CHAPTER 6
The comparison between the seize mai crisis of 1877 and the 16 June crisis of 1940 is suggestive, but there was a crucial and telling difference between the outcomes of the two events. The seize mai crisis ended in Marshal MacMahon’s backing down, a hinge moment in the consolidation of the Third Republic. The 16 June crisis had just the opposite denouement—Marshal Pétain came out on top whereas the Republic went under—and this for one simple reason: in 1877 republicans stood by what they believed in; in 1940 they cut and ran. So maybe Reynaud’s capitulation does not provide incontrovertible proof of the regime’s bankruptcy, but the National Assembly’s suicidal vote on 10 July does.
It’s hard not to be swept along by this way of looking at things, but several additional observations need to be made before a final judgment can be rendered. The first has to do with the circumstances under which the decision on 10 July was taken. The 1940 defeat was not just a military collapse but a debacle for France’s civilian population as well, who fled by the millions before the Wehrmacht’s advance, creating chaos and moral dislocation from which the enemies of the Republic contrived to profit. Then there is the conduct of the Republic’s enemies themselves, first Pétain and then Laval—the former from the moment he became prime minister herding France toward an authoritarian solution, the latter by maneuver and threat working in tandem to consummate the process. Last of all, there is the question of what happened to France’s political class in the wake of its fateful decision. Second thoughts set in before long, a buyer’s remorse that hit sooner and ran deeper than is usually recognized.
A discussion of the exodus is the place to begin. Two million Belgians fled before the onslaught of Hitler’s armies, and their numbers were soon swelled by millions more French. Belgium and northern France had had first-hand encounters with the harshness of a German occupation during the Great War, and local residents did not want to relive the experience. Some provision for evacuation had been made, but the planning was modest in scale. No one anticipated a mass exit of such proportions, and preparing for a worst-case scenario might have been unnerving to civilians anyhow. The worst case happened, nonetheless, and the situation got worse still once the exodus was in full spate. A handful of prefects, the future Resistance hero Jean Moulin among them, and many mayors remained at their posts to face down the approaching enemy, but other officials did not. They may have felt under obligation, as the state’s representatives, to avoid capture; they may have been caught up themselves in the climate of panic. Either way, the end result was the same: a breakdown of public services and a widening sense that the authorities had abdicated their responsibilities. The sight of so many soldiers, themselves in flight, added to the general demoralization, and the German military made its own contribution by strafing and bombing refugee columns.1
This was a catastrophe by any measure. The exodus and how it was handled—or not—may offer yet one further proof of the Republic’s unworthiness.2 Yet, in all fairness, it’s not clear that France’s level of unpreparedness, high as it was, was that much higher than anyone else’s. What is certain is that the disaster ate away at the public’s allegiance to the regime. The deputies and senators who regrouped in Bordeaux were cognizant of the growing disenchantment, “made clear to us,” as one of them put it, “on all the streets and the public spaces of the city,”3 and they would get that feeling again, though this time with yet greater intensity, once they relocated to Laval’s home base in the Auvergne.
One figure, however, positioned himself to turn to advantage the regime’s discomfiture, and that was Pétain. The Marshal, once head of government, took swift action. He delivered a radio address on 17 June, letting listeners know that he intended to ask Germany for armistice terms. He framed the announcement, however, in a way that drew the nation’s legitimating gaze on himself. France was hurting, he explained, and to “attenuate its pain,” he was prepared to make to it “the gift of his person.” He felt “compassion” and “solicitude” for the “unhappy refugees” who crowded France’s roads, and that is why, with a “heavy heart,” he was suing for peace. This speech told of the Marshal’s sacrifice and deep feeling; three days later, on 20 June, he went on the airwaves again, though this time adopting the tone of a sympathetic but reproving parent. France had won a great victory in 1918 but then frittered it away. Citizens had got into the habit of taking rather than giving; they indulged themselves and did not sacrifice. The result was France’s present calamity, and if the nation aspired to greatness again, it would have to learn from its mistakes. This speech lacked the harshness of General Weygand’s vituperations about twenty years of demagogy, but it was very much in the same spirit.
Pétain instrumentalized the exodus and the defeat to build himself up as a providential man, a savior and father to whom a people in distress might turn. There was a creeping authoritarianism in such posturing, and the Marshal was abetted in this by the members of his new cabinet. Bouthillier and Prouvost were kept on, and Baudouin got promoted to minister of foreign affairs. A new man, Raphaël Alibert, was brought in as under-secretary of state, and he was every bit as anti-republican as the rest. A jurist who had taught at Sciences Po in the 1930s, Alibert was known to refer to the Republic from the teaching podium as la gueuse, the whore. Such men, conferring among themselves and with the Marshal, sketched out the future they imagined for France. Case in point: a note drafted by Weygand, read to and okayed by Pétain, and then communicated on 28 June to a no less approving Baudouin. It was time to finish with the old order of things, the document explained, with its “shopworn personnel,” its “Masonic compromises,” and its “class struggle.” A feeble birth rate had left France prey to foreign interlopers who, exploiting all too lax natural-ization laws, had come to make themselves at home, buying up the nation’s wealth along the way. A “wave of materialism” had eroded family values and the morals of youth. The nation needed new leaders and new principles to live by. It was high time to find a replacement for the Republic’s outdated motto, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” and Weygand had just such a device in mind: “God, Country, Family, Labor.” Rebirth, purity, authority, such were the watchwords of the Pétain cabinet, a government that had already left the Republic behind even before it left Bordeaux en route to Vichy.4
The new Pétain administration had little sympathy for the republican institutions it had been put in charge of, for parliament, or for the word-spinning politicians who made parliament their home. What was to be done with the lot of them?
Pétain himself had part of the answer: make sure that its ranking representatives did not set up shop in North Africa where they might constitute a competing node of legitimacy. Here’s the point at which to take a closer look at the fate of the Massilia expedition. On 18 June, Pétain assented to the plan of a number of parliamentarians, including the president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, to sail for Casablanca. While the Marshal meant to remain on French soil, he did not object to others leaving if they so desired. Such was his initial position. In a matter of days, however, Pétain reversed course, influenced by Alibert who had been hostile to the Massilia venture from the outset. Efforts were made to persuade Lebrun to remain: there was no rush to depart, he was told, as German armies were still some distance from Bordeaux; why not wait to find out what Hitler’s armistice terms were? And on it went. In case Lebrun remained unconvinced, however, Pétain was prepared to resort to tougher measures. Baudouin, for one, fretted about Lebrun’s imminent departure, and he pressed the Marshal on what he planned to do to stop it. “It’s very simple,” Pétain reassured his minister, “I’ll have him arrested,”5 though in the event this did not prove necessary. Then on the very eve of theMassilia’s departure, Pétain rescinded the order to let it go. It sailed away all the same, although it’s unclear whether those on board were aware of how the situation had changed. In a matter of days, Pétain’s minister of information, Prouvost, was branding theMassilia’s passengers as national outcasts, and they would in fact be treated as such.6 On arrival in Morocco, they were sequestered in a hotel. Mandel, who was among their number, was placed under house arrest, and several others who happened to be army officers as well as deputies—Jean Zay and Pierre Mendès France for instance—were charged with desertion in the face of the enemy.
Pétain used a firm hand to squash the Massilia expedition, a foretaste of more authoritarian measures to come, but he did not pull off the maneuver without critical assistance. He got help from three quarters, from Laval first of all. The Bordeaux town hall with Mayor Adrien Marquet’s blessing became a gathering place for pro-armistice parliamentarians, Laval in the lead. On 21 June the cabal sent a delegation to buttonhole Lebrun, determined to get him to stay. Laval, who did most of the talking, did not mince words, speaking in a voice that was “curt, authoritarian.” He had a string of arguments to make. Weygand and Pétain were in the right, and as military men they understood France’s plight better than the likes of a Reynaud or Churchill. Therefore, it was inconceivable that Lebrun, in furtherance of a bankrupt policy, should leave France. As Laval put it “with a sudden vehemence”: “I do not recognize your right to leave, whatever the pretext or excuse.” Laval pivoted then from indignation to menace to make his final, clinching point. There was, he went on, a word to describe Lebrun’s proposed line of conduct: “defection … perhaps a word graver still, that of treason.”7
The upshot of the exchange was twofold. Lebrun caved in, and his about-face weighed on others. Edouard Herriot, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, followed the president of the Republic’s example: his luggage went out on the Massilia, but he did not. Second of all, Laval was well rewarded for his services. He coveted a position in Pétain’s cabinet and on 23 June he got one. He did not become minister of foreign affairs as he wanted—this was more than Pétain, who had no stomach for intriguing politicians, could tolerate—but minister of state, as did Marquet too for that matter. Lebrun had at first refused to sign Laval’s appointment but did so in the end on the Marshal’s firm insistence.8
Helpful as Laval was, it was Noguès who played the more decisive role in scotching the North African gambit. De Gaulle telegrammed the general twice, on 19 and 24 June, appealing to him to rally to the Gaullist cause, and on both occasions Noguès turned a deaf ear.9 He was not deaf, however, to commands to sequester, arrest, and deport back to France Massilia passengers for eventual trial. It was he more than anyone else, moreover, who put a damper on any consideration of creating a North African redoubt. He had discouraged Reynaud on this score and continued in the same vein once Pétain acceded to office. The Marshal, as we have seen, did not want anyone heading out to North Africa, but he had a nagging worry. What if Hitler’s terms were unacceptable, unacceptable in this context translating as a threat to the integrity of France’s fleet or empire? In that case, maybe some kind of North African operation might be called for after all. Weygand sounded Noguès out about the matter and got an unambiguous reply, which he reported on to a cabinet meeting on 22 June. Senior government officials who relocated to Algiers risked assassination. Offensive operations against Italy in Libya might be possible but not until September. And it would be necessary in the meantime to occupy Spanish Morocco to forestall a German landing there, bringing Spain into the conflict as a result. A liaison officer was dispatched to Algeria to confirm Noguès’s assessment. The officer returned the very next day, 23 June, and spelled out the situation in no uncertain terms. Bouthillier came away persuaded that any move in North Africa was not just “chimerical” but “dangerous.”10
Had Hitler pressed France’s plenipotentiaries too hard during the armistice negotiations, the Pétain government might have found itself in an impossible position, torn between accepting the unacceptable or pursuing a North African strategy it had no desire to pursue. But the Führer extended a helping hand, just as Laval and Noguès had done before him. Hitler wanted nothing more than a peaceful southern flank, the better to focus his attentions on finishing off Great Britain, and so the terms he tendered were not intolerable so far as the French fleet and empire were concerned. Indeed, Hitler prevailed on his own military, which had initially envisioned a harsher deal, to take a step back.11
This is not to say that the agreement was generous. Quite the contrary: three-fifths of France’s continental territory was subjected to an occupation whose costs the French themselves were obliged to bear; the Germans also occupied (and then later annexed outright) Alsace and the Moselle; captured French soldiers—and there were well over a million and a half of them—were required to remain in POW camps until Germany’s war with Britain had ended; and not least of all, the French had to surrender asylum-seekers and German refugees to the Nazis, an ignominious violation of the laws of hospitality. This was a punitive bargain, no doubt, but Hitler compromised on just the points where compromise was called for, and Pétain, who had staked so much on bringing the fighting to an end, swallowed the rest. So an armistice accord was signed on 22 June. A ceasefire went into effect three days later, and the Marshal’s government relocated itself to Vichy in the unoccupied zone.
Pétain might well congratulate himself on how much had been accomplished in such a short space of time. He headed a cabinet of like-minded men, most of them handpicked, with the exceptions of Laval and Marquet. North Africa was quiet and the fleet and empire were still in French hands. Most important of all, France’s war was over, the sine qua non of the Marshal’s larger objective, a national rebirth under the sign of labor, family, and fatherland. This might have been enough for the Marshal. He was already well on the way to establishing the regime of paternal authority he felt was required, but then on 2 July, Laval dangled the promise of yet greater authority. He would get the National Assembly—the term for the Chamber of Deputies and Senate when they met together—to suspend the constitution, in effect making Pétain not just head of government but the sole and unbounded master of France’s destiny (not counting Hitler, far from a minor caveat). Baudouin did not think the idea feasible, but Laval had a ready answer to such hesitations: “You don’t have experience. With fear, it is possible to get men to do anything, for they are cowards.”12
Laval got the go-ahead to win over the National Assembly, and this he did with a degree of success that cannot but be unsettling to friends of democratic institutions. How did he pull it off?
To some extent, Laval was pushing against an open door. The defeat and the exodus, as has been intimated, shook the public’s confidence in parliamentary government, a loss of faith that in turn eroded the democratic resolve of the nation’s representatives. Many of them, of course, did not need much persuading. Not elements on the right such as the Fédération Républicaine mainstay Pierre-Etienne Flandin who had been accumulating doubts about democracy for some time. Nor a solid phalanx of mous, about a hundred in all (not counting pro-peace socialists), who were lined up behind Laval, ready for any maneuver.13 Circumstances too came to Laval’s aid. Britain’s decision to sink the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir on 3 July stiffened the Pétain administration’s determination to leave the bad old days of the Republic behind, and some deputies and senators were swept along by the anti-British current.
It also needs stressing that the parliamentary voices most likely to take a stand against Laval did not make themselves heard. This is explained in part by absence. One representative in four was unable to take part in the Vichy deliberations. Well over a hundred had been called to the colors and for that reason couldn’t attend. Remember also that Communist deputies who had not renounced the party’s anti-war line were placed under arrest in 1939 and still remained in detention. And then there were the twenty-six deputies and one senator who had sailed out on the Massilia and now found themselves moldering far away in French North Africa. The group included some strong personalities, convinced republicans like Daladier and Mandel and future résistants like Mendès France and André Le Troquer. The National Assembly might not have rolled over with such ease had these men been on hand.
Still, it is not as though the Assembly was stripped of all its committed democrats. Reynaud remained on the scene, and so too did Léon Blum, yet they did not speak up. Reynaud’s is a special case. He had been in a car accident on 28 June that killed his mistress and left him with a bandaged head. There was a first, preliminary vote on 9 July, the two houses of parliament meeting separately, to sanction a revision of France’s constitutional laws. Reynaud attended the Chamber of Deputies meeting and cast a ballot in favor, but he did not take part in the decisive vote the next day when both houses, meeting in joint session, confirmed the need for a change in the constitution and at the same time invested Pétain with full powers. Blum’s silence is more troubling. The man did not lack fortitude. Vichy would blame him (among others) for France’s misfortunes and place him on trial in 1942 at Riom. The charges were trumped up and the setting—a pro-Vichy courtroom—intimidating, but Blum rose in his own defense and with consummate oratorical skill turned the tables on his accusers. This is not what happened in July 1940, however. Blum voted against constitutional revision on 9 July and against constitutional revision and pleins pouvoirs the next day, but he made no eloquent plea justifying his course of action. Blum’s Socialist Party was divided with a significant faction favoring a pro-Pétain line, and it may be that Blum did not want to bring the fracture to breaking point. Or it may be that, courageous as he was, Blum felt a moment’s fear. He was a socialist and a Jew, the one-time standard-bearer of the Popular Front now so much reviled by the government in power. The town of Vichy itself was infested with right-wing thugs, and Blum had had a run-in before with such types. Action française toughs had pulled him from a car during the electoral campaign of 1936 and almost beaten him to death. It’s worth adding that units of the German army were stationed not 40 miles to the north at Moulins; and Blum did not have much reason to feel reassured knowing that a French division, under Weygand’s command, was bivouacked about the same distance to the south at Clermont-Ferrand. Blum himself later spoke of the climate of “fear” that prevailed at Vichy in 1940 and of its decomposing effects.14
There is no doubt that Laval, true to his word, played the fear card for all it was worth. Speaking in closed session to the nation’s representatives on the morning of 10 July, he stigmatized France’s entry into the war as “the greatest crime.” He accused Mandel of conspiring with the British “to foment insurrection” and leveled a personal attack on Blum for lack of patriotism. Nor was Laval’s bullying just ad hominem. A few days preceding he had addressed a group of eighty deputies, advising them to accept what he proposed or else swallow a constitution imposed by the Germans. He adopted a similar tack dealing with a delegation of veterans hoping to find a way forward more in accord with republican principles. There was no room for compromise, Laval told them: “I will resign, and in that case we shall have the dictatorship of General Weygand.”15 Such bullying was not mere rhetoric. When the National Assembly met at the Vichy casino to take its fateful vote on the afternoon of 10 July, Vincent Badie, a Radical deputy, attempted to climb the podium to submit an alternative motion to Laval’s, but ushers blocked his path and threw him “unceremoniously to the foot of the staircase.”16 Laval’s words of menace, moreover, sharp and authoritarian in tone as they were, were constrained compared to the shrillness and bluster of his followers.
At a time of defeat and dislocation, with a number of the Chamber’s most stalwart members absent or detained, with the Germans at hand and Pétain and Weygand in charge, it would have taken a brave soul to stand up to the arm-twisting of Laval and his minions. One hundred men had the wherewithal to do so, voting no or abstaining on 10 July.
Some will no doubt find such a summing-up too indulgent. There were mitigating circumstances, it might be conceded, but the fundamental fact remains: a crushing majority of the Republic’s parliamentarians did cast the fatal ballots in the end. What more proof is needed of the bankruptcy of the regime’s political class?
The failings of France’s political class were of profound consequence, but it is worth pointing out that they were also momentary. No doubt not a single “prominent” politician rallied to de Gaulle in June 1940, and it is equally true that a full third of the old political class continued to back Vichy into 1942.17 At the same time, an estimated one parliamentarian in six opposed the National Revolution from the outset (a contingent made up of the noes and abstentionists of 10 July, rounded out by a bloc of deputies and senators who had not been present to cast a ballot but remained staunch in their republican convictions). That proportion, moreover, would begin to grow from 1941, swelling to two out of three over the course of the year following and continuing to edge up thereafter as one-time Vichy backers, whether motivated by a new-found moral clarity or by simple opportunism, began to peel away. The Republic’s political class, as the leading historian of the subject has put it, “came to its senses,” not soon enough or in sufficient quantity to redeem itself, but enough to dispel accusations of unworthiness.18
The point is not to whitewash the old Republic. Reynaud made bad choices, and the National Assembly made a worse one, but that is just half the story. There were political forces dead set on democracy’s demise, and they were ready to threaten, to criminalize, and to arrest in order to get the authoritarian outcome they desired. An alliance of army brass and senior civil servants worked together to push Reynaud out and bring Pétain in. An unscrupulous alliance of mous and right-wingers then finished off the job, harrying the National Assembly into an act of self-destruction. The Republic in 1940 was done in by its weaknesses, no doubt, but above all by its enemies.
At the highwater mark of Hitler’s European imperium, democratic institutions had been wiped off the map everywhere on the continent, save in Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland. In this regard, the Third Republic’s undoing was not a unique development; indeed, the regime lasted longer and put up more of a fight than just about any other form of government until the Soviet Union, no democratic paragon, got into the war. Also, had France held the line against Hitler’s armies, which was not beyond the realm of possibility, the Republic would have held too. No defeat, no Vichy, and as I have tried to argue above, France’s defeat was not decided in advance. As for Vichy itself, it was the work in the first instance of elites, military and civilian, with long-standing ambivalences about the legitimacy and effectiveness of parliamentary government. They had a counter-project in mind, and Hitler, anxious for peace and tranquility on Germany’s southern flank, was willing to let them have a try. The final push was given by Laval, backed in turn by a coalition of right-wingers and appeasers at any price. Right-wing deputies with an animus against the Republic were not a novel presence on the French political scene, but the upheavals of the Depression decade—the street riots, the Blumexperiment, and the attractions of authoritarian examples abroad—had toughened them and multiplied their number. As for the mous, they were something new. These one-time republicans had turned on a regime they once supported, haunted by the bloodletting of the Great War and driven mad by the specter of communist subversion. That Laval was able to muster so large a faction, that as many parliamentarians as did stood by Vichy up to 1942 and even beyond, is testimony to the corroding effects of the politics of the 1930s. By this measure, the regime was eaten away from within.
But make no mistake about the point at issue. It’s not that France’s fractious politics set the nation up for defeat on the battlefield but, rather, that they played into the hands of anti-regime elites once the battlefield disaster, like some slow-motion nightmare in Robert Paxton’s celebrated phrase, was underway.19 Most of the nation’s representatives in fact came round once the nightmare of 1940 had passed, and anyhow it wasn’t Laval, the politico, who leveraged the Reynaud administration out of power. He delivered thecoup de grâce to an expiring Republic, but it was Pétain and Weygand, Baudouin and Bouthillier, who formed the execution squad that fired off the fatal volley. In this measure, it was not decadence or even a decadent parliamentarism that did in the Republic, but a betrayal, and it wasn’t politicians who were the main culprits so much as military men and senior civil servants. They had never felt much attachment to democracy in whatever form, and the defeat gave them the chance to steer France into authoritarian waters, a change of course they believed essential to the nation’s survival and rebirth.