B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  This was only the most radical of a range of measures designed to counter the ‘evil wind’. Political parties were suspended (a symbolic measure since parliament had not met since July 1940), a new anti-Masonic law was passed (20 August) and lists of Freemasons were published. In Paris, the Prefecture of Police resuscitated the ‘Special Brigades’ (BS) which had originally been created during the Phoney War to crack down on the Communists. Finally, on 7 September 1941, a State Tribunal was set up to judge ‘terrorists’ and pronounce the death sentence without the possibility of appeal.

  Pucheu not only aimed to suppress dissent; he also wanted to mobilize popular support more systematically. In this he was supported by members of Darlan’s government who were interested in experimenting with fascist-style methods of propaganda and political organization. This was particularly true of Jacques Benoist-Méchin and Paul Marion who exercised considerable influence despite only having junior posts. Marion was in effect minister of propaganda, and Benoist-Méchin had responsibility for relations with Germany. Their presence in the government reopened the issue of Vichy’s relationship to fascism.48

  Jacques Benoist-Méchin had been a journalist in the 1930s and a member of the Comité France-Allemagne. The passion of his life was the search for Franco-German reconciliation—he had written a history of the German army and translated a book on France by the well-known German writer Curtius—and it was this which drove him to fascism. He wrote in his memoirs that France should have joined the war against Britain and ‘aligned her institutions on those of the totalitarian power’.49 Paul Marion was a quintessential representative of that generation whose political anchors had been destroyed by the Great War. He had been a Communist until 1929, studying at the Leninist School in Moscow. After this he passed through a number of stages—Luchaire’s Notre Temps, the Socialists, the neo-Socialists—before ending up in the PPF which he left after Munich. The only consistency in Marion’s career was a rejection of liberalism, and a restless search for an energetic politics. He was fascinated by totalitarian methods of propaganda on which he wrote a book entitled Leur combat: Lénine, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco (1939). Drieu la Rochelle said of Marion: ‘he was a true fascist … he had that mixture of love and irreducible hatred which characterizes real revolutionaries’.50 Like Marion, Pucheu had also been in the PPF. This was also true of many of the advisers who staffed the cabinets of the technocrats: Robert Loustau and Yves Paringaux who were in Pucheu’s cabinet, Claude Popelin in Lehideux’s cabinet, and Maurice Touzé who was an aide to Marion. If there was a mafia at Vichy in 1941, it was not the imaginary synarchy, but the fascist network of former members of the PPF. Drieu, another ex-PPF member, was friendly with both Benoist-Méchin and Marion, and regularly met them during this period.51

  After rejecting a single party in August 1940, the regime still had to devise a means of articulating the relationship between State and society. In theory, this role fell to the Legion of Veterans which was called upon to be the ‘ears and eyes’ of the Marshal. By February 1941, the Legion had 590,000 members, as well as a newspaper and a daily radio slot. But there were two problems with the Legion. First, being limited to a single—and ageing—category of the population, it was too exclusive. Secondly, its leaders saw themselves as personally loyal to Pétain, but not necessarily to his government as a whole. It was difficult to define their relationship to the administration, and conflicts frequently occurred between local Legion leaders and prefects. In April 1941 Darlan issued guidelines to clarify the situation. While the Legion was allowed the ‘right and even the duty’ to inform the authorities about breaches of the National Revolution, légionnaires were reminded that they were supposed to assist the prefects, not supplant them. Unfortunately this instruction was too ambiguous to resolve the situation.52

  Given the Legion’s shortcomings, Vichy looked for other ways to build links between State and society. The Conseil national was one such attempt, but it had no power. Another initiative was the Amicale de France, founded in November 1940 by Ménétrel and other Pétain aides, as a pawn in their battle with Laval. The Amicale had a network of Équipes du Maréchal which were supposed to spread the gospel of the National Revolution. In January 1941, Dumoulin de Labarthète, another Pétain aide, sponsored yet another idea: the Comité du rassemblement pour la Révolution nationale. Vichy intrigues were so complicated that it is impossible to be sure what Dumoulin’s motives were in this case. Perhaps he wanted a possible foil to Flandin’s Conseil national. The Comité contained members of the Legion, the PPF, and the PSF, but it never got off the ground because these groups could not agree amongst themselves. By the spring, Dumoulin’s Comité had ceased to exist.53

  This was the situation when Marion took over propaganda in January 1941. Immediately he set about organizing a network of propaganda delegates in each département and created a training school for them at Mayet de la Montagne. Marion intended these propaganda cadres to provide the embryo of a future single party. As a step in this direction, he took over the previously independent Amicale de France. In terms reminiscent of Goebbels, Marion declared that he wished to create a new type of Frenchman like a sculptor moulding his clay.54 In the summer of 1941, he found an ally in Pucheu who was coming to believe that the regime needed a single party or some similar organization.55 Pucheu hoped to get the co-operation of La Rocque whose PSF cadres still represented a considerable force. But La Rocque was unco-operative, so Pucheu and Marion turned their attention to the Legion, bringing it under closer government control in order to make it more like a single party. From November 1941, it was opened to non-veterans and its name changed to the ‘French Legion of Combatants and Volunteers for the National Revolution’. But none of this made much difference. The Legion’s leader, François Valentin, hung on to his independence, and just as the Legion was being given a more important role, its membership was starting to decline.56

  The ‘fascists’ also had designs on youth policy. In the summer of 1940, at the same time as rejecting a single party, Vichy had also rejected the idea of a single youth movement on the model of the fascist regimes. Lamirand, head of the SGJ, had wanted to promulgate a youth charter requiring every young person to join a youth movement, only to abandon this idea in the face of Church hostility. But Lamirand never intended to create a single youth movement. This idea was explicitly ruled out by Pétain on 13 August 1940: ‘all existing movements will be maintained and their specificity will be recognized’. Youth movements were required to apply for official accreditation (agrément), but this was granted liberally. In June 1941, it was accorded to all six scouting movements—including even the Jewish scouts (ÉIF). The regime’s youth policy thus conformed to the definition offered by the Church in July 1941: ‘A united youth? Yes …A single youth? No.’ The only obligation imposed on the young was the Chantiers de la jeunesse.57

  Marion found the SGJ too tolerant and insufficiently directive. In May 1941, he tried to secure control of the Compagnons de France and impose his protégé, Armand Petitjean, as its head. This was unsuccessful, and instead Marion tried to build up another youth movement, the Youth of France and Overseas (JFOM), which was more overtly political than the Compagnons. Despite Marion’s incursions into his territory, Lamirand succeeded in keeping youth policy under the control of the SGJ. But the SGJ itself was not homogeneous. Lamirand’s immediate subordinate, Louis Garrone, a high-minded Catholic, who had taught at the École des roches, shared the same outlook as Lamirand, while the head of the SGJ’s propaganda in the Occupied Zone, Georges Pelorson, had more affinity with Marion.

  In March 1942, youth policy was debated by a commission of the Conseil national. Pétain opened the proceedings by reaffirming his opposition to a single youth movement. Representatives of the Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, defended pluralism. On the other side, Pucheu attacked the ‘boy scout’ and ‘churchy’ (calotin) spirit of the SGJ’s policies, and claimed that the churches were too marked by the past to be able to train
the cadres which the new France required. Pelorson argued the same, and so did Gaston Bergery who claimed that a single youth movement could create the classless society he believed to exist in Germany. The spokesmen of Pétain’s cabinet—Massis and Dumoulin—agreed that the SGJ was too tolerant, but rejected moves towards ‘totalitarianism’. In the end it was agreed to create a new non-confessional movement which would absorb the Compagnons and JFOM. This seemed like a concession to Pucheu, but before the decision became effective, Laval had returned to power, and Pucheu left the government.58

  Conflicts III: The Economy

  Social and economic policy was the area in which the rhetoric of the National Revolution was hardest to implement. In theory, the guiding principle was corporatism on which Pétain delivered two speeches in 1941. The problem was that the term was open to various interpretations. Was it about overcoming class conflict and institutionalizing conciliation between capital and labour? Was it about forcing industries into compulsory organizations whose decisions were binding on their members? The former view was inspired by the traditionalist ideal of the organic society; the latter view saw industrial organization as the key to modernization. The two shared only a common rejection of liberalism.59

  After months of wrangling, Vichy’s corporatist aspirations were enshrined in the Labour Charter published in October 1941.60 The delay arose from differences between, on one hand, the traditionalist corporatists in Pétain’s cabinet, who wanted workers and employers in each industry to be represented in single bodies, and, on the other, the syndicalists, around Belin at the Ministry of Labour, who wished to preserve separate representation for trades unions, although ‘disciplined’ within an overall corporate structure. The negotiations were so acrimonious that even after a final draft had been agreed, Belin had to literally occupy the building where the government printing presses were located so that the opposing faction, led by members of Pétain’s military cabinet, would not try and alter the text at the last moment. The result was a muddled document closer to the corporatists than the syndicalists. It prescribed exclusive and obligatory syndicates for five categories of occupation—employers, cadres, foremen, white-collar employees, workers—grouped into twenty-nine ‘professional families’. Strikes were outlawed. Social committees, intended to resolve welfare problems in the workplace, would be set up in every factory. Since the committees were organized on a tripartite basis, representing employers, workers, and cadres (engineers, middle managers), the workers were likely to be outvoted. Implementing this system was slow and cumbersome, and it was greeted with indifference by workers and employers.

  Indifference was an appropriate response since the key decisions about running the economy had already been taken. These were determined more by immediate practical problems than by the finer points of corporatist theory. In the summer of 1940 three serious economic dangers loomed: the prospect of a systematic pillage of French industry by Germany; the inevitability of raw materials shortages resulting from the British blockade; and the spectre of unemployment once arms production had ceased. To confront this situation, the government rapidly improvised a battery of controls. There was a new Ministry of Supply, an entirely remodelled Ministry of Industrial Production, which was employing 16,000 civil servants by 1944, and a Commissariat responsible for implementing infrastructure projects (DGEN). The keystone of the system was the hastily drafted law of 16 August 1940 authorizing each branch of industry to create ‘organization committees’ (COs).61

  The idea behind the COs was defensive: to oblige the Germans to negotiate with industries by sector instead of picking off firms one by one.62 Each CO was run by a chairman and small management committee. They were empowered to carry out a census of the available stocks in their sector, allocate scarce resources, fix prices, and recommend plant closures. In reality, the power of COs was limited by the government’s control over raw materials through the Central Bureau for the Distribution of Industrial Materials (OCPRI). This organism was set up in September 1940 at the behest of the Germans, who monopolized access to most raw materials, and intended French industry to work for them. OCPRI allocated raw materials to the COs which redistributed them among the industries in their sector. This gave enormous power to the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Industrial Production, Jean Bichelonne, who was in charge of OCPRI.

  Bichelonne epitomized the caste of technocrats who rose to prominence at Vichy. Having graduated at the École polytechnique with the highest marks in the school’s history, he was an intellectual prodigy even by the exacting standards of the French education system. He claimed not to need an address book because he could keep over 2,500 telephone numbers in his head. In the 1930s Bichelonne was involved in X-Crise and worked for the railways. In 1939 he was brought in by Dautry to organize rearmament. Worshipping the gods of efficiency, rationalization, and modernization, Bichelonne was completely naive about politics. Du Moulin de Labarthète described him as being like a brilliant child. Vichy represented the opportunity to reorganize the world without having to worry about the human beings that inhabited it.63

  Bichelonne hoped that the economic controls introduced by Vichy would lay the foundations for the long-term modernization of the French economy. In January 1942 he announced that the COs and OCPRI would be the basis of a ‘durable controlled economy’: ‘a modern State should not be allowed to run according to the blind and simplistic rules of the liberal economy’.64 Bichelonne created a Commercial and Industrial Economic Council (CSEIC), chaired by Gerard Bardet, a former member of X-Crise, and made up of CO directors, civil servants, and experts. It produced a report favourable to the idea of economic planning. Similarly, the DGEN, under François Lehideux, produced two draft economic plans: a ten-year one in 1942 and another one in 1944 to prepare the transition to the post-war economy. These initiatives can be seen up to a point as precursors of French post-war planning.65

  How did they fit into the world-view of the National Revolution? The second DGEN Plan adopted a more modernizing tone than the first, but both emphasized the need for substantial investment in capital equipment, condemning prewar entrepreneurs for their ‘Malthusianism’. The 1942 plan described the ‘return to the land’ policy as ‘probably utopian’; the 1944 one condemned it as liable to reduce France to the status of a second-rank power. But both accepted the assumption that social stability required the preservation of a substantial agricultural sector. The 1942 plan accepted the necessity to ‘reinforce peasant values’; it was the countryside’s ‘harsh and noble discipline which has formed our race’. The word ‘modernization’ was not often used; the key words were ‘balance’ and ‘stability’. This is another case where it would be wrong to exaggerate the dichotomy between modernizers and traditionalists.66

  Neither plan was implemented or had much influence on policy.67 In practice, what happened to the economy under Vichy was not so much planning as a proliferation of bureaucratic controls, bestowing huge power upon an administration unchecked by democratic control. Where the system did prefigure the future was in creating a close community of interest between the State and the CO leaders, anticipating the interpenetration of administrative and business elites so characteristic of post-war France.

  The chairmen and management committees of the COs were appointed by the government. The nominees tended to be representatives of big business, sometimes the bosses themselves, sometimes younger professional business administrators. Where a powerful business association had existed before the war, it often dominated the relevant CO. In theory, the State had a regulatory role since each CO was supervised by a government-appointed commissioner. In practice, these commissioners went along with the decisions taken. Although Bichelonne’s role in charge of the OCPRI gave him ultimate power over the COs, he exercised it in co-operation with the main business leaders. OCPRI was itself divided into thirteen subsections which were run by the leading members of the CO in the relevant area. Thus the people who benefited from the allocation of raw mate
rials played a key role in determining it. This created a sort of symbiosis between State officials and businessmen, most striking in the cases of CO chairmen who went on to become ministers: Lehideux had headed the automobile CO, as well as sitting on two OCPRI committees, before becoming Minister of Industrial Production, and Pucheu had been head of the mechanical industry CO, and on two OCPRI committees. In short, about 150–200 men ran the French economy under Vichy.

  Representatives of small business complained that this system discriminated against them. The synarchy rumour was a symptom of this discontent. Even Pétain made a speech in 1941 denouncing the power of ‘trusts’ over the economy. In February 1944 a small business leader, Léon Gingembre, was taken into the cabinet of the Minister of Industrial Production, but this was only a sop to small business interests. The gap between word and deed in Vichy’s economic policy is demonstrated by the fate of the artisans. Supposedly the regime was devoted to the interests of the artisan. An Artisans’ Bureau was set up in November 1940 to protect artisanal production. But when the CO system was set up, artisans found themselves apportioned to the COs by sector—plumbers with the construction industry, tailors in the textile industry—where they sat alongside other larger employers. This made it impossible for them to protect their specific interests. When the Artisans’ Bureau wrote to CO chairmen to complain that artisans were not receiving their share of State commissions, the textile CO replied that this was because of their ‘feeble productive capacity’.

  The Artisans’ Bureau was drafting measures of support for artisans until the end, but these had few practical consequences. Artisans became increasingly critical of the regime. One of their spokesman complained in August 1942 that the COs were organized to the ‘advantage of the trusts and big business and the … progressive suffocation of the artisan and medium-sized production’.68 In August 1943 artisans were provided with their own corporatist organization called the Artisans’ Statute. The details of the Statute were complicated, but its main effect was to integrate the many independent professional groups previously representing artisans into the State bureaucracy—not surprisingly since Bichelonne was the inspiration behind it. In short, despite the rhetoric, artisans were protected much less effectively under Vichy than they had been under the Republic where they had had an important parliamentary lobby.