Vichy functioned like a court, albeit a shabby and impoverished one. At the centre of the court was Pétain. To be regularly admitted to dine at his table was a signal honour; Laval was rarely invited. The regime was much exercised by questions of protocol which would have delighted Saint-Simon: was it permissible, for example, for the Secretary-General of the Présidence du Conseil to accompany Pétain in his car or eat at his table?14 Although Pétain was in remarkable condition for his age, his short-term memory was unreliable, and he tired easily. Visitors took away different impressions depending on the time of day they saw him. Politics was new to Pétain, and he was often unsure what policy to pursue. He frequently took a decision and was then persuaded to reverse it a few hours later, as over the Massilia. Pétain tended to listen to the last person he spoke to.
Pétain’s doctor, Bernard Ménétrel, whose father had been a close friend of Pétain, exercised considerable influence over him. Ménétrel was like a son to Pétain—there were rumours he was Pétain’s natural son—and Pétain loved to play with his children. Given Pétain’s robust health, Ménétrel had much time to spare for politics, and he headed Pétain’s Personal Secretariat. His office adjoined Pétain’s, and he screened Pétain’s visitors. ‘I had predicted everything’, remarked Laval in 1944, ‘except that France would be governed by a doctor.’15 Another influential figure in Pétain’s entourage was the Finance Inspector Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, director of Pétain’s civil cabinet, and author after the war of a cynical account of life at Vichy.
Laval was the dominant figure of the government during the first five months of the regime. Pétain was head of State and prime minister (président du Conseil); Laval was deputy prime minister (vice-président du Conseil). A ministerial reshuffle on 5 September 1940 removed the five parliamentarians still in the government, leaving Laval as the only one. But the relationship between Laval and Pétain quickly deteriorated. Laval was often in Paris negotiating with the Germans and neglected to keep Pétain informed. Pétain had never found Laval congenial despite all he owed him: Laval’s scruffiness offended his sense of order, and he complained that Laval blew cigarette smoke in his face. These resentments were stoked up by Pétain’s entourage, and by the many ministers who were jealous of Laval’s German contacts, or despised him as the last survivor of the Third Republic. It did not help Laval’s reputation at Vichy that he was praised in the Paris press, especially by Déat.
From the autumn of 1940, Pétain’s advisers were plotting Laval’s removal. They sounded out Flandin as a possible successor. Events were precipitated when Laval arrived at Vichy from Paris on the morning of 13 December with news of a theatrical German gesture of goodwill to France. Hitler was offering the return to France of the ashes of Napoleon’s son, the Duc de Reichstadt, who had died in Austria. Pétain was invited to Paris for the reception ceremony, and Laval persuaded him that the trip could be followed by a triumphal tour of the Occupied Zone. This idea tickled Pétain’s considerable vanity and he called for maps to trace the route.16
The anti-Laval conspirators were appalled that their efforts were about to founder. During the afternoon, they worked on Pétain, insinuating that it was Laval’s intention to kidnap Pétain and take over the government. Reverting to his original anti-Laval view, Pétain called a special cabinet meeting in the evening where he summoned his ministers to write him resignation letters. The procedure had already been used for cabinet reshuffles, and the unsuspecting Laval assumed that the victim was to be the Minister of Labour, René Belin. Instead, once the letters had been signed, it was Laval who was astonished to find himself dismissed, and put under house arrest. On the next day, Déat was arrested by Vichy’s representative in Paris, General de Laurencie. The 13 December crisis, a vivid illustration of Pétain’s vanity, suggestibility, and duplicity, was managed in an amateurish cloak-and-dagger style characteristic of Vichy. De Laurencie had previously been informed that the code for Déat’s arrest was to be ‘The Marshal’s wife will cross the demarcation line at 5 o’clock’. But when he received the message, he had forgotten it was a code, and complained at not having more time to make arrangements to receive her.17
Laval was succeeded by a triumvirate whose leading figure was Flandin. This government only lasted two months because the Germans, annoyed at Laval’s dismissal, refused to do business with it. The deadlock was resolved on 10 February when Admiral Darlan was appointed deputy premier and nominated as dauphin. Darlan had been the driving force behind the expansion of the French navy in the 1930s and admiral of the fleet during the war. A blunt and gruff individual with no time for parliamentary veterans like Laval and Flandin, he preferred the company of technicians and experts. To avoid Laval’s mistake of allowing his enemies to become too powerful, Darlan took on several portfolios: the Navy, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This did not make for increased efficiency: Darlan held so many offices that in one impersonation he sometimes wrote to himself in another (via subordinates) to refuse a request he had made to himself.18
Darlan remained in power from February 1941 until Laval’s return to power on 18 April 1942. But even these fourteen months of relative stability were punctuated by plotting and uncertainty. In March 1941 two of Pétain’s advisers even warned his wife to watch out in case his coffee had been poisoned.19 Darlan regularly drew up lists of enemies whom he believed to be conspiring to have him removed. In July 1941, he came up with the following: the Germans in cooperation with Laval; Déat and the Paris collaborationists; Pétain’s entourage; General Weygand; the British and Americans; various parliamentarians.20 Darlan’s worries about his own situation were part of a general sense in the summer of 1941 that the regime was in crisis because it was failing to carry the French population with it. To improve the government’s effectiveness, Darlan gave up the Ministry of the Interior in July, and appointed the industrialist Pierre Pucheu to take it over. On 13 August, Pétain broadcast to the nation that an ‘evil wind’ of discontent was blowing through the country, and announced tough measures of repression. This did not end Darlan’s problems. Pucheu rapidly emerged as the second most powerful man in the government, and his undisguised ambition began to worry Darlan.21
Despite the political instability of the Vichy regime, continuities existed between its governments. Members of the armed forces were omnipresent throughout—although the regime had been born out of military disaster. The government formed by Pétain on 12 July contained more military men than any other since Marshal Soult’s administration of 1832. In the void which opened up in French society in the summer of 1940, the army was one of the only institutions (along with the Church) to remain intact. Apart from Pétain and Weygand themselves, military figures at Vichy included General Colson, Minister of War (replaced by General Huntziger on 6 September), General Pujo, Air Minister (replaced by General Bergeret on 6 September) and Admiral Platon, Colonial Minister. Darlan gave positions to so many admirals that Cardinal Linéart of Lille remarked that he would probably soon be replaced by an admiral. Military men were not only to be found as ministers. The governorships of France’s five most important overseas possessions all went to members of the armed forces; Admiral Bard was Paris Prefect of Police from May 1941 to May 1942; and eight other career officers were appointed as prefects elsewhere.22
The regime was partly the revenge of the armed forces over the Republic; it was also, as Yves Bouthillier remarked, the ‘triumph of administration over politics’. Under Vichy the line between government and administration was blurred. At the head of each ministry the regime created a new administrative post of Secretary-General on the model of British Permanent Secretaries. They were often as powerful as their ministers. Sometimes when a minister was sacked, his Secretary General replaced him. This happened when Jacques Chevalier became Minister of Education in December 1940, and Marcel Peyrouton Minister of the Interior in September 1940.23 Members of the administrative corps who had often exercised power behind the scenes no
w emerged into the limelight. The Inspectors of Finance Yves Bouthillier and Paul Baudouin became respectively Minister of Finance (from July 1940 until April 1942) and Minister of Foreign Affairs (from July 1940 until October 1940). The experts who served Vichy were not only from the administration. The engineer Jean Berthelot was Minister of Communications from September 1940 to April 1942, and the agricultural economist Pierre Caziot Minister of Agriculture from July 1940 to April 1942.
Under Darlan the number of experts increased even further. The distinguished classicist Jerôme Carcopino became Minister of Education, and the jurist Joseph Barthélemy Minister of Justice. But a new type of expert, what today would be called technocrats, also came to prominence under Darlan. Mostly in their early forties, they stood out as young in this gerontocratic regime. They were committed not just to efficiency, as was true of administrators like Bouthillier, but also to economic modernization within a German-dominated Europe—a gleaming Europe of autobahns and autoroutes. These technocrats had backgrounds in banking or industry, and had often participated in those reforming groups, like X-Crise or Nouveaux cahiers, which proliferated in the 1930s. They included figures like Pierre Pucheu, formerly an international sales director for the French steel industry, who was first Minister of Industrial Production (February 1941–July 1941) and then Minister of the Interior (July 1941–April 1942); Jacques Barnaud, who was in charge of economic relations with the Germans from February 1941 to November 1942; and François Lehideux, Minister of Industrial Production from July 1941 to April 1942. Barnaud had previously worked for the Worms Bank and Lehideux had been a manager at Renault.
These Young Turks aroused much suspicion, and for people whose minds were attuned to conspiracy theories, it was easy to assume that the influence they achieved under Darlan had a sinister explanation. They were rumoured to be members of a secret organization known as the Synarchy, which was allegedly linked to the Worms Bank. The Synarchy had no basis in fact, but Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was close to this group, writes in his memoirs that they did see themselves as a team, sharing a similar outlook and dining regularly together.24
The National Revolution: Doctrine
The Synarchy rumour was partly invented by conservatives around Pétain who felt that Darlan’s team did not share their vision of the National Revolution. The truth was that they needed someone to blame when it appeared that the National Revolution was not working. One problem was that people had very different ideas about it. Inasmuch as there was an official version of the National Revolution it was contained in Pétain’s speeches—although Pétain himself disliked the term Revolution and only used it four times, preferring to talk of redressement or rénovation.
The National Revolution defined itself first and foremost in opposition to liberal individualism which uprooted people from the ‘natural’ communities of family, workplace, and region. Such communities supposedly offered ‘real’ freedoms unlike the abstract and hollow rights vaunted by liberals. Once society was reorganized hierarchically into organic communities, the class struggle would become redundant: the liberal obsession with rights would be replaced by a stress on duties. These duties were adumbrated in 1941 in fifteen ‘Principles of the Community’ which were offered as Vichy’s answer to the Declaration of Rights of 1789.25
The most important community was the family, which Pétain declared in September 1940 to be the ‘essential cell’ of the social order: ‘the rights of the family precede those of the State and the individual’. A law of 11 October 1940 forbade the employment of married women in the public sector; in April 1941 a law made divorce much more difficult to obtain; the regime missed no opportunity to extol the virtues of motherhood. Strengthening the family was also seen as a first step towards regenerating French youth. A Youth Secretariat (SGJ), run by the Catholic engineer Georges Lamirand, was set up to coordinate youth policies. All 22 year olds had to carry out six months’ civic training in Chantiers de la jeunesse (Youth Work Sites). Partly functioning as a replacement for military service, these were intended to instil moral values in the young. There was also a new youth movement called the Compagnons de France. It was a voluntary organization, but the regime strongly encouraged people to join.
When Pétain celebrated the community of the workplace, he was thinking above all of artisans whom he addressed in a message in May 1941: ‘there is no chance of the class struggle in the artisan’s workshop’. He was also thinking of peasants who were portrayed as exemplifying hard work, discipline, and tradition: ‘the land does not lie’ was one of Pétain’s most famous phrases (coined for him by the urban Jew Emmanuel Berl). Propaganda depicted Pétain as the Marshal-Peasant. In April 1941, he declared: ‘France will become again what she should never have ceased to be: an essentially agricultural nation.’ Subsidies were introduced to encourage a return to the land (May 1941). A law was passed in March 1941 making it easier to regroup parcels of land into single units. Instituteurs were required to teach basic agricultural skills. The most important measure relating to the countryside was the Peasant Charter of 2 December 1940 that instituted a corporatist framework for agriculture. Each locality was to organize a single peasant syndicate. Ascending from village to region, these would form a national Peasant Corporation running agriculture in the interests of the peasantry without government interference.26
The celebration of the peasantry went hand in hand with the promotion of regional culture and folklore. In September 1940, Pétain sent a message of encouragement to the organizers of the 110th anniversary of the birth of Frédéric Mistral, founder of the Provençal regionalist movement. Regional costumes appeared on stamps, and architects were exhorted to build in regional styles. From December 1941 teachers were allowed to teach optional classes in dialect. The Legion of Veterans in the Landes celebrated the Marshal (Lou Manescou) in patois. Henri Pourrat, who won the 1941 Prix Goncourt for Vent de Mars, the latest of his regionalist works on the Auvergne, acquired almost the status of an official author. Marc Bloch wrote that Vichy was turning France into a ‘vast antiquarian museum’.27
Some people had no place in Vichy’s France of rootedness and regions. Pourrat wrote in 1940: ‘the Jew, the epitome of the intellectual, is by his race fundamentally opposed to the peasant in all his being’.28 At the apex of the communities of family, workplace, and region stood the community of the nation which had to be purged of undesirable elements: foreigners, Jews, Freemasons, and Communists. As Pétain said in September 1940: ‘There is no possible neutrality between good and evil, order and disorder, France and anti-France.’
Exclusionary laws were among the first measures enacted by the regime. From 12 July, only a child of a French father could be member of a ministerial cabinet. Five days later, this exclusion was extended to public servants (including teachers), then to doctors, dentists, and pharmacists (16 August), and finally lawyers (10 September). In effect, these measures created a second class of French citizens whose families were deemed not to have been French sufficiently long. In addition, on 22 July, a commission was instituted to revise naturalizations that had occurred since 1927. Between 1940 and 1944, this body stripped 15,000 people of their citizenship (6,000 of them Jews).29 Foreign refugees living in France were forced into ‘foreign work units’ (GTEs). The spirit behind these measures was revealed by the repeal, on 27 August 1940, of the 1939 Marchandeau decree prohibiting the publication of material inciting racial hatred. Nonetheless the precedents for Vichy’s first measures against foreigners dated back to the 1930s. Vichy was only extending legislation which had been started under the Republic, and this eased the transition to laws specifically directed against Jews even if they were not foreign. The first of these laws was the Jewish Statute of 3 October which excluded French Jews from public service employment and from ‘professions that influence people’ (teaching, the cinema, press). A second Statute, in July 1941, extended the list of exclusions, and was followed by quotas on Jewish employment in a whole series of professions. These two Sta
tutes affected Jews whose families might have been French for generations. As for foreign Jews, from 4 October 1940 prefects were given the power to intern them.
The new regime also acted against political ‘undesirables’. From 17 July 1940 public servants could be sacked without any formalities. The Fifth Constitutional Act set up a Supreme Court to try those ‘responsible for the defeat’: Blum, Reynaud, and others were interned while awaiting trial. On 13 August, ‘secret societies’—which meant Freemasons—were outlawed, and civil servants had to swear that they had never belonged to a secret society and would never do so. On 3 September prefects were authorized to intern anyone judged dangerous for national security. This was primarily aimed at Communists who started to be rounded up in the autumn of 1940. By June 1941—before Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the Communist entry into armed resistance—between 4,000 and 5,000 Communists had been arrested. At the end of 1940 the internment camp population stood at about 55,000–60,000, consisting largely of foreign Jewish refugees, former members of the International Brigades, and French Communists. They were interned in about thirty camps scattered mainly throughout the Southern Zone, and in Algeria. These were French camps which had nothing to do with the Germans, many of them indeed dating from the late 1930s.30
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