CONCLUSION
Such a conclusion raises some obvious questions. If the decadence story is so far off the mark, why has it had such a long and popular run? And presuming the alternative narrative sketched in here, which lays overwhelming blame for the defeat on France’s army brass, has some measure of validity, how does French history writ large—and not just 1940—look different?
In answer to the first question, the Republic’s failings were admittedly real enough. France took its time grasping the seriousness of the Nazi threat and mustering a response. The response itself was not all that might have been hoped for, although it made sense for a democracy with a green, conscript army to work with and a public consciousness weighed down by painful and unhealed memories of the Great War. Then in the face of defeat, the Republic failed again. Reynaud deserves credit for exploring all the possible alternatives to capitulation, but he did not have the decisiveness to follow through on any one of them. In the meantime, he populated his cabinet with the Republic’s enemies, building up the pressure in favor of an armistice, just the course of action he most opposed. As for the National Assembly, whatever excuses may be made on its behalf, it still cast the decisive vote that mothballed the Republic and cleared the way for Vichy.
What has been argued here is not that a view critical of the Republic is without foundation, but that it is just one piece of the puzzle and not the most important one at that. What about the Germans, first of all? There was nothing predetermined in Hitler’s decision to attack through the Ardennes, nor in Guderian’s to disobey orders and race westward once French lines had been breached. German victory, and by extension French defeat, was a contingent event, almost as much a surprise to the victors as it was to the defeated.2With defeat looming, France’s anti-republican elites swung into action, using every tactic fair and foul to get their way. It’s not that they conspired, but that they soldiered toward a common goal because guided by a common Weltanschauung. The Weygands and Baudouins thought of themselves as true patriots, truer in their patriotism indeed than the parliamentarians who, they were convinced, had got France into its present predicament. What their beloved country needed first and foremost was a bracing dose of authority to lead the nation out of the slough of parliamentary democracy toward a more disciplined future.
It’s impossible to understand the Republic’s fate without factoring in the contributions of its adversaries, both foreign and homegrown. Not just that: when the Republic’s record is scrutinized in comparative perspective, what it did manage to accomplish doesn’t look so meager after all. The Low Countries, the English-speaking peoples, the Soviet Union, none of them were any better prepared for Hitler’s attacks, nor did any of them perform better on the battlefield in the war’s early stages (the Battle of Britain apart). In fact, they had all bet on France to do the heavy lifting, hoping to spare themselves the effort, and were caught short when things did not turn out as they hoped. If a judgment needs to be made, then it is not so much France that should stand accused but all those other countries who imagined France as their own first line of defense.
So, the declinist narrative, while off the mark in the main, is not altogether so. It has a measure of plausibility and, of even greater importance, it is a narrative with political uses. The point is an obvious one when applied to Vichy: Pétain’s regime was among the first to speak of the rottenness of the Republic, all the better to legitimate its own project of national regeneration.
There were elements of the Resistance, moreover, that thought in similar terms, though without the same anti-republican animus. De Gaulle himself understood the nation’s recent history in a decline-and-renewal framework.3 Interwar France had lost its way, bogged down in parliamentary bickering on the home front while opting for stasis over change in military matters. Vichy was not the answer to France’s ills but the ultimate expression of them, and renewal began not with the Marshal but with de Gaulle’s radio appeal on 18 June, which called on the French to continue the fight. In the Gaullist scheme of things, France did just that, rallying to the general as a nation—all but, in the famous phrase, “a handful of misérables.” Not every résistant, of course, subscribed to the Gaullist view, but it was the common coin of Resistance discourse to understand the anti-German struggle itself, with or without the general at the center, as a turning point. Taking up arms against Nazi barbarism was a purifying experience that elevated the Resistance militant above the petty partisanship of the old Republic. In the white heat of the anti-fascist struggle, a new elite was forged with the moral rigor and sense of purpose to effect a genuine revolution out of which a new France, built on self-sacrifice rather than on self-indulgence, might be born. Technocrats in Resistance ranks emphasized less the ethical than the economic possibilities of the situation. The backward Third Republic had failed to find a solution to the Depression and so left France unprepared for war against an enemy armed with the most advanced weaponry. The nation had foundered as a result, but a concerted program of economic modernization might yet turn things around, placing France once more in the European vanguard where it belonged.
The Resistance generated multiple, often overlapping projects—national, ethical, economic—but however varied, all were cast in a common mold. The Republic had failed; Vichy was even worse (although it took more than one résistant time to figure this out); but the war experience had swept away the detritus of the past, making possible a fresh start at the zero hour of the Liberation.
Not least of all, the Resistance’s take on France’s strange defeat found an early and unsurpassingly eloquent spokesman in Marc Bloch. Bloch’s eyewitness testimony, unsparing in its dissection of France’s shortcomings not just on the battlefield but as a society, gave singular credence to the declinist line of analysis. He was not after all just anyone, but a historian’s historian, one of the profession’s greats, and when he wrote of the demands of citizenship these were not idle words. Bloch was a first-hour résistant who went to a hero’s death in front of a German firing squad. What he had to say carried added weight because of the way he lived and died.
More than one political family, then, had a deep investment in the decadence narrative. There was good evidence to back it up, and the story, told both well and often, lent validity to a varied range of agendas. It’s little wonder that it proved so durable.
But the make-up of France’s political scene has undergone a sea change in the last half century. The events of 1968 and the general’s death two years later have taken the sheen off the Gaullist project. There was, of course, no revolution at the Liberation. Moreover, the myth of revolution itself has taken some blows in recent decades with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and a pair of Mitterrand presidencies that proved nothing so much as that the Parti Socialiste was a governing party much like any other. As for the modernizers and technocrats, their faith in state-managed growth has come under heavy fire in the wake of the 1970s recession and the neo-liberal surge that followed. It’s not that there is no future for Gaullism, the revolutionary idea, or technocracy in contemporary France, not at all. It’s just that they no longer have the same aura of old. So too the stories that Gaullists, revolutionaries, and technocrats told about themselves, which, as we have seen, often took the decadence of the Third Republic (and even of the Fourth) as a point of departure.
The fading of once-dominant narratives—though not as told by Bloch whose account continues to occupy a special place of reverence—has cleared space for a different way of looking at the Third Republic’s demise, and the contours of such a new understanding have been outlined in the pages preceding. Does France’s history look different as a result?
In several ways, it does. First of all, France’s 1930s look a little less dismal. There was always the bright spot of the Popular Front, but it now looks like the Daladier years that followed have something to be said for them as well.4 France did not fail to prepare for war. It may have not been as ready as it could have been, but it was ready enough and more ready than most.
Then there is the question of how France under Vichy is itself to be looked at. An old, heroic view—that France was a nation of résistants—now lies in a heap, battered down by a series of counter-arguments. Pétain’s National Revolution did not come out of nowhere but had roots deep in French soil; the Marshal himself was a popular figure and remained so until the end; and the Resistance, however much it grew over the course of the Occupation, never encompassed the nation as a whole.
But if the French weren’t resisters, what were they? Recent literature has spotlighted not so much the French public’s enduring Pétainism as its basic indifference to politics. The Occupation was hard, and in the midst of material want and unheated winters most people worried about how to find food and coal, not about Vichy policy.
Yet there may be another way of thinking about all this. The defeat and the exodus were disorienting, no doubt, but there is reason to believe that the disorientation did not last long. Vichy tried to use the loss of life at Mers el-Kebir to stoke anti-British sentiment, but public opinion did not buy the regime’s line. Prefectural reports noted the public’s admiration for British steadfastness during the Battle of Britain, and that admiration did not flag.5 The onset of food shortages, accompanied by a rash of rationing scandals, in the winter of 1940–1 ate deeper into the Vichy regime’s prestige and support.
Now, the public did not balk when Vichy enacted anti-Semitic legislation in the fall of 1940, but it did in reaction to the round-up of Jews a year and a half later. In July 1942 the regime under German pressure undertook the arrest of 12,000 Parisian Jews, who were interned first in the Vélodrome d’hiver before eventual deportation to Reich territory. The event was met with general reproof, amplified by the protests of a number of senior Catholic clergy. The protests, it might be added, were not just behind-the-scenes gestures but in many instances vocal declarations read from the pulpit. The Church hierarchy might align itself with Pétain on many things but not on its complicity in the implementation of the Occupier’s program of mass arrests and deportations. This is not to say that anti-Semitism was a negligible quantity in Vichy-era France—far from it—just that when push came to shove there were moral limits that many French were not willing to cross.6
In all, 1942 proved a disastrous year for the regime’s standing with the public. The trouble began in February/March with the bungled management of the Riom trials, which created sympathy for the defendants, Blum and Daladier among them. It ended in November with the German occupation of the southern zone in the wake of the Allies’ successful invasion of North Africa, proof positive of Vichy’s inability to protect French national sovereignty. In case further evidence was needed of the regime’s abjection, it imposed a labor draft in February 1943 (the Service du travail obligatoire) at the behest of the Germans who were ravenous for manpower. Vichy implicated itself in the process and—to its utter discredit—in the sacrifice of the nation’s youth to the Moloch of the Nazi war machine. The French may have turned to Vichy in desperation in July 1940, but within a year or two at the most they had turned away again.7
This trajectory has implications for how the Resistance itself is to be evaluated. Conceived of as an organized movement engaged in a range of clandestine activities, from propaganda work to intelligence gathering to armed struggle, it was indeed a minority affair. No doubt, in comparative terms, it was one of the largest and most unified of its kind in Europe, but, taking numbers alone into account, it mobilized no more than a hard-core elite, an estimated 2 percent or so of the national population. In recent years, however, a different way of understanding the Resistance has been proposed, focused less on organization—on movements and networks—than on what has been called “the civil Resistance.” The term encompasses a range of illegal activities: helping out downed Allied aviators, harboring persecuted Jews, abetting labor draft dodgers. The objective may not have been the overthrow of Vichy or the ejection of the German occupier, but enormous personal risks were involved nonetheless. When added together, it has been argued, such individual and small-group efforts, a “cloud of gestures” as one historian has labeled them, constituted a veritable “society of rescue.” This society in turn provided an indispensable medium, sympathetic and supportive, that enabled the movements and networks of the regular Resistance to do their work. It was the ocean in which the fish of the armed Resistance swam, to rephrase Mao’s celebrated dictum. Looked at in this way, the Resistance was indeed a mass phenomenon.8
A final point has to do with the ideological glue that held it all together, a public less and less enamored of Vichy and a Resistance movement, both armed and civil, that was on the rise. Writing in 1942, the novelist Irène Nemirovsky reflected on the tidal flows of public opinion, its abandonment first of the Republic and then of Vichy: “The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the dictatorship was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realize that she is dead, their Republic, their freedom. They are mourning her.”9 It’s too simple to think of the French, having recovered from the shocks of defeat and exodus, as once again republicans one and all, but Nemirovsky’s remarks are a reminder that the idea of the Republic still carried weight. De Gaulle himself was well aware of this. As a military man, the symbolism of republican tradition may not have meant that much, but from 1941 he had ever more recourse to it. At the outset, Free France had campaigned under the military motto, “Honor and Fatherland,” but to that slogan was soon added a new (or, rather, not so new) one, the venerable trio of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” As the interior Resistance ramified, de Gaulle pushed the various movements to unify, a policy that resulted in the formation of the Conseil national de la Résistance in May 1943. The general insisted further, and to the chagrin of many résistants looking for a sharp break with the past, that the body include representatives of France’s old parties. Hepursued a similar course of action in liberated Algiers when constituting a consultative assembly, what amounted to a parliament in exile. The assembly was created in September that same year, former deputies and senators of the defunct Third Republic accounting for a full quarter of its membership.10 De Gaulle’s motives were no doubt multiple. He wanted to show the Anglo-Americans that he was a democrat who deserved respect. He wanted to show self-styled Giraudistes that France stood behind him and not Giraud. But he was also expressing recognition that the French, however at sea in 1940, had in due course recovered their republican moorings. Republican slogans, institutions, and even personnel still mattered to them, and now they mattered to de Gaulle too, who so deeply aspired to incarnate the national spirit.
It is important to strike the right balance here. France was not a nation of attentistes preoccupied with hunting up the next meal while waiting to see how the war played out, but neither was it a nation of resisters. There remained right down to the end a minoritarian current loyal to the National Revolution and a greater number still who continued to have faith in the Marshal. On the other side of the ledger, however, the Resistance phenomenon was larger than recent literature intent on debunking Gaullist myths concedes, and it fed off of popular sympathies that deepened with every passing month. There was a moral reawakening over the course of the Occupation, and it took place under the sign of the Republic, of a political form—republican democracy—that had once seemed discredited.
No doubt such a claim is more speculative than proven, but it does help to make sense of a puzzling fact. The Fourth Republic, in constitution and parliamentary modus operandi, bore a striking resemblance to the Third. There were critical differences: the executive branch was endowed with welfare and planning authority it had never had before; Christian Democrats and Communists were numerous in a way they had not been in the 1930s. In many respects, though, there were continuities, enough so that manyrésistants who had nurtured dreams of a revolutionary transformation wrote in plaintive tones of a “restoration.” The term is exaggerated, but I do think it is fair to speak of an enduring, public commitment to republican values and institutions that was interrupted by the defeat and the exodus but that reknit itself, like a broken bone, in the first years of the Occupation.
Think of the 1940 defeat as a military event and not as an expression of national decline, and then certain features of the war and post-war scene become that much easier to account for: the public’s rapid disenchantment with Vichy, the expansion of the Resistance understood in broadest terms, and over all the staying power of the republican idea. Vichy for all that does not become a parenthesis in French history. It drew on long-standing currents of anti-republican feeling, swelled by the crisis of the 1930s; it maintained a constituency right down to the end; and it left a significant policy legacy behind. Yet, even if the regime enjoyed a majoritarian moment in the summer of 1940, that moment did not last long. There were popular constituencies to which the regime appealed—nationalist, Catholic, fascist—but their numbers dwindled in time, and on the whole it was among the nation’s elites, rather than the public at large, that the regime found its most kindred spirits.
In recent decades, there has been a revival of interest in France’s republican tradition, a tradition that, as argued here, had more tenacity, even in the darkest of moments, than sometimes thought. In the 1930s the Republic looked like an also-ran in a race dominated by fascists and communists. In the 1940s and 1950s it was hobbled by a stubborn attachment to empire that spawned decades of grisly colonial warfare. But now that the Cold War is over and the imperial era has closed, the republican idea looks a good deal more appealing. The search for an alternative path has lost urgency, and the most pressing question now is what kind of Republic the French want. It is a question as pertinent to citizens of sister Republics as it is to the French themselves.