From the beginning, then, Vichy was a regime of persecution and repression. It was also authoritarian and anti-democratic. The regime believed in hierarchy and elites. Local democracy was eliminated when elected departmental councils (conseils généraux) were replaced by appointed commissions administratives (12 October 1940). In localities with a population over 2,000, elected mayors were replaced (16 November) by appointed ones, and the municipal councils were named from a list provided by them; in localities with a population under 2,000, municipal councils could be dissolved at the discretion of the prefect.
The National Revolution: Sources
What was the inspiration behind the National Revolution? The main contemporary model was the Portuguese Estado novo of Salazar whose volume of collected speeches was on Pétain’s table. The four parts into which this volume was divided—National Revolution, Principles of a New Order, New State, Corporative Economy—coincided perfectly with Vichy’s project. The French 1942 edition of the speeches noted the similarities explicitly:
Like Salazar, the declared enemy of destructive Communism, [Pétain] distances himself from Nazism and Communism, rightly believing that a totalitarian system does not correspond to the French temperament … Like Salazar, Marshal Pétain does not want a Single Party which under the pretext of supporting the State in fact dominates it.31
Salazar himself had been influenced by France’s leading theorist of counterrevolution Charles Maurras, and the National Revolution owed much to the tradition of counter-revolutionary thought in France from de Maistre to Maurras via Le Play and La Tour du Pin.32 But although Action française supported Pétain until the end, its direct influence on the regime should not be exaggerated. Maurras edited the newpapaper from Lyons, was rarely at Vichy, and had few meetings with Pétain.33 The most high-profile Action française sympathizer in the government was Raphaël Alibert, Minister of Justice until January 1941. In the early days of the regime, Alibert was a powerful figure, helping to draft the first constitutional acts, and the first anti-Semitic measures. Some histories of Vichy make Alibert the evil genius of the first months of the regime, describing him as fanatical to the point of mental instability: he is described, after his sacking, as wandering around shaking his fist at Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc. But the temptation to turn him into a scapegoat for the early policies of repression should be resisted. There was no significant opposition to the measures he proposed. Alibert was influential partly because, as a jurist, he was skilled at drafting laws.34
Other people who could broadly be categorized as ‘Maurrassian’ were Weygand, Vichy’s proconsul in North Africa from September 1940, and Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs from March 1941 to March 1942. Maurrassians were to be found not so much in the government as in Pétain’s own entourage. The list includes aides like Generals Émile Laure and Charles Brécard; the Secretary-General of the Presidency of the Council, Admiral Fernet; and also such figures as Dumoulin de Labarthète, Ménétrel, René Gillouin, and Henri Massis. But although many of these people defined the tone of the National Revolution—Massis, Gillouin, and Dumoulin helped write several of Pétain’s speeches—their real power should not be exaggerated.
Another distinctive milieu at Vichy was the group in charge of youth policy which had close links with conservative social Catholicism and with the Catholic scouting movement. Georges Lamirand, head of the SGJ, had been a vice-president of Robert Garric’s Équipes sociales; Henri Dhavernas, founder of the Compagnons, and General de la Porte de Theil, founder of the Chantiers de la jeunesse, were both involved in the scouting movement; and Marcel-Denys Forestier, one of the leaders of the Catholic Rover Scouts, was appointed chaplain general of the Chantiers. Many members of this group drew inspiration from Lyautey: Lamirand’s book Le Rôle social de l’ingénieur (1937) (with a preface by Lyautey) had tried to apply Lyautey’s ideas about leadership to the factory.35 The influence which this group acquired at Vichy from the summer of 1940 owed much to the patronage of Paul Baudouin who shared many of their views, and had in 1939 written an article in the Revue des jeunes calling on Catholic youth to form a new chivalry to defend the values of European civilization.
Action française traditionalists gave the regime its tone; social Catholics colonized one specific area of policy. Neither of them had as much influence at Vichy as the liberal conservatives. Apart from the already-mentioned cases of Flandin and Joseph Barthélemy, these included Lucien Romier, who was a Minister of State from August 1941, and Henri Moysset, an academic who had advised many inter-war politicians including Tardieu. Moysset became Secretary-General to the President of the Council in February 1941 and entered the government as Minister of State from August 1941 to April 1942. Such people had not been bitter enemies of the Republic or excluded from influence under it, but they had been influenced by the Maurrassian critique of democracy, and their presence at Vichy is testimony to the long-term corrosive effect of Action française on French liberalism. They did not subscribe to all aspects of Maurras’s counterrevolutionary programme: their ideal was the Orleanist notion of government by the compétences. The presence in government of figures like Carcopino, Barthélemy, Bouthillier, or Berthelot seemed to embody that ideal perfectly.
One Vichy institution very much in the spirit of Orleanist liberalism was the Conseil national. Created in February 1941 by Flandin, the Conseil was a non-elective consultative assembly of worthies designed to give the regime a more liberal façade by building bridges to moderate conservative opinion. Seventy-eight of its 188 members were former parliamentarians. It also included non-political celebrities like the pianist Alfred Cortot, the physicist Louis de Broglie, two members of the Académie française, and some clerics. Flandin himself had left power once the Conseil had been formed, and because Pétain was irritated by the presence of so many parliamentarians, it was forbidden to sit in full session, and only permitted to convene its specialized commissions.36
One of the Conseil’s commissions was instructed to draft the new constitution. It was chaired by Barthélemy who was certainly the most important influence on the new constitution. A version was ready by the end of 1941, although it was never promulgated. It lay somewhere between the authoritarianism of the Second Empire and the Orleanist ideal of a republic of notables. The first article read: ‘the French State is national and authoritarian’. Article 8 read: ‘the authority of the State is incarnated in its head. He alone decides after listening to his councillors and gathering the wishes of the nation.’ There was to be a Grand Council of 220 members representing the elites and appointed by the head of State, and a National Council of 300 members selected by provincial assemblies, professional groups, war veterans, and heads of families.37
The presence of liberal conservatives at Vichy is a reminder that it would be wrong to limit the inspiration, and appeal, of the National Revolution to the traditionalist right. The themes of family, authority, regionalism, communitarianism, and anti-Semitism had a much wider constituency. Not all those who believed in strengthening the family would have accepted the conservative organicist social theory which underpinned Maurrassian views of the family; not all those who wanted a stronger executive welcomed the abandonment of democracy. But there were enough overlaps to create a tentative consensus and sustain a certain ambiguity. To Maurras’s chagrin, Vichy never formally renounced the Republic; 14 July remained, in theory, a national holiday. Pétain’s head appeared on several series of ‘État français’ stamps—the first time this had happened to any living head of State since Napoleon III—but the pre-war stamps of the République française continued to appear.38 Busts of Pétain were supposed to replace Marianne in the town halls, but the tricolour flag was retained, as was the Marseillaise. Rarely had the Marseillaise been more sung as the regime desperately attempted to cling on to the symbols of French patriotism. Pétain said that he preferred the verse beginning ‘Sacred love of the Fatherland’, but on his regional tours he was often greeted with the Republican r
efrain ‘Aux armes citoyens’.39
It is clear from this brief survey that all strands of French conservatism were present at Vichy, but there were also representatives of the left, although they were never more than a small minority. The only one in the government was the trade unionist René Belin, Minister of Labour from July 1940 until April 1942.40 Many of the former Syndicats group in the CGT joined Belin in his support of Vichy. Given Belin’s pacifism and anti-communism, his presence at Vichy is not so surprising. Belin, however, was never at ease in the government, and there were constant rumours that he was to be dismissed.41
Conflicts I: Education
Maurrassians, social Catholics, conservative liberals, syndicalists: this is not an exhaustive list of the political sensibilities represented at Vichy but it is enough to demonstrate the regime’s considerable diversity. According to Charles Rist, if Vichy had an ideology, it was not so much ‘integral nationalism’ as ‘integral confusionism’.42Hoffmann describes the regime as a ‘pluralist dictatorship’. Whatever their differences, however, those who participated in the regime were bound together by the conviction that Germany had won the war. They all had scores to settle—whether with the Communists (as in the case of Belin), with the Popular Front (the case of Laval), or with the Third Republic as a whole (the case of Alibert). They all agreed that the new regime would be authoritarian, anti-individualist, and anti-Semitic. But this left many questions unanswered. How much influence should be given to the Church in education? What was the most desirable relationship between state and society? How should labour relations be regulated? On these matters, there were differences of outlook between corporatists and syndicalists; clericals and anticlericals; centralizers and regionalists; fascists and conservatives.
These conflicts were complex and cannot be reduced to any simple pattern. The most extreme polarity was between those favouring an organicist, Catholic society and a decentralized, minimalist State and those who favoured an interventionist State, mobilizing activist popular support and working for economic rationalization and efficiency. Broadly speaking, this could be described as a distinction between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernizers’. Of course, some people do not fit either term neatly. Alibert, supposedly a Maurassian (hence a traditionalist), had also been in Redressement français (hence a modernizer). Darlan may have been a modernizer when it came to the economy, but he was a traditionalist when it came to the family. Many social Catholics were traditionalists regarding morality and social policy but modernizers in respect of the economy. Many liberal conservatives were mildly anticlerical and anti-corporatist, which separated them from the traditionalists; but they were laissez-faire about economic policy which distinguished them from the more interventionist modernizers. Certain conflicts, for example between corporatists and syndicalists, do not fit the dichotomy between traditionalists and modernizers. Nonetheless, providing these two labels are used loosely, they provide a rough guide to the power struggles, and factional infighting, at Vichy. Three issues were particularly contested: education; the relationship between state and society; economic and social policy.
In education, the conflict revolved around the degree of influence to be granted to the Church. All conservatives agreed that France had been undermined by pacifist and godless instituteurs, and there was general approval when, in September 1940, Vichy abolished the special colleges (Écoles normales) in which these teachers were trained. But did the National Revolution also imply a reversal of the secular laws which were the cornerstone of Republican education? A series of measures promulgated in the autumn of 1940 seemed to imply that it did. Religious orders were given back their right to teach (September 1940); the Caisse d’écoles, a charitable fund for needy parents, was for the first time made available to Catholic pupils (October 1940); ‘duties to God’ were reinserted into the primary school syllabus (November 1940); local authorities were authorized to subsidize Catholic schools (January 1940). Most controversially of all, religious instruction was introduced as an optional subject in State schools (January 1941). Parents wishing their children to undergo religious instruction had previously had to arrange this themselves. Now it could occur in school time and on school premises: priests could enter State schools for the first time since the 1880s.
The last two measures were the work of the philosopher Jacques Chevalier who became Education Minister in December 1940. Chevalier was a devout Catholic who had been invited by Franco to prepare a plan for the reform of Spanish education. His seventy-two days as minister were the high point of Catholic influence over education, but his measures aroused considerable alarm, and he was moved to another portfolio in Darlan’s ministry. Darlan, who described himself in January 1941 as ‘ferociously anticlerical’, had no intention of bowing to the Church lobby.43 His Minister of Education, the classical scholar Jerôme Carcopino, reversed almost all the measures described above, apart from the abolition of Écoles normales and the decree authorizing religious orders to teach.
This did not mean that the Church gained nothing. Carcopino’s defence of the religious neutrality of State schools was less rigid than the Republic’s. Religious instruction was now allowed a place in the timetable and could be taught in school time (but not on school premises) for those who wished it. Following a personal intervention by Pétain, in November 1941 Carcopino offered State subsidies to Catholic schools in need. Although he presented this as a provisional emergency measure, it was a significant breach with republican practice. Overall the relationship between State education and religion remained delicate. When Darlan heard in April that many schools were taking advantage of the new climate to flout the 1880s secular laws and put up crucifixes in schools, he ordered prefects to forbid this; two months later he was forced to back down and accept the practice where it conformed to local tradition.44
Carcopino’s reversal of Chevalier’s reforms was a defeat for the most extreme Catholic traditionalist position. But Carcopino himself represented a different version of traditionalism inspired by the Cercle Fustel de Coulanges, an educational lobbying organization close to Action française, and opposed to the democratization of education promoted by the Cartel des Gauches in 1924 and the Popular Front in 1936. Léon Bérard, a leading member of the Cercle, had been one of Carcopino’s main academic patrons. Carcopino was also inspired by the example of the École des roches, founded by Édmond Demolins, a disciple of the conservative thinker le Play, and modelled on the British public school. In the inter-war years it became the favoured school of the French bourgeoisie. Carcopino’s father had been its doctor and his son-in-law was its director; Jean Borotra, who was in charge of Vichy’s sporting programme, sent his children there. There was a small, but influential, École des roches lobby at Vichy.45
A major feature of Carcopino’s important education reforms, promulgated in August 1941, was the re-establishment of fees in the higher classes of the secondary education system, which had been gradually abolished by the left in the inter-war years. Carcopino also upgraded the status of technical and higher elementary schools by according them the rank of full secondary schools. Access to secondary education was acquired by the new Diploma of Primary Preparatory Studies to be taken at 11. Although this had been intended to discourage pupils from trying to enter secondary education, it had the opposite effect. On the vexed question of the role of classics in education, Carcopino, despite being himself a classicist, did not accept the full demands of the conservative Latin lobby. Latin was made compulsory for all lycée pupils, but other secondary schools were permitted to teach a modern language curriculum. Carcopino’s reforms were therefore more complex than a simple implementation of the most conservative educational agenda.46
Conflicts II: State and Society: The Fascist Temptation
No theme was dearer to the traditionalists than regionalism. For Maurrassians, the celebration of regions was inspired by an idealized vision of the provinces of the ancien régime. In July 1940, Pétain announced that ‘governors will
be placed at the head of the great French provinces’, and the Conseil national was instructed to draft a regional constitution. By August 1941, it had produced a division of France into twenty regions (the term sounded less ancien régime than provinces) each with an appointive regional assembly and a governor. This regional map took no account of the actual divisions into which the Occupation had divided the country, a characteristic piece of wish fulfilment. This did not matter because nothing came of these schemes. The governors’ names remained in the yellow file where Pétain kept them. Meanwhile, in April 1941, Darlan had created the new post of regional prefect to strengthen the government’s powers in its difficult task of organizing scarce food supplies. Thus Vichy got its regions, but in a spirit entirely at odds with the original intention: as a reinforcement of state control not a return to ‘natural communities’.47
The creation of regional prefects was the prelude to the increasingly repressive policies of the regime during the summer of 1941. These were announced in Pétain’s speech about the ‘evil wind’. This was an admission that the National Revolution was not proving popular; it was also possibly an oblique reference to the first stirrings of the Resistance. But almost immediately after that speech, the Resistance entered a new stage when the Communist Party embarked on a policy of terrorism. The first terrorist attack occurred on 21 August with the shooting of a German naval cadet in a Paris metro station. The government responded by announcing that suspected Communists would be tried by ‘special sections’ of courts martial, ready to act expeditiously, vigorously, and retrospectively.
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