This hesitation over dates—16 June? 23 June? 10 July?—underlines the weakness of the case for the illegality of Pétain’s government. That is why de Gaulle also invoked the less precise notion of legitimacy. For de Gaulle, the government of a partially occupied country could not be legitimate. But legitimacy is a slippery concept. If it is conferred when a country’s population supports the regime, Pétain’s overwhelming popularity until 1942 certainly conferred legitimacy on him. If it is conferred by international recognition, Vichy also passed the test. Although French diplomatic relations with Britain ceased in July, Vichy in 1940–1 had diplomatic relations with forty countries including the United States, Canada, China, and Japan.52
There seems little doubt, therefore, that at the beginning Vichy was both legal and legitimate. This is not just a matter of academic interest. It meant that de Gaulle was technically a dissident and rebel, and made his position more precarious than that of the formally constituted governments in exile. Vichy’s legality also affected the responses of the French administration: in the early days at least, disobeying the regime caused a greater crisis of conscience than obeying it. Quite apart from the glorious reputation of Pétain, the regime had law on its side.
This made the Vichy regime almost unique in occupied Western Europe. In Belgium, King Leopold II signed the capitulation of the armies on 28 May and constituted himself a prisoner of the Germans. The government fled to London, and was recognized by the Allies as the official government. Leopold, however, no longer recognized it. He met Hitler in November 1940 and would have liked to set up a rival government in Belgium, but the Germans did not want this. Instead Belgium was directly run by the German military in the person of General von Falkenhausen governing through the Belgian secretary-generals who were the top civil servants in each ministry. Before the war the government had authorized the secretary-generals to stay in place in case of defeat and guarantee that the country continued to be administered. They had to exercise their judgement about whether they could accept all the demands the Germans made of them. On occasion they were helped by the courts which remained in operation and intervened sometimes to contest the constitutionality of the acts which the secretary-generals were required to execute. In December this flared up into open conflict and the courts went on strike. But they capitulated a few days later, and from this point the secretary-generals had to fall back on their own judgement and sense of duty.
In Holland, the monarch Queen Wilhelmina fled to London with the government. There was not, as in Belgium, a conflict of legitimacy between the king and his government. The Germans installed a civil administrator, Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The administration was, as in Belgium, in the hands of secretary-generals. In Norway, King Haakon VII and his government left for London after the German occupation. The German representative in Norway, Josef Terboven, tried to get those Norwegian MPs who were still in the country to form a government and declare the deposition of the king. This was unsuccessful and the Germans were reduced to setting up a council composed of a few Norwegian fascists who represented no one but themselves. The established Norwegian politicians would not associate themselves with the occupying power. Because no instructions had been provided for the country’s civil servants, they were thrown entirely on to their own devices. Some resigned and others tried to continue the task of daily administration.
The only case comparable to France was Denmark which was occupied by Germany on 9 April 1940. The monarch and Danish government decided to stay, and they were permitted to remain in power. This arrangement survived until August 1943 when the Germans, in the face of growing resistance activity, insisted that the government declare martial law. This request was refused and the Germans took full control. Up to this point, however, the Germans interfered little in Denmark’s internal affairs. Democratic institutions were left intact to the extent that free elections were held in 1943. In France, however, although the government retained a similar degree of independence, it decided to embark on a fundamental transformation of French society which it christened the National Revolution. When French administrators found themselves asked to carry out anti-democratic or anti-Semitic measures, it was often French laws, not German ones, they were being asked to apply.
Part II
The Regime: National Revolution and Collaboration
Introduction to Part II
The armistice of 23 June 1940 and the vote of full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940 defined the formal framework of Franco-German relations and internal French politics for the next four years. But many questions remained unanswered. In foreign affairs the new regime might have confined itself to the Armistice and waited on events; domestically it might have confined itself to the basic tasks of administration until the future was clearer. It did neither. For Vichy the Armistice was the prelude to a durable redefinition of Franco-German relations—what came to be called ‘collaboration’—and Pétain’s full powers the prelude to a fundamental transformation of politics and society—what came to be called the ‘National Revolution’. The Armistice and the vote of full powers were the necessary condition of these policies, but did not make them inevitable: they were a deliberate choice.
Nor did the one policy necessarily follow from the other. In Denmark the government of Eric Scavenius aligned its foreign policy on Germany’s—even joining the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1941, something that Vichy never did—but this did not substantially affect its domestic political agenda. Notwithstanding the Danish example, it was not unreasonable for Vichy leaders to assume that Germany would look more favourably on a regime that had adopted a more authoritarian political system, and this was one of Laval’s arguments for a change of regime. But if it was unlikely that democratic politics could have continued entirely unchanged with half France occupied, the Germans in fact showed little interest in France’s internal political arrangements for the first two years, providing public order was maintained. Indeed, to the extent that the National Revolution encouraged the traditional values of French patriotism, the Germans were suspicious of it. Such pillars of the National Revolution as the Legion of Veterans and the youth movements were prohibited in the Occupied Zone.
Not only were the National Revolution and collaboration distinct, but at Vichy not everyone supported both positions with equal enthusiasm. Weygand opposed collaboration while ardently supporting the National Revolution. He hoped that France’s internal reforms would one day allow her to avenge her defeat like Prussia after Jena. This analogy was frequently repeated. Laval, on the other hand, was cynical about the National Revolution, but committed to collaboration. Weygand and Laval were at the two extremes, loathing each other as a result. In general, the differing attitudes to collaboration and the National Revolution were questions of priorities and emphasis—separating those with a primarily Francocentric outlook from those with a primarily European outlook. Pétain fitted into the former category. His main requirement of collaboration was that it encourage the Germans to alleviate conditions in France in order to facilitate his government’s reforms. Laval fitted into the latter category. His only requirement of domestic policy was to preserve public order so as not to upset the Germans. For Pétain collaboration was the instrument of the National Revolution; and for Laval the National Revolution the instrument of collaboration.
Without the German victory, however, those who wanted to carry out a National Revolution would not have achieved power. This meant that the distinction between collaboration and National Revolution was muddied from the beginning even for those who conceived them as separate. They were insidiously and subtly linked. In 1940 it was a logical step, easy to make, to move from saying that France’s defeat, although deplorable, made reforms inevitable to saying that France’s defeat was less deplorable because it made reforms possible. This was the force of the comment by the Archbishop of Lyons, Cardinal Gerlier: ‘victorious we would probably have remained prisoner of our errors’.1 On 28 May 1941, the economist Charles Rist reported hearing
a more extreme version of this sentiment: ‘Mme Aubouin tells me that after the Armistice she received a letter from a reactionary friend of hers containing these words: “At last we have victory!” She tells me that it took her a moment to understand.’2 For no one was this link between National Revolution and French defeat more paradoxical than for the Germanophobe Charles Maurras. He became famous for his remark that 1940 had been a ‘divine surprise’. Maurras did not mean that he welcomed the defeat, but that it had had unexpected benefits in Pétain’s arrival in power. Pétain not Germany was the divine surprise. Even so Maurras found the question of collaboration embarrassing. The phrase ‘divine surprise’ occurred in his book La Seule France, published in April 1941. He summed up his position as: ‘Only France [France seule] or, if one prefers, France alone [La Seule France.’] For Maurras this meant unconditional loyalty to Pétain without needing to take up a position on collaboration: he wanted to pretend that Germany was not there.
One group who had no difficulty in reconciling the internal reform of France with collaboration were those who came to be described as ‘collaborationists’. For them collaboration was the condition of internal renewal, and internal renewal the guarantee of commitment to collaboration. The ideal of the most extreme collaborationists, who were based mainly in Paris, was a National Socialist France. They attacked Vichy for not going far enough, and mocked Maurras’s affectation of agnosticism about Germany: one might as well, one of them claimed, argue for a policy of ‘la Provence seule’.3
The first three chapters of Part II will treat successively the three positions which have been outlined above—National Revolution, collaboration, and collaborationism—from 1940 to 1942. Chapter 10, which takes the history of the regime from 1942 to 1944, will no longer separate out the three strands because the boundaries between the National Revolution, collaboration, and collaborationism, never entirely distinct, became in practice totally blurred. From 1942 the Germans began to interfere increasingly in French internal affairs. They started to implement a fully-fledged war economy which required France to deliver more and more to them. At the same time they began to implement the policy of exterminating the Jews, and insisted that the French government help them round up Jews. In this context the idea of pursuing an autonomous policy of internal French reform became increasingly unrealistic. Internal French policy could no longer be separated from collaboration with Germany. Those who remained loyal to Vichy had to confront the fact that their survival was dependent on a German victory in Europe, and for that reason the collaborationists became more influential at Vichy itself.
7
The National Revolution
Vichy, a sleepy spa town, was as improbable a capital for France as Harrogate or Cheltenham for England.1 After leaving Bordeaux, the government had initially moved to Clermont-Ferrand, in the heart of the Auvergne. It stayed only one day because the city lacked sufficient accommodation. Lyons, France’s second city, would have been an obvious choice of capital, but it had a large working-class population, and its Radical mayor, Édouard Herriot, was closely identified with the Third Republic. Marseilles’s unsavoury reputation as ‘the French Chicago’ rendered it an unsuitable location from which to launch a moral renewal of France. Toulouse was geographically too remote and had a left-wing tradition. Vichy had none of these disadvantages: it was centrally located, decorous, and with no working-class population liable to cause trouble. Most importantly, its large hotels, designed for visitors to the spa, were ideal to house the itinerant ministries. As it turned out, this Ruritanian setting was a singularly appropriate location for the chimerical project of regenerating France while half the country was occupied by Germans and war was raging in Europe: from Vichy the real world seemed far away.
Pétain installed himself on the third floor of the Hôtel du Parc, Laval on the floor below. The Ministry of the Interior took over the Casino, the Colonial Ministry, to some amusement, the Hôtel de l’Angleterre. Lesser ministries inhabited lesser hotels. Conditions were indescribably cramped: bedrooms doubled up by day as offices; bathtubs had to be used as filing cabinets. Vichy’s discomforts increased in the first winter because the town was geared only for the summer tourist trade, and no provision had been made for heating arrangements. One provident minister who asked for coal was told that the government would have left Vichy by Christmas.2 The intention was to return to Paris, as was permitted by the Armistice. But the Germans cooled towards this idea, and the negotiations about a transfer dragged on through the summer. There was also talk of a move to Versailles. In the end, however, no move occurred: the provisional capital became permanent.3
The smallness of the town encouraged a febrile atmosphere of gossip and intrigue. Vichy was a dull place, with few distractions; there was little to do except plot and hate. Never were the corridors of Vichy’s hotels more buzzing with conspiracies, speculation, and fantasy than in the first weeks. Pundits, prophets, and politicians descended on the town, offering their services and peddling their solutions to France’s problems. There was everything to play for while the regime’s political orientation remained uncertain. Unlike Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933, the regime emerged not from an internal crisis but from an external defeat. There was an internal political crisis during the 1930s in France, but a provisional resolution to it had been provided by Daladier in 1938. The Fall of France reopened that crisis without preconditioning its outcome. This meant that the situation in 1940 was relatively open-ended. There was a void—and many candidates to fill it.
The lobbying began even before parliament voted Pétain full powers. On 28 June, Weygand presented Pétain with a memorandum calling for policies inspired by ‘God, patrie, Family, Work’.4 Different from Weygand’s traditionalist conservatism was the Declaration published on 7 July by the former Radical Gaston Bergery whose disillusion with parliamentary democracy had attracted him increasingly to fascism. His Declaration called for collaboration with Germany, and the organization of an authoritarian new order in France. Ninety-seven députés supported this declaration, twenty-nine of them Socialists.5 The signatories included Marcel Déat, who was also moving towards fascism. On 8 July, he wrote in the newspaper L’Œuvre: ‘We need, like other peoples who have carried out their revolution, whether Italy, Germany or Russia, a party, a single party, which establishes and orients the shared aspirations of the people.’6
The government which Pétain formed on 12 July, consisting largely of representatives of the traditional right, was a disappointment to Bergery, Déat, and other advocates of fascist policies. Déat described it as a ‘consortium of old men … A team of reactionaries offering the prospect of a sub-Doumergue’.7 But Déat did not despair. While lobbying Pétain and Laval for the establishment of a single party, Déat set up a committee to work out the details.8 The committee’s report, ready on 27 July, argued that a single party, acting as sole mediator between state and society, would forge a genuine national community.
Although Déat wanted all existing parties and interest groups to be absorbed into this new organization, the members of his committee could not even agree amongst themselves. Bergery wanted to go and study the single parties of Italy, Germany, and Portugal; Doriot, who sent a representative to the committee, was angling to ensure a predominant role for the PPF; La Rocque put it about that Doriot was in receipt of German funds, and withdrew his support from the committee on 11 August. Even if the organizers had agreed among themselves, the scheme would never had got off the ground because Pétain was not keen on parties of any kind. Weygand and Maurras also intervened to oppose this ‘totalitarian’ solution. As for Laval, he was suspicious of anything which he did not control.
Pétain suggested that the supporters of a single party go on an exploratory mission around France to prepare the ground. The credulous Déat, not realizing that this was a manoeuvre to get them out of the way, was pleasantly surprised. The committee’s discussions continued during August in an increasingly unrealistic atmosphere—one sessi
on even considered the party’s uniforms—but even Déat knew the game was lost when it was announced on 29 August that Vichy was uniting all war veterans’ associations into a single Legion of Veterans. This was not a single party, but Vichy’s alternative to it.
Disgusted by the atmosphere of Vichy, and vowing never to set foot there again, on 12 September Déat left for Paris, which was to become the refuge of many disappointed fascist sympathizers.9 Among these was Lucien Rebatet, one of the most violent journalists on Je suis partout, who had also arrived in Vichy during the summer. He and various associates tried to secure key posts in the regime’s propaganda services, but they were seen off by Pétain’s more traditionalist advisers.10 As Rebatet later put it: ‘after the great upheavals, people resumed their positions … Everyone with any fascist or anti-Jewish convictions left for Paris’.11
Vichy Governments
The departure of the ‘fascists’ did not end the power struggles at Vichy. Although claiming to bring efficiency and stability, Vichy’s governments were no more stable than those of the Third Republic. In the four years of the regime, there were five education ministers12 and five interior ministers.13 Traditional ministerial responsibility did not exist at Vichy. Each minister was directly responsible to Pétain and could be sacked at will. The Council of Ministers met once a week. It was too unwieldy to take decisions, and Pétain did not like large meetings because of his deafness. He preferred to deal with small groups or individuals. Real decisions were taken by a conseil restreint of a few key ministers who met daily in Pétain’s office. Influence was also exercised by Pétain’s own advisers, concentrated in his civil and military cabinets and his Personal Secretariat.
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