In short, if there was a shield in France between 1940 and 1944 it was less Vichy’s shield against Germany than the shield which the reactions of French civil society created between the French people and the regime supposedly protecting them against the Germans. It is to society that we must now turn.
Part III
Vichy, the Germans, and the French People
Introduction to Part III
As we have seen in Part II, only a tiny minority of people were actively involved in political collaboration, and as we shall see in Part IV, only a small minority were actively engaged in the organized Resistance. But what of the large majority who were actively engaged in neither, and often described as attentiste? One approach might be to argue, like the historian Richard Cobb, that for most people the daily rhythms of private life are more important than the public sphere. In the preface to his evocative book on the Occupation, Cobb proposes for his own autobiography a chronology marked by a private calendar of ferocious toothaches. The novelist Jacques Laurent agrees:
One must remember that the Occupation did not entirely occupy the thoughts of my contemporaries, whether it be my parents, whose only concern was to resolve the indirect consequences of the Occupation, notably the lack of coal which obliged them to move into the smallest room of the apartment, the bathroom, or my parents’ concierge, whose concern was that her husband’s bronchitis would become chronic despite the lack of tobacco, and who was sad at the death of her cat.1
But was it possible to live outside politics in the peculiar conditions of the Occupation when ‘ordinariness’ has implications it would not have in other circumstances? One aim of German propaganda was to encourage a return to ‘normal’. Did the attempt to continue an ordinary life not render one complicit in that enterprise? Is indifference not a form of complicity? As Pascal Ory has written: ‘At the most extreme, everyone who remained on territory occupied by the German army or that was under its control had to some degree collaborated.’ This is what Robert Paxton means by describing even those who ‘did’ nothing as ‘functional collaborators’. But everything depends on context. Another historian, John Sweets, has convincingly suggested that many of the silent majority could just as accurately be described as ‘functional resisters’. If a concierge who did nothing while witnessing a Jew being escorted out of her building by the police was a functional collaborator, was not a concierge who did nothing when seeing someone stuffing Resistance tracts in the letter boxes of her building a functional resister?2
In other words, silence during the Occupation had multiple meanings. A writer who did not actively participate in resistance, although refusing to publish while the Germans were in France, may not have been ‘doing’ anything, but this silence could carry the weight of an accusation. As Jacques Debû-Bridel put it: ‘Only silence has grandeur, all the rest is weakness … I sincerely pity those who mistake this necessary silence for resignation and refuse to understand the full force of its eloquence.’3 Or in the words of the writer and editor Max-Pol Fouchet: ‘Silence, far from being an absence, is a presence which is waiting.’4 On the other hand, another observer, the Jewish lawyer Lucien Vidal-Naquet, wrote in his journal in September 1942 to stigmatize what he called the ‘silence of abjectness’.5 Yet the most famous Resistance novel, Le Silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea), published clandestinely in 1942, celebrates silence: the silent resistance of a girl and her uncle who refuse to address a word to the German officer who has been billeted upon them.
Although we must try to penetrate the various meanings of silence, it would be wrong to go to the other extreme of trying to fit all conduct on to the spectrum of resistance and collaboration. These categories barely existed at the start of the Occupation. Until at least the end of 1942, the Resistance was too small to be a presence in the experience, even consciousness, of most people: choices did not seem to exist in 1940. One could say that the avoidance of choice is in itself a kind of choice in the way that Alain once claimed that someone who denied the existence of left and right was by definition of the right. Individuals were confronted with moral choices every time they came into contact with a German and they had to fashion individual codes of conduct compatible with dignity, self-respect, conscience, and survival. Such dilemmas are the inevitable consequence of any foreign occupation. They are present in Maupassant’s stories about the occupation of 1870–1. The writer Léon Werth, who kept a journal during the Occupation, remembered the case of his aunt who regretted for the next thirty years that she had in 1870 shaken the hand of a German officer because he had allowed her to visit her prisoner-of-war husband.6 The Occupation presented innumerable such dilemmas. Did one accept a seat proffered by a German soldier in the metro? Did one give directions to a German soldier if asked?
How do we assess the case of Edmond Dumérial, a teacher of German, who kept a diary during the Occupation, subsequently published under the title Journal d’un honnête homme pendant l’Occupation (Journal of an Honest Man during the Occupation). After the start of the Occupation, Dumérial offered his linguistic services to the prefect of the Loire-Inférieur. He was given considerable responsibility in the official contacts between the German and French authorities. A man of patriotic sentiments, conservative but not anti-republican, Dumérial deplored Vichy’s anti-republican and anti-Semitic legislation, and the policy of collaboration: after Montoire, he put flowers on English graves in the local cemetery. But Dumérial also saw it as his duty to smooth over problems between the Germans and the French. His view was that ‘the only policy is to accept the situation and adapt oneself diplomatically as best one can’. He formed a good relationship with the local German commander, who was assassinated in October 1941, and he regretted Resistance attacks on Germans as ‘regrettable for the harmony of Franco-German relations’.7 The Manichaean vocabulary of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ hardly seems appropriate to Dumérial. If he used his linguistic skills to mediate between the population and the Germans, it was because he wanted to protect his compatriots from the worst effects of the Occupation.
How do we assess the case of Frédéric Joliot, one of France’s most distinguished scientists? Winner of the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1935, Joliot held the chair of nuclear chemistry at the Collège de France. Having acquired the funding to build a particle accelerator (cyclotron)—the only one in Europe—he was in the forefront of research into the study of nuclear chain reactions and the potential development of nuclear energy. Immediately after the defeat Joliot had taken the precaution of sending abroad France’s stock of heavy water—used as a moderator in nuclear reactors—but he decided himself to stay on despite pressing invitations to go to Britain or America. Returning to Paris after the Exodus, Joliot found his laboratory had been taken over by the Germans, and he immediately embarked on negotiations to recover possession of it. It was clearly to Germany’s advantage that he should return to the laboratory, but before doing so he wanted assurances that any Germans working in the laboratory would not carry out research which could be detrimental to the military interests of France. He wrote to one colleague that these negotiations certainly pained him but the alternative might be ‘to exclude us from our place of work and dispossess us of our material’. Up to a point he was reassured by the fact that the German negotiators included the scientist Wolfgang Gentner who had worked in Joliot’s laboratory in the 1930s and was known to him as a former anti-Nazi. Joliot wrote to his wife that in the negotiations the Germans had shown themselves to be ‘correct, even respectful’. In the end Joliot never obtained all the guarantees he would have liked, but a modus vivendi was reached. Joliot continued to run the laboratory and the German scientists had two rooms of their own. The French and Germans did work together in the basement where the cyclotron was situated, but apart from this they met only in the lifts.
Despite this semi-amicable accommodation Joliot was not favourably viewed by the occupying authorities, not least because in the 1930s he had been closely involved
with the Popular Front and the anti-fascist left. In early November 1940 he was involved in one of the first public manifestations of opposition to the occupiers after the Germans arrested the distinguished physicist Jean Langevin on suspicion of being involved in early resistance efforts. This arrest outraged Parisian academic circles. At what would have been Langevin’s first lecture Joliot took the podium and made a public protest. On 11 November he was involved in a demonstration at the War Memorial of the Sorbonne. On two occasions in 1941 Joliot was arrested, but on both occasions almost immediately released thanks to the intervention of Gentner. Some time in 1942 he joined the clandestine Communist Party and was on the executive committtee of the Communist Resistance organization, the Front national.
How, then, does one characterize Joliot’s conduct? To work in a laboratory which was technically under the protection of the German army was clearly in some sense collaboration. Justifying his decision to stay in France, Joliot wrote to a colleague that it was ‘of primordial importance to maintain scientific activity intact’ in France: he was staying to protect his laboratory and France’s scientific future. Could this be described as ‘prophylactic collaboration’, even ‘patriotic collaboration’? But was not Joliot in quite a literal sense playing with fire given that the development of nuclear weapons in America was only two years away? Even if, as seems the case, Joliot did not realize that this development was so close—the cyclotron in Chicago which produced the first quantities of plutonium in 1942 was much more powerful than the French one—was he not too confident of his own ability to keep several balls in the air at once? Was he too reassured by the presence of Gentner? Did his resistance activities outweigh the degree of pragmatic collaboration which he felt to be necessary? How are such comparisons and measurements to be carried out?8
The near impossibility of answering such questions satisfactorily suggests that it might be more useful to jettison these categories of resistance and collaboration for all but the small activist minorities. Perhaps for the mass of the population it would be preferable to use the less morally charged term ‘accommodation’ proposed by Philippe Burrin. He has distinguished between ‘structural’ or forced accommodation imposed by the need to keep services running; ‘voluntary accommodation’ in which the French took initiatives of their own for a variety of motives ranging from the defence of professional or corporate interests to simple self-interest; and political accommodation inspired by some degree of ideological sympathy with the occupier.9
Burrin’s conceptualization, which owes something to Hoffmann’s distinctions between different kinds of collaboration, is extremely useful, but there are problems with entirely abandoning the category of collaboration, or at least restricting its application to a small minority. Given that the tendency of recent historiography is to extend resistance from the activist minority and site it within a broad social context, it would surely be illogical simultaneously to narrow the category of collaboration. It is also the case that the concept of collaboration did eventually come to structure the way people perceived their own conduct and the conduct of others. In that sense collaboration ‘existed’. It existed, however, as a historically contingent category. During the Great War, in the part of northeastern France which was occupied, the French lived in proximity to the Germans as they did between 1940 and 1944. But after 1918 only 123 people were tried for ‘intelligence with the enemy’, and they were people who had carried out flagrant acts of assistance to the Germans (such as denouncing people who were hiding French citizens on the run from the Germans).10 After 1945 the notion of what was considered reprehensible conduct was extended much more widely.
Even if collaboration exists, defining it remains very difficult. One celebrated contemporary definition was provided by Sartre in his essay ‘What is a Collaborator?’ Sartre defines the collaborator as a ‘feminine’ psychological type with certain predispositions which are latent and emerge in certain circumstances. For Sartre collaboration was a vocation to be explained by certain certain ‘psychological and social laws’.11 In fact Sartre was talking more about the extreme and committed cases like Drieu la Rochelle, who was probably his model. Another solution would be to take the definitions used by the post-Liberation courts and purge commissions. But even here there was much ambiguity. For example, there was uncertainty as to how to deal with ‘sexual collaboration’ between French women and German men. Some courts judged it as a crime of ‘intelligence with the enemy’; others saw it only as a misdemeanour punishable by the loss of civic rights.12 Social representations of collaboration were constantly shifting: its history is to some extent the history of the construction of the concept. The term must therefore be used in a fluid way, and we must be aware of the importance also of what Italian historians, following Primo Levi, call the ‘grey zone’. Conduct which might be described as collaboration could incorporate a myriad of motives including self-protection, the protection of others, even patriotism.
These problems were complicated by the existence of the Vichy regime. How do we judge those people who applied Vichy’s Jewish Statute, excluding Jews from various categories of employment? The term ‘collaborator’ is technically inappropriate since the law in question was a French law not a German one. The case is different from that of French policemen who rounded up Jews in July 1942: this was a German policy not a French one, and so the term ‘collaborator’ might be appropriate (although the orders had been given by the French government). Vichy further complicated matters because some who ardently opposed Germany were ready to serve the regime either out of personal loyalty to Pétain, believing he was playing a double game, or because they believed in the National Revolution. It has to be remembered that Vichy started with a radical project to change France. Like the so-called totalitarian regimes, Vichy up to a point aspired to create a New Man (and Woman). Examining the experience of life under the regime therefore also requires examining how people responded to this project. How much ‘resistance’ was there to it?
The more that is known about the social history of ‘totalitarian’ societies, the more it is clear how unsuccessful they were in transforming civil society, even when people did not resist in any organized or political way. The German term for political resistance is Widerstand, but Martin Broszat has suggested that the term Resistenz, the medical term describing the body’s resistance to infection, could also be given a social meaning to describe the multifarious ways in which the social organism resists attempts to transform it. Society develops its own antibodies: the Russian peasants whom Stalin collectivized could be physically moved, but they could not so easily be remade, and their values reacted back on the state which tried to transform them.13 At one level, therefore, totalitarian regimes are hard to resist because their control of society is so all-encompassing. But by trying to influence behaviour that more liberal states ignore, or leave in the domain of private life, they politicize what had previously been unpolitical and private, and thereby increase the surface of possible opposition. If, say, listening to jazz is prohibited, a previously innocent activity becomes a sort of resistance, or at least pushes civil society into an opposition that is the precondition of organized resistance. This makes it necessary to extend the notion of resistance beyond politics. The extent to which individuals retain autonomy defines the limits of a totalitarian regime’s success in transforming civil society.
Up to a point, this model applies to Vichy—but only up to a point. Despite its ambitious reform projects, the regime explicitly eschewed ‘totalitarianism’, and allowed a considerable measure of pluralism. This created another level of ambiguities. Having rejected the single party, Vichy was forced to rely upon the co-operation of pre-existing organizations and institutions to carry out its transformation of society. Since the regime supposedly believed in handing power back to the ‘real’ communities, this was entirely in line with its ideological preconceptions: there was to be no Gleichschaltung. Vichy did not invent all that many new institutions so much as enco
urage initiatives that were believed to be in the right spirit. This created, between the regime and civil society, what Henri Rousso has called ‘spaces of liberty’.14 As a result, between the policies of the regime and their implementation, there were contradictions and misunderstandings which derived from the large margin of manoeuvre that Vichy left to many executants of those policies.
This meant that initially Vichy had something to offer not only traditional conservatives and diehard anti-Republicans. Some of those who had supported the Popular Front not out of passionate republicanism but because they believed it was an opportunity to remedy some of the defects of the liberal state were also ready to give Vichy the benefit of the doubt, or at least see how much of its project was compatible with theirs. This was not opportunism or betrayal but a sign that there were many for whom the divisions between Republicans and anti-Republicans were no longer the ones that counted most.
These are the questions which will be discussed in the following chapters. Chapter 11 examines propaganda, policing, and administration, and the ways in which the Vichy regime tried to mobilize support. Chapter 12 looks at the responses of the population towards both Vichy and the German occupier. Here we will be primarily concerned with the period up to the end of 1942 but not beyond. This is because once the organized Resistance became a more important presence in 1943, people found themselves reacting not simply to the Germans and to Vichy but also to the Resistance. We shall, therefore, return to this question when discussing the organized Resistance in Part IV. Chapter 13 is concerned with the responses of artists and intellectuals, not those, already examined, who were politically committed to collaboration, or those, to be examined later, who were politically committed to resistance, but rather the majority who were testing what could be achieved with the new constraints, and probing the limits of acceptable compromise.
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