Initiating Collaboration: Montoire
The German authorities gave out different signals, and various French politicians tried in the summer of 1940 to make contact with them. Flandin saw Friederich Grimm, of the Embassy staff, on 16 July, and told him that France must collaborate with Germany; Bonnet met Schleier on 31 July; Adrien Marquet contacted representatives of the SD and talked himself up at the expense of Laval; Pétain himself tried in the autumn to make contact with the Germans via René Fonck, a First World War air ace friendly with Goering.17 But it was Laval who succeeded in establishing a relationship with the Germans, and it was his success in doing so, not his attempt to do so, which set him apart.
Laval’s German contact was Abetz whom he met for the first time on 19 July. They discovered an affinity based on shared left-wing origins and a commitment to Franco-German reconciliation. Once Abetz was appointed ambassador on 3 August, this contact became important. As time went on, Laval and Abetz came to need each other: Laval to prove to Vichy that he had the ear of an important German, Abetz to prove to Hitler that he had found a Frenchman he could do business with.18 Laval, who even obtained a semi-permanent Ausweis enabling him to travel freely between the two zones, became a frequent visitor to Paris. But it took two to collaborate, and Hitler, after his abortive attempt to get a foothold in North Africa, showed no interest. Not until the end of September did his attention turn to France again.
Hitler’s attitude changed as a result of events in France’s African Empire. Although most French colonies had stayed loyal to Vichy, French Equatorial Africa (Chad, the Cameroons) had rallied to de Gaulle in August. Worried that this rebellion might spread to West Africa, Vichy urgently sought German permission to reinforce French forces there. In September a joint Anglo-Gaullist force set sail for Dakar, the main port of French West Africa. But the Vichy defenders remained loyal and the Gaullists were repulsed. In retaliation the French bombarded Gibraltar. For Hitler this evidence of Vichy’s determination to defend her Empire opened up the possibility of a Mediterranean and colonial strategy against Britain now that the invasion had been shelved. On 24 September Vichy was authorized to rearm the air force in North Africa. Encouraged by this, Pétain announced on 10 October that France wished to free herself of ‘traditional friendships’ and forge ‘a new peace of collaboration’.
Hitler was now ready to launch the ‘new policy’. The problem with a Mediterranean strategy was to reconcile the competing interests of Italy, Spain, and France in North Africa. One idea, never in fact presented to Vichy, was that France would be given Nigeria to compensate for the cession of Morocco to Spain and Tunisia and Corsica to Mussolini.19 On 23 October, Hitler met Franco at Hendaye on the Franco-Spanish border to persuade him to enter the war. On his way, he stopped at Montoire, near Tours, where a surprised Laval was summoned to meet him on 22 October. A similar meeting was proposed for Pétain on the return journey two days later. Pétain’s advisers were suspicious, but Pétain agreed to go, recalling the precedent of Tilsit when the defeated Alexander I of Russia had met Napoleon in 1807.
The discussions at Montoire remained general. The French had had no time to prepare their position, and Hitler made no concrete demands, partly because he had failed to win over Franco. No details were discussed and nothing was signed. At Montoire Pétain was more cautious than Laval. He called the declaration of war a blunder; Laval said it was a crime. Laval proposed collaboration; Pétain accepted it in principle, but said that he could not discuss details before talking to his government. Nonetheless, the symbolic impact of Montoire can hardly be exaggerated. Pétain was photographed shaking Hitler’s hand, and in a speech on 30 October he announced that France was ‘entering the path of collaboration’. He promised that in ‘the near future’ there would be an improvement in the situation of the prisoners of war, a reduction in occupation costs, and a relaxation of the demarcation line.20 Montoire’s importance was also shown by the fact that it led to the resignations of Charles-Roux and Baudouin; Laval now became Foreign Minister.
After Montoire, discussions started in Paris between German military representatives and envoys from Vichy (Laval, Darlan, Huntziger). The negotiations concerned a French expedition to reconquer French Equatorial Africa even at the risk of opening hostilities with the British. At the first meeting, on 31 October, General Huntziger, French Minister of Defence, told the Germans: ‘The British must be chased out.’ But at the second meeting, on 29 November, he disappointed the Germans by claiming that no operation against the British would be possible until the end of 1941. At the next meeting, on 10 December, he had revised his position again, and suggested that an operation might be feasible by February 1941.
These fluctuations in the French line are entirely comprehensible. At the very least, Vichy had to seem serious about defending her Empire from Britain so that the Germans were not tempted to step in themselves; on the other hand, Vichy did not want to provoke the British and Free French into launching further attacks on the Empire. In addition, French negotiators hoped to use the prospect of military operations against Britain as a way of securing German agreement for an increase in the size of French naval and military strength in the Empire. It is not clear how serious the French were about military action against Britain in Africa. Laval seems to have been the most enthusiastic—he informed Abetz that he was disappointed by Huntziger’s position on 29 November—while Darlan and Huntziger seemed more cautious. On the other hand, on 12 December Pétain told the American diplomat Robert Murphy that France was organizing an expedition to recapture Chad. French policy was not fixed at the end of 1941, but it would be wrong to suppose that the idea of military action in Africa was Laval’s alone.21
13 December: The Fall of Laval
Despite these negotiations, Montoire brought no tangible benefits to the French population apart from an agreement on 16 November to release POWs with more than four children.22 The German representatives on the Armistice Commission remained as unco-operative as ever: Hemmen told the French that Montoire was a ‘political event which has nothing to do with what we are doing here’.23 Indeed things got even worse for the French. At the end of October the Germans expelled some 7,700 Jews from the Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg and dumped them in France. From 11 November, the Germans started to expel citizens of Lorraine who were judged to be unassimilable into Germany. Trainloads of refugees arrived daily in France. When the operation ended in mid-December, some 100,000 Lorrainers (and 4,000 Alsatians) had been unceremoniously dumped into France. This was a major blow to the German image in France, and annoyed Abetz whose seduction of the French required them to be offered some concessions. On the economic front, German demands escalated daily.
Montoire’s failure to produce results poisoned relations between Pétain and Laval. It revealed a significant difference between them—not about the desirability of collaboration, but about its nature.24 For Pétain, collaboration was a way of securing improvements in the conditions of daily life in France. The prefects reported that Montoire had shocked public opinion, and Pétain felt aggrieved at having staked his prestige on a policy which had not delivered results. For Laval, indifferent to the National Revolution, collaboration was a longer term strategy. Although disappointed that Montoire had not achieved more, his objective was a durable Franco-German reconciliation. For this he was ready to make sacrifices. On 26 November, he accepted a German request that the French surrender their capital holdings in the Bor copper mines in Yugoslavia. Three days later, he handed over, without compensation, the gold stocks that had been entrusted to France by the Bank of Belgium. In both these cases Laval, arguing that France must give ‘testimony of our good faith’, overruled the protests of the Minister of Finance, Bouthillier.25 For all his reputation as a cynic, Laval was extraordinarily naive. His mistake was to overestimate the importance of Abetz whose influence over German policy was less than he believed (and Abetz hoped).
Laval also became too confident of his own indispensability
. He was therefore completely taken by surprise when Pétain sacked him on 13 December. Subsequent claims that he was dismissed because of his closeness to the Germans are quite wrong: only the hope that his German contacts would bear fruit had saved him from being dismissed sooner. The objection to Laval was not that he sought collaboration, but that he had achieved nothing from it.26 On the other hand, many of Laval’s enemies within the government did believe that he had executed the policy imprudently, and to that extent it is true that collaboration played some part in Laval’s downfall.
Laval was replaced by a triumvirate of Flandin, Darlan, and Huntziger. Pétain assured Hitler in a letter that French policy had not altered, but Abetz was furious. Storming down to Vichy on 16 December, accompanied by some armed SS men, he had Laval released, and returned to Paris with him. Although Darlan met Hitler on 25 December, listened to a tirade, and assured him that France remained committed to collaboration, the Germans would not be appeased: they punished Vichy by closing the demarcation line even to civil servants. By January the government in desperation started to consider taking Laval back, but Laval now refused anything less than full power. In the end, however, Laval’s return to government foundered not on his intransigence, but on a change of attitude by Ribbentrop who decided to keep him in reserve in case Vichy misbehaved again in future.27 For the moment the Germans had decided that Darlan could be trusted after all. They spun the crisis out only to squeeze some extra concessions from Vichy. On 9 February, Flandin resigned and Darlan took over. The Germans received satisfaction with the dismissal of some of the 13 December conspirators (including Alibert and Peyrouton) and the entry into government of some ardent proponents of collaboration (Marion, Benoist-Méchin).28
Throughout the crisis the French had done all they could to assure Germany that Laval’s dismissal was not a repudiation of collaboration. They would have done this whether it was true or not, but there is no reason to assume it was not. After the war, Flandin claimed that he had broken with collaboration. There was indeed almost no contact with the Germans in his short period of power, but this was not his choice.29 Flandin, the man who sent Hitler a telegram of congratulation after Munich, did not have an anti-collaboration reputation. He had made a speech favourable to collaboration on 18 November, and he had been appointed partly to allay suspicions of anti-German motives in the elimination of Laval.30 The scheme had foundered, but through no fault of Flandin’s.
The British Connection
Apart from the dismissal of Laval, those arguing that Pétain was ambivalent about collaboration point to the existence of secret contacts between Vichy France and the British. These are taken as signs of Pétain’s ‘double game’. Contacts with Britain certainly existed, but their importance was exaggerated after the war, and Laval’s dismissal was unrelated to them.31
The contacts started in September 1940 via the two countries’ embassies in Madrid. The French hoped to alleviate the effects of the British blockade which was starving metropolitan France of French colonial produce and the British hoped to avert any attack on their colonies or the dissident Gaullist ones. When the French refused to commit themselves on this point, the contacts were broken off. Another contact was made by Louis Rougier, a professor at Besançon, who obtained Pétain’s agreement to visit London where he met Churchill on 25 October. After the war Rougier claimed, with the aid of doctored documents, that he had signed a secret protocol with Churchill. No such document existed, but Rougier’s presence in London at the moment of Montoire did at least reassure the British that France had not entirely turned her back on them. It encouraged them to resuscitate the Madrid contacts. When Laval became Foreign Minister, he immediately informed the Germans and terminated these contacts again. He wanted ‘loyalty’ to Germany ‘exclusive of any equivocal diplomacy’.32
Clearly there was a difference on this matter between Pétain and Laval, but events after Laval’s fall showed that the difference was minimal. A third set of Franco-British contacts occurred through the Canadian diplomat Pierre Dupuy, who had contacted Jacques Chevalier just before Laval’s fall. The significance of this connection was that Chevalier had once known the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Dupuy brought a message from Halifax that if France promised to keep the Empire out of German hands and leave the Gaullist colonies alone, the British would consider relaxing the blockade. On 6 December, Dupuy saw Pétain, Darlan, and Huntziger. He was assured that no action would be considered against the Gaullist territories before the spring at the earliest, and that the Germans would not be allowed in the Empire. Pétain also made the sibylline comment: ‘you know where my sympathies lie’. Dupuy took this news to London. This was the extent of what Chevalier after the war christened the Chevalier–Halifax Agreement. In fact, nothing was signed. It is not even clear whether Dupuy had been authorized by Halifax to pass on any message; and if he had been, it only represented the private view of Halifax who was better disposed to Vichy than Churchill was.
Nonetheless on the strength of Dupuy’s more extravagant assertions about Vichy’s real attitude, and encouraged by Laval’s dismissal, Churchill sent Pétain a secret message at the end of December suggesting possible British military assistance to North Africa if the French would contemplate an eventual entry into the war. Pétain did not reply. Another consequence of the hopes aroused by Dupuy was the resumption of the talks in Madrid (for the third time) in January, but British suspicion was aroused when Flandin informed the Germans about these. At Madrid the French presented the British with unrealistic demands for the importation of massive quantities of supplies. The negotiations petered out in February 1941, and the Franco-British contacts were now over. Dupuy went on proffering his services, but no one took any notice.
There was no French double game either before or after Laval’s dismissal. The French hoped for an alleviation of the blockade, but they offered no concessions in return: nothing that Dupuy was told on 6 December was not already French policy. If the French subsequently sabotaged the Madrid negotiations, it was because they realized that the British lacked the resources to enforce a blockade: in the first three months of 1941, only eight out of 108 French ships passing through the Straits of Gibraltar were intercepted.33
France’s plight was also eased after the American government started sending supplies to French North Africa, subject to certain conditions. This was the result of an agreement negotiated in February between General Weygand and President Roosevelt’s representative in North Africa, James Murphy. The Murphy–Weygand agreement was motivated by Roosevelt’s belief that if the Allies showed goodwill towards Vichy, it would be possible to bring France back into the war on the Allied side. Roosevelt’s ambassador at Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, built up excellent relations with Pétain. But the Americans had even greater hopes of Weygand, seeing him, in the words of the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, as ‘a cornerstone around which to build a policy of resistance towards Germany’. The British were not convinced about this strategy, but they could not stop it.34
After the end of 1940, there was no more talk of retaking Chad, but this was not because Laval had gone. The policy had never been Laval’s alone: when Darlan and Pétain saw Dupuy on 6 December they had refused to rule out a Chad expedition. If the project was abandoned, it was partly because Hitler had lost interest in the Mediterranean–African arena and was already planning the invasion of Russia. This meant that he was unlikely to allow the French to equip the necessary forces.35 It was also clear that the British, scarred by the failure of the Dakar expedition, were not going to sponsor such operations in future. Thus it made sense for Vichy tacitly to accept the colonial status quo rather than risk provoking the British unnecessarily.
Relaunching Collaboration: The Protocols of Paris
Nothing more conclusively contradicts the view that Laval’s dismissal was a repudiation of collaboration than the fact that the apogee of the policy occurred under Admiral Darlan, his successor. Darlan was a devious figure in whose c
areer it is hard to find any consistency. In the Third Republic, he had never displayed anti-Republican sentiments, and his sympathies were considered to lie on the left, yet in 1941 he claimed to believe that France’s problems had been caused by the weaknesses of the Republic, its schoolteachers, and its ‘Judaeo-Masonic political habits’. Unlike Weygand, he had not been an early advocate of the Armistice, yet he had changed his mind at the last moment. He was not involved in the plot against Laval, yet he became its main beneficiary. Apart from a tenacious Anglophobia tradition in the navy—in May 1942 he remarked: ‘I worked with the British for 15 years and they always lied to me; I have worked with the Germans for 3 months, and they have never deceived me’36—Darlan’s only principle was opportunism. He also enjoyed the trappings of office, and had a taste for the high life which contrasted with the austere tone of Vichy. Apart from two residences in Vichy itself, he had a sumptuous official villa in Toulon. He entertained lavishly, and liked to be accompanied wherever he went by a large military band.37
Darlan’s views in 1941 can be easily reconstructed because he had a predilection for composing long memoranda which decked out his opportunism in grand geopolitical speculations. He believed that whether the war resulted in a stalemate or a German victory, its consequence would be a world divided into two blocs—a European one dominated by Germany and an Anglo-Saxon one dominated by America—and the end of the British Empire. Although one day France might become a bridge between these two blocs, her immediate destiny was to be part of German Europe.38 Not only did Darlan think a German Europe was the likeliest outcome; he also thought it the desirable one. A British victory would lead to France being treated as a third-class dominion; a negotiated peace between Germany and Britain would allow them to carve up France’s Empire to their mutual advantage; a German victory would offer France some sort of continental role and posed the least threat to her Empire.39 Some of Darlan’s predictions have been borne out by history, but for an opportunist it is fruitless to be right fifty years early.
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