In addition, Caziot’s legislation eased credit for rebuilding farmhouses, modified inheritance laws to make it easier to pass a farm on intact to one son who wanted to farm it (antirepublicans had long accused the Napoleonic Code of hastening the breakup of family farms by requiring equal inheritance among sons), encouraged better education in agronomy, and encouraged tenants to make improvements by obliging the owner to
reimburse the tenant for value added if the lease were ended (ending sixty years of agitation for this provision).
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In the end, whatever its contribution to consolidation of plots, rural education, and to home improvement, the Caziot regime failed in its essential purpose, which was to keep Frenchmen down on the farm. Only 1,561 families actually drew “return to the soil” subsidies, of whom 409 failed to make a go of it. A look at the agricultural statistics shows that the long secular population trend away from the countryside continued more rapidly than ever after the war, after the brief pause of the war years. The perfervid propaganda for the countryside aroused, as Gordon Wright observes, “more raillery than results.”
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In agriculture, as in industry, the evolution at Vichy was away from nostalgia toward modernization and toward power for the well-organized and efficient. It should not be surprising that the directors of prewar agricultural cartels, in the most capitalized and easily organized sectors of French agriculture, such as Achard and Hallé, found important places at Vichy. Self-regulation by the major producers was the point of corporatism, in agriculture as in industry.
Although Pierre Caziot was on rather poor terms with leading corporatists such as Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie and Louis Salleron, he acquiesced when the interwar peasantist organizations rushed forward with a Peasant Charter that the government adopted and made law on 2 December 1940. The
charte paysanne
provided essentially what the more concentrated sectors of French agriculture had been working for since the 1870’s, official public machinery embodying producers’ self-regulation in an organized market. But the Peasant Corporation machinery was only gradually set up. Caziot quarreled with Louis Salleron, who was removed from office as one of the general delegates of the Peasant Corporation in September 1941, over the issue of bureaucratic control vs. corporatist self-regulation. Meanwhile, Caziot was losing the support of the German occupation authorities, who found him “old-fashioned,” “reactionary” and “attentiste” (they thought he was close to Weygand, who was forced
out in November 1941).
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When Laval set up his second government in April 1942, therefore, Jacques Le Roy-Ladurie became minister of both agriculture and food supply, an appointment praised by the German authorities.
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Although Le Roy-Ladurie had been an active corporatist before the war, food shortages and the rationing system required direct state intervention. The corporations became, in effect, machinery for state administration of the market. Thus what had begun as “peasantism” progressed through corporatism to state management of agriculture, with emphasis placed upon efficiency of production rather than upon encouragement of the family farm. If Caziot represents early Vichy traditionalism, the sugar-beet cartel lobbyist Achard represents the direction of future development. Vichy’s evolution moved French agriculture toward its postwar pattern.
French farmers faced great difficulties during the occupation: 36 percent of the prisoners of war were farmers; the price of fertilizer went up; the few machines lacked fuel.
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On the other hand, farmers had at hand the most precious commodity: food. They undoubtedly got more ready cash during the war than ever before, but there was nothing to spend it on. It was sufficient advantage to anger townspeople without permanently improving the farmer’s position. The wave of the future was clearly with the big modern farm rather than old-fashioned polyculture, and that movement was foreshadowed in the evolution of political power at Vichy. The little farmer was destined to decline with the traditionalists who favored him. After the war, those who were willing to sacrifice productivity to social order had been reduced to a minority.
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Escape from Class and Competition: Corporatism in Power
F
RENCH BUSINESSMEN FELT BESIEGED ON TWO FRONTS
between the wars: labor and competition. French labor made up in class spirit what it lacked in size and organization, and businessmen, always ready to fear the worst, mistook the giant, spontaneous, and good-humored sit-down strikes of May–June 1936 for the revolution of their nightmares. Simultaneously, slumped in the trough of the Great Depression, businessmen and political economists became convinced beyond question of “the fact of overproduction”: modern industry had outrun the world’s capacity to purchase.
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The enormous vogue of corporatism among businessmen and political economists in the 1930’s stemmed from that doctrine’s promise to solve both problems at once. Behind corporatism’s defensive earthworks, French business could escape from both the class struggle and merciless competition.
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Corporatism proposed that all levels of the economically active population—employers, managers, workmen—be organized into natural economic groupings (by branch of industry or profession) and that these natural “corporations” govern themselves and society. Thus the artificial authoritarian state and the chaotic liberal market would be replaced by self-regulating
“natural” groups. Artificial class groupings that emphasized conflicting interests, such as labor unions and employers’ associations, would be replaced by “natural” economic units whose members all shared a common interest in the success of their product. Each economic unit would harmonize its own productive capacity with the needs of the market, and the chaos of the liberal market place would give way to the organized exchange of goods. Liberalism was dead, but a “third way” was available between the two competing statisms: fascism and socialism.
One root of corporatism was the desire to get rid of the class struggle. Denying that class conflict reflected an intrinsic inescapable clash of interests between those who own machines and tools and those who have only their muscles, the corporatists insisted on the community of economic interests within each profession, industry, or trade. Class struggle, corporatists believed, was an artificially aroused conflict. If workers and employers were organized along lines that emphasized their common interests and prevented agitators from organizing them along class lines, the class struggle would vanish. Faith in the natural harmony of interests, it should be noted, derived not from conservative doctrines of social inequality and hierarchy as in de Maistre and Bonald, but from the Enlightenment doctrines of Adam Smith and such nineteenth-century successors as J. B. Say, and the Radical Léon Bourgeois’ “Solidarism.” Thus they could clothe regressive legislation, such as the abolition of trade unions, in the language of nineteenth-century liberals.
The other root of corporatism was the flight from competition. In a sense, the French economy had never functioned along classical liberal lines. Indeed, had any? Mercantilist state enterprises (glass, Gobelins tapestries, armaments) survived into the nineteenth century, when they were joined by government-supported industry in the industrial revolution (railroads, beet sugar) to form a substantial bloc of subventioned enterprises. In addition, tariff protection was the rule rather than the exception in the nineteenth century (free trade lasted less than twenty years after Napoleon III’s trade treaties of 1860). In France laissez-faire had historically applied mostly to employer-worker relationships.
But subventions and protection were not enough to muffle the blows of competition upon industrialists and major agricultural producers, especially after the free trade agreements of 1860 and the depression of the 1870’s. Those industries sufficiently concentrated (usually the most modern, capital-intensive sectors) to permit organization began in the 1870’s to restrict competition by ententes and cartels. Everyone would have preferred to escape competition; highly concentrated producers were actually in a position to do so. The Comité des forges (1864) was a precursor to what became the normal escape mechanism for European businessmen.
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The financial and economic disorders of the post-World War I Europe produced a steep increase in industrial ententes, which then became nearly universal in the 1930’s. In practice, French governments left the initiative for producers’ associations in private hands, and by tacit consent, those industries that could organize themselves effectively did so. There were probably over 2,000 ententes or agreements among producers setting prices or conditions of sale for their products by 1939, and some 60 international cartels to which French industry belonged. By 1939 the French economy was still “liberal”—i.e., with market forces beyond the control of individual firms or groups of firms—only in those fragmented or primitive sectors where there were unmanageable masses of producers or distributors.
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Corporatism simply suggested that these cartels, organizations, and ententes be made universal and official. Indeed, in the reigning climate of skepticism about the usefulness of parliament in economic matters, corporatists believed that such “natural” economic groups should themselves compose a legislature, or council of corporations. Even during the Third Republic, for example, the Marchandeau bill of 1935 had proposed that all sectors of industry and business organize to prevent overproduction and further price decline.
After the defeat, corporatists had a free hand. But there were three possible directions in which industrial organization could move. There might be mixed councils of working men and managers at every level of each corporation, a genuine worker participation in the administration of his branch of industry. Or corporatism could merely provide a camouflage for what was really self-regulation by the most powerful industrial owners in their own sole interest. Finally, corporatism might become subordinated to a planned statism in which bureaucrats set industrial production goals, allocated resources, and placated competing interests.
At the beginning there seemed to be a genuine possibility of bending corporatism to the first pattern. The first minister of industrial production was René Belin, a telephone workers’ union official who had worked his way up to become deputy secretary-general of the Confédération génerale du travail by 1933, second only to Léon Jouhaux. He was simultaneously minister of labor. Belin’s abhorrence of war reconciled him to the armistice position, and as an old syndicalist distrustful of parliamentary parties and more interested in creating a new society upon building blocks of local labor associations than in electoral politics, he saw opportunities for syndicalist progress within corporatism. Although most of the CGT subsequently became a backbone of the Resistance, much of organized labor seems to have been ready for a while to continue its wartime self-restraint and work for a syndicalist program of “free unions in organized professions” within the new regime.
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This was the period, it should be noted, in which the Vichy regime sounded most hostile to unregulated liberal capitalism. Marshal Pétain’s major address on social policy of 12 October 1940, denouncing liberal capitalism as a foreign import that had
been “degraded” by 1939 into “enslavement to the powers of money,” promised a “hierarchial and social regime” that would “guarantee the dignity of the worker’s person by ameliorating his conditions of life all the way to old age.” It was drafted by Gaston Bergery, whose “frontist” movement in the late 1930’s was a curious antiparliamentary, anticapitalist appeal for national unity against communism and against “the trusts.”
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Bergery as well as Catholic traditionalists had long proposed a revision of the 1867 law creating the limited liability corporation, or
société anonyme.
Jean Le Cour Grandmaison, Xavier Vallat, and other leaders of the Fédération Nationale Catholique had actually proposed to abolish limited liability in a March 1938 bill, while Bergery preferred to make the president of each company fully responsible for all he possessed in case of bankruptcy. Georges Bonnet proposed to limit the number of corporate directorships an individual could hold. These prewar currents triumphed in a law of 13 September 1940 increasing the personal responsibility of the president of a corporation in case of bankruptcy and limiting to two the number of companies of which one person could be a director. Although Yves Bouthillier claimed after the war that this was an alternative to nationalization (which was never dreamt of at Vichy), it was actually a moralistic attack on traditional grounds against alleged irresponsibility and corruption behind the screen of corporate limited liability.
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Other traditionalists hoped to go even further in dismantling
the modern urban and industrial world. Pétain had not been afraid to say on 12 October 1940 that the family farm was the “principal economic and social base of France.” Traditionalist social philosophers close to Pétain like Gustave Thibon and René Gillouin, at whom we shall look more closely in
chapter 3
, argued that France was being punished in 1940 for having departed from the balanced, individualist craft and peasant world that had made her both happy and great. On the inspiration of such ideas, Vichy took steps to revive artisan skills. Unemployment provided a practical justification, but the social dream of the traditionalists was also at work. René Gillouin, who believed that a strong
artisanat
gave a nation balance and social order, seems to have forgotten that proud artisans struggling against mechanical competition were the shock troops of nineteenth-century revolution. The regime preferred to think that “artisans represent old France, the France which had a taste for work, the sense of saving, and the sentiment of the family.” By the end of 1942, therefore, the government had resettled about two hundred artisans in the French provinces. Education programs emphasized the value of handwork anew. Finally, a host of individual initiatives flourished in this climate. The Jewish essayist Daniel Halévy assisted in the reestablishment of the old artisan brotherhood, the Compagnonnages de France, whose revived headquarters one may still visit in the narrow streets just behind the Hotel de Ville. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny used his troops and some students from the University of Strasbourg to rebuild a deserted village, “Opme,” near Clermont-Ferrand.
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