Vichy France (66 page)

Clearly other motives led Frenchmen deeper into that final complicity. Bureaucratic inertia and blindness to considerations beyond the efficiency of the state were among them. Beyond that was the attraction of the National Revolution for its partisans.

At bottom, however, lay a more subtle intellectual culprit: fear of social disorder as the highest evil. Some of France’s best skill and talent went into a formidable effort to keep the French state afloat under increasingly questionable circumstances. Who would keep order, they asked, if the state lost authority? By saving the state, however, they were losing the nation. Those who cling to the social order above all may do so by self-interest or merely by inertia. In either case, they know more clearly what they are against than what they are for. So blinded, they perform jobs that may be admirable in themselves but are tinctured
with evil by the overall effects of the system. Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.

Readers will prefer, like the writer, to recognize themselves in neither of these types. It is tempting to identify with Resistance and to say, “That is what I would have done.” Alas, we are far more likely to act, in parallel situations, like the Vichy majority. Indeed, it may be the German occupiers rather than the Vichy majority whom Americans, as residents of the most powerful state on earth, should scrutinize most unblinkingly. The deeds of occupier and occupied alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.

¹
Peter Novick,
The Resistance Versus Vichy
(New York, 1968); Robert Aron,
Histoire de l’épuration
(Paris, 1967–69).

²
André Mornet,
Quatre années à rayer de notre histoire
(Paris, 1949). Yves Bouthillier,
Le Drame de l’armistice
(Paris, 1950), talks in his preface about the “revolution of 1944.” Conflicting figures on the summary executions of the Liberation are admirably reviewed and assessed by Novick, Appendix C, 202–8.

³
Philip M. Williams,
Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic
(London, 1958), remains the best account of this evolution.

⁴
Novick, 159 n., 186–87. A law of 14 September 1944 held that civil servants were liable to prosecution only if they had gone beyond orders to aid the Germans or if they had had the power to ignore Vichy orders.
Ministère public c/Dayras
, 78.

⁵
For apparent Communist orders to work within the system between 1944 and May 1947, see Alfred J. Rieber,
Stalin and the French Communist Party
(New York, 1962). There is much information on the Resistance leaders’ rejection of the liberal economy and adoption of planning in Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch,
Les Idées politiques et sociales de la résistance
(Paris, 1954), and Henri Michel,
Les Courants de Pensée de la résistance
(Paris, 1962).

⁶
The Cour des Comptes’ sphere of competence was further enlarged on 31 December 1949 to include social security and family allowances. For the membership of the Cour des Comptes, see
Bottin administratif
, 1938, 59–60; 1946, 21–22; 1949, 63–64; 1952, 75–76; Ministère des Finances,
Annuaire
, 1942.

⁷
Note the rather satisfied tone with which the president of the Cour des Comptes reported how “effective” the court had been under Vichy. Cour des Comptes,
Rapport au président de la république. Années 1940–45
(Paris, 1947), 6.

⁸
Ministère des Finances,
Annuaire
, 1942;
Adresses des membres de l’IGF
(1948).

⁹
Inspection des Finances,
Rapport sur Vactivité de l’Inspection générale des finances en 1941
(Paris, 1942), 4–5.

¹⁰
Some of this drop also was the result of Vichy removal of Jewish members. The total was up to 134 by 1952. This figure does not include the secretaries-general of ministries, all of whom were
conseillers d’état en service extraordinaire.

¹¹
Bottin administratif
, 1938, 54–56; 1946, 18–19; 1949, 58–60; 1952, 69–71. Ministère de l’Intérieur,
Annuaire
(1942).

¹²
Ministère public c/Dayras
, 61, has information regarding the postwar sentences of the Section spéciale judges. The judges’ oath was required by a law of 12 August 1941. Barthélemy circular of 25 March 1942, Ministère de la justice,
Bulletin officiel
, 1942, 26–29. The magistrate Guy Raïssac has particularly accurate information on the Vichy judicial system in
Combat sans merci
(Paris, 1966). For Mornet, see Raïssac 211, 363 n.,
Ministère public c/Brinon
, 119, and
New York Times
, 23 July 1955.

¹³
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères,
Annuaire diplomatique et consulaire
, 1939 and 1947. Personnel changes may be followed in detail in Ministère des Affaires Etrangères,
Bulletin officiel
, 1
^re
année, no. 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1942)
et seq.

¹⁴
Ministère de la Justice,
Bulletin officiel
, 1941, 24.

¹⁵
Pierre Doueil,
L’Administration locale à l’épreuve de la guerre
(Paris, 1950), 41, 283 ff.

¹⁶
Michel Laferrière,
Lyon: Ville industrielle
(Paris, 1960), 386.

¹⁷
For business, see Henry W. Ehrmann,
Organized Business in France
(Princeton, 1957). For agriculture, see Pierre Barral,
Les Agrariens
(Paris, 1966), 296, and Gordon Wright,
Rural Revolution in France
(Stanford, Calif., 1964).

¹⁸
For an example of the new biographies’ suggestion that Pétain would have known how to handle the “blousons noirs,” see Georges Blond,
Pétain
(Paris, 1966), 309.

¹⁹
For Darnand, Luchaire, and Brinon, see
Les Procès de la collaboration
(Paris, 1948). For the Milice, see Jacques Delperrie de Bayac,
Histoire de la milice, 1918–45
(Paris, 1969).

²⁰
See, for the efforts of these men to return to political life, the Association des Représentants du Peuple de la IIIe République, esp. no. 4, January 1947, “Lettre aux adherents.” (BDIC: O Pièce 24975).

²¹
Cahier of the OCM, 1942, quoted in Maxime Blocq-Mascart,
Chronique de la résistance
(Paris, 1945), 168–70.

²²
Philip Williams,
Politics in Postwar France
, 2d ed. (London, 1958), 14–16. Some of the 80 were dead by 1944, of course; Mandel and Zay had been murdered by the Milice.

²³
Journal officiel de la république française
(Algiers), 10 August 1944, 689–94.

²⁴
Sully Lederman,
Alcool, Alcoolisme, Alcoolisation
, Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques, Travaux et documents, Cahier #41 (Paris, 1964), 139.

²⁵
Pierre Doueil,
L’Administration locale à l’épreuve de la querre
(Paris, 1950); J.-M. Jeanneney and M. Perrot,
Textes de droit social et économique français
(Paris, 1957), 455–56. Lepercq was also a leader of the most technocratic Resistance movement, the Organisation Civile et Militaire. He was killed in an automobile accident on 9 November 1944.

²⁶
J. E. S. Hayward,
Private Interests and Public Policy
(London, 1966), 76–80, on the approval of the Fifth Plan. For budget procedures, see Christian Chavanon, “Les Hauts fonctionnaires,”
Aspects de la société française
(Paris, 1954), 175: “If you want to have some influence in this domaine, become a
rédacteur
in the Direction du Budget and not a deputy.”

²⁷
Doueil, 20–69. The regional inspectors of economy and police also survived.

²⁸
Doueil, 259–76.

²⁹
République française, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques,
Recensement géneral de la population effectué le 10 Mars 1946
(Paris, 1949), vii–ix; see also
ibid., Annuaire statistique de la France
, vol. 57—1946 (Paris, 1947), 19.

³⁰
France, Ministère de l’Agriculture,
Statistique agricole annuelle, 1942.
(Paris, 1944).

³¹
The French census’ survey of business firms ceased with the 1936 census and began again with different categories in 1958. No comparison of firm size between 1936 and 1946 is possible. See also David Landes,
The Unbound Prometheus
(Cambridge, 1968), 225: “The historical experience of concentration is almost terra incognita.”

³²
Individual cases of German authorities closing inefficient plants in the Occupied Zone in 1941 are reported in U.S. Dept. of State Serial File 851.5018, documents 126, 137, 139.

³³
See examples in German intelligence reports, T-77/1444/5,594,874 ff. See also Pierre Nicolle,
Cinquante Mois d’armistice
(Paris, 1947), for the frequent disgruntlement of this lobbyist for small business.

³⁴
Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques,
Conférences d’information
, no. 1 (7 February 1941).

³⁵
Le Temps
, 5 May 1941, 15 May 1941. Jean-Michel Jeanneney and Marguerite Perrot,
Textes de droit économique et social français
(Paris, 1957), 474;
Ministère public c/François Lehideux
, 10;
Ministère public c/Berthelot.

³⁶
France, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques.
Annuaire statistique de la France
, vol. 57—1946 (Paris, 1947), 100, 107. See also “Population active, production, et productivité dans 21 branches de l’économie française,”
Etudes et conjonctures
(February 1965), 73–108. Charles P. Kindleberger makes a similar case from postwar figures in Stanley Hoffmann, ed.,
In Search of France
(Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

³⁷
E.g., coal production in France stayed close to 1938 levels, but coal consumption in France dropped below 1890 figures. See
Annuaire statistique
, 1946.

³⁸
F.-Louis Closon, in preface to 1946 French census. For the technocratic left before 1940, see Georges Lefranc’s journal
Révolution Constructive
and Jules Moch,
Confrontations
(Paris, 1952).