B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  1970s: Enter the Vichy Regime

  The professional historians at last turned their attention to Vichy in the late 1960s. From this point one can discern three distinct phases in the study of Vichy. The first concentrated primarily on the nature of the regime; the second on public opinion and the reactions of different social groups; the third on the interactions between regime and society.

  The first phase was inaugurated by the publication in 1972 of Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (translated into French a year later). Paxton, who taught at Columbia University, had already established his scholarly credentials with a study of the army under Vichy.38 But his second book caused outrage in some quarters in France, not least at the presumption of a 41-year-old American lecturing the French about their past. Henri Michel, who reviewed the book favourably, wondered if the moral passion underlying Paxton’s scholarship was not inspired by a degree of anti-Frenchness. Answering this point in the preface to a 1982 edition of his book, Paxton observed that, writing at the time of the Vietnam war, his target was ‘nationalist conformism of any kind’.39 Paxton has since become the inspiration for a generation of younger French historians—recently his book was described in France as the ‘Copernican revolution’ in the study of Vichy40—and he has become the most celebrated Vichy historian. His book, even after twenty-five years, remains the best study of the regime.

  Paxton’s interpretation had three main strands. First, he showed that the leaders of the Vichy regime had consistently sought to collaborate with Germany. Making extensive use of German archives, Paxton rejected the distinction between a collaborating and pro-German Vichy of Laval and a patriotic and anti-German one of Pétain. For Paxton, there was no Pétainist double game. Secondly, Paxton argued that Vichy had a domestic project for the political regeneration of French society. Where it had been customary to view Vichy as a victim of circumstances and blame its most unsavoury policies on the Germans, Paxton distinguished between policies which were imposed by the Germans and those which were not. For example, he showed incontrovertibly that Vichy had its own anti-Semitic agenda. Thirdly, Paxton demonstrated the complexity and incoherence of Vichy’s domestic policies. Instead of seeing Vichy as an exclusively reactionary regime, Paxton showed that it contained modernizers as well as conservatives: the subtitle of his book was ‘Old Guard and New Order’. Thus Paxton reinserted Vichy into a longer historical context, drawing out continuities with France’s past and future. Vichy could no longer be viewed as an aberration or parenthesis in French history.

  It would be wrong to see Paxton’s interpretation as novel in all respects. The impact of his book has overshadowed other studies which anticipated many of his conclusions. There was, for example, the Franco-American historian Stanley Hoffmann, who had passed his adolescence in occupied France. Hoffmann was the author of two brilliant articles, which remain among the most important pieces ever written on the regime. In the first, he interpreted Vichy not as a simple revenge of the reactionary right but a ‘pluralist dictatorship’ where different political factions competed for influence. In the second, he analysed the different strands of collaboration.41 Although Hoffmann argued that there were several Vichys and several kinds of collaboration, the distinction was not between a ‘good’ one and a ‘bad’ one, between Pétain and Laval. While emphasizing the diversity of Vichy, Hoffmann argued for an internal logic running through the history of the regime from the beginning to the end.

  Another pioneering work, appearing in French translation in 1968, was La France dans l’Europe de Hitler by the German historian Eberhard Jäckel.42 From the German archives Jäckel showed that Vichy had actively sought collaboration, and that this policy had been carried out even when Laval was not in power. Vichy’s domestic policies came under scrutiny in 1970 when the august Fondation nationale des sciences politiques organized a colloquium on Vichy, assembling survivors from the period and historians of it.43 Although confining itself to the study of policy and institutions, this colloquium provided new information on Vichy policy, and addressed the issue of continuity between Vichy and the years surrounding it.

  These studies had nibbled away at Aron’s interpretation, but it was Paxton’s study which made the impact.44 His book was written with a moral passion which was all the more effective for being restrained in its expression. More importantly, no one had offered such a trenchantly comprehensive synthesis. Hoffmann’s articles constructed the conceptual framework around which a history of Vichy might be written, but he had not himself written that history; Jäckel had not addressed domestic policy; the 1970 colloquium had not covered foreign policy, and thus it sidestepped the relationship between Vichy’s internal reforms and collaboration.

  It is not enough to write a good history book (which Paxton certainly did); it helps to write it at the right time. Paxton’s book appeared when the Gaullist myth was losing its credibility, and people wanted to hear what he was saying. Jäckel’s book, although narrower in focus than Paxton’s, was hardly less important. Appearing in French in 1968, it sold 3,000 copies in its first ten years; Paxton’s sold over 58,000 in its first twelve years.45

  Subsequent work on the regime has extended or refined Paxton’s interpretations, but not challenged them substantially.46 In 1982, the doyen of French diplomatic historians, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, produced a study of foreign policy based on newly opened French archives. He identified more internal debate in the making of French foreign policy, but did not fundamentally differ from Paxton except on details.47 Studies of economic policy-making in France by the American historian Richard Kuisel and the French historian Michel Margairaz have underlined even more emphatically than Paxton the continuities between Vichy and what came before and after: their account of the modernization of the French economy gives a central role to the Vichy period.48

  There have been some rearguard actions against Paxton’s interpretation. Michèle Cointet has tried to salvage the existence at Vichy of a liberal tradition by studying the regime’s attempt to set up a consultative body called the Conseil national.49 But if the Conseil’s history is worth writing, it should not be given excessive centrality: it had no power. In 1989, there was a boldly apologetic biography of the Vichy leader Admiral Darlan. But despite the authors’ best endeavours, the new documentation they unearthed only further undermined the case they wished to prove.50 The consensus existing in the historical profession today is best demonstrated by the fact that when in 1990 Francis-Georges Dreyfus provided a réchauffé version of the Aron thesis, his efforts excited indifference more than outrage.51

  The 1980s: From Regime to Society

  The second phase in the historiography of Vichy was a move at the end of the 1970s, from a study of the regime to a study of those who lived under it, from politics to society.52 Inasmuch as Paxton discussed this subject, his view was that the Resistance was a tiny minority, and that most people, whatever their private views of the Germans, were ‘functional collaborators’. Just as the German archives had allowed Paxton to challenge previous orthodoxy, it was the opening up of prefects’ reports, and other contemporary reports on public opinion, which allowed his judgement of the attitudes of the French population to be contested. Prefects are the agents of the government in the départements. Each département has a prefect at its head, and one of his duties is to provide the government with regular bulletins on public opinion. Obviously this source needs to be used carefully, not least because prefects’ reports were coloured by their author’s own ideological assumptions, and their déformation professionnelle inclined them to present a picture corresponding to the desires of their superiors. But these biases can be detected, and under Vichy the prefects were soon reporting what their superiors did not wish to hear. Using such sources, Pierre Laborie for the département of the Lot in the south-west, and John Sweets for the city of Clermont Ferrand, reached remarkably similar conclusions about public opinion.53 They found almost universal hostility to the Germans fr
om early on, and a fairly rapid disenchantment with Vichy. If the French were attentiste, it was not out of sympathy with the occupier. A proliferation of regional studies has largely confirmed these interpretations.

  More importantly, such studies have challenged overly simplistic categorizations of opinion. The dichotomy between ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ is too crude to accommodate the multiplicity of responses to the regime. Laborie has plotted the confusion, changeability, and complexity of public opinion.54 These general studies of public opinion have been buttressed by studies of particular social and political groups: committed collaborators,55 workers,56 industrialists,57 prisoners of war,58 women,59 the young.60 The best indication of the transformation of research agendas was the publication twenty years after the 1970 colloquium on the regime of another huge colloquium organized in 1990 by the IHTP on the theme of ‘Vichy and the French people’.61

  The third phase in the historiography of Vichy from the mid-1980s has concerned the interaction between regime and people: the study of social and cultural organizations, some established or encouraged by the regime, others independent of it, which mediated between State and society. This has opened up new areas of research into cinema,62 theatre,63 art,64 propaganda,65 icono-graphical representations,66 labour organizations,67 and so on. These studies revealed all kinds of intermediate positions between support for the regime and opposition to it: especially in the cultural sphere, the regime was seen to permit a surprising degree of latitude. Again, these new research agendas were discussed at another important colloquium of the IHTP in 1987 devoted to ‘cultural life under Vichy’.68

  If one wanted to summarize the periodization which this historiographical survey has suggested, it would run as follows: A benevolent interpretation of the Vichy regime and the conduct of the French who lived under it (Aron: the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s) was replaced by a more critical one (Paxton: the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s); and this was subsequently modified by a more nuanced account of the social and political attitudes of the French population (Laborie: mid-1980s onwards).

  Le Grand Absent: The Jews

  These historiographical stages emerge particularly clearly in the way the historiography has treated one specific issue: Vichy and the Jews. Until the end of the 1960s the fate of the Jews and Vichy’s policy towards them was largely ignored: Michel’s 1964 bibliography lists only a handful of books about the Jews. The 1970 colloquium hardly mentioned the issue at all. It is not true that nothing was written about the Jews during this period. On the contrary, a very important body of work was produced by the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine (CDJC) founded during the war by Isaac Schneersohn. Born into a Polish Hasidic family, Schneersohn had arrived in France in 1920 where he had become a successful businessman. His original idea for what became the CDJC was to gather documentation in order to help Jews obtain restitution of their property after the war. Thanks to an audacious initiative by Schneersohn’s young helper Léon Poliakov after the Liberation, the CDJC obtained the papers of the SS in France. This important body of archives allowed the CDJC to become a major research centre. In 1945, it founded Le Monde juif, the first journal in the world devoted to the exclusive study of the Holocaust.69 Historians attached to the CDJC published pioneering works in the 1940s and 1950s on the Jews in occupied France during the war: on Jewish resistance,70 on internment camps for Jews in occupied France,71 and on Vichy institutions dealing with the Jews.72

  The CDJC’s work was entirely on the margins of official French historiography and went unnoticed by the wider public, another example of how the reception of historical writing is as much a product of the time it is written as of its ‘objective’ quality. The neglect was both a result of the Jacobin tendency of French historiography—a reluctance to treat specific groups apart from their identity as French citizens73—and also a reluctance by French Jews themselves to confront the horrors of the period. Many Jews after the war wanted to fit back into French society and preferred to accept the idea that responsibility for their persecution rested with the Germans.

  This perspective changed in the 1970s partly because the Arab–Israeli war developed a clearer sense of identity among France’s Jewish population, partly as a result of the challenging of myths in the wake of The Sorrow and the Pity (the film did not duck French persecution of the Jews). Among historians, Robert Paxton was again a pioneer, co-authoring in 1981 a merciless account of Vichy’s policy towards the Jews, which showed how Vichy’s discriminatory laws were passed independently of German pressure and argued that until 1942 the attitude of the French population towards the Jews was one of indifference verging on hostility.74 At the same time the French Jewish lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld reached similar conclusions about Vichy policy.75 Klarsfeld, whose father died in Auschwitz, has sought to pay homage to the victims and make the guilty pay. One of Klarsfeld’s achievements has been to reconstitute painstakingly the names of all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust from France.76 It was his efforts during the 1980s which pressurized the French government to try those surviving executants of Vichy’s Jewish policy who had escaped punishment at the Liberation. Throughout the 1980s, huge numbers of books appeared on the Jews and Vichy, and on Vichy’s wider policy of persecution: its concentration camps, its treatment of foreigners, gypsies, Communists, and Jews.77 Where historians once distinguished the early years of the regime from the police state of 1944, they now emphasized the continuity of Vichy repression: persecution was there from the start and the radicalization merely a matter of degree.78To the extent that professional historians did discuss the fate of the Jews in occupied France they took the view that the Vichy regime had done its best to protect them from the Germans. This was the line followed by Raul Hilberg’s pioneering study of the Holocaust in 1961, The Destruction of the European Jews.79

  Recently, however, historians have begun to refine their account of the attitude of the population towards the Jews while not questioning the culpability of the regime. They have had to confront the paradox that despite Vichy’s anti-Semitism, a comparatively high proportion of Jews in France survived the war. For Paxton the explanation lies in the vagaries of German policy, but for Klarsfeld, who always distinguished between the regime and the population, it lies in the reactions of the French people. He is not the only French Jewish historian (and survivor) of the period to offer this less negative perspective which has been adopted by other recent historical writing on the subject. But this has not yet penetrated to the wider public which still resists the view that the Occupation might after all have contained heroes.80 It is interesting, however, that Louis Malle’s second film on the Occupation, Au revoir les enfants (1987), the story of three Jewish boys given refuge in a Catholic school, paints a less bleak picture than that presented in Lacombe Lucien, even if the film ends with the boys’ arrest.

  1990s: The Resistance Returns

  What happened to the history of the Resistance during these years of obsession with Vichy?81 It was inevitable that in the 1970s the Gaullist orthodoxy on the Resistance would face a battering similar to that received by the orthodoxy on Vichy. The first challenge came from the memoirs of two leading resisters, Henri Frenay and Claude Bourdet.82 Presenting a view of the Resistance from France not London, they were acerbic about de Gaulle’s historical annexation of the Resistance. A primarily metropolitan perspective also emerged from the five-volume history of the Resistance by Henri Noguères which appeared between 1967 and 1981.83 Noguères had himself been a local Resistance leader of Socialist sympathies. His books, written in conjunction with another former resister, the Communist Marcel Degliame-Fouché, provided a month-by-month account of the Resistance, built out of the testimonies of leading resisters. The result is an informative chronicle, not an interpretative history. Indeed on the vexed question of Communist participation in the Resistance, the first two volumes appeared with a dissenting appendix by a third contributor, Jean-Louis Vigier, who left the project after this point
.

  Noguères was not a professional historian, and the most striking fact about the historiography of the Resistance from about 1970 is that it no longer engaged the attention of French historians to the same degree as Vichy. It is not true that the writing of resistance history ceased after 1970. Of the 7,000 books and articles devoted to the period in the thirty years since Michel’s 1964 bibliography, some 1,500 at least were devoted to the Resistance.84 More books on Resistance movements were published in the 1970s, but these studies, which concentrated on organizations, followed the model of the earlier works of the 1960s without offering new interpretative agendas.85 By 1992, the review Esprit could comment that the Resistance had become ‘a blank … a taboo’ in historical research.86

  It was symptomatic of this neglect of the Resistance by French historians that the most important work to appear in the 1970s was by a British historian, H. Roderick Kedward’s Resistance in Vichy France (1978), which studied the southern Resistance up to the end of 1942.87 Unlike previous historians of Resistance, he was more interested in individuals and motivations than in structures and organizations, in tentative beginnings as much as outcomes. In that sense his book is informed by the anti-institutional spirit of 1960s radicalism. Kedward, who betrayed real warmth for his subject, teased out continuities between past and present and located the Resistance in the society around it. But the lack of mainstream interest in the Resistance meant that Kedward’s book had to wait eleven years (1989) for a French translation. Paxton, who had waited only one year, wrote the right book at the right time, Kedward the right one at the wrong time.