Vichy France (6 page)

This yearning for discipline’s chastising hand led directly to a father figure. The upwelling of feeling around Marshal Pétain among this skeptical people would be hard to imagine under less cataclysmic circumstances. In 1940 any victorious World War leader would have been balm to wounded pride. Pétain fitted the moment even more perfectly. Here was a genuine national hero without visible ties to the politics of the sorry 1930’s. By sheer age he had outlived the animosities of his military career;
by taciturnity he had not acquired new ones. His public political roles since retirement, as minister of war in the Doumergue government following the riots of February 1934 and as first ambassador to Franco Spain in 1939, were seen merely as an old soldier’s civic duty in an emergency; for the rest, he said little in public on national issues beyond the officer’s traditional disdain for politics. He had become a blank image, ready to be stamped with each Frenchman’s conception of savior.

For some, Pétain was simply “le drapeau,” a personification of abiding Old France: an erect old soldier of austere tastes, of Catholic peasant stock, marshal of France, member of the French Academy, returning from his modest country estate once more to rescue his country from the rabble. On the other side, Pétain seemed less threatening to republicans than many another senior officer. No “booted Jesuit” like Foch or Currières de Castelnau, Pétain was a mere nominal Catholic. Although he had allowed Colonel de la Rocque’s newspaper,
Le Flambeau
, to publish an “apolitical” interview endorsing the Popular Front’s opponents in May 1936, Pétain was less suspect of links with far right movements than Marshal Franchet d’Esperey. Although he had commanded the most costly defense of the whole 1914–18 war—Verdun—his rejection of the doctrine of attack made him seem a hoarder of French blood. His settlement of the mutinies in 1917 seemed fair as well as firm. Even Léon Blum called Pétain France’s “noblest and most humane soldier,” while deploring his appointment as ambassador to Franco. Reynaud named him to the cabinet on 18 May 1940 as a kind of flag. Only the irreverent young right had mocked Pétain without compunction in the 1930’s.
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In the summer of 1940, therefore, Pétain fitted the national mood to perfection: internally, a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution; externally, a victorious general who would make no more war. Honor plus safety.

Inside the icon, however, dwelled a Philippe Pétain of flesh
and blood. What sorts of decisions could one expect from this man to whom millions of Frenchmen had entrusted their public destinies?

Contrary to a common postwar assumption, Pétain was not senile in 1940. Other doctors at Vichy believed that Dr. Bertrand Ménétrel, Pétain’s personal physician, secretary, and son of an old friend, heightened the marshal’s morning spirits with shots of Benzedrine or Ephedrine. That may be. In any event, visitors as late as 1943 recorded their surprise at the health, alertness, and vigor of the still-erect old man of eighty-seven. Contemporary reporters of Pétain’s conversations in 1943 with German visitors, at unspecified hours of the day, had no apparent motive to invent the forceful expressions, wide curiosity, and command of detail his words displayed.
⁶⁵
Pétain’s acts were conscious and deliberate choices.

Age, however, had unquestionably deepened a lifelong caution. As a colonel destined for early retirement in 1914, he had already won some notoriety for an acid skepticism about the prevailing tactical doctrines of attack. He reached supreme command in World War I when the partisans of attack had been discredited. As commander in chief of the French Armies in 1917–18, Pétain attacked only when careful preparation had assured a clear advantage, in a manner more reminiscent of an Eisenhower than a Patton or Montgomery in 1944. Poincaré’s memoirs suggest that Pétain expected French defeat in February–March 1918. Paul Valéry, welcoming the marshal to the Académie française in 1934, recalled even in the midst of eulogy his “cold and almost severe attitude” and his reputation for pessimism. By 1940 these qualities had hardened into “morose skepticism.”
⁶⁶

Pétain had also learned a quarter century earlier about revolution.
At the moment when he replaced the discredited General Robert Nivelle at the head of the French Armies in May 1917, half the front-line divisions were in mutiny. Pétain understood better than most other officers that futile sallies “over the top” for a few yards of terrain at the cost of thousands of lives had been the mutinies’ root cause. Like most other officers, however, he attributed almost mythic powers to “outside agitators” and Bolshevik influences.
⁶⁷

The 1917 alarms left their mark on Pétain’s lifelong concern for patriotic morale. When Pétain claimed in the 1930’s that education had become his main interest, he meant morale, not knowledge. In 1940 he was convinced, as he told U.S. Ambassador Bullitt, that unpatriotic schoolteachers had been responsible for French defeat.
⁶⁸

All this meant that Pétain saw his mission in 1940 less in terms of finding the right policy than of instilling the right attitudes. He put immense effort and care into his role as moral tutor to the French people. That terse manner, once used for irony as well as for military reports (Pétain’s military nickname was “Précis-le-sec”), was now applied to homilies composed of brief, simple phrases which turned more often to platitude then to epigram. The schoolmaster began to lecture his pupils on the values of social stability:
travail, famille, patrie.

It was not that Pétain had plotted in advance for power or had seized it illegally. His grip on office, released only when the Germans dragged him protesting out of the Hotel du Parc at Vichy in August 1944, ahead of the advancing Allied armies, rested upon a subtler vanity. Having grown accustomed to being listened to on every subject as his country’s savior for a quarter century, Pétain thought he was indispensable. He had given France, he said in his radio message of 25 June 1940, “the gift of my person.” He clung to office with the embrace of conscience, far more dangerous than ambition. A merely ambitious man
would have trimmed to the tide later on, rather than carry down with him all those who worshipped the icon.

W
HERE
,
ONE WILL ASK
,
WERE THE
“
RESISTERS OF THE
first hour,” as numerous by 1944 as Mayflower descendants at a DAR convention? Nothing said here should diminish the honor due those who recognized, even in 1940, that Frenchmen could not recover their freedom without force. Their number, however, was minuscule, and it was to grow smaller still during the first year. There was silent dissent, of course, on the model of the old man and his daughter in the first major novel published underground during the occupation—Vercors’
Le Silence de la mer
(Editions de minuit, 1942)—who refuse to speak to a quite decent young German officer billeted in their home. The subject here is active resistance of the sort that troubles regimes, from gathering intelligence for the Allies or publishing underground newspapers, to acts of violence. Very good contemporary sources are now available: some French police records and many German ones. They reveal no serious problems of dissent for the regime until well into 1941.

A number of obstacles stood in the way of an active French Resistance movement in the early days of the occupation. It was hard to believe in late 1940 that the war was not over. Only British tenacity and the endless expanses of Russia were to show that Hitler’s French campaign had not been as decisive as it seemed at the time. Resistance needs some modicum of hope, and this was absent in late 1940.

The very existence of the Pétain regime further confused the issue. While the direct German presence in the northern two-thirds of France left no doubt where the enemy lay, it was not clear in the south whether anti-Germanism meant opposing Vichy or rejoicing in its simulacrum of independence and its nationalist rhetoric. One of the first clandestine newspapers, Captain Henri Frenay’s
Combat
, carried quotations from both Pétain and Foch on its masthead until early 1942. This was not an isolated case.

The disarray of the French Left further obstructed a vigorous
early resistance. One would have expected the Popular Front alliance of 1936, once the main proponent of strong action against Hitler and now the regime’s chief whipping boy, to form a natural focus for an anti-Hitler underground. It was not, and the main reason lies less in governmental repression—although the Pétain regime arrested Léon Blum and five of his ministers in September 1940 and although the Communist party had remained illegal since September 1939—than in ideological confusion. The Popular Front partners had all renounced their 1936 position. The Radicals, that anachronistically misnamed party of laissez-faire middle-class Frenchmen, had been the first to grow lukewarm as their majority slipped behind the rising Marxist parties in the 1936 elections. The Socialists, with Léon Blum in eclipse, reverted in 1940 to a traditional pacifism around people like Paul Faure, once Blum’s deputy party leader, a lifelong pacifist, and a doubter about national defense even in the late 1930’s. The Communists executed their about-face of 23 August 1939 with the loss of only a few intellectuals, so that the party for which one Frenchman in six had voted in 1936 denounced the war against Hitler in 1939 as imperialist fratricide whose victor, be it the City of London or the Nazis, was of no concern to workers. In the summer of 1940, from underground, the Communist newspaper
Humanité
urged a peace of reconciliation between French and German workers. To be sure, it attacked Pétain as the lackey of French capitalists, permitting the party to claim after the war to have launched the Resistance. In the same breath, however, it attacked the Allies as fomenters of imperialist war and asserted that France could remain free only by avoiding becoming a British Dominion. “Ni Pétain, ni de Gaulle” read a Communist poster in Paris in January 1941. “France wants neither cholera nor the plague.”
⁶⁹

Without clear signals from the organized Left, and with every expectation of rich rewards for the Right at Vichy, the
early Resistance in 1940 was the work of exceptional individuals, usually already outside the social fabric in some way, or of such amorphous effervescence as student demonstrations. The first major public display of opposition was an illegal student parade up the Champs-Elysées on Armistice Day 1940, focused, it should be noted, upon a traditional patriotic rather than revolutionary symbol: the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arch of Triumph. On 6 September 1940, retired Air Force General Cochet imprudently circulated a signed appeal for civil disobedience. The first clandestine newspapers, other than the pacifist
Humanité
, appeared only at the very end of 1940. Captain Henri Frenay left the army in November to found
Combat. Libération
(the future
Libération-nord
), the work of two moderate trade union leaders, Christian Pineau of the Catholic bank clerks’ union and Robert Lacoste of the civil servants’ union, appeared on 1 December in seven mimeographed copies. At year’s end, a group of Catholic law professors, François de Menthon, Pierre-Henri Teitgen, and René Capitant, were preparing the first
Liberté
in the unoccupied zone. The first intelligence-gathering network was being formed in late 1940 among anthropologists at the Paris Musée de L’Homme, led by two Russian émigré ethnologists, Boris Vildé and Anatole Levitsky. These tentative individual gropings, more often ideologically conservative than Left, were only the germs of what the Resistance was to become.

At the time, they posed no real problem for the regime. Some of them—Frenay, Major Loustenau-Lacau, army officers hiding weapons—claimed to be acting in Pétain’s name. Even the Catholic trade union leaders around
Libération-nord
urged a complete transformation of past institutions and a variant of current corporatist theory: “a free union in an organized profession in a sovereign state.”
⁷⁰
No Resistance groups in France supported de Gaulle at first; the Left found him too Maurrassian, the Right too disloyal. Their most daring expression was a handful of mimeographed broadsides. The best measure, perhaps, of the
early Resistance was the authorities’ calm. The Germans carried out no “grand operations of repression” in the first months except against Communists, whose honeymoon period in occupied Paris ended with mass arrests on the night of 4–5 October 1940. The first signs of official alarm appeared in the spring of 1941. The Musée de L’Homme group was swept up in the first major wave of Resistance arrests in March 1941; the prefect of the Seine-et-Oise required householders on 2 April 1941 to efface troubling slogans from their property, the first indubitable sign of the ubiquitous “V” for victory advocated by Radio London.
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There was simply no significant organized domestic alternative to Pétain for most of 1940.

The real threat to Pétain in the summer and fall of 1940 came from an elite movement abroad rather than a mass movement at home. The men in command of France’s overseas empire found the armistice of June 1940 very hard to swallow. Spared the direct impression of blitzkrieg and schooled to the concept of saving France with imperial resources, the governors-general and army commanders overseas were the most bellicose Frenchmen left in the summer of 1940. The two most important overseas commanders, General Auguste Noguès in North Africa and General Mittelhauser in the Near East, raised strenuous objections in the days before the armistice took effect. General de-Gaulle’s first strategy, it appears, was to contribute his London group to this larger effort. In the end, however, General Noguès swallowed his anguish and obeyed the firm orders of the commander in chief, General Weygand, who sent General Koeltz to explain to him that since the navy would not come to North Africa, further resistance was futile. General Mittelhauser could only follow suit. The only overseas commanders or governors to join de Gaulle—Generals Le Gentilhomme in Djibouti and Catroux in Indochina—did so as individuals without bringing their men and territories with them. Rebuffed at Dakar in September 1940, de Gaulle was able to win the allegiance of only
parts of French Equatorial Africa and a few Pacific Islands by the end of 1940. Vichy’s legitimacy and the chain of command, exploited vigorously by General Weygand, who toured French Africa in person in the fall of 1940, kept almost the entire empire in line.
⁷²