Why did such former stalwarts of the Republic agree to serve Vichy? Often they acted from social duty, trying to protect the population from the consequences of the Occupation. This was especially true in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais where the German presence was so oppressive. The pre-war mayor of Roubaix, Jean Lebas, who was involved in the Resistance from the beginning, had no qualms about encouraging his Socialist colleague Victor Provo to accept the post of mayor in 1942 on the grounds that the alternatives might be worse. For the same reason, he persuaded the Vichyite prefect Carles not to resign in 1941.96
Some of those who felt it their duty to protect their fellow citizens devised ways of distancing themselves from the regime. In the Eure, most Socialist mayors avoided putting up photographs of Pétain; the Socialist mayor of Moulins refused to remove the bust of Marianne; the mayor of Argenton put Pétain’s photograph next to one of Jaurès.97 But many mayors, even Socialist ones, initially felt no need to apologize for their willingness to serve the regime. At the Liberation, those who had refused to do so were viewed as patriotic. But patriotism was viewed differently in 1940 when mayors who had abandoned their posts during the exodus were resented: the stigma of ‘desertion’ preceded the stigma of collaboration. In the context of 1940—of social collapse and national disintegration—Vichy’s rhetoric of unity made sense, and the ideological project behind it was not immediately obvious. The Republic’s reputation was tarnished, and the seemingly apolitical moralism of Pétain’s speeches had great appeal. It was not so removed from the kind of austere republican values held by many instituteurs. In the traditionally left-wing Var, several Socialist mayors expressed allegiance to Pétain: the Socialist mayor of Bandol joined the Legion, as did many instituteurs who had once been seen as bastions of Republicanism. Such conversions may have been motivated by opportunism or prudence, but also, in many cases, by conviction.98
No group was more assiduously courted by the regime than the peasantry. How successful was this? The outside world seemed remote in the countryside, and the rhythms of rural life proceeded as before. Many villages never saw a German soldier in four years of Occupation. Léon Werth who spent the war in a village in the Jura was surprised by his first visit to Lyons in December 1940:
In the countryside the image of the Marshal is not so all-obsessing. We only see his picture in the papers. The postcard-sellers have not reached isolated farmers. But in Lyons the Marshal is everywhere. His portraits, his messages, his radio speeches are stuck in the windows of shops.99
Werth throus interesting light on the local peasantry. He observed their complacency that ‘whatever occurs they at least will never go hungry’. Mostly the peasants were ‘absolutely indifferent to everything that the government says and does … All the acts and projects of Vichy go largely unnoticed.’ One day in August 1941, after a copious meal of two rabbits and two chickens washed down with marc, the conversation turned to the outside world:
They are suspicious of everything, of Germany and England, of Communism and the government. But they have one common hatred, the hatred of the workers: ‘they envy us, but they do not envy our work. If there was a revolution they would come and take their revenge on us … they would pillage us.’
The peasants felt satisfaction that the workers, envied for their short working days and high wages, should now also suffer: ‘there are those who say that five years like this would do the workers no harm’. This also provided a reason to support Vichy: if a revolution came, the workers might be tempted to take their revenge on the peasants!100
In theory, the main impact of the National Revolution on the countryside was the Peasant Corporation. Each village was supposed to create a single corporative syndicate. These would combine to form an ascending hierarchy of regional syndicates at the apex of which was a national corporative council. Previously there had been two agricultural syndicates in France, the conservative National Union of Agricultural Syndicates (UNSA), and another one linked to the Radical Party. The Corporation represented a victory for the ideas of UNSA, and its members staffed the regional syndicates.101 Corporatism was supposed to give the peasantry a collective identity and allow them to organize their affairs independently. But as the government was faced with organizing an economy of scarcity and fulfilling German demands for food deliveries, it used the Corporation as an instrument of economic regulation. The corporatist theorists became disillusioned, and the peasants, far from seeing the Corporation as defending their interests, came to see it as an intrusion on their freedom.102
The peasants were, as Werth noted, practised in the skills of evasion. They would appear at the town hall to declare their produce to officials ‘who don’t know if a cow gives two or twenty litres of milk a day’. One Sunday the authorities imposed price ceilings at the local market; on the following market days no produce appeared at the market.103 But peasants became increasingly unhappy at having to wage constant guerilla war against a regime that claimed to protect them. Werth heard people in the village café saying in February 1942 that ‘we’d rather see the Soviets than see what we see at the moment’.104 Prefects became frustrated by the peasantry’s evasion of economic controls.105 One of them observed that he needed ‘a gendarme on every farm’. The servitors of a regime which so adulated the peasantry referred increasingly to peasant ‘selfishness’, even peasant ‘resistance’.106 In the Hérault, in February 1942, it was reported that the ‘peasants feel for the Marshal the hatred they feel for his government’, and a year later that ‘the peasantry has lost all confidence in the government and in some cases people go as far as to accuse the Marshal of duping the agricultural population’. By 1943, peasant disaffection was almost universal, even in conservative départements like the Haute-Savoie.107
The Sociology of Opinion: Business
At the Liberation, it was believed that business had acquitted itself badly under the Occupation. De Gaulle allegedly told a business delegation in 1944: ‘I did not see many of you in London.’ Undoubtedly the Vichy regime enabled employers to complete their revenge over 1936. Even if, as Richard Vinen suggests, they had already done this by 1938,108 the memory of 1936 remained raw: in a class war there are always new battles to win.
The employers were not a single block. One division was between the elite who dominated the COs, and the mass of small employers who felt Vichy was not serving their interests. Pierre Nicolle, one of the small employers’ leaders, aired his resentments in his diary of the period. Nonetheless Nicolle was a Vichy insider—his diary is a precious source of Vichy gossip—and one should not exaggerate the discontents of small employers: even if they did not get all they wanted from Vichy, they sympathized with its social values.
What about attitudes to Germany? By the end of 1941, 7,000 businesses were producing directly for German orders; this figure had doubled by 1944.109 This underestimates the real level of economic collaboration since many firms not directly exporting to Germany supplied firms who were. Between 70 and 90 per cent of metallurgical goods produced in the Nord ended up in Germany although only about 50 per cent of this showed up in the official figures.110 German pressure on French business was not confined to heavy industry: the Germans were as interested in clothing and champagne as in aluminium and lorries. Some French industrialists were better placed than others to respond to German pressure. The iron producers of the annexed Lorraine, under direct German control, were in a weaker position than the bauxite producers, who were all situated in the Unoccupied Zone. Marius Berliet, the lorry manufacturer based in Lyons, had more leeway than other vehicle manufacturers, who were all in the Occupied Zone. But he was not free of German pressure since he had a factory outside Paris producing parts for his lorries, and only the Germans could authorize these to be sent South.111
Industrialists were subject to the regulations imposed by their CO. Despite being located in the Unoccupied Zone, Berliet was instructed by the automobile CO to sell a percentage of his output to the Germans since it would be unfair on his comp
etitors if their dependence on German orders allowed him to supplant them in the French market.112 Berliet needed little prompting to sell to Germany. The same was true of most other industrialists. German representatives of the Armistice Commission, travelling in the Southern Zone in the autumn of 1940, reported that industrialists were keen to procure German orders. In his memoirs, Pucheu recalled that his efforts as Industry Minister to monitor the signing of contracts with the Germans were ‘forestalled by the industrialists themselves, which placed me in an impossible position with regard to the occupier’.113 Pucheu knew only too well what he was talking about. Before becoming a minister, he had complained, as an industrialist, that businessmen who wanted to make contact with the Germans were being hampered by the government.114
In July 1940, when General Huntziger, French representative on the Armistice Commission, told the German negotiator Hemmen that French industrialists would be likely to experience ‘moral and almost sentimental difficulties’ about the idea that their manufactures might end up being used in the battle against Britain, he met with a sceptical response. Hemmen’s cynicism was vindicated, and in the first weeks after occupation industrialists displayed almost indecent haste in making contact with the Germans. The directors of the Kuhlmann chemical company were trying to contact representatives of the German dye industry as early as 26 July despite receiving counsels of caution from Vichy. But the German representative of IG Farben in Paris was slow to respond, preferring, as he put it later, to ‘let the French stew in their juice’. Another Farben representative reported that Kuhlmann had been looking for an ‘intimate collaboration’ allowing ‘the integration of French industry into a new Europe under German leadership’.115 If Vichy tried to restrain this enthusiasm it was in order to impose some control over the negotiations and obtain German concessions in return. But in the late summer and autumn a whole series of industries—bauxite, aluminium, chemicals, building—signed contracts with the Germans with little heed for Vichy. Barnaud who was supposedly monitoring the process of negotiations complained in May 1941 that he had lost track of them.116
In February 1941, the Germans organized an industrial fair at the Petit Palais, exhibiting items they required. The operation was a success: 10,000 French companies put in bids. French industrialists frequently visited German factories to view industrial techniques: in the single month of November 1941, six such delegations visited Germany.117 A congress of French and German chambers of Commerce took place in September 1941. This occasion was so successful that it was followed by others.118 Social encounters between top businessmen and Germans were frequent. At one such occasion, a reception at the German Embassy to meet a German trade minister, the banker Henri Ardant, head of the Société Générale, spoke of his hopes that the Germans would set up a single customs zone in Europe and create a single European currency.119 The highest and most visible level of Franco-German economic and commercial contacts was the so-called Table ronde lunches held at the Ritz between February and October 1942 where top French businessmen met their German counterparts.
Flagrant examples of political commitment to collaboration, like Eugène Schueller’s backing of the MSR, were exceptional. One extreme case was the eccentric Georges Claude, inventor of liquid air and founder of the Air liquide company. Obsessed by Bolshevism, Claude became a passionate advocate of Franco-German reconciliation, and a leading member of the Collaboration group. After the Allies landed in North Africa, he gave spectacular proof of his devotion to Hitler, announcing, at the end of a lecture delivered in Bordeaux, that he was swallowing a fatal dose of strychnine in the hope that his sacrifice would touch Hitler and persuade him to offer France a privileged place in the new Europe. In fact Claude’s strychnine did not kill him, allowing him to be arrested in August 1944.120
There were industrialists who merely tried to profit opportunistically from the Occupation and others who enthusiastically embraced the idea of a durable economic reorganization of Europe around Franco-German co-operation. In the former category was the Photomaton company which suggested in May 1941 that, since interned Jews needed to be photographed for administrative purposes, the Germans might like to invest in the company’s high-quality photo machine.121 Long-term co-operation with Germany was attractive to the automobile industry where the main pre-war competitor had been America. In March 1941 French automobile industrialists set up a committee with the Germans to prepare the ‘collaboration of the European automobile industry’. One Vichy official commented on the ‘bad impression’ created by the sight of Germans in Paris riding around in Renault, Citroën, and Peugeot cars, and wondered if the Germans could not be persuaded to do this more discreetly, preferably early in the morning.122 But where the main pre-war competitor had been Germany, as was true of the coal and steel industry, the attractions of long-term collaboration were less obvious—although during the Occupation the coal industry found itself working flat out for Germany. After the Liberation, coal owners defended themselves by claiming that only 4 per cent of their output had been exported to Germany, but this neglected the fact that most coal was distributed to industries like steel which were working directly for the Germans. Demand was so great that the coal owners used the opportunity to exploit less profitable seams of lower quality coal, keeping the better coal for after the war.123
STO was a major cause of tension between industrialists and the Germans. In the coal mines, employers protected their employees from being drafted to Germany, and subsequently claimed credit for this ‘resistance’. But just as the motives for co-operation with the Germans were usually more commercial than political, the same applies in the opposite case. Employers who shielded workers from STO did so because they were desperately short of labour. Since workers were probably more productive in France than Germany, saving them from being drafted abroad could be said to have objectively helped the German war economy.124 The same coal owners who protected their workers in 1943 did not hesitate to use German help to quash labour unrest in May 1941; and this was also true in the aircraft industries.125
For these reasons, the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’ do not apply neatly to the world of business. Not everything was what it seemed. The directors of the AFC aluminium company—the future Péchiney—were unhappy about contracts which had been negotiated with Germany by the French government, and after the war they cited their objections as an example of resistance. But their arguments against the contracts had been commercial not patriotic: fearing that the Germans would steal their export markets, they wanted assurances that the aluminium would only be used for German war industry and not re-exported to former French customers. These same industrialists spent months discussing a German proposal to build jointly a new aluminium factory in France.126 They were worried that otherwise the Germans would go ahead instead with a plan to build their own factory in Yugoslavia and weaken France’s share of the market after the return of peace. Although the discussions broke down in May 1942, the rhetoric of resistance with which they were invested after the war bears no relation to how they were perceived at the time. The assumption was that the Germans had won the war, and the issue was seen only in terms of future commercial strategy. The same was true of Michelin, another industrialist with a resistance reputation. Michelin’s supplies of rubber from Indochina had been disrupted, but he refused to concede German participation in his French firm or cede control of his Dutch and Belgian branches in return for a German offer to supply him with synthetic rubber. Despite pressure from the French government, Michelin said: ‘I have made my choice: sacrifice the present for the future.’127 His calculation was vindicated.
In the end, Berliet’s remark at his trial that he ‘viewed the matter only as a head of industry’ applied to most industrialists. When patriotism did not coincide with commercial interest, the latter was rarely sacrificed to the former. There clearly was a difference between Berliet, who sent two of his sons to Germany as voluntary workers to set a good example, and the Peugeot fa
mily who helped STO evaders and developed contacts with the Resistance, but neither Peugeot nor Berliet could have survived without German orders.128 Even the aircraft industry, tightly integrated into economic collaboration, contained Resistance heroes, like Jacques Kellner and Marcel Robert Bloch, while others, like Félix Amiot and Louis Renault, were happy to provide all the Germans wanted. Most aircraft makers fitted into neither category and tried only to keep their factories running, while implicating themselves as little as they could: Louis Verdier, head of the Gnôme-et-Rhône company, greeted an Anglo-American Inspection team in August 1944 with champagne, as he had the Germans in 1941.129
The Sociology of Opinion: The Workers
At the Liberation, it was the received wisdom that the working classes had been the heart of the Resistance. Mauriac wrote: ‘the working class alone are faithful to the profaned patrie’. By 1944, workers were certainly over-represented in the active Resistance,130 but this did not apply to the period 1940–2, to the extent that Resistance existed at this stage. In the first two years of Occupation, the workers were often described as the most apathetic and passive section of the population. ‘We’re going to work for the Boches. So what, one has to live’, was a comment overheard by one observer in 1940.131 All reports suggested that workers had no sympathy for Vichy, but they remained quiescent. It was noted in February 1942 that the ‘workers suffer the most and protest the least’.132
This fatalism is easy to understand. The political demobilization of the working class went back to the defeat of the trade-union movement in 1938. Immediately after the Armistice, the main preoccupation was unemployment. Once unemployment fell in 1941, there was the problem of survival. As prices rose and wages were blocked, real incomes fell: in Paris at the end of 1943 they were about half the level of 1939.133 Quite apart from wage levels, it was difficult to find food to buy, and many workers started to grow their own. Workers’ gardens in the Loire increased tenfold in the period.134 If workers shunned politics, it was often literally to cultivate their gardens.135
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