PART III
CHAPTER 5
France’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate met in joint session on 10 July. The setting was Vichy, a spa town in the Auvergne. The assembled representatives authorized Marshal Pétain to draft a new constitution and to govern with a free hand in the interim, and they did so by a crushing majority: 569 voices in favor with just 80 opposing and 20 abstentions. This was an awful and spectacular act of political “hara-kiri,”1 a suicide all the more appalling because it cleared the path for a new, authoritarian order to emerge. How had it come to this?
The political collapse of the Third Republic was a tragedy in two acts. The first opened on 5 June when the Germans launched an assault on the Somme–Aisne line. They met with stiff initial resistance but then broke through, pitching toward Paris. The French government was obliged to abandon the capital on 10 June and beat a retreat to the provinces. It relocated to the Touraine, just south of the Loire, a natural barrier which, it was hoped, might provide beleaguered decision-makers with a moment to recoup. Once there, Premier Reynaud convened a series of cabinet meetings at the château de Cangy, and the prospect of an armistice, already a subject of simmering differences, was confronted head-on. Reynaud was dead set against giving up the fight and cast about for alternatives. Winston Churchill flew to the region for a pair of summit talks—Supreme War Councils as they were called—hoping to stiffen French resolve. All the debate, often tense and tempestuous, did not result in a concerted course of action, nor did it slow the German advance. On 14 June a second government transplantation was improvised, this time to Bordeaux. Being a port city, it was well situated for further relocations. Indeed it was from there that a diehard Charles de Gaulle would fly into London exile on 17 June, and that a boatload of no less resolute parliamentarians would sail on the passenger liner Massilia en route to French North Africa on 21 June. Yet prior to all such departures Reynaud himself had thrown in the towel. He had hoped the United States might come to France’s rescue, but it would not, a demurral made crystal clear to him by the American ambassador’s second-in-command, Freeman Matthews, on the morning of 16 June. Reynaud resigned that very day in favor of Marshal Pétain, who was standard-bearer of the pro-armistice faction.
The second act of the drama was less compressed than the first but not by much, unfolding across a span of three and a half weeks from Pétain’s accession to office through the vote of 10 July. Pétain addressed the nation on multiple occasions during this period, and it became clear that he meant not just to bring hostilities to a close, but to take charge. On the matter of the armistice, Hitler gave a lending hand, setting terms that were intended to be hard to swallow but not too hard, leaving intact France’s empire and fleet, the building blocks of French hopes for a return to greatness. The armistice was in due course signed on 22 June. Britain too in its way helped out. It was not reassured that the French navy was secured against an eventual German takeover and, to be on the safe side, insisted that the battle fleet anchored in the Algerian harbor of Mers el-Kebir set sail for a British port. The French commander wouldn’t budge, and on 3 July the British opened fire, sinking the fleet and killing 1,200 sailors in the process. The war was now not just over for France but its bridges to its erstwhile ally, Great Britain, had been well and truly burned, affording Pétain yet greater room for maneuver.
The armistice provided for the division of France into two major zones: one in the north, extending down the Atlantic coast, was occupied by the Germans; the other, made up of central and southern France, was not. Bordeaux fell within the occupied zone, and so Pétain’s government decamped in search of a new seat for itself, moving first to Clermont-Ferrand and then at the very end of June to Vichy. Vichy was a resort town with plenty of hotel space to house ministries and government personnel. It was also situated in the Auvergne, the political home turf of Pierre Laval, a one-time socialist who had drifted far to the right. He was a hardcore appeaser who had never wanted France to go to war in the first place. Laval volunteered his services to Pétain, promising to bring the Republic’s representatives to cede the Marshal the freedom to act that he craved. What is most disturbing is the staggering success Laval had in this enterprise, resulting in the lopsided vote that placed the nation’s fate in Marshal Pétain’s hands. Pétain used his new-found powers to create a collaborationist dictatorship: Vichy.
By this account, Vichy’s emergence was built on a double capitulation: Reynaud’s on 16 June and the National Assembly’s on 10 July. It may have been the military that was responsible for France’s defeat, but it was the Republic’s political class, irresolute and beaten, that did in the Third Republic.2 I don’t quite see it this way. The Republic did not just self-destruct but was cornered into self-destruction. There was an Iago in this tragedy, indeed, many of them, officers and civil servants who felt little if any loyalty to the regime they served, appeasers and right-wingers who, though never more than a minority, exploited a moment of extreme crisis to get the temporary upper hand. That there were well-placed power-grabbers, gleeful at the chance to finish off the Third Republic, does not absolve the men, from Reynaud on down, who should have known better than to yield, but it does invite a reapportionment of blame. Once the moral balance sheet has been recalculated, it will be possible to take a fresh look at the Republic—at its flaws both inbuilt and born of events and how they contributed to the regime’s demise in 1940.
Let’s begin by taking a closer look at Reynaud’s decision on 16 June to turn over the reins of government to Pétain. The decision, of course, was Reynaud’s alone, but he came to it after a series of sometimes unnerving and ever more polarized arguments with cabinet members and military brass first in the Touraine and then at Bordeaux. The pro-armistice faction over time grew in number and did its level best to make Reynaud feel that he had no viable option but to ask for a ceasefire. To start with, it is worth asking who these men were and how they pressed their case.
Reynaud had taken office on 21 March, heading a coalition that extended from the center-left Radical Party through the more moderate Alliance Républicaine (Reynaud’s own political formation) to the hard-right Fédération Républicaine. General Gamelin for the time being remained in place as supreme military commander. A first reshuffle on 10 May tilted the cabinet to the right, introducing the Fédération Républicaine stalwart, Louis Marin, and a second more ambiguous figure, Jean Ybarnégaray. Marin was a confirmed anti-German who had never believed in appeasement, but Ybarnégaray was something else altogether. For a period, he had militated alongside Marin in the Fédération Républicaine, but he was a Catholic nationalist at heart who welcomed General Franco’s coup against the Spanish Republic in 1936 and wound up bolting from the Fédération Républicaine in favor of Colonel François de La Rocque’s Parti Social Français (PSF). Ybarnégaray was a bear of a man with an expansive personality, and he was well liked in the Chamber of Deputies, which may explain why Reynaud appointed him. But the PSF was an authoritarian, far-right party, and it did not augur well for the Republic that a man with such connections had an influential voice in determining its fate.3
More fateful by far, however, was the personnel overhaul that unfolded over the three-day period from 17 to 19 May. French lines had been breached on the Meuse, and Reynaud felt an acute need to show a firm hand and boost morale. On 17 May he recalled General Weygand to Paris, the first step en route to promoting him to commander-in-chief, a process consummated two days later when Gamelin got word he was sacked and Weygand was to take his place. In the meantime, on 18 May, Reynaud moved Georges Mandel over from the Ministry of Colonies to the Ministry of the Interior, at the same time bringing Pétain into the cabinet for the first time. It’s not hard to figure out what Reynaud thought he was doing. Mandel and Weygand were confident, dynamic men who might be counted on to steady a situation gone awry, and there was a symbolism to the trio of appointments meant to reassure the public. Pétain, of course, was the nation’s greatest living war hero, the victor of Verdun, but Mandel and Weygand had also played a part in the Great War, the former as Georges Clemenceau’s right-hand man, the latter as Marshal Foch’s. Reynaud’s message was clear enough: the stalwart men who had brought victory in the Great War were once again at the helm either in person or at one remove.
Reynaud’s reshuffle, however, entailed taking a political risk, though not so far as Mandel was concerned. He was a staunch republican cast in the same iron mold as his mentor, Clemenceau. Pétain, renowned for his glacial manner and imperturbability, was harder to figure out. He was a conservative man and a deep-dyed anti-communist, but there was no reason as yet to think he was lacking the will to carry on the war. That would change, of course, as the battlefield reverses piled up. By 26 May, Pétain had begun to doubt the wisdom of fighting to the last man. It would be “criminal” to do so, he expostulated to a confidant on that day, and in almost the same breath he delivered himself of an indictment that betrayed the political direction his thinking had begun to take: “The real guilty party is premier Daladier. He’s the one who brought us the Popular Front.”4 In the case of Pétain, a pro-armistice leaning went hand in hand with an ever more encompassing animus against the left. The true political wild card, though, was the septuagenarian Weygand, and there was no doubt about that. He was a known anti-Dreyfusard, not surprising perhaps in a career officer of his generation. In the 1930s, Weygand had sympathized with anti-parliamentary rioters in February 1934 and at decade’s end he was connected with military conspirators plotting to rescue a France they felt was too much in thrall to leftist politicians.5 However effective a military commander Weygand may have been, he was no republican, and as defeat loomed, he grew yet more exalted in his reactionary views. When the Somme–Aisne line broke, he feared that the far left might exploit the situation to seize power in a Commune-like uprising. It was to forestall just such an eventuality that he opposed the government’s departure from Paris in early June, and once the government had removed itself to the Touraine, Weygand continued in the same vein, retailing rumors of a communist coup in the capital that the better-informed and less obsessive Mandel had to dispel.6 Pétain showed his colors in confidential remarks, but Weygand was not so reticent. At a cabinet meeting on 5 June he let fly, exculpating the army and blaming France’s predicament on “twenty years of errors, twenty years of negligence.” It was the nation’s pacifist schoolteachers, he ranted, and not its generals, who deserved rough handling.7 Later in the meeting Weygand, now joined by a Marshal Pétain at last ready to show his hand, urged Reynaud to ask for terms from the enemy. Reynaud had wanted to wrap his government in the mantle of Great War heroism, but what he got instead was a pair of military men fixated on scapegoating the left, even as they called for an end to the fighting.
Reynaud’s last cabinet reorganization, undertaken that very same day, 5 June, only aggravated the situation.8 The Dunkirk evacuation had just ended, and the time had come to dig in behind the Somme–Aisne line. Reynaud took the opportunity to clear out a number of defeatist ministers, the notorious Anatole de Monzie among them. At the same stroke, however, he dismissed the minister of foreign affairs, Daladier, who was a personal rival no doubt but also a reliable voice in favor of carrying on the war. Reynaud took over Daladier’s position, adding to his own already considerable portfolio of responsibilities. He was prime minister, minister of defense (since 18 May), and now minister of foreign affairs. Reynaud contrived to lighten his burdens by appointing junior ministers to help him out. The post of under-secretary of defense went to Charles de Gaulle, who needs no introduction, and that of under-secretary for foreign affairs to Paul Baudouin, who had been attached to the prime minister’s office since March and was a known quantity to Reynaud. Rounding out the list of new cabinet officers were two first-time ministers, Yves Bouthillier at the Ministry of Finance and the press baron Jean Prouvost at the Ministry of Information.
The newcomers were a capable crew, no doubt. Prouvost apart, all were young stars on the rise, reputed for their brilliance and administrative skills. De Gaulle, a graduate of the national military academy at Saint-Cyr, was a proven and innovative battlefield commander. Baudouin and Bouthillier both belonged to the prestigious state administrative corps, the Inspectorat des Finances. None of the four new cabinet members, moreover, was a politician. Not Prouvost the businessman; not de Gaulle the career officer and apostle of army professionalism; not Bouthillier and Baudouin the experts in public administration. Reynaud in so selecting may have thought he was bringing in a non-partisan cadre of the best and the brightest, but he was mistaken. Three of the new men (de Gaulle was the exception) had come recommended by Reynaud’s mistress Hélène de Portes. She, unlike her more steadfast inamorato, had attached herself to the pro-armistice camp, and her three protégés thought much as she did. It’s not only that most of the new men favored getting out of the war but that a couple of them—Baudouin and Bouthillier—were not republicans at all. The former was a “fervent Christian” well disposed to the corporatist experiments of the Salazar regime in Portugal. He liked the idea of Weygand as a potential successor to Reynaud and did not hesitate to confide in the generalissimo, lamenting to him in a private conversation in late May that France had lost its way: “The moral force of this country has been reduced to ruins … What we need is a thorough-going labor of reconstruction.”9 As for Bouthillier, he has been described as “a disciple of Maurras, if not an out-and-out Action française militant.” He was an enemy of the Popular Front, an appeaser, and an Anglophobe.10
As the military situation deteriorated, Reynaud made repeated efforts to shore up his government, surrounding himself with the most storied figures of the French establishment and with a raft of younger men of exceptional energy and executive capacity. At the same time, he unwittingly reinforced the pro-armistice faction and, even worse, introduced into the councils of power not just mous but proto-authoritarians who hated the left and had little more taste for the Republic itself.
This was a recipe for disaster when it came to finding a way forward, and that became evident once French defenses along the Somme–Aisne line began to buckle. At a pair of cabinet meetings on 8 and 9 June, just as the government was preparing to flee the capital, Weygand and Pétain made clear to all present where they stood. The time had come to treat with the enemy. Weygand, as he had before, railed on about “twenty years of abdication,” a theme Senator Joseph McCarthy would take up (substituting treason for abdication) in another context fifteen years later, with Pétain chiming in: “This country needs an overhaul top to bottom.”11
How did Reynaud answer back? First, with the apposite observation that France’s enemy in this war was not just any enemy, or as he put it at a cabinet meeting on 12 June: “We’re not dealing with Kaiser Wilhelm but with Genghis Khan.”12 Second, he proposed alternatives to surrender: holing up in a so-called Breton redoubt or retreating to North Africa. There was always the possibility, moreover, that the British might yet come to the rescue, dispatching additional fighter squadrons to the continent; or, the most desperate hope of all, that the US would intervene in some unspecified way to save the day. Finally, Reynaud floated what might be called the Dutch option. Holland’s armies had capitulated to the conquering Germans, but Queen Wilhelmina and her government had then headed for London, leaving Holland itself in the hands of administrative caretakers. Might not France, Reynaud proposed, do the same?
Most of these options did not get very far. De Gaulle and Churchill liked the Breton gambit, but it was never accorded a serious thinking through, and the rapidity of the German army’s advance soon made the whole question moot. Nor was Britain in much of a position to extend aid that might make a difference. As the French government retreated to the Touraine, Churchill flew to France for face-to-face talks. A first meeting took place on 11–12 June, Churchill coming at Weygand’s invitation to the château Muguet near Briare; a second took place at Tours on 13 June. Churchill promised just two additional fighter units, pleading by way of excuse that his cabinet, worried about home defense, would authorize nothing more. The French also pressed him on the question of an armistice. France after all was treaty-bound to stand by Great Britain. Would the British let their ally sue for a separate peace? Churchill answered back, urging the French to fight on and suggesting that they sound out Roosevelt. There were Anglophobes, Bouthillier for example, already in Reynaud’s cabinet. Pétain himself had never much cared for the British and made no secret of his views. After the Tours meeting, Anglophobic sentiment gained in currency, and few remained who put much stock in help from that quarter. Churchill made one last desperate effort to turn things around on 16 June. He proposed to de Gaulle, who was on a mission in London at the time, that Britain and France form a union, though how such a gesture, however grand, might work out in practice or improve France’s fortunes was not made clear. De Gaulle dutifully phoned in the offer to the French cabinet, which then voted to turn it down by a close margin, 14 to 10. As for the American option, it too came to nothing. Reynaud had acted on Churchill’s counsel and petitioned Roosevelt for assistance. Early on 16 June the answer came in. The US conveyed to Reynaud its ongoing moral support but nothing more substantial than that.13
There would be no Breton redoubt and no Anglo-American bailout, but France might yet prosecute the war from its empire. Reynaud seized on the idea at Cangy but seems to have been forced to reconsider for two reasons. First of all, the opposition he encountered was ferocious to the point of insubordination. At a first cabinet meeting on 12 June, Pétain raised the stakes in the debate: it would be “criminal,” he declared, to wait a moment longer to ask for an armistice, and Baudouin picked up on the theme in a private conversation with Reynaud afterward. “France does not reside in its colonies but in its home soil,” Baudouin told the prime minister, adding that it would be a “crime” to leave the nation to the invader’s mercy. At a second cabinet meeting the next day, Pétain turned up the pressure yet further. He stood up and read a prepared statement, an unusual procedure, and what he then went on to say just added to the extraordinary nature of the occasion. He himself would never leave metropolitan France. A government that did not stand by its people risked losing legitimacy and, worse, a France abandoned by its natural leaders risked losing its “soul,” along with all hope of a future “renaissance.” Pétain’s words were delivered in measured language even if what he had to say was not so measured. Weygand took the extra step. The general had contempt for politicians, and all the hand-wringing about what course to pursue just exasperated him. He told cabinet members that there was but one choice, armistice, and dodging that basic truth was just proof of a lack of courage. As for leaving France, Weygand went on, he would sooner be clapped in chains, and with that he asked permission to leave, storming out in a fury.14 The pro-armistice faction made two points plain: that they viewed any other policy as a criminal betrayal and lacking in legitimacy, and that they for their part—by implication in Pétain’s case, explicitly so in Weygand’s—would not obey any order to move the government and the military to North Africa.
Doubts about the feasibility of the enterprise further eroded Reynaud’s resolve. He had been in contact with the commanding officer in North Africa, General Charles Noguès, about the possibility of prosecuting the war from there. Noguès had telegrammed back in discouraging tones: there were not enough men, not enough materiel for the purpose. After the disastrous cabinet meeting of 13 June, Baudouin and Reynaud separately sought out Admiral François Darlan, the navy’s most senior officer, to talk through the matter. The question that both put to the admiral was this: was it realistic to think about transporting France’s armies in the hexagon to North Africa? Darlan’s reply to both was much the same. In the face of German air superiority, such a crossing was unthinkable and North Africa itself undefendable. The exchange prompted Baudouin to a demonization of the anti-armistice camp: they were demagogues, out of touch with the realities of “life”: “They have lost contact with French soil.” Reynaud’s conclusion by contrast was to cast about for a different course of action, and it was at this juncture that he began to explore the Dutch solution.15
The scene had by this time shifted to Bordeaux, which was not favorable terrain for Reynaud. The town mayor was Adrien Marquet, a renegade socialist, unrepentant appeaser, and crony of Pierre Laval. Moreover, the numerous refugees and hangers-on who had relocated to Bordeaux seeking safe haven did not scruple to manifest their unhappiness with the politicians they held responsible for their present plight, Reynaud not least among them. This was the setting in which the prime minister fired his last shot, and it proved a blank. First and most important of all, Weygand and Pétain remained unbending. Not long after talking to Darlan, Reynaud tried out the idea of a Dutch alternative on Weygand, who responded with “a formal refusal.” He was no less adamant when the cabinet met later that day, and the argument spilled over afterward, growing ever more heated. The generalissimo squared off against Reynaud, insisting once more that he would under no circumstances sign a capitulation. This gave rise to the following exchange, Reynaud speaking first:
You will do it if I give the order.
Never …
You are here to obey.
I am here to defend the honor of the army.16
Weygand was mutinous. Pétain, by contrast, was more politic, squeezing Reynaud rather than defying him outright. The cabinet met once more early on 16 June, and the Marshal then made his move. He stood up and read a statement threatening to resign, confronting Reynaud with an awkward choice: ask the Germans for terms or fall out with one of France’s most prestigious and respected public personalities.
Two further factors weighed on Reynaud’s decision. Over the course of the day, the US and Great Britain both had occasion to show how little they could do to help the French out—America by its early-morning formal refusal to intervene, Britain by its futile, last-minute scheme to form a union. France, Reynaud must have concluded, was on its own, and Reynaud himself felt more and more isolated. As the prime minister’s room for maneuver narrowed, the cabinet’s will to back him slipped in equal measure. He could still count on the support of a half dozen diehards, among them the minister of armaments Raoul Dautry, Mandel and Marin, but the pro-armistice faction had begun to grow. No more than half a dozen at Cangy, they now accounted for a near majority as the fence-sitters and opportunists rallied to their side.17 The pressure was too much for Reynaud. Unable to stomach the prospect of opening armistice talks himself, he stepped aside in favor of someone who knew no such hesitations—and so Marshal Pétain became prime minister, the Third Republic’s last.
It’s impossible not to take a dim view of Reynaud’s capitulation. He made disastrous personnel choices, in effect creating a pro-armistice bloc—Pétain, Baudouin, Ybarnégaray, Bouthillier, Prouvost—that didn’t have to exist. From a political point of view, the most disastrous appointment of all was the rancorous, indeed mutinous Weygand as commander of France’s armies in the field. And then Reynaud gave in to the pro-armistice faction when it may be he did not have to. To be sure, Noguès and Darlan had been discouraging about carrying on the fight from North Africa, but why not try?18 Hitler had had air superiority at the time of Dunkirk, but the BEF had made good its escape all the same and with no advance planning. France might have been able to pull off a similar feat had it acted with a will. Much depended on how the Spanish conducted themselves. Had Franco come to Hitler’s aid, he would no doubt have exacted a heavy price—a chunk of France’s empire in all likelihood—but think where that would have left Spain and Germany: the former embroiled in a war with Britain and imperial France, not so welcome a prospect whatever the potential gains for a country just emerging from a ruinous civil war; the latter committed to mobilizing an amphibious assault on North Africa, a much more challenging enterprise than an amphibious assault on Great Britain, which in the event it was never able to pull off.
Reynaud let himself be pushed around by overly prudent military men like Noguès and Darlan, and then let himself be bullied in his dealings with Weygand and Pétain. Why not, after all, go the Wilhelmina route and head to North Africa or Great Britain for that matter? The Massilia passengers did just that and so too did de Gaulle. It’s easy enough, of course, to grasp Reynaud’s thinking on this point. The pro-armistice group had made clear, not just that it opposed leaving the hexagon, but that it regarded any such gesture as a betrayal of the national interest and of the French people at a time of extreme suffering. A monarch like Wilhelmina, Bouthillier conceded, might carry the mantle of sovereignty with her, but not a republican head of government who lacked that kind of embodied legitimacy. Pétain had made a similar point to Reynaud at Cangy: a Reynaud government overseas would not be recognized as a government at all by the French people. Such an admonition was bound to give the prime minister pause. Imagine a face-off between Reynaud and Pétain, the former ensconced in North Africa accompanied by a handful of ministers, the latter “with his crown of glory” and backed by Weygand “with his prestige” still on the scene in metropolitan France. It is reasonable to suppose that Reynaud would have come out the loser in any such contest.19
Reynaud was not the great man that de Gaulle proved himself to be; he did not brave the odds. It is understandable, however, why Reynaud chose as he did, and he cannot be faulted for having failed to make energetic efforts to find another outcome. One more thing: Reynaud was not choosing in a vacuum. The Germans had him cornered; Great Britain, which accorded justifiable priority to homeland defense, was in no position to help out, nor was a US just starting to emerge from isolationism; and at every turn Reynaud had to push up against an ever bolder pro-armistice faction. An up-close look at that faction and how it conducted itself opens up a second perspective on the crisis of 16 June, focusing not so much on Reynaud’s failings as on the character and determination of his enemies.
The pro-armistice faction did not just argue about policy: they were interested in regime change, if not from the very outset, then soon enough. Weygand did not hide the fact that he considered the Third Republic “unworthy.”20 He was more explicit than most, but the themes he sounded were taken up by others. Communism threatened public order; the Popular Front and pacifists had rotted the nation’s soul away; France stood in dire need of a spiritual overhaul; and only those in touch with the national soil had the moral weight to bring such a renaissance about. These would in time become Vichy themes, but this comes as little surprise since the men who articulated them, from Pétain on down, were to become Vichy ministers in just a few weeks’ time.
These were men of exceptional stature and ability, France’s best and brightest, and that’s in fact why Reynaud had turned to them in the first place. Yet even if Reynaud can’t be taxed with picking incompetents, couldn’t he have made wiser choices? Surely there were some in France’s military and civil service establishments who were not that unreliable in political terms. No doubt there were, and de Gaulle himself may be cited as a case in point (Reynaud in fact did single out de Gaulle for promotion). Yet de Gaulle was probably more the exception than the rule. In early June, when Reynaud left Paris by car, he was accompanied by de Gaulle who was upset to learn that it was an overreaching Weygand and not Reynaud himself, the head of government, who had invited Churchill to the château Muguet near Briare. Reynaud took the point, making up his mind to sack Weygand and replace him with General Charles Huntziger, a course of action of which de Gaulle approved (and which Reynaud never acted upon).21 But would Huntziger have been that much sounder a choice? He was a less obstreperous personality than Weygand, to be sure, but he wasn’t that distinguished a military commander, as his record at the head of the 2nd Army attests. As for politics, Huntziger was in due course to prove himself a reliable Vichyite. He represented France in armistice negotiations with the Nazis, accepting the German terms that he found “hard but not dishonoring,”22 and then went on to serve the regime for a period as minister of war. Or consider the examples of Noguès and Darlan, two of the key senior officers who did so much to frame Reynaud’s options. In contrast to Weygand, neither was a marked reactionary, but on the other hand neither demonstrated much affinity for democratic institutions over the course of events to come. Not Darlan, of course, who went on to a term of service as Pétain’s second-in-command at Vichy. Noguès never reached so high, but he did remain in charge in French North Africa and in that capacity showed no reluctance to order French troops to fire on American soldiers during the Allied invasion of November 1942. When it then came to deciding how to govern a liberated North Africa, moreover, Noguès did not favor de Gaulle, preferring instead the proconsulship of General Henri Giraud, himself a semi-repentant Pétainist. No, the moment Reynaud began looking to appoint non-partisan experts, he was fishing in troubled waters: France’s military and civil service elites were that much riven with second thoughts, or worse, about the value and efficiency of democratic institutions.
No less disturbing, Reynaud’s so-called experts did not hesitate to play hardball in pursuit of their goals. Bouthillier and Baudouin of course kept low profiles, not making too much noise in cabinet meetings but letting on how they felt when tête-à-tête. Pétain too was no shouter, but his Olympian manner did not stop him from throwing a thunderbolt or two, rising in cabinet debate to read statements threatening resignation or branding policies favored by Reynaud as criminal. The point man when it came to intimidation was Weygand, who battered the prime minister with fits of temper and fiery defiance, so that Reynaud in the end bent before the onslaught.
From this angle, the 16 June crisis and Pétain’s accession to power appear not so much the result of Reynaud’s weaknesses (though more might have been hoped for from a man so able) as the result of what amounted to, in one historian’s words, “a palace coup.”23 Robert Paxton noted some years ago how well stocked the Vichy regime was with experts, civil servants, and military brass, concluding “to judge Vichy is to judge the French elite.”24 Yet even before Vichy itself was in place, the French elite had begun to turn, and what better evidence to make the point than the conduct of its most haloed, most brilliant representatives in the run-up to 16 June?
Yet doesn’t just such a finding nail down once and for all the case against the Third Republic? That is, it was a flawed regime which in the end met with the fate it deserved. No doubt the Republic was flawed but it is critical to keep in mind just what the nature of that flaw was. From its inception in the 1870s to its very end, the regime had had difficulties with the military. France’s chief executive in 1877, Marshal Patrice de MacMahon, was no republican but found himself, whether he liked the regime or not, the Republic’s president. Confronted with a parliamentary majority he didn’t care for, he dismissed parliament on 16 May of that year, the so-called seize mai coup. There were fears that MacMahon might go a step further and, military man that he was, engineer an army takeover. The Marshal backed down in the face of determined public opposition, and the crisis was resolved, but uncertainties about the military’s loyalty persisted, and for good reason as the behavior of so many senior officers at the time of the Dreyfus Affair bore witness. Yet again, in the 1930s, there were rumblings of military plots against the Republic. One of the reasons why Gamelin was named to the command of France’s armies was that he enjoyed a reputation as a soldier whose republican loyalties might be counted on. The army had its own, non-democratic ethos; and it was a refuge for royalists and Catholics who wanted to serve France but had a hard time making peace with a secular Republic.
Nor should it be thought that the French military’s political unreliability came to an end with the Third Republic. The Fourth foundered in 1958 under pressure from an army unhappy with the regime’s conduct of the Algerian War; and the Fifth in its turn had to face down an attempted putsch in 1961 although it pulled through, unlike its predecessor, thanks to General de Gaulle’s sangfroid and political skills. It took a general in the end to teach the nation’s generals how to live with a Republic.
It’s not so much that the Third Republic was a rotten regime, but that post-revolutionary France was saddled with a military establishment that had not made its peace with democratic institutions and would not do so until the 1960s. If there was a flaw in the regime, it lay not in republican political culture but in a military caste as yet inadequately republicanized.