These terms were harsh, but not unreasonable enough to give ammunition to those who hoped that a majority of the government could be persuaded to reject them. They included none of the three conditions that Pétain had stipulated to Huntziger would be unacceptable: occupation of the whole of France; occupation of any part of the Empire; a handing over of any part of the fleet. Hitler’s relative moderation was a calculated tactic. On 18 June he told Mussolini, who had hoped for rich pickings, that it was preferable not to provoke a possible French refusal. It was in the Axis interest that the French fleet did not fall into British hands ‘quite apart from the unpleasant administrative responsibility which the occupying powers would have to assume’ if the French rejected an armistice.39
The Armistice was signed on 22 June. Before it could come into effect, an armistice also had to be signed with Italy. Mussolini had to listen to Hitler, and provisionally abandon any designs on the French Empire. As a consequence, the Italian terms were much more lenient than the French had feared (or hoped—if they were opponents of the armistice). The Italians received a tiny zone of Occupation stretching from Menton to the frontier. This agreement was signed on 24 June, and the two armistices came into effect on the next day. After the signature of the Armistice, the government had to move since Bordeaux was in the zone of German occupation. On 1 July, it set up its base in Vichy.
The last possible obstacle to the implementation of the Armistice might have come from the Empire. Telegrams urging the government to allow the Empire to fight on arrived in Bordeaux from the colonial administrators in the Levant, from General Boisson in French West Africa, and from General Noguès in North Africa. The strategic importance of North Africa made Noguès a key figure. On 24 June, General Mittelhauser in the Levant urged him to form an Imperial Government in North Africa and continue fighting in alliance with the British. But the imperial proconsuls, schooled in obedience, could not ultimately bring themselves to rebel, and with reluctance they rallied to the government. They were also reassured that neither armistice contained any threat to the Empire.40 When two British envoys, Lord Gort and Duff Cooper, arrived in Rabat on 26 June to try and make contact with the passengers of the Massilia, they were prevented from doing so by Noguès, and sent packing on the next day. This British interference probably helped consolidate Noguès’s loyalty to the government.
Subsequent British actions only reinforced that loyalty. Despite containing no German claim to the fleet, the Armistice did not entirely allay British fears that it might fall into German hands: of the five home ports to which the fleet was to be sent, all but one (Toulon) were in the Occupied Zone. On 3 July, therefore, the British government sent a naval force to Mers el Kébir on the Algerian coast where some of the French fleet was docked. The French commander was presented with an ultimatum summoning the French fleet to scuttle itself, join the British, or go to distant French colonial ports. The third of these conditions, which was the least unacceptable from the French point of view, seems not to have been transmitted to Vichy in time. But even if it had been, one cannot see how the French government could have complied, since this would have represented a breach of the Armistice, which it had only just signed.41 The French Admiral, Gensoul, rejected the ultimatum, and the British opened fire, killing almost 1,300 French sailors. There was a furiously anti-British reaction in France. Noguès commented that ‘the Boches would not have acted more perfidiously’, and this dispelled his lingering doubts about the Armistice.42
The argument over the Armistice has raged ever since. Opponents of the Armistice claimed that continued military resistance from the Empire would have been possible. Although, as we have seen, it is unlikely that the French could have resisted effectively from North Africa, it would not have been easy for the Germans to transport an army to North Africa against the combined operations of the British and French fleets. Hitler’s desire to avoid such an eventuality by offering comparatively lenient armistice terms lends support to the view that he still took the prospect of French resistance seriously. After the war, defenders of the Armistice argued that, by keeping the Germans out of North Africa, the Armistice had enabled the Allies to land there in November 1942 and prepare the reconquest of southern Europe. They seized upon Churchill’s remark to General Georges in January 1944 that ultimately the Armistice had served the interest of the Allies by keeping French North Africa free of Germans.43 Even if Churchill’s comment is correct, however, it has no bearing on the reasons why France signed an armistice in 1940. At that time the intention was certainly not one of keeping North Africa free for the French to re-enter the war against Germany. On the contrary, it was believed that the war was over, and the Armistice was viewed as a preliminary to a fully-fledged peace.
Enter Laval: The End of the Republic
Announcing the Armistice terms to the French people on 25 June, Pétain told them that the defeat had occurred because the ‘spirit of enjoyment’ had prevailed over the ‘spirit of sacrifice’; France needed ‘a new order … an intellectual and moral renewal’.44 The link between suffering and redemption, contrition and renewal, already visible in the armistice debate, now became explicit.
Before Pétain could embark on creating this new order, he had first to consolidate his power. There was still in theory a parliament and a president, and Pétain was technically only premier of a Third Republic government. Although Weygand would probably not have worried about constitutional niceties, Pétain, who always preferred to advance cautiously, was not a man to stage a coup. It was in offering another solution to the problem of what to do next that Pierre Laval saw his opening. It was a strange irony that Laval, the man who was to effect on Pétain’s behalf the destruction of the Third Republic, was himself a pure product of that Republic, and the incarnation of what its critics considered to be its worst vices.45
For Laval the presence of the government in Vichy was extremely convenient because he had a property quite close in the village of Châteldon where he had been born. Laval’s father had been the village innkeeper and also had a butcher’s shop. The family had been well off, but of modest social status—somewhere between the peasantry and the petite bourgeoisie. It was a classic pattern of French social history that ambitious Auvergnats went to Paris to make their fortune, usually as traders or café proprietors. In Laval’s case success came at the bar. Having trained as a lawyer, he started his career defending trade unionists in the courts. It was thus entirely natural that Laval should begin his political career on the left. He was elected to parliament as a Socialist in 1914, and made his first parliamentary speech in 1917 defending French Socialists who wished to go to Stockholm to discuss peace terms with Socialists of other belligerent powers.
At the elections of 1919, Laval lost his seat. Three years later, he was elected mayor of the Parisian working-class suburb of Aubervilliers, and in 1924 he returned to parliament for the same constituency. Aubervilliers became his electoral fief. Ostensibly Laval was still on the left, and his first cabinet posts were in short-lived centre-left governments in 1925–6, but gradually he was moving to the right. His first important portfolio was as Tardieu’s Minister of Labour in 1930, and when he became premier for the first time in 1931 it was as the head of a right-wing government.
To some extent, Laval’s move from left to right reflected growing prosperity and social success. During the 1920s his law practice had made him into an extremely wealthy man. In 1923 he bought a property in Normandy, then a newspaper and a radio station. Laval set the seal on his social standing in 1931 when he bought the château in the village of his birth. In 1935 his daughter married the Comte de Chambrun. Laval’s social ascension was not the only reason, or even the primary one, for his drift to the right. Such a trajectory was not unprecedented in the Third Republic. Aristide Briand, who became something of a role model for Laval, had also started on the extreme left before becoming a pillar of centrist politics. Laval’s socialism had never been doctrinaire. It was more an instinctive sympathy wi
th those from modest backgrounds. He always put personal contacts above ideologies.
As mayor of Aubervilliers, Laval learnt the arts of patronage and clientelism which he practised for the rest of his career. In government he operated not according to any fixed ideas, but by improvisation and persuasion. Like Briand he wrote nothing down, and spent little time studying official papers. He preferred conversation which allowed him to envelop his interlocutors in a haze of charm and cigarette smoke (like Briand he was a chain-smoker). Laval was capable of inspiring deep personal loyalty, and returning it. Pierre Cathala, whom he first met when they were adolescents preparing their baccalaureate in the same lycée, was one of several followers who accompanied Laval throughout his political career, ending up as his Minister of Finance in 1942. Such enduring relationships allowed Laval to believe that in essentials he had not betrayed his origins or beliefs.
Having few settled political ideas himself, Laval did not understand politicians who could not be persuaded or flattered, bullied or bought. His enemies claimed he practised politics like a horse-trader. Laval would not necessarily have considered this an insult. He was proud of his peasant background. Nothing gave him more pleasure than inspecting livestock on his estate.
It was not true that Laval believed in nothing. Once he observed that it was wrong to describe him as a cynic since his entire career had been devoted to the cause of peace. This does not mean that he was in any ideological sense a pacifist, but he could see no sense in war, lacking the imagination to conceive a cause which might make war worth fighting. This explains Laval’s affinity for Briand who initiated him into international affairs, although Laval never shared Briand’s idealism about the League of Nations. When Laval returned to government after February 1934, he was convinced that he could save peace by building good relations with Mussolini’s Italy.
Laval’s desire for rapprochement with Italy was not inspired by any particular ideological sympathy for Mussolini’s regime. But the opposition which this policy aroused on the left did start to push Laval further towards the right. He was furious when, in the name of ideology, the left jeopardized his pro-Italian policy by insisting on sanctions against Mussolini after Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Laval’s resentment against the left increased after the Popular Front drove him from power in 1936. His politics of backslapping and camaraderie worked less effectively in the more ideological climate of the late 1930s. In 1940 Laval commented: ‘That Chamber spewed me up [in 1936], now I’m going to spew it up.’ Laval moved from being a genial cynic to being an embittered one.
By 1939, Laval was frustrated that France was being dragged into a war from which he genuinely believed he could save her. Although lacking personal vanity, Laval, like many self-made men, had developed a strong sense of his own abilities, and was impatient that lesser men were messing things up. When told by Pétain in July 1940 that the Germans distrusted him, Laval replied that this was because they were worried he might outwit them.46 During the Phoney War Laval was one of the most active parliamentary plotters in the peace lobby. Already in mid-September there were rumours of a Laval-Pétain government.47 There was little temperamental affinity between the two men, but they respected what they had to offer each other: Pétain needed Laval’s political skills; Laval needed Pétain’s prestige. A personal link was provided by Laval’s son-in-law, the Comte de Chambrun, who had been on Pétain’s staff in 1917.
When he formed his government, Pétain had intended to make Laval Foreign Minister. This move was blocked by Weygand, for whom Laval represented everything he loathed about the Republic, and by those who wanted to avoid sending out excessively pro-German signals when bridges with England had not yet been burnt. Laval finally entered the government as deputy premier on 23 June, after the signature of the Armistice. He quickly consolidated his influence with Pétain by devising a solution to the problem of France’s political future. His idea was that parliament should be persuaded to commit suicide by granting Pétain full powers to revise the constitution.
The cabinet approved Laval’s scheme on 4 July, but other plans were still in the air, and Pétain seemed not to have rejected any of them. One idea, proposed by Flandin, was that President Lebrun should resign and parliament elect Pétain in his place. Pétain would thus combine the positions of president and premier within the framework of the existing constitution. Flandin’s plan foundered when Lebrun made it clear he would refuse to resign: the only notable act he had performed in eight years as president. Another idea, proposed by a group of Senators, was that the constitution should be suspended until the end of the war and Pétain granted full legislative powers in the interim. In the end, Laval successfully saw off these counter-proposals which were less radical than his own. He conceded two points: that the new constitution would be submitted to popular ratification; and that Pétain would not have the power to declare war without the approval of parliament.
Laval’s next step was to secure parliamentary approval. As the deputies arrived at Vichy, Laval subjected them to a mixture of charm and bullying. He reassured them that Pétain could be trusted not to abuse his power; he warned them that if they did not act first, Weygand or the Germans would do so for them. On 9 July, in the Vichy Casino, parliament met to consider the proposal that the constitution should be revised. Laval, making it clear that he spoke with Pétain’s full authority, outlined the argument for constitutional revision: ‘a great disaster like this cannot leave intact the institutions which brought it about’. The bill was almost unanimously approved by 624 votes to 4.
Having secured approval for the principle of revision, Laval’s real success occurred on the next day when the proposal to give Pétain authority to revise the constitution was passed by 569 votes to 80 (with 17 abstentions). This massive majority was partly explained by the absence of députés who would have voted against: the Communists were ineligible, the parliamentarians on board the Massilia were still trapped in North Africa. Léon Blum, who voted against, claimed that people had voted out of fear of Weygand or the Germans. Fear was a factor, but not a decisive one. Essentially, the vote was born out of despair at the defeat. It revealed an erosion of faith in the institutions of the Republic across the entire political spectrum. On 10 July, only five députés of the right (two of them from the Christian Democrat PDP), voted against, but even if most of the eighty who voted ‘no’ came from the left, they were in a minority within their own parties (except for the five members of the left Catholic Jeune République group, all of whom voted ‘no’): 57 per cent of Socialist députés and 58 per cent of Radicals voted full powers to Pétain.48
Such people were not voting for what we have come to know as ‘the Vichy regime’. The size of the majority was essentially a vote of confidence in Pétain, and it is entirely explicable without invoking the black arts of Laval. If anything, Laval’s involvement increased suspicion. Laval’s achievement was not so much to have buried the Republic as to have convinced Pétain of his indispensability for the operation. His reward was the prospect of playing a key role in the new regime.49 Laval was also important to Pétain because he was thought to enjoy good relations with Germany. But Laval probably overestimated the extent to which Pétain believed himself to be in his debt. When Laval brought Pétain the good news that the vote had gone smoothly, he suggested that the Marshal show himself on the balcony to receive the applause of the crowd, Pétain refused, telling one of his aides: ‘He [Laval] wants to gets himself applauded behind me, but I won’t play his game.’50
Was Vichy ‘Legal’?
On 11 July, Pétain issued the first constitutional acts under his new powers. The First Act effectively terminated the Republic by abrogating the famous Wallon amendment of 1875 which had created the office of President of the Republic (and thereby the Republic): Pétain was declared to be Head of the French State. The Second Act gave Pétain full powers to appoint and dismiss ministers, and pass laws through the Council of Ministers. The Third Act adjourned parliament un
til further notice. The Fourth Act entitled Pétain to designate his successor: he chose Laval for this position. After the Seventh Act in January 1941, which authorized Pétain to investigate and sanction all civil servants whose performance of their duties was deemed unsatisfactory, Pétain had accumulated almost all legislative, executive, and judicial powers. One of his advisers commented that Pétain now had more power than any French leader since Louis XIV; Laval was his dauphin.
Many of those who voted for Pétain on 10 July had not expected any of this. A lot of ink was subsequently spilled arguing whether these measures represented a kind of coup d’état. De Gaulle’s Free French tried hard to demonstrate that the Vichy regime was illegal. In December 1940, the jurist René Cassin, who had joined de Gaulle in London, published his proof of Vichy’s illegality. He argued that, quite apart from the irregular circumstances surrounding the vote of 10 July—the climate of intimidation and the absence of many deputies—parliament was not entitled to delegate its right to amend the constitution. Furthermore, by not submitting his constitutional acts for popular ratification as was stipulated by the 10 July vote, Pétain had infringed the authority he had been granted.51
The juridical validity of Cassin’s arguments is questionable. Even if they are accepted, the illegality of Pétain’s government would date from 10 July or after. Yet on other occasions the Free French offered different arguments for the illegality of Pétain’s government. On 27 October 1940, de Gaulle issued a manifesto declaring the Vichy government to be unconstitutional and announcing the establishment of a council with responsibility for those parts of the Empire free from enemy control on the basis of French legislation prior to 23 June 1940. The choice of the date 23 June implied that the government’s illegality dated from the signing of the Armistice because it had forfeited French sovereignty to Germany. But a later Gaullist Ordinance of 9 August 1944, which became the legal basis of the post-Liberation regime, claimed that any laws passed since 16 June 1940 were null and void. This date implied that the illegality of Pétain’s regime preceded the Armistice.
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