Authors: Ruth Brandon
For manufacturers commited to the idea of a
Franco-German community, however, this transfer of assets presented no problem.
Rather it made sound economic sense. A
mixte
economy
required
mixte
management. An investigative
commission set up in the Lyon region in 1945 found “no trace of forcing” by
Vichy or the Germans in this respect. On the contrary, when, as happened from
time to time, Vichy tried to prevent such moves, the businessmen generally
managed to get around the prohibition. “They say now that resistance, in 1940
and 1941, would have been premature and useless,” the commission reported. “But
the question . . . never really arose for the bosses of finance and
industry. . . . It simply didn’t concern them. . . .
Resistance seemed absurd and pointless—a fight against themselves.”
17
Naturally, little if any of this was ever stated in
so many words. When the occupation ended, and Schueller was tried for industrial
collaboration, he was asked about his paint firm Valentine, whose product was of
course of considerable interest to the occupiers, and which appeared to have
sold them a good proportion of what it made. Schueller simply replied that he
was no longer in charge there at the time. He had relinquished his majority
holding, along with his position as Valentine’s CEO, in October 1940. What he
did not say was that Valentine was closely involved with the German firm
Druckfarben, and helped it take control of another French paint firm, Neochrome,
in which Valentine had a 50-percent holding. Valentine (and thus Schueller)
ceded 15 perent of its Neochrome holdings to the Germans, and as a
“participation française” was necessary, retained the remaining 35 percent.
. . .
18
The German in charge of
this transaction was a Dr. Schmilinsky. He valued his acquaintance with
Schueller and went out of his way to introduce this “eminent industrial chemist
and an eminent and ardent partisan of the Franco-German accord,” to his
superiors in the German embassy.
19
Dr. Schmilinsky also described Schueller as being
head of the economic section of a political party. For he had now made his
choice. He would offer his services—and his money—to the Mouvement Sociale
Révolutionnaire (MSR—which, in the French pronunciation, emerges as “Aime et
Sers,” or Love and Serve—an acronym we shall encounter frequently in the
following pages).
MSR were the most extreme of the extreme. They were
led by Eugène Deloncle, a clever and charismatic naval engineer whose hypnotic
personal charm nullified his somewhat absurd appearance—short, plump, invariably
bowler-hatted—and kept his inner circle spellbound. Deloncle, who operated under
the nom-de-guerre of “Monsieur Marie,” was a plotter and intriguer; his favorite
reading was Malaparte’s
Technique of the
Coup-d’état
. Ultranationalist and deeply anti-German, he was nevertheless
convinced that, given the fait accompli of the Occupation, collaboration was a
“biological necessity” if France was to become, as he hoped, an independent
fascist state.
20
“The first priority for France
is to collaborate. Why is she wasting so much time?” he demanded in a radio
broadcast in January 1941.
21
Deloncle had been spurred into independent
political action by the failure of the great antigovernment demonstration of
February 6, 1934. Ever since 1789, French politics had been dominated by the
never-resolved conflict between those who supported the Revolution and those who
were against everything it stood for. For the antis, who included many if not
most of the governing and officer class, this February day represented the last
best chance of overturning the hated Republic. Forty thousand supporters of the
royalist right—Charles Maurras’s Action Française and its youth wing, the
Camelots du Roy; Colonel de la Rocque’s ultra-Catholic Croix de Feu; the fascist
Solidarité Française; and the Jeunes Patriotes—gathered in the Place de la
Concorde to march on the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais-Bourbon, on the other
side of the Seine. For more than a month the rhetoric had been building. The
climate of insurrection had reached the boiling point; the time had come for
action.
By the end of the day, sixteen were dead and a
thousand wounded, including four hundred police. But at the crucial moment La
Rocque, whose Croix de Feu were massed in a vital passage from where they could
have overwhelmed the
garde républicaine
, called off
his troops. He had decided that as a serving officer he could not march on the
Chamber of Deputies. None of the other factions had either the men or the arms
to act without him. The Republic was saved, and in the 1936 elections, a huge
left-wing majority swept Léon Blum and his Popular Front to power.
There was general gnashing of right-wing teeth, but
for some, gnashing was not enough. In February 1936, Blum was attacked by Jean
Filliol, the little killer who would become Deloncle’s hit man. On his way back
from a meeting, Blum’s car had got caught up in the funeral cortege of a popular
royalist historian. Filliol, who was attending the funeral, noticed it and
seized his opportunity. He broke the car’s window, sank a bayonet into its
backseat, and was preparing to sink it into Blum himself when workers from a
nearby building site rescued the prime minister, who eventually found refuge in
the nearby headquarters of the League of Catholic Women. Blum was bloodied and
terrified but still alive. That June, he dissolved the right-wing ligues, making
them illegal.
Deloncle, always attracted by the clandestine,
thereupon decided to set up his own secret army: the
Organisme spécial de l’action régulatrice nationale
, or OSARN. It
was more commonly known as La Cagoule, “the hood”—an epithet referring to the
Klan-type red hoods supposedly worn when members were inducted, and soon
generally adopted. These chosen shock troops would be a French fascist party in
embryo, and would counter what Deloncle dubbed “inaction française.” He
organized them along the lines of the secret societies that perennially
fascinated him, even when (as with the Freemasons) he hated them. Potential
members were vetted. They needed a reliable “godfather” to vouch for them, and
were allotted to separate cells that knew only their own members and doings, and
that operated under names with anodyne and vaguely patriotic associations,
different in every region. Connections between the center and the regions were
kept indirect. Army officers received what was in effect a contract, promising
protection in exchange for their support. And “traitors” were pitilessly
executed. “
Nous sommes méchants
,” Deloncle liked to
say—something Filliol made sure was no idle boast.
The proper equipment of this organization would
require funds. Deloncle obtained signed letters of endorsement from the aged
Marshal Franchet d’Espèrey, France’s most senior soldier, and set about raising
them. Many of France’s biggest businessmen—Lafarge cement, the Byrrh and
Cointreau liqueur interests, Ripolin paints, several of the big Protestant
banks, the Lesieur cooking-oils magnate Lemaigre-Dubreuil—were sufficiently
terrified by the looming specter of communism to fill his coffers. Louis Renault
donated two million francs; Pierre Michelin gave a million, and sent another
three and a half million in cash, in a briefcase. The Michelin tire empire was
based in Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auvergne; the local branch of La Cagoule was
composed entirely of Michelin engineers, placed by their employer at Deloncle’s
disposal. Soon Deloncle’s organization had ten thousand members, among them many
senior army officers.
They at once set about their business. When
Franchet d’Espèrey demanded a “blood proof” before raising any more money, it
was provided in the shape of Dmitri Navachine, the Soviet representative in
Paris, who in addition to being a Communist was a Jew and a Freemason, thus
ticking all the hate boxes of the right. Filliol murdered Navachine in his
trademark way—shot, then finished off with a dagger—while the diplomat was out
walking his dogs in the Bois de Boulogne on January 24, 1937.
Other murders followed. On March 16, 1937, a La
Cagoule commando fired missiles into a socialist demonstration in Clichy, a
working-class district of Paris. In June, in exchange for machine guns from
Mussolini, the Italian socialist Carlo Rosselli was assassinated, along with his
brother, Nello, in the quiet Normandy spa of Bagnoles de l’Orne: “the sad death
in exile that seems almost inevitable for the best sons of Italy,” as Rosselli
himself wrote of another Italian socialist (Filippo Turati) who had suffered a
similar fate. The police solved none of these crimes: the details did not emerge
until La Cagoule was finally brought to trial after the Liberation.
On September 11, 1937, Deloncle overreached
himself. At ten that evening, in a coup organized by Filliol and a team that
included a Michelin engineer, two bombs exploded in Paris near the Arc de
Triomphe. One destroyed the façade of the rue de Presbourg offices of the
Confédération Générale du Patronat Français (the general confederation of French
employers), raising a cloud a hundred meters high and blowing over a nearby
taxi. The second destroyed the building of the iron and steel manufacturers’
association at 45, rue Boissière. Two people were killed and many more injured.
Deloncle spread rumors, propagated by the right-wing press, that this attack was
the work of Communist plotters. The police had infiltrated La Cagoule and soon
began to unravel what had happened, but Deloncle’s numerous supporters in the
army all believed in the Communist plot, their fears further fanned by a new
Deloncle rumor, this time that a Communist takeover had been planned and was
imminent. It was agreed that they would descend on Paris, avert the danger, and
take over. The night of November 15–16 was fixed for the operation and assembly
points arranged at four addresses where La Cagoule had established arms dumps:
in a
pension de famille
for elderly ladies, an
antiques shop, a radiography center, and a villa in the suburb of Rueil where
the basement had been fitted up as a torture chamber. Unfortunately for the
plotters, the police were waiting, arrested those cagoulards unable to escape in
time, and confiscated the arms. Deloncle and his brother were picked up, as were
a number of others, including, sensationally, a general—Duseigneur—and a duke,
who held the Corsican title of Pozzo di Borgo. They were held in prison awaiting
trial. When war was declared, however, the cagoulards were provisionally freed
to join—or rejoin—the armed forces. And after the German triumph, they went
their different ways.
Supporting La Cagoule did not mean that you
automatically supported the occupying Germans. On the contrary, many, especially
among army officers, were proud nationalists. They had been unable to bear the
spectacle of their beloved France mismanaged by a leftist rabble, and now found
the thought of a teutonic hegemony equally intolerable. Some followed de Gaulle
to London; others supported General Giraud, who had been an active cagoulard
while governor of Metz, and who became a rival focus for resistance. Several
joined Pétain in Vichy, where an increasingly vain pretense of independence was
maintained. But a hard core, including Filliol, chose out-and-out collaboration.
They followed Deloncle to Paris, becoming the MSR.
For Deloncle, the debacle offered the prospect of a
dazzling revenge as the hated Republic was destroyed, along with its “puppets.”
“I witnessed their agony,” he wrote to his wife. “If you could have seen their
faces, masks of terror, sweating dishonor, you’d have hugged yourself with
joy.”
22
Now he, whom they had forced into
hiding and imprisoned, would prepare to take power. But to do so he would need
money, and Schueller offered it.
S
chueller said he first met Deloncle at the end of 1940, “when he came
to find me and said he was utterly converted to my social and economic ideas,
which he wanted to include in his party’s program.”
23
In fact, many historians claim he was the secret financier behind
La Cagoule, in which case they would have met much earlier. But there seems to
be no evidence—other than the historians’ assertions—to support that. La
Cagoule’s finances were not secret, at least within cagoulard circles; nor did
Schueller’s name appear on the carelessly uncoded list of members kept by La
Cagoule’s archivist, Aristide Corre, and found by the police when they searched
his rooms five days after the Arc de Triomphe bombs. The list was sketchy
regarding the provinces, but was clear and full as far as Paris membership was
concerned, giving all members’ names and addresses.
When the new party was born, on September 15, 1940,
describing itself as “European, racist, revolutionary, communitarian [i.e.,
Franco-German in outlook], authoritarian,” Schueller was the first member to
sign up (the second was Filliol).
24
On the new
party’s letterhead, where his name appeared just below that of Eugène Deloncle,
he was named as “president and director of technical commissions and study
committees.” As well as money, he gave the MSR a meeting room adjacent to his
own luxurious offices in the L’Oréal building on rue Royale.
25
In return, a nod to the proportional salary
was included in the MSR manifesto of aims. Alongside the standard racist and
nationalist clichés that Deloncle took so chillingly literally (“We want to
construct the new Europe in co-operation with National Socialist Germany and all
the other European nations liberated, as she has been, from liberal capitalism,
Judaism, Bolshevism, and Freemasonry. . . . The racial regeneration of
France and the French . . . Severe racial laws to prevent such Jews as
remain in France from polluting the French race . . . We want to
create a united, virile and strong youth . . .”) there was a promise
“To create a socialist economy that will assure a fair distribution of goods by
raising salaries along with production.”
26