The military meetings in Paris on November 29 and December 10 had to be most carefully explained to the Americans. Admiral William D. Leahy was expected in January, the most important ambassador to be accredited to Vichy. Pétain told Robert Murphy on December 12 how pleased he was, although he claimed to the Germans that Leahy had been forced upon him.
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Then Pétain went on to observe that General Weygand was organizing an expeditionary force to Lake Chad to “defend” the area against any British or Gaullist expedition, though both must have known that the Gaullists were already there. Ex-Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin explained the same plan as a ruse to obtain more French arms in Africa.
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As mid-December 1940 approached, the Americans, too, were being prepared for a more vigorous French presence in Equatorial Africa. Despite the alarm in Washington over Montoire, Admiral Leahy was on his way to France, and it looked as if
the “new policy” had been squared with good relations with pro-Allied neutrals like the United States. Was there one Vichy policy or several? Did Vichy seek an autonomous, neutral middle way, or the “renversement des alliances” that Abetz thought he foresaw? The evening of December 13, when Marshal Pétain dismissed Pierre Laval from the government, raised these questions to the headlines.
The Meaning of December 13
O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
F
RIDAY
, D
ECEMBER
13, 1940, Pierre Laval, home from the second round of military talks on Africa with General Warlimont, presided over a routine cabinet meeting. A few hours later, a surprise meeting of the whole Council of Ministers was called by Marshal Pétain. The Marshal asked each member of the government to write out a letter of resignation. Then he accepted those of Pierre Laval and Georges Ripert, minister of education. In the meantime, Laval’s floors of the Hotel du Parc were occupied by special security forces responsible to Marcel Peyrouton’s Ministry of the Interior. Laval was taken to his country home at Châteldon, a few miles away, and placed under house arrest. Communications with Paris were cut off. This was the most Byzantine of all the many Vichy changes of cabinet, the only one accompanied by the threat of force. It was also the only Vichy cabinet change to arouse the passionate hostility of German Ambassador Otto Abetz and to cause the near rupture of Franco-German relations. It has naturally become a focus for judgments about intentions at Vichy in December 1940.
Laval’s removal from office on December 13 has been so overlaid with self-serving explanations since the Liberation that it has become almost impossible to uncover the contemporary play of issues and interests. Participants in that palace coup and those who subsequently took office under Laval’s successor Darlan took pride in “our audacious initiative” and took credit
for “the turning point of the war.” They described it as a setback for Germany “as serious as the loss of a battle,” the “end of military collaboration,” and a “decisive turning” in Franco-German relations.
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Partisans of Laval argue, with equal but contrary self-interest, that so far from ending active collaboration, it was Laval’s successors and principally Darlan who went on after December 13 to preside over the high point of Franco-German collaboration.
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Nor are the rich German and United States diplomatic reports for December 1940 directly helpful here, for foreign observers were as surprised by these events as Laval himself.
A few general points are now clear, however, if one limits oneself to contemporary sources of information. Laval’s removal did not end Vichy efforts to reach a comfortable working arrangement within Hitler’s Europe. Quite the contrary; if anything, his successors pressed even more eagerly for the negotiation of a sweeping general settlement and came even closer to direct military collaboration than Laval had done. Furthermore, relations with Britain grew worse in 1941 than they had been even in the fall of 1940. On the other side of the coin, it is also true that in fact French forces did not move actively against Gaullists or British in Africa after some fighting in the Gabon in October–November 1940, which stabilized the lines fairly neatly between Gaullist Equatorial Africa and Vichy West Africa. Moreover, a period of cordial relations with the neutral United States opened with the arrival of Ambassador Leahy in January 1941. If one looks for decisive changes accompanying Laval’s removal, the most genuine turnabout took place in German attitudes toward France. December 13 brought the “new policy” to an abrupt end.
Hitler’s support for the “new policy” had always been grudging
and opportunistic. Furthermore, it rested upon deception. It was useful for the French to keep the Allies out of Africa themselves, but they would do so only if the losses in store for them in a German peace were concealed by postponing all substantive negotiation indefinitely. In any event, nothing could deflect Hitler from savoring revenge for 1918. His suspicions of French revanchism, always sharper than the reality,
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seemed confirmed by Pétain’s dismissal of the man he had dealt with at Montoire and by the spoiling of the Duc de Reichstadt’s reburial in the Invalides on December 15. Abetz, whose link with Laval was an integral part of his own rise to prominence, replacing the military channel at Wiesbaden with the diplomatic one at Paris, reacted most violently of all. After going through sullenly with the macabre torchlight ceremony at the Invalides on December 15, he erupted into the Free Zone on December 16 with an armed escort, brandished a pistol about the Hotel du Parc, pronounced an ultimatum for the restoration of a government acceptable to the German embassy, and took Laval back to Paris with him. The Demarcation Line was sealed, even to French officials. The German policy toward France, wrote General Halder, was “a cold shoulder.” It was almost with relief that he noted that “we are no longer bound by any obligation toward France.”
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Even before December 13, Hitler had already ordered plans drawn up for the next step after abandoning the direct invasion of England. It was not to be a Mediterranean strategy, in which French help would be vital, but an eastern strategy: Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. Except for Abetz, the German reaction was more loss of interest in France than anger.
It is much less clear that the basic intentions of Vichy foreign policy changed on December 13. The main problem is to discover what those intentions had been on the eve of Laval’s departure.
A whole gamut of responses to the Anglo-Gaullist spread in Africa was possible. At the most pro-Allied extreme was a possible stratagem of pretending to fight the Anglo-Gaullists in order to trick the Germans out of more arms which the French could eventually use for their own liberation. This is the interpretation of the Chad preparations in General Weygand’s memoirs, and indeed Paul Baudouin explained to Robert Murphy in 1940 that the aim was to secure the release of more French colonial officers from prison.
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A more realistic position is that Vichy meant to repel vigorously any attempt to swing parts of the empire into Gaullist (and thereby British) hands. Nobody at Vichy disagreed with this position. There is no mistaking the hard anger at Churchill and de Gaulle and the conviction with which Vichy French troops fought the Anglo-Gaullists at Dakar in September 1940, in Syria in June–July 1941, and in North Africa in November 1942.
At the other extreme of belligerency was the possibility of full-scale French participation alongside Germany in the war against Britain. There may have been figures in Paris who longed for such a commitment, but it would be difficult to find anyone at Vichy who agreed. Laval told Hitler at Montoire that Pétain did not have constitutional authority to declare war on England without the support of the Assembly. He told Marshal Goering on 9 November that there was no question of French and German troops fighting side by side in Africa. With both Abetz on 31 October and Goering a week later, he took care to reemphasize Hitler’s not having asked France to enter the war, in the fashion of a skilled negotiator who singles out the acceptable part of the other side’s statement. In any event, the matter is academic, for Hitler never wanted France as a co-belligerent. Mussolini always complained to him about any hint of special favors to France. In pragmatic terms, Germany had more to gain by the cheap neutralization of the French Empire than by an uncontrolled spread of the war to additional fronts. France must be ready to defend her empire by force, as at Dakar,
but German policy papers after Montoire all refer to France as a “nichtkriegführende Macht.”
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December 13 did not block a war upon Britain at Germany’s side. Nobody wanted one.
It is the intermediate possible courses of action dicussed in November–December 1940 that make December 13 a fascinating puzzle. There were two possibilities: an offensive course—French attack upon Gaullist Equatorial Africa and even upon exposed British colonies such as Sierra Leone; and a course of active defense—French action in Africa only as reprisals in case of further Anglo-Gaullist advance. The Vichy military planners of late fall 1940, after the spasms of anger over Mers-el-Kebir and Dakar had cooled and Britain had still not been invaded by Germany, clearly preferred the less ambitious course. Not only to Americans, to whom General Huntziger said in October that he opposed military operations in Africa except defensive ones,
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but even in the military conversations with General Warlimont on November 29, the French service chiefs emphasized that no action was planned against British territory in Africa unless the British attacked further. It is hard to find anyone on the French side working very hard for aggressive French attack on British colonies; even Laval thought that wider conflict, if it came, would emerge from a British attack which would then free France from her “difficulty” (i.e., inhibitions) respecting operations against England.
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Were the plans to recapture the Gaullist areas of French Equatorial Africa serious? Although General Huntziger’s plans sounded lukewarm at the meeting with General Warlimont on November 29, Abetz and Warlimont had no doubt of Vichy’s resolution after the December 10 meeting. Much later, around the first of November 1942, Laval told a group of leaders of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse that he had really meant to take the
Gaullist colonies back in December 1940 and that that was why “the British” had forced him out. He had gone out of his way to assure the cabinet on December 9 that the operation would not lead to war with Britain, while assuring Abetz and Warlimont that it would, though he may only have been magnifying France’s risk in order to get more concessions. The curious thing is that Pétain himself told Robert Murphy on December 12 about the planned operation to “defend” the Chad as if he supported it. Governor-General Boisson read parts of his instructions from Pétain and Weygand to the American diplomat Thomas C. Wasson at Dakar on December 10. “I gathered the impression that the British colonies may be invaded should de Gaulle make any further moves in these parts.”
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The whole French cabinet seems to have agreed on retaliating with force against any further Anglo-Gaullist encroachment. Vigorous defensive force in the empire against the Allies was Vichy policy both before Laval’s removal, as at Dakar, and after, as in Syria in June 1941.
The fact that an offensive Chad operation was never actually carried out has usually been taken to prove that Laval’s removal stopped it. That may be. Or possibly the hostile German reaction to Laval’s removal, which interrupted the release of additional French forces for Africa, did more to stop it than Laval’s removal itself. The important point is that the larger commitment to the “new policy” was never called into question. December 13 was not meant to end the quest for good relations with Germany and for normalcy under the armistice.
The Montoire meetings had followed months of effort by the whole French government to establish good working relations with Berlin. The follow-up after Montoire had also been the work of the whole government. From Vichy’s point of view, this policy was not Pierre Laval’s private reserve. It could go on without him. Furthermore, the Chad operation was only a small part of the “new policy.” Collaboration could develop in a more
neutral fashion, based on a vigorous defense of the status quo against any further Anglo-Gaullist attacks (as in Syria in June 1941), but avoiding any inflammatory effort at rollback. Even if one accepts the thesis that Laval’s removal meant blocking an aggressive Chad expedition (and the evidence is not all in), it was most certainly not intended to be the end of the “new policy.” It is pure postwar invention to suggest, as do the memoirs of Bouthillier, Peyrouton, and others, that Laval was removed in order to reverse the post-Montoire negotiations.
So we must look again at the internal interpretation of Laval’s fall. Not only the Germans but the Americans (who might have preferred to hear an anticollaboration explanation) were assured that Laval’s dismissal was a purely internal affair.
One point to notice is that Laval’s quest for domestic concessions had been an abysmal failure. Flandin later claimed he could get more results than Laval by being more independent. Not one of the major domestic issues had been settled in Vichy’s favor, despite the Bor Mines, the gold, and other striking French concessions. Vichy’s refusal to pay the occupation costs bill of December 1 had simply evoked a German ultimatum. Pétain told American officials on November 16 that he had been promised the liberation of at least some prisoners of war, but the Reinecke-Scapini agreement of November 20 won the release only of fathers of more than four children who were in need.
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Pétain’s regime was left out on the limb of those October 31 promises, following Montoire, that France would soon enjoy a less uncomfortable existence. He needed more collaboration, not less.