B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  From the 1970s, the French were increasingly reminded in films, books, and newspapers that millions of people had revered Marshal Pétain; that Vichy laws, not German ones, had represented the ‘true’ France and discriminated against French Jews and French Freemasons; that French policemen, not German ones, had arrested Jews and Communists; that the resisters had been a small minority; and that most people had been attentistes not heroes. The myth was turned on its head. Films now treated the Resistance in a debunking mode: Vichy, not de Gaulle or the Resistance, now seemed to represent the ‘true’ France.

  This vision of the Occupation is no more satisfactory than the Gaullist one. Pétain was certainly popular, but his regime less so. Jews were persecuted by the French government, but a larger proportion of Jews survived the Holocaust in France than in most other occupied countries. Opinion was attentiste, but attentisme covered a multitude of positions. There was a Resistance myth which needed to be punctured, but that does not mean that the Resistance was a myth.

  Redressing the balance does not, however, involve returning to the old mythology. The history of the Occupation should be written not in black and white, but in shades of grey. Vichy may have been a reactionary and authoritarian regime, but it enjoyed heterogeneous support, even from people who had backed the left-wing Popular Front in the 1930s. At different times, and to differing degrees, Vichy attracted people as varied as the architect Le Corbusier, the journalist Hubert Beuve-Méry, the future president François Mitterrand, the economist François Perroux, the theatre director Jean Vilar. These are not marginal figures in France’s twentieth-century history, and Vichy was the beginning of their careers not the end. Mitterrand’s importance hardly needs emphasis; Beuve-Méry, founder of Le Monde, was the most powerful newspaper editor in France from 1945 until 1969; Perroux was the most distinguished French economist of the twentieth century, the French Keynes as his obituaries put it; Vilar was the founder of the Avignon festival, a pioneer of the democratization of theatre in post-war France. Mentioning these names is not intended to discredit the individuals concerned, but to emphasize the complexity of Vichy. Some of the people in this list eventually ended up in the Resistance, but this did not necessarily mean that they repudiated the values which had led them to Vichy. The Resistance was never monolithic, and the lines dividing it from Vichy were not always well defined.

  Ambiguities

  The ambiguities of the period can be illustrated by five short quotations. The first is from Henri Frenay, one of the earliest resisters. It comes from the manifesto of the Resistance movement he began to organize in the autumn of 1940:

  We are passionately attached to the work of Marshal Pétain. We subscribe to the body of great reforms which have been undertaken. We are animated by the desire that they turn out to be durable and that other reforms will complete those already undertaken. It is with this aim in mind that we form part of the movement of National Liberation … All those who serve in our ranks, like those who are already there, will be authentic Frenchmen. The Jews will serve in our ranks if they have really fought in one of the two wars.3

  The second quotation comes from a letter written in June 1940 by François Valentin who shortly afterwards became leader of the Légion des Combattants, an organization created by Vichy to drum up support for Pétain.

  I consider the attitude of the Pétain government to be mad. We are beaten. Alas, this is true. But it is no reason to accept as definitive what, with an exercise of will, need not be more than an accident. To treat with the enemy is to submit! It is to reinforce Germany against England, our last hope: it is to dishonour ourselves in furnishing arms to our enemy against our ally. We must hope and therefore hold out … If the possibility offers itself for me to leave for England, I will not let it slip through my hands.4

  The third quotation comes from the journal of the Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier who was, when he penned these words in October 1940, a qualified supporter of the Vichy regime. He is commenting on Vichy’s Statute discriminating against Jews:

  This evening appeared the shameful Jewish Statute, much more severe than anything which had been expected … I feel myself aged as if by an illness.5

  The fourth quotation comes from Maurice Ripoche, founder of the Resistance organization Ceux de la Résistance:

  We need to get rid of talkative politicians and Jews without fatherland.6

  The final quotation comes from a study published in 1942 by the Resistance movement OCM:

  The Jewish minority, concentrated in some big centres and represented in political, intellectual, and financial milieux is active and very much in evidence … Antisemitism … remains universal even in liberal countries. This suggests that it is based on a reality.7

  A pro-Pétainist resister; a pro-British and anti-German Pétainist; a pro-Jewish Pétainist; two anti-Semitic resisters: these are not the categories we might expect. They reveal the complexity of reactions to the Occupation and the extent to which antagonists might share as many assumptions with their enemies as with those on their own side. People who made different choices often did so in defence of similar values.

  Péguy’s Frances

  One common point of reference for resisters, Vichy conservatives, and Paris-based fascists alike was the writer Charles Péguy. On the day Marshal Pétain announced he was seeking an armistice, the Christian Democrat activist Edmond Michelet distributed in the streets of his town a tract containing six quotations from Péguy. One of these read: ‘In wartime he who does not surrender is my man, whoever he is, wherever he comes from, and whatever his party … And he who surrenders is my enemy whoever he is, wherever he comes from, and whatever his party.’8 Michelet was the first of many resisters to quote Péguy. His name was often invoked by resisters opposed to Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws.9 De Gaulle himself was steeped in Péguy’s writing; he quoted him in a speech on 18 June 1942.10

  Vichy was also eager to claim the patronage of Péguy. There was even talk of instituting a national holiday to commemorate him.11 Péguy was cited as an inspiration behind the regime’s conservative counter-revolution, christened the National Revolution.12 One of Péguy’s sons, Pierre, wrote a book to support this interpretation.13 But Péguy was also praised by hardline ‘collaborationists’ who believed that Vichy’s reforms were insufficiently radical and wanted a fascist regime in France. One of this group, the novelist Robert Brasillach, saw Péguy as ‘the inspirer of the new France, in brief a French National Socialist’. He regretted only that Péguy had not been a racist,14 but in 1941 Péguy’s other son, Marcel, published Le Destin de Charles Péguy which claimed: ‘My father is above all a racist … His thought could be summed up as: a country, a race, a leader.’15

  It is not unusual for historical figures to undergo a posthumous annexation which pays little respect to the reality of their lives—Joan of Arc was also invoked by all sides under the Occupation—but Péguy’s writing genuinely lent itself to contradictory interpretation. As a young Socialist at the turn of the century, he was an ardent defender of the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, seeing the Dreyfusard cause as a spiritual crusade to defend the purity of the Republican tradition. By 1904, however, he had come to deplore the way Dreyfusism had been appropriated by careerist politicians. As he put it in a famous aphorism: ‘Everything begins as mystique and ends as politique.’ In 1905, in the shadow of Franco-German rivalry, Péguy’s book Notre patrie celebrated patriotism, and distanced him from the internationalism of the Socialists with whom he had fought for Dreyfus. In 1910, his poem Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc announced his conversion to Catholicism. He died at the battle of the Marne in 1914, after which he became the object of a patriotic cult.16

  The essential point about Péguy, however, is not that his life was a series of renunciations and repudiations. Rather it was one of accumulations and accretions. He was not, as he saw it, first Socialist, Republican, and pro-Jewish and then Catholic and patriotic: he was all these things at the same time. T
his made Péguy an awkward member of any camp he joined. He was a Republican who despised political parties; a Catholic who attacked the institutional Church; a defender of French rootedness who wrote in passionate praise of Judaism. Above all, Péguy was a moralist and a prophet. If there is a thread running through his writing, it is to be found in his deep immersion in French history, his suspicion of the ‘modern’, and his cult of the traditions of the French countryside and artisan labour. Claiming to despise intellectuals who dealt only in abstractions— one of his key words is charnel—Péguy was as involved in the physical production of the journal he published as he was in writing for it. Péguy’s fundamental belief was that all the traditions he celebrated—the Catholic, the Socialist (his socialism was never Marxist), the Republican, the Jewish—are part of the rich soil of France’s history. There is no writer more French than Péguy, but he was at the confluence of many different Frances.

  Vichy conservatives admired Péguy’s obsession with rootedness and tradition; de Gaulle his passionate patriotism; Catholic resisters his concern for spiritual values; Republican resisters his defence of the purest Republican ideal; fascists his furious intransigence. These strands cannot be easily separated out, and this is what makes Péguy such a perfect emblem for France’s history between 1940 and 1944.

  Over the past twenty-five years, that tortured history has been the subject of intensive historical research. Nothing could be less true than the journalistic cliché, particularly common among the British, that France has failed to ‘confront’ her wartime past. Thus before the recent trial of the Vichy functionary Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity, The Times informed its readers that the event ‘set the stage for a painful and overdue examination of France’s wartime past’.17 The re-examination may be painful, but it is not overdue. If one goes into any bookshop in France, there is frequently a whole table displaying recent works on the Occupation, and usually those concentrating on its most unsavoury aspects. Such books can literally be bought on station platforms. The flood of writing on the Occupation seems unstoppable: it is now the most intensively researched period of French history.

  1945–1965: The Resistance writes its History

  The writing of the history of the Occupation began even while German soldiers were still present in France. In October 1944, de Gaulle’s government set up a historical committee to study the occupation and liberation of France. This became the Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, headed by the historian Henri Michel. The Comité set about building an archive of material relating to the war, and it founded a journal, the Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, which published the first scholarly articles on the period, and has done so ever since. The Comité had a team of departmental correspondents—156 of them by 1979—many of them secondary school teachers, who collected local information on the Occupation and conducted some 2,000 interviews with resisters. In 1980, it was subsumed into the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP) which is devoted to the study of contemporary history in general, but still concentrates primarily on the Occupation.18

  In the first twenty years after 1945, historical writing centred mainly on the Resistance. When Michel published a critical bibliography of the Resistance in 1964, he listed 1,200 items.19 Many of them were the work of former resisters who wanted to tell their stories. Memoirs were also produced by members of de Gaulle’s London-based Free French,20 and by some Resistance leaders who had remained in France.21 Very different pictures emerged depending whether the writer had been based in London or France. Colonel Passy, head of de Gaulle’s intelligence service, described the Resistance in France as ‘an abundant desire to do well, brave thoughts and exalted imagination which translated into disorganised actions without real effectiveness’.22 De Gaulle’s own memoirs which appeared between 1954 and 1959 said a lot about his conflicts with his Anglo-Saxon allies but treated the Resistance with a mixture of glacial respect and Olympian disdain, as a piece in the larger Gaullist enterprise to rescue French honour.

  A number of histories began to appear, starting in 1951 with a study of the small movement Résistance,23 and continuing into the 1960s with histories of larger movements24 and of Resistance institutions.25 Most of these appeared with the encouragement of Michel’s Comité, in a series called ‘Esprit de la Résistance’, whose self-proclaimed objective was to be ‘the edification of our citizens and the re-establishment of a truth which puts each person in their just place, the formation of the young in France’.26 Although the authors had usually been involved in the Resistance, these were scholarly works based considerably on oral evidence. As Lucien Febvre wrote in the preface to one study, the Resistance generation had to provide its own account of its history.27 The Comité even set about producing a chronology, département by département, of every single act of resistance recorded on over 150,000 index cards. This was not just historical positivism gone mad, but also an act of piety: the Comité saw its role as transmitting part of the national heritage to future generations.28

  The dominant figure of this historiography was Henri Michel (1907–86) whose prolific output included the first short general history of the Resistance in 1950, the first doctoral thesis devoted to it, and the first scholarly study of a single resistance movement.29 Before 1940, Michel had been a history teacher and Socialist activist in Toulon. He participated in the Resistance of the Var département, representing the Socialists on the Departmental Liberation Committee. He was both a scholar and an effective popularizer, inspired by a sense of duty to the memory of the Resistance. It was, he wrote, ‘one of the most magnificent episodes in the history of France’ despite the fact that ‘moving from mystique to politique, it became loaded, in spite of itself, with impurities’.30 Michel, while not ignoring conflicts between France and London, sometimes let piety get the better of him. Thus in his biography of Jean Moulin, Michel wrote of the conflict between Moulin and another leading Gaullist resister, Pierre Brossolette: ‘It is, in my view, unnecessary to linger over this episode. Jean Moulin and Pierre Brossolette both died heroically as victims of the Gestapo and our memory of them cannot be dissociated from the same feeling of respect and admiration.’31 This biography appeared in 1964, the year in which de Gaulle’s decision to transfer Moulin’s remains to the Panthéon signified that he had been selected as the emblematic hero of the Resistance, the man who had unified it and rallied it to de Gaulle.

  This Gaullist consensus was rejected by the Communists who proclaimed their predominant role in the Resistance.32 The Party downplayed the impact of de Gaulle’s BBC speech of 18 June 1940 and claimed that its own Appeal of 10 July had been more important. Non-Communist historians, however, argued that the Party had not started to resist until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. One respect in which Gaullist and Communist interpretations did converge was in emphasizing the centrality of resistance, whether Gaullist or Communist. Between these Gaullist and Communist monoliths, there was little room for dissenting voices, although one or two squeezed through in the memoirs of resisters like Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie and Georges Bidault. But these did not substantially affect the overall picture. D’Astier had a reputation for irreverence and Bidault was known to have personal grudges against de Gaulle whose Algerian policy he opposed.33

  This concentration on the Resistance meant that the history of Vichy was largely ignored. The Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale did not devote an issue to the Occupation and Vichy before 1964. Most writing on Vichy took the form of exculpatory memoirs written by the regime’s former supporters.34 The start of the Cold War provided a more sympathetic audience for these accounts than they would have received in 1945. In 1957 Laval’s daughter produced a three-volume collection of testimonies by former collaborators of her father. Although much of the documentation was useful, the interpretations were tendentious, and produced an angry rebuttal by historians on the Comité.35

  The first history of Vichy came not from a
n academic historian, but from the writer Robert Aron in 1954. In the 1930s, Aron was one of that generation of young intellectuals disgusted by what they considered to be the impotence of the Third Republic. Aron himself had belonged to a group called Ordre nouveau, whose members included Jean Jardin, later a close adviser to Laval in 1942. Thanks to his relationship with Jardin, Aron evaded anti-Semitic persecution and escaped to North Africa where he supported General Giraud, the conservative general whom the Americans sponsored as a counterweight to de Gaulle. Aron was well connected in the worlds of politics and business, and his history of Vichy was based to a considerable extent on personal information (and also on the records of the post-war trials). Writing with no nostalgia for the Third Republic, Aron produced a subtly apologetic account of Vichy which argued that the regime had acted as a ‘shield’ between the French and the Germans, doing its best to resist German pressure for collaboration. When this did not succeed, the fault lay with Laval not Pétain.36 Aron’s distinction between a Vichy of Pétain and a Vichy of Laval received the imprimatur in 1956 of the respected political scientist André Siegfried.37

  For all its faults, Aron’s book had the merit of viewing Vichy as more than simply a tool of Germany. He reinserted it into French history as worthy of study in itself. Although Aron’s interpretation of Vichy was clearly not Gaullist, it did not necessarily subvert the Gaullist myth. By suggesting that Vichy had tried to resist in its own way, Aron, like the Gaullists and Communists, limited the number of real ‘traitors’ to a handful. He too agreed that the ‘real’ France was about resistance; he merely wanted to include Vichy in it.