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by Jackson, Julian

  It is hard to believe that Laval did not realize at the beginning of 1944 that the game was up. On two occasions, in February and May, he offered himself to Abetz as a possible peace mediator between Germany and the West, at the expense of the Soviets. There was no response.2 This did not mean Laval had no more cards to play. Germany’s defeat was now inevitable, but what would follow it was not yet clear. There were at least four possibilities.

  1. That by exploiting Roosevelt’s distrust of de Gaulle, Laval or Pétain might succeed in presiding over the transition to liberation. This solution, which might be called the ‘Badoglio scenario’, had no chance of success unless the Americans were persuaded that Vichy was still able to keep order in France. It also required giving the regime a last-minute democratic facelift, as had already been tried in the autumn of 1943.

  2. That the Allies would administer France directly on the model of the Italian AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories). Certainly this was one of the options being considered by Roosevelt. At Charlottesville, Virginia, a team of Americans was being trained to be ready to administer liberated France.

  3. That liberation would spark off a descent into anarchy or at least a total disintegration of central power, leaving the field open to a much-feared Communist attempt to seize power. Whether or not the Communists had any intention of trying to do this, the Allies and de Gaulle certainly liked to pretend that there was a real danger. The Corsican precedent was a reminder of how effective the Communists could be at furthering their interests.

  4. That the plans which the CFLN had devised would ensure a smooth assumption of power by de Gaulle. But quite apart from any ambitions which the Communists might have had, these plans left much scope for conflict between the Resistance—Communist or otherwise—and the CFLN.

  Which of these outcomes came about would depend partly on the rapidity with which France was liberated. It would also depend on the attitude of a population whose total alienation from the Vichy regime did not necessarily imply that it was ready to fall into the arms of de Gaulle, or that it would not turn to a saviour ready to offer it not only liberation but also peace and order, and save it from the civil war which threatened. The end of the war was in sight, but the future of France remained an open question.

  22

  Towards Liberation: January to June 1944

  By the spring of 1944, much of southern rural France could be more appropriately described as ‘Resistance France’ than ‘Vichy France’. In many areas the Resistance now had more impact on people’s lives than the Vichy government.1 In March, the new prefect of the Corrèze, Pierre Trouillé, described his département as experiencing two occupations: seventeen cantons were controlled by the Maquis, and nine, mainly in the urban areas, by the Germans. Without resistance approval, a prefect could no longer operate, and Trouillé quickly made contact with the Maquis.2 A similar situation existed in the neighbouring Dordogne where the prefect reported that he had lost control over his département. The Germans stuck to the towns, emerging only on brief and bloody forays.3 They now viewed the Maquis as a genuine military threat in the eventuality of a landing.4 After a meeting with d’Astier in January 1944, Churchill too was persuaded of the potential of the Maquis, and he ordered an intensification of arms drops to the Resistance.

  The Milice State: Darnand and Henriot

  Enfeebled from above by the Germans, from within by the collaborationists, from below by the Resistance, and from outside by de Gaulle, the Vichy government existed in only the most nominal sense. Since December 1943, Pétain was constantly shadowed by his German minder, Cecil Renthe-Fink, whom he called his gaoler. Laval hardly had more power than Pétain. In January Sauckel, whose influence was now eclipsing Speer’s, demanded a further million workers, at a rate of 91,000 per month, and threatened to comb the protected ‘Sperr-Betriebe’. Laval was forced to extend STO liability to every man aged between 16 and 60, and even to married (but childless) women between 21 and 35. Laval did, however, secure the concession that these women would not be sent to work in Germany. In March, he was forced to appoint Marcel Déat as Minister of Labour, with the task of overseeing labour conscription. Déat’s entry into the government, in the wake of Joseph Darnand and Philippe Henriot, signalled the final victory of the Paris collaborationists: he did not even bother to come to Vichy. Having preached the gospel of collaboration for four years, Déat was now confronted with its realities, in the form of Sauckel screaming at him for more workers. All this was somewhat academic: in the first four months of the year, fewer than 20,000 workers left for Germany.5

  As the Vichy regime lost control, it became more violent and unpredictable. The strong man was now Darnand, who had total authority over internal security. On 20 January, summary courts were instituted to judge ‘terrorists’ expeditiously. Bousquet’s delimitations between French and German spheres of authority were now redundant, and the French police were required to work directly with the Germans.6 In fact the police were no longer reliable and Darnand resorted more to the Milice, stuffing its members into key positions. The new director of prisons, Jocelyn Maret, was a milicien who dressed as a Nazi and gave the Nazi salute.7 There was an administrative purge: thirty-one prefects or sub-prefects were sacked or moved, nine at the direct behest of the Germans. In May, the existence of the Resistance infiltration network Super-Nap was uncovered, and this sparked off another purge of thirty-six prefects or sub-prefects. Most were deported to Germany.8 A few prefects, like Chiappe in Orléans or Pujes in the Pas-de-Calais, remained unquestioningly devoted to the regime, but most tried to mitigate the effects of the irruption of these thuggish elements into the administration.

  The Milice became ever more unrestrained. On 2 December 1943, the respected Radical newspaper editor, Maurice Sarraut, was assassinated; on 10 January 1944, it was the turn of the 81-year-old Victor Basch and his 82-year-old wife. Basch’s crime was to have been president of the League of the Rights of Man and also a Jew. Apart from carrying out such killings and pursuing resisters, the Milice also participated enthusiastically, along with the PPF, in rounding up Jews. Milice violence spiralled further out of control after Pétain’s broadcast on 28 April condemning resistance terrorism.9 Collaborationist organizations like the Milice and the PPF were now attracting increasingly marginal, even criminal, elements of society. Many of them were young men who had joined to escape from STO. This was true of about a third of the miliciens in Marseilles in 1944. By this time 55 per cent of PPF members in Marseilles were under 28 as opposed to 15 per cent in 1940–2.10

  In its last stages Vichy has been described as a fascist regime. But there was no longer a grand project, no illusion of winning mass appeal. The regime had become a police state—or Milice state—which existed only to crush its enemies. In 1940, Vichy’s rhetoric had oscillated between three themes: regenerating France, protecting the population from the consequences of the war, and preserving order. In 1944 only the last theme remained: Vichy presented itself as the last bulwark against revolution and anarchy. The regime lived on fear. The executant of this policy was Darnand; its orchestrator was Philippe Henriot, the French Goebbels.

  In the inter-war years Henriot had moved from the National Catholic Federation to the right wing of the Fédération républicaine. After 1940, his anti-communism drove him inexorably rightwards. His fanatical Catholicism makes it difficult to describe him as a fascist, but by 1943 he was certainly an unconditional collaborationist. After taking over responsibility for propaganda in 1944, he spoke twice daily on the radio. Playing on the fear of civil war, he depicted the Resistance as a horde of terrorists and Communists. He was a mesmerizing orator and his broadcasts had an extraordinary impact. One observer noted that the streets were deserted when he spoke; Trouillé reported that everyone found Henriot compelling, even those who were not persuaded by him. A case in point was François Mauriac who, according to his son Claude, started switching from the BBC to tune in to Henriot: ‘he cannot, despite everythi
ng, stop himself listening… refuting the arguments as he goes along, as if he needed to persuade himself’.11 For Maurice Schumann on the BBC, Henriot was an adversary not to be underestimated.

  Glières: ‘Defeat of arms, victory of souls’

  The climax of their duel over the airwaves occurred during the battle of the Glières Maquis in March 1943. Glières was a plateau, 1,500 metres high, in the Haute-Savoie. In the summer of 1943, a military mission was sent from London to assess if it could be used as an operational base for a secret Alpine army. The conclusion was positive, and Romans-Petit was instructed to organize the local Maquis. Once Churchill decided to arm the Maquis, Glières was chosen as a site for parachute drops. Romains-Petit, forced to return to the Ain, where his own Maquis was under pressure, appointed Lieutenant Théodose (‘Tom’) Morel to replace him. At the end of January, Morel took a detachment of maquisards to Glières to receive the first parachute drops. These events occurred just when Darnand needed to prove to Germany that he was ready to act vigorously against the Resistance. Deciding to make an example of the Haute-Savoie, he despatched a force of miliciens and GMR. Schumann broadast to the Haute-Savoie, warning of an imminent attack, and virtually calling for an insurrection. Although, at the behest of BCRA which opposed premature action, he followed this broadcast with counsels of caution, Schumann’s words had already had their effect.

  This combination of these circumstances—the imminence of arms drops, the fear of an attack by Darnand, the eloquence of Schumann—caused the numbers on the Glières plateau to swell to almost 500. Three parachute drops occurred, and there were sporadic skirmishes between the maquisards and the Vichy forces. In one of these, on 9 March, Morel, whose charismatic leadership had contributed to the reputation of the Maquis, was killed. Although the noose was tightening around the maquisards, Morel’s replacement, Captain Anjot, decided to fight on. Darnand visited Annecy on several occasions to supervise operations, but the maquisards held out. The Milice was better at torturing than fighting, and the GMR were unhappy about fighting not only ‘terrorists’ but also regular officers like Morel and Anjot. Eventually the Germans lost patience. After a preliminary air bombardment of the plateau, 6,000–7,000 German troops, aided by the Milice, moved in for the kill on 24 March. Two days later, Anjot gave the order to disperse, but too late to prevent the deaths of about 150 maquisards in the retreat. Another 200 maquisards and local civilians were hunted down and killed by the Milice in the following weeks.

  There was much controversy about what had gone wrong. Was it a mistake, as the Communists alleged after the war, to have encouraged a static concentration of forces—a kind of Alpine army—instead of small mobile units? In fact, Glières had not been conceived as the site of an Alpine army, but as the destination for parachute drops to supply what might eventually become one. But once the supplies had been dropped, the maquisards were reluctant to abandon the site; and it also took time to unload the containers and store their contents. Thus the maquisards became prisoners of the parachute drops. At the same time, the sheer numbers of maquisards congregating on the plateau led some to believe that an army was forming under their eyes. Even Jean Rosenthal, one of the London envoys who had been sent out in 1943, succumbed to this excitement. He appealed to London for troops to be parachuted to relieve the maquisards and allow Glières to hold out until D-Day. The tragedy of Glières was not so much a misconceived strategy as confusion about what the strategy should be.

  As the first fully-fledged battle between the Maquis and the Germans, Glières became a myth which transcended the defeat. Romans-Petit called it ‘defeat of arms but a victory of souls’. For almost a month, a mixed bunch of AS and FTP maquisards (including fifty-six Spanish Republicans) had sunk their differences and lived out the image of purity, heroism, and camaraderie which constituted the Maquis legend. They had sworn an oath to ‘Live in freedom or die’. It was because he realized that a myth was being born that Anjot delayed the order to disperse. Schumann, in constant radio contact with Rosenthal, broadcast the epic adventure to the world. The BBC announced that three countries in Europe were resisting the Germans: Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Haute-Savoie. On the other side, Henriot, who rushed down to the Haute-Savoie when the battle was over, depicted the maquisards as a criminal rabble.12

  Who won this propaganda war? The prefect of the Haute-Savoie, although not favourable to the Resistance, reported that the local population had not swallowed Henriot’s version of events. A secret poll undertaken by the CFLN found that 94 per cent of respondents admitted to listening to Henriot’s broadcasts, but 84 per cent also said that his words had no effect on them.13

  Springtime of Fear

  Henriot did not convince, but he did instil fear in his listeners. People had waited so long for liberation that lassitude and anxiety had replaced hope. As Morandat described the state of France to London on the eve of D-Day: ‘the population is feeling the effects of four years of nervous tension, emotion and hopes raised then dashed …People believed in the landings in January then February … and this will go on until it arrives. It is no longer the long-awaited miracle but a mathematical certainty, and it has in the process lost its wondrous quality.’14 Resentment was growing towards the Anglo-Americans who seemed more capable of bombing France than liberating her. Four bombing raids on Paris in March and April left 1,113 dead. On 26–7 May, ten major cities were hit, causing almost 6,000 deaths.

  At the same time, the Germans inspired increasing terror as they resorted to random reprisals in the hope of cutting off the Maquis from the population. An operation against the dispersed Maquis groups of the Cévennes between 26 February and 4 March was accompanied by atrocities like the burning of the village of Ardailles and the massacre of sixteen inhabitants of the village of Les Crottes.15 On 1 April, the SS Division Adolf Hitler massacred eighty-six inhabitants of the town of Ascq a few miles from Lille. Early April, in the Corrèze, witnessed what Trouillé called the ‘bloody week’: houses burned, 3,000 arrests, fifty-five executions.16 The combination of Allied bombing and German massacres had made France a battlefield again.

  On top of this came the violence of the Milice. In most communities, the miliciens were pariahs. Their families were sent miniature coffins to show the fate in store for them. Many miliciens defected, but those who did not resorted to ever more desperate acts of violence, knowing that they had burnt their bridges. One report to the CFLN in 1944 described the country as in a ‘state of pre-civil war’: ‘the Milice assassinate daily and arrests by the Germans and the Vichy police are common currency. No one, strictly no one knows if they will sleep the night in their bed, if they will be executed or shot the next morning. We live in a dreadful atmosphere, stifling and agonizing, above all in the big cities.’17

  Resistance attacks increasingly targeted the Milice. One tract read: ‘From today every member of the Milice must be thought of as a mad dog and treated as such. Fire on the Milice.’18 In the Haute-Savoie two miliciens were killed in September 1943, three in October, nine in November.19 In the countryside, these Resistance attacks caused almost as much fear as the depredations of the Milice. Only 20 per cent of letters opened by the postal censors approved of Maquis ‘terrorism’ in the first six months of 1944. A typical comment was: ‘The Maquis act in the name of patriotism, but fortunately the police are getting tough and I hope with all my heart that these youths are soon destroyed, for they commit all kinds of atrocities on innocent people.’20 People were understandably cautious in their letters, but other evidence exists that Maquis violence was widely condemned. In the Jura, where there was terrible German repression in April, the FFI encountered people three months later who refused to shelter them, doctors who refused to tend the wounded, priests who refused to say prayers for the dead.21 In the neighbouring Haute-Saône, the prefect noted: ‘less and less do the terrorists enjoy the complicity of the rural population’.22 Jacques Bingen reported to London on ‘the great emotion now felt by the average Frenchman— that is
the Frenchman who hates the Germans and awaits the liberation from his balcony or his cellar. The most fantastical stories are circulating; people talk of hold-ups and attacks on isolated people.’23 There were also many examples of solidarity between the population and the Maquis, but it would be wrong to assume that these increased in the last months before the Liberation: reasons to fear the Maquis grew alongside the rejection of Vichy.

  This does not mean, however, that France was divided into two equal camps. Only a tiny number of people were actively involved in either the Resistance or collaborationism, and among those who were not, sympathy lay, as it had for a long time, with the Resistance. In that sense there could not be said to have been a civil war in France as there was in Italy.24 In civil war there must be two sides. But in France, if the Maquis was feared, the Milice was both feared and detested. One observer reported of the Hérault in April: ‘The public is completely disorientated and ready to throw itself, like a lost child, into the arms of those who will bring peace.’25

  April 1944: Pétain in Paris

  This background explains a surprising recovery in the popularity of Pétain at the start of 1944.26 The Allied bombing raids enabled Pétain to resume his role as the father of the nation, sharing its grief and shielding it from war. On 20 April, a bombing raid in Paris left 651 dead and 461 wounded. Six days later, Pétain visited the city, his first trip to the Northern Zone since the Armistice. He attended a ceremony in memory of the dead at Notre-Dame, and went to the Hôtel de Ville where he addressed a crowd from the balcony. Because large crowds turned out to cheer de Gaulle only four months later, this occasion has generated much sarcastic commentary on the fickleness of the French: how many who acclaimed de Gaulle in August had done the same for Pétain in April?