Vichy France (54 page)

Not even the disasters of November 1942 ended Vichy’s efforts to negotiate some area of defensive autonomy. As we shall
see, the revival of a French armed force was a major element in the last efforts by Pétain and Laval for a sweeping settlement with the Germans at the beginning of 1943. The very attempt shows the persistence at Vichy of two ideas: hope for a compromise peace and expectation that France, neutral in an increasingly fanatical world, could be an effective mediator. As against these dreams, an Allied landing in Europe seemed an “aggression.” It was a damaging Freudian slip when Laval referred at Pétain’s postwar trial to the Allied “aggression” of June 1944, but it had been by no means an unusual point of view at Vichy.
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The suffering caused by Allied bombing in France in 1943 and 1944 helped make even anti-Germans prefer a compromise peace to armed liberation. It may shock Americans, who have inflicted aerial bombardments on many peoples but have never endured one, to learn that their approach seemed more a menace than a promise of liberation to many staunchly anti-German Frenchmen. General Bridoux’ reports from the postal censor in May 1943 reported “indignation” over Allied bombings in the industrial suburbs of Paris even in a population with a “general belief in Allied victory.” Resistance journals such as
Témoignage chrétien
had to spend precious space countering hostility to Allied bombers. André Gide, who was overtaken by the war in Tunis in the spring of 1943, saw from the ground the “absurd results” of high-altitude bombing that cost thousands of civilian casualties while doing apparently the least damage to Germans. “What sense do these idiotic destructions make?” Some Frenchmen in Tunis even thought that the Germans were raiding in camouflaged planes to bring discredit on the United States. Gide also foresaw that armed liberation meant civil war:

That liberation of France which the Anglo-Saxons promise us, that liberty will prove for us, I fear, the occasion of serious upsets and of lasting internal dissensions of which I shall presumably never see the end.
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The joyful delirium of the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 has overlaid the earlier dread at that prospect. Part of that joy no doubt was relief at a
fait vite accompli.
In anticipation, however, the prospect of Allied landings could not have been a happy one. The World War I experience and the fact of extremely heavy Allied shipping losses in the North Atlantic suggested that the Liberation would bog down into years of slogging on French soil. The Americans, those masters of the technology of destruction, were getting around the problem by raining high explosives from five miles up. Beyond the remaining handful of Vichy partisans in 1943 and 1944 was a mass of Frenchmen who wanted the Germans out but not at the price of such slaughter. There was still an acquiescent mass upon whom Pétain and Laval could build their last efforts to negotiate a sweeping agreement with Hitler in 1942 and 1943.

Last French Bids for Collaboration: 1942–43

L
AVAL
’
S RETURN TO POWER IN
A
PRIL
1942
WAS A TACIT
acceptance of the old strategy’s validity. Although he never repeated Darlan’s July 1941 proposal for replacing the armistice with normal diplomatic relations, he continued to offer voluntary French association in exchange for more normal living conditions for Frenchmen. He still worked far into 1943 for that elusive “broad settlement” that would set France free to evolve back to some reasonably significant role within the new European power system.

Laval was unlucky in his moment of triumph, however. His revenge for 13 December coincided with a sharp increase in pressures from all sides upon France. It was in the summer of 1942 that the implications of a long war were finally borne in upon the German civilian population. Germany’s first really total economic organization for war, organized now by the
young architect Albert Speer who became minister of armaments production in the spring of 1942 and eventually replaced that sybaritic dilettante Goering as head of the national economic planning organization, visited its austerities upon the German people. The belts of occupied peoples were expected to tighten even more narrowly than the belts of Germans. Food rations having been reduced in Germany on 6 April 1942, for example, quotas of food delivery to Germany from the occupied areas—including France—were sharply raised in July. At a conference on food supplies in Berlin on 6 August 1942, Goering said that questions of inflation or scarcity in the occupied countries were of no interest to him, even though the French food delivery quotas were described as “extraordinarily high.”
Abetz, who had telephoned nervously about the impact on French domestic stability, admitted that as a matter of policy Frenchmen should eat less than Germans and accepted a plan to draw the new quotas from the Occupied Zone, leaving the Vichy zone free to help feed the rest of France as it chose.
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More ominously, Polish and Russian laborers having been literally worked to death by 1942, Germany began to turn to the west for foreign labor. Fritz Sauckel, a former merchant seaman and early Nazi who had proven his narrow-minded toughness as gauleiter of Thuringia, was given the job in March 1942 of coordinating all use of foreign labor in the Reich. On April 25, 1942, Rudolf Schleier, Abetz’ deputy in the German embassy in Paris, warned Laval informally that the voluntary recruitment
of labor for Germany in France had been insufficient and that far more was going to be expected. Fritz Sauckel’s Order No. 4 of 7 May 1942 authorized the use of force to obtain labor in all occupied countries, and on June 15 Sauckel came to Paris to give Laval an unpalatable alternative: either increase French labor volunteers or accept labor conscription. It was at this June meeting that Laval wriggled off the horns of the dilemma by proposing the notorious
relève
scheme: a French prisoner of war would be paroled for each three French skilled laborers recruited to work in German factories. The full propaganda resources of the regime could not meet Sauckel’s quotas under the
relève
system, however, and a Vichy law of 4 September 1942, directly imposed by Abetz, permitted the conscription of workers for Germany in individual cases. Finally, in February 1943 conscription of whole age groups began under the Service de Travail Obligatoire. Beginning with Laval’s return to power, therefore, France was becoming, after Poland, Germany’s largest source of foreign labor and the largest source of skilled labor in all occupied Europe.
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That was not all the bad news for France in the summer of 1942. The German military staffs were reluctant to permit any increase in French armaments in West Africa or the recruitment of more French soldiers at home. Police affairs in the Occupied Zone were shifted from the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich to the SS in May. General Henri Giraud’s daring escape in May from a German fortress gave the Germans an excuse for refusing any further discussion of early release of prisoners of war. In July began the most bestial of the German depredations, the massive deportation of foreign refugee Jews from France to the
extermination camps in Poland and eastern Germany. Laval had reason to complain to Abetz on May 17 and May 23 that Germany was being harder on him than it had been on his predecessors.
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The United States was also growing much tougher on Vichy France. Laval had always been more personally identified in Washington with outright military collaboration than his colleagues, and Admiral Leahy was summoned home when Laval assumed the prime ministry, leaving only a chargé d’affaires to represent the United States at Vichy. The United States was now a belligerent, and although she was not at war with France, the earlier American policy of helping keep France neutral was no longer enough. In particular, the way in which French facilities and equipment in the Caribbean were put to use became a vital factor in the struggle against German submarines in American waters. After Laval returned to power, Secretary of State Hull would no longer accept the assurances Darlan had made after the German submarine visit to Martinique in February 1942.
On 9 May 1942 the United States government demanded that all French ships in the Caribbean be totally immobilized with their ordinance removed, that the United States oversee communications with the French islands, and that the Allies use the merchant ships and gold there. In return for Admiral Robert’s agreement to these measures, obtained finally in October, the United States government recognized Robert as the ultimate governing authority of these French possessions. The German authorities, believing that the United States was preparing to seize French possessions in the Caribbean, tried to get Laval to forbid any agreement between Admiral Robert and the Americans and to order immediate scuttling of French ships there in the event of an Allied effort to seize them. Laval seems to have conducted a genuine “double game” in this instance, assuring Abetz on 16 May that Admiral Robert had been ordered
to enter into no agreement with the United States. The narrowing French freedom of action in the empire, caught between ever more determined belligerents, was made clear by these Caribbean pressures.
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In July and August 1942, as the seesaw battle in the Libyan desert brought Rommel deep into Egypt again, the United States tried to force Laval to move the French naval squadron of Admiral Godefroy, which had been immobilized at Alexandria since the armistice, to some more secure Allied base. The Germans, in turn, threatened to hold France accountable for a violation of the armistice if the ships were moved to another Allied base or fell into Allied hands. Only Rommel’s failure to overrun the Suez Canal spared Laval an impossible choice and left the Godefroy squadron to rust on at Alexandria. The narrowing field for neutral maneuver in a widening war was once more apparent.
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The United States decision to accredit an official representative to the Gaullist Committee of National Liberation in July 1942, the first serious breach in Roosevelt’s policy of aloofness from the Free French, was a further ominous blow at Vichy’s claim of legitimacy.

Vichy’s authority in the Indian Ocean and Asia also suffered serious blows as Laval returned to power. In Indochina the Japanese violated their agreement of 1940 and seized the entire merchant fleet. Following rumors that Laval planned to permit Japanese forces to use Madagascar, the British invaded Madagascar in May 1942.
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Wherever Laval turned, the French empire
of 1940 was being eroded away by the efforts of both sides to use French wealth for their own war interests. In retrospect Laval returned to power at the moment when a neutral was becoming ever less a possible arbiter and ever more a pawn of the more determined belligerents.

Like Darlan before him, however, Laval chose to regard increased German needs as an opportunity rather than a danger. All the themes of 1940 were revived in Laval’s first meeting with a prominent German. He wanted a “lasting settlement” rather than mere piecemeal adjustment, he told Albert Speer on 19 June 1942. France would provide “intensive economic aid” and even a military alliance to assist in “the heroic struggle in the east” if only collaboration would produce striking results visible to every Frenchman. Although German demands now went beyond the armistice, Laval could fulfill them if the French people gained some hope about their nation’s fate. French interests, for example, required freedom to develop toward the south—the imperial theme again. Laval mentioned a whole series of issues on which concessions would do no damage to German political or military interests: return of the northern departments to administration from Paris; return of French peasants to their lands in the northeastern “forbidden zone”; leave for prisoners of war in spite of Giraud’s escape. Finally Laval asked Speer to help arrange a high-level meeting with Ribbentrop—that summit meeting which had been anticipated by both sides in December 1940 and which still eluded Laval.
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Through the summer and fall of 1942, however, Laval saw only lesser German functionaries. He used every piecemeal German demand as an occasion for renewing his larger aim of a broad general settlement. Confronted with higher food quotas in July 1942, for example, he tried to bargain for better conditions for French prisoners of war. Faced with the issue of providing French labor for Germany, Laval asked Sauckel on a number of occasions to place these negotiations within the framework of a larger political settlement. Sauckel always replied that he was
a mere technician without competence in these broader matters.
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The best Laval could do was reestablish some fragments of French administrative sovereignty within the Occupied Zone in the summer of 1942. The police agreements between René Bousquet and SS General Oberg have already been discussed. In April 1942 the Vichy press agency, Office Français d’Information, was finally permitted to function in the Occupied Zone. Vichy’s attempts to “open a French crenellation” in the German West Wall, however, and to extend the Armistice Army’s defense preparations to the Occupied Zone had gotten nowhere by the fall of 1942. Neither had his plan, along with Defense Minister Bridoux, to transform the Paris-based Anti-Bolshevik Legion from a warren of agitators and conspirators into the Tricolor Legion, an official unit of the French Army ready to impose a French presence “in all theaters where French interests are at stake.”
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In the light of these mostly frustrated efforts through the summer and fall of 1942, the Allied landings in North Africa in November offered Laval opportunity as well as danger. The main danger was the risk of empire and mainland now being swallowed up by both belligerent sides. The opportunity was the renewed possibility of summit meetings, the third and last major effort at a sweeping settlement by Vichy leaders.