B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Chapter 14 examines the regime’s policy towards women and the young. The intention here is not only to evaluate the impact of those policies but also to analyse an area in which the ‘spaces of liberty’ were particularly important, and the ambiguities also. Finally, Chapter 15 looks at the experience of the Jews, examining how their fate was bound up in the interaction between the policies of the Germans, the policies of the Vichy regime, and the responses of French civil society.

  11

  Propaganda, Policing, and Administration

  Balkanization

  Assessing the impact of the Occupation on the French population is difficult because a unified France no longer existed: there were at least six Frances. First, the Unoccupied Zone covering 45 per cent of French territory and about a third of the population. Secondly, the tiny Italian Zone (extended after November 1942). Thirdly, Alsace-Lorraine which had been effectively annexed by Germany and was run by two Gauleiter: the two départements of Alsace were attached to the Gau of Baden, and Moselle in Lorraine was attached to the Gau of Saar-Palatinate. Fourthly, the two départements of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais (zone rattachée) were attached to the German military command in Brussels. Fifthly, there was the Forbidden Zone (Zone interdite) or Reserved Zone (Zone réservée), comprising a total of six départements and part of four others, running from the mouth of the Somme in the north down to the Swiss frontier in the Jura. This area was separated from the rest of the Occupied Zone by another demarcation line, and refugees who had fled from it during the Exodus were not allowed back. Finally, there was the rest of the Occupied Zone.1

  To these six Frances, one could add three more. From April 1941, another ‘forbidden zone’ about 20 kilometres deep ran along the coast from Dunkirk to Hendaye. There was Algeria which remained free of German troops throughout the Occupation. Finally, there was the diaspora of 1.5 million prisoners of war in Germany who were assiduously courted by the Vichy regime.

  The divisions between these zones respected no previous administrative boundaries. The demarcation line between the Unoccupied and the Occupied Zones ran through the middle of thirteen départements; in the Occupied Zone only twelve départements were not crossed by at least one line. The Jura département lay in three different zones. These lines were genuine internal frontiers. Obtaining a pass (Ausweis) could be difficult. Even communicating across the demarcation line was problematic. People could only write to family members, and had to do so using a card thirteen lines long where they ticked the appropriate words: ‘in good health’, ‘tired’, ‘slightly/seriously ill’, ‘wounded’, ‘prisoner’, ‘dead’, ‘no news of’.

  Conditions in the two main zones were very different. The North was on German time, one hour ahead of the South. This meant that during midwinter in the North it was not light before 9 a.m. In the North, there was a curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.; in the South there was none. In the North, American films were forbidden; in the South, they were available until November 1942. In much of the North, it was difficult to hear Vichy radio, and easier to hear Radio Paris, or the BBC. In the South there were French flags; in the North swastikas. In the South, the Marseillaise was sung; in the North it was prohibited. Because the Germans feared any possible revival of French militarism, several distinctive features of the Vichy regime, like the Chantiers de la jeunesse and the Veterans’ Legion, were banned in the North.

  The division between Free Zone and Occupied Zone was not the only one that mattered. The population of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais felt entirely cut off from the rest of France. The German presence was oppressive from the start; workers were being drafted to Germany from the summer of 1940. The history of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais under occupation belongs as much to the history of Belgium as France. Visiting the area in May 1941, a Vichy representative reported: ‘there is as much difference between this Zone and the Occupied Zone as between the Occupied Zone and the Free Zone’.2

  Alsace-Lorraine underwent total Germanization. School lessons were conducted in German; citizens not considered to be assimilable were deported to France; Nazi organizations like the Hitler Youth were introduced; statues of Joan of Arc were pulled down; and berets forbidden. The 410,000 refugees who had fled south were ordered to return; about two-thirds of them did so. From August 1942, men of eligible age had to join the Wehrmacht. If they tried to escape, they were warned that reprisals would be exacted on their families. There were about 130,000 of these ‘malgré nous’ (Against Our Will), as they were called. Dispersed in different army units, most were sent to the eastern front, from where 40,000 never returned.3

  The disruptions caused by France’s geographical fragmentation were exacerbated by constant changes in the rules. After May 1941, all zones were on German time. The system of correspondence across the Line was progressively relaxed: from June 1941, there was a blank card of seven lines; from September 1941, ordinary cards could be sent; from March 1943, all restrictions were lifted. The German troops policing the Nordostlinie were removed in December 1941. The separation of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais remained in force, but from the spring of 1941 Vichy representatives were allowed in, and people permitted to display photographs of Pétain.

  Given the Nazis’ predilection for ethnic theorizing, it is perhaps surprising that the ‘six Frances’ were not joined by others: a Flemish one and a Breton one. In the north-east, where only about 170,000 French people spoke Flemish and, unlike in Belgium, there were no community tensions, the Germans allowed the separatist leader the Abbé Gantois to organize regionalist cultural events, but not to promote separatism. In Brittany there were a million Breton speakers, and a tiny Breton nationalist party (PNB) had existed since 1931. After the defeat, its leaders, who escaped to Germany on the outbreak of war, believed their moment had arrived. In July 1940, they proclaimed the Breton National Council, and set up a paper, L’Heure bretonne, which had about 8,000 readers. But after momentary hesitation, the Germans decided that the advantages of supporting a movement which enjoyed such minuscule support were outweighed by the disadvantages of causing friction with Vichy. The PNB was taken over by a moderate leader who approved Vichy’s regionalist policies. At the end of 1943, however, the more radical wing seceded, and in May 1944 founded a pro-German PNB and a Breton milice (the Perrot group) whose fifty members ended up fighting for Breton independence wearing German uniform with a Breton badge.4

  Other Maps

  The occupation map of France must also be fitted over an older map of French memories and traditions. These two maps did not necessarily match. Much of the Unoccupied Zone included the traditional Republican heartlands of the south which might have been expected to be more resistant to Vichy’s message than the traditionally conservative west which was in the Occupied Zone. In some Protestant areas of the south, ‘resistance’ had a history going back to the seventeenth century. During the Occupation, the Catholic north of the Lozère département proved less favourable to the Resistance than the Protestant south.5

  One intense regional memory survived in those north-eastern départements which had been occupied during the First World War. This was the only part of France where people started out with concrete images of what occupation meant.6 An ingrained suspicion of southerners made people ready to believe that the Armistice had been signed because the timorous meridionals wanted to keep the war off their territory. The region was traditionally Anglophile—Roubaix was the second town in France to form a football club—and the Germans remained ‘Boches’ throughout the years of Briandism. Lille has five monuments commemorating the city’s suffering between 1914 and 1918, and several streets celebrating local resistance heroes of the First World War. Jean Lebas, Socialist Mayor of Roubaix, had been deported to Germany in the First World War and suffered the same fate in the Second—but this time he did not return. Many restrictions imposed in the second occupation were familiar from the first: the curfews, the obligation to step off the pavement if German soldiers were passing, the taking of hostages, and the confiscation of c
arrier pigeons in an area where pigeon fancying was a popular pastime. Lille had erected a statue to the sixteen ‘colombophiles morts pour la France’ in the First World War. Although such memories helped to forge a unified regional identity, one must not underestimate the countervailing effects of the Popular Front which had exacerbated class tensions in this highly industrialized region with its deeply conservative and Catholic bourgeoisie.

  To these maps—the conjunctural map imposed by the Occupation and the deeper structural map of memory—should be added a third one: that of food shortages. By September 1940 most essential goods were rationed. The struggle for survival forms the background to every memoir of the period. The most literary of diarists spent time obsessively compiling lists of prices and noting the time spent in queues. Thus the journalist Galtier-Boissière on 12 January 1941: ‘Atmosphere reminiscent of the Siege of Paris; interminable queues.’ Or the writer Jean Guéhenno on 3 January 1941: ‘We have coupons but cannot buy anything with them; the shops are empty.’ Or the journalist Jacques Biélinky on 29 December 1940: ‘Rue Mouffetard there is no food. In the queues the subject is discussed energetically.’ On 10 February 1941, Biélinky noted that he had queued one and a half hours for an egg.7

  The level of rations for the largest category of the population was 1,327 calories per day as opposed to an average of 3,000 per day before the war.8 This barely adequate ration was steadily reduced, but even then it was difficult to find. There were many reasons for the shortages: the British blockade, German requisitioning of French produce, and falling agricultural production caused by lack of labour, livestock, and fertilizer. To make matters worse, the Occupation divided the France of grain-producers from the France of wine-growers. Before the war the Occupied Zone had produced all the sugar grown in France, three-quarters of all wheat, 87 per cent of all butter.

  The market became so fragmented that it is impossible to draw a comprehensive map of shortages. People in the South believed that food problems did not exist in the North. In fact the most fundamental division was between town and country. In thirty-nine mainly rural départements, mortality rates in 1941–3 were lower than in 1936–8; in cities they were higher.9 City dwellers with country relatives, or country property, were privileged. Others would embark on scavenging expeditions into the countryside. In Dijon, hundreds of people regularly headed to the countryside on bicycles with trailers attached in order to stock up on provisions.10 The rural commune of Arnecke in the Nord was frequently invaded by townspeople. Up to 200 people at a time would descend from the train from Lille to find provisions for their families, or buy for resale on the black market. The local populace viewed these expeditions with apprehension.11

  Some country areas of monocultural production, like the wine-producing Var and Hérault, suffered as badly as towns. Regions of mixed production, like the Seine-et-Marne or Loiret, suffered least.12 Nowhere suffered more than cities like Marseilles and Montpellier, which were surrounded by monocultural production. Montpellier in 1944 was said to be the town with the least meat, least bread, least eggs, least milk, and most wine in France. In the Hérault, in November 1942, all outside supplies of vegetables had dried up, and people lived on a diet of chestnuts and potatoes.13 Everywhere meat became a luxury; swedes and Jerusalem artichokes made their appearance in the winter of 1940. Recalling the Occupation fifty years later, the Resistance leader Jean-Pierre Lévy remembered above all hunger.14

  When prefects listened to popular opinion, the loudest sounds they heard were not political slogans but rumbling stomachs. This had profound political consequences. It undermined Pétain’s claim that by signing the Armistice he had saved France from the deprivations of war; and it subverted Vichy’s rhetoric of moral unity. The struggle to survive created a general sauve-qui-peut which was far from the propaganda image of the nation gathering around the Father-Protector. The mothers of large families were fêted by the regime, but in reality people resented them for enjoying the privilege of being allowed to join the front of food queues.15 Despite propaganda extolling the virtues of the peasantry, town-dwellers blamed peasant cupidity for the shortages, and believed that the countryside was groaning with unsold produce. Urban resentment reached such proportions that in some areas the authorities worried that people from towns would invade the countryside and violently seize the food they lacked; occasionally this did happen.16

  Trying to control prices forced the regime into ever more bureaucratic intervention which alienated the peasants it courted so assiduously: there was more State, not less. Farmers held back or hid their produce, and black market prices soared. In the Haute-Savoie these were sometimes 1,000 per cent above official prices.17 In March 1942, the regime acknowledged its inability to eradicate the black market by accepting that those who infringed the regulations would not be prosecuted if they had acted to satisfy family needs.18 Tacit tolerance of the black market nonetheless created grey areas which caused friction between the population and the authorities. On two days in April 1942, the police searched every passenger descending from the train at Lille station. In the course of this operation they seized 9,550 kilos of potatoes, 170 kilos of beans, 120 kilos of peas, 430 kilos of wheat, 70 kilos of meat, 230 eggs, and 16 chickens. But most individuals were only carrying small quantities of goods (between 10 and 30 kilos) for their own use. They felt that they were entitled to keep their merchandise, and the atmosphere in the station turned ugly. In such situations, serious incidents often flared up.19

  Shortages did not affect food alone. Obtaining fuel was also a major problem. The winter of 1940 was exceptionally cold—in Paris there were seventy days of frost—and coal was scarce. Lack of petrol led to the appearance of cars powered by gas or woodburning (gazogènes); in Paris people turned to bicycle-rickshaws (vélo-taxis). Since the Germans issued permits for only 7,000 private cars in Paris, the streets of the city were eerily empty. This was the heyday of the bicycle. But even these were not so easy to acquire: they were subject to German requisitioning and the scarcity of rubber made tyres difficult to replace. The price of bicycles rocketed, and there was a black market in stolen ones.20 In general, the Occupation was the time of the ersatz economy: wooden soles instead of leather, grilled acorns instead of coffee, sunflower leaves instead of tobacco.

  Selling the National Revolution: Propaganda

  It was against this background of penury and fragmentation that Vichy set about implementing its National Revolution. The division of France into zones complicated the most basic tasks of government. Ministers were located in Vichy, but their civil servants were mostly in Paris. Keeping contact depended on German co-operation. When the Germans were displeased with the French they would refuse to issue an Ausweis. Yves Bouthillier and René Belin, the Ministers of Finance and Labour, were not allowed to go to Paris between December 1940 and April 1941. Such restrictions became less severe during the course of 1941, but Berthelot, the Minister of Transport, who went to Bordeaux in October 1941 without permission was unceremoniously ordered to leave. The first minister authorized to visit the Zone rattachée was Pucheu in September 1941. Only some civil servants were permitted to carry files across the Line. The Germans could also suspend authorization to telephone across it, and they listened in to conversations. This made civil servants more liable to write things down, adding to the flood of paper produced. Like everything, paper was scarce, and officials were instructed to write on both sides of it; and also to dust their lampshades regularly to save electricity.21

  To govern at all in such conditions was an achievement, but the regime claimed to be inaugurating a new era of administrative efficiency. Pétain announced on 11 July 1940: ‘The impotence of the State must no longer paralyse the Nation … Civil servants will no longer be hindered by narrow regulations and excessive controls. … They will act faster …We will create an organized France.’22 The reality was quite different as was noted by an internal report of 1941: ‘The Vice-President of the Council is not informed about the internal situati
on of the country … The ministers do not control their administrations which usually betray them … The result is that the country is neither administered nor governed.’ One of the government’s main preoccupations was drumming up enthusiasm for the Marshal, but it could not even provide sufficient portraits of him. The Ministry of the Interior had instructed all public buildings to display Pétain’s portrait, but in February 1941 the prefect of Belfort complained that of the 392 portraits he had ordered four months earlier, only twenty had arrived!23

  Nonetheless, the regime’s propaganda was on a scale unprecedented in France.24 It was reported in January 1942 that there were so many posters on city walls that no one read them any more.25 Saturation had been reached. The effectiveness of propaganda was also undermined by factional infighting. Until 13 December 1940, Laval tried to keep control over propaganda, and stuffed his cronies into key positions. To counter Laval’s influence, Ménétrel set up the Amicale de France. Once Marion took over propaganda, he imposed a degree of consolidation, but although he took over the Amicale, its teams of propagandists—the Amis du Maréchal—continued to compete with Marion’s Propaganda Delegates. On Laval’s return, Marion was sidelined, though not sacked, and Laval again put in his own team. Laval did not suspect Marion of being lukewarm about collaboration, but he always preferred having personal control over everything and was happier using traditional propaganda methods than experimenting with new techniques. Laval believed essentially in newspapers.

  Apart from problems caused by these internecine conflicts, Vichy propaganda was also competing with the Germans. In two years, the German Embassy, less active in this area than the Propaganda-Abteilung, distributed 17 million brochures, 10 million tracts, and 400,000 copies of 23 posters.26 The Germans created a Press Agency, and the Propaganda-Abteilung gave detailed guidelines to the 350 papers or periodicals of the Occupied Zone. To counter this, in November 1940, Vichy took over France’s main independent press organization, the Havas agency, which was renamed the French Information Office (OFI). Vichy censorship was supplemented by a stream of instructions and ‘guidance notes [notes d’orientation]’ sent out by OFI.27 These ranged from matters of high policy—an instruction to play up a meeting between Laval and Goering and downplay the celebration of the Armistice (11 November 1940)—to minute points of detail—an instruction prohibiting reference to the menus offered to the Marshal on his provincial visits (presumably in deference to food shortages) or mention of his birthday in 1941 (presumably in order not to remind people of his age).28