German flags hanging from the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot.
In his inaugural address, Pétain sang the praises of discipline and work. “The labor of Frenchmen is the supreme resource of the Fatherland. It must be sacred,” he declared.
International capitalism and international Socialism, which exploited and degraded it, played prominent roles in the prewar period. They were all the more sinister for acting in concert while appearing to cross swords. We shall no longer tolerate their shady alliance. In a new order, where justice will reign, we will not admit them to factories and farms. In our warped society, money—too often the servant of lies—was an instrument of domination.… In France reborn, money will only be the recompense of effort. Your work, your family will enjoy the respect and protection of the nation.12
Marshal Pétain greeting schoolchildren in Vichy, 1940.
Laws calculated to “remake” France were drafted in great haste during the summer of 1940. Six days after Pétain’s speech, the sons of foreign-born fathers learned that they could neither practice law nor serve in government. On July 22, all naturalizations approved since 1927 became subject to review. On July 30, a Supreme Court was established for the express purpose of finding ministers of the Third Republic guilty of failing in their duties or betraying the public trust. On August 13, secret associations, above all the Masonic Order, were banned. By law, anyone who came under suspicion of “endangering the safety of the state” could be arrested and imprisoned. October marked the beginning of Vichy’s anti-Semitic campaign. Decrees excluded Jews from public office and liberal professions; Algerian Jews lost their citizenship; internment camps filled with refugees from Nazi Germany.
The festivities of July 1939 celebrating the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution were still vividly remembered when “Work, family, fatherland” replaced the republican motto “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” This brought immense satisfaction to Charles Maurras, who felt that his editorial jeremiads had, like a desert cactus, unexpectedly flowered after growing needles for forty years. “People have spoken about the ‘divine element’ in the art of war,” he wrote. “Well, the divine element in the art of politics has shown itself in the extraordinary surprises the Marshal has reserved for us.”
And where Maurras led, the royal pretender, the Comte de Paris, followed. “This providential man,” he wrote of Pétain, “has managed to accomplish a triple miracle: he has prevented the total disappearance of the fatherland; he has by his presence alone enabled the country to stay alive; and he has set France on the path of its great traditional destinies by breaking with the principles of the fallen regime.”
The “État Français” became even more the simulacrum of an independent state when, in November 1942, after the Allies landed in North Africa, German troops crossed the line of demarcation to defend against a Mediterranean invasion.
1Bonnet, who had briefly served as France’s monolingual ambassador in Washington, made no secret of his aversion to New Deal economics and his hostility to Roosevelt.
2In May 1940, when the French army was retreating from the Germans helter-skelter, Georges Mandel said of Chautemps, his fellow minister and vice premier, whom he regarded as a prime specimen of the political class’s fecklessness, “He is rehearsing the speech he will deliver as Chief Mourner should France drop dead.”
3In his account of the battle, Pétain praised the performance of the turreted guns and the fixed fortification system when in fact conventional field artillery in the open had inflicted much more damage on the enemy. This misrepresentation influenced France’s calamitous decision to build the Maginot Line.
4On July 12, six weeks before the Munich agreement, Daladier declared in a major speech, portions of which were published in Le Temps, that France’s commitments to Czechoslovakia were “ineluctable and sacred.” Precisely because these commitments existed and France’s intention was to respect them scrupulously, he continued, “she is entitled to exert all her influence over the country to which these guarantees have been given to favor conciliation.… Her bounden duty is to spare no effort to maintain peace.” In England, Chamberlain’s foreign minister, Lord Halifax, voiced his sentiments in a letter to the former prime minister Stanley Baldwin: “Nationalism and racialism is [sic] a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s unnatural or immoral! I cannot myself doubt that these fellows [the Nazis] are genuine haters of Communism, etc.! And I daresay if we were in their position we would feel the same!” Pierre Flandin, a former premier and holder of various portfolios, put it to an interviewer from Le Petit Parisien that economic pragmatism should be France’s watchword, that the idealistic opposition to dictators and concern with the “Jewish question” worked against the country’s essential interests.
5Another of Léon Daudet’s favorite targets, Louis Louis-Dreyfus belonged to a rich family of global commodity merchants. He owned the newspaper L’Intransigeant and had served for many years as a deputy and senator. The voices raised against Jews for denouncing the Munich pact and thus exposing France to the hell of another war included politicians of the left as well as the right, especially those associated with the bimonthly La Flèche, and in particular Drieu’s former friend Gaston Bergery. In the anti-Communist and anti-Semitic paper Combat, Maurice Blanchot, a regular contributor, who achieved fame after 1945 as a literary theorist, declared, in response to the furor over Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936: “There is, outside of Germany, a clan that wants war and, under color of prestige and international morality, insidiously propagates the case for war. It is the clan of former pacifists, revolutionaries, and Jewish émigrés who will do anything to bring down Hitler and put an end to dictatorships.” Condemned in this article were “unbridled Jews” who, in a “theological rage,” clamored for immediate sanctions against Nazi Germany.
6In the revolutionary calendar 18 Brumaire was the date of Napoleon’s coup d’état, overthrowing the Directory and establishing the Consulate. In comparing Daladier to Napoleon, L’Humanité obviously had in mind the opening lines of Karl Marx’s Le 18 Brumaire de Louis Napoléon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historical facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
7As previously noted, the nationalists would not enter Madrid until March 28.
8In 1934 King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated by a Bulgarian nationalist during a state visit to France.
9Maurras, who was all for the invasion of the Rhineland in the 1920s, adamantly opposed France’s declaration of war in 1939. On August 26, 1939, six days before Germany invaded Poland, he wrote, “Jews, or friends of Jews, these gentlemen are in close contact with the powerful Jewish clique in London.… If today our people allow themselves to be slaughtered unsuspectingly and vainly at the behest of forces that are English-speaking Jews, or at the behest of their French slaves, then a French voice must be raised to proclaim the truth.”
10“The capitulation of the government was less dreadful [to those in command] than a military debacle,” Raymond Aron writes in Chroniques de Guerre. “General Weygand, whose political conservatism dominated his military thinking, feared that pockets of revolutionary resistance would form within the throng of routed troops. This obsession clouded his view of things. He had responded to the setbacks in Flanders by organizing a continuous line along the Somme. When this fragile defense collapsed, he was confounded by the new dimension of warfare and lost all capacity for synthesis and action.”
11They were placed under house arrest in Casablanca. Zay (Blum’s education minister) and Georges Mandel (Reynaud’s minister of the interior), both Jews, were eventually assassinated by the Vichy militia. Mendès France, another Jew, was imprisoned but escaped. Daladier was handed over to the Gestapo and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where, for a time, his fellow inmates included Reynaud and Léon Blum.
12Money, lies, abstraction, and Jews were cognates in Vichy�
�s vocabulary of denigration.
Epilogue
With each week’s accumulation of diplomatic news, it becomes increasingly clear that Europe is now permanently divided into two camps of conviction, which differ fundamentally on one thing: war. For historical and material reasons, France and England today consider war a summum malum; for biological and material reasons, Germany and Italy consider war a summum bonum.
—JANET FLANNER, February 2, 1939, Paris Was Yesterday
I hope for the triumph of totalitarian man over the world. The age of divided man has passed.… Enough of this dust of individuals in the crowd.
—PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, Journal, June 10, 1945
Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who tacked so obsessively between self-hatred and vanity, ended up collaborating with the Germans despite himself and for reasons of literary promotion. His pledge of fealty to Jacques Doriot and the French Fascist Party in 1936 had followed the pattern of all his enthusiasms. It had laid the ground for disillusionment. He came to believe that the movement capable of transcending politics and organizing France around a militant creed had dissipated its energy in political opportunism. Worse still for Drieu, who felt alive only within the radiant circle of a hero, was the dimming of Jacques Doriot’s aura. Drieu accused him of failing to “weld into one metal the energy of the many who had entrusted themselves to him” and in January 1939 resigned from the PPF. Doriot, the Vulcan presuming to harden men in the heat of battle, turned out to be an ordinary trimmer. Like Republican France, he was “mou”—soft. Not so, Hitler.
The basic vocabulary of an ideologue at war with his own intellect—energy, fire, metal, strength, virility—received full play in Gilles, an autobiographical novel Drieu published shortly after his resignation from Doriot’s PPF, hoping finally to establish himself as something more than a respectable but minor literary figure and to find consolation thereby for his political orphanhood. It spans the life of Gilles Gambier from the First World War, when he first visits Paris as a wounded young soldier on leave, to 1937, when the soul-sick veteran of Paris society volunteers for service with Franco during the Spanish Civil War. His movements across the intervening years tell a story not unlike Flaubert’s Sentimental Education in its randomness—a story of wrong turns, dry wells, and impasses. Women flock to him. He has affairs. He marries a rich Jewess and divorces her. His well-connected wife finds him employment in the foreign office, where he languishes dutifully. He shares his loathing of the bourgeoisie with nihilistic young writers who play at revolution. He flees to Algeria, seeking spiritual solace in the desert, but returns to bourgeois Babylon unredeemed and continues his quest for spirituality as the editor of a journal, Apocalypse, dedicated to the proposition that France’s ultimate well-being lies not in the sterile middle ground of a republic but at the ideal confluence of political extremes. This, too, is an impasse. Apocalypse ends up buried in the riot rubble of February 1934, when Gilles converts to Fascism.
Suffice it to say of Gilles that Drieu wrote a picaresque novel with the bones of a thesis regularly poking through the flesh of its characters. Irremediably decadent, France has been undermined by modernity and by the assimilation of foreigners alien to her nature. Surrealists, homosexuals, drug addicts, feminists, and métèques are all called to account, but the most lethal and comprehensive agent of subversion is the Jew. Like Maurras, Drieu distinguished between the “real” country and its “legal” counterfeit. Jews belong to the latter. Devoid of the organic Frenchness that inheres in roots and soil and physical reality, they are themselves legalisms, personifying the abstract notion of citizenship invented by the Revolution. Only as old as their abstraction, they are yet responsible for France’s senility—a paradox Drieu applies to the broad compass of French history. The modern world, which Jews epitomize, is decrepit; the Middle Ages, in which “French reason” made its home, were young and vital. “Gilles had associated his loneliness with the soul of France,” writes Drieu.
On foot or by car he had made pilgrimages to sites the length and breadth of France. He had rested his eyes on mountains and rivers, trees and monuments. He had been moved and arrested by monuments quarried from the matrix of the earth. How often he had jumped out of his car on a country road to visit some forsaken little church, believing that it contained the secret of life. The French once built churches and they no longer could.… The reasoning, calculating architect needed audacity.… With his church he challenged the tree rooted beside it. Now what did he make? Office buildings, boxes for rent, public conveniences, and monuments that feebly imitate the style of lost youth and creation.… French reason was the passionate, proud, furious twelfth century splurging itself in epics and cathedrals.… The French had been soldiers, monks, architects, painters, poets, husbands, and fathers. They had sired children, they had constructed, they had killed, and laid down their lives. They had sacrificed themselves and sacrificed.
“Sacrifice” is another word belonging to the vocabulary of the Fascist at war with his intellect. In an epilogue that calls to mind the French Romantics who portrayed Spain as a netherworld of salutary primitivism, Gilles finds on the battlefield of Extremadura, where men untouched by the modern age and careless of their individual fate fight for a cause, what he couldn’t find in the Algerian desert. “Almost all the soldiers were young and recruited from the neighboring province of Old Castile. Young peasants, robust and incorruptible in their simplicity. They were born of that eternally primitive race which still populates the depths of Europe and from which we now see emerging the great irresistible movement that astonishes delicately strung minds in cities of the West.”
Drieu’s paranoia, feelings of inferiority, and melancholy all played a part in making the publication of Gilles, by Gallimard in December 1939, a vexed affair. Months earlier, Jean Paulhan, the editorial director of the literary review NRF, to which Drieu contributed, had rejected the chapter ridiculing the Surrealists—a rejection at which he would have certainly taken umbrage even if Paulhan had not continued to publish the work of Louis Aragon, by whose flourishing career Drieu always measured his own. In April he vowed never again to set foot in the NRF offices, where “Jews, Communist sympathizers, former Surrealists and all manner of people who believe that truth lies on the left call the tune.” He protested to Paulhan that his “national sentiment” was not subject to the vagaries of a foreign power. “Aragon is more Communist than ever and obeys the defeatist agenda of the Soviet Union. As for myself, I remain a resolute adversary of democracy, which I consider above all a ruin encumbering us with its debris—and at the same time a patriot. I am the opposite of Aragon—I subordinate my tastes and distastes to the country I belong to. I have asserted this position in the NRF, … in the PPF’s Émancipation Nationale, and in Gilles.”1
But Paulhan was not alone in thinking that with patriots like Drieu, France had no need of potential traitors. Drieu himself couldn’t tease apart his allegiances. “I can’t think my thoughts through to the point of hoping for a victory of the totalitarians, although they would establish a European union more organic and effective than our League of Nations,” he wrote on May 10, 1940, the day Germany attacked France. “I am incapable of stifling my instinctive French reaction. Habit is second nature and second nature is instinct.” Yet three days later, when the Germans were crossing the Meuse at Sedan, en route to the interior, he noted in his diary that he and Hitler were made of the same stuff and moved by the same impulses. “I feel Hitler’s movements as if I were he himself; I am at the center of his impulsive force. The male and positive side of my work are what make him tick. Strange adventure, these parallels.… In Hitler the same weakness and strength.… At twenty-five or thirty, I discerned the essence of Fascism in my first works.”
The catastrophic events of 1940–41 unhinged Drieu, intensifying both his paranoia and his grandiosity. He fled Paris on June 10 with or without the poison he had threatened to swallow as soon as Germans entered the city, but more fearful of being assassin
ated by “Jews and Anglophiles.” The army was in full retreat. A tide of refugees swept him down to the Dordogne, where he remained until, on July 19, the opportunity to visit Vichy presented itself. By then Drieu had learned that Germany’s ambassador to Paris was Otto Abetz, whom he had met six years earlier in Nuremberg.2 Drieu offered to cultivate Abetz for whatever intelligence of German plans their acquaintance might yield. Home he came, crossing the line of demarcation with quasi-official credentials. But the powers that be in Paris proved more alluring to Drieu than the geriatric regime in Vichy. Before long he reconciled his differences with Jacques Doriot in hopes of founding a “Socialist-Fascist” party inspired by the Hitler-Stalin pact. “I tell myself (and, alas, confide to all and sundry) that I would like to play the role of gray eminence and am so persuasive that there has been much whispering about it.” Otto Abetz, who kept close tabs on Paris’s cultural scene, discouraged the idea and proposed that Drieu apply his energies to literature rather than politics as if the two could be distinguished in occupied France. This he did so effectively that in December 1940 the German authorities allowed the Nouvelle Revue Française, which had been shut down, to resume publication under Drieu’s directorship, and gave him oversight in the affairs of Gallimard, the book publisher. Suddenly the world had turned upside down for Drieu. The great had been made small, impedimenta had been swept away, and France’s foremost literary journal, which had added insult to injury by publishing an uncomplimentary review of Gilles before its extinction, would be his to revive.
The Embrace of Unreason Page 34