The working class received no clear guidance from its former leaders. After the defeat, the pre-war tension between the Belin and Jouhaux factions of the CGT became an open breach. Belin’s supporters organized themselves into a new Trade Union Co-ordination Committee (CSC) and created a newspaper, Au travail, which defended Belin’s policies.136 There were also trade unionists who opposed the new regime. On 15 November 1940, twelve union leaders, including nine members of the CGT (among them Jouhaux) and three Catholic trade unionists, signed a manifesto reaffirming their commitment to free trade unions and denouncing racist legislation (which few other people did at this stage).
They constituted themselves as the Committee of Social and Economic Studies (CEES). Their manifesto was a marker for the future, and most of its signatories ended up in the Resistance.
Although national trade-union confederations had been outlawed in November 1940, trade unions were allowed to continue a regional and departmental existence. Many trade unionists participated in Vichyite bodies like the Workers’ Committee of Emergency Aid (COSI), which was set up to assist the victims of Allied bombing (with funds taken from Jews), the Secours national, the Committee for the Reinsertion of POWS, and various boards administering the relève. Of the thirty-five former confédérés elected to the Executive Committee of the CGT in 1938, fourteen are known to have played a role in the institutions of the regime, as did at least sixteen leaders of the thirty-one union federations. Their motives were varied. Union leaders from the former pacifist and anti-Communist wing of the CGT may genuinely have supported the regime, whose Labour Minister up to April 1942 had after all been deputy leader of the CGT in the 1930s. Syndicalists had never considered the political form of the State to be important: their duty was to defend workers within existing political structures. Some may even have seen the Charter as a step towards the depoliticized producers’ society of which they dreamed. Even the CEES, which opposed the Labour Charter, did not propose a total boycott of its institutions.137
The technicalities of implementing the Charter were so complex that by 1944 the creation of the single syndicates had made only limited progress. As for the factory social committees prescribed by the Charter, 372 of these had been formed by January 1942, 4,644 a year later, 7,807 in January 1944. These committees were useful in organizing food supplies, creating workers’ gardens, and organizing leisure activities, but most workers showed no interest in them. Even where the committees were elected, which was not obligatorily the case, few workers participated. Those trade-union leaders who rallied actively to the regime found little response from their members. Even L’Atelier noted in 1942 the ‘scepticism, indifference or hostility’ of most workers to the Charter.138
What about the working class and the Germans? By 1944 there were about 660,000 workers in Germany. Most of them were not there voluntarily but as a result of STO. Before the introduction of STO, about 150,000 workers had volunteered to work in Germany (many of them on short contracts so that the number in Germany at any one moment never exceeded 75,000). Another 35,000 had volunteered under the relève scheme. This gives a total of about 185,000 volunteers (less, as a proportion of the workforce, than the number of volunteers from Belgium, Holland, or Denmark).139 These volunteers were motivated less by politics than the prospect of higher wages and reports of good working conditions. Nor was it necessarily politics which prevented others going: workers were not so much put off by working for Germany as by doing so if this involved travelling abroad. In the Breton département of Morbihan, there were 370 volunteers to work in Germany, but 3,000 others worked for the Todt Company in France (on constructing the Atlantic wall).140 Todt, which paid up to three times higher than French firms, had no problem in recruiting labour.
Given that most of French industry was producing for Germany, it was impossible for workers not to find themselves producing for the German war economy. Sometimes workers tried to slow down production, and there were even cases of sabotage. In the spring of 1942, productivity at Renault was 40 per cent lower than in September 1939; the same was true in the coal mines. Since both these industries worked extensively for the Germans, this could have been a kind of resistance, but it could also have been a result of undernourishment and fatigue.141 In the mines, factory inspectors reported that the workers seemed worn out; cases of fainting were more numerous than before the war.142 Absenteeism was also higher because workers spent time on their gardens.
When industrial action did occur in the first two years of occupation, it did not necessarily have a patriotic motivation. The most important strike of the Occupation, involving up to 80 per cent of the labour force, took place in the mines of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais between 27 May and 9 June 1941. The Communists later celebrated this strike as one of the bravest examples of working-class resistance. There is no doubt that this was an exceptionally anti-German region. On 11 November 1940, about a third of the Pas-de-Calais miners demonstrated their patriotism by not turning up to work, and were punished by a fine from the Germans. But apart from this incident, the social tension that had been simmering in the coalfields since the autumn of 1940 had little to do with the Germans. The miners were angry about falling real wages and by the fact that the coal-owners, exacting their final revenge on the Popular Front, had reimposed the hated Bedaux system which had been abolished in 1936.
Working-class militancy was directed against employers, not against the Germans, who tried to keep out of the conflict. The Communists, whose role in fomenting the strikes was important, were not yet pursuing an anti-German line. Indeed workers’ representatives tried appealing to the Germans to intervene on their behalf. The Germans relished the opportunity to play employer off against worker. On one occasion, the local German commander ordered an increase in the number of workers’ delegates in the mines although the prefect warned him this would let in ‘extremists’ eliminated in 1938. But German tolerance of working-class activism soon started to wear thin because it disrupted production. During the strike itself, the Germans worked closely with the employers and local French authorities: about 325 miners were arrested, and cafés and cinemas were closed. In this way, the Germans helped turn what had started out as a social conflict into a patriotic one.143
In the end, it was impossible for most employers or workers to avoid some degree of implication in the German war economy unless they wished to go out of business or find themselves unemployed. It is necessary now, however, to turn to one professional group that did enjoy a greater freedom of manoeuvre: artists, entertainers, and intellectuals. No one forced writers to publish or intellectuals to take up public positions: when they did so the impact was all the greater.
13
Intellectuals, Artists, and Entertainers
‘When M. Montherlant went to receptions at the German Institute, he consented to Auschwitz’, wrote the Communist writer Claude Morgan in 1945.1 Although this remark was an extreme assertion of the responsibility of intellectuals, the prestige attaching to intellectuals in France did invest their actions with huge significance. The trials of intellectuals at the Liberation attracted as much publicity as those of Pétain and Laval: they were punished more for who they were than what they had done.
The surest way to avoid compromising oneself was to go abroad. This was a real possibility for artists and intellectuals, many of whom had foreign contacts. American institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation provided grants and organized visas. From New York, the biologist Louis Rapkine organized the departure of French scientists who wished to leave. The most important initiative of this kind was the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC), a privately funded American organization set up immediately after France’s defeat, and run from Marseilles by a young Harvard classicist called Varian Fry.
Despite limited funds, and harassment by the French authorities, the ERC helped some 1,500 people to escape, including Hannah Arendt, André Masson, André Breton, Max Ernst, and Heinrich Mann. Some sailed from Marseilles after visas, legal or for
ged, had been obtained for them; others were smuggled across the Spanish border. Some had to be persuaded to leave. Marc Chagall was slow to accept that his French citizenship would not protect him from anti-Semitism. He left in March 1941, having been reassured by Fry that there were cows in the United States. Fry was eventually expelled from France in August 1941, but his assistant, David Benédite, continued the rescue work for a few more months. The ERC’s last ‘client’ was Marcel Duchamp who sailed from Marseilles in May 1942.2
A considerable number of French artists and intellectuals did choose exile. They included the film directors Jean Renoir, René Clair, Julien Duvivier, and Max Ophuls; the actors and actresses Michèle Morgan, Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Françoise Rosay, and Jean-Pierre Aumont; the aritsts Marc Chagall, Tanguy, Man Ray, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, and Fernand Léger; the writers André Breton, Saint-John Perse, Georges Bernanos, Julien Green, Jules Romains, André Maurois, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jacques Maritain; the journalists Geneviève Tabouis, André Géraud (Pertinax), and Emile Buré; and academics like the biologist Louis Rapkine, the physicist Francis Perrin, the physiologist Henri Laugier, the historian Gustave Cohen, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the philosopher Raymond Aron. Most of them ended up in America: Greenwich Village became a sort of Manhattan Montparnasse.3 But there were entirely respectable reasons not to go abroad. Was this not a ‘desertion’ of France in her greatest hour of need? L’Univérsité libre, an underground Resistance paper run by Communist academics in Paris, argued against leaving the cultural field open to the Germans.4 André Breton’s decision to leave for South America in March 1941 was condemned by other surrealists who chose to remain in France. After the war, Tristan Tzara argued that the surrealists who abandoned France had for ever discredited the movement.5
Reputations
The post-war reputations of those who stayed in France have often been based more on rumour and innuendo than a balanced assessment of their conduct during the Occupation. Certain reputations never fully recovered from a few endlessly recycled half-truths. Take for example the Catholic poet and playwright Paul Claudel, whose activity in the Occupation is frequently reduced to two ‘facts’: that he wrote an ‘Ode’ to Pétain in 1940 and another one to de Gaulle in 1944. Claudel’s diary, however, reveals a more complex story. Certainly he was one of those conservatives without nostalgia for the defunct Republic. He exulted in July 1940: ‘France is delivered after sixty years from the yoke of the Radical and anti-Catholic party (teachers, lawyers, Jews and Freemasons).’ But the same diary entry showed no indulgence towards the Armistice: ‘we have lost all the conditions which constitute independence … we have alienated England which represents our only eventual hope’. In November 1940, he was shocked by Cardinal Baudrillart’s ‘monstrous’ article calling for collaboration. Claudel judged Catholics who adopted this position to be ‘nauseating in their stupidity and cowardice’. In December, he wrote a long poem entitled Paroles au Maréchal (not an ode) which was a patriotic call for France’s resurrection under the guidance of Pétain.
On this evidence, Claudel was a Pétainist who opposed collaboration. But he was not a Pétainist like any other. On 24 December 1941, he wrote a letter to the Grand Rabbi, which soon became public, expressing ‘the disgust, horror and indignation which all good Frenchmen and especially Catholics feel about the iniquities … and ill treatment inflicted on our Israelite compatriots’. No other writer had at this stage so forcibly condemned anti-Semitic persecution; most never did so. During 1941 Claudel became increasingly hostile to Pétain, and his diary contained mocking references to ‘our venerated Leader’. He noted how Péguy has been so ‘lamentably distorted and deformed’ by the National Revolution. It is true that in November 1943 Claudel allowed his play Le Soulier de satin to be staged in Paris, but Camus and Sartre also had plays performed in occupied Paris. In August 1942 Claudel refused to allow a production of his play Protée without the music of the Jewish Darius Milhaud. On hearing of the American landing in North Africa, he wrote: ‘My God I thank you for allowing me to see this hour.’6
If Claudel in the Occupation has often been reduced to his ‘Ode’, Picasso has been reduced to his alleged riposte to Abetz when asked if he was the creator of Guernica: ‘No, you were’. The story was apocryphal, but Picasso himself later said: ‘I used to distribute reproductions of Guernica to visiting Germans and say to them “take it, souvenir, souvenir”.’ Another anecdote claims that Picasso refused a German offer of heating fuel with the words ‘a Spaniard is never cold’. On such fragile foundations, after the Liberation, Picasso acquired the reputation of a minor Resistance hero. Was this justified?
After fleeing to the south-west during the Exodus, Picasso had chosen to return to Paris, although he could have escaped to America. He moved his studio to the Left Bank, worked with frenzy, and socialized intensely with a small group of friends, many of whom were involved in the Resistance. No ‘messages’ can be convincingly read into his work at this time although the shortages of the period are reflected in the materials used for some of his sculptures: cardboard, cigarette boxes, matchboxes, a piece of bread. Speaking later of his decision to remain in France, Picasso told his mistress Françoise Gilot; ‘staying on isn’t a manifestation of courage; it’s just a form of inertia’. But his pro-Republican sympathies during the Spanish civil war, and the fact that Hitler had personally singled him out as a degenerate artist, meant that this ‘inertia’ was itself quite courageous. As he also remarked to Gilot: ‘in a passive sort of way I don’t care to yield either to force or terror’. He was not permitted to exhibit, and he was sometimes visited by the German police looking for incriminating evidence. On one occasion, some canvases were slashed. But Picasso also received politely German visitors who wished to see his studio. Among these were Gerhard Heller, who worked for the literature section of the Propaganda-Abteilung, and the writer Ernest Jünger, who was stationed in Paris. They were not offered postcards of Guernica, and Jünger noted in his diary that Picasso told him: ‘the two of us sitting here together could work out a peace treaty this very afternoon’.
The photographer Brassaï, who may or may not have known about such visits, was not alone in seeing Picasso’s very presence in Paris as an act of courage, a ‘comfort and a stimulant’. After the Liberation, Picasso was severe about painters who had compromised themselves, telling one interviewer he hoped Derain would be shot. But although preventing others making claims for him, Picasso was modest. He told one friend: ‘There was nothing to do but work and struggle for food, see one’s friends quietly, and look forward to the day of freedom.’ Calling Picasso a resister is no more helpful than describing Claudel as a collaborator.7
Looking back on the Occupation, writers often indulged in minor distortions of the truth to place their conduct in a favourable light. Simone de Beauvoir later said that the first rule of Resistance intellectuals was ‘no writing for the Occupied Zone papers’,8 but Sartre published an article in the Paris review Comoedia. The novelist Edith Thomas claimed that she had refused to publish during the Occupation, but this ‘choice’ was helped by Gallimard’s rejection of her manuscript in 1942.9 Distinctions also have to be drawn between the reception of a work and its author’s intention. Claude Vermorel’s play about Joan of Arc, Jeanne avec nous, staged in August 1942, was viewed after the war as a Resistance piece. In fact the play had been written in 1938, and shortly before its staging, Vermorel had been trying to get German approval for a youth theatre project to establish links between German and French theatre. In 1941, he wrote in Le Gerbe that the theatre should turn its back on the ‘taste for rottenness’. Vermorel’s play was approved by collaborationist critics: Rebatet saw his Joan as a possible ‘patroness of French fascism.’10
It is also necessary, as in the case of Claudel, to distinguish between attitudes towards Vichy and towards the Germans. When Abel Bonnard proposed to his fellow members of the Académie française that they send Pétain a letter
of support after Montoire, the idea was blocked by Georges Duhamel and Paul Valéry. What made Bonnard’s idea so inopportune was that its timing implied approval of collaboration. Only four academicians were openly pro-German, but most others were ardent Pétainists apart from a small minority of whom Duhamel was the leading light.11 For these conservative intellectuals, Vichy represented the chance for revenge on the literary avant-garde represented by the NRF. Le Figaro launched a debate in August 1940 on the responsibilities of literature for the defeat. One target was Gide, the supposed corrupter of youth, who was attacked by the academician Henry Bordeaux in a book at the end of 1940.12 In May 1941, members of the Legion in Nice prevented the ‘immoral’ Gide from delivering a lecture on the poet Henri Michaux. The cartoonist Sennep satirized such attitudes in a caricature of two bemused peasants being told: ‘How can you be surprised [about the defeat]; you gorged yourself on Proust, Gide and Cocteau.’13 Many of the writers interrogated by Le Figaro refused to participate in this witch-hunt. No such reticence was displayed by the collaborationist press in Paris. Its favourite target was Mauriac who was vilified in language of extraordinary violence. One paper wrote: ‘ Mauriac is not Jewish but he deserves to be … Everything about him is muddy, false, satanic, degenerate, stinking … scrofulous, with the appearance of an over-brimming chamber pot.’14
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