On 12 June and for the next two days, Louis took his men into battle at Le Cadran, Connantre, Voué and Bréviandes in the Champagne, in the hills and plateaux between Rheims and Troyes, and he was in the thick of action in the last days before the fall of France. His commanding officers commended his enthusiasm, his vigour, and his foi.On 15 June he was cited for bravery in covering his battery in retreat—“He was the last officer to stay in position with a machine gun until all of his battery were out of enemy fire.”52 On the same day he was taken prisoner, one of two million captured by the Germans in these last days of the war in France, and was sent off to prison camp in Poland.
In early June Reynaud sacked de Monzie and Daladier and other defeatists in the cabinet, and installed General Charles de Gaulle as Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of War; but it was too late, for by 13 June Weygand had abandoned all military endeavour. Reynaud begged his supreme commander to offer Germany a military capitulation only, a settlement which would allow the French government to continue the war from France's overseas colonies. Weygand was intransigent. He would not continue with the battle. He would not resign. He wanted to end the war. Pétain, the more lugubrious, more pessimistic and more personally ambitious of this military duo, was entirely in agreement with Weygand's approach.53 Weygand reported that communists were about to take over Paris. Instead the German army reached the capital the next day, 14 June; over two million Parisians had already left, leaving an almost empty city for German occupation. Both Churchill and Reynaud had been bombarding Roosevelt with requests for American support; this Roosevelt could not publicly supply.
On 13 June Churchill came to France for the last time before it fell, to Tours, to which the French government had fled. De Gaulle, who flew to London to beg for help to move the French government to North Africa, had convinced Churchill to “proclaim the indissoluble union of the French and British peoples.”54 As the French government fled further south to Bordeaux, on 16 June the British cabinet authorised a “declaration of union.” Reynaud was euphoric; Pétain said it would be “a fusion with a corpse.”55 The rejection of Churchill's offer for a union between France and Britain was the end for Reynaud. Pétain, supported by Weygand, formed a cabinet of national defence and prepared to sue for peace. Reynaud resigned; Pétain was declared prime minister and immediately ordered his armies to cease fighting.
Pétain had been in Spain when Reynaud summoned him to save France, as the first French ambassador to Franco's new government. From 5 June he had kept José Felix de Lequerica, Spanish ambassador to France—and by way of him Germany too—informed that he wanted an armistice.56 Pétain sent de Lequerica—a Spanish, Catholic and monarchist version of de Monzie in almost every way, who became another figure of importance in the life of Louis Darquier—to open negotiations with Germany. These were completed on 22 June, and the next day Hitler came to Rethondes in the forest of Compiègne to see the armistice signed in the same railway carriage in which Germany had accepted its defeat in 1918. Hitler gave a jig of triumph when it was done, and went on the next day for a quick inspection of the wonders of Paris, now acquired for his Third Reich. Shortly afterwards he issued instructions to “take into custody all objects of art, whether state-owned or in private Jewish hands.”57
Two days after the fall of France, on 17 June, the day he came to power, Pétain told the French people that in taking over their government he was bestowing upon them “the gift of my own person.” Arthur Koestler, who heard his radio speech, thought he sounded like “a skeleton with a chill,” but Pétain's thin, reedy voice belied his appearance.58 He was in fact a portly pouter pigeon of a man, with round cheeks, clear blue eyes and a careful grey moustache, his neat head held stiffly above a substantial stomach. This body requires description because, just as Churchill's speeches to the nation are woven into the fabric of British life, so is Pétain's first speech to the French people, who welcomed his assumption of power as the arrival of their Saviour.
Because of his age, eighty-four when he came to power, anecdotes about Pétain's dotage abound. Was he senile? He was prone to irrelevancies, and was known to fall asleep in public on occasion, and to prose on. But this was one of many myths sent forth into the world by himself and others, and judiciously fostered over many years. After the First World War, in which he had become established as a national hero, Pétain had achieved an almost godlike reputation as the compassionate general, the father figure of the republic. For this reason he was also a hero to socialists like Léon Blum. Pétain preserved this reputation effortlessly because he was a secretive, silent man who hid the fact that his concern for French soldiers during the 1917 mutinies in the First World War had compounded his conservative Catholic fear of communism and socialist ideas. Though not a practising Catholic, Pétain was a traditionalist who had absorbed the Church's apprehensions and fixed opinions, one of which was that the fall of France was due to its politicians and its teachers, all pacifists, godless communists or, worse, Freemasons. He always spoke about his beloved France and its people with paternal affection, and when he took command in June 1940 the people of France trusted him. They continued to do so almost without question for the first two years of his rule, many of them until the very end, deluded by a belief in secret strategies hidden behind his impassive face.
But Pétain's immaculate public persona sheltered an inflexible and touchy army man, who viewed a good portion of his countrymen and countrywomen as unworthy of defence, and Hitler as the lesser monster. Weygand, having determined not to fight, now proceeded to instruct Pétain as to what must be done next. “The old order of things,” he stated, “a political regime made up of Masonic, capitalist and internationalist deals, has brought us where we stand…France's recovery through hard work cannot be achieved without the institution of a new social regime…We must return to the cult and the practice of an ideal summed up in these few words: God, Country, Family…Today a new team, made up of a small number of new men untainted and uncommitted, and animated solely by the desire to serve, must, under the direction of Marshal Pétain, the leader recognised by all, proclaim its programme and set to work.”59
As one of Weygand's “new men,” a member of this team from 1942 to 1944, Louis Darquier was indeed set to work. In 1973 Henry Coston said of him: “From 1937 he demanded that they [the Jews] be expelled or executed… and he achieved both these aims.”60
IV
VICHY FRANCE
12
Work, Family, Fatherland
BOTH PéTAIN AND WEYGAND firmly believed that as France had fallen, Britain would shortly follow, and Hitler would be in England within a week. Instead, as Pétain was issuing his instructions to his subjects, General de Gaulle flew from Bordeaux to London, and on the next day, 18 June 1940, this unknown general broadcast on the BBC to the few in France in a position to hear him: “Must all hope vanish? Is defeat final? No!”1
A vast number of those he addressed—a quarter of the stupefied population of France, accompanied by Belgians and Dutch who had fled before them, took to the road as the Germans advanced.2 Hauling their possessions strapped to bicycles, carts and cars, lorries, hearses, prams, boxes on wheels, this slowly moving caravan of terrified humanity created the atmosphere in which the French people were to accept their defeat. After this exodus many families were never reunited, many homes never restored, and over ninety thousand children lost their parents in the mêlée. On the road, strafed by German Stukas as they huddled for protection with their families, the death of the children began here.
The towns and villages of southern France were swamped with refugees. Anatole de Monzie escaped Paris on 10 June “in the packed car of a fellow Cadurcien.” Charles Maurras left on the same day. Pierre Darquier may have been de Monzie's driver, for he and Louise fled Neuilly in early June, taking René's wife and children with them. They took refuge in St.-Paul-de-Loubressac, a village south of Cahors, in the holiday house of an old friend.3 The village, like Cahors, was flush with refug
ees; within weeks the population of Cahors alone had grown from thirteen to sixty thousand. During his stay in St.-Paul, Pierre comforted the villagers in the patois he had known since childhood, and treated them for nothing, or for a chicken or a duck, as he had decades before. Also in the village was Germaine, the wife of Georges Blond, noted journalist of the rabid Je Suis partout, known for fascist views well to the right of “Pétain et Compagnie,” as the lower orders called the Vichy government. Germaine Blond was accepted with the rest.
Louis was in prison camp in Poland, and Jean, who had been mobilised in an ambulance brigade in 1939, had also been captured. Myrtle, back in Paris, “alone in the wake of defeat, not knowing which way to turn,” sent a last card to her family, which escaped the censors in the confusion of June 1940—“just a few lines, the old Myrtle shouting defiance at the enemy.”4 After that, Tasmania heard nothing more from her until the war was over.
Hitler's orders for the occupation of France had the appearance of leniency at the time. In retrospect his instructions can be seen as a clever, but bloodsucking arrangement in which France was partitioned but given a sedative pretence of sovereignty. France was chopped into pieces. Sections to the north, east and west, and the Atlantic coast, were carved off and either annexed or appropriated. The rump that was left was divided in two. German-occupied France stretched through Rheims, Rouen and Paris, and down to Angoulême—Tours, Dijon and Bourges were all occupied, and wandering underneath these cities Germany drew a demarcation line. Below this, except for fifty kilometres which Italy took along its border, two-fifths of France was left to Marshal Pétain for so-called “selfgovernment.”5
This was the Non-Occupied Zone, the Vichy Zone, often called Zone NonO, the “Free” or “Southern” Zone. It began in the centre near Vichy and Clermont-Ferrand, and stretched south to Lyon and Marseille, and westwards to include Toulouse.6 This remnant of France was permitted to retain control of its extensive overseas empire, a small army of 100,000 men, and its demobilised fleet. Apart from this surgery, the armistice had two scorpions' tails. A million and a half captured Frenchmen were transported to camps in Germany or its occupied territories and kept there. These servicemen, the same vast number as the French dead of the First World War, were Hitler's trump card, used to extort compliance from the Vichy state and the French people. And France had to pay the costs of occupation. Unspecified in the armistice agreement, these were to bleed the country dry.
In June 1940 the French population was left with two rulers instead of one, each of them eager to harry the population into his own chosen
Occupied and Unoccupied (Vichy) France, 1940–1944
shape. Five days after his return to Cahors, de Monzie was called to Bordeaux as the French government arrived in the city. There, the day before Reynaud resigned and Pétain took over, de Monzie sat in the office of José de Lequerica to “plan the procedure and practical details of the armistice,”7 though he used a word which also means “predict,” an interpretation he was to need desperately after the Liberation.
When Pétain was asked to form a government on 16 June, he drew out of his pocket his list of ministers. By 1 July he had installed them in the spa town of Vichy in the Allier, a northern department in the Auvergne, long famous for its natural springs, its gambling casinos and its curative regimes. Vichy had large and numerous hotels and an up-to-date telephone system, blessings which turned into a curse as the name of the town became forever associated with the French puppet government that collaborated with Nazi Germany. Today Vichy labours hopelessly to lose the image bestowed upon it by the “gouvernement du Maréchal Pétain,” as its inhabitants insist on calling the regime everyone else calls Vichy France. A pretty town then, and a pretty town now, its gracious parks, imposing hotels and stately buildings with their pilasters, glass and wrought-iron balconies provided comfortable space for the new French state.
In Vichy's Grand Casino on 10 July 1940, 569 deputies and senators of the National Assembly voted full powers to Pétain and so brought an end to the Third Republic. De Monzie voted in favour of Pétain, as did Louis Louis-Dreyfus. The eighty men who voted against included Léon Blum; there were eighteen abstentions.8 The next day Pétain became head of state and suspended Parliament indefinitely.
General de Gaulle never accepted that the Vichy government was a legal inheritor of republican France. But it was. On the other hand, de Gaulle asserted that Vichy was “collaborating with murderers,”9 and he was right. The people of France, citizens no longer, were subjects now, and it was with the rituals of Action Française and the Catholic Church, and using the words they used, that Pétain was welcomed to power. He told the French that they had lost the “spirit of sacrifice,” which had been replaced by a decadent “spirit of pleasure.” It was now time for “atonement for their sins.” He told them that they had been defeated because of “too few children, too few arms, too few allies …”10 Immediately “Papa” Pétain shepherded his children into his National Revolution, an idealised attempt to re-create old France—Catholic, agrarian, authoritarian, with an emphasis on order and obedience.
Maurras hailed Pétain's election as “a divine surprise”; the Papal Nuncio described it as the “Pétain miracle.” The Pater Noster was adapted for him:
Our Father who stands before us,
thy name be glorified,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done on earth so that we may live.
Give us our daily bread, though we give nothing in return.
Give once more life unto France.
Lead us not into false hope nor into deceit,
but deliver us from evil, O Marshal.11
Pierre Laval negotiated the vote which gave Pétain his dictatorial authority. Fifty-seven years of age in 1940, during his long political career as both deputy and senator Laval had twice been prime minister of France and many times a cabinet minister. He began his public life as a lawyer and a socialist, then went on to become a wealthy and successful businessman, and in so doing solidified into one of those men who demonise excessively all those whose views they themselves once held but have since discarded. Anti-communism allied him with men such as Pétain, Taittinger, la Roque and traditionalists generally, but in a most uneasy fashion.12 Catholic nationalists like General Weygand loathed him, and he reciprocated. Laval hated war, but for many years before 1939 he had worked towards the achievement of an authoritarian government, hopefully under the figurehead of Pétain. He was very much a republican in the mode of de Monzie, a committed European who had struggled to achieve a special relationship with Mussolini's Italy, quite oblivious to Mussolini's dislike for his brash persona.
Pétain was supposed to govern only the Non-Occupied Zone, but to administer both zones; French administrators, not valuable German bodies, were to manage what was left of France. In practice the Germans constantly intervened and never permitted Vichy to do this satisfactorily. In the four years of the Occupation Pétain visited Paris, only three hours from Vichy, but once. Pétain's Zone was left with France's wine industry, its better weather and a little over a third of its population, so that when he began to implement Drumont's catchphrase “France for the French,” he had lost most of France anyway.
Pétain rewarded Laval's kingmaking by naming him as his successor and deputy prime minister. Except for the first few weeks, theirs was a disastrous relationship. Pétain detested Laval, his ambition, his cunning, his pacifism, his non-military and parliamentary past, and his habit of blowing smoke into his face. Laval, for his part, misread Pétain, and continued to do so. He expected Pétain to be “a statue on a pedestal… nothing more,” while he, Laval, got on with running the country.13
Louis Darquier expressed a prevailing view when he described Laval: “He was ugly. Good Lord that man was ugly!” With his nickname of “Don Pedro,” Laval's ugliness, coupled with a smouldering mistrust of him, is as often mentioned as the mindless devotion offered to Pétain. Laval was not prone to Pétain's moralising, but
he was neither ugly nor merely a forthright and uncharismatic rough diamond. His bluntness sheltered a devious and ruthless intriguer, a fatal combination which brought him the hatred of his people.
Apart from Laval, Pétain surrounded himself with men who also had ambitions for power of their own, and with them he proceeded to construct his National Revolution. For his rebirth of France Pétain jettisoned the maxim of the French Revolution and its republic, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and replaced it with la Roque's words of command for his Croix-de-feu: Travail, Famille, Patrie—Work, Family, Fatherland.
Laval matched Pétain in his view of Britain, la perfide Albion,as “France's most implacable enemy,”14 a self-interested country that liked to fight its wars on French soil. This hostility was exacerbated a few days after Pétain signed the armistice, when the British government recognised de Gaulle as leader of the Free French forces, as those citizens of France who followed the general to London were called. Then on 3 July Churchill ordered the destruction of the French navy at Mers-el-Kebir in French Algeria. Over a thousand French seamen were killed. Pétain broke off relations with Britain, and in August tried de Gaulle in his absence and condemned him to death.
Unlike Laval, Pétain never extended his hatred for Britain to the United States, which maintained an embassy in Vichy until 1942. Prominent Americans around Roosevelt, re-elected president in November 1940, resisted involvement in the European war, adopting an ambiguous attitude which included seeing little difference between Pétain and de Gaulle, whose “certain idea of France” Roosevelt resolutely loathed. In the early years of the war, for the United States “such hope as there might be for the future was centred almost entirely on Marshal Pétain himself.”15 The French people felt the same.
Bad Faith Page 24