France of the 1930s presents a fascinating example of confused, overlapping, and often contradictory perceptions of enemies and victims. This was reflected in the bizarre combination of ideological dogmatism and fluidity, whereby unrelenting pacifists advocated collaboration, adherents of communism or socialism turned to militant populism and fascism, intellectuals were transformed into demagogues and bullies, and mainstream republicans were converted into putschists. The ambiguity of French politics extended well beyond the interwar period and the Occupation into the Fourth Republic and its ultimate demise in the wake of the Algerian crisis. But in the midst of the social and ideological turmoil of the 1930s, and under the impact of the Great Depression and France’s decline as a world power, most political camps came to share the view that rather than being the victors of World War I, they had in fact become its victims. This transformation of self-perception from the vanquishers of the enemy to its victims was of course related to the fear of even greater destruction in a future war. Yet since the superiority of the most likely foreign enemy was readily recognized, the fear of war only enhanced animosities toward its alleged domestic advocates. Hence precisely those who supported resistance to foreign threats were labeled as the enemy’s allies, while those who supported compromise, appeasement, and eventually collaboration, claimed to be true patriots. Not only did this skewed reasoning blur the distinction between homemade and external enemies, it severely paralyzed politics by making resistance to invasion into treason, and resistance to war into an act of national loyalty. Moreover, as fears of yet another slaughter grew, the advocates of compromise on the international front became increasingly supportive of active domestic suppression of those who called to prepare the nation for war. This anxious, often paranoid search for the nation’s “true” enemies was made all the more bitter by mutual accusations of paving the path for another mass murder of a new generation of French youth, whose numbers were already depleted by the butchery of their potential fathers in 1914—18.
United by their fear of war, the French were thus split on what to do about it. The lessons drawn by the socialists and communists from events in Germany were that the Left must unite against the threat of domestic fascism. Hence the precarious coalition of the Left and the moderate center was achieved by postulating the existence of an enemy within the nation who shared the interests and ideology of the foreign foe. Moreover, even this alliance included a powerful communist component whose willingness to tone down its revolutionary, antidemocratic rhetoric in view of the more immediate danger of fascism, reflected rather than diminished its subservience to Moscow’s changing policies. In fact only the socialist party was willing to stand firm against the Right and at the same time to protect the democratic system, since the pragmatist Radical Party had no qualms about changing coalition partners in mid stride as long as it could maintain its position at the center of national politics. If the logic of the Popular Front was to confront the putschist tendencies manifested on February 6, 1934, to protect the working class from exploitation by big capital and to prepare for international conflict, its price was to institutionalize a national split that haunted the country until well after the Liberation. For now the Right could unite against what it saw as the greatest threat to the nation, namely the policies of the Left, rather than the emergence of Hitler. The Left, which had previously opposed war as serving the interests of capitalism, now pushed for rearmament; whereas the Right, which had traditionally advocated maintaining France’s stature as a great European and colonial power, now charged the Left with provoking war in service of foreign interests, such as the Soviet Union and Britain, and of real or alleged “foreigners” residing in France, such as the Jews and a variety of political refugees from Germany, Italy, and Spain.
In France, then, fear of war and domestic turmoil made for the construction of an array of enemies over whose identity there could be no agreement. Conversely, in 1930s Germany, as politics came under the tyrannical rule of Nazism and the mobilization of society for war became state policy, the identity of the nation’s primary enemy was dictated from above, albeit drawing on an increasingly widespread popular prejudice. To be sure, France too revealed a growing predilection to view those most vulnerable to attack, namely the Jews, as its primary, though elusive, domestic and foreign enemy. But while antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, nourished as it certainly was by much older anti-Jewish sentiments, France also produced impressive manifestations of resistance to this easy solution for its seemingly intractable problems. The infamous battle cry of the Right, “better Hitler than Blum,” also signified the fact that the leader of the Popular Front, and for a while the Prime Minister of France, was a Jew, at a time when the expansion of antisemitism throughout the continent made such an appointment unthinkable in most other European countries. Conversely, Leon Blum’s political prominence enabled the antidemocratic forces in France to identify not only the Left but the republican tradition itself, with Jewish influence, an argument repeatedly made during Vichy. It is also true that among France’s intellectual circles, antisemitic sentiments were anything but rare, ranging from Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s rabid calls to slaughter the Jews to Andre Gide’s ambivalent comments on the “Jewish question.” Yet Blum’s substantial electorate seemed impervious to this rhetoric. And if the deep rift between the rejection of antisemitism by the working class and the socialists, and the right-wing and Catholic growing enchantment with it, was symptomatic of the disintegration of French politics, it also indicates that unlike Germany, 1930s France never reached a consensus on “the Jew” as the nation’s main enemy and victimizer. In other words, just as the French could not agree on what was to be done about the approaching war, so, too, they failed to agree on the status of the Jews. And if Vichy tried to realize the aspirations of French antisemites to eliminate the Jews from society, it is clear that its anti-Jewish policies did not have the unifying ideological and political effect they achieved in Germany. Indeed, despite a widespread indifference to the fate of the Jews in occupied France, the radicalization of antisemitic policies by Vichy and its collaboration on this issue with the Nazis did eventually contribute to popular resentment and opposition, even if it was not the primary cause. In Vichy, then, the prewar condition of disunity soon prevailed, thereby making everyone—Jew or gentile—into a potential enemy; conversely, in Nazi Germany the utopia of racial purity focused attention on every individual’s potential Jewish heritage. It is for this reason that far more French Jews could remain patriotic both during and after the war than was the case in Germany, despite some notable exceptions on both sides of the Rhine.
If the inability to agree on the identity of the enemy in France hampered its preparation for war and resistance to occupation, it also ultimately prevented it from wholeheartedly engaging in the fantasy of redemptive antisemitism and from remaining blind to the folly of collaboration. Under Petain the question quickly arose as to who was the enemy and who the savior. Initially, it was Petain who had saved the nation at its darkest hour from its domestic and foreign enemies by striking a deal with the victorious Germans and setting out to eliminate those who had allegedly brought about the debacle. By the time of the Liberation, however, it was the rebel Charles de Gaulle, described by Vichy as chief of the nation’s domestic enemies and ally of its foreign foes, who was now hailed as the savior of la Grande Nation. Now Petain was declared the chief of the nation’s domestic enemies and the leader of its collaboration with the Germans, even if this view was qualified by his record as the more or less undisputed savior of World War I. These shifts reflected, of course, the transformation in people’s perceptions of the foreign enemy. If the Germans were first viewed as the enemy, then as occupiers, then as allies, and finally as agents of crime and destruction, the British (and later the Americans) were first allies, then enemies, then liberators, even if they also became agents of destruction. Moreover, while the French had collaborated to avoid becoming the victor’s victims, they felt betrayed when the Germans nevertheless increasingly victimized them. Similarly, while they felt betrayed by Britain in 1940, the French were grateful for their liberation by the Western Allies, embarrassed by their relatively marginal contribution to it, and embittered by the devastation it brought in its wake. Hence another reason for the myth of the Resistance. Finally, while French authorities during the Occupation produced an array of victims, especially Jews and resisters, by the end of the occupation the French perceived themselves as victims of war, fate, and injustice. Here the Resistance played a more crucial role in organizing and normalizing the memory of the past than it had in influencing the course of events. At this point there was no room for the argument that some members of the nation might have been victimized more than others. And although the French wars of identity, along with those of decolonization, were far from over, the notion of elusive enemies was gradually supplanted by the idea of universal victimhood, which paradoxically made specific, individual victims into an increasingly elusive entity.