This apparent unanimity was misleading. Until censorship intervened, the extreme-right press had opposed the war. Je suis partout’s headline on 1 September was: ‘Down with the War.’ Nor had the left-wing pacifists changed their views. Paul Faure stopped contributing to Le Populaire, and his supporters went into a kind of internal exile in the Party. Zoretti ran a semi-clandestine paper, Redressement, which articulated the unreconstructed pacifism of many Socialists.8 In parliament the mood was no more determined. The corridors were thick with intrigue against the government. Pacifists still hoped Italy might broker a peace.
Daladier appeared before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Commission at the start of October 1939. His performance was sufficiently robust to silence his critics.9 He achieved this partly by deflecting opposition towards the Communist Party: anti-communism intensified dramatically during the Phoney War, forming a link between the final months of the Republic and Vichy.10
The pretext for anti-communism was the Non-Aggression Pact signed between Moscow and Berlin on 23 August. In fact no one had been more surprised by this than the French Communist leaders. Lacking guidance from Moscow, their first reaction was to argue that it did not alter their commitment to national defence. L’Humanité’s headline on 26 August ran: ‘Union of the French Nation against the Hitlerian aggression.’ This did not stop the government seizing the paper, and banning publications that defended the Pact. The Communist press was forced underground.
There was a second wave of anti-Communist repression at the end of September. On 26 September 1939, a decree dissolved the PCF and empowered the government to suspend Communist municipalities. No public statement from the Party justified this action on grounds of national security. The Communists had unanimously voted war credits on 2 September; on 19 September they declared their ‘unshakeable will’ to defend France. In fact a new Comintern line was emerging in Moscow. On 27 September, this was formally communicated to the Party: the war was now condemned as an imperialist conflict in which the French Communists should not choose sides. On 1 October, the Communists called on the government to give a favourable hearing to Hitler’s forthcoming peace proposals. On 4 October, Thorez deserted from the army and escaped to Moscow via Belgium. Within the next few days, thirty-five Communist députés had been arrested.
This sequence of events shows that the government’s new anti-Communist measures preceded the Party’s adoption of an anti-war line. If Daladier’s priority had been to keep the Communists within the national community, he could have waited until they had formally adopted an anti-war line. This would have allowed him to play on the unease many Communists felt about the policy. The Communist Renaud Jean wrote to Daladier from gaol that if he had not been imprisoned, he would have opposed the Party’s policy, but the government had rendered it impossible for him to disavow his Party in the face of unprovoked repression against it.11 About thirty Communist députés (out of seventy-three) did renounce their party, but the government’s primary objective was to win over the right not rally Communists who could be ‘saved’. Conservative neo-pacifists could hardly advocate a positive attitude to German peace proposals when the Communists were being persecuted for doing the same.
In return for accepting a war it did not want, the right was rewarded with a campaign against Communist ‘traitors’. This diversion was temporarily successful. The press succumbed to an orgy of anti-Communist hysteria, denouncing ‘Hitlero-Stalinists’ and reporting that Thorez had been recruited as an agent of the German high command. About Hitler there was almost nothing. When de Kérillis summoned the government to act with equal vigour against German sympathisers, he was denounced as a Soviet agent.12
The anti-Communist campaign intensified throughout the Phoney War. From November, citizens could be interned on suspicion alone; in February 1940, Thorez was stripped of his citizenship; in March, forty-four Communist députés were put on trial, most receiving sentences of upwards of five years. By March 1940 some 300 Communist municipalities had been suspended and 3,400 Communist activists arrested. Anti-fascist refugees, many of them communists, were interned in camps originally inhabited by Spanish refugees. Among these was Arthur Koestler whose book Scum of the Earth gives a gruesome account of the conditions in the camp of Le Vernet which was filled with anti-fascists from all over Europe. According to Koestler, veterans of Dachau judged the conditions to be worse in the French camp even if the cause was neglect rather than active sadism: ‘In Vernet beating-up was a daily occurrence; in Dachau it was prolonged until death ensued. … In Vernet half of the prisoners had to sleep without blankets in 20 degrees of frost; in Dachau they were put in irons and exposed to the frost.’13
Domestic anti-Communism also affected French military planning and relations with Britain.14 On 30 November, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. There was a wave of public sympathy for the Finns, and people who had once been so reluctant to die for Danzig (or Prague) were suddenly ready to do so for Helsinki. Flandin argued that a defeat of Russia in Scandinavia would be a blow struck against Germany; Émile Mireaux, director of Le Temps, claimed that driving Russia into the arms of Germany would serve France’s interests by lumbering the Germans with a weak ally. Most far-fetched of all were the proposals for a pincer movement against the Soviet Union combining a force from Scandinavia with another coming through the Caucasus from the Near East.
The British government, not subject to the same anti-Communist pressures, was unwilling to provoke the Soviet Union unnecessarily. The idea of helping Finland would therefore have gone no further had it not offered the prospect of undermining Germany’s war economy by acquiring control of Sweden’s iron ore fields which provided much of Germany’s iron. For this reason, at the end of February 1940, the British reluctantly agreed to despatch a force to Scandinavia on the pretext of helping Finland. Delays occurred, and it became clear that Finnish resistance would soon be over. Daladier, convinced that the British intended to renege on the agreement, became increasingly incensed. Anglo-French relations reached their lowest point since the start of the war. Vichy’s Anglophobia went back to the misunderstandings of the Phoney War.15
Daladier’s fury was largely caused by the fact that he needed a military success to bolster his increasingly beleaguered political position. As the Phoney War dragged on, there was a slump in morale not helped by the fact that 1939–40 was the coldest winter since 1893. Peasants resented the fact that young workers were being drafted from the front to the factories. Once again it seemed that the peasants were to be cannon fodder. Floods of letters denounced individuals who had obtained transfers from the front on fraudulent grounds—a precursor of the denunciatory frenzy which exploded after the defeat.16 In the army, initial reports of ‘magnificent’ morale gave way to accounts of ‘demoralization’. Morale was corroded by poor organization—the soldiers were short of socks and blankets—and by lassitude after months of forced inactivity. The mood is conveyed in the diary of Jean Paul Sartre. In November he notes: ‘All the men who left with me were raring to go at the outset’ but now ‘they are dying of boredom.’ In December: ‘The soldiers returning from leave in Paris are full of complaints against the young fellows shirking in the factories.’17
The government failed to provide clear explanations why the war was being fought. This was partly the fault of the Propaganda Commissariat. Giraudoux’s operation was underfunded and his own radio broadcasts were too fastidiously literary, but his main handicap was the lack of guidance about war objectives. Anti-German chauvinism in the style of 1914 was inappropriate for a population raised on memories of apocryphal atrocity stories. The alternative of presenting the war as an anti-fascist crusade was ruled out by the desire not to provoke Italy or alienate the French right. The censors weeded out slighting references to Mussolini. The void was filled by anti-communism, but this hardly explained a war against Germany.18
The failures of propaganda lay behind the impact of the Radio Stuttgart broadcasts by the French journalist Paul Ferd
onnet. Hitherto an insignificant figure on the fringes of the extreme right, Ferdonnet acquired notoriety when the French government revealed his existence in October. Ferdonnet’s theme was that Britain would fight to the last Frenchman: ‘Britain provides the machines, France provides the bodies.’ Few people heard the broadcasts, but news of them spread by rumour, and Ferdonnet acquired a fearsome reputation. He would broadcast information about France, and when this was proved correct, people believed he was being fed information by a network of spies, although he knew nothing that could not be gleaned from newspapers. The potency of rumour was another bridge between the Phoney War and French society under Vichy.19
All this made Daladier increasingly vulnerable. Opposition in parliament came from both the peace faction and those who felt Daladier was not prosecuting the war effectively. The convergence of these two groups signalled Daladier’s demise. The coup de grâce was the capitulation of Finland. On 19 March, 300 députés abstained in a vote of confidence, and Daladier resigned. Daladier’s successor, Paul Reynaud, had long believed himself to be destined to save France. During the 1930s, he was one of the few conservatives to oppose appeasement and favour a Soviet alliance. This cut him off from the right, and one of his problems in 1940 was the lack of a political base: his government had a parliamentary majority of only one. Reynaud’s main support came from the anti-fascist left, but he could not fully capitalize on this for fear of alienating the right: he did not dare bring Blum into the government. Unable to form the compact war cabinet he dreamed of, Reynaud had to give posts to many people whose commitment to the war was lukewarm. Reynaud certainly made some very ill-judged appointments, among them the banker Paul Baudouin, who would eventually use his position in the government to sue for peace.
It was a striking illustration of the prevalence of anti-communism that even Reynaud was not immune from it. He promoted a plan to deprive Germany of oil imports by bombing Russian oilfields in the Caucasus. The British rejected this as a dangerous provocation of the Soviet Union.20 They did, however, accept a scheme to mine Norway’s waters in order to stop Swedish iron ore reaching Germany, but this operation was pre-empted by a German invasion of Norway on 9 April. Over the next three weeks, the Allies struggled unsuccessfully to recover their position in Norway. Anglo-French relations deteriorated further despite Reynaud’s reputation for Anglophilia. So too did relations between Reynaud and the Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, whom Reynaud accused of being responsible for the Norwegian fiasco. On 9 May, Reynaud sacked Gamelin, but he had to rescind the decision immediately because on the next morning the Germans launched their long-awaited offensive.
Defeat and Exodus
There was nothing inevitable about what followed. Although French politics were riddled with defeatism, it is not clear how this could have caused a military defeat. As for morale, censors’ reports showed that it had recovered in the spring. This had less to do with Reynaud than with an improvement in the weather. The morale of the French soldiers when fighting began was no worse than in 1914. They were to fight as bravely as those of 1914 when they were properly led and equipped. The failure of 1940 was above all the failure of military planning.21
Anticipating the main offensive through Belgium, this was where the high command had sent the best French troops. In fact the brunt of the German attack came further south through the Ardennes. The French, believing that this sector of the frontier was protected by the natural barriers of the Meuse river and the Ardennes forest, had guarded it only by ill-equipped reservists, unprepared for the massive assault of German panzers. Within three days, the French line had been breached; on 15 May, Rommel was advancing so fast that he was overtaking the French in retreat; on 16 May, nothing lay between the Germans and Paris. Officials in the Quai d’Orsay began to burn their archives in preparation for an evacuation of the capital.22
Probably the battle of France was already lost, but the denouement took another three weeks. Reynaud sacked Gamelin and replaced him with General Weygand. In retrospect this was a terrible mistake. Weygand was an arch-conservative with no love for the Republic; Gamelin, whatever his faults, was a good Republican. Weygand might originally have been the best man to produce a victory, but if the battle were lost, Gamelin would have better served Reynaud’s purpose when it came to dealing with the political consequences of that fact. On 18 May Reynaud also took the fateful decision to reshuffle his cabinet and bring in the aged hero Marshal Pétain.
Weygand’s plan was that the British and French troops in Belgium, who now risked being encircled by the Germans, should attack southwards while French troops further south attacked northwards. If successful, this operation would have breached the German corridor and re-established a continuous front. But poor co-ordination between the British and French commanders meant that when the British attacked southwards on 21 May, the French attack northwards did not materialize. General Gort, the British commander, fearing he would be cut off from the Channel, retreated towards Dunkirk on the coast. Between 27 May and 4 June, some 320,000 men were evacuated from Dunkirk. Since twice as many British troops were rescued as French ones, the Dunkirk operation only exacerbated the Anglophobia of Weygand who already blamed the British for sabotaging his plan in the first place.
After Dunkirk, Weygand formed a new defensive line on the rivers Aisne and Somme. But this was no more than a last-ditch battle to save the honour of the army. The unfolding of the remaining military events is easily told: the Somme front was breached on 7 June and the Aisne on 9 June; on 10 June, Mussolini declared war on France; on the same day the government left Paris and declared it an open city; the Germans entered Paris on 14 June. The fact that the battle was lost did not stop Reynaud and Weygand ‘howling’, in the words of a British diplomat, for more fighter planes. When these were not forthcoming, Weygand became apoplectic.
The British were not ready to commit planes essential for the defence of the British Isles to what was obviously a lost cause. The French view was that once France was beaten, Britain would have to surrender, and therefore the British had nothing to lose by pouring all their resources into France. The French calls for British aid began the process of shifting the blame for defeat and psychologically paved the way for France to abandon the British alliance with a clear conscience: at the end of this road lay the Armistice.23
As French military resistance disintegrated, panic-stricken refugees fled from the advancing Germans.24 Starting from Belgium on 10 May, this panic spread to the north-east of France: on 16 May people were fleeing Reims; on 6 June they started to leave Paris. Since the government had not envisaged the possibility of such a rapid military collapse, its contingency planning for civilian evacuations was totally inadequate or non-existent. In most localities, the population started to leave while the authorities were still proclaiming that there was no need to panic and ordering people to stay put. By the time General Huntziger issued the order to evacuate the Marne département on 2 June, only livestock were left there.25 In some localities, especially in the Nord, the municipal authorities were the first to flee.26 Forced back on their own resources, people felt betrayed by their political leaders. This was to have important consequences in the future.
The roads became clogged by interminable columns of slow moving cars, vans, lorries, hearses, and horse-drawn carts piled up with furniture, mattresses, agricultural tools, pets, birdcages. People on foot pushed wheelbarrows or prams into which they had loaded a few possessions. From time to time, German planes attacked the refugees, adding to the atmosphere of panic. The roadsides were strewn with the corpses of horses or with cars abandoned for lack of petrol. As the refugees poured southwards, localities which they had expected to be havens of safety turned out already to have been deserted by their populations, in some case so precipitately that half-eaten meals remained on dining-room tables. People headed for the Loire, and their terror was increased when they found that the French, in the hope of impeding the Germans’ advance, had destroyed most of
the bridges. Even once the Loire had been crossed, it turned out that the Germans could easily cross themselves in inflatable boats. The refugees plunged ever deeper into rural France.27
The scale of this extraordinary population movement, christened the Exodus, astonished contemporary observers. One described it as resembling a geological cataclysm. The writer-pilot Antoine Saint-Exupéry wrote that from the air it looked as if some giant had kicked a massive anthill. It has been estimated that between 6 and 10 million people fled their homes. The population of Chartres dropped from 23,000 to 800, Lille from 200,000 to 20,000. In the village of Bosselange in the Côte d’Or all the inhabitants left except one family which committed suicide. Cities in the south had to cope with a massive influx of population: the population of Pau swelled from 38,000 to 150,000, of Brive from 30,000 to 100,000, of Bordeaux from 300,000 to 600,000.
Living through the Exodus was to experience a total disintegration of social structures. Thousands of children became separated from their families, and for months afterwards local papers contained poignant advertisements from parents trying to contact them. One refugee remembered: ‘we had lost all points of reference, all our habits and all the rules of life were floating.’28 When Marshal Pétain, on 17 June, expressed his ‘compassion and solicitude’ for the ‘unhappy refugees’, his words touched millions of people who were plunged in hopelessness and despair. Against this background, it is easy to understand why many people would greet the news of an armistice with such relief.
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