B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  The RNP was founded with Abetz’s approval, but once Germany no longer insisted on Laval’s return to power, it lost its raison d’être and was reduced to railing harmlessly against Vichy ‘reactionaries’. The RNP was also weakened by incompatibility between its two leaders. While Déat aspired to build a mass party, Deloncle was more interested in an elite force of shock troops; Déat’s supporters wore suits, Deloncle’s uniforms. When Déat was the victim of an assassination attempt in August 1941, he assumed Deloncle was the culprit. Whether or not this was true, the fact Déat suspected it showed the state their relations had reached. The break with Deloncle occurred in September 1941, and although this brought into the RNP some neo-Socialists who had been suspicious of Deloncle, it lost most of its MSR members and ended Déat’s dream of a movement transcending previous divisions. By the end of the year, the coming man was Doriot.9

  While Déat made the initial running, Doriot was reduced to reacting to him. Since Déat attacked Vichy, Doriot tried to ingratiate himself with it by publishing a collection of speeches under the title ‘The Marshal’s Man’. Since Déat was unreserved about collaboration, Doriot was cautious (possibly because of the Nazi–Soviet Pact). Since Déat had Abetz’s support, Doriot cultivated the SS and the Abwehr. Gradually his rhetoric became more violent. ‘It is intolerable’, he declared in May 1941, ‘that Mandel’s blood has not served to mark a red line between the Third Republic and the National Revolution.’10 It was Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union which released Doriot’s energies and gave him a cause. He immediately advocated the creation of a volunteer force to join the German fight against Bolshevism. Déat, Deloncle, and the collaborationist leaders had no choice but to agree, and an anti-Bolshevik Legion (LVF) was formed.11

  Vichy discouraged the recruitment of LVF volunteers in the South, although in November 1941 Pétain sent a message of support to the men who were defending ‘part of our military honour’. The ambiguity was characteristic of Vichy’s ambiguous stance towards collaborationism. The main problem for the LVF was that the Germans neither felt they needed help against the Soviet Union, nor wished to encourage French activism even in a good cause. For this reason, they imposed a ceiling of 10,000 men on the LVF. It took two years to reach 10,000 volunteers, and half of these were turned down by the Germans as unfit. The first three LVF battalions arrived on the eastern front in October 1941. Among them was Doriot, setting off to fight Bolshevism almost twenty years after he had arrived in Moscow as an idealistic young Communist disgusted by war. The LVF troops were unequipped for the Russian winter, and unhappy at having to fight in German uniform (with only a tricolour badge on the sleeve to signify their French affiliation). Their effectiveness was further undermined by squabbles between followers of Doriot and Deloncle. Two weeks later, after 250 casualties, they were removed from the front line and subsequently used only for police duties and action against partisans.12

  Despite the LVF’s unheroic record, Doriot acquired the prestige of being the only collaborationist leader to fight on the eastern front, apart from Deloncle who, after an endless series of ‘farewell dinners’, also went east, but only in a propaganda capacity.13 The LVF kept Doriot away from France intermittently, but the meetings held on his return were triumphalist, and boosted the PPF’s influence.

  The Rank and File

  Membership of the collaborationist movements is difficult to estimate. At its peak in 1942, the PPF had around 40,000–50,000 members (including North Africa), the RNP between 20,000 and 30,000.14 Collaborationism was never a mass movement. If one adds up the membership of all the various movements between 1940 and 1944 (including some like Collaboration and the Milice to be discussed later) the total would not exceed 220,000, with the peak being reached at the end of 1942 when German success seemed at its height. But this cumulative figure overestimates the total numbers since some people joined more than one movement, or moved from one to another.15

  Figures available for thirty-eight départements reveal no significant difference between the social bases of the movements. Their members were largely urban and lower middle class, with an under-representation of workers and peasants, and an over-representation of office workers, small businessmen, artisans, and shopkeepers. The PPF members were slightly younger than the RNP; the RNP had more functionaries and more women. Although both were strongest in the Paris region, the PPF also had provincial bases—especially in the south-east and North Africa—which it owed to its pre-war existence. In Marseilles, one of its regional strongholds before 1940, the PPF had around 1,500 members in 1942, while the RNP never had more than 60.16

  What made people join these movements? Sometimes the motive may have been opportunism—a way of winning German favour. In Louis Malle’s film Lacombe Lucien, the young peasant who joins the German police acquires a sense of power he has never enjoyed before. But joining the German police was an extreme step that few people took, and most members of French collaborationist movements acquired little social validation. Collaborationist activists were not popular, and in small communities they met with suspicion. The case of the small town in the Eure where the fifty RNP members kept their membership a secret was probably not untypical.17 From the beginning, the windows of collaborationist offices were regularly smashed; by 1943, collaborationists were at risk of their lives from the Resistance. People ready to run such risks obviously had a high level of political commitment. About a third of those who joined collaborationist movements before the end of 1942 had some political past. Of these, about two-thirds came from the extreme right, about a quarter from the left, and less than 10 per cent from the moderate right. Members of collaborationist groups spent much time brawling with each other. The rest of the time they distributed tracts and papers, destroyed busts of Marianne, defaced Republican street names, denounced people to the authorities, or smashed up Jewish shops. In short, they remained outsiders, even after 1940.18

  Leftist Collaborationism

  If it is hardly surprising that the collaborationist rank and file mostly came from the extreme right, it is also important to note several former leftists among the collaborationist cadres. These were not, like Doriot or Déat, renegades from the left since the mid-1930s, but people who had participated in the Popular Front: for example, the syndicalist Ludovic Zoretti, who had organized workers’ educational projects during the Popular Front, or the Socialist Charles Spinasse, who had been in Blum’s government.19

  Usually pacifism and anti-communism both figured in their journey towards collaborationism. For trade unionists, the journey was eased by a lack of commitment to parliamentary liberalism. Some leftist collaborationists were former planistes—de Man followed the same route in Belgium—who had moved from non-Marxist socialism to anti-Marxist socialism. Some were seduced by the ‘socialism’ of the ‘National Socialists’: a delegation of trade unionists who visited Germany in March 1941 returned impressed by the conditions in German factories.20 Some sought to recover a non-Marxist and French socialist tradition inspired by Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Fourier. Spinasse denied that his commitment to a German Europe contradicted this return to French roots: ‘I do not accept that by aligning [with Germany], we will have to accept a terrifying unity of thought … and action … It is what she offers that is original and unique that makes France useful to the European community.’21

  In the end, the belief that collaborationism was compatible with any meaningful left-wing politics was based on an entire misreading of Nazism. Those who did not eventually jump off the collaborationist bandwagon ended up breaking with their left-wing origins. This was discovered by Spinasse who had in November 1941 founded a weekly paper, Le Rouge et le bleu, which defended collaboration while remaining sufficiently faithful to the values of the Popular Front to criticize the Riom trial and attack Déat’s advocacy of a single party. The paper was banned in August 1942, showing that there was diminishing space for a collaborationism which was not fascist.22

  No trajectory was more torture
d than that of the Socialist Georges Soulès who had in the 1930s been on the left of the Party. As a former polytechnicien, Soulès was attracted by economic planning and had acted as an adviser to Blum’s aide Jules Moch during the Popular Front. Soulès’s support of collaborationism after 1940 is partially explicable by pacifism. More surprising was that he joined the MSR. He seems to have believed that, unlike the eternal talker Déat, Deloncle was a genuine man of action in search of an ideology. This offered the opportunity for an intellectual like Soulès to make his mark. At the end of 1941, however, Soulès started to lose faith in Deloncle, and together with the former Communist André Mahé, he formed a dissident faction within the MSR. They carried out a palace revolution, drove Deloncle out of the movement, and by the end of 1942 had taken control of it. They published a book calling for the rejuvenation of France by a new elite, inspired by a racist mystique. The book’s heady mixture of Sorel, Rosenberg, and Nietzsche had little practical relevance since the MSR had few members left. At the end of 1943, Soulès founded a new movement called the Mouvement révolutionnaire français. Although despising Déat’s intellectualism, Soulès suffered from the same defect. He also had Déat’s infinite capacity for self-delusion, allied to a marked predilection for plotting. Soulès’s was a mystical temperament in search of certainties, and from 1944 he turned to esotericism and the Cabbala.23

  Unlike Soulès, most leftist collaborationists gravitated towards the RNP, especially after Déat’s break with Deloncle. Five of the thirteen members of the RNP’s governing committee were former Socialist activists. The RNP showed a lot of interest in social problems, especially workers’ education which was looked after by Zoretti. In the orbit of the RNP were the collaborationist syndicalists who set up a paper, L’Atelier, a Syndicalist Centre for Propaganda (CSP), and a Social Labour Front (FST), whose name was inspired by the Nazi Arbeitsfront. The syndicalists who ran these organizations included important former CGT leaders like Georges Dumoulin, former head of the Nord Federation, and Marcel Roy who had run the Metallurgical Federation. Although such men had been central figures in pre-war trade unionism, the popular appeal of this leftist current of collaboration was minuscule. Dumoulin commented in June 1941: ‘the base is hostile, indifferent or refractory’.24L’Atelier sold about 2,000 copies. The so-called Congress of the FST managed to attract 600 people thanks to an allowance of 150 francs per day paid to each delegate by the Germans. In twelve départements for which detailed figures are available, out of 32,400 pre-war Socialists, only thirty can be found among members of collaborationist groups.25 Left-wing collaborationism had cadres without followers.

  Nonetheless the presence of former left-wing leaders in the RNP gave it a distinctive sensibility in the politics of collaborationism. It represented a left wing and the PPF a right wing, although the distinction blurred with time.26 Déat himself was reluctant to jettison all republican values. He condemned the removal of Marianne from schools and denounced Vichy’s clericalism. He confided in the autumn of 1942 that his French philosophical training made it hard for him to swallow German racist thought.27 Déat saw the Nazis as a twentieth-century incarnation of the soldiers of Year Two who had taken revolution to Europe on their bayonets. Doriot, on the other hand, was unbridled in his denunciations of traitors, Freemasons (suggesting that Déat was one), and Jews. The differences between Doriot and Déat were partly opportunistic: they both wanted power and were trying to outflank each other in winning German favour. There were also temperamental antipathies deriving from their past careers. Doriot retained the ruthlessness of a former Bolshevik; Déat the earnestness of a former Socialist. In character they were the Danton and Robespierre of the National Revolution: Doriot the working-class rebel, Déat the lower middle-class scholarship boy; Doriot the earthy street fighter, Déat the ascetic intellectual (he did not smoke or drink); Doriot driven by passion, Déat by logic. The source of Doriot’s passion was his hatred of communism. Déat was immured in the dialectical inevitability of his arguments: he allegedly wrote his six daily editorials for L’Œuvre at the start of the week. Each week he proved irrefutably, as he had done for ten years, that his political moment was about to dawn.28

  Despite their differences, Doriot and Déat shared the same dilemma. They depended entirely on German patronage, but the Germans had no intention of bringing them to power. The French fascists could not win. To the extent that they had no popular base, they were of dubious value to Hitler; to the extent that they might acquire popularity, they were a possible threat to him: National Socialism was not for export. If Abetz encouraged Déat over Doriot, it was partly because Doriot seemed more liable to succeed.29 Abetz wanted not to promote a French fascist movement which might one day take power, but to fragment French politics further. The collaborationists were to be a sword of Damocles suspended over the Vichy government—threatening enough to keep it in line, never strong enough to unseat it (unless the Germans wished).30

  Circles of Influence

  The audience for collaborationist ideas was larger than the membership of the collaborationist parties. Political activism was the most intense form of commitment, but not the only one. There were those who attended collaborationist meetings; those who read their newspapers; those who visited the exhibitions organized by the Germans to promote collaboration.

  The first of these exhibitions, at the Petit Palais in October 1940, was on Freemasonry. Visitors could see objects seized from the lodges and read information about Freemasonry’s links to the British and the Jews. In five weeks over 900,000 people visited this free exhibition, and then another 113,930 when it toured the provinces. An exhibition on ‘European France’ at the Grand Palais, between June and October 1941, attracted 635,000 visitors. It was followed between September 1941 and January 1942 by an exhibition on the ‘Jew and France’ at the Palais Berlitz. This attracted 255,600 visitors in Paris, and another 95,000 in the provinces. Finally, in March 1942, an exhibition on ‘Bolshevism against Europe’, at the Salle Wagram, attracted 370,000 visitors, and another 300,000 in the provinces.31 These figures are not insignificant but hard to interpret. Presumably many visitors went out of simple curiosity; the numbers visiting the exhibition on ‘the Jew and France’ were inflated by school visits. The Masonic and Jewish exhibitions may have attracted people who were sympathetic with the objectives of the organizers without necessarily being pro-German: although the Germans subsidized these exhibitions, they were ostensibly organized by French frontmen.32

  The Germans put considerable effort into propaganda with the Embassy and the Propaganda-Abteilung both vying for control.33 The Propaganda-Abteilung had a staff of over 1,200 and six sections dealing with the press, radio, literature, propaganda, cinema, and culture (including theatre, art, and music). Its objective was to promote German influence, and annihilate French cultural dominance in Europe. But Abetz, who was conducting a more subtle game of seduction, wanted to restrict the Propaganda-Abteilung to press censorship and run cultural affairs himself. In July 1942, he won this battle. The German Institute became a centre of cultural collaboration, organizing exhibitions, lectures, language classes, and concerts. It revived the pre-war Cahiers franco-allemands.

  German Institutes were also set up in the main provincial towns. There were fifteen of them in existence by 1944. In the first two years of the Occupation their language courses were so successful that people had to be turned away. Over 12,000 people enrolled in the autumn of 1941, but in the next year the numbers started to decline.34 Efforts were also made to promote German literature. This was one of the jobs of Epting’s deputy Karl-Heinz Bremer, who had been a lecturer at the École normale before the war. In January 1941 Bremer drew up a list of 500 works to be translated into French. In the end 331 of these did actually appear, but most of them were classics—twenty-one by Goethe, eleven by the Grimm brothers, seven by Schiller—rather than specifically Nazi products.35

  Reading Goethe did not make one a collborator; nor indeed did learning German—
even if there was something in Fabre-Luce’s observation that ‘the French bourgeois fulminates against collaboration, but learns German: that means that he thinks it is durable’.36 But the Germans also found French people willing to work for them in the areas of more overtly ideological propaganda. These were often professional anti-Semites and anti-Freemasons who now had access to funds for the first time in their lives. Henry Coston, one of the most indefatigable anti-Masonic polemicists of the 1930s, set up an anti-Masonic Action and Documentation Centre (CAD) in the premises of the Grand Lodge; the former naval officer Paul Chack created a Centre of Anti-Bolshevik Studies and a Committee of Anti-Bolshevik Action; Paul Sézille, a retired army officer, created the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions (IEQJ).37

  These pseudo-scientific bodies reached an infinitesimal audience. More important was the collaborationist press. Even a vicious rag like Au pilori sold about 50,000 copies; Déat reached more people as editorialist of L’Œuvre (with sales of around 130,000) than as leader of the RNP. After the arrival of the Germans, most of the pre-war Paris press had moved to the Free Zone. Of the forty-odd daily and weekly papers published in occupied Paris, only six were survivors from before 1940, but these included three very famous titles: Le Matin, which resumed publication on 17 June, three days after the arrival of the Germans, L’Illustration, which resumed on 10 August, and Le Petit Parisien which resumed on 8 October.