And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (21 page)

Five years later, Vichy also seemed like a good shelter for many Parisians fleeing the advancing German army. And soon Pétain and his future deputy, Pierre Laval, spotted the town’s suitability as a seat of government. Situated in the center of France, only thirty miles from the demarcation line dividing occupied and unoccupied zones, Vichy was just a few hours away from Paris by road or rail. In this haven of tranquillity, undisturbed by the sound of Wehrmacht boots, Pétain could play his chosen role of head of state of
all
France.

Surprisingly, the fiction that Vichy spoke for the entire nation—and not just for the unoccupied zone—was widely accepted. No fewer than forty governments sent representatives there, including the United States, China, Japan and, until June 1941, the Soviet Union. Distant lands untouched by the war were also represented, among them Afghanistan, Thailand, Iraq, Turkey and most of Latin America, as well as neutral Ireland and even the Vatican. This suited the owners of Vichy’s plusher mansions, which, instead of being left empty and abandoned, were snapped up by major embassies. For example, the Villa Ica, the new home of the United States embassy on the suitably named boulevard des États-Unis, was owned by the American millionairess and Riviera socialite Florence Gould. Other delegations rented suites in the no less aptly named Hôtel des Ambassadeurs.

Naturally, most diplomats yearned for Paris, even occupied Paris, but they tempered the tedium by playing tennis, attending endless receptions and dinners and arranging clandestine erotic distractions. Latin American diplomats were known for giving the best parties, some continuing long after the eleven o’clock curfew. The belief that Pétain was important brought foreign journalists to Vichy, among them correspondents of United Press, Associated Press,
Chicago Tribune
and
The New York Times
. For entertainment, there were also visits by Paris opera, ballet and theater companies, while Piaf sang at one of the many galas organized to support Pétain’s official charities. The Germans, meanwhile, kept a low profile, monitoring events from a rambling building close to the river. Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador, spent most of his time in Paris.

Pétain set up his new home and office on the fourth floor of Vichy’s best hotel, the Hôtel du Parc, which overlooks the town’s central gardens and had the Hôtel Majestic as an annex. On Sundays,
dressed with customary elegance and accompanied by his wife, Eugénie, also known as
la maréchale
, Pétain would watch the changing of the guard from the balcony of his hotel before being driven to attend mass at the Church of Saint-Louis, where a crowd was usually waiting to applaud him. Laval worked on the third floor, although he preferred to spend his nights fifteen miles away in Châteldon, the medieval village where he had been born in 1883 and where he now owned the local château. The floor below was occupied by Vichy’s Foreign Ministry, which Laval also headed, while other ministries were scattered around town: the Army Ministry—the June 1940 armistice had allowed France to keep a 100,000-man lightly armed force in the unoccupied zone—was at the Grand Hôtel Thermal; the Hôtel Carlton found room for the Finance, Justice and Labor Ministries; the Youth Secretariat was based at the Opéra itself.

Swelling the population of Vichy to 130,000 were some 30,000
fonctionnaires
, many drawn to the town by the prospect of job security and the appeal of not living under German occupation. Theirs would be a safe war, but not one exempt from the discomfort of chilly winters—that of 1940–41 was one of the coldest in memory—and frequent food shortages. Ministerial posts in Pétain’s first cabinet went to retired military, former ministers in prewar conservative governments and members of Maurras’s ultranationalist party, L’Action Française. A few
pétainistes
already enjoyed close ties with the Nazis, among them Fernand de Brinon, who represented Vichy in Paris from December 1940. But Fascist intellectuals, believing more in Hitler’s new Europe than in Pétain’s National Revolution, showed little interest in staying in Vichy. For instance, Marcel Déat, a socialist-turned-Fascist who became editor of
L’Oeuvre
, left Vichy after Pétain ignored his call to form a regime modeled after that of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. In 1941, he created his own collaborationist party, Rassemblement National Populaire, and never abandoned hope that it would become Vichy’s official party. Lucien Rebatet, the virulently anti-Semitic journalist, worked briefly for Vichy’s Radiodiffusion Nationale before returning to Paris and rejoining the pro-Nazi weekly
Je suis partout
. As he later noted in his book
Les Décombres
, “Everyone with any fascist or anti-Jewish convictions left for Paris.”
¹
But there was no shortage of politicians, businessmen and artists looking for jobs or favors in Vichy.

Among them was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, the celebrated Swiss-born architect better known as Le Corbusier. He left Paris a
few days ahead of the Germans and headed for Vichy. “I must fight here where I believe it is necessary to put the world of construction on the right track,” he wrote at the time.
²
In other words, this was the artist speaking; to exercise his profession, he had to be close to power. And he was not put off by Vichy’s actions on other fronts: on October 1, 1940, two days before Vichy decreed the Statute on Jews, Le Corbusier noted that Jews were going through “a very bad time,” but he added, unsympathetically, that “it does seem as if their blind thirst for money had corrupted the country.”
^*
3
Le Corbusier’s real dream was to be hired by Vichy to execute an urban renewal plan for Algiers, and he flew there in the summer of 1940 with this in mind. He was also named as a consultant on reconstruction of areas damaged during the German invasion and was later placed in charge of a new housing program. But not one of his dreams was realized. In April 1942, Le Corbusier again flew to Algiers, but his plan for the city was rejected. “Some inventors have ideas and receive a kick in the backside,” he lamented.
⁴
On July 1, 1942, he left Vichy forever, and in October he reopened his studio in Paris. In two years, all he had achieved was a reputation for being uncomfortably close to Vichy.

Le Corbusier’s mistake was to project his hopes and ambitions onto the majestic figure of
le maréchal
without knowing what Pétain had in mind for France. He was not alone among artists and intellectuals. The pianist Alfred Cortot was among the very few who chose to live and work in Vichy, but a good many shared the regime’s anti-Communist attitude and identification with Catholicism and, initially at least, offered it their support. Some, like the writers Marcel Jouhandeau, Jacques Chardonne, Ramon Fernandez and Henry de Montherlant, did so publicly. Others, like Gide and Mauriac, did so discreetly, more in hope than conviction; and both were soon disillusioned. But in the summer of 1940, they were hardly out of step with the vast majority of French people who wanted to believe that, like some Old Testament prophet, Pétain would lead them out of captivity. They felt reassured that in this old soldier France’s brave heart continued to beat, that the military hero of yore would again save France’s honor. It helped that Pétain looked the part of the patriarch. His stolidly upright image was endlessly promoted through posters,
statuettes, scarves, paintings, newspaper articles, books, radio broadcasts and newsreel footage of crowds cheering him on visits to towns and cities in the unoccupied zone.
^*
And when he spoke to the French by radio, his vision of a National Revolution built on those old-fashioned values of work, family and fatherland—
travail, famille, patrie
—was spelled out in simple and comprehensible phrases. The French had good reason to believe that Pétain knew what he was doing.

The reality was far more complicated. While Vichy worked on a day-to-day basis with Abetz and the German embassy in Paris, it also had to deal with the German military command, the Armistice Commission based in Wiesbaden, the Propaganda Abteilung and, later, with the Gestapo and the SS. Further, although Pétain’s regime was based in Vichy and the Germans denied its request to move to Versailles, it also had responsibilities in the occupied zone, not only for major cultural and educational institutions but also for security and the economy. To maintain order, it counted on France’s traditional network of
préfets
, appointed officials with the power of governors who owed their loyalty to the central government, not to the citizens. While
préfets
were de facto police chiefs in their
départements
, they also provided Vichy with crucial information about German behavior and the population’s reaction to the occupation.

Vichy nonetheless felt under constant pressure from the Germans, who disapproved of any excessive displays of nationalism and banned various Vichy organizations from operating in the occupied zone. Its biggest headache, though, was managing its economic relationship with the Germans. Not only was Vichy required by the armistice to pay 400 million francs daily
^*
to cover the cost of the occupation, but it also had to organize the economy so as to satisfy Germany’s enormous demand for industrial and agricultural products and raw materials. Pétain himself was pulled in different directions. While he publicly endorsed collaboration with Germany after his meeting with Hitler in October 1940, he continued to promise a National Revolution designed to build a new and stronger France.

In practice, at least until Germany took over southern France, this
meant subservience to the Germans in the occupied zone and a degree of autonomy in the unoccupied zone. For instance, although subject to Vichy censorship, literary journals like
Poésie, Confluences, Les Cahiers du Sud
and
Fontaine
published work by such known anti-Fascists as the poets Aragon and Éluard. The Vichy region also had a busy press, which included nine newspapers and thirty weeklies that had fled Paris, among them
Le Figaro, Le Temps, La Croix
and a new Lyon edition of
Paris-Soir
, as well as numerous regional dailies, such as
La Dépêche de Toulouse
. And these publications enjoyed some freedom: the intellectual journal
Esprit
, which the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier moved to Lyon, was a rare case of a publication being closed by Vichy. Even Maurras, known for his dislike of Germany, found ways of expressing skepticism toward the occupiers in his movement’s newspaper,
L’Action Française
. Michel Déon, then a follower of Maurras’s, today an
immortel
of the Académie Française, recalled the mood in Lyon at the time: “You could not think that France was on the right path, but you were waiting, totally powerless in a world war. In the south, you were free, you could speak, even in the press. Although there was censorship, there was also criticism. You became an egoist. I will live! I will eat! In the south, we could think of nothing but victory.”
⁵

Inside the Vichy regime, there was continuous tension between those favoring outright collaboration and those backing the National Revolution. And, as a stranger to the murky world of political maneuvering, Pétain was himself ill-prepared to rule the governments he headed. In each, men of assorted ideologies and ambitions spent enormous energy wrestling for supremacy and settling scores dating back to the Third Republic. Disenchantment often followed: in time, many French rightists gave up on Vichy and either accepted a new German-ruled Europe or joined the resistance. One who broke with Pétain was François Mitterrand. Having escaped from a German prison camp in late 1941, he held a middle-level post in the Vichy regime dealing with prisoners of war before joining the resistance in mid-1943.

On one early occasion, though, Pétain asserted his will. He disliked Laval, not least for the way his deputy would disrespectfully arrive late for their meetings and blow cigarette smoke in his face. More importantly, the marshal instinctively distrusted this man, who seemed to personify the cynicism and amorality of the Third Republic. Laval could, in fact, boast consistency in one area: as far back as
1919, his desire to avert a fresh confrontation with Germany had led him to vote against the Treaty of Versailles, convinced that it would feed German resentment and bring trouble. Now he was ready to reach out to the Germans: on July 19, 1940, in Paris, he was the first Vichy official to meet Abetz. But this only reinforced Pétain’s suspicion of Laval.

On December 13, 1940, after learning that Laval was engaged in unauthorized negotiations with the Germans, Pétain jumped at the chance to be rid of him. He asked all his cabinet members to offer their resignations, then accepted that of Laval and ordered his house arrest. In a brief radio broadcast, Pétain said, “I have resolved to make this decision for compelling political reasons. It in no way alters our relationship with Germany. I remain at the helm. The National Revolution will continue to move forward.” Laval was replaced by a triumvirate comprising former prime minister Pierre-Étienne Flandin, General Charles Huntziger and Admiral François Darlan. For Pétain, it was a daring move, but one that displeased Berlin. Abetz rushed to Vichy with an armed guard to free Laval and accompany him back to Paris. While still in Vichy, according to what Galtier-Boissière heard, Abetz demanded to see Flandin, who claimed to be unwell. When Abetz insisted on a meeting, in order to maintain the pretense of his illness, Flandin received the ambassador in bed. “A true Molière farce,” Galtier-Boissière observed.
⁶
Two months later, the Germans pushed out the triumvirate, leaving Darlan alone as Pétain’s deputy and newly assigned political heir. But while Darlan proved himself eager to collaborate with the Germans, offering numerous concessions during a meeting with Hitler in May 1941, Laval remained the Nazis’ favorite. In April 1942, to Pétain’s considerable discomfort, Laval returned to power, this time with the title of prime minister, as well as its power.