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From the outset, in his National Revolution, Marshal Pétain shouldered, like a sacred burden, the entire weight of his autocracy. It would seem clear that at least at the start—before disappointments, office-seeking, cabals, intrigues, palace politics, the machinations of Pierre Laval, and the Teutonic Machiavellianism of the seven-year-old Nazi régime had befogged the eighty-four-year-old Marshal’s Vichy scene—he had clearly in mind a half-dozen ideas on which to build his Revolution.
His Idea No. I was that France was utterly defeated. “A nation has to be whipped sometimes,” he insisted in an early speech, adding later, “The country ought to know we have been beaten. For two years I have been repeating it to myself every morning.”
Second, although he had often mistakenly insisted, in the last war, that the Allies were lost, he was sure the Germans were victorious in this one. “The war was practically won by Germany as soon as Italy entered the campaign,” he broadcast for historians to mull over. As a loyal French officer, he agreed that a Germany which had swiftly dismembered France would certainly, as someone had said, “wring England’s neck like a chicken’s.” Judging by his experience, Pétain figured that the United States would, as usual, enter the war late, or maybe never.
Third, Pétain, the man who had been a commander in chief in the last war, had come around to accepting the former Corporal Hitler as a militant German phenomenon who, through his unique struggle, had risen so high by 1940 as to be trusted like a brother officer—especially if he had the gentlemanly Reichswehr to keep an eye on him. Pétain had asked that the armistice be drawn up “as between soldiers, after the struggle, and in Honor,” capitalized. Three days after it was signed, Pétain broadcast, and seemingly believed, that “France will be administered only by Frenchmen.”
Fourth, he thought that collaboration was not only unavoidable but astute. “To collaborate is to avoid the worst,” he announced, as a maxim, to intimates at Vichy. Of his single meeting with Hitler, in October, 1940, at Montoire, he told the French, “This first meeting between the conqueror and the conquered marks the first step in our country’s rehabilitation.… Between our two lands a collaboration has been envisaged. I have accepted it in principle.” At first, Pétain’s collaboration policy, in which he was backed by many brokenhearted or merely ambitious Frenchmen, was based on the assumption that, in the new postwar lineup in Europe, France would be Germany’s favored and favorite former enemy. Though busy governing in the summer of 1940, he found time to write a lofty article for the Revue des Deux Mondes which wound up, “We should be able to coordinate our thought and action with those which tomorrow will preside over the reorganization of the entire world,” or, in simple slang, “We should tie up with the Nazis, who will soon run the whole show.”
Fifth, Pétain, a convinced anti-Republican, saw in the defeat of the corrupted, weakened Third Republic a victory for his pre–French Revolution principles of absolutism. In one of his first Vichy broadcasts, he ridiculed the French folly of ever having believed in the ballot.
Sixth, and most important, he regarded himself as a historic savior. Ever since he had figured in the rescue of France at Verdun, he had labored under the dignified obsession that France had not sufficiently appreciated him or harkened to him. Now he was to have the undisputed, and for once undivided, glory of governing what was left of his beloved country, of leading her back, in a bitter penitence for her democracy and her defeat, to a restoration of the autocracy of her great seventeenth-century past, in which he thought her future still lay. “You have suffered. You will suffer more.… I permit neither doubts nor murmurs,” he warned over the air. “Hitherto I have spoken to you as a father. Today I address you as a chief. Follow me!”
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In the two-and-a-half-year drama of Unoccupied France, before the Nazis came in and lowered the curtain on November 11, 1942, the Marshal’s two most spirited performances were against Pierre Laval, and against a handful of imprisoned statesmen left over from the Third Republic whom and which Pétain put on trial at the court of Riom. Both Laval and Riom were tragic issues in France, yet at moments they afforded the French the only real laughter of their defeat. Certainly the libretto of Laval’s opening plot against the Marshal, four months after Pétain had settled on the Vichy chair of state, was as comic, and implausible, as that of any Berlin opéra bouffe. Briefly, the idea was this: During November, 1940, the Germans had let the Marshal hope that he and his government might be removed from the purlieus of Vichy and set up in autonomy in the royal precincts of Versailles. Shortly afterward, the Nazis let all France know that on December 15th, a hundred years to the day since the Paris Invalides had received the ashes of Napoleon Bonaparte from his tomb on St. Helena, the Parisian Germans, in a series of parades which would include a magnificent midnight torchlight procession, would finally make to Paris the amazing companion-piece gift of the ashes of Napoleon’s son, l’Aiglon, to be fetched by brother Austrian Nazis from his crypt in Vienna. (The Nazi newspaper propaganda angle on l’Aiglon, devised to impress the French, was a Teutonic, retrospective buildup of Father Bonaparte as a wise, early Hitler who had yearned merely to federate Europe, a good Führerprinzip idea in which he had been foiled by British selfishness at Waterloo.) In the weeks of waiting for l’Aiglon’s ashes, Laval hatched his opéra-bouffe scenario: The Marshal, on the Nazi promise that his government would soon follow, was to be lured to Versailles with the flattering bait that he was the sole legendary French figure worthy of presiding over the December 15th mummery. In the torchlight parade his name was to be evoked in the dark by enthusiastic, rehearsed cries of “Vive le Maréchal! N’abandonnez pas Paris! C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut!” If the Marshal, upon his arrival, fell for the setup, he was expected to desert Vichy and remain in Paris. If the Marshal did not fall, he was to be politely imprisoned at Versailles. In either event, Laval would rise to complete power and to a spirit of more complete collaboration with the Germans than the crochety Marshal then seemed willing to give.
The plot thickened when loyal friends tipped Pétain off. On December 13th, as Laval, fresh from Paris and his final stage directions, walked into the Marshal’s Vichy office, he was met by the old man’s denunciation, insults were exchanged, and Laval was arrested and himself became the prisoner that night in his own nearby château at Châteldon. The next day the Marshal angrily broadcast, “Frenchmen! Monsieur Pierre Laval no longer forms part of the government.” On December 16th, Otto Abetz, the Führer’s personal delegate, arrived in Vichy, accompanied by what one Vichy propagandist described as collaborators—a Nazi sub-machine-gun outfit. Laval was freed before Christmas. In Pétain’s first interview of the New Year, given to an American journalist, he was still in a position to say that Laval filled him with physical revulsion and that he had slept better since getting rid of that “German agent.” But that same month Pétain learned that, along with the German O.K. on the cereal and coal he must have if his Unoccupied French were not to starve and freeze, he had also to take Laval, a less desirable life-giving commodity. As the cultivated Abetz was supposed to have phrased it, “We need Laval until the peace is signed. After that anybody can put a bullet in his belly.” Laval was not reinstated; he was merely allowed to continue functioning as a German agent. For Admiral Darlan was reserved the honor of becoming Pétain’s new dauphin and of receiving the first bullet on the program.
In order to deafen his Unoccupied Zone to any echoes left over from the Republic, Pétain had replaced the old trumpet call—Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—with a new sober slogan, Travail, Famille, Patrie. Unfortunately, so far as le travail went, his scheme for exchanging a few sick French prisoners in Germany for a multitude of healthy French workmen led to riots of increasing violence in Vichy France. Furthermore, his Charte du Travail of October, 1941, aimed at “breaking the old class-war system,” was patterned on Mussolini’s corporatives and took from French labor its right to organize, to strike, or to function polit
ically. Having eliminated labor unions, Vichy set up, like a cruel ersatz, a Jewish union, the Union Générale des Juifs de France, which every Jew had to join. As for la famille, one handsome, healthy octogenarian could no longer console with his famous phrase—“Fathers, those great adventurers of modern times”—a nation of which a million and a half young potential fathers were wasting their manhood as prisoners in the Third Reich. As for la patrie, it was hungry.
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Pearl Harbor was no Christmas gift to Vichy. After the United States entered the war, when the Marshal’s stately figure made its regular appearance in movie newsreels, young Frenchmen shouted not “Vive le Maréchal!” but “Vive Roosevelt!” And when little Admiral Darlan was pictured, they yelled, “Vive l’autre amiral!,” meaning Admiral Leahy, American Ambassador to Vichy. Nature, as well as history, was unkind to Vichy in its second winter. Unusually cold weather froze the ink on the National Revolution’s desks. Short of coal, like everybody else, the government wore its overcoat indoors and wrote with its gloves on. Vichy’s propaganda staff’s order to Unoccupied Zone newspapers to “kill any story which represents Vichy life as society life in which pleasure plays a great part” was doubtless not needed, but the sharp reminder forbidding publication of “any newspaper column dealing with public discontent” was unquestionably to the point. Fifteen months before, the Marshal, with brisk truthfulness, had told American journalists, “I do not pretend that this government is free.… The Germans hold the rope and twist it whenever they consider the accord is not being carried out.” In his weak 1942 New Year’s broadcast, Pétain, with wearier truth, said that his revolution had not yet “passed from the domain of principles to enter that of facts.… Circumstances do not favor enthusiasm. In the partial exile in which I am constrained, in the half liberty left me, I try to do all my duty. Daily I attempt to save this land from the asphyxia which menaces it, from the troubles which lie in wait.” The Pétain mystique was on the wane. His former worshippers, now divided into two camps, either thought of him as an august, dignified, if defeated, martyr or believed him to be a fine-phrasing old figure with clay feet. Because of Vichy’s increasing collaboration with the Germans, millions of those Frenchmen who had never loved him now bitterly regarded him as the country’s most aged traitor.
He was also a matter of concern to those who, as part of his régime, were necessarily devoted to him. Even in gerontocratic France, the Marshal, for a chief of state, was becoming old. The Vichy population grew accustomed to seeing the somnolent figure of the elderly man riding through the streets on clement afternoons in his limousine, which flew on its bonnet the official marshal’s ensign—a baton, flanked with battle axes, on a tricolor field. To reassure Unoccupied France in general, Dr. Bernard Menetrel, the Marshal’s physician, superintended the taking of some newsreels which showed the Marshal in a state of lively health in the garden of his Riviera country place, where a small ditch had been dug expressly in order that the Marshal might be photographed in the act of briskly jumping over it. This Dr. Menetrel had appeared early on the Vichy scene and had become important. He is reported to be the forty-year-old son of an old friend of the Marshal’s and has been described as an Action Française Royalist, anti-German, and intelligent. In 1942 the Doctor supposedly diagnosed the patient’s condition more or less as follows: The Marshal, who sleeps badly but persists in his lifelong habit of rising at 5 a.m., still has left enough of his phenomenal health to function for about eight hours a day, were his day that of an ordinary idle old man; this exceptional vitality, however, fails to get him through a morning of governing without the aid of a drug (which other Vichy doctors, judging by the way it acts, have deduced must be benzedrine or ephedrine, in carefully controlled doses). The importance of the Doctor’s aid to Pétain has been recognized by his being named to the Secrétariat du Maréchal, a post which has permitted him to accompany Pétain to Ministerial meetings, where the old man may need all his wits about him.
The latest report on the Marshal’s health is this: During his best morning hours, when important visitors see him, his blue eyes are sapphire-clear and his features have the neatness of mere middle age. Flattery acts on him like a tonic; compliments are not enough. In official discussion, he is, while his medicine still upholds him, alert, cynical, hard, realistic, and as pessimistic as ever. For an hour after he has left his doctor, he is a match for anyone, even Laval. The liveliness of the Marshal’s luncheons, with eight or ten male guests chosen from among distinguished government officials and visitors, was one of the first legends in Vichy; the Marshal still eats well, or as well as the supplies allow. His discerning, restrained taste in French wines is about all that is left now, however, of his gastronomy. “I beg of you to remain to lunch,” he one day urged a visitor, adding, with an old man’s courteous candor, “You will give me the added pleasure of an excuse for opening a good bottle of champagne.” By afternoon, the Marshal has turned into an old man. When the effect of the drug comes to its end, the transition is swift and startling. While you look at him, he becomes his own old empty shell. Within a few minutes the lights and movements fade from his face, leaving a waxen, uninhabited mask. His blue eyes seem to see nothing, his memory fails to function. His brain closes against any new identifications; he thinks a man he has just met is another man he knew well years ago. Yet from a lifetime of self-control, the habit of dignified wariness still aids him. If forced to receive some visitor—his staff sees to it that only second-string visitors are given afternoon appointments—the Marshal limits himself to rising, bowing, and shaking hands; he will not risk the possible disaster of conversation. Sometimes, though, the Marshal murmurs, as if to himself, small, routine, melancholy phrases such as “Ah, les bons s’en vont” or “Tout est bien changé.” At times these cryptic utterances can daze the caller. More often, since France has indeed lost its good men and since the times are, alas, changed, the Vichy visitor retires impressed by the wise sadness of a weary old statesman.
Once out of his office in the Hôtel du Parc and back home, the Marshal dwells, as he has always done, in complete inaccessibility. Since the first, he and Madame la Maréchale have lived in Vichy in a fine old residence known as the Pavillion de Sévigné. Only the few family friends, who can be trusted to take the Marshal as they find him at night, are ever invited to dine with them. In contrast to his notable luncheons, the Marshal’s domestic evening meal is light. It is the soft supper of a very old man.
The most visible proof of the Marshal’s dwindling popularity was the slump, in 1942, in his fan letters, which had earlier numbered two thousand a day. After the Riom trial, they dropped to nearly nothing (where they have remained), and the propaganda desk, advised by the local police, tactfully advised the Marshal to spare his strength and avoid appearing in public.
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The Riom trial, by which Pétain meant to shatter the very memory of the Third Republic, succeeded principally in weakening the Vichy régime. The trial, the most hilarious, shameful travesty of French justice and example of Army bigotry since the Dreyfus case, was held in the late winter of 1942, and it apparently began as an alibi for the Germans, who, still smarting from the war-guilt stigma for 1914, wanted to force France to pin on herself the war guilt for 1939. Pétain, in his turn, wished the war guilt to fall not on his beloved France but on the hated Third Republic. Such double-barrelled intentions demanded special preparations. In July, 1940, Pétain issued a decree setting up a supreme court, subsequently established in nearby Riom—the only town in the region which possessed a courthouse big enough for the trial of a dead republic—which should judge those responsible for France’s recent “passage from a state of peace to a state of war.” In January, 1941, he issued an act, even odder, which was known as the Retroactive Responsibility of Ministers Act. Its tyrannical opening lines must have made the Vichy higher-ups shake in their shoes, since the law stated that all high government officials must “swear allegiance to his person,” that as office-h
olders they “pledged their persons and worldly goods,” that if they broke faith with him he could strip them of their political rights, ship them to the colonies, intern them, imprison them in a fortress—everything but hang them up by their thumbs. Less humorously, this law could retroactively apply to “high dignitaries who had held office within the past ten years,” which clearly meant the Third Republic’s, Popular Front, and Radical-Socialist leaders. In September, Pétain decreed that something to be called a Council of Political Justice be set up with the incredible right to “establish its own rules” and give a preliminary opinion as to the guilt of whoever would be unlucky enough to be tried before the supreme court. On October 13th, Nazi Minister Walther Funk shed considerable light on what was up by broadcasting, from Berlin, that “the French government would soon condemn those guilty of the war.” Sure enough, three days later, Pétain himself ordered, on the recommendation of the Council of Justice, that Radical-Socialist Premier Edouard Daladier, Popular Front Premier Léon Blum, and former Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, principals in the trial to come, be incarcerated in the Pyrenees fortress of Pourtalet on the ground that they were guilty, without having been indicted or tried, of failure in their public duty. Pierre Cot, Popular Front Minister of Air, also on the list of the accused, couldn’t be imprisoned, the Council report noted, “as he is a fugitive” in Washington, D.C. Seventeen months after they had been imprisoned as guilty, the three other men blossomed out as defendants in the Riom trial, which opened on February 19, 1942.
Riom is a grim, handsome Auvergnat Renaissance town of black stone fountains and façades carved from the local volcanic rock. To house the trial in style, Riom’s famous swarthy Palais de Justice, built in medieval times, was gadgeted with central heating, the walls were decked with priceless Beauvais and Flanders tapestries depicting scenes from the Odyssey, and from the ceilings hung splendid crystal chandeliers which once had twinkled in the Tuileries. To match this stage set, the court officials wore their red robes and white toques and the court president and state’s attorney were ringed with ermine collars. The farce, and France’s laughter, began when, the first day, Blum’s attorney opened by blandly reading aloud the eight secret Vichy orders which, as a preliminary, had been handed to the French press. Order No. 1, which took no cognizance of what the Nazis thought the trial was about, said “Keep in mind that the trial is limited to the unpreparedness for war existing in France from 1936 to May, 1940”—just in case some cub reporter forgot that Pétain had been War Minister in 1934. Order No. 4 instructed the press to make clear that this was a trial of the government of which the French people “had been victims.” Order No. 5 said, “Show that this cannot be the trial of the Army.” Order No. 7 added, “Especially consider this trust when either the person of the Marshal or his policy is referred to during the trial.” That evening, new secret Vichy orders were given to the press, forbidding it to report that Blum’s lawyer had disclosed that it had had the secret orders in the first place. As the trial proceeded, other orders forbade reporters to report that Daladier, on the stand, had said that Weygand had said that Pétain had failed to call a Superior War Council from 1934 on, that Pétain had had millions sliced off Daladier’s appropriations for training camps, and that Pétain, as War Minister, in 1934 had had the war budget cut by one-third, and that “in 1939 there were strong attacks on Pétain in Parliament.” Rather listlessly, Order No. 10 said, “To sum up…suppress all that concerns the actions of the Marshal.” Order No. 16, with more zest, said, “Do not quote the name of de Gaulle.” Once, the state’s attorney was driven to admit, “We are not here to decide if [Pétain’s] laws are constitutional, but only to enforce them.” Once, all that the court president could say, in reply to a Daladier attack on the Marshal, was “Oh! Oh!” After Blum’s lawyer had thrown the fat in the fire, the frantic district press censor sent a confidential memorandum to newspaper editors declaring that he no longer dared send them the press instructions “for reasons you can well imagine.” He also regretted that he could send no adequate trial report, since by the time he got through censoring he had left “only two or three lines of text per page. Many doubt that the trial can continue much longer.” Off the record, he added that Daladier’s defense of himself had “produced a very strong impression.”
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 47