Voices from the Dark Years (15 page)

This, then, was the tenacious millionaire lawyer-politician who walked always a few paces behind the marshal as together they led France into the dark years ahead. The last civilian refugees in Vichy – men in linen suits and panama hats, the ladies in floral-patterned summer dresses, open sandals and pretty hats – watched as the dark-suited politicians in collar and tie wearing trilby or homburg hats emerged from their cars and set about the first business of the day: finding a bed. Not all succeeded in having a roof over their head the first night, although the situation was eased by the reduction in their numbers due to the expulsion of the communists at the beginning of the year and a prohibition from returning to metropolitan France to attend the National Assembly for all those who travelled on the
Massilia
to North Africa in the belief that they were going to form a last-ditch government there.

On 4 July, when everyone else was still grappling with the news from Mers el-Kebir, Laval read out at the morning cabinet meeting a text he had drafted with Minister of Justice Raphaël Alibert for the National Assembly’s approval. It was nothing less than an abdication of Parliament that placed all power in the hands of Pétain. The marshal said nothing, but when seven members of the cabinet raised objections, Laval cut them short claiming he had no time to listen because an important group of senators was waiting for him.

Like all spa towns, Vichy had been run by its doctors. In the meeting hall of the medical societies, sixty senators awaited his arrival. If they were seeking clarification of their role, it was quick in coming. Laval informed them that the Constitution had to be drastically reformed if France were to continue to exist in a German-dominated Europe. If parliament did not agree to do this, Berlin would impose it by force and occupy the rest of France. This was a blatant fabrication. With less than a year to run before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it suited Hitler that Pétain should govern the two-fifths of the country with no immediate strategic importance and thus reduce the number of German forces tied up in the west.

Laval’s proposals hardly commended themselves to the assembled senators, but they were without leaders capable of restraining Pétain’s deputy when he had the bit between his teeth. Reynaud, his head bandaged from the accident that cost the life of the Comtesse of Portes, was discredited by the scandal. The whereabouts of Édouard Herriot and Blum were uncertain. Daladier and Mandel were in custody in North Africa, where, as in other overseas possessions, the administration remained loyal to Vichy, its civil servants fearing they would lose their pension rights if they opted for de Gaulle.

But there was more to it than that. Most of the deputies and senators had been elected under the Popular Front and knew – although they would never have admitted it – that they were
responsible
for France’s downfall. Driving to Vichy along roads littered with the human and material debris of the exodus from the towns and cities, through throngs of bewildered and unhappy people making their way back to homes that had been destroyed, they had been all too aware that the electorate trusted only one man. Laval – whom few trusted except the voters in Aubervilliers, a working-class district of Paris which had elected him mayor in March 1923 and stayed loyal to him all the way until 1944 – claimed to be speaking for that man.

Next day, Jean Taurines, leader of twenty-five senators who believed that Pétain would listen to them because they were ex-servicemen, tabled a motion expressing complete confidence in the marshal within normal parliamentary constraints. That afternoon, Laval faced eighty deputies in the great hall of the Casino. To their leaders defending parliamentary democracy, he retorted that the time for speeches was past. The rebuilding of France could only be achieved by destroying what had caused her problems. Either the deputies accepted his way of solving the problems, or Hitler would impose his own solution. With his years of courtroom experience, Laval knew he was on thin ice as he spent the next hours lobbying small groups everywhere, promising anything and playing on everyone’s fears of German intervention.

That evening Taurines’ ex-servicemen senators took to Pétain a counterproposal: that the constitution be not abolished but
suspended
for the duration of the war, with government by decree until then. They had the impression that Pétain was in favour. Was he going to dump Laval? That was the question.

The answer next morning was Laval’s speech as the marshal’s spokesman before the National Assembly, in which he informed the deputies and senators that, although parliament had no place in post-Armistice France, they would be allowed to keep all their prerogatives of office, including salaries. Taurines returned to the marshal, who said that he had not changed his mind but nothing could be done without Laval. Wheeling into the attack, Laval gave a furious ultimatum. Should the counterproposal be voted in, he would resign his office and they could resign themselves to a coup d’état led by Weygand or Gen de Lattre de Tassigny, military commander of the region – neither of which had any foundation in fact.

With the death knell of the Republic that Laval was so vigorously sounding ringing in their ears, the lower house had another idea: to get rid of Lebrun, making Pétain both head of government and head of state. There was nothing in the constitution of 1875 to prevent it. Failing to grasp that the ploy was directed against Laval and not himself, President Lebrun refused to resign.

Laval pressed on, his next legal weapon was Article 8 of the constitution, which required both houses to vote separately on whether or not to amend the constitution and then meet in joint assembly within forty-eight hours to pass the amendment. If that was legal, his use of lies, promises and threats to divide the many deputies and senators who were against him smacked more of sharp practice in the courtroom than parliamentary democracy.

The largest hall in Vichy was the theatre of the Casino, where on 9 July – the day Parisian publisher Mercure de France rushed into production a cheap French edition of
Mein Kampf
⁶
–
398 deputies in the morning and 230 senators in the afternoon voted to amend the constitution. Of the deputies, only three voted against; of the senators, only one. After sixty-five years, the Third Republic was laid to rest, complete with eulogy from one senator, acknowledging that it was the constitution which had made France a free country. It was, he said, not the constitution that had failed, but rather its guardians, who had not done their duty.

On 10 July beneath a cloudless sky and a burning sun, 666 soberly dressed deputies and senators, including Herriot, Blum and other late arrivals, passed through the massive police cordon holding off a crowd of the curious and into the 1,450-seater opera house for their joint secret session. There were no women present. Not until 1944 would they gain the right to vote or stand for public office in France. Did anyone there remember the text of the Book of Revelation 13:18? ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.’

One man may have done. Léon Blum, France’s first socialist and first Jewish premier, whose Popular Front coalition of 1936–37 had contributed so much to France’s fatal unpreparedness for war, looked around at his fellow parliamentarians and watched ‘all the courage and integrity one knew certain men possessed disappear before my eyes, corroded and dissolved in a human swamp’.
⁷
He was perhaps projecting his own guilt, for Taurines’ group showed courage, insisting on their counter-proposal being debated after the Bill had been read. However, Laval outflanked any opposition by inserting into the Bill a clause that the new constitution must be ratified by the nation – and then carried the day by reading a letter from the absent marshal in which Pétain declared the Bill necessary for the safety of the country. Out of respect for him, the veterans’ group withdrew their counterproposal.

Having won the day, Laval launched into one of the most extraordinary speeches ever delivered to any parliament. Mixing histrionics and history, he accused Blum and the Popular Front of bringing France to this terrible pass; he accused de Gaulle in London; he accused the parliamentarians in North Africa. We cannot save France by running away from her, was his gist. The occasional interruption was overridden rough-shod. Winding himself and his audience up to a climax, Laval ended:

Make no mistake about it. We are now living under a dictatorship. The functions of Parliament will be restricted. We shall accept no amendment. This evening, I know, not a single vote will be cast against the Bill, for it is to France that you give your vote!
⁸

Carried away by his rhetoric and by his unquestioning belief in his vision of what was best for the country, the Assembly burst into applause. The eloquence that had won so many courtoom victories had cut the ground from underneath his opponents’ feet.

Proving Blum wrong about other people’s courage, a few voices were raised in defiance of Laval’s statement that the Vichy government would set up labour camps on the model of the Russian and German totalitarian states. Sixty-nine senators signed a declaration of reservation, but it was not permitted a reading. Another group of twenty-seven refused to vote for a Bill that would inevitably lead to the disappearance of the republican regime. Their spokesman was forcibly removed from the rostrum by the ushers when he tried to read their signed protest. As the joint houses rose, to return that afternoon in public session for the vote, Laval could not resist having the last word. The government, he said, had drafted the Bill as the way to give France the least evil peace. It was a curious phrase:
la paix la moins mauvaise possible!
But by then he was almost feverish with triumph.

At 2.30 p.m. the public session opened with no sign of Pétain. The President of the Senate read the obituary notice of the Third Republic:

The National Assembly gives complete powers to the government of the Republic under the authority and with the signature of Marshal Pétain for the purpose of promulgating, by one or more laws, a new Constitution for the French state. This Constitution is to guarantee the rights to work, of the family and the country. It will be ratified by the nation and applied by the assemblies it will create.

The necessary majority being defined as half those present plus one, Laval was at his most charming while the formalities for the vote were being conducted, assuring everyone that, until new assemblies were set up under the new constitution, the two houses would not be dissolved, but merely suspended. As a sop to those deputies and senators who feared that Pétain might be coerced into going to war on the German side, he also guaranteed that the head of state had no power to declare war without the consent of the suspended legislative assemblies.

When the vote was counted, the majority in favour exceeded the minimum required: 569 votes for and only eighty against, with seventeen abstentions.
⁹
After the result was announced, among the cries of
‘Vive la France!’
and
‘Vive le maréchal!’
one lone voice was heard to call,
‘Vive la République, quand-même!’

The briefly glorious Second Empire of Napoleon III had been extinguished by France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war; its successor state died of the same disease on that torrid afternoon in July 1940 and was buried in the Casino at Vichy with a mere ninety-seven mourners at the graveside. Of these brave men, fifteen were to be arrested for having the courage of their convictions, five of them dying in German camps; two others were murdered in France.

One who survived was Deputy Jules Moch, who had returned clandestinely from North Africa in order to attend the Assembly. After the vote, he changed back into his officer’s uniform and was driven to the railway station to take the first train out of Vichy, no matter what its destination. Alighting from a taxi in the closely guarded station forecourt, he expected to be arrested on hearing the guard called out – only to find that Pétain had found time on that fateful morning to reinstate the honours due to officers in peacetime. Moch was required not merely to return the salute of a single sentry but to inspect the whole guard paraded as a mark of respect to the uniform he was wearing.
¹⁰

The following day, the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, last theatre in Paris to close its doors on 10 June, was the first to reopen – with a frothy comedy. Next came Les Ambassadeurs with a show whose posters promised ‘three hours of non-stop laughter’
.
Why not? Lest any single person in France doubted that the country was a military dictatorship on both sides of the line, Pétain’s three decrees of 11 July were regal declarations beginning: ‘We, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France.’ In the first, he declared himself head of state. In the second, he enumerated the powers with which he was invested – total powers, excepting only the right to declare war. In the third, he suspended
sine die
both houses of parliament, which could reassemble only if he summoned them. Equally alarming was that France was officially no longer a republic, its title having been changed by the marshal from ‘La République Française’ to ‘L’État Français’ – the French state.