by Matthew Cobb
The overwhelming response by French soldiers to the armistice was one of relief and acceptance. Captain Henri Frenay reported:
I saw our men, who had fought so well right up to the last minute, throw down their arms, abandon their field packs and organize folk dances on the road and in forest clearings.47
Jean-Pierre Levy, a reserve artillery lieutenant who fought up until the bitter end, wrote:
It’s sad to say, but, alas, it’s the truth: around me there was widespread relief at the announcement of the news. Soldiers and officers were in favour of ceasing hostilities and did not hide it. Everything happened in a virtually unanimous consensus.48
Some soldiers were less enthusiastic. Lieutenant Barlone, who had returned to France following his evacuation from Dunkirk, wrote in his diary:
We learn by wireless that Pétain and Weygand have asked for an armistice. Several officers weep bitterly. Others remain indifferent as if struck dumb by the disaster.49
The full implication of the fall of France was still unclear to many. On 18 June Arthur Koestler passed groups of refugees on the road to Périgueux in the Dordogne, seemingly unaware of what was to come. As he caustically remarked in his diary:
All the way saw families camping by the roadside with cars parked off the road, on the spot where the last drop of petrol gave out. It is a sort of general stay put. All wait for armistice to be signed and ‘everything to become normal again’. They really believe life will be as it was before. Meanwhile, they eat and drink in the sunny meadows and play belotte. The apocalypse as a family picnic.50
Under the terms of the armistice, the country was divided into two zones: an Occupied Zone in the north and a Non-Occupied Zone (or ‘Free Zone’) in the south. A ‘demarcation line’ – a frontier in all but name – snaked across the country, allowing the Nazis to control traffic between the two zones. France was carved up like a carcass. First pickings went direct to Germany: the coal-rich regions of the north were put under Nazi command, while the coal- and steel-producing areas of Alsace-Lorraine in the east, which were not mentioned in the armistice agreement, were simply annexed by Germany (speaking French was forbidden, Jews were banned from the area and all men were subject to Nazi conscription). Italy – which had opportunistically declared war on France on 10 June – got a small area around Menton, in south-eastern France.
Hitler wanted to turn France into a colony, and Pétain was his stooge. By agreeing to do the Nazis’ work for them, Pétain and the Vichy regime made a total German occupation unnecessary. Crippling reparations were imposed – the astronomic sum of 20 million Reichsmarks per day – as the Nazis set about bleeding their victim dry. Over the next few years all major production was integrated into the German war machine. The fact that the industrial and raw material-producing areas in the north and the east were under German control made this easier. Thousands of trainloads of food and industrial products travelled to Germany, while the French population was subject to severe rationing. Furthermore, 1.8 million French prisoners of war were held as hostages and potential slave workers in prison camps in the heart of the Nazi machine in Germany. The huge number of prisoners, together with the dead and seriously injured – numbering perhaps up to 300,000 – meant that France was missing about ten per cent of its male population.
Once the ceasefire came into effect on 25 June, the defeatist clique around Pétain set about creating a new state. The seat of government was moved to the sleepy spa town of Vichy in the Non-Occupied Zone, and on 10 July the National Assembly, convened by Pétain, voted for its own dissolution, by giving all power to the aged Marshal and allowing him to draw up a new constitution. To their credit, a small minority of French parliamentarians refused to go along with the new constitution – eighty deputies, virtually all of them Socialists (the Communist deputies had been banned since September), voted ‘Non’. This protest was simply ignored. Encouraged by Pierre Laval, a newspaper magnate turned far-right politician, Pétain abolished the Third Republic and replaced it by the ‘French State’. The revolutionary motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité was scrapped in favour of the crushing conservatism of Travail, Famille, Patrie (‘Work, Family, Fatherland’). The programme of the French State was simple: a ‘national revolution’ designed to root out the Freemasons, Communists and Jews who were deemed to be the root of France’s woes. To accompany this reactionary recipe, Pétain added a quasi-religious flavour, declaring to the French public that he would make ‘a gift of my person’ to the country. This promise helped reinforce Pétain’s undoubted popularity on both sides of the demarcation line.
Neither the major political parties, nor the leading industrialists and bankers, nor the armed forces showed any inclination to back de Gaulle and continue the fight. Instead, they apparently considered that it was best to be ‘realistic’ and to go along with the Occupation. This not only involved a morally fatal compromise with the new Nazi masters, it also meant accepting the introduction of a paranoid state surveillance apparatus. In both zones, counter-intelligence services were deployed against those who opposed the new regime, informers and police spies were encouraged to betray their neighbours, while the police and the gendarmerie spent a substantial part of their time opening private letters and reporting on changes in public opinion. In August 1940, Arthur Koestler correctly predicted what happened in the months that followed: ‘France will go fascist without noticing it’, he wrote.51
The Vichy government found itself in an ambiguous position. It was nominally an independent state, in that its laws governed the whole of France, yet it had no decisive control over more than half the country. The presence of Nazi troops in the northern zone meant that the Germans had effective power in these areas, even though Vichy was the civil authority for the whole country. In the south, the formal independence of the government occasionally allowed for some surprising events – sections of the armed forces and police apparatus sometimes took action against Nazi spies in the south, or helped protect Resistance forces. Up until the total occupation of the country (November 1942), there was little the Germans could do to stop this. The word that soon came to symbolize Vichy – ‘collaboration’ – initially meant just that: active cooperation and support, not simple subservience. But as the months went by, Vichy gradually became nothing more than a puppet regime, increasingly populated by enthusiastic Nazi stooges and fanatical anti-Semites.52
For the next four years the division of the country shaped all aspects of life. For those in the Non-Occupied Zone, there was the illusion of freedom, while for those in the north there was the brutal reality of Occupation. The demarcation line cut through the country, dividing families, making once routine visits to friends and relatives impossible. Nazi bureaucracy, enthusiastically applied by the Vichy administration, soon became a regular part of life. Even in the Non-Occupied Zone, everyday life repeatedly reminded the French that they were a subjugated people, beaten in a lightning war by their powerful neighbours, reduced to the role of observers in the cataclysmic events that were shaking the planet.
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While Pétain, Weygand and the other leaders had been carefully paving the way to defeat, most of the French armed forces had been fighting valiantly. As Saint-Exupéry put it ‘there were clusters of infantrymen still giving up their lives in undefendable farmhouses. There were aviation crews still melting like wax flung into a fire.’53 Around the Maginot Line, where Levy’s and Frenay’s units were based, fierce fighting continued right up until the armistice. According to German reports, their troops were ‘pinned down with heavy losses’ as the French felled trees to block the roads, then used the cover to attack with artillery, snipers and machine guns.54 Overall, German casualty rates actually increased after the fall of Dunkirk, with an average of 750 deaths per day, as against around 550 in the three weeks after the invasion began.55 Even in the air, where the Germans enjoyed undoubted superiority, the Battle of France inflicted significant damage on the Nazi war machine. By mid-June the Luftwaffe had lost
around forty per cent of its aircraft. Overall, British and French losses were greater (1,921 Allied aircraft were destroyed, as against 1,469 German planes56 – RAF losses were higher in the Battle of France than in the Battle of Britain),57 but the loss of German pilots and machines proved to be decisive, weakening the Luftwaffe just as it was ordered to turn its attention to Britain.
Many civilians also showed honour and bravery in the face of the Nazi offensive. After the German troops swept through and around Paris, they came to Chartres, a small town about fifty miles south of the capital, home to a beautiful medieval cathedral. The Prefect of Chartres, Jean Moulin, was one of the republic’s high-flyers – once the youngest prefect in the country, and one-time senior civil servant in the Air Ministry. As German troops swept into his deserted and looted city on 17 June, Moulin remained at his post to organize an orderly transfer of power. But when the Nazis tried to make him sign a false declaration that a series of war crimes in the region had been carried out by French African troops, Moulin refused and was promptly arrested, beaten and abused. Still he refused to sign. Early in the morning of 18 June, crushed by the power of the Nazis, unable to see any way out of the dishonour created by the Germans’ total victory, Moulin tried to commit suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken glass. But the suicide bid, like so much in the warm summer of 1940, was a failure. Moulin survived, although for the remaining three years of his life he would wear a scarf around his neck to hide the scar.58
Despite these signs of bravery and determination, overall the Nazis won an easy victory in France. Paradoxically, this success ultimately proved an advantage for the Allies, reinforcing Hitler’s fantasies of world domination, and making him overconfident in the effectiveness of the blitzkrieg.59 The Führer was so impressed with the outcome of the French campaign that on 31 July, even before the Battle of Britain had begun, he instructed the military to prepare the invasion of the USSR – his fundamental political, economic and ideological enemy. From the outset, this had been his main objective. As Hitler put it in August 1939:
Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia. If those in the West are too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians to beat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn with all my concerted force against the Soviet Union.60
For many in France, the cause of the defeat was the legacy of the pre-war left-wing Popular Front government, which won the election of spring 1936 and was greeted by a huge general strike, leaving the French right wing obsessed with the threat of Communism.61 On his return to Britain, Spears scornfully reported that Weygand was ‘far more concerned about the danger of revolution in France than about the consequences of capitulation to the Nazis’.62 In early May a leading right-wing parliamentary deputy argued that ‘whereas victory would mean revolution, defeat would save France, for it would, at the cost of a certain loss of territory and prestige, preserve the social order’.63 Taken together with Ybarnegaray’s comment that it would be better for France to be a Nazi province than to unite with Britain, it is clear that many of France’s leaders had little stomach for a fight with fascism. This was obvious to many ordinary French people. In mid-June Victor Serge asked soldiers in Paris why the battle was being lost. Their answer was straightforward:
. . . we’ve been sold out, betrayed, by Jove! By the officers who legged it sharpish with their bits of skirt, by the high-ups, by the cagoulards [pre-war fascists] who wanted their revenge over the Popular Front.64
Traditional anti-Communism among army generals – and the leaders of many of the political parties, including the Socialists – had been reinforced in August 1939, when Stalin suddenly announced that he had signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Previously, the French Communists had been enthusiastically pro-war and anti-German – a consequence of the Franco-Soviet mutual defence pact, which had been signed in 1935. Now, loyalty to Moscow obliged the Party to oppose the war against their master’s new ally. Understandably, the vast majority of Communist Party members were distraught. Tens of thousands ripped up their Party cards in disgust – the 7,000 PCF members in the Calais region plummeted to 250 within a month.65 The French government banned the Party, arrested its deputies and suspended its local councils. By the end of May 1940 around 5,500 Communist militants had been arrested, under suspicion of forming part of a supposed Nazi ‘Fifth Column’ of saboteurs and agitators.66 This was the context that fuelled Weygand’s excited claim about the Communists having seized power in Paris, and led US Ambassador Bullitt to send a coded telegram to Washington labelled ‘Personal and Secret for the President’:
Will you please have put on the next Clipper twelve Thompson submachine guns with ammunition, addressed to me for the use of this Embassy. I am fully prepared to pay for them myself. There is every reason to expect that if the French Government should be forced to leave Paris, its place would be taken by a communist mob.67
The machine guns duly arrived. The Communist mob did not.
In truth, the PCF could barely organize itself, never mind a mob. Its influence was severely weakened, its leadership was either in jail, in hiding or in exile, its policies were not understood by any but the most loyal members. Its working-class constituency, still scarred by the experience of 1914–18, had reluctantly gone along with the war and had then been battered, bombed, misled and finally abandoned. Despite the nightmares of Weygand, Bullitt and their like, the workers were in no mood for revolution. Arthur Koestler neatly punctured the fevered imaginings of the right, roving through 150 years of French history to explain why the government had rushed into the arms of defeat:
Both in 1792 and in 1870 the French ruling caste had betrayed the nation and preferred the Prussians to revolution. In 1940 there was no danger of a revolution; the proletariat was tired and apathetic; while the bourgeoisie had found its symbolic expression in a living mummy. It was an unreal drama of shadows: the ghost of the French ruling class committing suicide, scared by the spectre of revolution.68
Ultimately, however, the fall of France was not simply a French defeat. It was an Allied defeat. In a matter of weeks the Belgians capitulated, the Dutch government fled to London. Unable to resist their own demons, the French leadership sued for peace, while the British could not convince their allies to fight on. The single factor that enabled all these events to take place was the absence of the USA from the war. Without the power of the American military machine, the Europeans had no chance against the aggressive expansionism of the German ruling class and their fascist leader, driven not only by economic aims but also by the stinging desire to burn away twenty years of humiliation at the hands of the Great Powers following defeat in the First World War. The French and the British desperately pleaded with Roosevelt to go beyond his private pledges of support and his piecemeal public deliveries of weapons, but to no avail. It took a direct attack on the USA eighteen months later for it to enter the war.
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As France was crushed under the Nazi heel, two speeches were made within hours of each other in London. In the afternoon of 18 June Churchill rose to his feet in the House of Commons. History could have made what he said next appear ridiculous, foolhardy and full of bravado. Instead, because of the way events turned out, it seems to have been invested with immense foresight. With his customary growling rhetoric, Churchill outlined the ‘disastrous military events’ that had taken place in the previous fortnight, simultaneously apportioning blame and arguing that the reckoning would have to be drawn up by future historians. After surveying the state of Britain’s armed forces, Churchill concluded with words that have become famous, but which at the time were more an expression of his personal will than the conviction of the country:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institu
tions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’69
Shortly after Churchill sat down in the Commons, General Charles de Gaulle made his way to Broadcasting House and was taken down into studio B2. The day before, he had left France without any clear idea of what he was going to do. De Gaulle was the most junior general in the army – only a few weeks earlier he had been a mere colonel. He had no army, no troops, no supporters. He was virtually unknown in France, with little influence and few contacts. Yet on 17 June de Gaulle decided he should broadcast an appeal, directed primarily at French soldiers, sailors and civilians in Britain, calling on them to rally to him and continue the fight. De Gaulle wanted to oversee the reconstitution of the French armed forces, and in particular hoped to win over the powerful French navy, which he naively supposed might come over to the Allied cause. The next day, when he asked for permission to use the BBC to broadcast to France, the War Cabinet, with Chamberlain in the chair (Churchill was absent), turned down the request. They were still not convinced that Pétain would sign the armistice and wanted to leave all their options open. Spears, who had witnessed the slow decomposition of the Reynaud government with a growing mixture of fury and nausea, rushed to see his old friend Churchill and argued that the Cabinet decision had to be reversed. It was.70