When Laval reached his political summit in the early 1930’s, he was thrust into crises for which he was ill-prepared: world financial collapse and the rise of fascism. Laval was prime minister for all of 1931 and foreign minister under successive governments from October 1934 until early 1936. He was also simultaneously prime minister from June 1935 to February 1936. Politically, he filled the vacuum left by Poincaré, Tardieu, and Briand. From Briand, who had been his foreign minister in 1931, Laval drew a language of Franco-German conciliation already familiar to him. His conservative majority, however, that of Poincaré and Tardieu, precluded any meaningful concessions. Personally, Laval brought to foreign and financial affairs the supreme self-confidence of a self-made man, contempt for the cautious upper-class rituals of professional diplomats and international bankers, techniques of direct bluff talk, and the inveterate fixer’s enjoyment of knot-cutting, which had worked so well at Châteldon and Aubervilliers. This political and personal mixture was disastrous. Laval rushed into delicate affairs with inexperienced directness. In 1931 his personal negotiations with German Chancellor Brüning and President Hoover did nothing to stem the world financial crisis or to ease Franco-German relations. In 1935 he seemed to give Mussolini a free hand in Abyssinia, was unable to prevent the storm that followed in French and British public opinion, and managed to antagonize everyone.
It is not clear to this day what he told Mussolini. After negotiating a mutual security agreement with Stalin in 1935, he made no effort to have it ratified at home.
The Popular Front elections of 1936 sent Laval into the political wilderness. He was almost silent for four years. The resentments he expressed in 1940 against the parliament elected, as he told Dr. Friedrich Grimm in August, on the slogan “Hang Laval” added one more ingredient to Laval’s political character. The parliament “vomited me up,” Paul Baudouin claimed Laval said on 26 June 1940; “now I shall vomit it up.”
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When the Pétain government, having signed the armistice and awaiting the imminent opening of a peace conference, also decided to summon the National Assembly for the purpose of abolishing the Third Republic Constitution of 1875 and empowering Pétain to draft a new one, Laval seems to have been eager to help. He had been excluded from the June 17 cabinet as too typical of the old “republic of pals” (as Weygand claimed at the time) or as too anti-British (as Weygand claimed after the war).
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A government led by nonparliamentarians needed a major Third Republic leader, however, if it planned to deal with the Chamber and Senate. Major Third Republic leaders were in short supply in the summer of 1940. Most of the recent prime ministers were out of the question, either as too Left (Léon Blum) or too compromised by the defeat (Daladier, Reynaud), even if they had been willing. Among conservatives, Poincaré was dead, Tardieu had withdrawn as the “hermit of Menton,” and Caillaux, whose notoriety as a proponent of Franco-German conciliation might have won him a major role at Vichy, was too old. Pierre-Etienne Flandin showed up late at Vichy and seemed to wish to go no further than making Pétain president of the Third Republic. It was Laval, therefore, who became deputy prime minister (
vice-président du conseil
) on 27 June. Pétain
wrote him on 7 July, “as it is difficult for me to participate in the meetings [of the National Assembly] I ask you to represent me.” We do not know what role Laval had in originating the government’s constitutional plans, except to observe that projects for new French institutions swarmed around Vichy in July 1940.
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What is clear is that Laval was charged with submitting the government’s bill to the National Assembly and steering it through. Hence his starring role on those two days. Laval’s front-bench role was made even more conspicuous by the personal qualities he brought to the job: his ambition, his penchant for blunt language, his self-confident directness.
Laval, of course, did not create the mood of national self-recrimination in which the senators and deputies gathered, physically and emotionally exhausted, in Vichy on July 9. Or at least most of them. Twenty-nine deputies and one senator had persisted in the earlier plan to move the government to North Africa and had sailed on the
Massilia
on June 21, only to find themselves detained and identified as cowardly émigrés three weeks later; the seventy-odd Communists had been unseated by the Daladier government in January 1940. Those present at Vichy did not have to be persuaded by Laval to ditch the Constitution of 1875. There was almost total unanimity on its faults. Even Léon Blum’s
A l’échelle humaine
, written in prison in 1942–43, stresses the old republic’s inadequacies in his plans for the new. The main rival project of July 1940, offered by Senate war veterans around Senator Taurines and sidetracked by Laval, according to conventional wisdom, proposed to “suspend” the Constitution of 1875 and to grant Pétain full powers to establish, in collaboration with the Chamber and Senate, “the bases of a new constitution.” Even the republican diehards who signed Socialist deputy Vincent
Badie’s handwritten proposal, who “refused to vote for a bill which would lead ineluctably to the disappearance of the republican regime,” affirmed that they “know the imperious necessity of carrying out urgently the moral and economic revival of our unfortunate country and of pursuing the negotiations envisaging a lasting and honorable peace.” Pierre Laval did not have to coerce the Assembly into voting 624 to 4 on July 9 that “the constitutional laws should be revised.”
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Indeed, the French electorate voted in 1945, twenty-five to one not to return to the Constitution of 1875. The Assembly’s stand of July 9, 1940, was no revolution from above. It reflected almost unanimous French public opinion.
Let there be no mistaking the gravity of the next day’s work, however. Although the armistice of 25 June had made a diplomatic revolution, nothing obliged France to make a constitutional one. An armistice regime administering France just to keep essential services functioning during this interim period, as in Belgium and Holland, was a valid alternative. Even the July 9 vote jettisoning the Constitution of 1875 left open the nature of the future regime. Above all, when should the new constitution be drafted, and by whom? Before or after the end of the occupation and signature of peace with Germany? By an elected assembly or by an authoritarian wartime emergency regime? The government’s bill of July 10 answered both questions in the way most hostile to Third Republic traditions. It gave Marshal Pétain full powers, not merely the
pleins pouvoirs
by which many 1930’s prime ministers had legislated by decree during crises, but explicit authorization to draft a new constitution. That document was to be “ratified by the nation and applied by the assemblies which it shall have created.”
Although timing is not specified here, this bill appealed to the country’s massive urge for instant change. One doesn’t empower
an eighty-four-year-old man to draft a new constitution unless work is expected to begin at once. That impatience determined other things. Authoritarian predilections aside, it would be impossible to hold elections or assemble a garrulous and quarrelsome constituent assembly while German troops occupied two-thirds of the country. The republican practice of elected constitutional conventions had to give way to a Bonapartist executive constitution-making. Furthermore, major changes would be wrought in French public life at the moment of maximum rebound from the defeated regime, in the presence of an occupying army, while awaiting peace negotiations with a victorious Hitler. It was a formula for the most blatant possible partisanship in the new regime.
Revolution from above? Perhaps, but it is a serious distortion to represent it as a “coup” by a handful of conspirators. What survives of genuine contemporary language suggests something very like massive assent to the idea of building a new regime at once, even under German eyes. There were not merely monarchists like Weygand out for revenge. There were those who believed, as Pétain was to tell Hitler the following October 24, that France could hope for a more lenient peace because she had “made a new start.”
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There was Gaston Bergery, that frustrated young Jacobin who wanted a pure, strong republic capable of fighting both fascism and communism and who had invented the term
Popular Front
in 1934, calling now for France to “rebuild today from top to bottom on the ruins which they [the Third Republic leaders] have piled up.” And there were simply the weary, like Chamber President Edouard Herriot, urging placidity upon the deputies on July 9. “Around the Marshal, in the veneration which his name inspires in us all, our nation has rallied in its distress. Let us be careful not to trouble the accord which has been established under his authority.”
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In this climate, Laval did not really have to work very hard
to get the Popular Front parliament, elected in May 1936, to approve the government’s plan. The deputies and senators voted 569 to 80 (the famous 80 who later boasted of fathering the Resistance), with 17 abstentions, to give Pétain constitutional powers.
56
The opposition, which seems in the postwar memoirs to have been railroaded into silence, was never very strong. The Taurines proposal, which differed from Laval’s not in advocating any delay in drafting a new constitution but in providing that Pétain “consult” with the National Assembly while drafting it, had some 25 backers. Twenty-seven members signed Vincent Badie’s handwritten last-ditch defense of the republic (which also called for change). As one reads the stenographic transcript of the morning session on July 10,
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the members’ mounting impatience at plodding parliamentary procedures is evident. It was the rank and file, not Laval’s claque, that howled for an immediate vote. Pierre-Etienne Flandin, whose words about clinging to French traditions of liberty are often quoted, ended his speech by advocating a vote for the government’s project. Laval had no serious opposition.
The Popular Front parliament did not quite “crucify itself,” as Léon Blum’s virulently disillusioned ex-colleague Charles Spinasse urged on July 6. Neither had it been coerced into voting against its true feelings. It had, rather, in Anatole de Monzie’s phrase, left the scene as “penitents” who “consented to the abandonment of power and the sacrifice of liberty in the conviction that the new regime would assure order.
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That is why no outcry arose the next day, July 11, when Marshal Pétain formally assumed the new office of “Head of the French State.” Constitutional Acts One, Two, and Three gave him authority to carry
out all executive and legislative acts except declarations of war without referring to the Assembly. The gravity of these widely accepted steps cannot be exaggerated. Collaboration no longer meant merely accomplishing one’s daily round under enemy occupation. Collaboration now meant taking advantage of a foreign army to carry out major changes in the way Frenchmen were governed, schooled, and employed.
A
N OLD WORLD WAS ENDED
. S
OME FEATURES OF THE
new were already apparent. Never had so many Frenchmen been ready to accept discipline and authority. A kind of jack-booted toughness had been part of the Fascist Leagues’ appeal to the young in the 1930’s, and a cult of outdoorsy muscularity was already a form of youthful rebellion against the Third Republic. “Thanks to us, the France of camping, of sports, of dances, of voyages, of collective hiking will sweep away the France of aperitifs, of tobacco dens, of party congresses, and long digestions.”
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Cultists of virility like Henry de Montherlant renewed the call for spartan values. “What we need most is a cure of purity,” wrote Jacques Benoist-Méchin.
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The discipline theme penetrated even into the Third Republic’s elite. Edouard Herriot, president of the Chamber of Deputies and the soul of the Third Republic’s accommodation politics, appealed to his colleagues at the National Assembly at Vichy on 9 July to accept “a hard discipline.” Gide found Pétain’s 17 June speech “simply admirable.” Pétain claimed that “the spirit of enjoyment has won out over the spirit of sacrifice. People claimed more than they served.” Gide’s response was to accept limitation on excesses of freedom. “I should rather gladly put up with restraints, it seems to me, and would accept a dictatorship, which is the only thing, I fear, which might save us from decomposition.
Let me hasten to add that I am speaking here only of a French dictatorship.”
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Suffering itself was supposed to burn away the dirty dross of interwar France, to purify and strengthen the national fiber. Of course Frenchmen knew they would have to suffer in June 1940, whether they liked it or not, but seeing some merit in suffering helped reconcile them to the armistice position. Spokesmen for the regime liked to proclaim that “suffering purifies.” Camus satirized them in Father Paneloux’ sermon at the end of the first month of the plague:
If today the plague is in your midst, that is because the hour has struck for taking thought.… For the plague is the flail of God and the world his threshing floor.”
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But men much farther from Vichy circles also talked about the redemption in suffering. There would be some benefit in the war, Gide thought, for those who suffered directly and learned.
Yes, long before the war, France stank of defeat. She was already falling to pieces to such a degree that perhaps the only thing that could save her was, is perhaps, this very disaster in which to re-temper her energies. Is it fanciful to hope that she will issue from this nightmare strengthened?
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