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by Jackson, Julian

  Armistice or Capitulation?

  The possibility of an armistice had been raised as early as 25 May, but the debate in the government began in earnest after the departure from Paris.29 It unfolded against a background of indescribable confusion as ministers were swallowed up in the Exodus and found themselves scattered around chateaux in the Loire region. The first cabinet meeting since the departure from Paris took place on 12 June, at the Château de Cangé, where for the first time Weygand formally demanded an armistice. There was such chaos that some ministers were not present because they had wrongly turned up at the Château de Candé instead. There was a second meeting at Cangé on 13 June. On the next day the government was on the move to Bordeaux where a cabinet meeting took place on 15 June. The final act was played out in two meetings at Bordeaux on 16 June. Reynaud opposed an armistice, but from meeting to meeting his resilience was whittled down as the peace faction swelled in size.

  Reynaud had reshuffled his government for the last time on 5 June, bringing in General de Gaulle as Under-Secretary of State for War, but still he did not eliminate defeatists like Paul Baudouin. Once the government arrived in Bordeaux, the defeatists were assisted by the city’s mayor, Adrien Marquet, a former neo-Socialist and pacifist. Marquet put every facility at their disposal while making things as difficult as possible for those who wanted to fight on. Bordeaux was thick with intrigue, and although it was impossible for parliament to meet, the defeatist députés operated on the sidelines with Marquet’s help.

  In the debate within the government, three issues were at stake.30 The first was military: was it possible to go on fighting? The opponents of the armistice argued that resistance could continue from North Africa. The problem was that France lacked economic or logistical bases there. In the inter-war years North Africa had been seen only as a reservoir of men. In July 1939, 400,000 soldiers were stationed there, but by June 1940 only four full units were left. All the rest had been sent to the mainland.

  It was on 3 June, as the last units were arriving in France from North Africa, that Reynaud first asked the military to study the possibility of transporting troops back there. De Gaulle was designated to liaise with the British, but time was short. Reynaud envisaged sending 454,000 men, but was informed that 60,000 per month was the best that could be achieved. On 15 June, Reynaud told Admiral Darlan that only ten days were left. The Admiral replied that the operation would require 200 ships, most of which were dispersed. He claimed to have ten ships at Bordeaux, ready to carry 3,000 men each, but no one knew the whereabouts of the men to be transported. Troops had not yet been selected for transportation so as not to demoralize the fighting armies.31

  These facts are worth recalling because it remains a matter of controversy whether military resistance from North Africa would have been feasible. The evidence suggests not, but because no preparations had been made, the argument within the government hardly examined the technical issues. The second debate was political: should the government go to North Africa or remain in France and sign an armistice? This argument, which was about attributing the responsibility for defeat, sparked off a serious crisis of civil–military relations. An armistice was a political act engaging the government to end hostilities in all French territories. Alternatively, by leaving France, the government would have signalled its political conviction that the war was not over. In this case, it would take as much of the army as could be salvaged, leaving the bulk of the army to surrender in the field and sign a ceasefire. Such a solution had occurred in Holland, where the government escaped to London after the capitulation of the army. Weygand refused this outcome for France, claiming it would dishonour the army. He swore that he would remain in France even if he was put in chains. Like Ludendorff in 1918, he wanted to shift the blame for defeat on to the politicians. Reynaud insisted that the military must obey the government’s orders, but he lacked the confidence to impose his will by sacking Weygand.

  When Reynaud cited the Dutch example, Weygand replied that a monarch who departed abroad could not be compared to ‘one of these ephemeral governments of which the Third Republic has already had over a hundred in 70 years of existence’. The obvious political assumptions of this statement signalled a third issue at stake in the debate: the political future of France. On 13 June Weygand claimed that revolution had broken out in Paris, with the Communists installed in the Élysée. A telephone call from Mandel to the Prefect of Police demonstrated this rumour to be false, but the incident revealed Weygand’s fear that defeat would be followed by anarchy: the precedent of the Commune was in many minds. Thus one of Weygand’s motives in proposing an armistice was to safeguard the army’s reputation so that it could preserve order in France.

  It was a simple step to move from the argument that the army was necessary to prevent defeat from degenerating into anarchy to the argument, which was soon to be the raison d’être of Vichy, that defeat could be the springboard of national regeneration. This step was taken by Pétain at the second Cangé meeting, on the evening of 13 June, when he read out a statement of support for Weygand:

  The duty of the government is, whatever happens, to stay in the country or lose its right to be recognised as a government. To deprive France of her natural defenders in a period of general disarray is to deliver her to the enemy. The renewal of France will come from staying in France rather than waiting for the conquest of our territory by allied forces in conditions and in a timescale impossible to predict. I am therefore of the opinion that I will not abandon the soil of France and will accept the suffering which will be imposed on the fatherland and its children. The French renaissance will be the fruit of this suffering … I declare that, as far as I am concerned, and outside the government if necessary, I will refuse to leave metropolitan soil and will remain among the French people to share its suffering and misery. The armistice is in my eyes the necessary condition of the durability of eternal France.32

  Enter Pétain

  Pétain’s intervention decisively shifted the balance of the argument in favour of the armistice camp. It also contained a barely disguised threat: that he would stay in France whatever the government decided. Weygand’s outbursts had already undermined Reynaud’s position, but their impact was weakened by his reputation as a Catholic and monarchist. Pétain, on the other hand, was universally revered, and had never been associated with disloyalty to Republican governments. Weygand’s unfavourable comparison between an ‘ephemeral’ Third Republic government and a monarchy contained an assumption unacceptable to any Republican politician, but even the most ardently Republican politician would have realized that he weighed little in the balance against Pétain.

  Pétain’s reputation had been built on two achievements: the defence of Verdun in 1916 and the ending of the army mutinies in 1917. His solution to the mutinies had been to shoot a few ringleaders, introduce improvements in the conditions of the ordinary soldier, and postpone further offensives until the Allies had acquired superiority with the arrival of American soldiers. Pétain’s genuine concern for the lives of his soldiers distinguished him from other First World War commanders. At times, however, his caution verged on defeatism. In 1918, when the final German offensive threatened to drive a wedge between the British and French armies, Pétain was accused by the British commander Haig of being ready to desert the British. Pétain’s pessimism alarmed Clemenceau himself, and it was for this reason that Foch, not Pétain, was appointed overall commander of the Allied armies.

  In the 1920s, Pétain was in charge of defence policy until being replaced by Weygand in 1931; in 1934 he served as Minister of War in the Doumergue government. Gradually he turned into a living legend. After the deaths of Foch in 1929 and Joffre in 1931, Pétain was the Marshal. The two other surviving Marshals, Lyautey who died in 1934 and Franchet who died in 1942, were not serious competitors. In 1929, Pétain was unanimously elected to Foch’s seat in the Académie française, and the traditional eulogy of welcome pronounced by Paul Valéry gave elegant expressi
on to the Pétain myth. Pétain’s physical appearance fitted the role he was required to play. As Blum wrote after the war: ‘I was struck, and I can say seduced, as were most people who met him, by his nobility of bearing, by the simple and honest gaze of his blue eyes, by the air of gravity and nobility expressed by his handsome face.’33 Those blue eyes were integral to the Pétain myth.

  The reverence for Pétain was not confined to the right. He was universally seen as the most humane commander of the war—‘the most human of our military commanders’, to quote Blum again. Unlike Foch, Castelnau, Lyautey, or Franchet, he was not ostentatiously Catholic or monarchist. In such company, it was not hard to acquire the reputation of being a good Republican. Pétain was also careful to keep his distance from politics. As Minister of War in Doumergue’s government, he did not stray from military policy. When, during the Popular Front, his aide Loustaunau-Lacau created the Corvignolles, a secret anti-Communist network in the army, Pétain was informed but did not get involved. He was as prudent in politics as in war.

  Pétain’s prudence did not stop elements of the right casting him in the 1930s in the role of national saviour. He topped a poll in the conservative Le Petit Journal in 1935 to discover who would make the most popular dictator for France. The journalist Gustave Hervé produced a pamphlet entitled C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut (1935) arguing that Pétain was the providential leader who would save France from chaos. If Pétain did nothing to encourage such suggestions, he did not disavow them either. He cultivated his myth with care, ensuring that he was not forgotten. His public utterances were all the more effective for being comparatively rare. In a speech in 1934 he blamed teachers for ‘destroying State and society’ by bringing up children to despise patriotism. This became an obsession of Pétain’s and he would like to have been Minister of Education in Doumergue’s government. In 1935, inaugurating a war memorial in the Pyrenees, he pronounced a eulogy of the virtues of the peasant. Between the two rounds of the 1936 elections, he declared that France’s crisis was spiritual not material, and that a new mystique was necessary.

  These sentiments were general enough not to tarnish Pétain’s reputation on the left. Although he did participate in some meetings of the Maurrassian brains trust, the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, Pétain had little time for ideology or abstract political ideas: he viewed politics as a military man. Pétain’s tragedy was to be an unremarkable person who had come to believe his own myth. In fact there was a considerable gap between the private man and the virtues he preached. Although he celebrated the peasantry and his own rural roots, Pétain had long put this world behind him. He adored being a celebrity in the politi-cojournalistic world of Paris, basking in the flattery of the titled and famous. Although preaching family virtues, Pétain himself was a childless womanizer who finally married a divorcée in 1920 when he was 64. The marriage did not stop him continuing his philandering: the looks which seduced crowds also exercised their magic on many women.

  It was wrong to believe that the myth was the man, but it was also wrong to believe that there was nothing behind the myth. This was the mistake made by Laval. Speaking during the Phoney War to a journalist who claimed that Pétain was too old to play a role, Laval replied: ‘That is without importance. What would we ask of him? To be a mantlepiece, a statue on a pedestal. His name! Nothing more!’34 In fact at the age of 83, Pétain was still in excellent physical and mental shape, apart from slight deafness. He looked twenty years younger than he was, and age had only burnished his aura of nobility, bestowing an aspect of grandfatherly benevolence. In fact Pétain was everything but benevolent. Weygand remarked ‘he is very secretive. He does not like to reveal his thoughts or open them to discussion … His heart is very open to collective affection especially to the humble and those who have suffered—he really loves the peasants and soldiers …—but it is more inaccessible to individuals whatever their relations with him.’35 It was not easy to know what Pétain was thinking, but too easy to assume he was thinking nothing. Behind the clear gaze of the blue eyes lay suspicion, self-regard, and cunning.

  In March 1939, Pétain agreed to become France’s first ambassador to the new Spanish regime of General Franco. The left protested that Franco did not deserve such an honour. On the outbreak of war, Daladier offered Pétain a place in his government, but Pétain declined, possibly hoping to keep himself in reserve if things went wrong. Although in Spain, he kept in touch with events in Paris. There were persistent rumours of a Pétain government. But just as on the eve of the First World War Pétain’s military career had seemed at its end, so in 1940 he must have come to doubt if he would ever play the political role which had once seemed possible. In a letter of January 1940 he expressed his desire to ‘steer clear’ of politics: ‘my physical strength would no longer permit me to bear the burden of office and I am abandoning the idea’.36 As in 1916, impending catastrophe came to his rescue.

  On 18 May, Pétain joined Reynaud’s government. He kept his peace while the catastrophe unfolded. The British officer General Spears, who had known Pétain in the previous war, found him bitter about the failings of politicians and schoolteachers. Instead of discussing the conflict with Spears, Pétain read him an interminable speech he had once delivered on Joan of Arc. Spears managed to stop Pétain reading out another one about the peasantry, and instead was shown a model of a statue of the Marshal on horseback.37

  In the armistice debate, Pétain initially allowed Weygand to make the running. There was no affinity between the two men: Weygand had been a protégé of Pétain’s rival Marshal Foch. They were brought together by the conviction that the politicians were guilty of taking France into a war they had not prepared for; that France had been let down by Britain; and that to leave France at such a moment would be desertion, condemning the country to anarchy.

  The Armistice

  Once Pétain had come out firmly in favour of an armistice, the writing was on the wall for Reynaud. How could the politicians be more right than France’s two most senior military figures? On 16 June, Reynaud resigned, and Pétain was asked to form the next government. He had a list of ministers ready in his pocket. It contained most of those ministers from the Reynaud government who favoured an armistice.

  Reynaud’s resignation was an act of fatal significance because it established the formal legality of Pétain’s government. Had Reynaud continued in office and left French soil for Algeria or London, any government formed by Pétain would have been technically illegal. Having said that, even if Reynaud had taken the government (or those members of it willing to follow him) abroad, in the short term the outcome would not have been so different. Reynaud in London would initially have counted for less than Pétain in France. But this was also true of de Gaulle who nonetheless managed to build up his authority despite not enjoying the formal legality of a government in exile. Thus having failed to be Clemenceau in May, Reynaud missed his chance to be de Gaulle in June.

  Reynaud later argued that his resignation was not itself equivalent to accepting an armistice. He claimed that he had expected the German armistice terms to prove unacceptable and allow him to re-emerge as head of a government of resistance. Reynaud may have deluded himself that this was possible, but once the mechanism for the armistice was in motion, there was little chance of stopping it. On 17 June, Pétain delivered his first broadcast to the French people: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must cease hostilities.’ This unfortunate phrase made many people believe that a ceasefire had already been agreed rather than that the government was seeking an armistice. The broadcast was repeated with the phrase amended to: ‘We must try to cease hostilities.’ But the damage had already been done, and of the 1.5 million prisoners of war taken in the battle of France most were captured in the week between Pétain’s speech and the signing of the Armistice. This final collapse of French resistance weakened the likelihood of the government rejecting whatever armistice terms the Germans chose to present.

  One chance for
the anti-armistice camp lay in a proposal to divide Pétain’s government into two parts, one staying in France, the other heading to North Africa with some leading members of parliament. This would in theory have allowed the government to discuss the eventual armistice terms free from the threat of German troops on the doorstep. Pétain accepted the scheme although he was not himself prepared to leave. But those, like Marquet, who interpreted this plan as a final manoeuvre by the anti-armistice faction, lobbied hard to delay or reverse it. Under this pressure, Pétain started to change his mind. A decisive role was played by the junior minister Raphaël Alibert who announced on 20 June that there was less urgency for the government to leave France since the Germans had not yet crossed the Loire. On the strength of this information, which Alibert knew to be false, government ministers were instructed not to leave Bordeaux. When twenty-seven parliamentarians left Bordeaux on board the ship Massilia on 21 June, there were no ministers among them.

  The absence of those who had departed on the Massilia was entirely welcome to the government since they were the people most opposed to the armistice. The Massilia turned out to be a trap. Having left in the belief that they were helping to prevent the signature of an armistice, those on board found, on arrival in Casablanca on 24 June, that an armistice had already been signed, and they were portrayed in the French press as deserters.

  On 21 June, the German armistice terms were presented to the French representative General Huntziger in the railway carriage at Rethondes, near Compiègne, at exactly the same spot where, twenty-two years earlier, Foch had presented armistice terms to the defeated Germans. ‘My poor friend’, was Weygand’s response when Huntziger phoned to say where he was. The German demands were few in number: France would be divided into an Occupied Zone in the North and an Unoccupied Zone in the South; the army would be demobilized apart from a force of 100,000 necessary to ensure internal order; the fleet would be disarmed and the ships would be docked in their home ports, but the Germans promised they would not touch them; the cost of maintaining German troops on French soil would be paid for by the French government; French prisoners of war would remain in captivity until the war was over.38