The Secret Life of France

by Lucy Wadham

  Henceforth, the telegram goes on, the old and infirm, visibly pregnant women, parents with children under two years old and all children under eighteen inside the ‘Free Zone’ would no longer be exempt from deportation. Bousquet then decided to include children under two years old, hitherto excluded from the convoys. Between 17 and 28 August 1942 three thousand children, many of whom were babies and toddlers, were taken by force from their parents inside the French internment camps and deported with adult strangers to the death camps. None of these children returned.

  As Vergès took pains to point out, all of this was carried out with perfect efficiency by French civil servants and without the aid of men like Klaus Barbie. Vergès reminded the court that this efficiency would never have been possible without the groundwork of Vichy’s anti-Semitic reforms. Two laws, passed on 3 October 1940 and 2 June 1941, laid down the ‘Status of Jews’ and set in motion their persecution. Henceforth all ‘Israelites’ of French or foreign nationality were required, by law, to have the word ‘Jew’ stamped on their identity cards. Vichy’s indexing of three hundred thousand Jews made possible their exclusion from all the professions and paved the way for the mass arrests and deportations.

  That summer I learnt – along with a generation of young French people – the full extent of France’s involvement in the persecution of Europe’s Jews. After the Barbie trial‡ and indeed the flurry of trials for crimes against humanity that followed – this time with Frenchmen in the dock – it was no longer possible to continue to preach mitigating circumstances for Vichy. Nor was it possible to go on perpetrating the myth of a massively resisting nation, nor the view of Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy regime, as a well-meaning war hero playing a double game with the occupier.

  Marshal Pétain and his rather more unpopular prime minister, Pierre Laval, managed to build a fascist regime in France under the auspices of the occupying forces. My own children’s history textbooks would still, in the mid-nineties, prefer to call Vichy ‘authoritarian’, specifying that the regime did not impose a one-party state and was therefore not technically ‘fascist’. I noticed that school historians – as outlined in the Manuel de Terminale – carefully chose the word unanimisme instead of totalitarisme and described Vichy’s ideology as ‘reactionary, anti-liberal and anti-democratic’ rather than fascist.

  This semantic hair-splitting does not prevent these textbooks from acknowledging that Vichy was a police state, which ended up participating in the Final Solution. The textbooks also acknowledge the ‘purifying zeal’ with which Vichy mobilised the French population against the forces of Anti-France. Pétain’s National Revolution declared war on its own citizens, who were held responsible for France’s military defeat as well as her moral decline. Vichy’s paramilitary police force (first the SOL or Service d’Ordre Légionnaire and then the Milice from 1943) would become right arm to the Gestapo. Its recruits sung an anthem in which they swore to

  Faisons la France pure:

  Bolcheviks, francs-maçons ennemis

  Israël ignoble pourriture,

  Ecœurée, la France vous vomit.§

  Knowing this, it was all the more intriguing to discover the strange inconsistencies within Vichy’s reign of terror. Laval and Pétain, for a long time, stubbornly refused to give up French Jews to the Germans. Instead they made it their business to deliver any foreign Jews they could find, even if it meant dipping into the ‘Free Zone’. After the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, which gave birth to the Final Solution, Eichmann began to put pressure on Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo in Paris, to deliver at least one hundred thousand Jews from France to the gas chambers. Dannecker, in turn, put pressure on Laval, who set about organising the biggest police raid on a religious community that Paris had ever seen. On 16 and 17 July 1942, nine thousand French policemen rounded up 13,152 men, women and children – Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – and sent them to Drancy for deportation.

  The Vel d’Hiv raid, as it came to be known (after the stadium where most of the families were held), was a turning point both for public opinion and for the French authorities. In its wake, the Germans tried to put pressure on Laval to denaturalise the seven thousand or so French Jews who had been given their nationality through a law passed in 1927. The Germans were increasingly infuriated by Laval’s insolence and ingenuity in stalling the law’s repeal¶ and were, from 1943 onwards, forced to carry out the arrest of French Jews without the help of the French police.

  After Vel d’Hiv, protestations came from the heads of France’s Christian community. The moving appeals, written by Cardinal Saliège in Toulouse and Cardinal Gerlier in Lyon, demanding an end to the inhuman treatment of the Jews, as well as the outcry of the head of the Protestant Church, Pastor Boegner, helped to turn public opinion against Vichy. This shift, combined, no doubt, with the change in the fortunes of the Allied armies, made Laval give up doing the Gestapo’s dirty work.

  France has taken decades to face up to the truth about the Vichy regime. The French administration was filled after the war with technocrats who had served under Vichy. Many of them made fine careers. Some of them, including René Bousquet and Maurice Papon, were eventually indicted for crimes against humanity. Bousquet was shot by a lunatic before he could come to trial, and Papon was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and released, due to ill health, after three – a decision that was widely criticised as pusillanimous.

  François Mitterrand himself, who swore allegiance to Pétain, was honoured as late as 1943 with the francisque (Vichy’s equivalent of the Légion d’honneur). He obstinately refused to apologise for Vichy’s crimes and stuck to the casuistic argument that Vichy was an aberration in French history: an illegal regime, which had usurped the Republic. As he put it in 1992, ‘The French nation was not involved in that, nor was the Republic.’ In the end it was Chirac (only a child during the war) who, as soon as he came to power in 1995, stood up and apologised for France’s role in the extermination of the Jews.

  Over the past twenty years the business of facing the truth, with all its messy ambiguities, has helped France to recover from the trauma of the Occupation. It has also helped to reveal more positive inconsistencies, hitherto masked by France’s habit of myth-making: the fact, as Serge Klarsfeld points out, that 240,000 people, three-quarters of France’s Jewish population, survived the Shoah, ‘thanks to the compassion and solidarity of countless French people’. When you consider that Serbia killed every last one of her Jews, and Poland, Estonia and Lithuania each slaughtered around 90 per cent of theirs, France – even with the complicity of Vichy – was one of the countries in Nazi-occupied Europe where the largest number of Jews survived. Despite Laval’s ignoble initiative, 84 per cent of Jewish children were saved in France, the highest proportion in Europe.

  France’s incurable idealism makes her prone to extremes. She is a nation in thrall to the idea and, as such, highly vulnerable to its grubby relative, ideology. In spite of her best efforts, however – her fascist legions, her nationalism and her racist laws – France made a very poor working partner for the Nazis, who became increasingly exasperated by her inconsistencies. Hitler had always preferred the English to the French, whom he saw as immoral and racially impure. As General Walter Warlimont, of the Wehrmacht High Command, put it, ‘For racial reasons Hitler seemed to prefer the English to the French. He had a view of France’s decadence as something irreversible …’||

  After the German invasion, André Gide, himself a Protestant, wrote in his diary: ‘That puritan rigour by which Protestants, those spoilsports, often make themselves so hateful, those scruples of conscience, that integrity, that unshakeable punctuality, these are the things we have most lacked. Softness, surrender, relaxation in grace and ease, so many charming qualities that were to lead us, blindfolded, to defeat.’

  * In Poland the Holocaust took more than 3 million Jewish lives and 8 per cent survived, while in France seventy-five thousand Jews di
ed and 72 per cent survived.

  † ‘The colonel was Action Française, / The major was a moderate, / The captain was for the diocese, / And the lieutenant was a rabid anti-cleric. / The adjutant was a fervent socialist, / The sergeant a hardened extremist, / The corporal was signed up to everything, / And the private was in the PMU.’ L’Action Française is a right-wing anti-republican movement, founded in the early twentieth century. The PMU (Pari Mutuel Urbain) is France’s monopolist bookmaker; its outlets are typically situated in bars, which have come to be referred to as PMUs by association.

  ‡ Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment on 341 charges. He died of cancer in 1991.

  § ‘Make France pure: / Bolsheviks, enemy freemasons, / Israel’s vile scum, / Sickened, France vomits you up.’

  ¶ Report by Heinz Röthke to Helmut Knochen, SS-Standartenführer, 15 August 1943.

  || Interviewed in Le Chagrin et la Pitié.

  10

  Foreign Affairs

  Cake and Spies

  Young children in France are swept up by the State from an early age. You can put your toddler (provided that he or she is nappy-trained) into free, full-time education from the age of three, and in some cases two. For me, the temptation to hand my little ones over to the child-catcher that is l’Education Nationale was irresistible. By the time Jack was four and Ella nearly three, my days were free between eight-thirty and four. Sometimes, usually when my English or American girlfriends came to stay, I would feel guilty about my children’s forced and premature socialisation.

  On winter mornings, as I waved goodbye to them at the school gates when it was still dark outside and watched them disappear into a low, grey building, I would long to run after them and whisk them away to the adventure playground. Then I would remember, there are no adventure playgrounds, only tame, picturesque pony rides in the Luxembourg gardens. I would pick them up at four and my heart would melt at the sight of their little camp beds all in a row, on the pillow of each a cuddly toy – or, as the school Freudian would put it, un objet de transfert (transference object). The children would file out of the classroom in pairs, hand in hand, and fetch their coats from their peg in an orderly fashion. Then they would lay their coats on the ground in front of them, feed their little arms into the sleeves and, with an expert motion, flip their coats over their heads. They would only need help with the zip. All this impeccable regimentation made me wonder why the French had made such poor bedfellows for the Nazis.

  While Jack was writhing and struggling in the mould and Ella settling comfortably into it, I began my working life. A friend from Oxford sent me off for an interview with the BBC Paris correspondent, Edward Stourton, who had just arrived from the Washington bureau and was looking for a researcher. Political correctness had not yet dawned in France and Edward seemed to welcome the respite from the new puritanism that was sweeping across America. A Roman Catholic himself, he had no difficulty slipping into French working rituals. He shared my view that there was little point in cutting short your lunch break when the whole of Paris only returned to their desks at three, nor was there much point in drinking water over lunch when your interviewee was drinking wine.

  Many years later, even now that France has joined the global economy, French businessmen still take a proper lunch break and drink wine with their meal. Laurent and his colleagues, who work in investment banking, testify to the joy or suspicion shown by their English or American investors when they come to Paris on business. They are surprised by the fact that while they invariably share a bottle of Bordeaux between three, their English guests will often get through a bottle each and the Americans will stick stubbornly to mineral water; to the French the relationship to alcohol seems, in both cases, somewhat excessive.

  *

  Shortly after I began working for the BBC Paris bureau, the French war criminal Paul Touvier was arrested in a monastery in Nice after forty-five years on the run. A devout Catholic and member of the Milice, Touvier had been hiding with his wife and two children in various monasteries across France ever since the war. The monks had pleaded ‘right of asylum’ as their reason for harbouring a man accused of crimes against humanity, and for some of them this was probably true, but for many it was clearly ideological compatibility that drove them. Anticommunism and anti-Judaism – strains that were still rife in the Catholic Church – made certain clerics take a lenient view of Touvier’s crimes.

  In those days (before John Birt and financial accountability) the BBC seemed to have endless resources. Documentaries were shot on very expensive 16mm film, generally by intense young men and women who dreamed of directing feature films. These films could take a year to make, from the research period (which might take six months) to editing and post-production. I remember having to find one hundred homing pigeons to provide a single shot for the Touvier film, a fifty-minute documentary made for Religious Programming that went massively over budget. This lavish approach meant that the researcher had plenty of time to go out and find the story. As a freelance researcher I was low down in the BBC pecking order, but working for ‘Auntie’ carried huge kudos in France, where her reputation for quality and impartiality opened many doors, some of which remained closed to French journalists. The stories I researched brought me into contact with the underbelly of French society, a world peopled with judges, politicians, delinquents, terrorists, cops and spies. Some of them became friends.

  *

  The eclectic friendships that I made during my years as a stringer for the British press stand as a measure of my incompetence as an investigative journalist. I now realise that by the time my career got under way, I had become irrevocably contaminated by the French cult of the jardin secret. Instead of proceeding as any self-respecting Anglo-Saxon reporter would do – by teasing the story from your source and then running with it – I found myself staying for coffee and cigars and listening to spooks, spies and investigative magistrates, for the sheer pleasure of learning. It became clear that with my menial status within the hierarchy of the BBC – and later, as a lowly stringer for the Sunday Telegraph – I could get away with filing anecdotal, ‘colour’ stories that hovered on the edge of a scoop, without ever betraying the implicit, though unstated request that my sources made of me to be discreet.

  When the children were at school I would do my job – which meant researching the stories that interested me (at the time, terrorism, espionage and organised crime) while keeping my employers in London happy but without blowing my contacts in France. Pusillanimous as this may sound to British journalists, this is very much the French approach to reporting. As everywhere else in French culture, the values of the press are fundamentally Catholic: take your pleasure – within the bounds of reason – and be discreet about it.

  So it was that in my working life, I found myself constantly torn between my Anglo-Saxon impulse to find out the truth that lay behind things and a growing French tendency to keep it to myself.

  Were I a true Brit, I told myself, my cosy evenings in a dining club in the sixteenth arrondissement with French counter-intelligence chiefs and their buddies from the French atomic agency would, by Monday morning, be on the front page of The Times. But then, I thought selfishly, they would never talk to me again. For these men and women, like all French people, love to talk. They cannot keep secrets. They have to flaunt their knowledge, their insights and their perspicacious overview. I would drink up their words and then go home to Laurent and sit up in bed with him and tell him all the things that I had learnt about his strange country – among them some of the reasons for her (as I saw it) rather contrary foreign policy.

  *

  I am sitting with Yves, retired head of French counter-intelligence, and his wife, Michelle, in their large, bright kitchen. The view is of a Normandy garden in winter: manicured lawn, poplars, Madame Bovary fog, limp but enduring roses.

  Yves’s wife cuts the galette des rois, a kind of almond cake that is eaten all over France in the first half of January. The galet
te testifies to the persistence of France’s dual Roman and Catholic heritage. The Feast of the Kings, as it is known here, refers to the three kings from the Nativity story, but it is a Christian rehash of the rather more debauched, week-long festival of Saturnalia, during which, apart from going completely crazy, the Romans would send each other cakes. The French galette is made with very buttery, flaky or crusty pastry, depending on the region (here in Normandy it is flaky), and filled with a creamy frangipani.

  Michelle cuts the cake into four large slices, one for each of us and one, as tradition dictates, for le pauvre, the vagrant who might show up at the door and need feeding. Hidden in one of the portions is a tiny porcelain figure known as la fève. It is either a religious symbol (the Black Madonna, one of the three kings) or a secular one (the Eiffel Tower, a sheep, a loaf of bread). The person who finds the fève in their slice becomes King (or Queen) and puts on one of the two gold paper crowns that the boulanger has provided with the cake.