Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  Major General Doumenc wrote a brilliant analysis of the military mistakes that led to the collapse of the French armies, which few people ever read because it was easier to blame everything on a few scapegoats – this despite Pétain telling his subjects as early as 20 June that the defeat was due to the mistakes of their former leaders ‘and to the moral corruption of the nation’. By this, he meant the grab-all-you-can mentality encouraged by the Popular Front. While Germans had been labouring fifty or sixty hours a week east of the Rhine, French workers had enjoyed paid holidays and a forty-hour week. The marshal saw the pursuit of pleasure and material comfort as the cause of France’s moral decline, which had to be eradicated from the national psyche, so back-to-the-land honest toil was a recurrent theme of his speeches, with the peasant-farmer epitomising the masculine ideal. On 23 June he likened the defeated nation to a hard-working farmer whose fields had been devastated by a freak hailstorm, but did not despair. Instead, he reploughed and replanted to ensure a good harvest.

  Already on 25 June, as the last shooting died away, except on stretches of the Maginot Line, where local commanders fought on pointlessly for several days, the marshal was talking of the New Order then beginning, and which would bring about a healthier moral climate. ‘I hate the lies that have done us so much harm,’ he said. ‘Yet the earth does not lie.’ Repeating often that the worst immorality was to hide the truth, he avoided acknowledging the awful cost of the occupation: France was paying 400 million francs a day and suffering widespread spoliation.

  On 11 July he announced a plan to rebuild France’s destroyed infrastructure, avoiding the mistakes of both socialism and capitalism under a slogan to replace the Republic’s Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. ‘Work, family and country,’ Pétain declared, ‘are the eternal verities, so from now on our slogan is Travail, Famille, Patrie!’ To a population fed up with being deceived by its smart-arse politicians, this home-spun philosophy came like a breath of fresh air.

  The following day, Pierre Laval was officially appointed Pétain’s successor – the dauphin to France’s uncrowned king – after which triumph he divided his time between Vichy and the official residence of French prime ministers, the Hôtel Matignon in Paris. There, he lived in style, fostering the personal relationships with the blond, blue-eyed German Ambassador Otto Abetz – a former biology teacher turned art historian from Karlsruhe – and other leading German military and political figures, whom he courted as important for France’s future. The only outward difference between his lunch parties and those of profiteers1 and black marketeers entertaining their cronies in the same restaurants was a respect for form: at one lunch in the Café de Paris, Laval insisted that all his bemused guests hand over to the waiter that day’s bread coupons.

  The great secular holiday of the year in France is the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, but that 14 July was a glum travesty. Everyone knew that within a few days 1 million men would be demobilised in the Free Zone and thrown onto a job market in chaos with a gratuity of 1,000 francs, which would not go far. The Armistice provided for Vichy to keep an emasculated symbolic army of eight divisions comprising 100,000 regular soldiers. For transport they had bicycles and just eight Bren-carriers per cavalry regiment. No tanks, no heavy artillery, a few anti-aircraft batteries. To reduce the officer corps to the 3,768 allowed, a special congé d’armistice granted extended leave to all who applied for it.2 Under cover of this, Minister of War General Colson penned a personal letter to the commander of each military region, suggesting that he actively camouflage materiel and stores against the day when …

  The results were sometimes surprising. By the following spring, 65,000 rifles, 9,500 machine guns and automatic rifles, 200 mortars, 55 75mm cannons and anti-tank guns had been administratively ‘lost’. Several thousand trucks were ‘leased’ to civilian transport contractors, who agreed to maintain them ready for return to the army at six hours’ notice. The owner of one small trucking company thus saw his fleet rise from five vehicles to 687! Sadly, when the Wehrmacht invaded the Free Zone in November 1942, all the hidden arms were useless to stop it.

  In the Marseille garrison, escaped POW Captain Henri Frenay, known for his anti-Nazi sentiments before the war, pretended to have clandestine links with London when recruiting a number of like-minded friends to his own underground group named Combat. Among its activities was Le Bulletin – a weekly digest of news from the BBC and Swiss press reports published under a quotation from Napoleon: ‘To live defeated is to die every day.’3 However, by July 1940 your average Jacques Dupont had had enough of life in uniform. If lucky enough not to be stuck in a German POW camp for the foreseeable future, he was as unlikely to ‘continue the fight underground’ as to be seduced by the time-worn inducements used in appeals for volunteers to serve in the Army of the Armistice: ‘Continue the glorious traditions of the … .regiment. An interesting career with regular pay rising for privates from 3,600 to 5,700 francs. More ample rations than for the civilian population.’4

  The marshal’s Paroles aux Français became progressively more specific, with decrees reforming education, social security and regional government. One subsequently much-criticised aspect of this reorganisation was inaugurated by a statute of association deposited on 25 July at the Sous-Préfecture of Lapalisse, 20km north-east of Vichy. Although ostensibly a private initiative, the Compagnons de France movement was the result of an interview General Weygand had been asked to grant earlier that month by Paul Baudoin to the crippled French Chief Scout Henry Dhavernas.

  Moved by the plight of homeless children and youths separated from their families during the retreat, Dhavernas wanted to do something for them. Weygand immediately had telegrams sent to a number of suitable officers, recalling them to participate in this initiative. Together with André Cruiziat, another top scouting figure, the diplomat Étienne de Croÿ and others, Dhavernas aimed to form a youth movement that would embrace all male adolescents of whatever class, whether or not they were church-goers, Scouts or members of any political party. It would therefore have to be acceptable to all existing youth organisations, in order to enlist their co-operation, and not replace them, lest Vichy be tempted to create a monolithic youth movement on the model of the Hitler Youth.

  From 1 to 4 August a conference was held in the forest of Randan, near Vichy, where thirty men and eight women representing both religious and lay youth movements agreed with Dhavernas on a structure like the Boy Scout movement, which was divided into troops and patrols to encourage esprit de corps. Compagnons were therefore organised in teams of ten boys each, five teams making a company and every three to six companies forming a commanderie.

  Few French families being prepared to allow their adolescent daughters to escape parental supervision, only boys could become compagnons. The congress was swiftly followed by a training camp for the leaders of the new movement targeting male adolescents between the ages of 14 and 19, before they became eligible for the Chantiers. The uniform was a cross between the Scouts and Hitler Youth: a navy blue shirt bulging with useful pockets, shorts, stout boots and a floppy alpine beret. On the right shoulder, a French cockerel; on the left, a regional badge. The leaders also wore shorts because ‘they had to be as cold as the boys to show they could take it’. Everyone used the familiar tu form when talking to each other, leaders being called ‘chef’ (‘boss’) and saluted with a relaxed gesture, palm to the front level with the face.

  To launch the movement, Paul Baudouin somehow scrounged 2 million francs from his Foreign Affairs budget – with the approval of the marshal, Weygand and others. Boys entered as ‘apprentice’ – or ‘tenderfoot’ in scouting terms. They took an oath to be kind to other compagnons and loyal to their leaders, and to work hard for the new France. Their day started with a bugler blowing Reveille at 6.30 a.m., followed by physical training, personal hygiene, breakfast and a salute to the flag drawn up in square formation. ‘Compagnons à l’aise’ was ‘Stand at ease’. ‘A moi, compagnons’
was ‘Attention!’ From 8.30 a.m. to 4 p.m. work was interrupted only by a brief lunch break. Evening activities after an early dinner included campfire singsongs and moral guidance.

  After one to three months, the ‘apprentice’ won his uniform if judged worthy of it, and was then solemnly sworn in. Ahead lay, not knots and lashings and cross-country paperchases, but real work. Since most of the 1.6 million POWs were farm workers, it was up to the compagnons to replace them in the fields, getting in the harvest. Within three months, 10,000 boys had been recruited, mostly refugees who had nowhere else to go. The majority were employed as cheap labour, but some were given genuine apprenticeships in skilled trades. To create jobs for men, women in the public service were employed only as secretaries and switchboard operators. So that they would stay at home and rear children, on 7 July a circular from Vichy to heads of large companies instructed them to ‘return to the home’ all women except war widows, single women, women supporting families and those in traditionally female jobs.5

  The small ads in La Petite Gironde, a regional daily published in Bordeaux, make curious reading. Those interested in getting away from it all were advised that American export lines operated weekly departures from Lisbon to New York! For smaller budgets, another advert ran, ‘Looking for small cutter or similar boat. Contact Havas agency in Bordeaux quoting 2799.’ North of the Channel, de Gaulle’s navy under the unpopular, ambitious Admiral Émile Muselier numbered 120 officers and 1,746 ratings – almost as large as his army, which comprised on 10 August a mere 140 officers and 2,109 men!6

  On 26 September, in case any readers had not yet learned the art of barter, La Petite Gironde printed the story of a lady who had realised the 20 litres of petrol in her car could be siphoned out and traded a litre at a time for butter, pasta, even coffee and salt. But beware, the paper warned, there are no fixed exchange rates, so buy what’s cheap and, if you don’t want it, pass it on later when the price has risen. Buying on a colossal scale was the business of the Deutsche Beschaffungsamt or Procurement Office, comfortably installed in the Hotel Wagram in Paris. Its brief was wide, but there were many other procurement agencies. Starting in 1941, the Bureau Otto used funds from the occupation taxes paid by Vichy to buy for the German war effort metals, leather, foodstuffs and other goods. Employing over 200 people at its peak and with warehouses in St-Ouen covering 3 hectares, it greased the wheels of every deal by an absence of paperwork and no awkward questions as to the provenance of the goods.

  Everywhere along the interface between French producers and stockholders and the German purchasing organisation, racketeers flourished. The price of leather was fixed by Vichy at 9 francs a kilo. Dealers offered 15 francs, but sold their purchases on at 30 francs, while the Bureau Otto paid as much as 70 francs a kilo. The parallel mark-up on 1 kilo of copper was from 15 francs to 85 and on lead from 6 to 27 francs a kilo.7

  So many fortunes were made in this area that no action was ever taken after the war, although gangland turf wars claimed some lives much sooner.8 Mandel Szkolnikoff, a lawyer from Latvia who had arrived in 1933 and acquired an Argentine passport, ignored the anti-Jewish laws and drove around Paris in his personal Rolls-Royce, amassing a fortune of 2 million francs in three years by acquiring for the SS textiles of all kinds. The money was invested in hotels and other property before he was killed by a rival. A fellow immigrant was scrap-metal dealer Joseph Joanovici, known as ‘Monsieur Joseph’, who sold millions of tons of metal to the SS purchasing commission, in return for which his fortune was estimated even higher than Szkolnikoff’s. Joanovici escaped justice after the Liberation by large payments to the Honneur et Police Resistance group.

  The little men involved in the procurement business were often enrolled as auxiliary gestapistes to prise hidden stocks away from their reluctant owners, thus becoming prone to blackmail by the SD and other intelligence agencies, at first controlled by Sturmbannführer Karl Bömelburg and his deputy Untersturmführer Josef Kieffer. Bömelburg, considered ‘not very bright’ by his underlings, delighted in being driven around Paris to expensive restaurants in an armour-plated Cadillac, whose previous owner PCF chief Maurice Thorez had deserted from the French army, slipped across the border into Belgium and from there been spirited away to the USSR, to sit out the war in Moscow preparing for the planned communist take-over of France when the Germans were driven out.

  Although Pétain banned freemasons from public office in August – ostensibly as enemies of the state, but really because of their republican sentiments – it was not until 3 October that Jews were similarly excluded from public life in both zones of France by the first Statut des Juifs, whose wording defined a Jew as being ‘a person with three Jewish grandparents or two if married to another Jew’. This was in fact less prejudicial than Talmudic law, which considers that any child of a Jewish mother is Jewish.

  On 9 November all trade unions and employers’ associations were banned. In the general rush to identify with Pétain’s New Order, a dissenting voice came from the town of Auch in the south-west. At the monthly meeting of the chamber of commerce, businessman Fernand Mauroux refused to add his name to a sycophantic joint letter to the marshal. Together with two friends who had also belonged to the Democratic Popular Party, he founded the Liberté resistance network, which rapidly spread throughout the département of Midi-Pyrénées. In the same town, but independently, soldiers of the 2nd Dragoons under Lieutenant Colonel Schlesser, the strongly anti-German former head of French counter-espionage, were secretly ‘losing’ weapons and ammunition to hide them from the Armistice Commission.

  When the marshal had taken his seat in the Académie Française in 1929, Paul Valéry’s welcoming speech had praised Pétain’s ability to adapt to changed realities and his dislike of rigid theories. So there was a certain consistency in the marshal’s Paroles adding up to a constitution evolved in reaction to the changing realities of post-Armistice France. His new state promised the working classes freedom and dignity in a society no longer dominated by financial greed. In future, work was to be regarded not as an unpleasant necessity, but as the only honourable way of getting money. Embodying something of the disenchantment of Kierkegaard, Bergson, Heidegger, Marx and Sartre, much of Pétain’s national-socialism could be read as proto-Christian. Although his civil marriage to a divorcee was not recognised by the Church, Pétain started attending Mass to make himself more acceptable to the predominantly Catholic population. He also reintroduced school prayers, which had been prohibited under the Third Republic, and abolished the prestigious state colleges that had traditionally provided the elite of France’s administrators, politicians and businessmen.

  To sum up in his own words, the New Order was ‘nationalistic’ in its foreign policy, ‘authoritarian’ in internal politics, economically ‘co-ordinated and controlled’ – and above all ‘social’ in spirit.9 Most importantly, it was not a slavish copy of the German or any other national revolution, but specifically French. Fortunately, the marshal’s vision of France as primarily an agricultural country coincided with Hitler’s requirement that the conquered territories produce all the primary materials including food needed by an increasingly industrialised Reich. One German general admitted privately to a French friend that Berlin’s unspoken plan was to make France part kitchen garden and part brothel.

  Anti-Semitic French people of all classes traditionally voiced their feelings as freely as their British counterparts. Lunching during October with Fernand de Brinon, soon to be appointed Vichy’s ambassador to the German authorities in Paris, Capt Ernst Jünger noted in his diary how his host used the word Youpin – equivalent to ‘Yid’ – despite having a Jewish wife, who spent most of her time at their country home to avoid embarrassing him. Jünger’s war diary was the draft of a literary work. A former foreign legionnaire, he spoke fluent French and charmed his way into what passed for high society, both German and French. At another society luncheon he met fashion designer Coco Chanel, who had made trouser suits fashionable for wom
en and suntanned skin acceptable in a world that despised it as indicative of manual labour. Convinced she had been cheated out of control of a perfumery company by Jewish competitors, Chanel launched into a vicious anti-Semitic tirade turning to plain bitchiness when ‘everyone agreed that Cathérine d’Erlanger’s emeralds were nothing but bits of green bottle glass’.10

  The artistic world was far from hostile to the occupation forces, pianist Lucienne Delforge envisaging a more appreciative audience for her recitals because their presence meant that the spirit of Mozart had come to Paris! Guests invited to the winter collections of Chanel, Nina Ricci, Jean Lanvin and the other haute couture houses included numerous high-ranking German officers who did not share Goering’s opinion that French women were grossly over-dressed. The faithful came to buy for their wives, who had not seen haute couture in several years. The unfaithful and fancy-free came with the companions of their leisure hours in Paris hoping shortly to wear the clothes paraded on the cat-walk. As the newspaper La Gerbe commented acidly, ‘For certain people the principal charms of Paris reside in nicely rounded backsides.’11 But there was also money in some French purses. Szkolnikoff’s wife Hélène Samson had three cars of her own in which to flit from one collection to the next, and reputedly bought fifty original dresses that season.

  For ladies compelled to cycle in the absence of motor fuel, the house of Paquin showed split skirts and an audacious short skirt with a detachable lower half that the wearer press-studded on after dismounting on arrival at her hostess’ house. However, for fashion-conscious Parisiennes with smaller budgets, ‘my wonderful little dressmaker just around the corner’ was reduced to going through Madame’s wardrobe and transforming an old dress into a skirt, to be sported with a blouse made of black market material, or converting the evening wear of an absent husband, who would not need it in his POW camp, into an elegant tailored jacket and a pair of cocktail trousers.