by Douglas Boyd
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 …’
Unfortunately Philippe Pétain was 84 when he became prime minister and subsequently head of state. His clothes were always immaculate and his bearing upright, but if at times his step was still sprightly and his wit razor-sharp, at others he was absent-minded, forgetful and unable to concentrate as his brain slowed down. He could easily be worn down by persistence and would doze off in afternoon meetings, losing the track of an argument and tending to cover the inattention by agreeing with the last person to speak, even when doing so contradicted himself. Unfortunately, circumstances obliged him to work in partnership with a man adept at taking advantage of these failings: the devious lawyer-politician and self-made millionaire Pierre Laval.
NOTES
1. ‘Nous avons eu un engagement assez meurtrier le 15. Une grande bataille se prépare, j’y vais sans arrière-pensée et sans appréhension, car j’ai fait le sacrifice de ma vie, les souffrances physiques qui peuvent m’être imposées sont peu de chose en comparaison des tortures morales subies á cause de toi.’ Quoted by H. Amouroux, in 1940: La Défaite, p. 482.
2. ‘Quelques livres nous tiendront compagnie ainsi que quelques amis de choix, dont les anciens flirts, de part et d’autre, seront exclus.’ Ibid., p. 483.
3. ‘Français, vous l’accomplirez et vous verrez, je vous le jure, une France neuve surgir de votre ferveur.’ Quoted by R. Aron in 1940: La Défaite, p. 484.
4. D. Pechanski, in Collaboration and Resistance, tr. L. Frankel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000), p. 9.
6
THE LIE THAT WAS TRUE
With France’s politicians dispossessed of their temporary capital in Bordeaux by the Germans requisitioning all the public buildings, on 29 June the impromptu convoy of private and official vehicles headed north-east for Clermont-Ferrand in the centre of France. Whilst its geographical position guaranteed good communications, this major manufacturing town was home to the giant Michelin rubber company and not equipped to accommodate the government and civil service with all their hangers-on and camp-followers. Ministers and their staffs were spread out in surrounding towns, without even a working telephone system to communicate with each other. It was a recipe for chaos, had one been needed.
The country was in turmoil with 8 million displaced people. Lack of motor fuel caused havoc with food distribution. Public transport for those who wanted to return home was non-existent. Even the police and gendarmerie had no clear idea who was in charge of what. Where it existed at all, the postal service was reduced to a few cyclists carrying official communications. Shops of all kinds had been broken into and pillaged, mostly by refugees desperate for food. Abandoned French army horses and farm animals roamed loose in the fields and ownerless dogs scavenged the streets. Everywhere there were queues for food, shelter, news and vital papers that had been lost in the panic.
As so often, a single-minded and ambitious man took advantage of everyone else’s confusion. On 16 June in Bordeaux, when the marshal agreed his handwritten list of cabinet ministers with President Lebrun, the name of Pierre Laval had not been on it because he had been offered, and refused, the Ministry of Justice. It was as Foreign Minister that Laval saw his role in Pétain’s government because that brief would embrace relations with Germany, whose leaders he already knew personally. Informed by the marshal that Foreign Affairs had been given to Paul Baudouin, Laval’s unbridled fury was such that he stormed out of the marshal’s borrowed office, slamming the door.
France’s diplomats heaved a collective sigh of relief, the ministry’s secretary-general having indicated to Pétain that making foreign minister a man with Laval’s anti-British reputation would destroy the tattered remnants of the Entente Cordiale. Despite Britain’s unilateral withdrawal at Dunkirk, a surprising number of influential French people were still anglophile at this stage. Having drawn a line in the sand by stipulating that he wanted the Quai d’Orsay or nothing, Laval therefore played no part in the negotiations for the Armistice – a fact that was often subsequently overlooked by his denigrators. Nevertheless, Pétain knew Laval too well to leave him out of the new government, where he could foment trouble, and therefore brought Laval into his government as one of two vice-presidents of the Council of Ministers or cabinet.
Pierre Laval’s solution to his country’s woes was simple: he proposed the abolition of the Third Republic on the grounds that it was responsible for the defeat. On the morning of 30 June a poorly attended cabinet meeting in Clermont debated his proposition. Not every minister was in favour, some arguing that the best way to put the country back on its feet was to give Pétain six months to govern without parliamentary oversight. Using a battery of courtroom lawyer’s tricks that would have worn down the resistance of men far stronger than the senescent marshal, Laval returned to the attack in the afternoon cabinet meeting. When Pétain argued that such a radical step should await their return to a free Paris after the conclusion of a definitive peace treaty, Laval riposted that only a strong France could negotiate the treaty to replace the Armistice with Germany on equal terms
Back in March he had said to British politician Robert Boothby:
If we had come to terms with Mussolini, as I wanted to do, we might have held Hitler ... That is no longer possible. Let us try to hold on to what we have left. I am a peasant from the Auvergne. I want to keep my farm, and I want to keep France. Nothing else matters now.1
Weakening in the face of Laval’s sustained arguments, Pétain protested that only a National Assembly of both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies had the power to alter the constitution. Calling that assembly required the assent of the President of the Republic. It was the moment for which Laval had been waiting. Scattering cigarette ash – he was a chain smoker – over his trademark white tie, he leaped up fr
om the conference table and drove to the nearby town of Royat, where President Lebrun was quartered. An hour later he returned with Lebrun’s assent to the National Assembly. Overwhelmed by Laval’s fait accompli, Pétain gave way.
As to where the assembly could meet, the nearest suitable place lay 50km to the north-east of Clermont. Some guessed that Vichy was chosen because it suited Laval, whose home lay only 20km from there; others more poetic averred that it was because its famous Celestins spring was the only one in the world that gushed water tasting exactly like tears. The true reason was that Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin suggested Vichy to the marshal because the prosperous spa resort had 15,000 hotel rooms, a modern telephone exchange and a direct railway link with Paris.2 Thus it was to Vichy that the ministers, senators and deputies made their way on the afternoon of 1 July.
Its unsought role as capital of the divided country was to cost the town dearly. Such is the stigma of having been the capital of collaboration that over half a century later few people want to be seen taking the cure there and many hotels never re-opened after the war. The many bedrooms barely sufficing to accommodate and afford office space for a government that historian Robert Aron described as ‘a comic opera government adrift in a cataclysm’,3 many top civil servants had to use their bedrooms as offices. The secretary of Minister for Ex-servicemen Xavier Vallat took dictation sitting on his bidet. Files were stacked in open drawers between monsieur’s underpants and madame’s lingerie. The chairman of a meeting would get up from time to time to check the vegetables boiling on a camping stove atop the dressing table. Nobody worried at first that most of the hotels habitually closed for the winter season and had no heating because Article 3 of the Armistice agreement was taken to mean that the government would soon be returning to Paris.
The phoney war had been a period of exceptional prosperity for Vichy, filling its hotels with middle-class families displaced by the armies in the north-east, but the brief hot war in June saw them in turn displaced by trainloads and road convoys of wounded soldiers. The Germans installed themselves briefly and left again, apart from a few liaison personnel. When the government moved in on the first day of July, the last curistes and tourists who had been turned out of their rooms at a few minutes’ notice were left gaping at cars and trucks of all sizes and conditions disgorging ministers, their staffs, wives and secretaries, filing cabinets and trunks of documents – all the paraphernalia of state.
Weygand’s Ministry of Defence moved into the Thermal Hotel; Darlan’s navy into the Helder, with the army taking the Hôtel des Bains; Justice and finance requisitioned the Carlton; the diplomatic corps took the aptly-named Ambassadors Hotel, with each mission being allocated a nearby farm for food supplies. Baudouin’s Foreign Ministry moved into the Hotel du Parc with Pétain and Laval staked his territory there after arriving in a muck sweat, his official car having broken down with clutch trouble some way out of town.
President Lebrun was allotted the elegant Pavillon Sévigné at the far end of the central park and the Ministry of Education was lodged in the prestigious Casino itself. The Majestic Hôtel, which shared a common entrance with the Parc, swiftly filled with senators and deputies, who continued to arrive long after the blackout, searching by the light of pocket torches for a bed in the overcrowded rooms and corridors. Only 200 of them had made it to Bordeaux, yet a week after the marshal’s arrival three times as many had reached Vichy.
French and foreign journalists and broadcasters, businessmen in search of government contracts or fearing their loss, and gamblers like the Egyptian khedive who sought the throne of Damascus, which was then in the French giving – they all came to Vichy in that first week of July. Well, not quite all. Among the foreign journalists who did not come was a correspondent of the London News Chronicle. While reporting the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler had narrowly missed being executed by Franco’s forces and had no wish to be handed over to the Germans. On 17 June he walked into a Foreign Legion recruiting office that in the general chaos had received no instructions to cease operations and there reinvented himself as Albert Dubert, a Swiss taxi driver. Persuading the recruiting sergeant to issue him with papers as a volontaire étranger in that name, he used them to find food and lodging in military barracks on a journey right across France. Reaching Marseille after six weeks of meanderings, he eventually escaped from there to Britain.4
The town of Vichy, enclosed in a circle of low hills, sweltered moistly in the stifling midsummer heat as people fought for a bed, status and recognition. Among the politicians scrambling for advantage, only Pétain preserved the appearance of authority. On his morning promenades through the town, accompanied by his aide Dr Ménétrel, and at the salute to the flag on Sunday morning the marshal moved with dignity among the people, gravely acknowledging their salutations or hushed respect and always finding time to greet children in their Sunday best on his way to Mass at the church of St Louis.
With normal communications almost non-existent, news travelled mostly by word of mouth in the traumatic summer of 1940. And news there was, all of it bad. The border départements of Alsace and Lorraine were not merely occupied by the Wehrmacht, but annexed directly into the Reich as an integral part of German territory on 7 August. In the schools of the two former départements the curriculum changed overnight, with all textbooks and exercise books collected and burned. At the start of the new term, schoolchildren learned in their first geography lesson that they now lived in Elsass, not Alsace. Although German propaganda was trying to make all Alsatians conscious that they spoke the Germanic dialect Alsässisch and were therefore German, speaking the dialect was discouraged in school, with French totally forbidden. Lessons were all in high German from then on. The biggest surprise for the pupils was learning the Nazi version of European history.5 However, the pull of home is strong and two-thirds of the 420,000 Alsatian refugees decided to return after months of living on handouts in temporary accommodation, although the thought of becoming German citizens if they returned home decided others to stay in the southwest, somehow surviving on daily handouts of 10 francs per adult and 6 francs for a child.
In rural Moissac the first Belgian refugees had been welcomed by the townsfolk until some young Flemings got into fights with local youths after expressing pro-German sentiments. The massive influx that followed threatened to swamp the town altogether: by 1 July an additional 16,000 refugees6 had arrived needing lodging and food and clothing and, at times, as many as 40,000 people, including 15,000 military, were also passing through. For most of June, Moissac was among the most important villes-refuges in all France. Only at the end of July did life return to something like normal.
In Brittany at Ponthivy a German-sponsored puppet Breton separatist government briefly surfaced before foundering for lack of support. Later Corsican and Basque separatists would be encouraged by the Germans as a way of fragmenting national sentiment, but Goebbels’ main priority was to drive an unbridgeable rift between France and Britain. On the evening of 3 July came news from Mers el-Kebir that fulfilled his wildest dreams.
Back on 23 June, with the Armistice already signed, a Royal Navy vessel – probably the same one on which Freeman and Cooper escaped, with the supernumerary commander and admiral on board – had brought to Admiral Darlan in Bordeaux a message from A.V. Alexander and Admiral Pound which did not refer to their recent meeting, but ‘reminded’ Darlan that the ‘condition imposed’ by Great Britain for an armistice was that the French navy should previously have steamed to English ports in order to ‘continue the struggle’ against Germany.7 At the time – and until 28 June – French vessels that had taken refuge in British ports were permitted to steam away unhindered as belonging to a neutral nation. So there was no reason for Darlan or anyone else on the French side to suspect that the British Admiralty was about to implement an operation planned months before and codenamed Catapult, although later dubbed ‘Operation Boomerang’ by Admiral Cunningham, the British Commander-in-Chief Alexandria, because of
its disastrous consequences.
It was the greatest gift Churchill could have given to Goebbels. Like all great propaganda coups, it was so simple that anyone could understand it. On 3 July 1940 a British battle fleet appeared without warning off the great natural harbour of Mers el-Kebir in the Bay of Oran, Algeria. Without giving any warning, the British vessels shelled the French fleet moored there, before the French had time to get steam up. With no power to rotate their gun turrets, ships were sunk and thousands of sailors killed.
It wasn’t quite like that, but the differences were only of detail.
On 24 June Admiral Sir Dudley North, based in Gibraltar, had paid a visit on HMS Douglas to the French naval base at Mers el-Kebir outside Oran. His object was to convince Admiral Marcel Gensoul commanding the base to throw in his lot with the Royal Navy. Although a great anglophile, Gensoul reminded North that he took his orders from Darlan and Pétain, who had already given him and the other fleet commanders orders on 28 May to scuttle their ships, were there any danger of them falling into the hands of the Germans or Italians. At 3 p.m. on 2 July, still wary of the Axis powers getting their hands on the French battle fleet moored at Mers el-Kebir, the British Admiralty ordered Admiral Somerville in Gibraltar to implement Operation Catapult. Under his command Force H arrived off Mers el-Kebir in the pre-dawn mist next day. For the first time since Waterloo, British weapons were then trained upon French servicemen.
In the harbour, Gensoul’s staff was carrying on with the demilitarisation of all vessels in compliance with the Armistice agreement. Ships’ boilers were cold. Reservists with homes in North Africa had already been demobilised. Naval planes had mostly been disarmed. In the coastal batteries, all shells had been sent back to the magazines and breech-blocks removed and locked away. The day was going to be hot, so the remainder of the French crews on board the ships in the harbour – reservists and regulars from metropolitan France – were looking forward to a day of sports and recreation.