B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  The only similarity between Le Ciel est à vous and Le Corbeau was the unanimity of response they elicited—in the case of Le Corbeau, a unanimity of rejection. Produced by the Continental, Le Corbeau tells the story of a small provincial town afflicted by an outbreak of anonymous letters of denunciation signed ‘The Crow’. One letter accuses the doctor (Pierre Fresnay) of being an abortionist; another tells a hospital patient that he is dying of cancer: in despair he cuts his throat with a razor. Other characters include a nurse who steals morphine for her former fiancé; and her sexually frustrated sister who tries to blame the letters on an innocent woman of whom she is jealous. These are hardly Vichy’s images of ideal womanhood. Even the children in the film seem malevolent. If there is a hero, it is the abortionist doctor; if there is a heroine, it is a sexually lubricious cripple who is first seen in bed, smoking, and painting her toenails. She alone refuses to participate in the lynch mob (including the priest) which drives an innocent woman out of the town believing her to be the Crow.

  The film was based on an incident which had occurred at Tulle in 1922, but the stifling atmosphere of the rotten little community could stand as a metaphor for occupied France: the theme of delation could hardly have been more contemporary. This was not a picture of healthy provincial life as Vichy conceived it, and it is not surprising that the film was criticized by the Vichy press for traducing all the icons of the National Revolution. Nor was the film ever released in Germany: it was judged it to be morbid, and the authorities could not approve a film that implicitly criticized delation. But criticisms in the Resistance press were no less strident: it vilified the film for portraying such a debased image of France. At the Liberation, anyone involved in the film was under suspicion. The Resistance press explicitly contrasted Le Corbeau with Le Ciel est à vous whose morally exalting characters were so removed from the ‘club-footed tart’ and the ‘hypocritical and criminal doctor’.83

  While Le Ciel est à vous showed the Resistance and Vichy to be competing up to a point for shared ground, Le Corbeau, simultaneously disapproved of by the Resistance, Vichy, and the Germans, was disconcerting because it offered no simple answers. It contains one scene that could serve as a commentary on the entire experience of occupied France. A seemingly respectable psychiatrist, who in the end turns out to be the Crow, gives a lesson on morality to the doctor:

  The psychiatrist: ‘You think that all people are good or evil [he grasps a hanging light which casts a pool of light in the otherwise dark room]. But where is darkness [he pushes the lamp and it begins to swing], where is light? Where is the border of evil? [The lamp illuminates different parts of the room as it swings]. Do you know which side you are on? Think about it and examine your conscience. You will perhaps be surprised’.

  The doctor: ‘I know myself’.

  The psychiatrist: ‘Since a whirlwind of hate and denunciation has blown through this town all moral values are more or less corrupted. You have been afflicted like the others. One only has choices you know’.84

  14

  Reconstructing Mankind

  ‘The sexes have again to be clearly defined. Each individual must be either male or female, and never manifest the sexual tendencies, mental characteristics, and ambitions of the opposite sex.’ Thus wrote Alexis Carrel in his international best-seller Man the Unknown (1935).1 Carrel was a Nobel prizewinning scientist, but in this book he assumed the role of sage and prophet. Arguing that science had disrupted the natural relationship between man and his environment, Carrel proposed to remedy this by a synthesis of sciences and social sciences. Such grandiose syncretic intellectual constructions were in the spirit of the technocratic reforming groups of the 1930s and Carrel had some contact with that other aspiring sage, Jean Coutrot.

  In November 1941, Carrel was appointed to head the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems (Fondation pour l’étude des problèmes humains).2 The Fondation was set up to ‘study the most appropriate measures to safeguard, improve and develop the French population’. Its staff consisted mostly of medical specialists, like Carrel himself, but there were also engineers and economists. Research groups were organized on public health, urbanism, nutrition, immigration, criminality, and childhood development. Carrel wrote that the Fondation aimed at the ‘systematic construction of civilized man in the totality of his corporal, social, and racial activities’. It was necessary to ‘reconstruct mankind according to natural laws’.3 The Fondation Carrel’s importance in the overall history of Vichy should not be exaggerated, but its objective of ‘reconstructing mankind’ was central to Vichy’s project of national renewal.

  Moral Hygiene/Social Hygiene

  The ‘reconstruction of mankind’ began with women and the young. In the language of Vichy, the ‘young’ meant boys and young men; ‘women’ meant mothers. Boys were to be brought up to become the virile elite of the new France; women to become their mothers, wives, and helpmates. As one writer put it: ‘we must never tire of repeating this: woman, wife and mother, is made for man, for the home, for the child. As long as the young wives of France do not understand this, do not live out this truth of nature, nothing can be achieved.’4 Remedying France’s decadence required a restoration of the ‘natural’ sexual order.

  The defeat of 1940 was often described in gendered imagery: France was ‘devirilized’ and her defeat was a ‘rape’.5 Many observers compared the unhealthy and unmanly appearance of the French troops with the youth and vigour of the conquering Germans—‘young war gods’, ‘angels of death’.6 One of Marion’s aides described the National Revolution as ‘a virile and human reaction to a feminized Republic, a Republic of women and inverts’.7 The collaborationist Costantini wrote: ‘What France, a female nation, lacks is a male … The purge will allow her to be soldered to Germany.’ For Vichy conservatives, however, France’s problem was not so much that she was feminine as that she had repudiated the ‘feminine’ virtues of fidelity and sacrifice, which had brought victory in 1918, in favour of the ‘feminine’ vices of frivolity and weakness, which had brought defeat in 1940. The ‘morality of the shopgirl’ was Montherlant’s verdict on Munich. National Revolution propagandists criticized ‘modern’ women who read women’s magazines and modelled themselves on Hollywood stars. As Thibon wrote, women should be ‘rooted in nature without horizon beyond their hearth and without any aspiration beyond the joys of motherhood’.8

  The decadence of French womanhood was viewed as the symptom of a general moral breakdown. In Pétain’s words: ‘the spirit of enjoyment has prevailed over the spirit of sacrifice’. Gide was frequently accused of having corrupted the young, but even his diary for 28 July 1940, lamenting the ‘sorry reign of indulgence’, sounded a similar note: ‘Softness, surrender, relaxation in grace and ease, so many charming qualities that were to lead us, blindfolded, to defeat.’ One Vichy documentary diagnosed the problem of France as ‘the English weekend, American bars, Russian choirs, and Argentinian tangos’.9 Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, an army officer who later founded a school to educate France’s elite, had his own insight into France’s collapse when, during the Phoney War, he witnessed his men listening to France’s most popular singer, Tino Rossi:

  This international Corsican singer … whose warbling voice transforms consonants into vowels, had taken on the proportions of a myth—a eunuch who made French women dream, and in whom their husbands revered their own mediocrity. Tino Rossi in the trenches: this scandal required a redemption—a virile song of men working on the fields.10

  In Vichy’s discourse, France’s moral disorder was related to her physical decline— the ‘collective suicide of the nation’ represented by dénatalité. A survey organized by the regime in 1941 asked people to choose among the following causes of dénatalité: young couples who preferred cinema-going or car ownership to bringing up children; the decline of religion; the expense of raising a family; women’s worries about their figure; the ready availability of divorce; the rural exodus; housing difficulties; unemployment. Th
e decline of religion came top, but the answers, which have no statistical validity, are less interesting than the assumptions revealed by the question.11 The inter-war obsession with dénatalité reached its climax in a law of February 1942 (commonly known as the Three Hundred Law since it was the 300th to be passed under Vichy) transforming abortion from a crime against the individual into a crime against society, the State, and the ‘race’. Offenders would be tried by the special State Tribunal set up in 1941 to judge Communists; abortion was now punishable by death.

  The population debate concerned quality as much as quantity: moral hygiene was inseparable from social hygiene. In August 1940, measures were taken against alcoholism (including the banning of pastis); anti-venereal decrees were passed in 1941; a premarital examination law of 1942 required both partners to undergo medical examination before marriage. The French Eugenics Society had long advocated such a measure, but in the inter-war years it had been considered too controversial. The 1942 law did not prohibit couples from marrying even if the results of the examination did reveal congenital defects, but the intention was to confront people with their responsibilities.12

  This was the only eugenicist measure promulgated by Vichy. Nonetheless eugenics under Vichy has recently attracted attention because the Fondation Carrel had a research group studying it. The last chapter of Man the Unknown was devoted to eugenics—or the ‘remaking of man’ as Carrel called it. The Fondation was committed to the notion of biological regeneration and it studied ways of determining the most biologically appropriate immigrants. But quite apart from the fact that support for eugenics did not make one fascist—the intellectual inspiration for Carrel’s eugenicism was America where he had spent most of his career—eugenics was not central to the work of the Fondation whose agenda was a broader social hygienist one. The real significance of the Fondation Carrel was to provide a quasi-scientific legitimization of the traditionalist agenda of the National Revolution.13 Carrel argued that women ‘attained their full development after one or two pregnancies’ and that it was ‘absurd to divert women from maternity’. The vice-regent of the Fondation, Félix-André Missenard, proposed that women be debarred from too much education or from entering unsuitable professions like the law.14

  Family Values

  At the centre of Vichy’s policy towards women was the family. Family policy was the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Family and Health, and, after September 1941, of the new Family Commissariat which was directly responsible to the head of government. The lobbyists of the natalist organizations enjoyed greater influence than ever before: Pernot sat on the Conseil national; the works of the indefatigable Boverat became recommended texts for demographic instruction (he was also involved in the Fondation Carrel); Paul Haury, former vice-president of the ANAPF, headed the cabinet of the Secretary of State for the Family.15

  Although familialism and natalism had now entirely converged, even at Vichy the imperatives of repopulation could override those of family morality. A law of September 1941 allowed children born out of wedlock to become legitimate providing their parents married subsequently. Known as the Loi du Jardinier because Pétain had supposedly insisted upon it to regularize the situation of his gardener, the law is sometimes presented as Pétain’s whim. The law did shock many Vichy familialists, including André Lavagne of Pétain’s civil cabinet, but it is explicable in terms of the natalist agenda.16 There was a surprisingly tolerant attitude towards illegitimacy in the cinema of the occupation, as there had been in the pre-war films of Pagnol.17

  In other respects, Vichy fully accepted the familialist agenda. Articles 53 to 59 of the 1941 draft constitution proclaimed the family to be the ‘basic social group assuring the physical continuity of the nation’. It went on: ‘the family has a head; the husband is the head of the household, the father is the head of the family’. The Gounot Law of December 1942 provided for the creation, in every locality, of a family association. Attributed a semi-official role advising the government and local authorities on family affairs, these associations were to be linked into a national federation. Existing family associations remained free to continue their activities in a private capacity—Vichy always shied away from ‘totalitarianism’— but they were encouraged to affiliate to the new federation. The Gounot Law was presented as a sort of Family Charter to accompany the Peasant Charter and the Labour Charter, building a structural relationship between family and State as the first step towards integrating the family into the future corporatist constitution.18

  Vichy orchestrated massive propaganda celebrating motherhood and the family. Mother’s Day became a major date in the calendar. Festivities were organized in schools and local communities; medals were awarded to deserving mothers; on Mother’s Day in 1941, Pétain broadcast to the mothers of France.19 Since the regime also celebrated Joan of Arc, school manuals were rewritten to show that, apart from her martial virtues, she had also practised the domestic arts of cooking and sewing (and also came from a famille nombreuse!).20 From March 1942 girls were required to study domestic science (enseignement ménager) at school for at least one hour a week.21 Positive propaganda about motherhood was accompanied by more coercive measures. The divorce laws, untouched since 1884, were modified by the law of 2 April 1941 which forbade divorce within three years of marriage. After that, severe mistreatment was considered grounds for divorce, but the process could take up to seven years. The Justice Minister Barthélemy instructed the courts to apply the divorce law retroactively to cases already under way.22

  A law of 11 October 1940 banned the recruitment of married women into public service except when their husbands could not support them. Unmarried women working in public service were offered incentives to leave and get married. As for married women already employed in public service, where their husbands’ means were adequate to support them, they could be put on unpaid leave. This legislation was presented as a provisional measure to tackle unemployment, but it was announced that similar legislation for the private sector would follow. By the spring of 1941, however, unemployment was falling, and the Minister of Labour, Belin, considered modifying the legislation restricting female employment. This was opposed by the Family Secretariat and also by Darlan who argued that it was essential to ‘ensure the return of the mother to the household’.23

  Women, Vichy, and the Germans

  In fact the employment laws became increasingly anomalous as labour shortages developed. It became impossible to fill public-sector posts, and in September 1942 the law on women’s employment was suspended. By 1943 prefects were being urged to employ women in preference to men in the administration and to encourage them into industry by raising wages.24 In the aircraft industry, where 8 per cent of workers were women in 1941, the proportion had risen to a quarter in 1944, higher than it had been in May 1940.25 In February 1944, married women became liable for labour service in Germany, a policy denounced by the Church as the final nail in the coffin of a family policy.

  This triumph of economic reality over social policy was one instance among many of the abyss between image and reality in Vichy’s policy towards women. The law prescribing domestic science was rarely applied because there were too few trained teachers available.26 The Gounot Law remained symbolic: by the Liberation only three departmental associations had been set up. The regime did seemingly enjoy more success in its efforts to combat dénatalité. In 1942 the birth rate started to rise, and by the end of the war it was higher than it had been for a century. The causes of demographic trends are notoriously difficult to establish. The rise in the birth rate may have been encouraged by the generous family allowance system established in the 1930s; it may have been one of those impalpable shifts in national mood which defy analysis; it probably had little to do with Vichy policy.

  Certainly the Vichy regime failed in its effort to stamp out abortion despite promulgating of one of the most repressive abortion laws in Europe. Forty-two abortion cases were considered by the State Tribunal under the te
rms of the Three Hundred Law: fourteen people were sentenced to life imprisonment and twenty-six others to prison terms of up to twenty years. Two death sentences were carried out: Marie-Louise Girard, a laundress who had performed twenty-six abortions, was guillotined on 30 July 1942 (the last woman to be guillotined in France); Désiré P—— (the only man to be convicted under this law) was guillotined on 22 October 1943. Giraud was singled out for her flagrantly ‘immoral’ lifestyle and disregard for public opinion. She rented out rooms to prostitutes and carried on open affairs in full view of her family until denounced to the authorities, apparently by her husband. As for Desiré P—— he had taken no precautions to hide what he was doing, and even performed an abortion in public.27