Voices from the Dark Years (11 page)

Bread rationing tickets.

N
OTES

  
1.
  Quoted in Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 47.

  
2.
  Most of the 8 million Occitan-speakers, 1.4 million Bretons, 400,000 Corsicans, 200,000 Flemings, 200,000 Catalans and 150,000 Basques also spoke French. In a 1931 survey in Alsace, 700,000 had declared themselves German-speaking, 800,000 were bilingual and 200,000 spoke only French. See Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 49.

  
3.
  Freeman and Cooper,
Road to Bordeaux
, p. 315.

  
4.
  Madame Cahen D’Anvers,
Baboushka Remembers
(privately printed, 1972), pp. 186–94.

  
5.
  G. and J.-R. Ragache,
La Vie des Ecrivains et des Artistes sous l’Occupation
(Paris: Hachette, 1988), p.32.

  
6.
  R. de Monbrison,
Memoirs
, unpub. MS.

  
7.
  
Populations abandonnées, confiez-vous au sol dat allemand!

5

B
EHOLD
THE
M
AN
!

What kind of man was Philippe Pétain, whose name became a synonym for cruelty and collaboration in the worst degree?

A career soldier who never expected to become a general, let alone head of state, he was born in April 1856 into a family of farmers a few kilometres from Béthune in northern France. Admitted to the military academy of St-Cyr after attending the village school and a religious secondary school, he was an outstanding cadet. Commissioned second-lieutenant in an Alpine regiment, he was popular with his men but not his superiors because of an inability to keep his mouth shut when disagreeing with them – a trait that has blighted the career of many a peacetime soldier. While an instructor at St-Cyr, Pétain opposed the nineteenth-century obsession with offensive operations at any cost, arguing that a commander must possess superior fire-power before launching an attack and that a well-organised defence to wear the enemy down was often a better course.

Thus, advancement came his way slowly. In 1914 he was a handsome blue-eyed unmarried 58-year-old colonel stationed in Arras with a record that even his hagiographical biography by General Laure described as distinctly below average. On the point of resigning his commission from sheer frustration when war broke out, Pétain was promoted general on the strength of commanding at Guise in 1914 one of the few successful operations against the invading armies of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Given command of 6th Division and then 33rd Corps, he distinguished himself again at Artois by the use of massive artillery barrages to reduce the horrific scale of casualties that his fellow-generals thought acceptable. Promoted to command 2nd Army for the ‘big push’ in Champagne during September 1915, he failed to break the German line, but was called on six months later to stem the attack under Crown Prince Wilhelm on the crucial fortress-city of Verdun. On his appointment, the situation was regarded as hopeless, but he reorganised the front, the transport system and the disposition of artillery, inspiring his demoralised troops. Unashamed to show his grief at the sight of the casualties, he earned at Verdun a reputation for humane and far-sighted generalship.

In June 1917 after the widespread mutinies following the ill-considered offensives of General Nivelle, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives to no purpose, Pétain’s success at Verdun and his popularity with the troops resulted in him replacing Nivelle as Commander-in-Chief of all French armies. His first problem was not the enemy, but the low morale of the men under his command. A brutal series of executions before his appointment, although intended to halt the widespread mutinies, had succeeded only in reducing morale even further. Pétain’s revolutionarily modern method was to
reduce
punishments and reward good conduct and bravery, even allowing men in the ranks to recommend their own comrades for the Croix de Guerre.

Conscripts who had been fighting for three years in the trenches without seeing their families were astonished to be given leave passes. They enjoyed regular rest periods out of the line – and better food. The latter he achieved by random visits to other ranks’ canteens, where he startled his aides-de-camp by sampling the fare personally and commenting on it frankly. In August and October 1917 at Verdun and Malmaison Pétain again made a name for himself by using enormous bombardments to save his men’s lives, and finished the war as France’s most respected soldier since Napoleon. It had taken him forty years to rise from second lieutenant to colonel; from there to Marshal of France took only four. His rise was all the more spectacular because the majority of his fellow generals were discredited and it seemed to the nation that he was the only one who had never been wrong since 1914.

At the age of 62, he was popular enough to enter politics, but chose to do what great Roman generals had done, retiring to a farm to occupy himself with husbandry while awaiting his country’s call. It came in 1926, when he was sent to Morocco to suppress the revolt against French colonial domination led by Abd el-Krim. Inheriting the chair of his deceased rival Marshal Foch at the Académie Française on 22 January 1931, he was hailed by the poet Paul Valéry as the man who had gone to war in 1914 at the head of 6,000 men and had 3 million under his command by 1918. However, outside the ivory tower of the Academy lay the smokeless factory chimneys and the hunger marches of the Depression years. After nationwide strikes and riots in 1934, it was Pétain’s presence in the unstable government of Gaston Doumergue that was largely responsible for the re-establishment of public order: people trusted the Saviour of Verdun to bring in the reforms they wanted.

His last public office in the 1930s was as ambassador to Spain. Aged 81 on appointment, the old soldier charged with opening diplomatic relations with Franco’s government was so widely respected that even the
caudillo
wept with emotion on hearing of his appointment. However, Pétain did not have the political sense it takes to be a diplomat and was easily duped into allowing himself to be photographed with German members of the Condor Legion or warmly shaking the hand of Hitler’s ambassador von Stohrer. Even after the declaration of war with Germany in 1939, Pétain was again photographed apparently reviewing swastika-badged German flagbearers at the reinterment of Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera in the Escurial. Goebbels’ propaganda machine naturally made the most of these photo opportunities before Pétain was recalled by Reynaud on 16 May 1940.

If that was the public Pétain, what was the private man?

All the world loves a lover, and France more so than most countries. Pétain had a great love affair, which endeared him to many women, who admired him for saving the lives of their menfolk at Verdun. The long affair began in 1881 at Menton. Aged 25, Second Lieutenant Pétain dandled 4-year-old Eugénie Hardon on his knee – and fell in love with her. In the guise of family friend, he consoled young Ninie on the loss of her mother and then her father. On his regular visits to the bereaved Hardon household, he watched her grow from an enchanting child into a beautiful, elfin-faced young woman, looking uncommonly like Leslie Caron in the film version of Colette’s
Gigi
. The perfect gentleman, Philippe Pétain bided his time, waiting until 1901 when she was 24 and he 45. Such age gaps were neither uncommon at the time, nor disapproved of. Yet when the nervous suitor proposed marriage, he was rejected by Eugenie’s guardians because of his poor military prospects. Two years later, she married and had a son.

The marriage failing, Eugénie became aware of Pétain’s
amour de loin
expressed in passionate love letters. Despite his enormous responsibilities, Pétain wrote to her every single day throughout the First World War, his letters revealing a tortured, jealous admirer. On the threshold of the greatest carnage the world had known, he wrote to her on a ruled signal pad dated 21 August 1914: ‘I face a great battle without regret or apprehension for I have already offered my life to my country, but the physical suffering ahead is as nothing compared with the spiritual torture you cause me.’
¹
In April 1916 he wrote to her, not of guns and glory but of a lovers’ fantasy tryst: the two of them alone ‘with just some books for company and a few good friends, who do not include your old sweethearts or mine’.
²

As the war progressed it was Eugénie’s turn to be jealous of the many beautiful women pursuing France’s great hero. Jealous of each other, now bitter, now loving, they were together when Joffre called Pétain to command the army at Verdun. Reluctantly he tore himself away from Ninie to fulfil his destiny. It was not until 1920 that the lovers could get married: he now 64 and she 43, a fashionable woman of beauty, poise and presence. Not in the high society of Paris, but in the bucolic setting of Villeneuve-Loubet in the Alpes Maritimes between Nice and Antibes, Pétain returned to his roots – becoming expert in raising chickens and rabbits, growing vegetables and pruning vines.

The rural idyll, interrupted by his suppression of the Abd el-Krim revolt in Morocco, ended for good when Pétain was sent to Madrid. When he was recalled by Reynaud in May 1940 to serve in the cabinet, Eugénie did not accompany him to Paris, having no place in his political life. However, she came to take up her duties at his side when the government moved from Bordeaux to Clermont-Ferrand and then to Vichy. She stayed loyally with him from then on, and accompanied him by choice on 20 August 1944 when the SS drove the ageing marshal into exile on the other side of the Rhine. She was still with him on his return via Switzerland in 1945 to face trial and a sentence of death. Briefly imprisoned with him, she was released, but showed both dignity and courage in standing by one of the two most vilified men in France – Laval was the other. After the commutation of Pétain’s death sentence immediately after its pronouncement in August 1945, she moved to the bleak Ile d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, where he was imprisoned, and stayed there near the prison until his death in July 1951 at the age of 95.

That, then, was Philippe Pétain, the soldier and the man. How did it all go so wrong?

Stimulated by the crisis of June 1940 and his unique ability to resolve it, Pétain aimed to rebuild the French people’s shattered morale by promising them the birth of a new intellectual and moral order after the signature of the Armistice. A brand-new France, he promised the people, would surge forth from the ashes of the old.
³
It was a beautiful dream, but at a time when reality is intolerable most people can be seduced by the right dream. A measure of his popularity is the speed with which his personality cult grew in this pre-television era when portraits of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Salazar were in millions of homes and every public building in their respective countries. Post offices in the Free Zone sold within two weeks 1,368,420 portraits of the man who had saved Verdun and now France itself. They were hung on office walls, in homes and factories and especially on the radio sets, which then occupied a focal point in living rooms, bars and hotel dining rooms.

Men sported Pétain handkerchiefs and propelling pencils bearing his picture. Children proudly carried to school souvenir pencil boxes in the shape of the marshal’s baton. In the classroom a new national hymn
Maréchal, nous voilà!
replaced
La
Marseillaise
and competition was fierce to be the child chosen to write a letter to the marshal, whose prompt reply came complete with a portrait of him looking noble on horseback. His fan mail averaged 1,200 letters per day. In every town and village, streets and squares were renamed in his honour – to be renamed again at the Liberation.

Although the Third Republic had no established religion, the vast majority of the population was Catholic. To them, the marshal’s sacrificial phrase in the broadcast of 17 June,
‘Je fais à la France le don de ma personne’
– I offer myself to France – had almost Christ-like connotations, as though Pétain had been sent by God to redeem the nation.
⁴
An entire iconography was to be created on the theme
Behold the man
… the state-owned Imagerie du Maréchal recruited artists to produce icons in two and three dimensions. A colouring book for children showed twelve significant events from his life, after the manner of the Stations of the Cross. Fairy stories were written about his life, some beginning, ‘Once upon a time, there was a Marshal of France …’