B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Rivière was a survivor, unencumbered by political baggage, ready to seize any opportunities to achieve his aims. This makes it difficult, in his relationship to Vichy, to draw the line between tactical accommodation and genuine commitment. In 1942 he wrote: ‘The new French State, and with it all Europe, senses the importance of hereditary values under threat and wants to incorporate the most precious substance of them into the new order which is emerging.’83 Rivet’s colleagues were shocked that books by Jews had apparently disappeared from the shelves of the ATP.84 But Rivière did not subscribe to Vichy’s archaic romanticism. He criticized the obsession with tradition which kept the peasant in poverty, talking of the need to adapt to the modern, and allow ‘a new beauty to come forth from the industrial revolution’.85

  Twentieth-Century Utopia: An Architect at Vichy

  Rivière’s ambiguities were to some extent those of the regime itself. Borotra, although revering Pétain, was quite ready to admit what his sports policy owed to the Popular Front. In October 1941, he held a big meeting to pay tribute to the memory and work of Léo Lagrange, the Popular Front minister in charge of leisure, who had been killed in the battle of France.86 But there is no more striking evidence of the ambiguities of Vichy than the brief Vichyite career of the architect Le Corbusier, who had also offered his services to the Popular Front. On the face of it nothing seems more improbable than the flirtation between the pope of architectural modernism and the France of folklore. But like that other social engineer, Alexis Carrel, Le Corbusier fully subscribed to Vichy’s ambition to ‘reconstruct mankind’. In Le Corbusier’s case, this role was to be fulfilled not by science but by architecture. This was a message he had been preaching for twenty years. Now the physical destruction that had occurred during the battle of France provided an opportunity to be seized.

  After 1919 the State had provided the funds for reconstruction, but did not interfere in the way it was spent. Vichy, however, intended to monitor the process closely. Urban squalor was considered to have been one of the Republic’s main failures; the need for a policy of enlightened urbanism was a major theme of Giraudoux’s Pleins pouvoirs. Vichy set up a Commissariat for the Reconstruction of Buildings (CRI) to oversee reconstruction. Its staff swelled from 894 in 1941 to 2,855 by the Liberation. Many of the experts who staffed it were running French urban policy into the 1960s. Inevitably there was an air of unreality about the CRI’s plans. Allied bombing, which started in 1941, made a mockery of the hope that France would escape further physical devastation, and rebuilding was only possible to the extent that the Germans, who controlled access to France’s raw materials, were willing to allow it.87

  The CRI was not given a totally free hand. Its decisions had to be submitted to another body set up at the same time, the National Committee for Reconstruction. In June 1943, Vichy promulgated an urbanism code and put all the bodies responsible for urban planning under a National Committee of Urbanism (CNU). This was characteristic of Vichy’s solution to most problems: the setting up of innumerable new commissariats, committees, commissions, and secretariats whose efforts cancelled each other out. A reconstruction plan for the city of Châteauneuf which was ready in April 1941 had still not been officially approved by 1944. The CNU was sympathetic to architectural modernism while the Architecture Committee of CRI was not. It organized competitions to guide architects towards traditional ‘non-degenerate’ French art, and warned against ‘deracinated’ architecture.

  It was into this maze that Le Corbusier stumbled in January 1941. For twenty years, he had not been unduly discriminating in searching for patrons to implement his grandiose schemes. In the 1920s he was a prophet of Taylorism, seeing businessmen, not governments, as the key to reform: he was a member of the urban study group of Redressement français, and believed that the world would be remade by an alliance of architect and engineer. From 1930 Le Corbusier became involved in neo-syndicalist and technocratic reviews like Plans, Prélude, and L’Homme réel. He became increasingly interested in urban planning and drafted plans for Rio, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Algiers. In 1928–30 he visited Moscow three times and was invited to give his views on the redevelopment of Moscow. He now saw the Soviet Union as ‘the promised land of the engineer’ until the turn to Stalinism scotched any prospect of his ideas being adopted. In 1934–5 he started to cultivate fascist Italy. He sent Mussolini an inscribed copy of one of his works, and submitted an urban plan for Italy’s new conquest Addis Ababa. Again this came to nothing. In 1936 Le Corbusier had hopes of the Popular Front. But although he was allowed to exhibit his ideas in the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the 1937 Exhibition, he got nowhere in trying to sell the new government his proposal for the model farm—‘la ferme radieuse’—which he had first devised in 1932.88

  After the defeat Le Corbusier wrote a short book, Destin de Paris, which argued that better housing could lead to a regeneration of the family. He also wrote a piece dedicated to the Compagnons de France. Having demonstrated in this way that he was in tune with the prevailing rhetoric, Le Corbusier arrived at Vichy in January 1941. He wrote: ‘I enter the ranks after six months of doing nothing and twenty years of hopes.’89 He was put in charge of a DGEN Study Commission for questions relating to housing and building. Enthusiastic about Vichy’s creation of an Order of Architects, Le Corbusier compared it to the master builders of medieval Europe. He envisaged the order carrying out a massive reconstruction programme under the direction of an official (presumably himself) to be called ‘the regulator (l’ordonnateur)’.

  While awaiting the realization of this scheme, Le Corbusier lobbied for the Algiers reconstruction plan he had drafted in the 1930s. This was to no avail. The Algiers Plan infuriated the city’s European population and the mayor denounced him as a Communist. Meanwhile the Study Commission ran into the opposition of the DGEN’s head, Lehideux. Le Corbusier returned from Algiers to find that it had been downgraded before being finally wound up in January 1942. Le Corbusier was kept off the CNU on the pretext that he had not been a French citizen long enough, but the real reason was that he had too many enemies. In frustration, Le Corbusier lobbied to get an interview with Pétain. He wrote to one friend: ‘I’m down on my hands and knees doing everything to get results.’ The most he obtained was a letter from Ménétrel acknowledging the receipt of Corbusier’s book Sur les quatre routes and transmitting the Marshal’s opinion that it contained ‘many suggestions for the regeneration of urban life, often happy ones’. After more fuming at the ‘mediocrity, hostility, and cliques’ of Vichy, Le Corbusier finally left the town in April 1942: ‘Farewell dear shitty Vichy! I shake the last speck of your dust from my shoes.’90

  Le Corbusier’s eighteen months at Vichy are only a footnote in the history of the regime, and he never approached its inner circles. That he should have hoped for anything from Vichy demonstrates his opportunistic naivety, but it also shows the diversity of expectations aroused by the regime in its early days. That Vichy could ever have held out the prospect of using him is another illustration of the many currents that coexisted within the regime. That he was finally thwarted was less an example of the victory of ‘traditionalists’ over ‘modernizers’—on the contrary one of his main enemies was Lehideux while one of his supporters was Dumoulin—than an illustration of the Byzantine workings of the regime where corridor intrigues so often ended in stalemate.

  Utopian Communities: An Economist at Vichy

  By the end of 1942, few ambiguities remained at Vichy: the Vichy utopians buried their illusions. Esprit had been silenced in the summer of 1941; Jeune France was closed down in March 1942. Dunoyer’s faith in Pétain did not survive the events of November 1942, and Uriage was closed in the following month (it became a Milice school instead). Most of Dunoyer’s team went into hiding or joined the Resistance. Vichy youth policy, long a contested arena between traditionalists and fascists, underwent a marked radicalization after Bonnard became Minister of Education in April 1942. Georges Pelorson became Lamirand’s de
puty, and proclaimed that he intended to provide the ‘political and revolutionary formation necessary for the New French State’. This was the role he envisaged for the Équipes nationales, volunteer groups originally created in the Occupied Zone to clear bomb damage. In August 1942 Pelorson summoned the leaders of youth movements to inform them that the Équipes were to become the core of a single youth movement swearing total obedience to the Marshal. This ambition came to nothing because the leaders of the other youth movements resisted any infringement of their independence, and Pelorson was not allowed by his superiors to abandon entirely the pluralistic youth policy which remained the regime’s official policy. He did, however, give official accreditation to collaborationist youth movements like the JFOM and the Jeunesse franciste which had previously been held at arm’s length by the SGJ.91

  Lamirand resigned from the SGJ in March 1943. Youth movements were now required to renegotiate the accreditation which Lamirand had granted them in 1941; the Jewish scouting organization (EIF) was banned. Borotra, who had never disguised his anti-German convictions, was ousted from the Sports Commissariat in April 1942, and subsequently arrested while trying to cross the Pyrenees. He had run the Commissariat in an ecumenical spirit. Collaborationists had disapproved of his readiness to celebrate the feats of France’s swimming champion Alfred Nakache, who happened to be Jewish. In 1941, Nakache accompanied Borotra on a tour of North Africa and was asked by him on various occasions to raise the colours. In 1943, after Borotra had gone, Nakache was arrested and deported with his family to Germany.92

  From the middle of 1942, there was less and less space within Vichy for a Mounier, Beuve-Méry, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Schaeffer, Le Corbusier, or Borotra. But the fact that the regime, or organizations which developed with its benediction, had, up to a point, enjoyed their support, is testimony to the crisis of traditional Republican values in France at the end of the 1930s. All these people had shared a certain number of preoccupations: a sense of living through a profound crisis of civilization which required a remaking of mankind; a belief that liberal individualism was incapable of embracing humanity in all its wholeness; and a conviction that the void which had opened up in France in 1940 offered vast possibilities. To the extent that they shared a positive doctrine to offer in opposition to liberalism, it was centred upon the idea of ‘community’.

  No one more ardently espoused this theme than another young reformer attracted to Vichy: the economist François Perroux (1903–87). Having been one of the first interpreters of Schumpeterian economics in France before 1939, Perroux was a pioneer in the application of Keynesian economics in France after 1945. In 1944, he founded the Institute of Applied Economic Science; in 1947, he produced the first French study of national accounts; he later became a seminal contributor to Third World economics. These and many other original contributions to economics are mentioned in the works of homage to him. Few of these works, however, mention his activities during the Occupation, unless to mention his pre-war book Les Mythes hitlériens in which he supposedly warned his compatriots about the dangers of Nazism, making it possible to portray him like a sort of resister avant la lettre.93

  In fact, Perroux was actively involved with Vichy at several levels. He was a member of the Conseil national, sitting on its Constitutional Reform Commission; he acted as a technical adviser to the Ministry of Finance;94 from September 1942 he was Secretary-General of the Fondation Carrel from which he resigned in December 1943 after quarrelling with Carrel. The quarrel was not about the work the Fondation was carrying out, but about the way it was run. Perroux claimed that it was riddled with inefficiency and that funds were being wasted.95 In September 1941 Perroux was also a founding member, along with Pétain’s pet philosopher Gustave Thibon, of the group Économie et humanisme whose leading light was the Dominican Louis Joseph Lebret. Économie et humanisme aimed to create a forum for dialogue between Catholics and the social and human sciences. After the war it became involved in Third World development and was ready to engage in a dialogue with Marxism. But during the Occupation it was guardedly sympathetic towards the National Revolution. Économie et humanisme participated in the ‘Journées communautaires de Mont Dore’ organized in April 1943 by Pétain’s cabinet to reflect (albeit rather hypothetically) on the future of the National Revolution. It received a subsidy from Vichy in 1943, and whatever Lebret’s doubts about Vichy, in August 1944 his main worry was that the Liberation would be a pretext for ‘Judaeo-Marxist revenge’.96

  In July 1942, Perroux also set up a group called Renaître whose objective was to offer doctrinal reflection on the National Revolution and help to ‘find the elite who will make it’. Renaître in fact consisted only of Perroux himself and the Africanist Yves Urvoy, director until April 1942 of an institute to provide légionnaires with a political education.97 Renaître’s output consisted of six dense brochures outlining proposals for reform. In addition to all these activities, Perroux can also be found editing a series entitled La Bibliothèque du peuple with the Catholic Jacques Madaule, lecturing in October 1941 to the École nationale de cadres civiques, which was the training school for Marion’s propaganda delegates.98 Although Perroux never lectured at Uriage, Beuve-Méry, to whom he remained close all his life, disseminated some of his ideas there. But Perroux felt Beuve-Méry had not properly emancipated himself from the ideology of 1789.99

  What did Perroux mean by this, and what was it about Vichy that he supported? Throughout the 1930s, Perroux had been the indefatigable advocate of a form of corporatism which he called the ‘Community of Labour’.100 He started from the position that the liberal state had no answer to the crisis of modern man. The totalitarian states (Germany and the Soviet Union) had succeeded no better although at least they had addressed the problem of trying to integrate the proletariat into the national community. The revolution of 1848, the Commune, and the Popular Front had tried to do this, but each of them had failed. Given that modern capitalism separated the worker from the means of production, it was necessary to reorganize industry around corporatist communities of labour giving equal rights to employers and workers. These communities would be the prelude to a restructuring of society on communitarian lines. Once ‘dissolving and mutilating individualism’ had been overcome, it would be possible to ‘reconstruct mankind’ in a society of ‘communitarian humanism’.101

  This communitarian society would move beyond parliamentarianism—the ‘fiction of representation’—and rediscover the notion of elites: ‘it is only around the leader and through the leader that the group becomes conscious of itself’. Elites emerged from ‘concrete communities, centred on definite activities’ ascending like a pyramid from the smallest local communities to the apex of the national community. The country would no longer be governed by professional politicians ‘separated from the deep life of the country’.

  Perroux’s anti-indivdualism was grounded in his strong Catholic convictions; his suspicion of democratic politics was shared by many young intellectuals of the 1930s. He wrote in 1938 that Ordre nouveau, Esprit, Homme réel, and Nouveaux cahiers had ‘in a few years brought more original and realistic ideas into circulation that any French political party in the last half century’.102 After 1945, Perroux’s interest in working out an economics of Third World development that respected local cultures was consistent with his suspicion of the disintegrating force of untrammelled capitalism. So was his interest, in the late 1960s, in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse.103

  Probably no one had reflected more carefully on the doctrine of communitarianism than Perroux. Not everyone would have subscribed to his interpretation of it, but the concept was sufficiently protean and ambiguous to accommodate reactionaries like Maurras, Catholic conservatives like Thibon, authoritarian Catholics like de Fabrègues, leftist Catholics like Mounier, social Catholics like Lebret, and syndicalists like Hubert Lagardelle. Communitarianism was the nearest Vichy came to developing a single, overarching ideology.

  Communities are of course defined by
whom they exclude as well as whom they include. Perroux himself did not address this matter in any detail. In one of the Renaître brochures he wrote:

  In a nation articulated into numerous overlapping and interlocking groups, one becomes more fully a citizen as one participates in a larger number of communities… There are infinite degrees, all possible nuances of citizenship…It is possible to conceive different kinds of status which could for some people involve participation in ordinary communities, for others participation in specialized communities reserved to people of specific origins. This would no longer involve people being thrown out of the single common national community, but reflect concrete realities, so that just as certain groups are more or less purely national communities, people would be more or less ‘pure’ citizens. This would be the most flexible way of…recognizing the real diversities while also assisting unity. This would also be the best way of resolving the ‘Jewish problem’.104

  Although vague on details, this was at least framed in relatively inclusive terms. There were others, however, for whom the French national community would have no place for Jews.

  15

  Vichy and the Jews

  At his trial for collaboration in 1947, Xavier Vallat, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, defended himself by arguing that he had always been an anti-Semite. As a defence, this is not as paradoxical as it sounds. Vallat’s point was that he could not be accused of having worked for Germany since his anti-Semitism was authentically French, ‘inspired by my personal conception of the Jewish problem’. That Vallat could even consider offering this defence is striking evidence of the fact that, although the fate of the Jews was not entirely ignored at the Liberation,1 anti-Semitism in itself was considered secondary to the crime of collaboration.