B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Céline’s violence puts him in a category of his own, but one can find the Maurrassian Pierre Gaxotte writing in Candide in 1938:

  How Blum hates us! he bears a grudge against our peasants for walking in clogs on French soil and for not having had ancestors who were camel drivers wandering in the Syrian desert … A choice has to be made between France and this accursed man. He embodies everything that revolts our blood and flesh. He is evil, he is death.24

  Or there is the case of the novelist Marcel Jouhandeau who announced his personal conversion to anti-Semitism in October 1936, and in the following year produced a book entitled The Jewish Peril. He wrote:

  Although I feel no personal sympathy for M. Hitler, M. Blum fills me with a deeper and quite different repugnance … The Führer is in his own country and master of his own country … M. Blum is master of my country and no European can ever know what an Asiatic is thinking.25

  These were not the views of marginal cranks. Jouhandeau was a respected author published by the NRF; Candide sold 650,000 copies weekly. Even more mainstream was the journalist Raymond Millet who wrote a series of articles on immigration in 1938 for the respected Le Temps. While claiming to oppose anti-Semitism, he worried about the Jewish ‘invasion’ of Paris, and ended by saying that ‘measures must be taken against this disorder’.26

  By 1937 anti-Semitism had also become intertwined with pacifism—the fear that the Jews, like the Communists, were driving France into an anti-Nazi crusade to defend their interests. This meant that on the right the list of Jewish enemies increased to include ‘bellicist’ conservatives like Mandel who had hitherto been immune from anti-Semitic propaganda. In September 1938, there were demonstrations against Jews in Paris and other cities. This association of Jews with war meant that anti-Semitism cut across traditional ideological boundaries to embrace elements of the left. There was nothing anti-Semitic about Paul Faure’s statement in April 1938 that fighting for Czechoslovakia was not worth the life of a single wine-grower from Mâcon, but another line had been crossed when the Socialist Ludovic Zoretti wrote that France did not want to ‘kill millions of people, and destroy a civilisation to make life a bit easier for 100,000 Sudeten Jews’.27 Even more explicit was the Socialist deputy Armand Chouffet in 1938: ‘I’ve had enough of the Jewish dictatorship over the Party … I won’t march for a Jewish war.’28 Such sentiments could also be found in the Radical Party. Paul Elbel railed against ‘undesirable’ Jews in L’Œuvre; the newspaper L’Ère nouvelle, which defended refugees in the early 1930s, was by 1938 mooting a possible numerus clausus for Jews and proposing that Jewish refugees should be sent to special training camps to turn them into farmers.29

  Race and the Republican Tradition

  The fact that such sentiments could be expressed on the left invites reflection on the relationship between the virulent xenophobia of the 1930s and the universalist traditions of French Republicanism. It was after all the Revolution which emancipated the Jews in 1791. Supposedly race did not enter into French conceptions of nationality. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Republican historian Jules Michelet had declared that the genius of France was her ‘universal receptivity’ and ‘intimate fusion of races’. The classic French formulation of nationhood was provided in Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture, What is a nation? Renan rejected any racial definition of the nation, seeing it as an artificial, historically determined construct. It was voluntaristic and subjective not ethnic and objective. He defined a nation as ‘a soul … the culmination of a long past’; it was a ‘daily plebiscite’. The immediate purpose of Renan’s argument was to justify French claims to Alsace-Lorraine, recently lost to Germany, by pitting a distinctively French nationalism against a German racial one.30

  French legislation relating to nationality was fixed in the 1889 nationality code.31 It was a mixture of ius sanguinis and ius soli. Children of French parents were French, but so, at birth, were children born of a non-French parent who had been born in France, and so, from the age of 18, were children born in France of foreign parents providing the child had resided in France for the previous five years. This 1889 legislation was less restrictive than German legislation (of 1913), which based citizenship on race, but more restrictive than American legislation which conferred automatic citizenship on anyone born in the United States. French law required an exposure to French culture, requiring the future citizen to become French culturally before becoming so juridically. In America, censuses asked questions about ethnic origin; in France this was unthinkable, and there was no equivalent to the American notion of second-generation Italian-American or Irish-Americans. In French Republican tradition, beliefs and customs were private and did not concern the State. When the Jews were emancipated, this idea was summed up in the phrase: ‘One must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and grant everything to the Jews as individuals … They must be citizens as individuals.’

  The 1889 law was less liberal than it seemed, however. It was inspired partly by concern at the presence of generations of foreigners without any stake in defending the country, and partly by the need, given France’s sluggish birth rate, to increase the numbers liable for conscription. Its purpose was less to allow second-generation immigrants to be French than to remove their right not to be. A similar spirit lay behind the relaxation of naturalization procedures in 1927.32 Assimilation was never quite as painless a process as abstract commentary suggested. From the Italians, who were the victims of race riots in the 1890s, to the Poles in the 1920s, each wave of immigration excited social tensions.

  While disparaging German racism and congratulating itself on its universalism, France did have its own racial theorists. The most famous of these was Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Although admired by Kaiser Wilhelm and enjoying quite a following in America, Lapouge was ostracized by the French scientific community, but in the 1930s the obsession with immigration provided racial theorists with a new audience. The most influential was René Martial (1873–1955), author in 1934 of La Race française. Having started out as a public health administrator, Martial acquired a reputation as an expert on immigration on which he lectured at the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Although believing that all races were a mixture, Martial argued that the role of public policy was to find the appropriate racial ‘graft’ through selective immigration. The basis of this selection was to be blood group. His maxim was that blood group B—Jews— should be kept out.33

  Until the arrival of the Germans in 1940, this French racial tradition remained marginal. But at the end of the nineteenth century, there was another challenge to the prevailing universalistic tradition in the emergence of what has been described as a ‘closed’ nationalism in contrast to the ‘open’ Republican tradition. This closed tradition was obsessed with French decadence. Its slogan, revived by the leagues in the 1930s, was ‘France for the French’.34 This was the tradition associated with Action française, and, in a different version, with Maurice Barrès. Supposedly repudiating racial definitions of French nationhood—Maurras defined the Jews as a people not a race, while Barrès wrote in 1921 ‘we are not a race but a nation’—they redefined French nationhood in terms of the Catholic tradition, or, in Barrès’s case, in terms of the cult of ‘the land and the dead’. Thus for the allegedly non-racist Barrès, Dreyfus’s physiognomy was sufficient to explain why he was a traitor; Zola’s name revealed that he would necessarily act as a ‘deracinated Venetian’. The war gave new force to Barrès’s idea of the soil and the dead. He suggested allowing the mothers or widows of fallen soldiers to vote on their behalf, binding the dead and the living into a common spiritual community. By definition, some were not included in this community. Charles Trochu of the National Association of Officer Veterans talked of ‘the scum from the Orient recently encamped on our land, soaked with the blood of those who achieved that magnificent moral victory which is the homeland’.35

  The closed tradition was not as far from the open one as might seem the case.36 Renan’s daily plebiscite
was balanced by the weight of history and inheritance. When he wrote that ‘the nation … is the culmination of a long past of effort, of sacrifice, of devotion … the cult of ancestors is absolutely legitimate since our ancestors have made us what we are’, he was not so far from Barrès’s cult of the soil and the dead. Barrès claimed to be a disciple of Renan, and one could say that he merely emphasized the objective over the subjective side of the equation: French identity as a sort of cultural alchemy after centuries of long assimilation. In the Republican tradition too, the key to nationhood is cultural assimilation: all ‘particularisms’ are confined to the sphere of the private. But by setting the bar of what constitutes assimilation sufficiently high, it was possible for Republican universalism to end up hardly less exclusive than the closed tradition of Barrès and Maurras, or even the racism of Martial.

  In short, French notions of nationhood and race were confused. The word ‘race’ was frequently employed, but more in the sense of population stock than ethnic group. Few people openly subscribed to the idea that nationhood was related to race, but the boundaries between these concepts were blurred. Even defenders of the 1927 nationality law, which made naturalization easier to obtain, displayed barely disguised racial assumptions. It was only passed thanks to the inclusion of a clause making it possible to remove citizenship from naturalized citizens who had proved unworthy of it.37 In the parliamentary debate on the law, one speaker wanted to ‘operate a selection among foreigners living in France’; it would be undesirable to try and ‘assimilate people who often fail to bring us the necessary moral and physical elements which we need’. Another speaker offered a hierarchy of assimilability at the bottom of which stood Orientals and Levantines ‘whose mentality will never be ours’.38 These were the views expressed at a moment of exceptional tolerance towards foreigners by supporters of a liberal policy.

  Ten years later, such sentiments were more widespread, more violently expressed, and closer to becoming policy. Nothing better illustrates the extent to which racial assumptions had infiltrated mainstream opinion than the case of Jean Giraudoux, the man whom Daladier appointed to take charge of French government propaganda in July 1939. France had not previously had a state propaganda organization, and Giraudoux’s Information Commissariat was a tiny operation compared to Goebbels’s in Germany, but it was a recognition that there was a propaganda battle to be won. Giraudoux was a celebrated novelist and playwright noted for his delicacy of feeling, refinement of sentiment, and exquisiteness of style. Like Morand he had combined a literary career with a diplomatic one. In the 1920s, he was one of those writers hostile to the nationalism of Poincaré, and his play The Trojan war will not take place (1935) is the epitome of 1930s pacifism. None of this meant that Giraudoux was in any way a politically committed figure. He is often seen as celebrating the classical France of refinement, quality, and proportion, but he was also interested in urbanism, planning, and modernization.

  In the year of his appointment to the Commissariat, Giraudoux published Pleins pouvoirs, outlining his diagnosis of France’s malaise. For Giraudoux, one of the main problems facing France was the physical health of her population. He deplored the absence of any State policy towards sport, any co-ordinated action against TB, any policy of urban planning, but the gravest problem of all was immigration. France had become ‘an invaded country’ facing a ‘continuous infiltration of barbarians’. It was necessary to accompany immigration by a policy of ‘methodical choice’ and ‘pitiless surveillance’ in order ‘to send back those elements which could corrupt a race which owes its value to the selection and refining process of twenty centuries’. France had too many foreigners: ‘We find them swarming in our arts and in our old and new industries, in a kind of spontaneous generation reminiscent of fleas on a newly born puppy.’ Giraudoux painted an apocalyptic picture: ‘Arabs pullulating at Grenelle or Pantin … an infiltration … by hundreds of thousands. of Ashkenazis, escaped from Polish or Romanian ghettoes … who eliminate our compatriots … from their traditions … and from their artisan trades … A horde … which encumbers our hospitals.’

  Giraudoux’s answer was the creation of a Minister of Race. He claimed that this was not a repudiation of France’s traditions since the objective was to search for a ‘moral and cultural type’, not, as in Germany, a physical type. Whatever this meant, it did not prevent Giraudoux observing that the immigrants ‘rarely beautify by their personal appearance’, nor from asserting: ‘we are in full agreement with Hitler in proclaiming that a policy only achieves its highest plane once it is racial’.39 These, it must be remembered, were the words of the delicately refined writer whose task it was to defend the values of liberal and Republican France against Nazi Germany when war was declared on 3 September 1939.

  6

  The Debacle

  Causes and Consequences

  At the end of 1940, the popular historian Sir Arthur Bryant published his English Saga which depicted England as ‘an island fortress … fighting a war of redemption, not only for Europe but for her own soul’. This was the first of several patriotic works in which Bryant celebrated the epic of English history culminating in the glorious leadership of Winston Churchill. What made these effusions particularly remarkable was the fact that, until the end of the 1930s, Bryant had been an ardent appeaser, anti-Semite, and admirer of Nazi Germany (he chose Mein Kampf as his book of the month in January 1939). Had British history taken a different turn in 1940, it is all too easy to imagine Bryant playing the same hagiographical role towards whoever might have become the British Pétain as he did towards Churchill. In different circumstances he would probably have become a British equivalent of René Benjamin, the writer notorious for his works of obsequious flattery of Pétain after 1940.1

  The case of Bryant is a salutary reminder of the importance of contingency in history. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet remarks: ‘History is not Tragedy. To understand historical reality, it is sometimes necessary not to know the outcome.’2 One must resist the temptation to read the history of inter-war France merely as a prehistory to Vichy. Daladier’s government may have represented a marked shift to the right by the Radicals, but within the Party there was still a vocal minority, led by Édouard Herriot, which still defended the Party’s traditional values. Despite the obsessive natalism, women’s rights did advance in the inter-war years: 1939 was the year of the Family Code, but in the previous year a law was passed bestowing civil equality on women.3 France did have an anti-Semitic tradition, but it was the country in which Dreyfus was eventually vindicated: such a case could never have arisen in Germany since at that time no Jew would have attained comparable rank in the army. Despite the xenophobia of the late 1930s, France in that decade took a higher proportion of refugees than any other country in the world.4 The Daladier government may have interned foreigners, but in April 1939 it promulgated the Marchandeau decree forbidding press attacks on people of particular racial or religious groups. Daladier’s decrees on foreigners were different from Vichy’s laws discriminating against French Jews. In short, if there were continuities between Vichy and the Republic, there was also a radical discontinuity.

  It is possible to restore continuity by arguing that the forces which came to the fore after defeat were among its causes: defeat was a consequence of what went before as much as a cause of what came after. This is the view that the defeat was partly attributable to the alienation of conservatives from a republic which they felt no longer protected their social interests. This argument should be treated sceptically. The battle against the Popular Front had been won by 1938: conservatives did not need Hitler because they already had Daladier. There was a reassertion of national self-confidence under Daladier, and the period between Munich and the Armistice was not a continuous slide from resignation to defeat.

  Although it is true that after the defeat, most of the early resisters were people who had opposed Munich, and that most supporters of Vichy had supported Munich,5 this example of continuity does not prove cause
and effect. If Britain had been defeated, we would hear more about the defeatists in Churchill’s War Cabinet or about the considerable pacifist lobby in parliament. The ‘resolution’ of the British people and the myth of Churchill were as much a consequence as a cause of victory. Or, to take another comparison, without the ‘miracle of the Marne’ in 1914, more would be heard about the weaknesses of the French Republic before 1914. If, then, the history of Vichy has to be understood in the light of long-term trends in French politics and society, there was nothing predetermined about that history: it could not have occurred if France had not suffered the trauma of the catastrophic defeat of 1940.

  Drôle de guerre and Anti-Communism

  The French government declared war on Germany at 5 p.m. on 3 September 1939, six hours later than Britain: to the end Bonnet had manoeuvred to avoid war. He was now removed from the Foreign Office. Until 10 May 1940, France lived the curious Phoney War (drôle de guerre) when the Allies, planning for a long war, avoided direct confrontation with Germany, and tried to consolidate their economic and military strength. The drôle de guerre was not just a parenthesis between peace and war. It exacerbated political and social tensions, and revealed the fragility of the consensus which had been reached under Daladier. In more than simply chronological terms, it was the bridge between the Third Republic and Vichy.

  Ostensibly the anti-war movement had collapsed. Twenty-eight anti-war députés, including Déat and Bergery, tried unsuccessfully to have parliament called into secret session so they could argue the case against war.6 A manifesto calling for ‘immediate peace’ was published by the anarchist Louis Lecoin ten days after the declaration of war. Although signed by thirty-one prominent pacifists—including Alain, Déat, and Zoretti—the petition had no impact. Giono was briefly imprisoned for tearing down mobilization posters, but, as in 1914, only an infinitesimal number of soldiers refused the call-up.7