An early peace would help France realize this maritime-colonial potential. Darlan shared fervently in the Vichy longing for a quick compromise peace within the status quo of 1941. A weakened Britain would be welcome. Furthermore, continued war threatened the French potential for recovery in two ways. It increased domestic disorder, as Darlan was finding to his pain in 1941. Darlan warned both the Americans and the Germans that continuing the war would spread communism. It also heightened the instability of the French empire. The longer the war lasted, the greater the occasions for both Allies and Axis to
seize parts of the empire for their own use. And if either belligerent set foot in the empire, the other was sure to follow. So Darlan not only committed Vichy troops vigorously to keeping the British out of Syria in June–July 1941; he also fought a losing two-month diplomatic battle in the spring of 1941 to keep German armistice inspection teams out of Morocco. Once there, they were kept under surveillance and required to remain in civilian clothes. Their Arab contacts were arrested and even shot by French police. The natives must not be allowed to see the victors in uniform.
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German bases were never permitted in the empire. Darlan’s program, then, was a revival of France through maritime and colonial resources, alongside a great continental Germany. All he needed to begin was a speedy and generous peace settlement with Germany.
Darlan made no progress with his program in the spring of 1941. The German “cold shoulder” resisted Vichy efforts to thaw it. Darlan’s own first meetings with Abetz, on March 5 and 31, after his government had been recognized on 27 February as more than merely temporary, were limited to current business. The other ministers were still forbidden until late in the spring even to cross the Demarcation Line. When they finally got to Paris, however, they had some propositions based on the notion of Franco-German economic complementarity in a technically advanced, united Europe. Finance Minister Yves Bouthillier finally reached Paris on April 24 for the first time since December 13, profuse in apologies for the Laval fiasco and brimming with assurances of the French will for collaboration and with hopes for the revival of the sweeping negotiations envisaged before Laval’s dismissal. Thirty thousand tons of copper were ceded to Germany on April 29 by Pierre Pucheu, minister of industrial production. Jacques Barnaud, the chief economic negotiator for Vichy, came to an agreement on May 8 with German aluminum interests for a vast mutual production venture approximately
doubling French output in this vital commodity in which France and Yugoslavia could dominate Europe. Communications Minister Jean Berthelot finally reached Paris for the first time on May 7, with plans for joint European construction of roads and railroads. At Wiesbaden, the French delegation still refused the German proposal of substituting German supervision of France’s external borders for the galling Demarcation Line, and although it had to give in about inspection of Morocco when German insistence reached “its sharpest phase,” France never agreed to sack General Noguès for his close police restrictions upon the German inspectors. But stubborn negotiations at Wiesbaden could not cancel out the general impression of longing for a broad settlement, especially in such documents as the plan for French participation in a European economic community, which was submitted to Abetz in February by Jacques Benoist-Méchin in the name of the young technocrats and Europeanists, Pucheu, Lehideux, and Marion.
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For his part, Darlan took the stiffer position against Britain that was expected of him. The blockade negotiations with the British at Madrid seem to have been abandoned already, even before the Germans ordered them halted on February 13. Following this rupture at Madrid, positions hardened on both sides of the blockade. Having more ships available than they had in the fall of 1940, the British tightened their surveillance of French shipping. Fewer ships passed than in 1940, and Franco-British incidents increased.
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As for Darlan, he resorted to armed convoying. On March 10, he formally notified the British government through U.S. Ambassador Leahy that if the British did not stop seizing French merchant ships, Darlan would use the French fleet to stop them. Darlan asked German permission on
March 15 to use French naval vessels for convoying, and the German Armistice Commission supported it enthusiastically on the ground that Franco-British relations would be further aggravated.
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A virtual Franco-British undeclared naval war was taking shape in the spring of 1941. British torpedo boats pursued a freighter right into Port-Etienne, Mauretania, on March 24, and a week later an armed French convoy fought a pitched battle off Nemours, Algeria, with a British cruiser and five torpedo boats. On March 26 and 29 British planes bombed French merchant shipping at Sfax, Tunisia, after the Italians had used the port. French armed escorts prevented British seizure of several French ships in the Atlantic, and there seem to have been British orders not to use force in such cases. On May 31, 1941, Darlan published a passionate diatribe against the British, summarizing their acts of “piracy” and claiming that 167 ships, or a total tonnage of 790,000, had been seized by the British. Relations were at their worst, despite United States efforts to moderate them.
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It was neither Darlan’s economic proposals nor his anti-British ardor but German desert visions that thawed the cold shoulder finally in late April 1941. When the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali-al-Gailani revolted against British forces in April 1941, French Syria became a vital link for German exploitation of this new colonial crisis. Having in April 1941 conquered the western Balkans and Greece, Hitler was ready temporarily to exploit Mediterranean possibilities if they offered themselves cheaply. Once again, therefore, France briefly came to seem more a useful partner than an object of revenge.
Darlan, in turn, like much of French public opinion, had been forcibly struck by German successes in Yugoslavia that April. He was all the more ready, therefore, when Abetz told him on April 26 that Hitler himself would receive Darlan at
Berchtesgaden in early May. Darlan was going to have his own Montoire.
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This time, even before meeting Hitler, Darlan and his fellow cabinet members were busy drafting a Grand Design. The Hitler-Darlan meeting would become the occasion for the major settlement of Franco-German relations that had eluded Laval. Darlan learned and accepted the German requests for use of Syrian equipment and airfields for clandestine aid to Rashid Ali, in meetings at the German embassy in Paris on May 3 and May 6.
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In return, the Germans had reopened the occupation costs negotiations with a new proposal and had offered military concessions. Darlan wanted to go much further. He asked for easing of the Demarcation Line between the two zones, and he stressed the necessity of maximum publicity for these concessions. On May 11 Darlan went to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden. On May 20 General Walther Warlimont of the Wehrmachtführungsstab arrived in Paris for talks on German use of French bases in north and west Africa. A major agreement on German base rights in the French Empire, the Protocols of Paris, was signed on May 28.
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The protocols granted three major French military concessions to Germany: the use of Syrian airfields and military supplies stocked in Syria to help Rashid Ali’s rebellion in Iraq; the use of the Tunisian port of Bizerte as a supply route for Rommel’s Afrika Korps; and eventually, a German submarine base at
Dakar. In return for the Syrian part of this bargain, there were German concessions: a small reduction in occupation costs, easier passage of the Demarcation Line, release of World War I veterans (70,000–80,000) in German POW camps, and some small improvements in Vichy military posture. Further concessions would be worked out when Parts II and III of the protocols were implemented. Like Laval in 1940, Darlan insisted that these concessions have maximum publicity.
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As at Montoire, the Protocols of Paris were eagerly grasped by Darlan and his cabinet as the entering wedge for a broad negotiated agreement by which France could escape from the armistice constraints into a voluntary neutral role in the New Europe. What unfolded in the next few months was nothing less than Darlan’s Grand Design: a peace treaty, or at least a broad preparatory agreement, that would restore normal economic and administrative life to a France willing to be associated in a German-dominated continental system, willing even to defend that continent against British counterattacks.
As after Montoire, German agencies began to talk about a “new era.”
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It was the OKW, the military, and Ambassador Abetz who were most interested in the prospects, Ribbentrop (as before) who was most reluctant, and Hitler who was only slightly less cautious.
At the heart of the protocol negotiations, however, lay profound differences of goal. On the German side, there was interest only in “getting the use of French facilities and bases for German campaigns.”
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Darlan wanted “first steps toward a happier future for our two lands” and toward “European cooperation,” as he wrote to Hitler on 14 May 1941 after returning from Berchtesgaden. Or, as he explained it more propagandistically to the French people in a message of 14 June 1941, he wanted to prepare for the coming peace treaty by creating “a favorable climate
for honorable treatment” and, beyond that, to prepare a “new Europe” which can survive “only if France has her honorable place.”
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He also went out on the familiar limb by making public promises in a 19 May press communiqué and a 23 May speech suggesting that the peace terms could be softened by collaboration.
The priority of economic and political concessions to France was the crucial difference. The OKW’s “new guidelines” for the German Armistice Commission gave first priority to military concessions that would enable the French to withstand the new pressures the planned German bases in Africa would be likely to generate; after that were to be considered “political concessions” to enable the French government to fulfill its policy of collaboration—to buy off domestic opposition. As Hitler himself, always suspicious of French attempts to euchre him out of the delights of vengeance, put it to Darlan at Berchtesgaden, concessions to France would be meted out to pay for each specific French military aid, “donnant-donnant.”
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Darlan, by contrast, like Laval before him, desperately needed conspicuous improvements in French living conditions. Laval had told Goering on 9 November 1940 that a French government friendly to Germany needed conspicuous concessions, “die ins Auge fallen,” in order to survive. Darlan followed the same reasoning. The concessions must deal first with the major French preoccupations (prisoners, Demarcation Line, etc.), and they must be given maximum publicity. Then, in the ensuing climate of mutual confidence, closer cooperation would become possible. The need was even more urgent when the Syrian affair led to more fighting with Britain.
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This latent misunderstanding was ripped into the open by two developments, one near and one distant, which shifted all the presuppositions on which the “new policy” of May 1941 had been built. First, the discreet use of Syrian airfields and matériel by the Germans did not escape British notice, and following the British bombing of Palmyra and Aleppo airfields on May 14, British and Gaullist forces actually moved into Syria on June 8. As heavy fighting developed, Darlan declined
Luftwaffe
assistance. Hasty reinforcements from North Africa could not prevent the surrender of Vichy forces, however, at Acre, on July 14. France had reached the high point of military aid to Germany, only to lose Syria for her pains. Second, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, definitively turned Hitler’s interest away from the Mediterranean and from French voluntary assistance. He had lost Iraq anyway by that time. He was later to want much more support from France but not “collaboration” between equals in the way Darlan and Pétain meant.
War in Syria aroused opposition to Darlan’s Grand Design, most strongly among military and colonial figures. The French delegate to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden, General Paul Doyen, took the position that France had far more to lose than to gain when she allowed Germany to drag her into colonial wars. General Weygand, French delegate-general in North Africa, hurried to Vichy to attend a heated cabinet meeting on June 3 and 4.
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It has been accepted history since the Liberation that Weygand and the others blocked the Protocols of Paris on June 3–4. There is even some contemporary evidence for this view, for Emmanuel Monick told an American diplomat at Rabat after Weygand’s return that Weygand had “succeeded in calling a halt to the proposed adoption of a new policy.”
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The turning point
was rather July 8–12, and the cause was Syria. Darlan did modify—and enlarge—his Grand Design after the Syrian fiasco, but it was toward more dramatic proposals for settling Franco-German relations. The Germans did not in fact use Bizerte or Dakar as promised in Parts II and III of the protocols, but it was as much by their own decision as by French reluctance. And the opponents to Darlan’s policy were removed from power before the end of 1941.
Indeed, from the beginning Darlan had tried to subordinate fulfillment of Parts II and III of the protocols to prior political preparation: those conspicuous concessions that would sweeten the pill and mollify the opposition.
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In July, as the loss of Syria increased French costs, Darlan raised his price considerably for the fulfillment of Parts II and III. The protocol was not abandoned; it was submerged in a vast Darlan bid for French voluntary association on equal terms. German rejection, more than Weygand or any other Frenchman, blocked the Grand Design.