The month of June 1940 marked in our country’s history a crisis in the face of which each person today must rethink his position.
…
We are among the few who have been proclaiming since 1932 the necessity of a total revolution. That was not for us just another opinion among many; it was the very meaning and vocation of our twenties.
—
Emmanuel Mounier, November 1940
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B
UT
V
ICHY WAS MORE THAN A REPAIR JOB
. Yves Bouthillier’s eloquent postwar defense of the policy of “presence” in the summer of 1940, the administrator’s dutiful serving of his suffering people’s most elementary needs, conflicts with what he told Otto Abetz in September 1940. When he first crossed the Demarcation Line to Paris to meet the German ambassador, he eagerly forecast “a new economic and social order.”
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Vichy was not a Band-Aid. It was deep surgery. To an extent unique among the occupied nations of Western Europe, France went beyond mere administration during the occupation to carry out a domestic revolution in institutions and values.
For it was unthinkable simply to put things back the way they had been. In losing the war, the Third Republic had lost its legitimacy. No modern French regime has survived a military defeat, and even the
ancien régime
was mortally wounded by defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Since war had become total, defeat was felt as a reproach to every man. That self-reproach was abnormally bitter in 1940—far bitterer, say, than the recriminations that followed the Prussian defeat of the Second Empire in 1870. For it mingled with a mood of national self-doubt that had been brewing since the 1890’s, and it followed twenty years of disappointment with the fruits of the victory of 1918. The moral and psychic wounds were even more tender than the material ones in France in the summer of 1940.
France had been the most powerful and most populous western kingdom under Louis XIV, the greatest nation in Europe under Napoleon, one great power among several under Napoleon
III and Clemenceau, and now—what? It was easy to link this decline to social and moral decadence, for it was the census in 1891 and 1896 that first called attention to the low French birthrate while other peoples, notably Germans, were increasing rapidly. Alarm over the French birthrate and other expressions of national vitality had never really abated since the time of Maurice Barrès’ “novel of national energy” of 1897 and Gabriel Hanotaux’s
L’Energie nationale
of 1902. That sense of decay returned, magnified tenfold by the defeat of 1940 and ripened by sixty years of habit. With morbid fascination, Frenchmen of 1940 turned over the stones of their national life and contemplated the crawling things, real or imaginary, that they believed festered there.
In this mood of self-flagellation, as in Jacques Benoist-Méchin’s description of German soldiers amazed at French farms in which “everything seemed to have stopped fifty years ago,”
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the myth of the German stroll through nonexistent French defenses became established. And with it, a repudiation of the Third Republic and a thirst for something different.
“Too few allies, too few weapons, too few babies.” Pétain’s lapidary formula for defeat in his June 20 speech carried the debate deftly from the realms of foreign policy and military doctrine to the realm of social decadence. A wide range of other Frenchmen followed in his train of thought. It was only to be expected that the antiparliamentarians of the Right, having long identified electoral politics with decay, would cry vindication in such works as Charles Maurras’
La Seule France
(1941) or Henri Massis’
Les Idées restent
(1941). Nor was it surprising that younger and angrier rebels should exult in the wreckage of the tired, old, boring middle-class France which they had been mocking since their student days in the 1930’s. The two angriest novels to appear under the occupation, Lucien Rebatet’s
Les Décombres
and Céline’s
Les Beaux draps
, took a ferocious joy in destruction that was an extension of the antibourgeois hatred of the 1930’s younger right. What is notable is how vigorously
others, who stood far outside the 1930’s far right, joined in the exposure of decadence. Even after the regime’s anti-Semitic bent was clear, the Jewish essayist Daniel Halévy, long troubled by the replacement of organic rural societies by faceless urban masses, hailed the new regime’s return to “verities … under the ashes and wreckage of defeat.”
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Paul Valéry, soon to lose his job as director of the University Center at Nice, was already using the words “old regime” for the Third Republic in his notebooks at the end of June. “The war was lost during the peace,” he wrote. André Gide, who had taken up rereading Zola’s novel about the Franco-Prussian War,
La débâcle
, on June 26, filled his diary with reflections on French “decomposition,” the “excessive freedom,” the “sorry reign of indulgence” that was being brought to an end. “All my love for France could not keep me from being aware of our country’s state of decay.”
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François Mauriac bridled in the columns of
Figaro
at those who dared speak of hope at such a time. France must recognize her humiliation and accept the “repose of the bottom of the abyss.” The Germans deserved to win, wrote Teilhard de Chardin on 3 August, for no matter how bad or mixed their spirit, they had more spirit than the France which had been stuck in the old routines since 1919.
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Each had his own diagnosis of the rot. Some looked to superficial signs, like jazz, alcohol, Paris night life, short skirts, moral depravity among the young, birth control. Enjoyment itself was blamed for softening the nation: the “spirit of facility,” the “cult of ease.” Intellectuals had mocked sacred institutions: Léon Blum had written a youthful work ridiculing marriage. Jean Cocteau’s play
Les parents terribles
had undermined the authority of fathers. Most of all, André Gide had opened the way to libertine
self-fulfillment in “gratuitous acts.”
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How it reveals the depth of the 1940 shock, therefore, to find Lafcadio’s own creator, whose fascination with free spirits always warred with a deep-seated Puritan austerity, echoing the same sense of freedom gone too far.
Indulgence, indulgences.… That sort of puritan rigor by which the Protestants, those spoilsports, often made themselves so hateful, those scruples of conscience, that integrity, that unshakable punctuality, these are the things we have most lacked. Softness, surrender, relaxation in grace and ease, so many charming qualities that were to lead us, blindfolded, to defeat.
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The irony seemed strongest in that those very features which had made France so delightful and artistically creative had ill-fitted her for the new harsh age. Paul Valéry wrote in his notebooks some time in late June 1940,
The abuse of things good in themselves has brought France to grief: among them, the bounty of the soil, liberty of the spirit, insouciance of individuals, all of which degenerates into facility, negligence, improvisation.… We are victims of what we are, and France, in particular, [is a victim] of her advantages.
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More fundamental critics found more basic faults in the whole development of modern moral values. Like those historians of national socialism who sought its roots in Luther and Tacitus, some thought the crash of 1940 revealed wrong turnings taken at the very beginning of the modern era. The diagnosis of Maurrassian writers was the “regime of palaver,” the unbridled individualism inherited from Descartes and Rousseau, which had led to the dismantling of hierarchy and authority in 1789 and their replacement by flaccid parliamentarism. Forgetting Valmy, Jemappes, the Marne, and Verdun, they argued that the post-revolutionary regime was too spineless and too indulgent to
narrow individual self-interest ever to rise to greatness. It had been imported from the Anglo-Saxons, along with every other assault on French grandeur. They rejoiced in “the end of ‘la France babillarde.’ ”
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Young Catholic radicals around Emmanuel Mounier traced the wrong turning to the Renaissance, which “failed to achieve the personalist renaissance and neglected the communitarian renaissance. Against individualism, we have to take up the first again. But we won’t succeed without the help of the second.” For such thorough critics of modernity, 1940 was a “judgment of history” not merely upon the Third Republic, which was beneath contempt, but upon a whole liberal, secular, individualist world view.
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In the summer of 1940, it was not yet clear what kind of new government would create what kinds of new institutions, but it was clear that the old ways had vanished irretrievably. June 1940 seemed, at the time, a clean break. “There is no more France in yesterday’s meaning of the term,” wrote Paul Valéry in his notebooks.
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You would think—such was the impact of the last elections—that in France in 1936 there were 38 million republicans. What has become of them?
—
Jean Guéhenno, 1942
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W
E CAN SEE NOW HOW MISLEADING IT WAS AFTER
the war to cloak the Third Republic’s self-immolation at Vichy on July 9–10 as a “coup” by Pierre Laval. It became expedient
to load everything on those stooped shoulders, especially after Laval was shot in the courtyard of Fresnes Prison in Paris on the morning of 15 October 1945. In postwar memoirs and recollections of those first days at Vichy, Laval is everywhere, cajoling, promising, threatening that Weygand and General de Lattre de Tassigny’s army division waiting nearby at Clermont-Ferrand would sweep the Assembly away if it did not do its job, warning that Britain would make a favorable peace first at French expense if the French did not hurry, and so on. How convenient to have a pariah available on whom to blame those lopsided votes at Vichy on July 9–10. Laval was an ideal scapegoat, a man plausibly reputed to have invincible lobbying prowess, a symbol of evil incarnate by 1944, a man who was dead and could not cry “tu quoque.” Black Peter, the only French politician whose name spelled the same whether one moved from Left to Right or Right to Left, a cartoonist’s godsend with his swarthy round face, his inevitable cigarette, and his white necktie.
The Laval conspiracy theory, as legends go, is an unusually incoherent one. While seeming to vilify the man, it elevates him to political wizardry. That reputation for skill in smoke-filled rooms was handy to exculpate the others of any say in the matter. The legend also draws upon contradictory currents. Old conservatives deplore Laval as the epitome of Third Republic chicanery; the republican Left abhors him as a renegade. Looked at more dispassionately, Laval was considerably less than the legend. He was neither an invincible cajoler nor an unscrupulous turncoat. None of his bold forays into summit diplomacy succeeded: neither with Brüning nor Hoover in 1931, with Mussolini or Stalin in 1935, nor with Hitler after 1940. Moreover, it is hard to dismiss as rank opportunist the headstrong Laval who was pacifist in World War I, voted against the Versailles Treaty in 1919, opposed war in 1939, and held on to neutrality at Vichy until the bitter end, long after the more ordinary careerists had slipped away into one belligerent camp or another.
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The son of a village entrepreneur, the innkeeper-butcher-mailman
of the Auvergnat hill town of Châteldon, Pierre Laval had ascended the steps that the Third Republic offered an ambitious poor provincial. Success in school led to a period of teaching (biology) and then to a scholarship to study law in Paris. After entering law practice in Paris, Laval won early notoriety by winning the acquittal of a workman accused of anarchism. He became a specialist in labor cases and an attorney for the Confédération générale du travail. It was as a socialist that he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1914 for the Paris working-class suburb of Aubervilliers.
Laval had never been a doctrinaire socialist, however. His power base in Aubervilliers rested far more on the deputy’s bonhomie and service to constituents than on ideological purity. Although Laval belonged to the moderate pacifist tendency of the SFIO (Jean Longuet’s followers) and made a sensation in June 1917 by accusing the government of using Vietnamese troops to crush peace demonstrations, he was strongly tempted by office. He felt that call first in late 1917 when Clemenceau was looking for a socialist to round out his cabinet, though Laval does not seem to have been seriously considered. His links with the Left were further snapped when he lost his parliamentary seat in the elections of 1919.
Laval’s comeback in 1924, as both deputy and mayor of Aubervilliers, required defeating a strong Communist party local. That campaign began the Laval-Communist feud that eventually became a dominant feature of Laval’s political career. He sat in Parliament now as an independent. No longer kept from office by socialist scruples, Laval first became a minister (Public Works) at the age of 31 in the Painlevé government of 1925. He was to be eleven times minister and four times prime minister in the next ten years.
Laval was now an eminence in Third Republic politics. The combination of law practice and politics having proven lucrative, he built a modest press and radio empire around Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand. Geoffrey Warner reminds us that Laval was “one of the wealthiest men in French politics between the wars.”
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He bought the run-down chateau of Châteldon, becoming the first citizen of his birthplace. Laval always insisted that his fortune was built by buying marginal enterprises on credit, managing them well, selling them off at a profit, and living frugally; and the postwar trial investigation in 1944 was unable to prove any of the rumors about graft. Be that as it may, Laval was now tied by business and personal links to another world. When he ran for the Senate in 1927, it was in opposition to the Cartel des gauches. Nevertheless, Laval can be understood only if one remembers that his political base in working-class Aubervilliers remained intact, nurtured by Laval’s plebeian manner and his effectiveness in helping constituents. A nonparty man, pragmatic, nurturing ties with both Left and Right, basing everything upon personal contacts—that had become Laval’s political style.