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by Jackson, Julian


  There is no sign, to the extent this can be measured, that young people were being won over to the values which Vichy wished to encourage. Its puritanism succeeded in creating opposition countercultures, the most celebrated being the ‘Zazous’ in Paris. They were middle-class youth rebels who affected an effete style—long hair, drainpipe trousers—listened to jazz and swing, and used their own slang (‘vachement bath’, ‘drôlement chouette’). There was nothing political about the Zazous—except the fact that they affected English expressions in their slang—but this did not stop them being chased by PPF thugs who would shave their heads.61 The Zazous were a tiny minority whose notoriety derived from the attacks of the collaborationist press. But there are other examples of youth disaffection. Although public dances were banned because they were deemed indecent while the POWs were languishing in Germany, by 1942 this prohibition was increasingly flouted and bals clandestins became common. In a period when resourcefulness was essential for survival and many fathers were absent in prisoner-of-war camps, petty crime and delinquency increased. The number of minors convicted of delinquency almost trebled from 13,000 in 1938 to 35,000 in 1942.62

  The Chantiers, which were the heart of Vichy’s enterprise to re-educate the young, were particularly hated. In the first winter, the camps lacked the most elementary facilities. Conditions improved, but the idea of dividing the day between physical labour and intellectual development or technical training never materialized. Many camps were characterized by a brutal army discipline which antagonized young men already alienated by boredom and hunger. Their letters home reflected apathy and cynicism; there were floods of letters from parents protesting at the treatment of their children. As for the political opinions of the recruits, the prefect of the Lozère reported that the youths in his local camp were ‘still imbued with Popular Front ideas’. An enquiry into 263 recruits in an Allier camp found that 150 believed the Republic was the ideal regime (presumably if so many said so, even more thought it).63 Those who ran the Chantiers, however, remained loyal to the regime almost until the end.

  The situation of the Compagnons was the opposite from that of the Chantiers: they did arouse genuine enthusiasm from their members, but their leaders were less conformist than those of the Chantiers. A government inquiry in March 1941 noted that the Compagnons had ‘taken on habits of independence… the appearance of a small state in a state’.64 This was the origin of the crisis of May 1941 when Dhavernas was forced out. His successor, Tournemire, was a reliable Pétainist army officer, and Pétain’s presence at the first anniversary of the Compagnons in July 1941 indicated that they were back in favour. Nonetheless their weekly journal Compagnons gave little coverage of the National Revolution, and in November 1941 it criticized attacks on Jewish synagogues in Paris. In the Catholic Lozère and Aveyron départements, the Compagnons were viewed with hostility, as a bunch of Communists and anarchists; the Bishop of Montepellier reminded his flock that Catholic children should join Catholic groups.65

  Uriage: A Pétainist Deviation?

  The Compagnons showed how little control Vichy might exercise even over a movement that it subsidized. This was even truer of one of the most famous initiatives supported by Vichy: the School of Uriage founded in the summer of 1940 by Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac.66 An admirer of Lyautey, Dunoyer believed that France had been let down by her elites. He resolved to create a school to train the nation’s future leaders. With the backing of the Youth Secretariat, his school was given the official task of offering courses for Vichy youth leaders. It acquired great prestige, and was visited by Pétain in October 1940 and Darlan in June 1941. After Darlan’s visit, Uriage’s brief was widened to include training courses for higher civil servants. Publishing a journal and a number of pamphlets, it aspired to become a laboratory of reflection for the National Revolution.

  Located at the Château d’Uriage, in the bracing air of the Alps above Grenoble, the school viewed itself as a sort of chivalric order. The standard course lasted three weeks, and consisted of lectures, study groups, and visits to local farms or factories. The atmosphere was somewhere between a religious community and a scout camp. Trainees wore a simple uniform—smock, blue shirt, and beret—and every day there was one and a half hours’ compulsory collective exercise. Meals were preceded by a song and followed by a reading. The guiding principles were team spirit, service to the community, and loyalty to Dunoyer, the ‘Vieux Chef’, as he was known.

  Despite the emphasis on community life, the atmosphere of Uriage was tolerant, and Dunoyer attracted some serious intellectual figures to his staff. Many of them were Catholics who had been associated with Esprit: the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, who was interested in Proudhon and Marx, the Dominican René de Naurois, a former member of Izard’s Third Force, the philosopher Jean Lacroix. Emmanuel Mounier himself was not on the staff, but he lectured at Uriage where ‘personalism’ acquired something of the status of an unofficial ideology. But there were also people from other backgrounds: Joffre Dumazedier, a young atheist with Socialist leanings, who had been involved in the youth hostel movement during the Popular Front; Pierre Ollier de Marichard, a Protestant and Socialist in the orbit of Esprit, who had advised Leo Lagrange during the Popular Front; the Grenoble professor Jean-Jacques Chevalier, a former member of the PDP. Until he went to work for Borotra’s Sports Commissariat, Chevalier combined Uriage’s dual preoccupation with spiritual and bodily health by regularly cycling 15 miles up the mountain to lecture on the need to create an ordre viril.

  The dominant intellectual at Uriage was Hubert Beuve-Méry, who was from June 1941 in charge of the research department. Before the war, Beuve-Méry had taught in Prague from where he also acted as the correspondent of Le Temps. He resigned from this post in disgust when the paper refused to publish his criticisms of Munich. After the defeat, he joined the board of Esprit. Beuve-Méry was a Catholic intellectual much influenced by Dominican theology. His experience of the venality of the French press in the 1930s made him congenitally suspicious of power and those who wielded it. In character he was austere to the point of asceticism, indifferent to money, and anti-materialist.67

  No one at Uriage had any nostalgia for the Third Republic or parliamentary democracy in general. The school’s doctrine has been variously described by historians as the ideology of Vichy, as a left-wing Pétainism, or even as semi-fascist.68 But the school also has its ferocious defenders. Critics of Uriage focus on two issues: its attitude to Germany and its attitude to the National Revolution. Dunoyer was fiercely patriotic. In March 1941 he said publicly to the students that he wanted a British victory, and that Nazi Germany was the enemy number one.69 Uriage had no ideological sympathy with Nazism. Naurois had spent time in Germany and his lectures were eloquent about the evils of Nazism. Some writers claim that in 1941 both Beuve-Méry and Mounier were ready to accept a German-occupied Europe. This is obviously true to the extent that, like anyone willing to work within the framework of the Armistice, they believed Germany’s victory was a fact, at least provisionally. The Resistance was deemed heroic but unrealistic. Beuve-Méry turned down an overture to join a resistance movement, and Mounier rejected the temptation to go abroad, saying ‘this is not the moment to desert’. But Uriage did not support collaboration: it wanted to test what could be achieved in France despite Germany.70

  This leads to the second question: what was Uriage’s attitude to the National Revolution? A giant portrait of Pétain hung over the entrance hall. Dunoyer was unconditionally loyal to Pétain until November 1942; Beuve-Méry was more reserved. But despite his adulation of Pétain, Dunoyer jealously guarded Uriage’s independence. The school shared much with Vichy—criticism of liberalism, materialism, and individualism, contempt for the Third Republic—but it was vague about positive policies. Its discussions were largely about values, the search, as Mounier wrote, for a ‘French humanism of the person and the community’. Uriage itself embodied the kind of moral community it idealized. The presiding influence was P
éguy: each new course began with a reading from a passage by Péguy on ‘work well done’. Uriage sought a third way between mystical fascism and materialistic liberalism.

  Uriage soon fell under official suspicion because it was too distanced from the day-to-day preoccupations of the National Revolution. As early as December 1940, Chantier leaders criticized the school’s religious neutrality. A visiting lecture by Massis was badly received.71 In July 1941, Action française attacked Mounier’s influence at Uriage while a collaborationist publication accused it of being pro-British and pro-Jewish. In the summer of 1941, Mounier and Naurois were forbidden to continue lecturing there. A government spy in the school reported in September 1941 that it ‘refused to admit the fact of our defeat and was exhorting people to a utopian return to arms’; two months later, members of Pétain’s cabinet criticized its teachers for acting as the ‘champions of a spiritual cause… rather than as instructors in the service of the political order’.72 At the meeting of the Conseil national to discuss youth policy in March 1942, Uriage was attacked for lacking sufficient ‘ideological content’ and being infected by Mounierism. Dunoyer was allowed to carry on, but under sufferance. In short, although it never condemned the National Revolution, Uriage was at the least a Pétainist deviation—or, to quote Roderick Kedward, ‘a Vichy that might have been’.73

  ‘Pockets of Health’ (Mounier)

  Uriage tried to occupy a middle ground between unconditional support for the regime and opposition to it. No one more perfectly exemplified this ambiguity than Mounier. He had no nostalgia for the fallen regime: ‘what was dead is dead; the History which awaits us has a new face, an authoritarian face; we cannot escape the massive oscillations of history, nor work against its fundamental premisses’. But this did not mean submitting totally to Vichy’s values. Mounier wanted ‘to profit from the verbal similarities between our values and the publicly proclaimed values in order to introduce… the content we desire’. The situation was ‘very open’, an opportunity to be seized. The alternative was to retreat into a ‘fruitless solitude’ and ‘abandon Vichy to its internal determinism’.74

  For these reasons, Mounier decided to resume publishing Esprit, despite the opposition of several contributors. Esprit reappeared from November 1940, offering a guardedly sympathetic critique of the early days of the National Revolution—with criticism gradually overcoming sympathy. Mounier came under pressure from his own circle to stop publishing, but he continued to believe, as he wrote in February 1941, that it was not necessary ‘to choose between yes or no’. This could become ‘an alibi for total inaction…taking refuge in the absolute and allowing history to run on without us’.75

  At the same time as writing this, Mounier was making more vigorous criticisms, in private, of Vichy anti-Semitism than one would find from many early resisters.76 He told his critics that Esprit was read by many people as a journal of resistance and independence. In the February 1941 issue he used Péguy to criticize anti-Semitism; in the June issue there was strong criticism of the film Jew Süss and an article pointing out that Péguy had ‘remained loyal to his republicanism and even to his revolutionary faith’. Mounier wrote in June 1941: ‘Each month I pull a little harder on the rope and one day it will break.’ It finally did in August 1941 when Vichy banned Esprit. Mounier wrote to his parents: ‘What a joy not to be on the side of cowardice and to be made, by an official decree, the brother of all the innocents suffering for their faith in the concentration camps.’77 Mounier’s critics are right that he was no defender of liberalism or democracy in 1940; but he was no orthodox Pétainist either.

  Despite his relief at the banning of Esprit, Mounier’s judgement on his balancing act was positive: ‘because we did not withdraw into our tents, we have known real pockets of health, corners of France truly free’.78 Among these pockets of health, he included Uriage, and also another experiment with which he was associated: the Jeune France organization.79 Founded in November 1940, by Pierre Schaeffer, a young broadcasting engineer, Jeune France started out as a means of assisting unemployed young artists. Subsidized by the SGJ, it soon developed the more ambitious project of reinvigorating the arts and bringing culture to the people. One of its objectives was to set up local cultural centres, maisons Jeune France. Although only five of these saw the light of day, no previous government had subsidized such an ambitious enterprise of cultural decentralization.

  In the 1930s, Schaeffer had been associated with Esprit, and Mounier agreed to help Jeune France. Other participants included Jean de Fabrègues, editor of Combat in the 1930s, Claude Roy who had written for Combat, and Albert Ollivier who had been in Ordre nouveau. These people were from the generation of 1930s nonconformists, but represented different strands of it. As a result, like other institutions of Vichy youth policy, Jeune France soon became torn by conflict. Fabrègues wanted it to defend the political objectives of the National Revolution and repudiate Mounier’s ‘intellectual liberalism… and political non-conformity’. The government was informed that Fabrègues was a ‘solid Catholic, a hardliner’ who wanted to combat the ‘danger of Mounier’s “Christian Bolshevism” ’.80 Schaeffer eventually sacrificed the Mounierists in the autumn of 1941, but Fabrègues still found Jeune France too heterodox, and he eventually left it to work with prisoners of war instead.81

  Jeune France was indeed culturally open-minded. Organizing a meeting of musicians and poets at the Château de Loumarin in September 1941, it invited contributors to magazines like Poésie, Confluences, and Fontaine. Aragon himself was invited, but did not go. At the end of the day some of the participants ran through the streets shouting ‘vive de Gaulle’. Jeune France’s main effort went into backing theatrical groups, often experimental ones: La Roulotte, Les Quatre Saisons, and the Comédiens routiers. The inspiration behind many of these groups was Jacques Copeau, whose entire career had been devoted to challenging the stuffiness of bourgeois boulevard theatre. In 1913 he had set up the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris; between 1924 and 1929 he formed a community of actors in Burgundy. His disciple Léon Chancerel had set up the Comédiens routiers, the theatrical movement of the Catholic scouts; another disciple Olivier Hussenot set up a theatrical group at Uriage. Influenced by Stanislavsky, Greek classical theatre, and the Commedia del dell’ Arte, they wanted to reinvigorate theatre and bring it to the people. Many of these groups were inspired by the social Catholic ambition of respiritualizing society. But they also drew on the Popular Front’s experiments in cultural democratization. They were precursors of the revival of France’s theatrical life in the Fourth Republic. Jean Vilar, a major figure in that revival, was involved with Jeune France in the Occupied Zone.

  Jeune France’s reputation has suffered from its association with Vichy; Schaeffer omits any mention of it from his long Who’s Who? entry. But rather than allowing its Vichyite origins to discredit Jeune France, one could use Jeune France to rethink Vichy. It was an example of the possibilities that Vichy seemed to offer to people who did not necessarily accept its conservative agenda, as the Popular Front had done to people who did not necessarily accept its Republican agenda. Vichy’s official values were susceptible to various interpretations. This was true, for example, of folklore. For Vichy, folklore was the decor of a nostalgic quest for vieille France. By the young innovators of Jeune France, folklore was viewed as a way of reinvigorating an atrophied local cultural life, bridging the chasm between cultural experimentation and popular culture. It was after all the Popular Front which had created France’s first folklore museum, the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (ATP), in 1937.

  The ATP’s first director was Georges-Henri Rivière who remained in place throughout the Vichy regime and continued to head it until 1967. In the 1920s Rivière who originally wanted to be a musician, was a member of the glittering Right Bank set—playing jazz at the Bœuf sur le Toit, writing songs for Josephine Baker—but he also mixed with the cultural avant-garde. It was surrealists like Michel Leiris, Robert Desnos, and George
s Bataille who had introduced him to primitive art. He organized an exhibition of pre-Colombian art which came to the attention of the ethnologist Paul Rivet, director of France’s main ethnographic museum. As a committed Socialist academic, and one of the intellectuals most committed to the Popular Front, Rivet could not have been more different from the dandyish dilettante Rivière, but he appreciated Rivière’s flair and enterprise. Rivet’s patronage gave Rivière the directorship of the ATP. Rivière had no strong political identity, but his cultural priorities meshed with those of the Popular Front: cultural democratization and the rediscovery of authentic popular cultures.82

  Rivière, who had owed his career to the patronage of the left, thrived equally well under Vichy. When the regime launched the idea of chantiers intellectuels (‘intellectual worksites’) to employ out-of-work intellectuals, Rivière proposed three projects: a survey of rural architecture; a survey of rural furniture; a survey of the arts and traditions of the peasantry. This was entirely in the spirit of Vichy, and Rivière received generous subsidies to employ teams of workers to catalogue the varieties of regional styles. This was among the most important research of its kind ever conducted in France. In carrying it out, Rivière co-operated with the Peasant Corporation, and published a study of peasant folklore in its journal, Études agricoles. At the Liberation, he was briefly under a cloud, but accusations of collaboration were not substantiated.

 

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