This social trend was partly the unintended effect of a war economy, which was partly, in turn, the result of increasingly urgent German pressures for greater French war production, accompanied by favors for the most concentrated sectors of French industry. The trend resulted, too, from the technicians’ ability to survive the purge and to find common ground with
Resistance ideas of innovation. The technicians had shared with Vichy traditionalists the ideal of social order. Now they shared with many Resistance veterans the ideals of a managed economy, a strong paternalist state, and planned economic expansion. Allied with the Vichy traditionalists, they had been unable to protect France from German encroachment. Now allied with the modernizing wing of the Resistance, they confronted a new threat in the postwar world: American and Russian hegemony. This they tried to meet by planning a new industrial revolution in France.
There is hardly an aspect of social structure that did not move during Vichy toward the modernizers’ model. The “return to the soil” campaign, for example, did not stop the flow of Frenchmen away from agriculture. In the short term, of course, French cities were hungrier, more policed, and more often bombed than farms or small towns. The census of March 1946 showed that, since 1936, 16 of the 54 French cities over 50,000 had lost population, some of them (like Paris) continuing a longer trend of movement to the suburbs, while others reflected an abandonment of the northern and eastern areas for the relative security of southern towns or farms. But the census-taker’s conclusion that agriculture had stopped losing labor was premature.
29
This rural reflux was more precautionary than preferential. Much of it consisted of wives and children staying with in-laws for the duration, rather than families remaining on the farm or returning to it permanently. The long, slow decline in cultivated land in France continued during the occupation labor shortages, while the only wartime increases were in the “kind of agriculture that can be left to itself”: pastures, woodlots, etc.
30
Once the temporary advantages of rural life had ended after the Liberation, the course of Frenchmen to the cities took up again more vigorously than ever. France had ceased to be predominately rural with the census of 1931. Vichy’s nostalgic social
pronouncements and even assistance to new farmers did not reverse a trend that lay deep in French social development.
Industrial rationalization and concentration into larger plants seems to have actually increased during the Vichy period, although good figures are harder to come by here.
31
It is clear enough that German policy toward France favored concentrating war production in the most efficient plants and closing the less efficient plants to release labor for Germany.
32
Furthermore, one surmises that Albert Speer’s protected plants, “S-betriebe,” from which no workers could be deported to Germany, were chosen for high productivity. The efforts of Pierre Laval to extend this system in France worked in the same direction. While small businessmen fumed about Vichy’s favoritism toward “trusts,”
33
big businessmen and technicians in government at Vichy also promoted industrial rationalization and concentration. Europe must organize against the growing economic challenge of the United States, François Lehideux, Darlan’s minister of national equipment and Louis Renault’s nephew, told an elite audience of students at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques at Paris in February 1941.
34
It was under Lehideux’s auspices that a Ten-Year Plan for developing French productivity was enacted in May 1941 and that the law of 17 December 1941 empowered the state to close inefficient plants.
35
The state’s authority to allocate raw materials was also used in the direction of rationalization, to judge from the protests of those who were left out.
Although there exist no good wartime or immediate postwar figures on the size of French firms, there is some statistical evidence of the move toward concentration. Production figures for the occupation years remained highest in those industries that were already the most concentrated before the war: coal mining, metallurgy, transformation of metals, glass-making. Indeed, aluminum production was higher under Vichy than it had ever been before. By contrast, wartime production in the most dispersed industries (textiles, leather, chemicals) limped along at even less than average production figures. It was the concentrated industries that continued at nearly prewar pitch until the end.
36
Vichy practice (as distinct from Vichy rhetoric) encouraged industrial concentration.
Vichy also afforded French businessmen and administrators the most substantial lesson in planning and state management of the economy up to that time. The management of an economy of penury, under German occupation, had to be far more thorough and more stringent than the World War I experience had been. The World War I experience of planning had been gradual, empirical, and temporary. The occupation experience was intentional, total, and designed to apply to an economy of abundance as well as to an economy of want. With Germany taking over half of French national revenues in occupation costs and with French and German consumers competing with ready cash for few goods, total market management was inevitable.
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What was not inevitable was a new climate of opinion that held planning and management to be the only permanent solution to French postwar revival.
An ethic of planned growth and productivity had moved to the fore. Before the war, the apostles of growth in the French
economy were minority voices. They were found mostly on the Right, as in such technocratic businessmen as Ernest Mercier of the electricity business and Auguste Detoeuf. Most of the Left was more interested in distribution than in growth. Most businessmen were interested mainly in preservation. It was during Vichy that the apostles of growth moved from oddity to commonplace. Vichy ministers of industrial production had more in common with the expansionist 1960’s than the protectionist 1930’s. The word “productivity” has become a new religious exhortation, wrote the director of the French census bureau in 1946. “Pilgrimages are organized to those sacred shores [i.e., the United States] where productivity was first revealed to men.”
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At the deepest levels of mass social consciousness, Frenchmen decided to have more children. After the interruptions of 1939–40, French family size began to climb, although the continued separations of the occupation kept that new affirmation of French national vigor from showing up in statistics. It was in 1945 that the postwar baby boom became perceptible, and for the first time in a century France’s population figures turned sharply upward. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this change of mood, and it is hard to explain it. It meant that with Vichy the period when the French population contained more and more old people began to close. Indeed Vichy was the climax of that process. During Vichy, the number of Frenchmen over sixty kept climbing from 14.7 percent of the total population at the beginning of the war to 16 percent at the end, and it would have mounted still higher if the death rate of the elderly had not risen in that period of cold, undernourishment, and grief. Vichy stands as the triumph of gerontocracy in France and the beginning of its end.
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Nowadays everyone talks about the “new France” of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Statisticians’ figures are less vivid than the astonishing physical changes that any tourist can see: the old
villages in which a few crones in black shawls were replaced in a decade with crowds of brightly dressed children. The shift to farm machinery and tractors, not to mention television and washing machines, was equally rapid. The middle 1950’s were the point at which the changes began to show in consumption, production, and population figures.
Some of the roots, though, go back to the shock of 1940 and to the experiences of Vichy. It was then that the nostalgic vision of France was finally discredited; not eliminated, but reduced to enclaves. It was then that a new generation of technicians and businessmen acquired new experience and new power. It was then that the baby boom began. Only one part of the Vichy leadership worked consciously for that kind of France. Many of them abhorred it. In retrospect, however, Vichy’s surface struggles will perhaps be less significant in the end than the beginnings here of one current, which was to merge with one current of the Resistance to make the New France. François Lehideux could have written the first chapter of that all-time best-seller of the 1960’s in France,
Le défi américain.
Was Vichy a Lesser Evil?
I
N THE END
,
ONE MUST MAKE SOME OVERALL JUDGMENT
of the immediate results of collaboration for Frenchmen. With all its one-sided social favors and with all its complicity in the brutal last stages of nazism’s paroxysm, did it not save many Frenchmen from still worse direct German administration? Was it not better to have Frenchmen administering Frenchmen than the tender ministrations of a gauleiter? Did not the Vichy regime save France from “Polandization”? Did it not “éviter le pire”?
Marshal Pétain elected to base his defense in 1945 on pragmatic material grounds, and most of the Vichy ministers followed his example. This defensive terrain was marked out for Pétain by Henri Massis, the old Action Française pamphleteer,
in the declaration drafted for Pétain when the retreating German armies carried him off to Germany in August 1944:
For more than four years, resolved to remain in your midst, I tried every day to serve the permanent interests of France. Loyally, but without compromise, I had only one goal: to protect you from the worst.… If I could not be your sword, I tried to be your shield. Sometimes my words or acts must have surprised you. Know that they hurt me more than you yourselves realized. But … I held off from you some certain dangers; there were others, alas, which I could not spare you.
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In his one statement before the High Court of Justice, Marshal Pétain developed the shield theory further:
I used my power as a shield to protect the French people.… Every day, a dagger at my throat, I struggled against the enemy’s demands. History will tell all that I spared you, though my adversaries think only of reproaching me for the inevitable.… While General de Gaulle carried on the struggle outside our frontiers, I prepared the way for Liberation by preserving France, suffering but alive.
41
Pierre Laval, in his turn before the High Court, claimed that his government had managed to “éviter le pire,” to act as a “screen” between the conqueror and the French population. The refrain was taken up by succeeding defendants before the High Court and by a stream of self-exculpating memoirs.
42
Despite these partisan origins, the material advantage theory has been quite widely accepted. Robert Aron, trying to strike a reasonable balance on the basis of the trial records, the only sources available in 1954, argued that life was easier, statistically speaking, for Frenchmen than for others in occupied
Europe. The reproaches against Vichy, he said, are moral rather than material.
43
In its most widespread form, the material advantage thesis argues that Vichy kept France from “Polandization,” and everyone knows that the Poles suffered more in World War II than the French. Nazi contempt for Slavic Untermenschen makes Poland an invalid comparison with France, however. Nazi purists might well cast aspersions upon French “mongrelization” and lack of racial self-consciousness, but they did not contemplate French extinction. The shield theory must be understood in terms of actual German demands, rather than in terms of vaguely infinite possibilities of evil. It can be validly tested only in comparison with fully occupied Western countries like Belgium, Holland, or Denmark, or other collaborating regimes like Quisling’s Norway. If incomplete occupation or the existence of a quasiautonomous indigenous administration spared France any of the rigors of direct German rule, those favors should show up in comparison with fully occupied Western countries without an indigenous collaborationist regime.
One can suppose two ways in which Vichy France could have suffered less than France under a gauleiter. The German occupation authorities might have asked for less in order to reward and solidify a useful collaborationist regime. Or if the German occupation authorities asked no less of France than of fully occupied Western nations, the Vichy regime might have been better able or more willing to refuse excessive demands than would a gauleiter. A hard comparative look at the material conditions of life in Western occupied countries fails to show any important advantage for France, either granted by or extorted from Berlin.
Frenchmen were no better nourished than other Western occupied countries. Comparison of caloric intakes in France and fully occupied Western nations is, of course, treacherous ground, for access to food depended greatly on one’s location, ready cash for the black market, or connections—and a cousin on the farm
might be more useful in that respect than a cabinet minister. Average figures mean even less in this case than in most, and agricultural statistics are certainly less reliable for French
paysans
than for Danish dairy farmers. Nevertheless, it appears that French caloric intake was the lowest in Western Europe, with the exception of Italy, which is astonishing for so rich an agricultural country. Furthermore, in Eastern Europe, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia seem to have eaten better than France. French caloric intake is estimated to have descended under the occupation as low as 1,500 calories a day where there was access to black market supplies and even lower for city populations where there was not.
44