When Bousquet took over the police in 1942 he tried to emasculate these new police forces. In July 1942 the PQJ was renamed the Investigation and Inspection Division (SEC) and had its powers reduced. The SPAC was harder to crack since its PPF director, Charles Detmar, was much appreciated by the German SD. But in August it was absorbed into the regular police and became the Service of Repression of Anti-National Activity (SRMAN). Bousquet’s motive in bringing these organizations under State control was administrative tidiness, not any ideological or sentimental objection to their activities. He was irritated that the PQJ had carried out arrests of Jews which it was not authorized to do. His method of neutralizing these rivals was to show that the official police could do the job better. Thus Vichy’s designated enemies—Jews or Communists—found themselves not only the victims of competitive zeal between the French and Germans, but of institutional rivalries within the Vichy regime.58
Bousquet’s reassertion of the authority of the traditional administration after Pucheu’s attempt to politicize the State apparatus shows how wrong it would be to characterize Vichy as moving closer to fascism in 1942. The regime certainly became more repressive in 1942, but fascism is about more than repression. The spirit of Pucheu and Marion’s policies in 1941 was more fascist than that of Laval and Bousquet in 1942. Even under Pucheu, however, the backbone of Vichy remained the French State bureaucracy. Despite promises of a leaner administration, the number of state employees swelled from 650,000 in 1939 to 900,000 in 1944.59
At least until the end of 1942, the regime was served loyally by the police.60 Vichy’s anti-communism and hostility to foreigners struck a chord with the police. They had already been arresting Communists in the last stages of the Third Republic, and in this respect Vichy at first represented no major change. If the police were discontented under Vichy, it was for practical rather than political reasons. Even before the imposition of STO and the growth of resistance in 1943, workloads had significantly increased. Policing the black market was a full-time job in itself. Wading through sacks of letters of denunciation was as dispiriting as it was time-consuming. These letters had to be followed up, but the accusations mostly turned out to be groundless. The police liked this job all the less because the letters often denounced them as Freemasons or Communists.
To cope with their new burdens, the police benefited from no increase in resources. A police chief in Clermont complained that his men lacked whistles, truncheons, handcuffs, new uniforms, and even proper shoes. The police were also short-staffed. Many policemen were in prisoner of war camps, and it was difficult to attract replacements. A recruitment campaign with the slogan ‘Police nationale, Révolution nationale’ was such a failure that in November 1941 Darlan ordered that the words ‘National Revolution’ be erased from the posters. The idea that the police was being offered a more political role than under the Republic clearly discouraged potential recruits.
Nor did the police appreciate the creation of the new supplementary police forces. They resented the GMR because it was better paid, and they considered the anti-Jewish police to be a nuisance. Because these anti-Jewish police were only authorized to gather information on infractions of the law and recommend action to the police, they were constantly sending them on what turned out to be wild goose chases. In 1942, the police started to become demoralized, and became nostalgic for the Republic when working conditions had been better. At a demonstration organized by the Resistance in Marseilles on 14 July 1942, police tolerance of the demonstrators was flagrant enough to arouse the fury of collaborationists, and win praise on the BBC. This was a warning to the regime that the police might not be counted on indefinitely. Nonetheless before 1943 the degree of police disaffection must not be exaggerated.
Vichy could also count on the loyalty of judges and magistrates. This could not necessarily have been taken for granted given how little concern was shown for legal niceties, especially once Pucheu became Interior Minister: in August 1942, one German observer noted approvingly that, in the pursuit of Communists, Vichy seemed ready to ‘abandon the sacrosanct conceptions of traditional French law’.61 The most striking example of this was the Special Sections set up on 23 August to act expeditiously against ‘Communists and anarchists’. This law was backdated to 14 August so that it could be applied retroactively. Two weeks later a special court—the State Tribunal—was set up to judge acts endangering ‘the unity and security’ of the State: it could order the immediate application of the death penalty with no possibility of appeal. Barthélemy, the Justice Minister, who had reservations about these measures, worried that it would be impossible to find judges to serve in these courts. His concern was unwarranted.
To ensure obedience Vichy did not even need to carry out a significant purge of judicial personnel.62 No existing careers were broken, but accelerated promotion was available for those known, in Barthélemy’s words, for their ‘firmness of character and devotion to the State’. No judges or magistrates protested publicly about the new duties they were required to perform. Only one, Paul Didier, refused to swear the oath to Pétain, and he was immediately sacked; another one who tried to restrict the oath to the person of the Marshal alone was suspended.63 No sanctions, however, were taken against the judge who refused to preside over the Paris Special Section in August 1941, and he subsequently received the promotion he was due. It was therefore possible to distance oneself from the regime, but few judges did so, at least before 1943. The habit of obedience was deeply ingrained, and most judges shared the prevailing anti-Communist prejudices. Exceptional measures against the Communists had after all started under the Third Republic. Judges were also susceptible to the argument that they were preserving French justice from German interference.
It is hard to generalize much beyond this point. The severity of the Special Sections varied considerably. The Special Section of Douai considered 550 cases, and pronounced five death sentences; that of Bourges considered twenty-eight cases and pronounced no death penalties. In total thirty-three death penalties were pronounced, and one carried out; 129 people were condemned to forced labour for life, and 1,130 for fixed periods. It would be wrong, however, to think that the activity of these courts mostly concerned the repression of communism. Of the eighty-two cases judged by the Special Section of Caen, only seven related to offences committed by Communists; three-quarters concerned the theft of animals or the theft of the contents of parcels being sent to prisoners of war.
The loyalty displayed by the police and the judiciary was representative of the administration as a whole. The bureaucracy worked smoothly and toed the line. For the first time since the Second Empire, high-ranking public servants had to swear an oath of loyalty to the head of State. The most important ceremony occurred on 19 February 1942 when all prefects gathered at Vichy to swear the oath. The regime discouraged zealous prefects from getting all their subordinates to swear as well: it was feared that this would devalue the oath or that the number of refusals would swell embarrassingly.64
It is difficult for administrators in any system to break with habits of obedience. As Peyrouton, an administrator turned minister, said at his post-war trial: ‘I did not pose questions. I repeat: I am not Republican, I am not anti-Republican, I am an agent, a functionary. If I had to pose such questions to myself in thirty-five years of service, I would have had to pose them thirty-five times.’65 Top civil servants were attracted by the regime’s supposed commitment to administrative efficiency. Many Vichy reforms, including the creation of a national police force, were measures that politicians had been trying to achieve for years.66 Some branches of the administration were more exposed to morally invidious situations than others. It was easier for a young official in the Finance Ministry, like Maurice Couve de Murville, to keep his hands clean, than for a young official in the prefectoral administration, like Maurice Papon. But officials did not only have the choice between obedience or dismissal. The top civil servants at the Ministry of Education found it easy to sabotage most
of Bonnard’s ideas—especially since Bonnard was not interested in the details of administration and would sometimes deal with documents by waving a pendulum over them. The surest way of getting him to approve a policy was to say that it was modelled on Germany.67
Bonnard was not hard to outwit. In other cases, officials went into a kind of internal exile. This was the tactic adopted by François Bloch-Lainé, a Finance Ministry official whom Bichelonne asked to prepare a statistical inventory of French industry. Excited by this chance to remedy France’s glaring deficiencies in statistical information, Bloch-Lainé enquired how these statistics would be kept from the Germans. On being told that the information was to be provided to both the French and the Germans, he had himself posted to a less interesting, but less exposed, assignment.68 Very occasionally officials refused point blank to carry out orders. In January 1943, Joseph Rivalland, regional prefect in Marseilles, refused to provide the Germans with a list of hostages. Instead he offered only his own name. He was immediately sacked, and moved to the Cour des Comptes.69
The Prefects: ‘Propagandists of Truth’
Rivalland’s case is celebrated because of its rarity. In general, French administrators executed their orders with efficiency. Of no group was this truer than the prefects, who had personified State authority in the départements since their creation by Napoleon. The prefects were infinitely more important to Vichy than any of its own innovations. In this respect, the regime resembled the Second Empire more than Nazi Germany. A circular of October 1940 informed the prefects that they were to be ‘the propagandists of truth, of hope and of liberating action, the defenders of a France bruised by twenty years of errors and follies’.
In the summer and autumn of 1940, thirty-five prefects were sacked (among them Jean Moulin). Prefects who remained in office were moved to new départements in case they had become too dependent on local influences: by the end of August 1940, only twenty-seven prefects (out of eighty-seven) remained in the département to which they had been appointed under the Republic; by July 1941, only five. There was a half-hearted attempt to bring new blood into the corps: 18 per cent of new prefects were recruited from outside the prefectoral corps, including seven from the armed forces. Pucheu also wanted prefects to undergo a political re-education to ‘rid them of everything in their intellectual formation which could impede their support of the movement of national renovation’.70
The prefects’ powers were extended and they were given a new uniform with gold braid (another imperial touch) to enhance their prestige. Nonetheless their role under Vichy was unenviable. Besides warding off interference from the Legion or from the propaganda delegates, they were also undermined by the creation of regional prefects in April 1941. The regional prefects were supposed to remedy supply problems by breaking down departmental autonomy. But there were unresolved issues of jurisdiction between them and the ordinary prefects. The prefects found themselves increasingly tied up in red tape: the minutiae of daily administration left little time to be ‘propagandists of truth’. It was all the harder to work effectively because they were continuously being moved around. Although most transfers and sackings occurred in 1940, there were six more occasions when these took place on a large scale. An average département had three or four prefects in just four years.
Prefects in the Occupied Zone also found their power whittled away by the German occupiers. Each prefect faced in microcosm the problem of the regime as a whole: whether to co-operate with the Germans in order to preserve French sovereignty or whether to be obstructive at the risk of provoking German intervention.71 When it came to anti-communism, however, many prefects shared a sense of purpose with the Germans. The first arrests of Communists in the autumn of 1940 did not occur under German pressure. Sometimes indeed the French authorities felt they did not enjoy full German support because of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Up to June 1941, anti-Communist repression was toughest in the South, where Vichy was most in control, and least severe in the Zone rattachée, where Vichy had least influence: the German authorities in the Nord refused to allow the prefect to open an internment camp for Communists.72 Once anti-communism became a German priority as well, French and German police co-operated on anti-Communist repression at local level even before the formalization of arrangements between Bousquet and Oberg in August 1942. The prefect of the Nord got his internment camp in September 1941. Camps were set up in the Loiret in April 1941, in the Saône-et-Loire in March 1942.73
The relève and STO pushed the French authorities into even closer administrative collaboration at local level. In a perfect illustration of the ‘River Kwai’ syndrome, the prefect of Loiret reported in the autumn of 1942 that ‘we have tried to protect the workers against arbitrariness and show the local occupation authorities a demonstration of the efficiency of the French administration’. The local Feldkommandant reported on his ‘exemplary’ attitude. The Germans played on the French obsession with sovereignty by holding out rewards for good behaviour. In May 1943, Sauckel’s representative reassured this prefect that the Germans would leave the implementation of STO to the French, and offered a bait to encourage them to co-operate: ‘The success of the operation could [cause] … a marked attenuation of the interference of the German military administration in French internal matters … The result of this operation will represent a touchstone of the capacity of the French administration to carry out its tasks independently.’74
For at least two years, the Germans had few complaints about the prefects. It was even reported at the end of 1942 that the ‘spirit of collaboration’ of the top French officials was improving. During his lecture tour of the South in 1942, Professor Grimm was impressed by the courtesy and friendliness of the prefects who received him.75
Only a tiny number of prefects, driven by ideological hostility to Communists, Jews, and Masons, could be said to have collaborated enthusiastically (Chiappe in the Gard). More of them were enthusiastic about the National Revolution (Morane in the Loiret, Carles in the Nord), but unsympathetic to the Germans. The majority, however, merely carried out their duties in a spirit of professionalism rather than political zeal. What made the prefects’ task difficult was that the destruction of local democracy had left them operating in a vacuum. In the Republic, local government operated through a delicate balance of power between the prefect, representing the State, and the locally elected representatives (mayors, conseillers généraux) who mediated between them and the population. The destruction of the conseils généraux was judged by Dumoulin de Labarthète to be Vichy’s biggest mistake because it created a void which the replacement commissions administratives were inadequate to fill.76
The prefects found themselves bearing the brunt of the regime’s unpopularity. Vichy considered creating a new administrative rank of ‘cantonal agents’ to explain policy and build contacts with the local population. But Laval wound up this experiment after it had been tried in a few localities.77 Laval’s replacement of the commissions administratives with conseils départementaux in August 1942 was a recognition that it had been misguided to abolish those bodies which genuinely represented local opinion. But this step towards the Republic was too half-hearted—there were still no elections—and too belated to win back support for Vichy.
To compensate for the destruction of local democracy prefects had to try and cultivate local figures of influence, even those with strong Republican affiliations. Certainly such people were hardly in favour with the new regime. Of 311 former conseillers généraux who were selected to sit on the new commissions administratives, only 10 per cent were from the left, mainly the moderate left. Of 355 Socialist conseillers généraux before the Armistice—11 per cent of the total—only two were retained in the commissions administratives.78 But the way that the new law on municipalities was applied suggests that the extent of the local purge should not be exaggerated. In towns with a population over 10,000, over one-third of mayors remained in place. Forty-seven Socialist mayors of towns with a population of over 2,000
were sacked, and twenty-three retained.79 In the mining areas of the Nord, the sub-prefect wanted to avoid ‘too great a gap between the appointed mayor and the population by the designation of personalities too markedly of the right’; in the left-wing Pas-de-Calais, 73 per cent of mayors were retained. In Lille, the Socialist mayor, Saint-Venant, was replaced by another Socialist, Paul Dehove; in Lens the Socialist Alfred Maes, a great local figure, was kept on despite his opposition to Marshal Putain (the French for ‘tart’), as he was wont to call the Marshal.80
The Nord/Pas de Calais was perhaps unusual because Vichy’s lack of influence in the area meant that the priority was less to implement the National Revolution than preserve some contact with the local population. But even in a département like the Loiret, the prefect avoided a sectarian approach, despite being personally committed to the principles of the regime. Of the twenty-six councils in the Loiret affected by the law on municipalities (those with a population above 2,000), twelve kept the same mayor, of whom half were Radical, and one was even a Freemason. This was recognition of the local importance of the Radical Party. As for the new appointees, they were chosen with an eye to local opinion. The new mayor of Orleans, Dr Simonin, a member of the moderate centre PDP, replaced a Radical. This represented a move from left to right, but within the boundaries of moderate Third Republic politics.81 In the Saint-Étienne region, the prefect, Georges Potut, himself formerly a centre-right politician, kept contacts with local left-wing politicians.82
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