The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  After de Gaulle’s death in 1970 it came as a shock, to France’s youth in particular, to discover the extent of the nation’s commitment to Pétain’s collaborationist regime. Contrary to the Gaullist myth of a massively resisting nation, the French were predominantly supportive of the ‘victor of Verdun’ – at least until November 1942, when the Germans invaded the South, the hitherto unoccupied ‘Free Zone’. The image with which Laurent and his generation had grown up was of legions of brave French men and women in berets, cycling across the French countryside at night to feed Jews hiding in barns or English aviators hiding in attics. After de Gaulle died, a series of films – the most famous of which was Max Ophüls’s long-censored Le Chagrin et la Pitié – offered a different picture of France under the Occupation and led to decades of guilt and self-recrimination.

  Since those years of mass mea culpa there has been a readjustment, and, as my own children’s history books show, a more level view of France’s war record has been established. It has become clear that those 55 million letters of denunciation were written by about 3 million people (many informers must have scribbled furiously right the way through the war). A large number of these people seem to have been making the most of the Vichy regime’s repressive climate in order to eliminate a professional or romantic rival. This does not make these acts any less repulsive but it does put France’s participation in the Shoah into a more realistic context.*

  *

  It was thanks to Laurent’s mother, Madeleine, that I began to get a sense of the enduring legacy of the war on this culture. She spoke of the Nazi Occupation of Paris as if it were yesterday and, unlike my own mother’s memories of the Blitz, there was not a trace of nostalgia. There was nothing romantic about Madeleine’s memories. No process of sublimation or rewriting of the past had taken place in the intervening years. The harsh facts were undeniable. France, in spite of her grandiose system of defence, her impenetrable Maginot Line and her superior firepower, had been entirely overrun by the enemy in five weeks. Hitler consummated France’s defeat by making her sign the armistice in the very railway car in which the Germans had signed their surrender in 1918. As my children’s textbook would put it, she had suffered ‘the greatest military defeat in her history’.

  Madeleine, whose mother had died in childbirth, was brought up by her grandmother. Madame de Segonzac was convinced, along with much of the nation, by Philippe Pétain’s credentials as the man to preserve France’s honour. In this, as in many other details, Madeleine’s wartime experiences were quite representative of the rest of the Parisian bourgeoisie. They spent their war in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, the Nazis’ preferred quarter, living on the same avenue as the Gestapo headquarters. Madeleine remembers feeling hungry much of the time, remembers, as well, her fear and hatred of the German uniform. She recalls listening, terrified, to the Allied bombing of nearby Boulogne and, at the age of eight, watching three of her Jewish classmates being called aside in assembly and marched away, never to be seen again.

  In the four years prior to the Liberation, Madeleine’s aunt and uncle were deported to Ravensbruk and Dachau for having hidden an English pilot (who had talked under torture). Like many French people, Madeleine’s grandmother had been shocked and appalled by Churchill’s decision to destroy the French fleet in the port of Mers-el-Kebir in June 1940 rather than run the risk of letting it fall into enemy hands. It was a savage attack. The French fleet, trapped in the harbour, was unable to riposte and 1,297 French sailors died at the hands of their allies, having fired hardly a shot. All France’s latent Anglophobia rose to the surface; the act was seen as yet another manifestation of English treachery. The fact that the Frenchman in command of the fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Admiral Gensoul, had been given warning of the attack and numerous options for averting it made no difference. In its aftermath anti-English posters appeared all over Paris depicting an evil-looking Churchill grinning over the crosses of the French dead.

  Admiral Somerville, the commander of the British fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, had been against the attack from the first. He had feared that destroying the fleet would throw the French into the arms of the Germans and had suggested at least allowing the French to put to sea and attacking them offshore, a move that would have had the merit of allowing the extremely proud Admiral Gensoul to save face. Years later, Somerville still referred to the attack as ‘the biggest political blunder of modern times’ and ‘an absolutely bloody business’. Occurring only a few weeks after Churchill’s idealistic proposal, in the aftermath of France’s defeat, for an ‘indissoluble union’ between the two countries, the event made Franco-British relations as bad as they had ever been.

  Like most French people, Madeleine’s grandmother, Madame de Segonzac, had never heard of Charles de Gaulle and missed his famous ‘call to arms’ when it was broadcast from London on 18 June 1940. The Mers-el-Kebir massacre, which took place just over two weeks later, made de Gaulle’s task of recruiting Frenchmen to fight alongside Englishmen much more difficult. For Madame de Segonzac, such an idea seemed absurd and dangerous, and de Gaulle vain and insubordinate. Like most people of her generation, she had no wish to see German uniforms return to France. She did, however, believe that signing the armistice was the only realistic solution. For as long as she could, she blamed Vichy’s excesses on Pétain’s swarthy, inelegant prime minister, Pierre Laval. Indeed, Pétain had such credit with his countrymen that there are still people today entirely unwilling to accept the fact that it was not Laval but Pétain, with his fantasy of building an authoritarian revolution on the back of defeat, who was the true architect of Vichy’s fascist policies.

  *

  I only have to compare my own mother’s childhood with that of my mother-in-law to understand the profound differences between the English and French sense of history. Madeleine and all of her generation perceive history as flawed, ambiguous and barbarous in its contingency. The children brought up in England during the war – both country children and evacuees – were able to conserve a sense of history as being morally coherent. They watched the virtues of honour and fortitude win through in the end. France’s war children, on the other hand, witnessed nothing but defeat, fear and moral cowardice. The forces of occupation were very effective in smothering the rare examples of heroism and, when they could not, they handpicked innocent men from the community and shot them in the village square.

  I am often struck by the harshness with which my parents’ generation, whose war was comparatively gentle, judge the French. Indeed, the fountainhead of anti-French sentiment that I so frequently detect in my own father seems to lie right there, in France’s war experience – the main grievance being her swift defeat. They let us down badly, my father says. Why did they buckle so easily? Surely they chose to capitulate, in order to save the furniture? Why wasn’t Paris destroyed like London was? Because the French care more about Beauty and Pleasure than Duty and Honour …

  Epicureanism and the devotional pursuit of pleasure in all its forms has been offered as an explanation for France’s poor war effort. And it is a good one: a nation addicted to the finer things in life will always find war harder than a nation that is not. Unlike the English, the French do not thrive on privation. Madeleine says, ‘I remember everyone around me as hungry and frightened. There was simply not enough to eat, and finding food took up most of people’s time.’ Her experience is echoed in Ophüls’s documentary by the testimony of Pierre Mendès-France, politician and resistance fighter: ‘It is very difficult to imagine what life was like then … There was nothing … This was a country in which everyone spent their whole time looking for everything.’

  Rationing in France, which was imposed by the enemy and did not (unlike British rationing) benefit from the people’s consent, was very stringent. There was no tobacco, for example, a reality that British airmen tended to forget as they busily smoked their way through their hosts’ hard-won cigarettes. Picture the Frenchman desperately trying to find the heroic Englishman his s
upply by digging out his stubs and rolling new ones with the remaining tobacco. Picture, too, the vast majority of the French population caught up in the business of searching for that lump of butter, or dash of cream, or that sliver of lard to flavour the fricassee or the ragout and supply that tiny drop of pleasure to the palate. The few who chose not to engage in this struggle against dearth hoisted themselves above reality, not with butter or cream or lard, but with ideas – of freedom, glory or solidarity – and joined the Resistance.

  The precise nature of the idea being fought for varied, of course, and the Resistance movement reflected this diversity, for there was nothing monolithic about it. You could join Libération (CDLL) or the OCM (various shades of right) or the Front National, the Franc-Tireur (various shades of left) or Combat (which was somewhere in between). The regions of France tended to be dominated by one or other of these movements, and the ideology you were fighting for – communist, socialist, nationalist or Christian democrat – often depended on where you happened to be born. As the war went on, an attempt was made to amalgamate these various movements into efficient fighting units. This attempt gave rise to the AS (Armée Secrète), the MUR, the FTP and the MOI, most of which became, on the eve of the Allied landings, the FFI (Force Française de l’Intérieure). While de Gaulle was busy trying to overcome British scepticism and convince his hosts to put resources behind such a fragmented entity, a popular French song sung by Maurice Chevalier, ‘Ça Fait d’Excellents Français’, ridiculed the French Army for its mindless and debilitating sectarianism:

  Le colonel était d’Action française,

  Le commandant était un modéré,

  Le capitaine était pour le diocèse,

  Et le lieutenant boulottait du curé.

  Le juteux était un fervent socialiste,

  Le sergent un extrémiste convaincu,

  Le caporal inscrit sur toutes les listes,

  Et l’deuxième class’ au PMU.†

  France’s defeat in June 1940 was swift and total. Contrary to the rumour put out at the time and broadly held to be true even today, France was not, militarily speaking, at a huge disadvantage. With Britain’s help, she had more tanks and guns than the Germans. She had fewer planes and infantry than the enemy and her cavalry – left over from the First World War – still outnumbered her armoured divisions, but it was not the inferiority of her equipment that undid her. As de Gaulle’s Resistance comrade Alain Peyrefitte put it, France was undone by the inferiority of her reasoning: ‘Instead of grouping her tanks in armoured divisions, she littered them about at the disposal of her infantry, which didn’t know how to use them. Instead of using her planes to defend the front, she let them fly about in the rear.’ The French historian Marc Bloch, a veteran of the First World War who lived through the defeat of 1940, explained the rout of the French Army quite simply as the failure to face up to reality. Caught up in ideas of war that were largely outdated, her generals were unable to adapt to the reality of the speed of modern weaponry: the result was that they were simply outrun by the Wehrmacht.

  The best illustration of the absurdity of French idealism in the context of war, however, is the story – told in Le Chagrin et la Pitié – of a group of bourgeois French housewives who decided to raise money to plant rose bushes along the Maginot Line in order to raise the spirits of the troops.

  The famous Maginot Line, about which we used to laugh in our history lessons as children, is frequently offered as a resounding metaphor for French pigheadedness, bureaucracy and idealism. This rampart, or rather ‘line of firepower’, 450 kilometres long, which cost the nation billions to create and which mobilised – or rather immobilised – thirty divisions, had been the pride of the French Army since its conception in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. Animated by the spirit of ‘Never Again’, France’s minister of war, André Maginot, was eager to believe his generals (Marshal Pétain being the most voluble among them) when they told him that the line would be impassable. When the wisdom of an entirely defensive strategy was contested in parliament as early as 1928, Maginot’s characteristically French faith in the administration, in the specialists, but also crucially in the idea, was already discernible.

  ‘The Border Commission and The Council of War have elaborated a plan. This plan has an advantage, that is that it exists,’ he said simply.

  Seven years later, when objections to this monolithic strategy were raised again, Maginot’s successor, General Maurin, showed the same rigid adherence to an idea that had by now absorbed enormous funds.

  ‘How can we still be considering an offensive strategy when we have spent billions on a defensive barrier?’ he asked.

  And that, it seems, was that. When the time came for the line to be put to the test and the Wehrmacht simply walked around it (taking the path through the Ardennes that they had taken in 1914), Clemenceau’s joke that ‘War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military’ had never been more pertinent.

  Collaboration and Defeat

  When Jack was nine months old, I went back to Oxford to finish my degree. At the end of the summer term, my grandmother came to stay with me in my digs. In the day, while she looked after Jack, I sat my finals. My grandmother kept me on a regime of chicken soup and bananas, the only thing I could eat without throwing up.

  ‘With that kind of morning sickness’, she told me, ‘you must be having a girl.’

  It turned out she was right. I was three months pregnant with Ella.

  Every morning I put on my gown and cycled five minutes away to the examination halls on the High Street. Every morning I would stop, usually near the St Giles monument, and throw up on the pavement. After a few days, the invigilators kindly took the initiative of putting two dried biscuits on my desk to help me get through the exam without vomiting.

  My finals over, I returned to Paris, to Laurent and la bande and my life as a bourgeois Parisian housewife. It was the summer of 1987. I would spend my days with Jack in Paris’s various parks, all of them quite picturesque, with their topiary, their ordered flowerbeds and their gravel paths, and all quite unsuitable for children. Jack would play grubbily alongside the groomed Parisian children, while I sat, not with the mothers (they were all at work), but with the au pair girls on a bench and struggled through Libération – France’s favourite left-wing daily newspaper; founded by Sartre and a group of eager Maoists in the early seventies, it was thriving back then but is now in steady decline. Haltingly and between waves of nausea, I read all about the trauma that was gripping the nation: the trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon.

  Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, the personification of the barbarity of the Occupation, had been tracked down in Bolivia by French Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld and brought back to stand trial for crimes against humanity in the very city where he had committed his atrocities. Six weeks of hearings over that long, hot summer of 1987, during which the whole of France was riveted to that stuffy, overcrowded courtroom in Lyon. Six weeks in which to face collectively – and for the first time – the true horror of what had gone on during Les Années Noires (the dark years).

  For the first two days of the trial, over an eight-hour period, the president of the tribunal read out the catalogue of horrors attributed to the former Gestapo chief. Barbie sat in silence and listened. An unfortunate twist to his thin mouth gave the impression that the seventy-three-year-old Nazi was smiling.

  At the end of his arraignment and to the horror of his victims, Barbie announced his decision not to attend the rest of the trial but to wait it out, as was his right, in the prison of Montluc, where he was being held and where he had once imprisoned the Jews and résistants he would deport to the camps.

  In his absence, his victims, or their descendants, came to the bar one by one to bear witness to his crimes. As I read Libération’s vivid accounts of these tales of unspeakable suffering at the hand of a single man, I would repeatedly put down the paper – and breathe. The crimes that Barbie had committed against résis
tant fighters, which included the protracted torture of France’s Resistance hero Jean Moulin, were considered war crimes and had lapsed. Only the crimes against Jews, which were considered crimes against humanity, have no statute of limitation. France’s Jews, most of whom had been children at the time, were now standing up and speaking out about what they had suffered.

  For the prosecution, Barbie’s crimes were simply the manifestation of his merciless and gratuitous violence. For the defence, however, this old Nazi was being used as a scapegoat to preserve France from the discomfort of looking at a much harsher truth: the role she herself had played in these crimes. Barbie’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès, believed it was time to examine that role.

  Despite the best efforts of the president of the tribunal and the prosecution to stick to the crimes themselves, the trial, in the absence of the accused, became a kind of collective psychodrama in which France’s history, or at least the current version of it, was being held up for scrutiny.

  It gradually became clear that a large proportion of the crimes that were being described with such terrible clarity had been committed at the behest of French people. The raid on an orphanage at Izieu, for example – in which forty-four Jewish schoolchildren, tracked to a farmhouse east of Lyon, were arrested and sent to their deaths – had been organised after a tip-off from a neighbouring farm-worker, Lucien Bourdon. Many French people learnt, for the first time, that the deportation of Jewish children under sixteen had come about at the insistence of the French authorities themselves. Unprompted by the Germans, Prime Minister Laval had insisted that all children be deported with their families, probably in order to avoid scenes that might stir up public indignation. A telegram sent on 18 August 1942 to the French Ministry of the Interior and signed by René Bousquet, head of the French police in Vichy, testifies to the zeal with which the regime was prepared to help the Germans in their persecution of the Jews: ‘Following my instructions of 5 August concerning operations for rounding up of Israelites …’