of a massive Allied airdrop. The Milice assisted a full German division in reducing the Glières
maquis
, producing some 400 casualties on the Resistance side. The main anti-Resistance effort was now decisively German: some 80,000 Frenchmen were deported by the German police in the summer of 1944. But the Vichy regime had followed the path of maintaining a French police in fictitious autonomy, and down that path lay not merely collaboration between French and German professional police but also the worse excesses of an officially encouraged anti-Resistance vigilantism. In May 1942 René Bousquet had warned Heydrich against filling a “moat of blood” between France and Germany by the continued execution of hostages. By 1944 another “moat of blood” had been filled between two Frances by the Vichy regime’s equation of Resistance with disorder.
¹⁷