One sign of this was the popularity of the BBC. In October 1940, Vichy forbade people to listen to British radio in public places. Offenders were liable to a 100 franc fine or six days in prison. A year later the ban was extended to listening in private as well, with the penalty raised to a 10,000 franc fine or two years in prison. General Stülpnagel, usually seen as a moderate, wanted the maximum penalty to be death, but Darlan resisted on the grounds this would only further antagonize the population. He preferred to reinforce the jamming of BBC broadcasts. The Germans got their way at the end of 1942, but the escalation of penalties only demonstrated the extent of the problem.18
Although people were almost unanimous in their attitude towards the Germans, initially it remained possible for people of opposing views to maintain cordial relations. In May 1941, Drieu sent his latest book to Guéhenno whose opposition to collaboration was unambiguous from the start. The dedication read: ‘as a token of complete disagreement’; Guéhenno found this ‘rather touching [plutôt gentil]’. Similarly Mauriac wrote to Drieu in December 1940 that, while not agreeing with him, he found his views ‘defensible’. By the end of 1941, contact between them was broken off. But when in November 1941 the writer Jean Grenier consulted Mauriac about the propriety of contributing to the NRF, Mauriac’s reply was: ‘No need to tell you that I in no way go along with Drieu; but I am not indignant at his attitude. Such is the position of France today that no one has the right to cast a stone at anybody.’ By 1942 such tolerance was a thing of the past. The Occupation was said to divide families like the Dreyfus Affair. By the end of 1942, Mauriac and his brother were ‘separated by such an abyss that they only dare speak to each other with the most extreme caution’. These were no longer differences of opinion but matters of treason.19
This heightened intensity of feeling was a response to the increasing violence of the Occupation. Well before the hostage shootings, which started in 1941, the image of correctness had become tarnished. The first victim of the Germans in Paris was Jacques Bonsergent, a 28-year-old engineer, who was in a group which jostled some German soldiers. In the ensuing argument, Bonsergent raised his fist against a German. He was arrested and shot on 23 December 1940. German posters announcing this event were posted throughout the city, and they became little shrines at which people laid flowers.20
From the summer of 1941 such sinister posters became a familiar sight, overlaying any lingering memory of images of Germans protecting civilians. One prefect reported that the hostage shootings had created ‘an abyss between the French and Germans which it will be difficult to overcome’. By 1942 words like ‘hate’ and ‘rage’ frequently occur in prefects’ accounts of attitudes towards the occupier.21 Jean Paulhan described seeing in his local café an old bookbinder, usually calm, trembling with joy at the news of an assassination attempt on Laval.22 Such attitudes were hardly affected by the Allied air raids on France which started in 1942. When Boulogne-Billancourt in the Paris suburbs was bombed in March 1942, killing 623 people, public opinion was favourable to the British despite official propaganda.
The unpopularity of the Germans did not, however, translate directly into disaffection from the Vichy regime. Except in the Forbidden Zone, most people in 1940 believed that the regime was doing its best to resist Germany and protect the French. Montoire, almost universally unpopular, shook this conviction, but the sacking of Laval helped to restore it. This early indulgence towards the regime does not mean that people subscribed to the National Revolution. The regular report on telephone conversations concluded in March 1941 that the National Revolution met with ‘almost total indifference’.23 Probably it would be truer to say that attitudes varied according to political belief and local tradition. In conservative, Catholic, and rural Haute Savoie, up to 42 per cent of the male population was in the Legion, more than in any other département of France.24
During the winter of 1940–1, food shortages undermined the regime’s popularity. In the Hérault, the prefect feared as early as December 1940 that these might lead to a ‘breakdown of public order’; housewives demonstrated against shortages in Carcassonne, Béziers, and Marseilles.25 In the winter of 1940–1, forty-six such demonstrations occurred in the Occupied Zone—especially the Paris region—and the Nord/Pas-de-Calais.26 In the Var, the first food demonstrations occurred in August 1941.27 When the regime celebrated pre-Revolutionary France, bread riots had certainly not been in its mind. This background made it harder to sell the National Revolution: Pétain’s ‘evil wind’ speech was an admission that the regime’s message was not getting through. By June 1941, in one Normandy département—an area not known for political radicalism and less affected by food shortages than others—the regime was judged to have only ‘an infinitesimal handful’ of supporters. In the summer of 1942, in the Var, which did have a left-wing tradition, it was reported: ‘the population has not varied in its convictions and is quietly favourable to a new democratic and Republican regime purged of the evils of the previous one’.28
During 1942, the breach between the people and the regime deepened. More food demonstrations occurred in the winter of 1941–2, affecting twenty-six départements: there were nineteen in the Bouches du Rhône in January and February; forty-two in the Var between January and May.29 In total, there were 149 such demonstrations between November 1940 and April 1942. Usually these demonstrations were small, occurring on market day, and often accompanied by pillaging. They were generally ended by an emergency distribution of food— which sometimes caused counter-demonstrations in villages protesting against the preferential treatment accorded to the towns.30 A few demonstrations were quite large: one at Sète, on 20 January 1942, involved 2,000 people. In general they were not explicitly political, but in Montpellier on 15 January and Sète on 20 January 1942 there were cries of ‘Down with Pétain’, ‘Pétain the Starver’, and even some singing of the Internationale.
Although the food situation was better by the spring, Laval’s return was unpopular. His speech of 22 June 1942 caused a terrible shock throughout the country. The word ‘collaboration’ ceased to be abstract after Laval had clearly said that he wanted a German victory.31 The round-ups of Jews in the summer also caused outrage. From the middle of 1942, mayors started to resign, and it became increasingly difficult to replace them. Vichy’s decreasing popularity was reflected by the difficulties of the Legion. A rally to commemorate the first anniversary of the Legion attracted 10,000 people in Toulon in August 1941; a year later the event pulled in only 1,800.32 Even in the Haute-Savoie where the Legion had been so successful, its popularity was declining from the spring of 1942.33
The Legion was increasingly discredited by the aggressive tactics of the SOL. A notorious example occurred in April 1942 when, to retaliate against the cutting down of a tree planted to commemorate Pétain’s visit to Annecy, some SOL activists assaulted the respected local figure François de Menthon, whose hostility to Vichy was notorious, and threw him into a fountain. Although local Legion leaders condemned this action, the Legion was tainted by it.34 If many people had long been irritated by the Legion’s officiousness, it had at least seemed to represent order; now it seemed to be moving towards rowdiness. In May 1942 the SOL held an anti-British demonstration in Toulon: there were scuffles with the police and twenty-two people arrested.35 By the end of 1942 the Legion had entered a state of chronic crisis. This was a good barometer of Vichy’s decreasing popularity.
The Pétain Cult
The French population, immediately hostile to Germany, and progressively disillusioned with Vichy, was much slower to lose confidence in Marshal Pétain. Reports in 1941 about growing opposition to the regime often referred simultaneously to Pétain’s growing popularity. The censors observed in October 1941: ‘only the popularity of the Head of State is holding together an artificial unity’.36 For a long time, people distinguished between Pétain and his government. In the countryside it was commonly said, ‘Ah, if only the Marshal knew’.37 Even when Pétain’s actions excited dis
approval, he was able recover support. The sacking of Laval in December 1940 appeased the disaffection caused by Montoire. A year later, newsreels of Pétain meeting Goering at Saint-Florentin caused such an uproar in the cinemas of the Unoccupied Zone that the authorities considered issuing an appeal for calm,38 but Pétain’s speech on New Year’s Day 1942 complaining at his situation of ‘semi-liberty’ won back waverers.
Pétain was the subject of an extraordinary personality cult.39 Vichy set up a special department to create an ‘Art Maréchal’. Images of Pétain were produced on an industrial scale. One could buy Pétain posters, postcards, calendars, plates, cups, chairs, handkerchiefs, stamps, colouring books, matchboxes, tapestries, paperweights, medals, vases, board games, ashtrays, penknives, barometers. One could have him in Aubusson tapestry, Baccarat glass, Sèvres porcelain, or plastic.40 Pétain’s portrait was omnipresent. So was the song ‘Maréchal, nous voilà’ with its refrain ‘Before you, the saviour of France, We, your lads, we swear to follow in your steps’ and its final line ‘For Pétain is France, France is Pétain’. The song, which achieved the status of a semi-official anthem, was written in 1941 by André Montagnard, previously known for lyrics written with the financial support of the pastis producer Paul Ricard.41 The Pétain cult was assiduously propagated in the schools. For the 1941 New Year, teachers exhorted their pupils to write to the Marshal: one and a half million letters, and thousands of presents, were sent.
The cult was sustained by Pétain’s provincial visits throughout the Free Zone, starting with Toulouse on 5 November, and followed by Clermont, Lyons, Marseilles, Toulon. Pétain visited almost fifty cities between 1940 and 1942. Those unable to witness his presence in person could see it on newsreels. The visits were meticulously orchestrated. Pétain’s two-day visit to Marseilles on 3 December 1940 took in the prefecture, the cathedral, the war memorial, and the hospital—symbols of authority, repentance, mourning, and suffering—and then he attended a meeting at which the assembled members of the Legion, arms outstretched, swore their oath of loyalty. On the next day, he went to Toulon to see the fleet, symbol of France’s imperial power.42 On all such visits, newspapers were given strict guidelines as to how the Marshal should be described:
in referring to the Head of State the expression ‘old gentleman’ must be avoided, even when preceded by a well-disposed adjective like ‘illustrious’ or ‘valiant’. Terms evoking his military past should be used as little as possible, though in certain circumstances it is permitted to employ the term ‘victor of Verdun’. On the other hand frequent mention should be made of the Marshal’s moral and physical vigour, his generous disposition, his lucidity, and the interest he takes in every problem. Such qualities do not have to be directly described, but should be shown in action, as if incidentally. For example:
‘The Marshal came forward with a quick and decisive step’. ‘He takes the liveliest interest in explanations which are given to him’.43
The Pétain cult had its high priests in the hagiographical effusions of authors like Pourrat, Thibon, Romier, Henry Bordeaux.44 But no one surpassed René Benjamin whose three books on Pétain defy parody.45 Benjamin’s rhapsodic description of coming upon Pétain’s overcoat is characteristic of his prose:
After several moving and happy meetings [with Pétain] I had one which I believe was more extraordinary than all the others. I found myself one day alone with his overcoat. Yes, his overcoat, which was lying just like that on the armchair in his study. It was a magnificent moment. I was overcome. Then all of a sudden I became as motionless as the coat when I noticed that the seven stars were gleaming like the seven stars of wisdom of which the ancients tell us.
The seven stars worn by Marshals of France were a favourite theme of hagiographers. So were Pétain’s blue eyes and his moustache ‘white with the impeccable white of virtue’. Benjamin recounted a conversation between a priest and parishioner: ‘ “My friend, do you know that God created man in his image, and do you know what that means?”… “I do understand … I have seen the Marshal”.’46
A hymn celebrating the Marshal as ‘an envoy from God | To save beloved France | O you whose age | Matches in its nobility | The youthfulness of Joan of Arc’ was not liked by the authorities because of its reference to the Marshal’s age.47 They were less worried by blasphemy. One newspaper published a ‘Credo de la France’ which paraphrased the Lord’s Prayer, ending with the words, ‘deliver us from Evil, O Marshal’. Pierre Taittinger dedicated his book Les Leçons d’une défaite to ‘Marshal Pétain, a new Christ, who has sacrificed himself, to allow the regeneration of defeated France’. Pétain himself had announced on 17 June that he was making the ‘gift of my person’ to France. This rhetoric of sacrifice and redemption was central to Vichy: the Pétain cult tapped into the mood of popular religiosity.
It is tempting to mock the excesses of the cult, but it would be wrong to see it as constructed entirely from above. On the contrary, Pétainism—or ‘Maréchalism’ as it has been described to distinguish it from support for the regime— represented a genuinely popular political culture born out of the Exodus, those six weeks sandwiched between the German invasion and the Armistice.48 In the Exodus, individuals experienced in person the disintegration of the French State: in many cases, the authorities were among the first to flee. Faced with this void, people retreated from politics into self-reliance. Pétain’s apolitical language of good sense and honest talk (‘I hate the lies which have done you so much harm’) touched a chord. His first speech expressed his ‘compassion and solicitude’ for the ‘unhappy refugees’. His fourth one offered this advice: ‘Do not hope for too much from the State which cannot give back more than it receives. Count for the present on yourselves and on those you have brought up in the sentiment of duty.’ For the first time since the declaration of war, when the gap between official propaganda and reality had grown by the day, the French were being addressed in words that genuinely reflected their own experiences. Pétain acquired a debt of gratitude which outlasted the popularity of his regime. As Fabre-Luce observed: ‘the terrible Exodus created the moral foundations of the Armistice’.49
If people risked forgetting what Pétain had saved them from, he was quick to remind them. In June 1941, he chided dissenters: ‘You have really short memories. Remember the columns of refugees.’ The refugees’ experience of disintegration, dislocation, and upheaval explains the appeal of Pétain’s language of rootedness: home and hearth, family and security. To a suffering nation, Pétain was not only the redemptive saviour but also the Father-Protector, sometimes severe (‘today, it is from yourselves that I want to protect you’: 12 August 1941), sometimes comforting (‘my children … Gather this evening around me’: 25 December 1940), but always solid as the oak tree in the Forest of Tronçonnais which was formally christened with his name in November 1940.50 In Vichy propaganda, Pétain’s life was given the simplicity of a fairy story: Pétain offered himself as a father; the French were ready to be his children.
From the spring of 1942, this situation began to change. Anti-Pétain graffiti appeared more frequently, and Pétain’s appearances in newsreels were no longer greeted with applause.51 But even if reverence for Pétain as political leader had diminished, many people retained a residual respect. One prefect observed in September 1942: ‘The majority of the population continues to venerate the Marshal, but it follows him less as a leader than as a personality of legend, a magnificent old man of astonishing virtues.’52
Private Lives
Disaffection from Vichy did not necessarily lead to active opposition or support for the emerging Resistance: caution and fatalism prevailed. People were suspicious of official propaganda and did not know what to believe. They lived on rumours, myths, and prophecies. One prophecy which circulated widely was that made by St Odile, patron saint of Alsace, in 890. She had predicted that terrible violence would be unleashed on the world by ‘Germania’, but also that the conqueror would reach the pinnacle of success in the sixth month o
f the second year of the war, and then the tide would turn.53 As prophecies go, this was more accurate than many of Darlan’s predictions in 1941.
People listened to the BBC because they trusted it more than Vichy propaganda. This eventually created a kind of clandestine community, but initially the Occupation generated an accumulation of individual discontents rather than any collective movement of dissent. One sign of this was the notorious epidemic of denunciations.54Gringoire had a special rubric encouraging delation called ‘Répétez-le’. Already in December 1940, prefects reported a ‘veritable deluge of anonymous letters’.55 Curés denounced instituteurs, doctors their patients, patients their doctors; women denounced the immorality of POW wives in the absence of their husbands, shopkeepers denounced rivals for trading on the black market, non-Jews denounced Jews, French denounced foreigners, husbands denounced wives.56 This came to be seen a major problem by the authorities, and prefects were told in February 1942 to discourage delation, and pursue those supplying false information.57
The daily preoccupation with survival encouraged a sauve-qui-peut mentality. Prefects frequently commented on people’s passivity and apathy. At the beginning of the school year in October 1940, Guéhenno observed the amorphous attitude of his pupils, worried only about their own problems and exams. The postal control report noted in October 1941: ‘One of the present characteristics of the French population is that individuals are turning in on themselves. For some months the French have become alienated from their government, but without significantly swelling the ranks of the opponents: they are retreating into their shells.’58 Fifteen months later, the synthesis of prefects’ reports observed a similar phenomenon: ‘a sort of indifference … towards collective issues. Each person limits themselves to their individual life and the egotistical pursuit of their immediate material interests.’59
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