The Secret Life of France (14 page)

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of war that were largely outdated, her generals were unable to adapt to the reality of the speed of modern weaponry: the result was that they were simply outrun by the Wehrmacht.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.

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
résistant
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 …’

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

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.