Urban wage earners were the unannounced pariahs of the regime. Real wages went down. The inflationary pressures incidental to any great war were enormously magnified in France by the gigantic hemorrhage of occupation costs, which turned about half the national revenue into purchasing power for the German armed forces in France. Even granting that Vichy finance ministers were somewhat more successful in keeping inflation in check than the early Fourth Republic was to be, the official cost of living went up by slightly over half between June 1940 and December 1942 and then doubled again by August 1945.
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The official cost of living, however, was not what it actually cost a city dweller to procure the necessities of life. The extreme scarcity of goods, magnified by the uncontrollable nature of small peasants and merchants, helped divert goods into the black market and hoarding. The money for the official price and the correct number of ration tickets might simply not purchase any food at all, if the stores were empty. Cash or a cousin
on the farm was sometimes the only way to get anything to eat. Because of the black market, the fragmentation of the French distribution system, and the business orientation of the regime, price controls were less effective than wage controls. Wages fell far behind prices. When Laval was planning a wage increase in July 1942, for example, Ambassador Abetz had figures showing that while prices had increased by 70 percent since the beginning of the war, wages had risen only 30 percent. The gap was even greater by 1944.
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Added to this cruel wage-price pinch, labor was made more helpless by the abolition of national trade unions and the outlawry of strikes. The few strikes of which we have knowledge, such as a miners’ strike in the Nord in May 1941, were brutally repressed. The “functional” representatives of workers in the corporative organization, the Comités sociaux, were formed very slowly where they were formed at all, and workers were placed there in a position of permanent minority by dividing membership three ways among employers, technical staff, and workers. By their very nature, the corporative structures, even those in which some workingmen were included, were intended to dismantle the workers’ side of the previous adversary system of labor relations. Although unemployment was soon replaced by a labor shortage in the unoccupied zone, working people were subjected almost without redress to long hours and lagging wages, political discrimination in employment, and the threat of forced labor in Germany. Immense ground had been lost since 1936.
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On the other hand, it was a time of opportunity for those
with scarce commodities to sell. The most obvious new power, for housewives dealt with it twice a day, was the “grocers’ dictatorship.” Not even the scheming butter-and-egg lady of Jean Dutourd’s
Au bon beurre
, of course, had unlimited privileges in a world where even the most commonplace articles were scarce. She had a newfound power to lord it over her former arrogant customers, however, and she reveled in it. And her euphoria colored the regime and the marshal himself in the rosiest hues.
Small, self-supporting farmers enjoyed the shelter afforded by primitiveness. The peasant plot on the
massif central
, with no tractor to lie idle and no more than one horse to attract the German army purchasing agent, could probably still turn out the mediocre living it had produced in 1939, provided the sons were not in a German prisoner-of-war camp. By 1942 that mediocre living was worth a king’s ransom. Moreover, the chances for lucrative sales in a world with nothing to buy probably improved the cash position of many small farmers. The main enemy was the age-old one, the predatory and inquisitive state.
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Industrialists can hardly be described as flourishing in an economy whose total production ranged from a half to a third of the mediocre prewar level of 1938. All business sectors, however, enjoyed the benefits of Vichy corporatist self-regulation, the limiting of competition through universal cartels, and the dismantling of organized labor. Some businesses were “more equal than others,” of course. Scarce raw materials were allocated by the state (the Offices de Repartition in the Vichy zone, the German military government economic branch at the Hotel Majestic in the Occupied Zone) according to clear priorities. Firms engaged in war production for Germany boomed, while nonessential industries were starved for materials, stripped of machinery, drained of workmen. A look at production figures for the occupation years in the
Annuaire statistique
shows where the favors lay. The new aluminum industry was producing more than
before the war, as were the energy industries—electricity, gas, petroleum. Wood and building materials worked at 70–90 percent of prewar levels. Next, at levels below prewar figures, but still above average, came metallurgy and the transformation of metals. By contrast, textiles, leather goods, chemicals, and paper limped along at barely a third of 1938 business levels. The rubber industry was simply unable to get raw materials. By and large, the most concentrated and rationalized sectors, those dominated by a handful of major firms—automobiles, aircraft, aluminum, steel—were in the forefront of this forced-draft boom. The most dispersed, fragmented, and antiquated sectors of industry, by and large, were among those further discriminated against.
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The stock and bond markets were also up after the bad years of the 1930’s. State bonds were all up over par during the occupation for the first time since World War I. Many issues were at their highest level since 1931. The stock market also moved upward. Since these gains for investors and
rentiers
seem to have run ahead of losses due to inflation, at least at first, they help explain how Finance Minister Yves Bouthillier could take pride in the “relative financial stability” that he claimed the armistice had permitted him to assure.
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There were even some illicit fortunes founded. It was open season on Jewish properties that were sold off cheaply. Better still, one might become
administrateur provisoire
of the property of Jews who had fled to the unoccupied zone or abroad and milk it for quick profits. Restitution could not always be made after the war if, for example, there was no one left to repay. There was also the black market and even the possibilities of exploiting the Resistance. We are now in the murky underworld of Vichy profiteering, where documentation is totally lacking. Although there were some prosecutions for illicit wartime fortunes after the war, nothing concrete has been made public.
At the top, Vichy’s elite lived well. Laval had amassed his fortune between the wars. The High Court of Justice, with all its unseemly courtroom vituperation of the man, could find no blatant graft in his wealth. As owner of the chateau of the village of Châteldon, where he had grown up as the innkeeper’s son, a few miles from Vichy, Laval enjoyed showing visitors about his acres, mud on boots, pointing out depredations made by the British in the Hundred Years War. His great pleasure was the table, and the country restaurants along the Allier River near Vichy seem to have been able to oblige.
Darlan enjoyed more conspicuous ostentation. An impressive villa near Toulon bought from a Jewish family by the Oeuvres Sociales de la Marine as a rest home for Navy personnel, was actually fitted out at a cost of eight million francs for Darlan’s private use. Its sumptuous furniture made the Cour des Comptes doubt the Navy’s postwar story that the villa was meant to be a clandestine Mediterranean command post.
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Marshal Pétain lived in personal austerity at the Hotel du Parc in Vichy. He was paid, however, in the coin of adulation. Delegations of scouts, veterans, artisans, and peasants crowded his anterooms. Enthusiastic crowds greeted his travels. He indulged his taste for fatherly aphorism in radio and newspaper messages. Despite some attempts to limit the practice, his name was attached to streets, squares, and most of the major public works commenced during Vichy: the one steamship launched during the occupation, the great suspension bridge begun across the Seine at Tancarville. Admirers bought him a fine Burgundy vineyard and renamed it the Clos du maréchal.
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Above all, his cabinet and press reminded him daily that he was his country’s savior.
Large sums in secret funds and subsidies went to favored officials and editors. Most of these were the Paris embassy’s hangers-on, however, rather than Vichy personnel. Of all the ministers and secretaries of state brought before the High Court
of Justice after the Liberation, only Fernand de Brinon, the journalist and founder of the Comité France-Allemagne who became Laval’s agent in Paris in 1940 and then the official Vichy government delegate in Paris, seems to have benefited from large-scale corruption. He was arrested at Nancy with his Jewish wife in 1944 with nearly 5,000,000 francs in cash and jewelry valued at 850,000 francs. M. Caujolle, the court’s financial expert, established that the de Brinons had lived far beyond their income before and after 1940, with country homes, servants, and thoroughbred horses, without finding exactly where it had all come from. Joseph Darnand, too, was rumored to have profited from the legendary “treasure of the Milice.”
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The conspicuous high-livers of occupied Paris, such as the actress Corinne Luchaire, daughter of Jean Luchaire,
Nouveaux temps
editor and president of the Paris press association, were major recipients of Otto Abetz’ press funds.
Vichy’s favoritism was nothing as simple and vulgar as graft, however. By and large, the Vichy elite was highly professional and financially correct. The Vichy regime spread its favors by the subtler play of economic and social policy. The regime is hierarchical, Marshal Pétain never tired of saying. It was hierarchical in its profits and losses as well as in the allocation of power. Vichy spoiled the rich.
A Moral Balance Sheet
T
HERE IS
,
FINALLY
,
A GRAVE MORAL CASE TO BE MADE
against the Vichy elite. There is, first of all, the charge of using the defeat of 1940 for narrowly sectarian purposes, to seek revenge upon the Popular Front and to remake France along new lines, no less partisan than the old and in the service of narrower interests. This does not mean that they had plotted the defeat of France in advance. But their domestic enmities were so
all-consuming, after four years of the Popular Front and its successors, that they committed the most elementary of political errors. They wrote new laws under an armed foreign occupation.
There is also the charge of abetting the further internal division of France. No other major occupied country entered the war so torn; no other major occupied country used the occupation as the occasion for such a substantial restructuring of domestic institutions. When biographies of Marshal Pétain began to appear in 1966, it became regular practice to blame the poisons of division attending the Liberation upon de Gaulle’s rigorous sectarianism and the upwelling of revenge encouraged by Resistance lawlessness.
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A will to healing reconciliation coexisted within the Liberation forces alongside a well-justified determination to purge and punish the collaborators, however. It was most visible in the Liberation army, a successful amalgam of Armistice Army, Free French, and Forces Françaises Libres under two ex-Pétiniste officers (Marshals de Lattre de Tassigny and Juin) and one Gaullist officer (Marshal Leclerc de Hauteclocque). If that will to reconciliation did not prevail over the will to revenge in 1944, it was very largely because the Vichy regime had not been the mere caretaker regime in 1940–44 that its defenders claim. Vichy waged another round in the virtual French civil war of the 1930’s. Then, its geopolitical gamble having failed and war having ended neither in German victory nor in a French-mediated compromise but in total Allied victory, Vichy reaped the winds of sectarian passion that it had sown.
There is, finally, the issue of complicity. Continually repurchasing its shadow sovereignty at a higher and higher price, the Vichy regime made many Frenchmen accomplices in acts and policies that they would not normally have condoned. Marshal Pétain, in particular, was a figure to whom millions of Frenchmen looked with more than usual confidence. After the total occupation of France in November 1942, or at least after the constitutional crisis of November–December 1943, it was time to cease lending the stamp of one’s approval to an enterprise that
no longer worked. “Old age is a shipwreck,” as de Gaulle observed, but Germans who met Petain in 1943 still found him fresh and alert.
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Moreover, he was surrounded by men whose brilliance of preparation and of administrative career made them superior to the Third Republic leadership of the late 1930’s. These able and intelligent men led other Frenchmen deeper into complicity with the besieged Third Reich’s last desperate paroxysms: the Final Solution, forced labor, reprisals against a growing resistance. What can explain such egregious choices?
Tactical motives, the hope of saving France from worse, can not explain that complicity after November 1942. Of the four elements composing the Vichy bargaining position—military defeat, continuation of others in the war, the stranglehold of German occupation upon the richest two-thirds of France, and the exclusion from German grasp of the French fleet and empire—only the last one was ever within Vichy’s control. After the total occupation of France, the scuttling of the French fleet, and the return of French North Africa to war in November 1942, Vichy no longer had even that leverage. Life was clearly no easier for Frenchmen by then than for the totally occupied Western European countries.