The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction in Occupied France, 1940-1944

After the Fall: The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction in Occupied France, 1940-1944

Ryan Perks

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Ryan Perks 2013 History M.A. Graduate Program January 2014 ii

ABSTRACT After the Fall: The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction in Occupied France, 1940-1944

Ryan Perks

Utilizing pre-existing scholarship on post-conflict reconstruction in twentieth-century Europe, as well as a variety of French primary sources, this thesis explores the concept of national-moral reconstruction as utilized by French political leaders in the wake of their country’s defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. In particular, this study analyzes the competing discourses employed by the Vichy regime and the various organizations of the French Resistance, as each group sought to explain to a broader public both the causes of the French defeat, as well as the repercussions of the German occupation of the country from June 1940 to August 1944. While previous scholarship has emphasized the physical and/or economic dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction—especially when considered in the context of the Second World War—this thesis focuses on issues of cultural identity and national history/memory in order to look at how French political leaders hoped to reconstruct the moral and cultural, as opposed to the strictly physical, fabric of their country in the wake of the comprehensive social, political, and military disaster brought about by the German occupation.

Keywords: Vichy France; German occupation; Philippe Pétain; national-moral reconstruction; post-conflict reconstruction; nationalism; collective memory; the Resistance; civil war; Second World War.

iii

Acknowledgements

This thesis could not have been completed without the support and encouragement of numerous individuals. First and foremost, I would like to offer a sincere thank you to my academic supervisor, Dr. Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, for encouraging me to be both curious and critical when reflecting on the past. It is thanks to him that I have begun to develop a sense of how, to borrow an oft-repeated phrase, ‘the past isn’t what it used to be!’ A heartfelt thanks, as well, to the members of my thesis committee, Olga Andriewsky and Carolyn Kay, for taking the time to read my work and for providing such thoughtful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Dr. William Irvine, of York University, for agreeing to serve as external examiner; it is an honour to have as part of my thesis committee a scholar whose work has contributed so much to the study of modern France. Thanks also to David Sheinin and Tom Phillips, in the Departments of History and Business Administration, respectively, at Trent University, for reading an early draft of this manuscript and providing helpful comments. That said, any errors in fact or interpretation are, of course, entirely my own. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, from which I received a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master’s Scholarship for the 2012-2013 academic year. More generally, I benefited immensely from my time as part of the History MA Program at Trent. I would like to offer a collective thanks to all of the individuals—teachers and fellow students alike—from whom I learned so much over the past two years. Finally, I wish to thank my parents, Brent and Donna Perks, for their constant encouragement, as well as my wife, Jessica Clancy, for her seemingly endless reserve of love, patience, and support. I could not have done any of this without her in my corner.

Table of Contents Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii List of Figures ...... v INTRODUCTION. THE MEANINGS OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 1. BEFORE THE FALL: THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION IN FRANCE...... 14 1. June 1940: Defeat, Armistice, Occupation...... 14 2. Establishing the Vichy Regime: From the Third Republic to L’État français ...... 22 3. “The Way of Collaboration” ...... 24 4. Collaboration as Reconstruction ...... 28 5. Reconstructing What? The Third Republic and the French Civil War ...... 32 6. A Period of Soul Searching ...... 41 CHAPTER 2. THE REACTION: VICHY, PÉTAIN, AND THE RHETORIC OF NATIONAL- MORAL RECONSTRUCTION AFTER JUNE 1940 ...... 45 1. Vichy: Some Problems of Interpretation ...... 45 2. Marshal Pétain: A Charismatic Leader ...... 52 3. Making Sense of the Defeat ...... 62 4. Pétainist Discourse: The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction...... 65 5. Negating the Republic: Reconstruction as Historical Revisionism ...... 76 CHAPTER 3. MOBILIZING HISTORY: THE RESISTANCE, REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY, AND THE ANTI-VICHY RHETORIC OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION...... 84 1. The Nature of the Resistance in Occupied France ...... 84 2. The Clandestine Press: Reconstruction as Revolutionary Memory ...... 89 3. A Republic—But What Kind? ...... 100 4. Winning the War, Winning the Peace ...... 106 5. The Resistance versus Vichy: Two Versions of a Single History...... 110 CONCLUSION. NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION AT THE LIBERATION ...... 113 Bibliography ...... 119

List of Figures

1. Pétain, the natural leader of the nation ………………………………………………………..62

2. “The Gift to the Country, June 1940” ………………………………………………………...64

3. “Follow me with confidence” ………………………………………………………………...67

4. The National Revolution. “Work, Family, Fatherland” ………………………………………76

5. “The earth, it does not lie” ……………………………………………………………………80

INTRODUCTION. THE MEANINGS OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION

This thesis looks at the ways in which French political leaders and organizations reacted to the defeat and occupation of their country by Nazi Germany between June 1940 and August 1944. It attempts to sketch the broader contours of what is referred to herein as the rhetoric of national- moral reconstruction in Nazi-occupied France, a term used to differentiate between a more narrowly physical or economic method of post-conflict reconstruction—the rebuilding of bombed-out cities, for example—and a much more abstract process of reconstructing the moral fabric of an entire nation in the wake of a comprehensive military, political, and social disaster.

Perhaps the prime example of the former phenomenon in the twentieth century is the Marshall

Plan, by which American political and financial leaders bankrolled the physical and economic rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War. While it would be naïve, especially given the Cold War context in which it took place, to deny the role of political ideology in the

United States’ extension of economic aid to the region’s parliamentary democracies after 1945, it is generally understood that the Marshal Plan’s ostensible focus was on the physical rebuilding of a war-torn continent, its primary “mechanisms . . . almost entirely economic.”1

1 This is the judgement of one of the leading scholars on the subject of the postwar recovery of Western Europe. See Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), 5. For an overview of the political consequences of postwar reconstruction in Western Europe, see Martin Conway, “Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model,” European History Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 59-84.

By contrast, the French experience during the Second World War provides an example of a different type of reconstruction, one that in many ways was unlike that undertaken by the

United States and its allies—France among them—after 1945. Here, the critical point of departure is the military defeat of the French Republic by Nazi Germany in June 1940 and the subsequent occupation of the country—a trauma so extensive and unforeseen that it profoundly affected French society; certainly the long-term repercussions of that defeat extended beyond the military sphere. First and foremost, the fall of France led to the establishment of a German occupation regime, initially in the northern half of the country, and then, after November 1942, in the remainder of metropolitan France, that would last until the summer of 1944. This of course had a profound impact on the daily lives of millions of ordinary people. Moreover, the defeat and occupation of France resulted in the dissolution of the democratic Third Republic—the country’s longest-running political regime since 1789—and the establishment of the authoritarian Vichy regime, which lasted from July 1940 until August 1944.

In the present context, this is significant primarily for the way it shaped the emergence of a rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction in France. Under the leadership of Marshal Philippe

Pétain (1856-1951), the Vichy regime undertook a program of reforms aimed at the physical, economic, but above all the moral and even spiritual renewal of the nation. The name the regime gave to the various policies aimed at the moral reconstruction of France, as well as the eradication of the very conditions which it assumed to be the cause of the country’s defeat, was the National Revolution. While it is not the aim of this thesis to provide a full outline of the

National Revolution, its successes or its failures,2 it is a crucial reference point nonetheless.

2 Robert Paxton has outlined some of both in a recent piece for The New York Review of Books. See Robert O. Paxton, “Vichy Lives!—In a Way,” review of L’Héritage de Vichy: Ces 100 mesures toujours en vigueur by Cécile Desprairies, The New York Review of Books, 25 April, 2013.

Henry Rousso has referred to these measures as the regime’s “program of internal reconstruction,”3 a phrase that hints at the insular nature of national-moral reconstruction in occupied France. Seemingly oblivious to the global conflict developing around it, Vichy undertook what it hoped would be a complete transformation of French society, as well as a radical revision of French national history and identity. Pétain himself seemed somewhat aware of this contradiction when he told his compatriots that “[o]ur tragedy is that we shall have to carry out in defeat the revolution which we were not even able to realise in victory, in peace, in an atmosphere of equal nations.”4 For Rousso, this was indeed “the tragedy of Vichy”—the fact that the regime assumed it could affect a transformation of the country “under the watchful eyes of the occupying forces.”5 While this may have been naïveté of the highest order, it also provides some measure of the emphasis placed on French society itself as one of the primary objects of reconstruction after June 1940.

The difference between the French experience in the First and Second World Wars provides a useful comparison. At the conclusion of the first war in 1918, France, though a victorious power, had undergone extensive physical destruction. Especially in the north of the country, which had seen some of the most intense and protracted fighting of the war, entire départements had been severely damaged.6 As is well known, the human cost was staggering: in

France fully twice as many people died between 1914 and 1918 as would die as a result of the

3 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991), 6. 4 Pétain quoted in Peter Davies, France and the Second World War: Resistance, Occupation and Liberation (London: Routledge, 2000), 20. 5 Idem, 6. 6 For an outline of the material losses suffered in Northern France during the Great War, see Hugh Clout, After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France After the Great War (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996), Chapter 2.

Second World War.7 This was a catastrophe if ever there was one, yet in spite of the scope of this disaster the French government concentrated much of its efforts on physical rebuilding after

1918.8 While the many crises which plagued the interwar Third Republic stand as a testament to the deep-seated national anxieties unleashed in France, as in other European countries, by the experience of the Great War,9 national-moral reconstruction after 1918 privileged restoration over comprehensive renewal.10

Vichy was in many regards the opposite, but it would be incorrect to assume that the regime accomplished nothing in terms of physical reconstruction after 1940. In fact, as scholars have pointed out, much of the bureaucratic infrastructure of the post-1945 physical reconstruction of France—the establishment of central planning agencies, the training of personnel, the promulgation of relevant reconstruction laws—were actually put in place under

Vichy.11 Yet, as this thesis tries to demonstrate, Vichy spent perhaps as much energy attempting to rebuild French souls as it did French cities. This is significant on its own terms, of course, but

Vichy’s view of national-moral reconstruction is also significant for the way it stimulated the emergence of opposing views on the subject of national renewal. In particular, this thesis looks at the wartime Resistance in France, especially—though not exclusively—in the southern

7 Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 17. 8 One of the leading experts on post-First World War reconstruction in France has argued that the postwar recovery of the country depended mainly on the mobilization of individuals and their resources. See Hugh Clout, “Restoring the Ruins: the social context of reconstruction in the countrysides of northern France in the aftermath of the Great War,” Landscape Research 21.3 (1996): 213-230, especially 214-215. 9 For a discussion of the impact of the war experience on interwar France, see Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1994), Chapter 1. 10 See Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the state in modern France: Renovation and economic management in the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 69-71. 11 See, for example, Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France After the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 56-57; Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 245; W. Brian Newsome, French Urban Planning, 1940-1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 57-59.

Unoccupied Zone. By virtue of its proximity to the German occupation regime, organized resistance in the north focused largely on the sabotage of the Nazi war effort, as well as assisting those on the run—foreign and French Jews, Spanish republicans, German Marxists, and other political or social ‘undesirables’—from occupation authorities. In the Unoccupied Zone, by contrast, groups such as Combat, Libération-Sud, and Franc-Tireur, while of course cognizant of their military roles, were also engaged in a war of words with Vichy over competing forms of national-moral reconstruction. While it would be inaccurate to say that Vichy and the Resistance were merely each other’s opposite in the realm of ideas,12 it is nonetheless true that the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction enunciated by the various movements of the Resistance was in many cases a tremendous departure from that of Vichy, the regime’s “National Revolution

[having] stimulated the resistance . . . to reflect about the future.”13

It should be emphasized that this is not a full history of either Vichy or the Resistance. As its title suggests, this thesis puts rhetoric above reality in its analysis of both groups. But why pay such close attention to the rhetoric, as opposed to the actual accomplishments, of those engaged in the discourse of national-moral reconstruction in occupied France? One answer is that much of what passed for a serious and sustained attempt at radical social transformation during the period was actually little more than propaganda and sloganeering, regardless of whether it came from the Resistance or Vichy. For the Resistance, the constraints of the postwar political situation were such that a full “consecration,” to use Henry Rousso’s phrase, of the radical tendencies embodied by much of the opposition to Vichy during the war would fail to bloom after 1945; there would never, in spite of the hopes of tens of thousands of French men and women who took part in the underground struggle against Vichy and the German occupation during the war,

12 Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 37. 13 Kuisel, Capitalism and the state, 164.

be a unified “Party of the Resistance” in the postwar Fourth Republic.14 Similarly, Vichy’s failure to achieve a lasting transformation of French society along the lines laid out in its

National Revolution was perhaps a reflection of the impracticality of undertaking such measures while under foreign military occupation, if not an indication of the impracticality of some of these measures themselves.15

Yet an analysis of the rhetoric, as opposed to the reality, of national-moral reconstruction in occupied France—a look at the ideal, albeit contradictory, world that many wanted to create, even if they failed to do so—is valuable primarily because it helps to shed light on certain aspects of this period otherwise overlooked; in particular, on how the events of 1940-1944 were understood by those that lived through them, both at the time, and to a certain extent posthumously. This is because to employ, and even more so to shape, a rhetoric of reconstruction is to engage simultaneously in the production of meaning. This claim is bolstered by the work of historians engaged in the study of the ideological dimensions of postwar reconstruction in twentieth-century Europe. Dacia Viejo-Rose’s recent work on post-Civil War Spain is exemplary in this regard.16

Simply put, reconstruction is rarely neutral; it is a highly selective process in which certain aspects of a society’s past are perpetuated or bolstered, while others are downplayed or ignored altogether. In fact, as Viejo-Rose has written, the word reconstruction itself is

“misleading”

14 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 18-20. 15 John Dixon, “Manipulators of Vichy Propaganda: A Case Study in Personality,” in Vichy France and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology, ed. Roderick Kedward and Roger Austin (London Croom Helm, 1985), 48. 16 Dacia Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after the Civil War. Brighten: Sussex Academic Press, 2011.

for while in a post-war or post-disaster scenario [reconstruction] can be motivated by desires to restore and remake a place exactly, it can also seek to re-imagine place, constructing a new vision that reflects changed power structures—economic, ideological and political . . . Most often, the reconstruction of a country will be driven by several of these motivators.17

This assessment is even more applicable when placed in the context of national-moral, as opposed to strictly physical, forms of reconstruction. For example, as is shown in Chapter 2,

Vichy’s concept of reconstruction was by no means impartial: just as the regime would point its finger at specific groups within French society when assigning the blame for the country’s defeat in June 1940, so too would it identify specific aspects of French cultural identity and history that were in need of reconstruction as a result. In Vichy France, as in Franco’s Spain, this process involved the assignment of meaning to certain aspects of the recent past. For example, by helping to shape the memory of the Battle of France (May-June 1940)—both the causes and the long-term consequences of the country’s defeat—Pétain and his regime were also able to shape, to some extent at least, how the events of June 1940, not to mention the occupation itself, were subsequently understood.18

The notion of crisis, or to be more specific, a “crisis of memory,” forms a significant part of this analysis; this is why the following chapters try to pay close attention to the ways in which issues of national history and collective memory have influenced the formation of a rhetoric of reconstruction in occupied France. According to Susan Rubin Suleiman, “a crisis of memory . . . is a moment of choice, and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about the remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups.”19 More to the point, Viejo-Rose has emphasized how

17 Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain, 4. 18 For a discussion of the intersection between reconstruction, memory, and meaning, see Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain, 7-11. 19 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2006), 1.

moments of crisis within a society provide a useful entry point into the study of reconstruction since they make explicit the connections between what she terms “cultural heritage, power and society.”20 All of these are implicated in the process of post-conflict, national-moral reconstruction. Quoting John Keane, Viejo-Rose argues that

As a rule, crises are times during which the living do battle for the hearts, minds and souls of the dead. They are also times in which controversies erupt about the prevailing definitions of how to understand the past in relation to the present. The belief that history is simply history tends to be undermined during crisis periods, as is the belief in the neutrality of methods of accounting for the past.21

Specifically, this thesis treats the defeat and occupation of France, and their subsequent analysis by both Vichy and the Resistance, as a crisis of memory. Defeat, occupation, and the overthrow, no matter how ‘constitutional,’ of the governing Third Republic—each contributed to a transformation of the discourse over French national identity and history between 1940 and

1944. One result of this transformation was the appearance, in the summer of 1940, of what

Roger Griffin has referred to elsewhere as a “palingenetic political community.”22 While the implications of this concept are explored in Chapter 2, it should be understood from the outset that palingenesis—in short, the desire for national rebirth—is a critical concept for understanding the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction in occupied France, especially as enunciated by

Pétain and the Vichy regime. Griffin has examined how during “a generalized ‘sense-making crisis,’ a community of belief can spontaneously form by mass-projection of longings for change onto a movement that offers a comprehensive diagnosis of the current crisis, and presents the

20 Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain, 2. 21 John Keane quoted in Ibid. Emphasis added. 22 See Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Political Community: Rethinking the Legitimation of Totalitarian Regimes in Inter-War Europe,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3.3 (2002): 24-43.

revolution it has undertaken as a panacea to all its ills.”23 One of the main contentions of this thesis is that the defeat and occupation of France in June 1940 provides an example of just such a

“sense-making crisis.”

Moreover, this crisis must be understood largely as an internal dialogue, and it is for this reason that the following analysis of national-moral reconstruction is situated within the context of civil, as well as international, conflict. For example, Chapter 3, which looks at the Resistance, focuses very little on the interaction between, say, the Maquis (rural guerillas) and the

Wehrmacht. Instead, it emphasizes the internal dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction—how the French contested these ideas amongst themselves. In fact, at the risk of stretching the point, it could be argued that the present analysis of French reconstruction has as much to do with what some have called the guerre franco-française—defined by one scholar as the “conflict waged against parliamentary democracy and its supporters [in France] from the 1880s onwards”24—as the Second World War itself. While it may strike some as odd to apply the paradigm of civil war to twentieth-century France, even a passing glance at the country’s political history shows this to be unwarranted. Leaving aside the conflicts of the prewar years (discussed in Chapter 1), it is clear that the Second World War unleashed the most intense period of civil conflict in France since the Paris Commune, a fact that makes the occupation period, in Rousso’s words, “the very archetype of the guerre franco-française.”25

23 Idem, 30. 24 Samuel Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de feu (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 1. See also Jean-Pierre Rioux, “La Guerre Franco française,” in War and Society in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Michael Scriven and Peter Wagstaff (New York: Berg, 1991), 273-290. For a more general discussion of Franco-French conflict, see Pierre Nora, “Conflicts and Divisions,” in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., under the direction of Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 21-23. 25 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 6.

While these conflicts were usually ideological in nature, this did not stop them from turning physical. Indeed, by the latter half of the German occupation, Vichy was engaged in a full-scale civil war with its political opponents. This included the summary execution of suspected members of the Resistance, the murder of several high-profile left-wing politicians, and even large-scale military operations against the Resistance (and alongside the Wehrmacht), particularly in Haute-Savoie and the Vercors in the spring and summer of 1944. And this does not even account for the bloodshed of the Liberation and the purges of the immediate postwar period.26 Yet this thesis focuses less on the overt violence of these conflicts, as important as this subject is, as it does on the latent quality of civil conflict in France during this period.

Specifically, it looks at the ways in which the periodic outbreak of ideological and social conflicts, especially during the interwar period, helped to set the parameters of the discourse over of national-moral reconstruction during the occupation.

To this end, Chapter 1 begins by looking at what is termed “the preconditions for national-moral reconstruction.” These would of course include the German invasion of France in the spring of 1940, but just as significant are the many internal crises that plagued the Third

Republic prior to the outbreak of war. As is argued in this chapter, it was the social and political conflicts of the 1920s and 30s—if not well before—that influenced to a very large extent the way the French viewed their own society; were it not for the erosion of confidence in the late Third

Republic and its institutions, and perhaps in the very idea of France itself, there would be few calls, and even fewer sympathetic ears, for national renewal under the German occupation.

26 See Debbie Lackerstein, National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies, 1930-1944 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 26-27; Fabian Lemmes “Collaboration in wartime France, 1940-1944,” European Review of History 15.2 (2008), 162; James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 45-47. For the Liberation and subsequent purge of collaborators, see Megan Koreman, “The Collaborator’s Penance: The Local Purge, 1944-5,” Contemporary European History 6.2 (1997): 177-192. For a look at a specific episode of civil conflict in this period, see Tzvetan Todorov, A French Tragedy: Scenes of a Civil War, Summer 1944. Trans. Mary Byrd Kelly. Hanover, N.H.: UP of New England, 1996.

Chapter 2 looks at the Vichy regime, and how it formulated its own rhetoric of national- moral reconstruction. In particular, this chapter focuses on the wartime speeches of Marshal

Pétain, and how this discourse was instrumental in shaping the terms in which the defeat and occupation were understood by many. Aimed primarily at a French audience, the dictator’s words thus provide a unique window onto the internal dynamics of national-moral reconstruction under Vichy, especially because they constituted such a radical departure from established historical and cultural narratives.

Finally, Chapter 3 looks at the organized Resistance to Vichy and the German occupation. Here, the aim is to trace the development of a rhetoric of reconstruction that in many ways—and especially in its engagement with national history and memory—was the opposite of

Vichy’s. While it would be somewhat inaccurate to view the regime and its domestic opponents as mutually exclusive camps, it is nonetheless true that the Resistance had its own rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction. As the final chapter hopes to demonstrate, this discourse was fashioned largely as a response to the ideas put forth by Pétain and the regime.

This analysis has relied on a variety of secondary and primary source materials, with two books in particular standing out as models in the organization of this thesis. The first, National

Regeneration in Vichy France, by Debbie Lackerstein, provides one of the most comprehensive treatments of the regime’s obsession with national renewal to date, certainly in English.

Published in 2012, Lackerstein’s book provides an exhaustive analysis of both the intellectual origins of Vichy’s ideology of national regeneration, as well as how—and indeed, to what extent—these ideas were put into practice by the regime during the German occupation. The second is The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944, by John Sweets, a slightly older volume that traces the origins and development of the various organizations of the French

Resistance, and their eventual merger into the larger body known as the Mouvements Unis de la

Résistance in 1943.27 For a subject like the Resistance, which to this day has received comparatively few in-depth scholarly treatments,28 Sweets’ book remains one the most detailed and comprehensive analyses of the various political currents that comprised the organized resistance to Vichy and German rule.

The present thesis, insofar as it departs from an already established interpretation, attempts a marriage of these two accounts—Vichy and the Resistance—in the hopes of demonstrating how these two groups formulated their respective rhetorics of reconstruction in the same historical context, in dialogue even. Put simply, both groups reacted to the same fears and anxieties after 1940, even if they diverged significantly in terms of how they sought to solve these issues and carry out national-moral reconstruction. The research presented herein thus relies on primary source materials that emphasize the dialogical nature of the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction. In Chapter 2, these include the wartime speeches of Marshal

Pétain, over one hundred of which are collected in the volume Discours aux Français: 17 juin

1940- 20 août 1944, edited by Jean Claude Barbas,29 as well as several examples of the regime’s visual propaganda, gathered from various sources. Chapter 3 relies primarily on the clandestine

Resistance press, a term that refers to the various newspapers, journals, and periodicals produced by virtually every organization within the Resistance under the German occupation. This thesis utilizes approximately a dozen different clandestine publications, of which many dozens of

27 John F. Sweets. The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944: A History of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1976. 28 As Julian Jackson points out, French historians began studying the Resistance as early as the 1940s. However, much of this output, even into the 1970s and beyond, tended to be of the patriotic, non-critical type. See the overview of Resistance historiography in Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 6-9. 29 Philipe Pétain. Discours aux Français: 17 juin 1940-20 août 1944. Edited by Jean-Claude Barbas. Paris: Albin Michel, 1989.

issues are preserved in electronic form at www.gallica.bnf.fr, the excellent online holdings of the

Bibliothèque nationale de France. While the majority of secondary sources cited below come from the sizeable literature on occupied France published in English, the majority of primary source materials, unless otherwise noted, have been translated from the French by the author.

CHAPTER 1. BEFORE THE FALL: THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL- MORAL RECONSTRUCTION IN FRANCE

1. June 1940: Defeat, Armistice, Occupation

With the French Army’s position in northern France rapidly deteriorating in the first half of June

1940, the government of Prime Minister Paul Reynaud decided to flee Paris. By the middle of the month it had relocated to the city of Bordeaux, in the southwest of the country, and it was here that a serious debate began over whether the French government should attempt to negotiate a temporary ceasefire or request an official, legally-binding armistice with Nazi Germany. The argument fractured along an essentially military-civilian divide within the cabinet. On the one side, Reynaud and the majority of his ministers advocated the capitulation of the military in the north so as to concentrate resources elsewhere in the war against Germany. According to its advocates, this strategy would likely result in a German occupation of France, but at least a significant portion of the country’s government and military would be able to carry on resistance from abroad. (The Netherlands, whose government-in-exile had recently set up camp in London, had made a similar decision, as had the Norwegians, among others.) Many in the government looked to North Africa as an obvious redoubt of the French military, and in fact Reynaud went as far as ordering the Army to look into the possibility of transporting troops from the mainland to

French Algeria.30

30 Julian Jackson, The Dark Years, 121-122.

An opposing faction, led by General Maxime Weygand, Supreme Commander of the

French Army, viewed the suggestion of a ceasefire with contempt: for the military, this option was seen not so much as impractical as completely unthinkable. According to Weygand and his fellow generals, the surrender of French troops in the field and the transfer of the government to

North Africa represented the sacrifice of the military at the hands of ‘the politicians,’ thus sending a message to the French people that the Army had collapsed while the government had continued to fight. In the fractious political climate of the late Third Republic, signs of a schism between France’s military and civilian leadership were already apparent; the ceasefire-armistice debate of June 1940 widened this gap considerably, resulting in what Julian Jackson has called

“a serious crisis of civil-military relations.”31

A much more desirable outcome for the Army was the conclusion of a formal armistice with the Germans—in essence, a ‘political’ capitulation—that, even in the event of foreign occupation, would allow the French military to maintain some semblance of public order and independence. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the country’s most decorated officer and a recent addition to the Reynaud cabinet, echoed Weygand’s calls for military discipline in the face of a possible defeat. For Pétain, this was an issue of legitimacy. In a statement to the cabinet on 13

June, he argued that

The government’s duty is, whatever happens, to stay in the country or lose its right to be recognized as a government. To deprive France of her natural defenders in a period of disarray is to deliver her to the enemy. . . . I am therefore of the opinion that I will not abandon the soil of France and will accept the suffering which will be imposed on the fatherland and its children. The French renaissance will be the fruit of this suffering. . . . The armistice is in my eyes the necessary condition of the durability of eternal France.32

31 Idem, 122. 32 Philippe Pétain quoted in Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 105. For a more detailed description of the breakdown of civil-military relations within the Reynaud cabinet,

Here, in embryonic form, is the rationale for the armistice that would be given so many times by Pétain and his supporters after June 1940—defeat as a prelude to national rebirth. Yet behind this supposedly neutral, patriotic attitude lay a barely concealed and extremely partisan objective: to use the armistice as an opportunity to transform French society by purging it of its acquired vices; in order to do this, democracy would have to go; so, too, would many people, from prominent politicians to ordinary—though in the eyes Pétain and his supporters, undesirable—citizens.

By arguing for an armistice, Pétain also aligned himself with a large portion of the

French public for whom an unshakable pacifism, following the staggering human losses of the

Great War, was widespread.33 The last conflict had touched virtually all of French society, colouring its reaction to almost every development on the European scene in the interwar period.

On the eve of the Second World War, veterans of the previous conflict made up nearly 40 percent of the country’s male population; two thirds of these men were registered in various veterans’ organizations, almost all of which declared themselves anti-war in one way or another.34 A year later, as rearmament against the German threat gathered pace, and war came to look increasingly inevitable, the French public—much like its British and German counterparts—reacted with resigned acceptance.35 There was nothing like the enthusiasm that

see Philippe Burrin, Living with Defeat: France under the German Occupation, 1940-1944, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Arnold, 1996), 6-10. 33 Jackson, Fall of France, 101-106; Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 7-12; Talbot C. Imlay, “Paul Reynaud and France’s Response to Nazi Germany, 1938-1940,” French Historical Studies 26.3 (2003): 526; Weber, The Hollow Years, Chapter 1. 34 Robert J. Young, France and the Origins of the Second World War (Houndsmills: MacMillan, 1996), 117. Henceforth cited as France/Origins. 35 See William D. Irvine, “Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940,” Historical Reflections/Refléctions Historiques 22.1 (1996): 87.

met the outbreak of the Great War. In the words of the New York Times’ Paris correspondent, the capital displayed “no cheering crowds, no enthusiasm, no passionate battle spirit.”36

Pétain’s embrace of the armistice line thus badly damaged Reynaud’s position, and on 16

June he resigned as Prime Minister, at which time Pétain was asked by President Albert Lebrun to form a government. The Marshal was seen as an attractive choice by many, and not only by his compatriots. Shortly after Reynaud’s resignation, the American Ambassador to France,

William Bullitt, Jr., told his superiors in Washington that “Marshal Pétain is universally respected in France as he is throughout the world. He is doing his best to bring order out of desperate disorder.”37 Known as the ‘Victor of Verdun’ for his command of French troops in the infamous battle of 1916, Pétain enjoyed a reputation as a firm but fatherly commander, one who was held in high esteem by his troops. His formation of a government in June 1940 was thus greeted with widespread relief amongst the French, for here was a man who in the last war had refused to squander his soldiers’ lives—who better to negotiate a settlement with the present incarnation of German aggression?38 Pétain, for his part, cultivated the reputation of a simple soldier, one entirely disinterested in politics, and he never tired of reminding the public of his humble, peasant roots.39

This image was not exactly consistent with Pétain’s public record. After right-wing militants marched on the Chamber of Deputies on 6 February, 1934, an event that resulted in violent clashes between the police and protesters as well as the downfall of the government of

Édouard Daladier, Pétain agreed to serve as Minister of War in the short-lived right-wing

36 P.J. Philip quoted in Young, France/Origins, 128. 37 Ambassador Bullitt quoted in Ellen Hammer, “Hindsight on Vichy,” Political Science Quarterly 61.2 (1946): 177. 38 This point is emphasized in Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 9-10. 39 Anna von der Goltz and Robert Gildea, “Flawed Saviours: The Myths of Hindenburg and Pétain,” European History Quarterly 39.3 (2009): 443-444.

administration of Gaston Doumergue. Shortly thereafter, when the popular newspaper Le Petit

Journal polled its readers on who would make the ideal French dictator, Pétain was deemed the most appropriate candidate.40 During the 1930s he was a known sympathizer of the extreme right-wing, anti-parliamentary Croix-de-Feu, calling it “one of the healthiest elements in our country.”41 Pétain also served as the first French ambassador to the newly-established Franco regime in Spain. In this task he drew on his command of French troops in North Africa during the mid-1920s as part of a joint French-Spanish campaign against the Rif Republic. Reacting to the news of his appointment to Madrid in March 1939, he told the French press that in General

Franco he would be encountering “a great mind” and “the dearest companion.”42

However, it was the Marshal’s seemingly universal acceptability that attracted many in

June 1940. As Robert Paxton explained, at the time “Pétain fitted the national mood to perfection: internally, a substitute for politics and a barrier to revolution; externally, a victorious general who would make no more war. Honor plus safety.”43 As head of the government Pétain stayed true to his reputation as a cautious, defensive soldier, and on 17 June he announced via national radio that his government would be pursuing the cessation of hostilities through an armistice with Nazi Germany.

Pétain’s pursuit of an armistice reflected not only the dire military reality in northern

France, as well as the prevailing popular mood, but also a significant shift in right-wing political opinion that had occurred in the lead up to the war. Whereas the right had traditionally viewed

Germany as France’s main foreign enemy, this position was gradually ceded to the Soviet Union

40 von der Goltz and Gildea, “Flawed Saviours,” 446-447 41 Pétain quoted in James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30. 42 Jackson, The Dark Years, 125; Pétain quoted in Herbert R. Lottman, Pétain: Hero or Traitor, The Untold Story (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 147. 43 Paxton, Vichy France, 35.

and its domestic ally, the French Communist Party (PCF), in the mid-1930s. The election of a

Popular Front government in May 1936, in which the PCF played a significant, if minority, role, galvanized the right’s fears of a Bolshevik takeover. With as many as 1.8 million workers involved in a nation-wide wave of nearly 12,000 strikes throughout the early summer of 1936, a left-wing seizure of power seemed to many on the right only a matter of time.44 This anxiety had a decisive impact on the right’s assessment of the German threat in the lead up to the war, since the European situation was viewed always through the lens of what William Irvine has called the

“war/revolution nexus.” Drawing on the right’s collective memory of the Paris Commune, conservatives feared that any war with Germany would lead inexorably to internal revolution.45

(A similar fear perhaps explains General Weygand’s bald-faced lie to the government in June

1940: in an attempt to force Reynaud’s hand in the armistice debate, Weygand had apparently told the cabinet that communists had seized power in Paris, and that an armistice with the

Germans was a necessary first step in the restoration of domestic law and order.)46

On the left, especially amongst members of the French Socialist Party (SFIO), these fears were matched by a growing, if belated, recognition of the threat of Nazi Germany and the need for rearmament. By 1938, the SFIO, one of the most staunchly pacifist organizations in France, was embroiled in a heated debate over the need to strengthen the French military and end appeasement—indeed, it was under the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, a socialist, that rearmament actually began.47 This charged political landscape was thus one in which the right and the left shed their traditional fears and anxieties in favor of new ones—the left, its strident pacifism and distrust of bourgeois parliamentary politics for a pragmatic strategy vis-à-vis Nazi

44 Jackson, The Dark Years, 74-76. 45 Irvine, “Domestic Politics,” 80. 46 Jackson, The Fall of France, 105. 47 Idem, 112-116; Paxton, Vichy France, 245-246. For French rearmament under Blum, see Irvine, “Domestic Politics,” 84.

Germany; the right, its fears of German rearmament and territorial ambitions in Central Europe, as well as on France’s eastern borders, for an intense anti-communism.

Pétain’s request for an armistice in June 1940 should be viewed, at least in part, in this context. It was certainly not, as some contemporaries claimed, a right-wing conspiracy to usher the Germans into France.48 Rather, it was a reflection of how much the French right’s assessment of the European situation had changed. While in the late 1930s, Léon Blum had called repeatedly for a reprise of the Union Sacrée of 1914—the consensus achieved by French politicians at the start of the Great War, when partisan interests were subordinated to the national war effort— many conservatives in France, now seemingly more afraid of French communists than German

Nazis, rallied around the popular slogan, “Rather Hitler than Blum.”49 It was less a statement of ideological preference than a demonstration of political ignorance.50

By 21 June, 1940, the terms of the armistice had been determined, and it was signed by

French and German representatives the following day. On 25 June, France was formally placed under foreign occupation. Henceforth, three-fifths of the country would be directly administrated by the Wehrmacht. With Paris as its base, the German occupation extended across metropolitan

France, splitting the country into two broad zones of administration. The Occupied Zone included the northern half of the country and the entire Atlantic seaboard. The northernmost

48 For an examination of one version of this type of thinking, see Richard F. Kuisel, “The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy,” French Historical Studies 6.3 (1970): 365-398. 49 Shields, The Extreme Right, 27. 50 See Bernard Philippe and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914-1938, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 331-333; Jackson, The Fall of France, 112-116. Ironically, the PCF demonstrated a similar, albeit much more cynical, form of ignorance following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact on 23 August, 1939 and the outbreak of war shortly thereafter. Under the guise of pacifism, the PCF pursued “Franco-German Friendship” during the first year of the occupation, reserving its vitriol mainly for British “imperialists” and France’s bourgeois elites, both of which were “responsible for the criminal declaration of war [against Nazi Germany!] on 3 September 1939 . . .” This quotation comes from the PCF’s official newspaper, L’Humanité, and is included in David Wingeate Pike, “Between the Two Junes: French Communists from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia,” Journal of Contemporary History 28.3 (1993): 470.

départements of Nord and Pas-de-Calais would be administered from Nazi-occupied Belgium, while the eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, so long a bone of contention between France and Germany, were incorporated directly into the Reich. With the exception of a small Italian occupation in the southeast, the Unoccupied Zone remained under the direct administration of the French government. According to the terms of the armistice, the French were to exert a nominal authority over the Occupied Zone, yet, in reality, the French government’s ability to rule unimpeded, subject as it was to German approval, was of course far from absolute.51

In addition to these territorial stipulations, the armistice called for the reduction of the

French Army to 100,000 soldiers—the number deemed necessary by the Germans for the maintenance of public order—and the confinement of the French fleet to home ports. As well, the entire cost of the German occupation was to be paid by the French government at an extremely unfavorable rate of exchange, a crippling bill that Robert Paxton estimated to have been approximately 60 percent of all government revenue between 1940 and 1944.52 Of even more relevance to ordinary French citizens, approximately 1.5 million prisoners of war were transported to Germany, where, according to the armistice, they would stay for the duration of the war: by the end of 1940, one-in-seven French males of fighting age found themselves in this position.53 France’s overseas colonies, by contrast, were to remain untouched—a gesture on the part of the Germans that, along with the maintenance of the fleet and the relative autonomy

51 Fabian Lemmes, “Collaboration in wartime France, 1940-1944,” European Review of History 15.2 (2008): 158- 159. 52 Paxton, Vichy France, 144. 53 Sarah Fishman, “Grand Delusions: The Unintended Consequences of Vichy France’s Prisoner of War Propaganda,” Journal of Contemporary History 26.2 (1991): 229.

granted the government, was aimed primarily at securing French cooperation for the remainder of the war.54

2. Establishing the Vichy Regime: From the Third Republic to L’État français

At this point, however, the Pétain government was not yet the Vichy regime. Although Vichy would soon attempt to distance itself from France’s prewar political system, the government over which Marshal Pétain came to preside at the end of June 1940 was in fact the final legally- constituted government of the Third Republic. This point was reinforced by the entry into the cabinet of Pierre Laval, who on 23 June was named deputy premier. A career politician who had made his name under the Third Republic, and who was synonymous with the worst vices of that regime in the minds of many conservatives (such as Weygand), not to mention many of his former fellow progressives, Laval was nonetheless instrumental in helping Pétain consolidate his rule. For these two men the key issue was how to move beyond the bureaucratic impasse into which the defeat and occupation had thrown the French state. This was, after all, no longer a government seeking a simple ceasefire and the resumption of hostilities on another front, but rather an armistice regime for which a post-defeat normalization of political authority was deemed essential.55

The solution, prepared by Laval and enthusiastically backed by Pétain, was to request that the French parliament grant Pétain full powers to revise the constitution of the Third

Republic, the illegitimacy of which was supposedly self-evident in the wake of the country’s

54Jackson, The Dark Years, 126-127. 55 For how anti-armistice opinion in the Reynaud government was not just silenced but in at least one important case physically excluded from the post-defeat regime, see Richard J. Champoux, “The Massilia Affair,” Journal of Contemporary History 10.2 (1975):283-300.

recent defeat. At the beginning of July, the government had relocated from Bordeaux to Vichy, a quiet spa town located at the geographical center of the country (in the northern portion of the

Unoccupied Zone), where it would remain until the summer of 1944. On 10 July, French parliamentarians at Vichy voted in favour of granting Pétain full powers to revise the constitution. Support for Pétain was overwhelming, with 569 deputies voting for the granting of special powers, 80 against, and only 17 abstentions. There were many complex and varied individual motives behind the ‘yes’ vote, but it is clear that support for Pétain transcended the political fault lines of the prewar era in significant ways.56 In July 1940, the Chamber of

Deputies was, with only minor alterations, the same body that had been elected in May 1936.

Yet, on 10 July, 1940, 57 percent of Socialist and 58 percent of Radical deputies voted in favor of granting Pétain special powers. In other words, this was not merely a right-wing ‘seizure of power,’ but rather a legally-constituted, if increasingly reactionary and soon-to-be-authoritarian, regime.57

The following day, 11 July, Pétain and his cabinet set about implementing the mandate that was granted to it by parliament. Through a series of constitutional acts, the Third Republic was completely dissolved. These measures ranged from the concrete—such as the indefinite termination of both chambers of parliament—to the symbolic—for example, officially renaming the French Republic the ‘French State’ (L’État français). In addition, Pétain arrogated to himself full legislative and executive powers, as well as the ability to appoint his own successor. Soon, all previously elected departmental authorities, such as municipal councillors and mayors, would

56 See especially Olivier Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic: The Nation’s Legislators in Vichy, trans. George Holoch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2009) Chapter 2. 57 See von der Goltz and Gildea, “Flawed Saviors,” 450. Wieviorka is very good on the conflicting motives behind the decision of otherwise democratically-minded, republican parliamentarians to support Pétain’s dismantling of the Third Republic. For one thing, collaboration with Nazi Germany had not yet been adopted as official policy by the government; moreover, the chaos of the defeat and occupation prevented many from understanding fully the long- term implications of their decisions. See Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 109-110.

be chosen by decree. These initial laws were quickly followed by more coercive measures aimed at purging the French national body of unwanted elements. At the top of this list were the representatives of the Popular Front and the Third Republic, some of whom (Léon Blum,

Édouard Daladier, Paul Reynaud) would actually stand trial in 1942 for their supposed role in the country’s humiliating defeat. Trade unionists, socialists, communists, and freemasons (who were outlawed as early as August 1940) would also be targeted. Of course, most notorious of all was

Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation.58

Chapter 2 will provide a more in-depth analysis of the regime and its worldview, but it should be clear from the start that a decisive shift had occurred with the establishment of the

Vichy regime: in effect it marked the arrival of authoritarian rule to France. Henceforth, Pétain— not unlike Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco—would style himself as the ‘saviour’ of the nation, and in typical authoritarian fashion he would become the center of a ubiquitous propaganda machine directed at the representation and consolidation of the leader’s personal, “charismatic” rule.59

Indeed, so central was Pétain himself to the political symbolism of the regime that some historians refer to “Pétainism” (discussed in Chapter 2) as one of the defining characteristic of the regime.60 From the French Republic to L’État français, from the banality of parliaments to the cult of personality—now one can talk of the ‘Vichy regime.’

3. “The Way of Collaboration”

58 Jackson, The Dark Years, 133; Jean-Pierre Azéma, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938-1944, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 58-59. 59 Marc Olivier Baruch, “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy in Pétain’s État français,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.2. (2006): 217-218. 60 See for example H.R. Kedward, “Patriots and Patriotism in Vichy France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982): 175-177.

Probably the most remarked-upon aspect of the Vichy regime is its collaboration with Nazi

Germany, the basic contours of which are generally well-known.61 Formally, collaboration came into being after a series of meetings between the French and German leaderships. On 22 October,

1940, on his way to meet with General Franco at Hendaye (near the Spanish border), Hitler requested an audience with Pierre Laval at Montoire-sur-Loir; on his return two days later he saw Pétain. The ostensible subject of these conversations was the reconciling of various territorial claims made in North Africa by the French, Italian and Spanish governments. In reality, however, the meeting with Hitler, though initiated by the Germans, was used by Vichy as an opportunity to request a formal collaboration between the two countries, something for which the French government had been manoeuvring for months. Initially, the Germans reacted quite coolly to these overtures, and in the long run they were never more than opportunistic in the ways they let Vichy feel, at times, like it had secured for itself a privileged status in Nazi- occupied Europe.62

If this was true at all it had more to do with the nature of the German occupation itself.

German policy in Western Europe, particularly in France, differed drastically from that pursued in Poland, for example—and in the Soviet Union a year later—where, in keeping with the Nazis’ obsession with racial purity, local populations were subjected to an unprecedented war of annihilation.63 In Western Europe, by contrast, where local populations occupied a more exalted position in the Nazi racial hierarchy, the Wehrmacht envisioned a much more “traditional

61 See in particular, Jackson, The Dark Years, 166-189. 62 Martin van Creveld, “25 October 1940: A Historical Puzzle,” Journal of Contemporary History 6.3 (1971): 88; Paxton, Vichy France, 74-78. 63 One telling indication of the difference between the Nazis’ occupation tactics in Eastern and Western Europe came when the German military governor of France sent a telegraph to Hitler’s headquarters in October 1941 in which he argued that the use of “Polish methods” in France would only serve to alienate the French population. See Robert Gildea, “Resistance, Reprisals and Community in Occupied France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 167.

military occupation.”64 This meant, among other things, that French administrators working under Vichy could exercise a relatively free-hand over internal affairs during the war, especially the first two years of the occupation. Seen from Berlin, Franco-German collaboration had much more to do with practical considerations—securing valuable raw materials and manufactured goods for the Nazi war effort, limiting active resistance and maintaining public order—than ideological ones.65

In the French context, collaboration with Nazi Germany is usually discussed in one of two ways. First there is ‘collaboration,’ sometimes referred to as ‘state collaboration,’ between the German occupier and the official French government—what one author has defined, simply but helpfully, as “the official policies emanating from Vichy.”66 Insofar as any ostensibly autonomous French government would be forced to satisfy the demands of, and thus enter into collaboration with, the Nazi occupier, this was in some sense an inevitable outcome of the defeat and armistice. Secondly there is ‘collaborationism,’ a term which refers to the activities of those hard-core French fascists (collaborationists) that identified in German National Socialism a kindred ideological worldview (Jacques Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF) is often seen as the supreme example). Stanley Hoffmann, who is very attentive to the subtleties and sheer variety of motives behind collaboration, also makes a similar distinction. In a seminal article on the subject, Hoffmann identified an “analytic distinction between two kinds of behavior [in Nazi- occupied France]. . . . on the one hand, collaboration with Germany for reasons of state . . . . [on the other] collaborationism with the Nazis, in the sense of an openly desired co-operation with

64 Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), 105. 65 Idem, 421, 432-435. 66 Shields, The Extreme Right, 30.

and imitation of the German regime.”67 In Hoffman’s view, Vichy exemplified the former, while fascists like Doriot, the majority of whom were based in occupied Paris, exemplified the latter.

This distinction is still widely reproduced by other authors.68 While these historians are usually very sensitive to the “slippery slope” (Hoffmann’s phrase) from state collaboration to collaborationism, this journey is often understood in terms of a crossing of boundaries between these two groups. James Shields, for example, has recognized the importance of not viewing state collaboration and collaborationism as mutually exclusive phenomena; he points out that

Pétain and the Vichy leadership were wary of certain collaborationists while at the same time welcoming others into the government (a fact reinforced by the presence within the regime of members of the PPF and other bona fide fascists).69 While this is certainly true, it can be argued that as the public representative of the regime, Pétain himself, though often viewed as merely a traditional conservative at odds with those radicals who would seek collaboration on ideological grounds, nonetheless embodied both types of collaboration—the pragmatic and the ideological.

In other words, collaborationism came in many respects from the regime itself. Yet this does not mean that Vichy saw the defeat and occupation as desirable outcomes to the crises of the 1930s, at least at first. Few would argue that Pétain, a military man whose patriotic credentials prior to the war were beyond reproach, cheered at the defeat of France by its main continental rival, no matter how strong his disdain for the democratic Third Republic. But

Vichy’s stance vis-à-vis the defeat of 1940 was still extremely complex. On the one hand, the

67 Stanley Hoffmann, “Collaborationism in France during World War II,” The Journal of Modern History 40.3 (1968): 376. Emphasis in original. 68 With some differences, this basic distinction between collaboration and collaborationism is found in several works cited in this chapter. See especially Paxton, Vichy France, Shields, The Extreme Right, Lemmes, “Collaboration in France,” and Jackson, The Dark Years. 69 Shields, The Extreme Right, 40; See also Julian Jackson, “Vichy and Fascism,” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le pen, ed. and trans. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 162.

defeat was viewed by the regime as an unmitigated national disaster, a painful repeat of the

Prussian victory over the country in 1871, while on the other it was seen as a unique opportunity to break with the past. Pierre Laval described well this sense of misfortune-meets-opportunity when he diagnosed the causes of the defeat in the following terms:

France was overly fat and happy. She used and abused her freedom. And it is precisely because there was an excess of freedom in all fields of endeavour that we find ourselves in the present straits. It is also a fact—I say this sadly because a great calamity has befallen us—that the existing institutions cannot be allowed to survive a disaster of this magnitude.70

For Vichy, the extraordinary circumstances created by the French defeat, though a painful demonstration of the nation’s decline, were nevertheless to be embraced as the first steps towards its rebirth. And so, only a few days after the meeting at Montoire, Pétain announced publicly that the government had “enter[ed] into the way of collaboration”71 with the German occupiers, and that this decision represented the “first step towards our country’s recovery.”72

4. Collaboration as Reconstruction

In its collaboration with Nazi Germany, the Vichy regime made a pretense of minimizing as much as possible the potential hardships of a foreign occupation, of safeguarding France’s independence and what was left of its national honour. As Pétain put it in a radio broadcast just after his meeting with Hitler, France might have been defeated but “[a]t least she remains sovereign.”73 Wishful though this type of thinking may have been, it nonetheless represented one

70 Quoted in Peter Davies, The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present: From de Maistre to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2002), 103. 71 Pétain quoted in Paxton, Vichy France, 77. 72 Pétain quoted in Shields, The Extreme Right, 16. 73 Ibid.

of the main rhetorical lines advanced by the Vichy regime at the time (not to mention at Pétain’s postwar trial),74 both to justify its existence and to describe its mandate—namely, Vichy as the

‘shield’ that would protect France from its foreign occupier.75 If one looks carefully, however, it is not difficult to discern a second, parallel narrative, one that was by no means buried beneath the surface—indeed, it saw the light of day in many of Pétain’s public statements.

As Robert Paxton has pointed out, one of the most remarkable features of the Vichy regime was that in addition to navigating the byzantine structures of the Nazi occupation it tried simultaneously to implement a project of national renewal. In Paxton’s view, the individuals behind this strategy “committed the most elementary imprudence. In their impatience to avenge old wrongs and transform the conditions that had led to defeat, they made major structural changes during an enemy occupation.”76 Pétain himself, in a curious mix of pessimism and optimism,77 seemed to lament this fact when he claimed that “[o]ur tragedy is that we shall have to carry out in defeat the revolution which we were not even able to realise in victory, in peace, in an atmosphere of equal nations.”78 Though in statements like this the defeat is treated as a tragedy, collaboration, by contrast, is seen as an opportunity to engage in what Henry Rousso has called the regime’s “program of internal reconstruction,”79 a process by which Vichy sought not only to mitigate the consequences of the defeat, but to actually purge the nation of those elements which were said to be its cause. The name given to this process by the regime was the

74 For a summation of Pétain’s postwar defense, see Jules Roy, The Trial of Marshal Pétain, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 214-234. 75 Davies, France/Origins, 29. 76 Paxton, Vichy France, 137. 77 There is a word for this phenomenon: “pessoptimism.” The phrase comes from the Palestinian novelist Emile Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, a book whose protagonist encapsulates, in a completely different context, the contradictions and absurdities of collaboration with an occupying power. See Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, trans., Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick. Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books, 2003. 78 Pétain quoted in Davies, France/Origins, 20. 79 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1994), 6.

National Revolution, and within the context of foreign occupation Vichy viewed collaboration with Nazi Germany as a precondition for its realization.80

This view was underscored by what the Vichy leadership liked to think of as a sense of realism. In the summer of 1940, many in Europe—and not just the Germans—believed it was only a matter of time before Britain capitulated, at which point the war would be effectively over and Europe definitively under the control of Nazi Germany. Collaboration with the victorious power was thus grounded, to some extent, in pragmatic considerations of realpolitik. This was especially evident when it came to matters of global politics. A central thrust of Vichy’s initial desire for collaboration was its desire to preserve France’s overseas Empire in spite of the country’s military defeat. After the pre-emptive destruction of a large portion of the French Fleet by the British Navy at Mars-el-Kébir on 3 July, 1940, and the wave of anti-British sentiment that followed, the regime went even further, pushing not only for the preservation of France’s imperial holdings, but their expansion at the expense of Britain’s, especially in Africa and the

Middle East—something for which an alliance with Nazi Germany was deemed essential.81

Yet on the other hand, idealism also influenced the regime’s view of collaboration as a precondition for national renewal. In implementing a project of national-moral reconstruction, the regime displayed obvious ideological predilections: the National Revolution was, after all, a highly partisan political project; Vichy knew exactly who its political enemies were, and, with only slightly less assurance, it could refer to a select fraternity of like-minded nations with which it hoped to align itself in the construction of a new European order. Indeed, Laval said as much when he described the choice that lay before the country in 1940: “Since parliamentary

80 Shennan, Rethinking France, 22. 81 Ibid; Paxton, Vichy France, 56-59.

democracy undertook and lost the fight against Nazism and Fascism, it must disappear. A new, bold, authoritarian, social and national regime must take its place. . . . There is no other way forward than through loyal collaboration with Germany and Italy.”82

By the autumn of 1940, with speculation into the shape of a postwar Nazi ‘New Order’ widespread, many in Europe were inclined to share Laval’s assessment.83 Insofar as it understood German National Socialism at all, the Vichy regime viewed it with a considerable degree of ideological affinity, and thus looked favourably on the construction of a Nazi- dominated Europe; at the very least, there was enough common ground between the Nazi revolution and Vichy’s National Revolution that the French government could view collaboration less with resignation than with a degree of genuine optimism. Vichy’s ideology was, by its own assessment, not incompatible with National Socialism.84 In this way, realism and idealism combined at Vichy to make collaboration the only desirable (which is very different from saying the only available) option for the regime. The logic, in simplified form, can be described in the following terms: Nazi Germany was on the rise, so Vichy sided with it; but

Vichy believed Nazi Germany to be on the rise because of the superior political-ideological doctrines it had adopted in the 1930s.85 It was exactly this type of logic that enabled Vichy— paradoxically for what Laval described as “an authoritarian, social and national regime”—to implement a project of reconstruction under foreign occupation in which national renewal was

82 Laval quoted in Shields, The Extreme Right, 23. 83 Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 102-103. 84 Shields, The Extreme Right, 16. For further elaboration on some of the ideological affinities shared by German National Socialists and the Vichy leadership—Pétain especially—see Burrin, Living with Defeat, 82-83. 85 Shennan, Rethinking France, 22.

actually privileged over national sovereignty. In the words of one scholar, it was “renovation- before-liberation.”86

5. Reconstructing What? The Third Republic and the French Civil War

Vichy would devote much of its energy after June 1940 to purging the nation of its republican heritage and undertaking a project of national-moral reconstruction along authoritarian, pseudo- fascist lines.87 In the regime’s eyes, the Third Republic had proven itself unworthy of resuscitation after the military defeat, if not well before. While collaboration with the German occupier was seen as a means to the National Revolution, dismantling the Republic was one of its primary ends, since it was on the ruins of the Republic that Vichy sought to reconstruct what it viewed as the authentic France. In so doing, the regime drew a great deal of inspiration from the writings of Charles Maurras (1868-1952), whose extremely conservative, nationalist, and anti-republican publications bespoke the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the so-called ‘true

France,’ or pays réel, and its corrupt and illegitimate opposite, the pays légal.88 As such, the

Republic represents a sort of anti-Vichy, in the truest sense of that term: if this image is not exactly representative of what Vichy claimed it was, it is at least suggestive of what Vichy claimed it was not. But what was it about the Third Republic that made it the object of such strong contempt on the part of Pétain and those that rallied under the banner of the National

Revolution in the summer of 1940? The following, admittedly very brief, outline of the final

86 Idem, 27. 87 The regime’s relationship to fascism will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. 88 Roderick Kedward has referred to Charles Maurras as “the grand ideological master of Vichy France.” See H.R. Kedward, “Charles Maurras and the True France,” in Ideas into Politics: Aspects of European History, 1880-1950, ed. R.J. Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann and A.B. Polonksy (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984), 119. Henceforth cited as “True France.”

years of the Third Republic—the nation’s longest-running political regime since 1789—is meant to provide context for the discussion of Vichy’s rhetoric of reconstruction that will follow in

Chapter 2.

It is now almost a cliché to claim that the Third Republic “passed away unmourned” in the summer of 1940.89 Yet like most clichés there is more than a grain of truth to this statement.

Formed in 1870 after the collapse of the Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War, the Third

Republic had reached an all-time low in the eyes of much of the French public by June 1940.

Throughout the interwar period the Republic had been the target of sustained attacks from both the right and the left. These attacks, many of which hinged on the supposedly decrepit nature of the Third Republic and its corrupting influence over the nation, were often of the rhetorical (as opposed to the physical) kind, but they were no less violent for this fact. Spearheaded by writers, academics, journalists and other intellectuals, the attack on the country’s governing institutions saw not only the Republic but parliamentary democracy itself placed at the center of a series of ideological conflicts whose origins went back to the Dreyfus Affair, and in some cases much further, to the French Revolution itself. In a phrase, these debates could be summed up as an obsession with national decline, and in France, as in many other European nations of the period, they culminated in the 1930s.90

At the very core of anxieties over national decline under the Third Republic lay the concept of decadence. This had been a central theme of left- and right-wing denunciations of the dominant social order since at least the turn of the century, and it had played a recurring role in

89 This phrase comes from Tony Judt, “’We Have Discovered History’: Defeat, Resistance, and the Intellectuals in France,” The Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 147. 90 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 6; Jackson, The Dark Years, 106-107.

the various political conflicts of the early twentieth century.91 In the 1930s, however, decadence took centre stage amongst the French right in particular as both the primary manifestation and the primary cause of the nation’s ills. Central to this contention was the belief, held by most of the nationalist right, that the country’s republican institutions did not represent true France. As a result, the Third Republic was presented not only as a weak, ineffectual regime under which the nation’s slide into decadence had occurred, but also as an illegitimate system that was the primary cause of that decadence. The notion of the internal enemy—whether Marxists, masons, liberals, Jews, or a host of other supposedly degenerate influences—was a central tenet of this theory since these individuals, as agents of the nefarious, ungodly Republic, were said to be the cause of the nation’s decline. The nationalist right of the 1930s thus tended to style itself as a revolt against these internal enemies, and indeed the entire post-1789 social, political, and cultural order that the nation’s enemies had co-opted under the Third Republic. 92

As a concept decadence is not easily defined, since even a brief glance at the word shows that it was hardly used rigorously. Among other things, it was a catch-all term used to denote any of the myriad social ills that might afflict a modern, industrialized society in the third decade of the twentieth century. The symptoms of decadence, for example, were said to range from demographic stagnation to the evils of urban living, from an increase in suicide and alcoholism to growing ‘Americanization.’93 Robert Soucy, who has written extensively on the extreme right’s attachment to the concept of national degeneration, argues that in the way decadence was

91 Paul Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right, 1930-1945 (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007), 35. 92 Edward J. Arnold, “Preface” in The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le pen, ed. and trans. Edward J. Arnold (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), xiii; Mazgaj, Imaging Fascism, 35-36; Lackerstein, National Regeneration, 29-31.

93 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 29-30; Mazgaj, Imagining Fascism, 35-36; Weber, The Hollow Years, 121-122.

applied by the nationalist right, the term represented a sort of all-encompassing taxonomy of social anxieties:

. . . not only Marxism and liberalism but also secularism and feminism. Decadence was proletarian solidarity, class struggle, and Marxist internationalism. It was political, social, and greater democracy. It was rule by the Darwinian unfit. Decadence was the nationalization of the basic means of production and working-class selfishness, laziness and indiscipline. It was hedonism, cowardice and self-indulgence as well as physical and moral softness. It was debilitating rationalism, religious scepticism, and liberal sentimentalism. It was military defeat by one’s enemies. Decadence was female.94

As a bogeymen for the French right, the notion of a decadent society was obviously less concrete than tentative; as such some of its most forceful denunciations were to be found in the works of some of the far right’s leading literary figures, most notably Robert Brasillach, Pierre

Drieu la Rochelle and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, rather than from, say, the conservative members of the Chamber of Deputies.95

However, the notion of a corrupt, unstable and decadent republican system was not merely a figment of right-wing intellectuals’ depraved imaginations. In the interwar years the

Third Republic had been riven by political crises of one kind or another. During this time much of the general population perceived the nation’s political leaders to be at best ineffective, at worst morally vacant. This belief was largely the result of the intense partisan infighting and governmental instability that had characterized the Third Republic for much of its existence.

Between the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, the French had seen approximately forty-four different governments rise and fall, sometimes in only a matter of weeks—and this in

94 Soucy quoted in Lackerstein, Regeneration, 48-49. 95 Arnold, “Preface”, xv.

a period of just over twenty years.96 Moreover, a wave of increasingly damaging financial scandals, culminating in January 1934 with the Stavisky Affair—in which several members of the government were implicated—further eroded the public’s faith in the Third Republic and fuelled right-wing claims of its moral failings.97

In the first volume of his postwar memoires, Charles de Gaulle painted a similar portrait of the institutional disorder so typical of the late Third Republic, one that many contemporaries would no doubt have recognized. Describing his own rise to prominence as a young officer in the period 1932 to 1937—during which time he served under no less than fourteen governments—de

Gaulle would recall how

The work I had to do, the discussions at which I was present, the contacts I was obliged to make, showed me the extent of our resources, but also the feebleness of the state. For the disjointedness of the government was rife all over this field. . . . As a reserved but passionate witness of public affairs, I watched the constant repetition of the same scenario. Hardly had a Premier taken office when he was at grips with innumerable demands, criticisms, and bids for favor, which all his energy was absorbed in warding off without ever contriving to master them. Parliament, far from supporting him, offered him nothing but ambushes and desertions. His ministers were his rivals. Opinion, the press, and sectional interests regarded him as the proper target for all complaints. Everyone . . . knew that he was there for only a short time; in fact, after a few months, he had to give his place to another.98

Beyond providing retroactive support for his own attempt to strengthen executive authority under the postwar Fourth, and eventually Fifth, Republics, de Gaulle’s description of the many miles of red tape spun by republican bureaucrats before 1940 is fairly typical. In the eyes of much of the French population, and especially amongst politically-engaged intellectuals, any legitimacy the Republic had once enjoyed was severely damaged by its apparent inability to

96 Weber, The Hollow Years, 111. 97 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 36-37. 98 Charles de Gaulle, The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honor, 1940-1942, trans. Jonathan Griffin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 6-7.

govern the country effectively.99 Yet de Gaulle’s comments must be taken with a grain of salt, as he was writing after the defeat of 1940, and thus tended to project onto the past ideas developed in the wake of the military catastrophe. Put differently, the apparent corruption and inefficiency of the Republic was not so much a product of the Republic’s record of accomplishment as it was a result of its military collapse and subsequent liquidation at the hands of Vichy. It was only after

June 1940 that the negative memory of the Republic would come to replace the much more diverse historical reality. In other words, the crises of the 1930s, severe though they were, did not point inevitably to defeat, but the defeat and its aftermath certainly pointed back to the crises of the 1930s—a fact William Irvine sums up best when he says that “it was not decadence that led to 1940; it is 1940 that has led us to view the late Third Republic as decadent.”100

This tendency was compounded by a number of crises that plagued French society after

1918. Though a victor in the First World War, France nonetheless began the 1920s a severely weakened and divided society. With over 1.3 million killed or missing, the country had lost a higher proportion of its citizens in the First World War—10.5 percent of the active male population—than any other country in Western Europe. The long-term effects of these losses loomed large over every aspect of public life in France.101 On the demographic front, the war years led to a significant drop in the country’s birthrate, which in turn exacerbated the already intense concerns over national decline. In the economic sector, over one million maimed and crippled veterans exacted a profound toll on the country’s active labor force.102 In all, approximately half the male population in France had joined the military between 1914 and

99 Judt, “’We Have Discovered History,’” 147. 100 Irvine, “Domestic Politics,” 90. 101 For a general discussion of the pervasive impact of the Great War on French society, see Omer Bartov, “Martyr’s Vengeance: Memory, Trauma, and Fear of War in France, 1918-1940,” Historical Reflections/Refléctions Historiques 22.1 (1996): 47-76. 102 Bernard and Dubief, Decline, 78.

1918, of which one in five would receive pensions in the interwar period. As in other European countries—Germany in particular—the war experience and its aftermath radicalized many of these men, discrediting the political authorities that had sent them to the trenches during the war, and which had failed to look after them during the peace.103

To this must be added the growing political radicalization of French society in general in the interwar years, especially in the 1930s. The Great Depression, which hit France later than most western nations but which lasted longer, severely weakened parliamentary democracy in the country due largely to the Third Republic’s inability to remedy the deteriorating economic situation. Politically, this translated into growing extremism on the right and the left, as well as an erosion of the moderate center. In 1920 French Socialists had split over the issue of membership in the Third International, with the majority leaving to form the PCF, an organization that would remain highly subservient to the Soviet Union throughout the following decades. By the 1924 elections, the PCF had gained almost ten percent of the national vote, once again raising fears amongst conservatives of a communist revolution. On the right, groups like

Action Française, led by Charles Maurras, or the Jeunesses Patriotes, founded in the mid-1920s by Pierre Taittinger, led to charges of fascism from the left. By 1929, the latter organization’s military wing, which took its inspiration from Mussolini’s Black Shirts, had approximately

300,000 active members.104

Ideological polarization reached boiling point between 1934 and 1936. As was mentioned, 6 February, 1934 saw the eruption of widespread street violence in Paris as approximately 40,000 right-wing activists marched against the French parliament, chanting

103 Weber, The Hollow Years, 14, 112; for an overview of the effect of the First World War on German society and politics, see George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), Chapter 8. 104 Bernard and Dubief, Decline, 160.

“Throw the deputies in the Seine!” In reaction, police killed more than a dozen protestors and wounded hundreds more. While historians tend to agree that these protests did not represent any sort of organized attempt at a Fascist coup by the extreme right, as some contemporaries feared, it was nonetheless the bloodiest day in Paris since the suppression of the Paris Commune nearly sixty years before.105 Neither was it insignificant that the Daladier government was forced to resign as a result of the protests, marking “the first time in the Republic’s history that a cabinet had yielded to street disturbances.”106 According to Julian Jackson, 6 February was nothing short of a “crisis of the liberal state itself.”107

The events of February 1934, even if they were not a Fascist seizure of power, nonetheless profoundly shook the French left, which reacted to the street violence outside the

Chamber of Deputies as if it was indeed a harbinger of fascist dictatorship. Bitterly divided since their split over the Third International, both the Socialist and Communist Parties, encouraged by

Stalin (who, after the Nazi dictatorship took root had to hastily reconsider his fateful strategy against the ‘Social-Fascists’—i.e., social democrats), banded together in a coalition with the

Radical Party, a sort of Union Sacrée of the left, forming a Popular Front government under

Léon Blum following the elections of May-June 1936. Ironically, though initially conceived as an attempt to galvanize support for republican democracy in the face of the threat from the extreme right, the Popular Front, in spite of Blum’s moderation—he tried hard to curtail the wave of popular strikes and factory occupations that occurred in the summer of 1936, and he acquiesced in the face of pressure from the French right and the British government over intervention in the Spanish Civil War—was accompanied by further alienation from the right, as

105 Paxton, Vichy France, 244-245. 106 Bernard and Dubief, Decline, 226-228, quote from 227. 107 Jackson, The Dark Years, 72.

conservatives became more radicalized (just like the left after February 1934), and anti- communism became a significant force in French politics.108

Abroad, mounting internal pressure on the country’s political institutions was accompanied by an “extraordinary coincidence” of external crises, particularly in Europe.109

Germany’s rearmament and flaunting of the Versailles Treaty, worldwide economic depression, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the Popular Front strategy of the mid-1930s, the outbreak of the

Spanish Civil War, appeasement and the Munich Crisis, and instability amongst France’s East

European allies, to name only the most prominent international challenges—all converged on the

Third Republic, influencing domestic politics. Viewed in a comparative perspective, it is clear the Third Republic was also at the center of a much more general, European-wide debate over the degeneration of public life and the need for national renewal. Like many of its European counterparts in the 1930s, France had seen both extremes of the political spectrum converge on at least one thing: the belief that liberal democracy in general (and not just the Third Republic) had failed. For many Europeans in the interwar period, fascism and communism, neither of which had yet been discredited by the crimes of the Nazi or Soviet regimes, offered legitimate, even respectable, political alternatives to parliamentary democracy and liberal capitalism.110

In an era of mass politics, the Third Republic was seen by some as ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of modern, industrial society. In the 1930s, intellectuals of both the right and the left believed that modernity had brought about a veritable “crisis of civilization” with which the leaders of republican France were complicit.111 Jean-Pierre Maxence summed these views up nicely when he lamented the fact that “[w]hile most countries of Europe are being led towards

108 Idem, 77-79. 109 The phrase is Lackerstein’s, Regeneration, 29 110 See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 2000), Chapter 4. 111 Bernard and Dubief, Decline, 213-218.

greatness and adventure, all our leaders are inviting us to transform France into an insurance company.”112

For some historians, the crises of the 1930s, of which those episodes mentioned above provides only a brief outline, was proof of what Robert Paxton has called a “virtual French civil war.”113 Going further, Henry Rousso has argued that the Vichy period witnessed such a violent culmination of the internal conflicts of the 1930s—what he calls the ongoing “guerre franco- françaises”—that there was nothing virtual about the war which began in this period and continued under the German occupation. In Rousso’s view, long-simmering ideological tensions surfaced in an unprecedented way under Vichy, especially with the advent of the Resistance, making it “the very archetype of the guerre franco-française.”114 “In sum,” writes Rousso, “the fratricidal struggles of the Occupation were by no means a ‘cold’ or merely ‘verbal’ civil war but a civil war tout court, at least when seen within the context of French history.”115

6. A Period of Soul Searching

And so, the Vichy regime—its social and political composition, its ideological ‘temperature’— must be gauged against the backdrop of the 1930s, and especially the notion of a French Civil

War. As in Spain, for example, the prewar Republic would be one of the first victims of the nation’s internal conflicts once they were transformed by the circumstances of war (and in the

French case, foreign occupation). From the very beginning, the Vichy regime was explicit about where it thought the blame for France’s humiliating decline should rest. “Four months ago,”

112 Maxence quoted in Judt, “’We Have Discovered History,’” 148. 113 Paxton, Vichy France, 245. 114 Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 6. 115 Idem, 8.

Pétain announced in October 1940, “France suffered one of the most thorough defeats in her history. This defeat was caused by many factors, not all of which were of a technical nature. In truth, the disaster was simply the reflection, on a military plane, of the weaknesses and defects of the former regime.”116 Certainly this statement represents an attempt by Pétain to absolve the military of any responsibility for the disaster of June 1940, a predictable response from any career soldier. But it also shows how Pétain tried to draw a rhetorical wedge between an abiding, permanent France, on the one hand—of which Vichy was the natural representative—and a transitory, almost illusory prewar Republic that had led the country to defeat, on the other.

Once again, however, it is important to avoid a teleological view of June 1940—namely, that the crises of the previous decade somehow led inevitably to a French defeat. While it is obvious that internal conflicts in France influenced the country’s reactions to the events of 1939-

1940, defeat and occupation were never a foregone conclusion. After all, the fall of France was

“a great disaster”: the French military was considered by many to be the world’s most advanced on the eve of the Second World War, and few would have believed that it could be defeated in just seven weeks.117 Even the French right, which spent much of the 1930s drifting away from its traditional Germanophobia, rallied in 1939 to the defense of a Republic that it had long claimed to despise.118

This does not change the fact that many on the right embraced the defeat as an opportunity for wholesale political and social transformation, but it does place those desires in their proper context. In this sense, the defeat that so shocked the French in June 1940 resulted in

116 Pétain quoted in Davies, The Extreme Right, 103. Emphasis added. 117 Stanley Hoffmann, “The Trauma of 1940: A Disaster and its Traces,” Historical Reflections/Refléctions Historiques 22.1 (1996): 287. 118 As William Irvine points out, the right’s embrace of the Daladier-Reynaud government at the outbreak of the war had as much to do with the fact that the Popular Front—the right’s main enemy—had been effectively defeated as it did with the right’s much-touted patriotism. See Irvine, “Domestic Politics,” 81.

a period of soul searching for those in France that had long seen the Republic as a corrupting influence on the true France, and even many that were unaccustomed to such views. For so dramatic were the events of June 1940 that every aspect of French society was “thrown into question: the army and the political regime, the policies leading up to the war, also the very identity of the nation . . . the nature of its elites, the behaviour of its social groups.”119

Of course, Pétain and the regime’s leadership were more clear-sighted than the average

Frenchman. From the very beginning they saw the country’s defeat as unequivocal proof of its moral and spiritual corruption. After the armistice, Pétain claimed that “[t]he pleasure principal destroyed what was built by the spirit of sacrifice. I am inviting you first of all to undertake an intellectual and moral reform. I promise that from your fervor and effort, you will see a new

France spring up.”120 The regime’s desire for collaboration with Nazi Germany was presented as the first step towards this moral and spiritual reconstruction; the National Revolution would provide the blueprint.

While the regime claimed to look ahead in pursuit of this so-called ‘new France,’ its view of what constituted this was shaped above all by its perception that the nation had skidded dangerously off course under republican democracy. For many on the conservative and extreme right who threw their support behind the Vichy regime, the defeat of June 1940 was thus a

“divine surprise,” a judgement against the ungodly Popular Front of the 1930s and a repudiation of the Republic—or la gueuse (the ‘old slut’), as its detractors had taken to calling it.121 Writing from across this political divide in December 1941, Léon Blum—who at the time was sitting in a

French prison, awaiting prosecution by Vichy authorities for his apparent role in France’s

119 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 58; quotation from Hoffmann, “The Trauma of 1940,” 288. 120 Pétain quoted in von der Goltz and Gildea, “Flawed Saviours,” 450. 121 Shields, The Extreme Right, 27.

defeat—understood the severity of the new regime’s indictment against the nation’s prewar social and political order. For, as Blum pointed out,

. . . it went far beyond merely placing responsibility for the catastrophe on the country’s political system or its recent leaders, it refused to stop at the mere constitution and personnel of the Republic, but went on to accuse in addition the whole complex structure of public life, its form and its content. The net of accusation was cast wide enough to bring in everything that for a century and a half had given life to political doctrine and habit as well as to institutions. Let us not mince words: What was attempted, in addition to a political revolution, was no less than a counter-revolution in social relations and civic obligations. Responsibility for the defeat was laid at the door, not only of the Republic, but of democracy, of the idea of individual liberty, of the principal of the natural equality of all citizens.122

122 Léon Blum, For All Mankind, trans. W. Pickles (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946) 20-21. Blum’s fate, in a sense, demonstrates the difficult reality behind the Vichy regime’s delusions: he ended the war, like the dictatorship that condemned him, a prisoner of the Nazis; he would be rescued, like France’s independence, by the Allies.

CHAPTER 2. THE REACTION: VICHY, PÉTAIN, AND THE RHETORIC OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION AFTER JUNE 1940

1. Vichy: Some Problems of Interpretation

When one talks of reconstruction in the context of the Second World War one is usually referring to the process of physical rebuilding that began after the fighting stopped (in Western Europe, that is) in the spring of 1945, and which lasted in many cases into the 1950s. However, one noteworthy feature of Nazi-occupied France is that reconstruction, as the term was most often utilized by the governing Vichy regime, actually began a full five years earlier, in the summer of

1940. Indeed, even before the regime had been officially sanctioned by the voting of extraordinary powers to Pétain in July 1940, many political leaders in France were speaking of reconstruction and the armistice “[i]n the very same breath.”123 Of course, this assertion requires some qualification of the concept of reconstruction. To this end, the present chapter focuses on the Vichy regime’s preoccupation with the national-moral reconstruction of France after its defeat by Nazi Germany. For while the extent of physical damage following the German invasion of the country in May and June 1940 was significant, the Vichy regime placed perhaps as much emphasis on the reconstruction of the nation from a moral standpoint, as part of what it called the National Revolution.124

123 On 25 June, 1940, in the same speech in which he notified his compatriots of the conditions of the Franco- German Armistice, Pétain spoke of the necessity of constructing a “new France.” See Burrin, Living with Defeat, 14. 124 For an overview of the regime’s attempts at moral renewal, see Paxton, “Vichy Lives!”

A list of key terms employed by the regime in the context of the National Revolution— indeed, used almost synonymously with it—provides some sense of the ubiquity of the concept of national-moral reconstruction in occupied France: rehabilitation, recovery, renewal, liberation, reconstruction, remaking, rebirth, social reconstruction, moral and spiritual renaissance—each of these phrases were used by the regime’s leader to describe a task that had little to do with the physical rebuilding of the country after the German invasion and had everything to do with correcting France’s supposed slide into moral degradation in the decades prior to the outbreak of war.125

As a result, the discourse over national-moral reconstruction is perhaps best understood as an internal dialogue, a debate amongst members of a specific culturally and historically determined, even if very broadly defined, national community; in a phrase, as an intermittent civil conflict amongst the French over the substance and meaning of their national identity. For this reason, the present chapter focuses to a large extent on the public statements of Marshal

Pétain, an individual whose status as national leader for most of the war, no matter how contested at times, lent his statements on national renewal a certain degree of authority. As this chapter will try to show, the dictator’s words thus provide key insight into the Vichy regime’s vision of national renewal under the German occupation.

Yet in some ways, this approach flies in the face of many scholarly treatments of Vichy, which are perhaps best summed up in the words of one 1942 Time magazine report that described Vichy as a regime suffering the symptoms of a “split personality.”126 For example, in the 1960s, Stanley Hoffmann argued that Vichy was a “pluralistic dictatorship” comprised of a

125 Shields, The Extreme Right, 27; H.R. Kedward, “Patriots and Patriotism,” 177-178; Dixon, “Manipulators of Vichy Propaganda,” 48-49. 126 “France: Schizophrenic Headache,” Time, 13 Apr. 1942.

merger of what he called conservative “minorities,” most of whom shared what you might call a certain political temperament, but no single, overarching ideological source.127 As a result, Pétain has often been presented as merely a symbolic, and indeed tentative, figurehead of the regime, one whose public visibility belied the real, behind-the-scenes exercise of power by career politicians and technocrats at Vichy. While even German Nazism and Italian Fascism relied to some degree on a pre-existing administrative apparatus to manage the everyday affairs of the state, Vichy’s failure to establish Pétain as the typical totalitarian strongman à la Hitler or

Mussolini has led some scholars to characterize the regime, in the words of one historian, as “a dictatorship without a real dictator.”128 These sentiments had their counterpart in contemporary, domestic criticisms of Vichy, particularly from those Parisian collaborationists for whom the regime’s National Revolution was deemed insufficiently radical.129

Indeed, it is said that Pétain himself was uncomfortable with the term ‘National

Revolution,’ preferring instead the decidedly less radical ‘restoration’ or ‘renovation.’130 This is no doubt a telling indication of the type of regime over which Pétain presided. For while Vichy made much of its desire to revolutionize France and create a new political and social order, this would never, in spite of the wishes of its more radical supporters, amount to a complete inversion of the traditional forms of political and social organization. While it is true that Vichy paid lip service to the notion of a far-reaching overhaul of French society and politics, this desire was

127 Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1974), 4; the term also appears in Hoffmann’s article, “Collaborationism in France during World War II,” The Journal of Modern History 40.3 (1968): 375, as well as in Shields, The Extreme Right, 42. 128 For a brief overview of these arguments, see Baruch, “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy,” 217. 129 Camille Féguy, editor of the pro-Nazi newspaper La Gerbe, summed these views up when he lamented the regime’s “written”, as opposed to “lived,” revolution. Quoted in Lackerstein, Regeneration, 129. 130 Peter Davies, France and the Second World War: Resistance, Occupation and Liberation (London: Routledge, 2000), 24; Lackerstein, Regeneration, 125.

underscored at every step by what James Shield has described as an “unyielding paradox: that of seeking to construct a ‘new order’ on the basis of age-old French values.”131

Yet it is as if, since Pétain was not a genuine revolutionary, then he must not have been a genuine dictator. Similarly, some authors have claimed that Vichy, despite the pejorative epithets with which it was smeared by left-wing critics, was “not a ‘fascist’ regime in any rigorous sense of the term.”132 Stanley Payne, one of the leading scholars of European fascism, has written that

“Vichy was a regime of moderate right authoritarianism (though with increasing right radical overtones) that identified with Franco and Salazar rather than with Hitler and Mussolini.”133

Elsewhere, Payne has concluded that “Pétain’s regime was distinctly rightist and authoritarian but never fascist.”134 For Payne and others, this conclusion rests on the fact that the regime never established a single, all-encompassing fascist-style political party along the lines of German

National Socialism, Italian Fascism, or Spanish Falangism; that it abhorred the notion of a dynamic, ideological mobilization of the masses; and that it was prevented, under the watchful eye of the German occupation, from indulging in the militarization of public life that was so typical of twentieth-century European fascist movements.135

These seeming anomalies have sometimes frustrated scholars’ attempts to assimilate the

Vichy regime into the broader context of European fascist and mass political movements; certainly, even this very brief summary suggests a much more conservative worldview than the term ‘fascism’ would normally allow. Yet while scholars of fascism debate the applicability of that concept to the case of wartime France, certain aspects of fascist theory retain interpretive

131 Shields, The Extreme Right, 23. 132 Idem, 42. 133 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995), 397. 134 Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1980), 137. 135 Payne, Comparison and Definition, 137; Baruch, “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy,” 216-217; Shields, The Extreme Right, 42.

value when applied to the case of the Vichy regime. In particular, this chapter draws on the work of Roger Griffin, whose emphasis on the “palingenetic myth” as a central component of

European fascism provides key insight into the development of the Vichy regime, and especially its rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction.

Palingenesis refers to the concept of rebirth, or what Griffin, in his 1991 study The

Nature of Fascism, defined as “the sense of a new start or of regeneration after a phase of crisis or decline.”136 As a sort of archetypal myth, the concept of palingenesis has exercised a profound influence over human society for thousands of years through most of the world’s major religions.

In the west alone, one need look no further than Christianity, a system of belief whose internal coherence and symbolic meaning depends entirely upon the palingenetic nature of Christ’s death and resurrection. Similarly, in literature and popular folklore the concept finds near universal representation in the form of the mythological phoenix, whose rise from the ashes is synonymous with the idea of regeneration in many cultures.137 In the modern era, the palingenetic myth has enjoyed perhaps as much resonance in the context of secular political thought. This was certainly true in the case of the French Revolution, whose participants viewed the overthrow of the decrepit Ancien Régime, especially after the establishment of the First Republic in September

1792, and the regicide of Louis XVI the following January, in terms of a radically new beginning.138 Similarly, in the early-twentieth century Russian Bolsheviks ascribed to their own

136 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 33. 137 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 33-34. 138 For a discussion of French revolutionaries’ attempts to celebrate the dawning of a new social order, see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), Chapter 1, especially 6-13. The comparison with the French Revolution is even more appropriate in the present context when one considers the concept of the ‘new man,’ fundamental to both the revolutionaries of the 1790s as well as twentieth-century fascism. See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 35.

revolution—itself viewed as a fulfillment of the palingenetic dynamic set in motion in 1789— distinctly millenarian qualities.139

Within the context of European fascism, the palingenetic myth, even if it was not referred to as such by contemporaries, was crucial to the formation of radical, right-wing, anti- parliamentary movements whose rhetoric, in the words of Stanley Payne, “emphasized above all the rebirth of the national spirit, culture, and society.”140 One of Griffin’s contributions to the study of fascism has been his combination of the concept of palingenesis with that of “populist ultra-nationalism,” a term used to describe those radical varieties of nationalism that “’go beyond’, and hence reject, anything compatible with liberal institutions or with the tradition of

Enlightenment humanism which underpins them.”141 The combination of these two concepts amounts to what Griffin has described as a “genus of political energy . . . whose mobilizing vision is that of the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.”142

While the populist nature of Vichy’s exclusionary vision of French society is certainly open to debate, the regime’s reliance upon an ultra-nationalist, to say nothing of palingenetic, discourse seems clear. Moreover, in the way that “ultra-nationalism” is used in Griffin’s analysis of European fascism, the term contains obvious resonance when placed beside the example of

Vichy’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction. Indeed, Griffin’s description of ultra- nationalism, though generic, provides as accurate a description of the Vichy regime’s sense of

139 For a discussion of the connections between the French and Russian Revolutions, as well as the ways in which the Bolsheviks viewed the latter as a logical extension of the former, see Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), Chapter 3, especially 64-72. 140 Payne, A History of Fascism, 5. 141 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 35. 142 Idem, 38. Emphasis in original.

the French ‘national community’ as any other. In The Nature of Fascism, Griffin writes that ultra-nationalism tends to be associated with a concept of the nation as a ‘higher’ racial, historical, spiritual or organic reality which embraces all the members of the ethical community who belong to it. Such a community is regarded by its protagonists as a natural order which can be contaminated by miscegenation and immigration, by the anarchic, unpatriotic mentality encouraged by liberal individualism, internationalist socialism, and by any number of ‘alien’ forces allegedly unleashed by ‘modern’ society, for example the rise of the ‘Masses’, the decay of moral values, the ‘levelling’ of society, cosmopolitanism, feminism, and consumerism.143

If, for some of the reasons outlined above, it is problematic to apply a generic concept of fascism to the case of Vichy—a judgement that Griffin himself has maintained144—this has not prevented him from including the regime amongst the ranks of what he has described as a

“palingenetic political community.”145 Drawing on Emilio Gentile’s work concerning the

‘sacralisation’ of twentieth-century mass politics, Griffin argues that in moments of systemic crisis a spontaneous ‘palingenetic political community’ can emerge. . . . [a key feature of which] is to provide a significant . . . basis for consensus of a different type than that recognized by the Enlightenment tradition, since it is essentially charismatic and hence supra-individual and anti-rational in nature.146

Of the various members of this palingenetic political community Griffin includes several key examples, ranging from the French and Soviet Revolutions, to German National Socialism

143 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 37. 144 Griffin has argued that the results of applying what he calls an “ideal type [of fascism] to comparative studies of inter-war regimes are fairly drastic,” since according to the usual criteria only two—German National Socialism and Italian Fascism—qualify. The word that Griffin uses to describe Vichy is “para-fascism.” See Roger Griffin, “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies,” in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence: Berghahn, 1996), 18-19. 145 See Roger Griffin, “The Palingenetic Political Community: Rethinking the Legitimation of Totalitarian Regimes in Inter-War Europe,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3.3 (2002): 24-43. 146 Griffin, “Palingenetic Political Community,” 29.

and Italian Fascism, to the Franco regime and even Maoist China; the Vichy regime, which took advantage of the “explosion of charismatic energy unleashed by an ageing Pétain on the formation of the . . . regime in 1940,” is among this group.147

2. Marshal Pétain: A Charismatic Leader

Much has been written in recent decades on the role of charisma in the maintenance of dictatorships, whether in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russia, or, to a lesser extent,

Francoist Spain.148 In his path-breaking 1987 study of the so-called “Hitler Myth,” Ian Kershaw demonstrated the degree to which Nazi rule depended not only on violent coercion and ideological fanaticism, but on a much more complex and subjective bond of personal devotion between Germans and their ‘Führer.’ Building on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority,149 Kershaw states in his introduction that

Charisma . . . is a quality determined by the subjective perceptions of the followers. The ‘followers’ of the leader are won over and their backing derived from personal loyalty, not abstract ‘rules’ or positions, sustained by great deeds, resounding successes, and notable achievements, which provide the repeated ‘proof’ of the leader’s ‘calling’. The bearer of charisma ‘seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his mission. If those to whom he feels sent do not recognize him, his claim collapses; if they recognize it, he is their master as long as he “proves” himself.’150

147 Idem, 35. 148 On the role of charismatic leadership in Spain, perhaps the most neglected of these four examples, see Stanley G. Payne, “Franco, the Spanish Falange and the Institutionalisation of Mission,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.2 (2006): 191-201. 149 For a brief outline of Weber’s theory of charismatic authority, see Richard Swedberg, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 31-33. 150 Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 8-9.

Once again, Vichy is rarely included within this interpretative framework. Certainly there are valid reasons for this: Pétain, at least at first glance, makes an unlikely candidate for the type of charismatic leadership typically associated with the fiery demagogues of the period. Described by one recent biographer as a “nearly senile octogenarian,”151 Pétain, who was eighty-four when he assumed power in 1940, certainly cut a very different figure than his Fascist or Nazi counterparts elsewhere on the continent. Yet as Roger Eatwell has argued, too narrow a definition of charismatic leadership, or even of charisma itself, can inhibit our understanding of the more general phenomenon he calls the “charismatisation”152 of interwar European politics.

“There were”, writes Eatwell, undoubtedly crucial differences—ideological, personality-wise, and so on—between the various interwar European ‘authoritarian’ and ‘fascist’ leaders. . . . [yet] whilst leaders like Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal lacked characteristics such as great speaking ability, a magnetic personal presence, or a clear utopian vision, there developed around them a cult of the exemplary, missionary leader, destined to re-forge national unity and lead the people into a new era—although in the case of the more conservative leaders, newness was more than tinged with the quest for the partial restoration of a Golden Age.153

In occupied France, Pétain’s assumption of leadership represented precisely the type of

“charismatisation” of domestic politics with which Eatwell is concerned. Indeed, especially in the context of the French defeat of 1940, Pétain’s role as a providential man-of-the-hour, or

“missionary leader” to use Eatwell’s phrase, can hardly be overemphasized.

During the Battle of France in the spring of 1940, French society experienced a profound physical and moral dislocation, with millions in the path of the Wehrmacht as it pushed through

151 Robert B. Bruce, Pétain: Verdun to Vichy (Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2008), xi. 152 Roger Eatwell, “New Styles of Dictatorship and Leadership in Interwar Europe,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.2 (2006): 133-134. 153 Eatwell, “New Styles of Dictatorship,” 134.

Belgium into northern France. The resulting internal mass migration, quickly dubbed ‘the

Exodus’ by contemporary observers, saw French roads swell with civilians en route to the relative safety of the south. In the millions—estimates range anywhere from six to eight—French men and women, no doubt encouraged by the collective memory of German barbarity in

Belgium and Flanders during the First World War (both real and imagined), simply abandoned their homes and began walking. For example, in the city of Lille (birthplace of Charles de

Gaulle), which found itself in the direct path of the German advance in the spring of 1940, the population dropped from approximately 200,000 before the invasion to a mere 20,000 in late-

May. The situation in the south was correspondingly extreme: the city of Bordeaux, to which the

Reynaud cabinet had relocated from the capital, saw its pre-war population of 300,000 double in a matter of days.154

As one historian has written, the sheer scale of the Exodus “transform[ed] the events of

1940 from a mere military defeat to something approaching the disintegration of an entire society.”155 Like other such episodes in the country’s unfolding disaster, contemporaries tended to see in the deteriorating situation not just a military debacle, but a social, political and moral one as well. Rumours of governmental incompetence and outright corruption and negligence spread quickly in the fevered atmosphere of the Exodus.156 Ordinary citizens, inflamed by conflicting reports of the Germans’ rapid advance, as well as their government’s seemingly feeble and ineffective response, exhibited a heightened contempt for established authority, whether local, regional, or national.157 In this sense, the Exodus provides a lens through which to

154 Julian Jackson, The Fall of France, 174-75. 155 Idem, 174. 156 For example, this chaotic experience forms the backdrop to the novel Suite française, written during this period by the French writer Irène Némirovsky, and published posthumously in France in 2004. See in particular the book’s first section, “Storm in June.” Irène Némirovsky, Suite française, trans. Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf, 2006. 157 Kedward, “Patriots and Patriotism,” 180-183.

reassess the growing dissatisfaction with the Third Republic and its institutions that had already grown quite pronounced by the late 1930s. Yet in an even more concrete way, the Exodus inaugurated a period in which, far beyond the sense of national humiliation occasioned by their country’s defeat at the hands of its traditional enemy, French men and women would feel the very real pinch of material privation and physical dislocation brought about by foreign occupation and an unfolding world war.

The upheavals of the Exodus and the resulting disdain for republican authority, coupled with the humiliation of defeat and occupation, provided the context in which Pétain’s image as a providential, and indeed fatherly, national saviour was established. Simply put, a power vacuum had been opened by the chaos of invasion and military defeat, in addition to Reynaud’s resignation from the government, and Pétain and his supporters intended to fill it. Of course, this was not accomplished by force, and nor was it premeditated: Pétain’s rise to the helm of the final legally-constituted government of the Third Republic was certainly not a coup d’état. Yet in terms of its rhetorical thrust, Pétain’s assumption of power imparted from the very beginning a clear sense that not just a new government but a new order was being put in place.

Pétain himself was central to this process. Almost immediately after it was founded the regime unleashed an elaborate propaganda campaign emphasizing Pétain’s status as an embodiment not just of the government, but of the nation itself. As such, the glorified representation of Pétain’s physical image became a ubiquitous feature of public life across

France, especially in the Unoccupied Zone. In keeping with the regime’s generalized, if comparatively moderate, obstruction of the traditional liberties of public speech and press freedom, all such reproductions of Pétain’s image were forced to undergo state censorship; so

too was any information published in public form pertaining to Pétain or his family.158 Moreover, the regime’s emphasis on Pétain’s physical image took on even more insidious forms, as he was made the object of a personality cult: indeed, he was portrayed as a sort of quasi-religious figure.

For example, the image of Marianne—the traditional female embodiment of the secular French

Republic—which for decades had adorned the walls of French schools and public buildings, was replaced after July 1940 with busts of Pétain himself. Even more explicitly, the regime encouraged Pétain’s legion of supporters to show their devotion in the “prayer to Le Maréchal,” that bizarre rewording of the Catholic “Our Father” that ended with the famous injunction, “and deliver us from evil, oh Marshal!”159

The cumulative message of the regime’s propaganda was that Pétain was the natural leader of the nation, not because of some abstract electoral process (more on ‘abstractions’ shortly), but because he could lay claim to an intimate, organic connection to the nation. This was a message underscored constantly by the regime’s many high-profile supporters, for example, by Pierre-Marie Gerlier, the Archbishop of Lyon, who in November 1940 claimed that

“Pétain is France, and today’s France is Pétain.”160 To be sure, French men and women were everywhere encouraged by the regime to come to a similar conclusion. Consider the following popular propaganda image, which showed Pétain as he was typically portrayed by the regime— official, stern, and lacking in ostentation. The caption asks, “Are you more French than him?”

158 Herbert R. Lottman, Pétain: Hero or Traitor, The Untold Story (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 254-255. See also Lottman’s description of Vichy’s extensive monitoring of citizens’ mail and telephone communications, Hero or Traitor, 255-256. 159 Eric Jennings, “’Reinventing Jeanne’: The Iconology of Joan of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-1944,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 714; quotation from Baruch, “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy,” 218. 160 Quoted in Baruch, “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy,” 218.

Fig. 1: Pétain, the natural leader of the nation.161

Pétain himself was at the very core, indeed was the core, of this much-publicized transformation of French politics after the defeat. The reason for this is on the one hand very simple: Pétain enjoyed a degree of credibility during this period that other politicians, discredited by their association with the chaos of the late Third Republic and the apparent degeneration of

French politics during the 1930s, as well as the disastrous handling of the German invasion, simply could not claim. The comments of Fernand Talandier, a member of the Independent

Radical Party, and a delegate to the Chamber of Deputies in the summer of 1940, provide a sense of the high esteem in which Pétain was held by many at the time: “To my mind . . . the purpose of giving full powers to Marshal Pétain was to enable him, thanks to the prestige he enjoyed, to

161 Image taken from Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski, eds. La Propagande sous Vichy, 1940-1944 (Nanterre: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, 1990), 238.

limit the disaster [of military defeat and occupation] and to undertake the restoration of the country ‘in dignity, in honor, and in the framework of republican legality’ . . .”162 Stanley

Hoffmann has described this posture, which was adopted by Pétain and his supporters immediately after the defeat, as a form of “crisis leadership,” a decisive feature of which was

Pétain’s apparent distance from the instability of prewar politics. By assuming the status of

“outsider” Pétain was able to portray himself as “a man who has not played the game,”163 and thus as the antithesis of the partisan chaos increasingly associated with democratic politics.

Pétain, the selfless patriarch of the nation, would thus be able to guide his unruly children out of their self-imposed disgrace.

This supposedly selfless ambition represented a much sought-after quality in the summer of 1940. Yet it is important to emphasize here that Pétain was not merely the representative of a stability and cohesion that would save the nation in its time of need, but rather the very embodiment of these virtues—indeed they were said to emanate from his very person. This is a theme that appeared time and again in the regime’s propaganda, and it began immediately after

Pétain’s assumption of power, prior even to the dissolution of the Third Republic in July 1940. In his very first address to the nation, on 17 June, 1940—just one day after forming a government—

Pétain spoke of his intention to seek an armistice with Nazi Germany. After praising the French

162 Quoted in Olivier Wieviorka, Orphans of the Republic, 101. Emphasis added. 163 Stanley Hoffmann, “Heroic Leadership: The Case of Modern France,” in Political Leadership in Industrialized Societies: Studies in Comparative Leadership, ed. Lewis J. Edinger (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), 113- 127; quotation from 127.

Army’s “magnificent resistance,” the new Prime Minister told the nation of his intention to “give to France the gift of my person to alleviate its misfortunes.”164

Fig. 2: “The Gift to the Country, June 1940.”165

The notion that Pétain’s assumption of power in June 1940 represented a gift to the nation would become a central component of Pétainist discourse. As such, it built on the most noteworthy aspects of Pétain’s personal history, in particular his role as the so-called ‘Hero of

Verdun’ and his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the French Army during the First

World War. Even as Prime Minister (then as “Head of the French State” under Vichy—the office of Prime Minister had been abolished by the regime) Pétain portrayed himself as a soldier first

164 Philipe Pétain, “Appel du 17 juin 1940,” in Discours aux Français: 17 juin 1940-20 août 1944, ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), 57. Unless otherwise specified, all subsequent references to the speeches of Pétain come from this volume. Henceforth, they will be cited as ‘Pétain, title of speech, page number.’ 165 Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski, eds., La Propagande sous Vichy, 123.

and foremost, ever the antithesis of the career politician. While it is known that this image had long been at odds with the truth—never more so than when Pétain found himself the recipient of a high-profile political appointment—it was as a defensive soldier that Pétain would often address the nation after the signing of the armistice. For example, in August 1941, just over a year into his reign as Head of State, Pétain concluded a long radio address in which he outlined his vision for the nation in the following terms:

I know, by vocation, what victory is; today, I see what defeat is. I have gathered the heritage of a wounded France. I have the duty to defend this heritage, to maintain your aspirations and your rights. In 1917, I ended the mutinies [of French infantry at the Chemin des Dames]. In 1940, I put an end to the rout. Today it is from yourselves that I want to save you. At my age, when making a gift of my person to my country, there is no longer any sacrifice which one would want to shirk. There is no other consideration than that of public wellbeing.166

Here, France’s larger national history is subsumed within a much more personalized account of Pétain as past-and-present national saviour, as well as the foundation of a reconstructed, and indeed a more authentic, France. Moreover, according to this logic it was

Pétain, and Pétain alone, who was capable of ameliorating the catastrophic repercussions of

France’s decline into moral degeneration and national humiliation because it was he that had come to its aid during the most trying period of its recent past. In this way a direct line was drawn from 1917 to June 1940, and onwards to the summer of 1941.

Yet Pétain’s claim to political legitimacy was based not only on historical precedent or past deeds, but also on his physical presence within France. For, according to the image shown above, Pétain came from deep, rural France to rebuild its morally and physically broken cities.

In this sense, Pétainist discourse posited not just a linear relationship between the past and the present, from the First World War to the Second, but a vertical one as well, from the very soil of

166 Pétain, “Message du 12 août 1941,” 172.

the nation, as it were, to its heroic leader. Pétain, in his many public statements, made much of the fact that he did not leave France when the country had been defeated by the Germans in

1940. For example, in his new year’s radio address of 1942, Pétain spoke of his “duty to label

‘deserters’ all those who, in the press as on the radio, in London as in Paris, engage in the contemptible task of sowing disunion . . .”167 Unwilling even to pronounce de Gaulle’s name,

Pétain’s oblique references to those “in London” nevertheless implied a denunciation of anti-

Vichy opponents across the English Channel, and even pro-Nazi (and Nazi-financed) collaborators in Paris, on the grounds that they, unlike Pétain, had deserted their compatriots.168

Similarly, a year-and-a-half later, as internal opposition to the regime became more pronounced, Pétain told the nation that “those responsible for your ills, the instigators of the war and the defeat, you know who they are. Linked to the causes of the disaster, they fled the consequences. . . . The rebel leaders have chosen emigration and a return to the past. I have chosen France and the future.”169 The following propaganda poster, for example, was meant to reassure the French public that “you have been neither sold out, nor betrayed, nor abandoned”:

167 Pétain, “Message du 1 janvier 1942,” 212. 168 Pétain’s radio address of 12 August, 1941, which contains the first veiled reference to the Resistance, charges the “radio of London” with contributing to the “disarray of spirits” in France. See Pétain, “Message du 12 août 1941,” 165. 169 Pétain, “Message du 4 avril 1943,” 299.

Fig. 3: “Follow me with confidence.”170

3. Making Sense of the Defeat

Another essential feature of Pétain’s charismatic authority was the perceived gap between the

Marshal’s supposedly upstanding conduct and the apparently less-than-savoury actions of those working under him. Here, again, comparisons can be made to the so-called “Hitler Myth,” which, as Kershaw has shown, depended on a divergence between the popular perception of

Hitler as a selfless public servant and the frequently venal actions of local Nazi Party functionaries. A very similar dynamic was at play in occupied France: in the words of one

170 http://chan.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/sdx-23b1-20090531-chan-pleade- 2/pl/toc.xsp?id=FRDAFANCH0098_72AJ_2_d0e7433&qid=sdx_q0&fmt=tab&idtoc=FRDAFANCH0098_72AJ_2 -pleadetoc&base=fa&n=19&ss=true&as=true&ai=standard|

supporter of the regime, “The people love the Marshal, they respect and admire him. When an injustice occurs, they say ‘I’ll write the Marshal’ or ‘Ah, if only the Marshal knew . . .’”171 It is thus an ironic fact that the German defeat of France in June 1940 elevated both Hitler and Pétain to the zenith of popularity in their respective countries—Hitler for his bold and seemingly miraculous reversal of Germany’s humiliating defeat in 1918; Pétain for the stabilizing and reassuring effect his leadership of the government had on his compatriots at the beginning of the

German occupation.172

The belief that Pétain stood for decency and transparency in the face of his subordinates’ treachery extended far beyond the bounds of the Marshal’s most loyal supporters; even some of the regime’s enemies acknowledged this fact. After more than a year of Pétain’s rule, the clandestine journal Vérités—which would soon rebrand itself Combat, one of the largest and most significant Resistance organs in the Unoccupied Zone—was still making a distinction between Pétain, who as late as August 1941 was being portrayed by the national media in an overwhelmingly positive light, and his functionaries, who were decidedly not.173 While Pierre

Cot, a former Minister under the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, and no friend of

Vichy, attributed the persistence of these views amongst the general population to Pétain’s

“cunning” rather than his virtue, he nonetheless conceded in November 1941 that the Marshal’s

171 Quoted in Roger Austin, “Propaganda and Public Opinion in Vichy France: The Department of Hérault, 1940- 1944,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 461. Compare the observation of a local Nazi Party functionary in Bavaria: “’Yes, if Hitler could do everything himself, some things would be different. But he can’t keep a watch on everything.’” Quoted in Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, 98. For a more detailed overview of this relationship, see Idem, 96-104. 172 For a description of the “unsurpassed heights” to which the German conquest of France had delivered Adolf Hitler’s public image, see Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’, 154-156; for Pétain’s analogous position, see Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 4- 8. 173 Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 8-9.

domestic popularity up to that point was reliant upon the apparent separation of the regime and its leader in the public eye.174

The immense personal prestige that Pétain enjoyed in the wake of the armistice was an essential aspect of the regime’s rhetoric of reconstruction; the former was conspicuously harnessed to the latter, and in the present context it is significant primarily for this reason. The appeal of this type of logic is perhaps best understood with reference to what Roger Griffin, in his analysis of the so-called palingenetic political community, calls a “generalised ‘sense-making crisis.’”175 The concept is easily applied to the case of Vichy. Disturbed by the humiliating reversal of national fortunes, as well as by the very real social and material disruptions brought about by the invasion and subsequent occupation, French society underwent a crisis of faith in its own governing institutions. At the very heart of this crisis lay a search for meaning, a desire, simply put, to ‘make sense’ of the recent disaster. This period of soul searching, as it was called in the previous chapter, has already been mentioned in passing. Yet if we look more closely at

Vichy’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction it should be even more apparent that in its public statements the regime, and in particular its leader, was responding to the fears and anxieties brought about by the country’s recent defeat. In this sense, occupied France, at least during the regime’s first two years in power, represents an example of what Griffin has described as a “community of belief . . . [that results from the] mass projection of longings for change onto a movement that offers a comprehensive diagnosis of the current crisis, and presents the revolution it has undertaken as a panacea to all its ills.”176

174 See Pierre Cot, “Morale in France During the War,” American Journal of Sociology 47.3 (1941): 439-451, especially 450. 175 Griffin, “Palingenetic Political Community,” 30. 176 Ibid.

It is for this very reason that the present study is so attentive to the public statements of

Pétain, the regime’s primary figurehead. For reasons analyzed above, this might appear to be a fruitless effort since, as is often assumed, Pétain was not as ‘charismatic,’ and hence not as effective a leader as Hitler or Mussolini. Yet in choosing to focus on the way in which Pétain presented his regime’s vision of national-moral reconstruction—that “panacea to all ills,” to use

Griffin’s phrase—the present analysis adopts an approach that is by no means foreign to scholars of European fascism and dictatorship. Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez’s recent work on the Franco dictatorship in Spain is especially instructive in this regard, since it puts forth such a lucid case for taking seriously the otherwise inconsistent or illogical statements made at the highest echelons of power in an authoritarian dictatorship. Speaking of Francoist rhetoric, Cazorla-

Sanchez has argued that

The words and the images invoked by the Caudillo’s [Franco’s] discourses . . . possessed a force that in a different context would have been absent, or even could have sounded ridiculous. What made the Caudillo’s words important to people was not what they said or how they were translated into action, but how they invoked the memories, fears and expectations of Spaniards. Franco’s words were, in a sense, also the story of the meaning of the dictatorship; they reflected both collective traumas and the deep cleavages of Spanish society.177

4. Pétainist Discourse: The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction

Throughout his time in power (June 1940 to August 1944), Pétain delivered more than one hundred public speeches, both in person and on national radio. Full of lofty goals and vague pronouncements, these speeches tell us little about the reality of Vichy’s National Revolution.

The reasons for this are rather straightforward. In his 1942 New Year’s address Pétain himself lamented the fact that the “National Revolution has not yet passed from the domain of principles

177 Antonio Cazorla-Sanchez, Franco: The Biography of the Myth (London: Routledge, 2013), 156.

into that of facts.”178 For a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this chapter—not least of which, the external constraints brought about by military defeat and foreign occupation—the

National Revolution was to remain for the entirety of Vichy’s existence exactly that—principal rather than fact.179

Yet Pétain’s public statements share at least one common theme: they are addressed first and foremost to a French audience, and it is for precisely this reason that they offer such a compelling window onto the regime’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction. In this sense,

Cazorla-Sanchez’s analysis of Francoist discourse offers a useful conceptual framework through which to view the Vichy regime’s discourse of renewal in the context of military defeat and foreign occupation. Simply put, Pétain’s speeches, like Franco’s, tell us little about the reality but much about the hopes that underpinned the regime’s vision of national-moral reconstruction; they show us not what the regime did, but what it hoped to do. As such, they represent a distilled version of the regime’s self-image. Finally, they represent a sort of intersection between the regime’s desires to affect comprehensive social change in the wake of the defeat of 1940, and its desire to live up to the expectations of French society.

Pétain spoke of Vichy first and foremost as a regime of national unity. Of course, in retrospect this claim appears rather vacuous given the fact that during its final two years Vichy presided over the most sustained and intense period of civil conflict France had experienced since the violent suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. The regime nonetheless viewed itself as an antidote to the disorder that had supposedly plagued the nation under the Third

Republic, and especially after the election of the Popular Front government in May 1936.

178 Pétain, “Message du 1 janvier 1942,” 213. 179 In the words of John Dixon, “The Vichy regime was an obvious failure. In four years it turned a nation of ‘Quarante Millions de Pétainistes’ into one which, to all intents and purposes, was torn about by a bloody civil war . . .” See Dixon, “Manipulators of Vichy Propaganda,” 48.

Whereas the Republic was said to represent individualism, egoism, chaos, and class struggle, among many other vices, Vichy, by contrast, represented the coming together of an organic

French “national community.”180 Perhaps the phrase that best encapsulates the regime’s unique definition of national cohesion is “social peace.” Though rarely used with any rigor—it is variously defined by Pétain as “the greatest benefit that a nation can know”, or “the union of

[Frenchmen’s] hearts”181—the concept was clearly used as a catch-all phrase to describe the various benefits that would accrue to the nation under Pétain’s leadership. These included, but were not limited to, a set of standard themes that Pétain outlined in the following terms: unite all Frenchmen through work; abolish everything that might lead to division, partisan strife and the opposition of classes; resolutely depart from the pre-eminence of individual interests over the general good; struggle against hoarding in its various forms, the hoarding of consciences, the hoarding of goods by the privileged.182

National unity had an external dimension as well in that social peace was said to derive from the fact that France had remained outside of the unfolding world war. Indeed, on New

Year’s Day, 1942, Pétain seemed almost to boast when he told a gathering of supporters that

“Today the war extends to five parts of the globe. The planet is in flames, but France remains outside of the conflict.”183 In this regard the regime demonstrated an almost complete disregard for reality—namely the fact that the country had not chosen to remain outside of the conflict at all, but had been defeated by (and was now actively collaborating with) a hostile foreign power.

Nonetheless, peace—or, more accurately, the absence of overt military conflict—was touted by the regime as the very foundation of its claim to moral and political legitimacy: the restoration of

180 This very Nazi of phrases appears in a speech Pétain delivered to the citizens of Haute-Savoie on 23 September, 1941 at Annecy. Pétain, “Discours du 23 septembre 1941,” 190. 181 Pétain, “Discours du 19 février 1942,” 227-228. 182 Idem, 228. 183 Pétain, “Message du 1 janvier 1942,” 211.

a corrupted France while most of Europe sinks into the abyss of global war. In the mouth of the dictator, impotence thus becomes virtue, defeat is presented as restraint, and subjugation is seized as opportunity.

Another major feature of the regime’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction was the purging of abstractions from public life. To understand the way in which this concept was employed by the regime one must pay close attention to its opposite, that of realism. As Debbie

Lackerstein has shown, the much-publicized “return to the real” was a cornerstone of Vichy’s vision of the future.184 For Pétain, the dangers of abstraction, linked always to the excesses of parliamentary democracy in general and the Republic in particular, were to be found chiefly in the nation’s past adherence to what he dismissively called “theoretical liberty . . . against the general interest and independence of the nation.”185 Drawing once again on the Maurrasian dichotomy between an age-old, traditionalist pays réel that pre-dated the French Revolution, and a novel, decadent and corrupt pays légal whose illegitimate reign began in 1789, Pétain wasted few opportunities to denounce the apparent inauthenticity of public life prior to the war. In the eyes of the regime, there was a substantial difference between a republican system, based as it was on universal—and thus abstract and illegitimate—principals of individual liberty and popular sovereignty, and Vichy, which, according to Pétainist discourse, was committed to the reconstruction of the true France. Thus on 10 October, 1940, in a long speech to the nation in which he outlined his vision for a “new order,” Pétain proclaimed that his regime would “no

184 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 135-136. 185 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 150.

longer be based on the false idea of the natural equality of men but on the necessary equality of

‘opportunities’ given to all Frenchmen to prove their aptitude to ‘serve.’”186

Pétain’s emphasis on the gap between abstraction and realism spoke to Vichy’s belief that national unity or social peace could only be achieved by the imposition of what he called, in a speech on 8 July, 1941, “an organic reorganization of French society.”187 Speaking to the inaugural meeting of the National Council, the commission charged with the creation of a new constitution, Pétain described what he meant by organic reorganization in terms that once again stressed the necessity of penetrating the many layers of inauthenticity and abstraction that had characterized republican democracy. “The solution [to the nation’s problems],” argued Pétain,

“consists in returning the citizen, perched on his rights, to familial, professional, communal, provincial and national reality.”188 Whereas the fiction of universal rights had served only to undermine the national community, Vichy’s emphasis on reality would be an important step towards its restoration. In the same speech, Pétain outlined his vision of an organic nation in the following terms:

A people is a hierarchy of families, of professions, of communes, of administrative responsibilities, of spiritual families, articulated and federated to form a homeland animated by a movement, by an élan, by an ideal . . . to produce at every echelon a hierarchy of men who are selected by their services rendered to the community, of which a few advise, a few command, and at the summit a leader that governs.189

186 Pétain, “Message du 10 octobre 1940,” 89. In the same speech Pétain made his contempt for republican democracy plain when he dismissed the electoral process as a sham: “Voting every four years, you get the impression of being free citizens of a free state.” Idem, 86. For an overview of Maurrasian thought, see Kedward, “True France,” 119-121. 187 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 153. 188 Idem, 150. 189 Ibid.

According to Pétain, the submission to an organic social hierarchy along the lines outlined above would result in an attenuation of the class conflicts—the very antithesis of social peace—that had gripped France in the interwar years since it would bring about a harmonization of the French body politic. This was a cardinal feature of the regime’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction, yet, once again, it is the physical presence of the dictator that would (supposedly) transform this rhetoric into reality. Consider, for example, an image already discussed in this chapter (Fig. 2), in which the dictator’s likeness is accompanied by the caption, “the gift to the country, June 1940.” On the right side of the image lies modern, industrial France in ruins, still smouldering from its defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, while on the left we see a rural, agricultural France—healthy, prosperous, and untarnished by the defeat. Pétain, who stands at the center of the image, is treated as the very conduit of reconstruction; he is, figuratively if not literally, the portal through which the nation must pass on its way to recovery. In sum, Petain’s figure itself embodies the concept of reconstruction.

Similarly, much of the regime’s visual propaganda presented the National Revolution as an epoch of positive transformation: the Third Republic, which had nurtured the seeds of degeneration first planted in 1789, had brought the nation to the brink of moral and political ruin; it was now time for Vichy to reverse this decades-long trend by reconstructing France on a solid foundation based on the natural order of work, family, and fatherland (as opposed to the degenerate influences engendered by the Republic, and portrayed below):

Fig. 4: The National Revolution. “Work, Family, Fatherland.”190

This is one of the reasons why so much emphasis was placed on the workplace, for example, one of the few areas where the regime’s desire for comprehensive social transformation was articulated—if never fully implemented—in a consistent way.191 Simply put, the regime viewed the workplace as a microcosm of French society. To this end, in October 1941, it promulgated the Charte du travail, or Labour Charter, which was inspired by Fascist Italy’s 1927

Carta di Lavoro and emphasized the organization of society according to “professional families.” While this document engendered its fair share of controversy, even amongst the regime’s leadership,192 this was no matter for Pétain: as he told a gathering of citizens at Annecy,

190 http://www.histoire-fr.com/troisieme_republique_seconde_guerre_mondiale_3.htm 191 For one example of Vichy’s failure in this area, see Steven Zdatny, “Coiffeurs in Vichy France: Artisans and the ‘National Revolution,’” Contemporary European History 5.3 (1996): 371-399. Henceforth cited as, “Artisans and the ‘National Revolution.’” 192 Zdatny, “Artisans and the ‘National Revolution,’” 388.

in Haute-Savoie, the Labour Charter “will have the effect of maintaining harmony among workers.”193

The term used to describe this state of harmony was corporatism.194 In the context of

Vichy’s National Revolution and the “return to the real,” this doctrine—according to Peter

Davies, one of the only genuinely “fascist” ideas promoted by the regime195—exerted a significant influence over the regime’s leadership because in addition to the supposed economic benefits (namely more efficient and higher levels of production), it appealed to the notion of an organic, French national community. As Debbie Lackerstein has written, “[t]he right saw corporatism as a non-materialistic form of economic organization that was based on real communities, the collectivist answer to capitalism, Communism and decadence in general.”196 In this sense, Pétain viewed corporatism, because of its apparent ability to harmonize class interests, as an indigenous French alternative—this was of course false—to the prevailing political and economic models of the day. As he mused in a much-reproduced speech of September 1940,

. . . the new social organization will not be “Liberalism” since it will not hesitate to combat the violence that lurks behind certain apparent freedoms, and to look at certain legal constraints for the indispensable instrument of liberation. It will not be “Communism” since it will respect, in large measure, individual liberty and it will retain the powerful driving force of individual profit. It will not be “Capitalism” since it will bring to an end the reign of the economy and its immoral autonomy, and it will subordinate the factor of money, and that of labour, to humanity. . . . I want to emphasize, in closing, that this conception of social life is purely and profoundly French. Liberalism, capitalism, collectivism are in France foreign products, imports that France itself quite naturally rejects.197

193 Pétain, “Discours du 23 septembre 1941,” 190. 194 Defined by one scholar as “a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organized into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically ordered and differentiated categories . . .” Philippe Schmitter quoted in Payne, A History Of Fascism, 38-39. 195 Davies, France and the Second World War, 25. 196 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 74. 197 Philippe Pétain, “La politique sociale de l’avenir,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 septembre 1940.

That its blueprint for national-moral reconstruction was thought to be innately, organically, quintessentially French (even if this was not the case) was yet another cardinal feature of the regime’s rhetoric. In a major early speech on 11 October, 1940, which includes one of the first references to his regime’s desire to “reconstruct France” in the wake of the country’s defeat, Pétain was emphatic on this point. “The new order,” he insisted, “cannot be a servile imitation of foreign experiments . . . [since] each people must conceive a regime adapted to its climate and its genius.” Hence, the new order would be described as “a French necessity.”198

According to Pétain, France was at its very core an agricultural society.199 This assumption was a typical and time-honored feature of right-wing nationalist thought in France

(not to mention amongst German Nazis and Italian Fascists), which since the nineteenth century had maintained that the essence of the true nation, the so-called pays réel, lay in its historical connection to the soil.200 The Vichy regime built on this traditional parochialism by making agricultural labour, and the peasantry more generally, into a core feature of its vision of national- moral reconstruction. For example, as early as December 1940, the regime had put in place a so- called “Peasant Charter” which, like the Labour Charter described above, it claimed would mitigate class antagonisms by restoring agricultural labourers to their rightful place in the French economy. But while there were obvious practical reasons for the privileging of agricultural production—in particular the food shortages brought about by the occupation and the war—the emphasis on the peasantry essentially amounted to a criticism of modern, urban (and by

198 Pétain, Message du 10 octobre 1940,” 88. 199 Davies, France and the Second World War, 25. 200 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 139.

implication, republican) France on cultural as much as economic grounds.201 Speaking to a gathering of regional prefects in February 1942, Pétain insisted that

The French peasantry has ensured the durability of the country through the vicissitudes of history. [Its] traditions have enabled France in the past to overcome the hardest tests and find in the immutable strength of the fields the courage to live and the cause for hope. But the peasantry is at once the guarantor of, and dependent on, the social equilibrium of the country, and the peasants can only escape those misfortunes that affect the country if their brothers in the cities submit to the difficulties of the present.202

This lionization of the peasantry was once again connected to the regime’s emphasis on realism. It was claimed, for example, that a modern, urban lifestyle constituted a breeding ground for decadence, a concept, as was discussed in the previous chapter, that encompassed a wide array of social issues ranging from the specific (demographic decline) to the general

(individualism). For the regime, one obvious way to combat decadence was through the promotion of what Chris Pearson has called a policy of “back-to-the-landism.”203 This was accompanied on the one hand by concrete governmental initiatives—for example, the law of

August 1940 in which land left untended for at least two years in the Unoccupied Zone was to be seized by the state and redistributed to small farmers.204 Yet once again, the bulk of the regime’s efforts at emphasizing the nation’s supposedly innate connection to the land took the form of a generalized and implicit cultural critique of republican France. For example, it was often said by the regime’s propaganda that “the land, it does not lie.” Indeed this message accompanied a popular piece of visual propaganda, pictured below.

201 Chris Pearson, Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 22-25. 202 Pétain, “Discours du 19 février 1942,” 226. 203 Pearson, Scarred Landscapes, 18-19. 204 Idem, 24.

Fig. 5: “The earth, it does not lie.”205

In some ways, this image says all there is to say about Vichy’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction; it is Pétainist discourse in visual form. At the centre of the image of course is the

Marshal himself, his hand outstretched in a gesture of greeting and solidarity with that timeless embodiment of authentic France, the peasant. In the background, just over the Marshal’s shoulders, we see members of either the Compagnons de France or the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, the two main regime-sanctioned youth movements whose membership bloomed in the

Unoccupied Zone after the summer of 1940. Finally, on the horizon lies the ideal rural commune: quiet, orderly, and with a church at its center. The peasantry and the youth, the fields and the village—each in their own way and in their rightful place help to transform, indeed to

205 Laurent Gervereau and Denis Peschanski, eds., La Propagande sous Vichy, 115.

regenerate, the nation through hard physical work and patriotic zeal. It is the very antithesis of the chaos and vice traditionally associated with the prewar Republic by its critics.

5. Negating the Republic: Reconstruction as Historical Revisionism

Reconstruction, in its various forms, is rarely straightforward. Usually it involves a complex and highly selective process of remembering and forgetting. We reconstruct those aspects of the past—be they physical or merely figurative—that we wish to retain in the present, and we consign to oblivion those aspects which fail to conform to our present needs or concerns.206 The

Vichy regime’s project of national-moral reconstruction was no different in this regard. Quite simply, the regime wished to preserve certain appropriate or idealized aspects of the nation’s past, and to forget or even to erase many of those aspects that contradicted its very particular conception of French national identity. In this sense, the regime’s rhetoric advanced a project of historical revisionism that attempted to meet the needs of national-moral reconstruction.

Of course, the concept of historical revisionism is not utilized here in the common, academic sense, though it should be noted that the regime was by no means unaware of the role of formal education in the political indoctrination of French youth, for example.207 Rather, like the concept of reconstruction itself, which has been used throughout this study to refer more to an abstract notion of moral renewal than to any specific instance of physical rebuilding, in the present context historical revisionism refers to the way in which the Vichy regime contested certain basic elements of the nation’s past after the defeat of June 1940. For if, as Robert Paxton has written, the defeat brought about a situation in which French “[c]onservatives had the power

206 Viejo-Rose, Reconstructing Spain, 4-5. 207 See, for example, Eric Jennings, “’Reinventing Jeanne’,” 711-734.

that universal suffrage had denied them,”208 it is also true that the defeat empowered a certain interpretation of French history. Philippe Burrin, for example, has argued that of all the nation’s modern, post-revolutionary political regimes, Vichy constitutes “the memory regime par excellence” because of its obsessive need to “tailor the future to the pattern of the past.”209

Further, Burrin has described Vichy as a deliberate, persistent, and futile effort to organize reality around . . . [the memory of a pre- republican France], to reconstruct a national spirit in which the memory of a mythologized past would shape the perception of the present to create a unified way of feeling, thinking, and acting.210

Indeed, while supporters of the regime often maintained that its orientation was progressive, technocratic, bipartisan, and apolitical, it was in fact reactionary in the strictest sense of the word: it looked to a pre-republican and pre-revolutionary past in order to define its specific vision of the future. This was not merely score-settling; it was a crucial component of the regime’s attempt to reconstruct the nation in the wake of national disaster, a fact Pétain alluded to in September 1941 when he told the citizens of Haute-Savoie that “the confession of our weaknesses of yesterday will cause us to work towards our new destiny.”211

This revisionist orientation was never more apparent than when Pétain spoke of the country’s defeat by Nazi Germany. Pétain repeatedly diagnosed the causes of the defeat in terms that left little doubt as to who should ultimately bear the blame for the nation’s humiliation— namely, the leaders of the Third Republic. This is precisely what guided the conduct of the Riom

Trial, for example—so-named for its location in Riom, a town not far from Vichy—the regime’s

208 Paxton, Vichy France, 138. 209 Philippe Burrin, “Vichy,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman under the direction of Pierre Nora, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 182. 210 Idem, 183. 211 Pétain, “Discours du 23 septembre 1941,” 190.

attempt to legally punish those republican leaders deemed responsible for the French defeat

(Léon Blum, Edouard Daladier, General Maurice Gamelin, among others). For example, on 16

October, 1941, Pétain delivered a speech on national radio in which he disclosed his regime’s intentions to legally prosecute these former republican officials (the trial did not commence until

February 1942): “A country that feels betrayed is entitled to the truth, the whole truth,” explained

Pétain.

Therefore, the sentence which will close the Riom trial must be delivered in plain sight. It will strike not only at the people, but also at the methods and morals of the former regime. It will be without appeal. It will no longer be discussed. It will mark the end to one of the most painful periods in the life of France.212

Indeed, the belief that the Republic was to blame for the country’s military defeat was one of the most consistent features of Pétain’s public statements, and in this sense the Vichy regime’s interpretation of the past was highly teleological. According to Pétain, the Republic was always marching towards the brink; its moral degradation—which in the dictator’s speeches takes on the impression of a self-evident fact—conditioned its response to both external and internal threats, thus rendering the country’s military defeat inevitable. For example, in July

1940, Pétain claimed that the “electoral, representative, majoritarian, parliamentarian regime [all bad words in the mouth of a dictator!] that was just destroyed by the defeat was in fact condemned long ago by general evolution . . .”213

Virtually anything connected to the Republic was thought to lead inexorably to the disaster of military defeat since the Republic, by its very nature, according to Pétain, was corrupt. As early as 20 June, 1940 (even before the armistice had been signed), Pétain claimed

212 Pétain, “Allocution du 16 octobre 1941,” 202. 213 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 148.

that the defeat was inevitable because before the war “the spirit of enjoyment [had] outweighed that of sacrifice.”214 On 10 October, Pétain told the nation that the “defeat has numerous causes, but not all are of a technical nature; the disaster, in reality, is a reflection on a military plain, of the weaknesses and defects of the former political regime.”215 In the same speech he claimed that it was the Republic’s “touchy nationalism and . . . unregulated pacifism, composed of ignorance and feebleness” that had led to war with Nazi Germany.216 In sum, the defeat was presented as a natural outcome of “the faults, the errors, the illusions, the egotism, and the inabilities accumulated” by the nation under a republican system.217 Indeed, the “misfortunes of the nation” were presented as a logical by-product of the fact that under the Republic excessive individualism, the false conception of liberty, and the decline of national consciousness [had] too often replaced the respect for duty with the demand for rights. . . . The home, the nation, the family, religion were too often ignored or disregarded. Social life had become an open struggle between interests drawn selfishly against each other.218

If it was not military defeat it was a more general societal malaise, since the Republic had, according to Pétain, encouraged “competition for advancement in the trades, in the professions, in the government, without a clear idea of the need for increased responsibility, [all of which were] proof of a decaying society or the symptom of a sick state.”219 The Vichy regime, of course, represented the antithesis of this nightmarish situation because, as Pétain so often claimed, it embodied the best parts of the nation’s heritage. In one of the longer—though extremely vague—references to the National Revolution to be found in Pétain’s wartime

214 Pétain, “Appel du 20 juin 1940,” 60. 215 Pétain, “Message du 10 octobre 1940,” 86. 216 Idem, 87. 217 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 151. 218 Pétain, “Message du 14 octobre 1941,” 197. 219 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 153.

speeches, the dictator asks rhetorically, “What is the National Revolution?” His answer gives the impression of a people liberating itself from the most negative aspects of its national history:

The National Revolution signifies the will to be reborn, affirmed suddenly from the depth of our being, in a day of terror and of remorse; it marks the ardent resolution to reassemble all the elements of the past and the present that are healthy and of goodwill, to make a strong state, to reconstruct the national soul, dissolved by the discord of parties, and render it acutely aware of the many privileged generations of our history . . .220

In many ways, Vichy’s rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction amounted to an intervention in the long-simmering polemic over the nation’s past, and this is especially true as regards the legacy of the French Revolution. Just as generations of committed republicans had looked to 1789 as the fountainhead of national consciousness in France, members of the right— whether of the royalist, conservative, or radical bent—had long taken the opposite view: that

1789 had witnessed the very beginning of the nation’s degeneration and slow decline.

Throughout the nineteenth century, significant portions of the French right had been openly hostile to the nation’s revolutionary heritage. The Revolution was seen as an inversion of the natural order; it had successfully overthrown the country’s time-honored method of political, religious, and social organization, setting in motion a period of chaos and instability. In 1941,

Pétain described this legacy in the following terms: “[i]n the last one hundred fifty years France has been governed successively by fifteen different constitutional regimes. They are separated, one could even say they are begotten, by either revolutions or defeats.”221 One can assume these were not considered positive traits.

Indeed, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the Revolution was viewed by the regime as the nation’s ‘original sin,’ as an illness whose ever-reverberating symptoms

220 Idem, 151. 221 Pétain, “Discours du 8 juillet 1941,” 148.

Vichy sought to eradicate by way of national-moral reconstruction after June 1940. This legacy had been an object of conflict long before the establishment of the Vichy regime. In the twentieth century alone the periodic outbreak of political and social conflict in France had often revolved around the highly contested legacy of the Revolution. By the eve of the Second World War, this history—and historiography—was thus already highly politicized.222 As with French politics in general, which during the interwar period had undergone a process of radicalization and polarization, the collective memory of 1789 had undergone a similar process of revision, with right- and left-wing intellectuals advancing their own highly partisan interpretations of that event and its consequences.223

Under Vichy the process of historical revision, transformed as it was by the defeat from mere posturing to governing and legislating, was directed towards the construction of new historical memories that were intended to replace republican symbolism. For example, between

1940 and 1942, July 14th, which under the Republic had been a national day of celebration in honour of the storming of the Bastille prison in 1789, as well as the Fête de la Fédération of

1790, became an official day of mourning for the nation’s fallen soldiers. Though July 14th—or

Bastille Day as it is known in the English-speaking world—remained in this sense a national holiday, its revolutionary, not to mention celebratory, character was virtually erased by the regime.224 Moreover, the traditional celebration of ‘the people’ was replaced by an emphasis on

Pétain’s singular role as national leader. In this way the regime’s treatment of July 14th further

222 See Joan Tumblety, “’Civil Wars of the Mind’: The Commemoration of the 1789 Revolution in the Parisian Press of the Radical Right, 1939,” European History Quarterly 30.3 (2000): 389-429. 223 Tumblety, “’Civil Wars of the Mind’”, 389-392. 224 Ethan Katz, “Memory at the Front: The struggle over revolutionary commemoration in Occupied France, 1940- 1944,” Journal of European Studies 35.2 (2005): 155. According to Katz, 14 July, 1942 represented a significant turning point in the erosion of public support for the regime as “huge numbers of French people responded to appeals from the Resistance and demonstrated in the streets in celebration of the revolutionary celebration.” Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 155.

eroded the classical republicanism of the prewar regime.225 In its place, Vichy emphasized the pre-existing ‘Joan of Arc Day’ (May 10) as the preeminent day of national celebration.226 This choice was far from arbitrary, as Joan had long been a malleable symbol of France’s national

Catholic (and pre-revolutionary) identity, one often championed by the conservative right. Under

Vichy in particular Joan was to become a symbol of national unity and reconstruction along the lines outlined by Pétain, as well as a significant feature of the cult of personality that accompanied the dictator’s exercise of political authority.227

Vichy’s negationist view of 1789 took the form of various symbolic attacks against the nation’s republican traditions. Indeed, one of the first things that Pétain did after the Vichy regime was founded in July 1940—in addition to legally dissolving the Republic, as was discussed in the previous chapter—was replace the revolutionary-era motto of the Third

Republic, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité,’ with the decidedly more conservative ‘Travail, famille, patrie’ (or ‘work, family, homeland’). While the work-family-homeland triptych recalled

Pétain’s comments on the necessity of reorganizing French society along what he thought of as organic and hierarchical lines, it also represented a direct repudiation of the republican emphasis on individual rights, which were viewed by the regime, predictably, as mere abstractions.228

Similarly, the ‘Marseillaise,’ the revolutionary hymn dedicated to the defense of the Republic against the forces of tyranny from across the Rhine—and adopted as the country’s national anthem under the Third Republic—was replaced with ‘Maréchal, nous voilà,’ a song extolling the virtues of serving Marshal Petain, now the sole embodiment of the nation: “Marshall, we are here before you, the saviour of France, we swear, we your men, to serve you and follow your

225 Idem, 156. 226 Jennings, “’Reinventing Jeanne,’” 714. 227 Eric T. Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), 115-126. 228 Shields, The Extreme Right, 16-17.

footsteps . . . you have given us hope . . . our fatherland will be born again . . .”229 To be sure, the regime went even further in its attack on the nation’s revolutionary heritage when, in 1941, it replaced one of the quintessential legal-philosophical innovations of the Revolution—the

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen—with what it called the “Principles of the

Community.” Consisting of sixteen different clauses, the “Principles” represented another step in the regime’s so-called return to reality. For example, principle number one claimed that “Nature bestows upon man his fundamental rights, but these are granted only by the communities around him: the family by which he is raised, the profession by which he earns his living, the nation by which he is protected.”230

While the regime’s attacks on established republican political and social institutions were often symbolic, some measure of their significance was provided by the reaction of the

Resistance as the occupation progressed. The following chapter looks at how France’s revolutionary and republican heritage, so embattled throughout the years 1940-1944, became a flashpoint in the struggle between the regime and the various organizations that made up the organized Resistance to Vichy (and German) rule over the proper form of national-moral reconstruction in France.

229 “Maréchal, nous voilà” quoted in Brian Murdoch, Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular lyrics of two world wars (London: Routledge, 1990), 109. 230 Quoted in Shields, The Extreme Right, 17-18.

CHAPTER 3. MOBILIZING HISTORY: THE RESISTANCE, REVOLUTIONARY MEMORY, AND THE ANTI-VICHY RHETORIC OF NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION

1. The Nature of the Resistance in Occupied France

On 12 August, 1941, Marshal Pétain gave a speech on national radio in which he famously warned of an “ill wind” blowing through France. The remark is generally considered one of the first public references on the part of the regime to the resistance of French men and women to the

Nazi occupation and its main domestic collaborators, the Vichy regime.231 To be sure, opposition to Vichy, especially its policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany, was nothing new. Charles de

Gaulle’s “Appeal” of 18 June, 1940, in which the General pledged to preserve “the flame of

French resistance,”232 was just one—though retrospectively the most famous233—demonstration of the largely scattered and inchoate opposition to the German occupation after the summer of

1940. It took considerable time for the first spontaneous acts of armed resistance, perhaps more accurately described as ‘sabotage,’ to assume the proportion of what the clandestine Resistance press would eventually come to refer to collectively (if somewhat inaccurately) as the

231 Shields, The Extreme Right, 29; for a transcript of the speech itself, see Pétain, “Message du 12 août 1941,” 164- 172. 232 De Gaulle quoted in Olivier Wieviorka, “France,” in Bob Moore, ed., Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 125. 233 The word retrospective should be emphasized here. In an excellent article on General de Gaulle’s legacy in France, Julian Jackson points out that many early resisters resented the assumption made by de Gaulle and his supporters that resistance to Vichy began with the General’s speech of 18 June. As Jackson writes, “Most resistors had acted quite independently of de Gaulle—if indeed they heard his speech at all.” See Jackson, “General de Gaulle and His Enemies: Anti-Gaullism in France Since 1940,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999): 45- 46.

“insurrection nationale.”234 A first, critical step in this direction came in June 1941, when, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, French communists joined the struggle against the occupation. Even more relevant to ordinary French men and women was the institution of the Service du travail obligatoire in June 1942, as well as the German seizure of the hitherto Unoccupied Zone following the Allied invasion of North Africa in November of the same year. Few developments illustrated so clearly the uneven nature of Franco-German

‘cooperation,’ and for this reason both were instrumental in widening the scope of active resistance to both German and Vichy rule.235

Nonetheless, scholarship on the Resistance often emphasizes the fact that it was, at least initially, a minority phenomenon. While an increasingly large portion of French citizens no doubt felt some sense of dissatisfaction with the Vichy regime, especially during the last two years of its existence, as state repression grew increasingly pronounced, this did not mean that large numbers of men or women left their work, homes or families to go underground.236 In recent decades, some historians have argued that what we now refer to as ‘the Resistance’ was not a homogenous, or even a coherent, phenomenon at all, but rather a loose assembly of different social and political movements and attitudes, such that it can sometimes seem more

234 For example, this phrase appears in the pages of Les Cahiers politiques, a journal produced by the Free French in London. See 07-1943, “Pour une Nouvelle Révolution Française, ” Les Cahiers politiques (No 2). 235 Walter Lipgens, “Ideas of the French Resistance on the Postwar International Order,” in Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union, 1939-1945 ed. Walter Lipgens (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 268-269. For a discussion of the communists’ role in the French Resistance, see Lynne Taylor, “The Parti Communiste Français and the French resistance in the Second World War,” in Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939-1948, ed. Tony Judt (London: Routledge, 1989), 53-76. 236 Olivier Wieviorka points out that as late as 1994, the number of officially recognized veterans of the French Resistance did not exceed 270,000 individuals. See Wieviorka, “France,” 125. See also the classic article by Henri Michel, “The Psychology of the French Resistor,” Journal of Contemporary History 5.3 (1970): 159-175. More recent work on the marginal nature of the Resistance includes Robert Gildea, “Resistance, Reprisal and Community in Occupied France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 163-185, and H.R. Kedward, “Mapping the Resistance: An Essay on Roots and Routes,” Modern & Contemporary France 2.4 (2012): 491-503, especially 493. For a discussion of the many methodological difficulties, including but not limited to the issue of marginality, facing the potential historian of the Resistance, see Jonathan H. King, “Emmanuel d’Astier and the Nature of the French Resistance,” Journal of Contemporary History 8.4 (1973): 25-31.

accurate to speak of individual ‘resisters’ rather than ‘the Resistance’ as a whole.237 In his excellent history of the period, for example, Julian Jackson argues that there may have been calls to resist Vichy and the Germans, but the “word [resistance] itself had no particular . . . resonance.”238 While even a cursory glance at the Resistance press of the period shows this to be false, Jackson’s point, like the writers mentioned above, is to show that the Resistance was a largely makeshift phenomenon, one that had virtually a different meaning for each person who took part in it.239

There were at least three main organizations active in each of the zones of occupation as of November 1942, and innumerable local ones as well.240 In the north, these included, but were not limited to, Libération-Nord, whose composition was primarily socialist; the Organisation civile et militaire, made up of many former government and military officials; and the Front

National, an outgrowth of the Communist Party. In the south, there was Combat, which included socialists, republicans, and many left-wing Catholics; Libération-Sud, which was predominantly socialist; and Franc-Tireur, comprised of a mix of socialists and republicans, in addition to various communist-affiliated organizations. These boundaries were not airtight, but they help to differentiate between what is an otherwise very chaotic phenomenon. Moreover, as even this very brief outline shows, the Resistance occupied a sizeable portion of the political spectrum in

France, and for this reason it can sometimes be difficult to speak of common political goals.241

237 See Peter Davies, France and the Second World War, 37; Kedward, “Mapping the Resistance,” 493; Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 159. 238 Jackson, The Dark Years, 385. 239 Idem, 385-386. 240 Lipgens, “Ideas of the French Resistance on the Postwar International Order,” 271. 241 Idem, 271-272.

While this is no doubt an important consideration, one that in the last several decades has helped to swing the pendulum away from a “certain Resistance hagiography,”242 it might also tend to obscure some essential features of the armed opposition to Vichy and the German occupation. In particular, this chapter looks at the ways in which the various movements of the

Resistance, in spite of their political and social heterogeneity, enunciated a remarkably consistent rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction—one, moreover, that developed for the most part in opposition to that put forth by the Vichy regime, as analyzed in the previous chapter. While the boundary between Vichy and the Resistance was never absolute,243 it is nonetheless true that the regime’s vision of a morally reconstructed France represented a significant point of departure for much, if not most, of the clandestine movements that made up the wartime Resistance in occupied France. Just as Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime gave voice to a very specific interpretation of national-moral reconstruction after June 1940, so too did the Resistance elaborate its own, anti-Vichy and anti-Nazi concept of national renewal. This was especially true in the Unoccupied Zone, where, as Richard Kuisel has shown, Vichy’s attempt at comprehensive social transformation under the banner of the National Revolution prompted the Resistance to reflect on the future as well.244

A remarkable feature of the wartime Resistance was the fact that inherent ideological differences were to a large extent subordinated to the different movements’ shared primary aim—first and foremost, the liberation of French territory from German military occupation.245

As was stated in the 1944 charter of the Conseil National de la Résistance, the body charged with unifying the various organizations fighting Vichy and the Germans towards the end of the war,

242 King, “Emmanuel d’Astier and the Nature of the French Resistance,” 28-29. 243 Shennan, Rethinking France, 37. 244 Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 157-164. 245 Stephen Hawes, “The individual and the resistance community in France,” in Resistance in Europe, 1939-1945, ed. Stephen Hawes and Ralph White (London: Penguin, 1976), 122.

the Resistance remains “United in [its] goals, united in how to achieve them—the rapid

Liberation of [French] territory . . .”246 Yet beyond the military overthrow of the German occupation, the Resistance invested a substantial amount of energy contesting the Vichy regime’s views of reconstruction, as well as formulating its own. Like Vichy, the Resistance used this term to refer to the moral, as much as the physical, rebuilding of the nation in the wake of the defeat and occupation.

This chapter seeks to describe the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction as it was developed by the wartime Resistance. In some ways this is a difficult undertaking since there was no single, unifying source of leadership for the Resistance. With the exception of de Gaulle, whose status as leader was by no means uncontested,247 there was no one public figurehead, à la

Pétain, who could claim to speak unanimously for the Resistance. As a result, many of the sources utilized for this chapter come from what is often referred to as the clandestine Resistance press. The emphasis placed on the production, on a semi-regular basis,248 of political propaganda, in particular illegally-produced, anonymously-signed broadsheets constitutes another remarkable feature of the wartime Resistance. Indeed, there were few organizations that did not utilize this form of political action under the occupation—a reflection, no doubt, of the incredibly unbalanced dynamics governing the armed conflict between the Resistance, on the one hand, and the seemingly limitless resources of the French and especially German states, on the other. Moreover, the clandestine press served an invaluable function as a tool of recruitment.

246 “Programme du C.N.R.,” in Les Idées Politiques et Sociales de la Résistance: Documents Clandestins, 1940- 1944, ed. Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 215-216. 247 See Jackson, “Anti-Gaullism in France,” passim. 248 Producing an illegal journal was a dangerous and unpredictable business. For instance, the masthead of Le Franc- Tireur described that journal in the following terms: “Monthly to the extent possible and by the grace of the Marshal’s Police.” See, for example, 12-1941d., Le Franc-Tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. Edition Zone-Sud (No. 1). See also Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 45-46.

In the words of Claude Bourdet, a member of the organization Combat, and one of the founders of the group’s eponymously named journal,

For most people, even those belonging to the organized Resistance, receiving packages and distributing journals long constituted the only material actions that they could perform. . . . [Moreover] the press was the only thing which gave to an individual in one part of the country the feeling that he was part of a national organization, [a fact] which was capital from the standpoint of morale.249

It is thus to an analysis of the literary output of the Resistance that this chapter now turns in an attempt to locate a rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction that in many significant ways stood directly opposed to that enunciated by the Vichy regime. While the latter was to a large extent communicated through a single voice—that of Pétain—the former was multi-vocal, its aims and desires a composite of many strands of intellectual and political thought in occupied

France.

2. The Clandestine Press: Reconstruction as Revolutionary Memory

Philippe Burrin has referred to Vichy as a “memory regime” because of its desire “to reconstruct a national spirit in which the memory of a mythologized past would shape the perception of the present . . .”250 While this historical orientation was certainly pronounced among the regime and its supporters, it was not exclusive to that group. The period between 1940 and 1944 constituted a critical episode in the ongoing conflict over national identity for virtually the whole of French

249 Claude Bordet quoted in Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 43. 250 Burrin, “Vichy” in Realms of Memory, 182-183.

society.251 This resulted in a highly partisan discourse on national memory in which established historical narratives were turned on their head during the occupation. The secular, liberal, and moderate republican narrative of the nation’s past—one that crystalized in the late nineteenth century around the so-called “republican consensus”252—was driven underground during the

Vichy years, a historical counter-narrative where it had once been hegemonic. While ostensibly oriented towards the past, these historical narratives were in fact rooted in the present, and as such had everything to do with contemporary political conflicts. The utilization of national memory, then, whether by the right or the left, was not simply an exercise in nostalgia: it also supplied a rhetorical blueprint for the nation’s postwar renewal.253

This point should be emphasized. While the accent placed on issues of national memory by Resistance organizations might appear to be of secondary importance, this was in fact a central component of these movements’ identities and sense of mission. In a period marked by material privations and physical hardships—not least of which concerned the difficulty of conducting a guerrilla war against the German occupiers and their domestic collaborators—it is perhaps surprising just how much energy was devoted by the clandestine Resistance press of the period to the seemingly arcane discussion of the nation’s past. Yet an appeal to national memory was one of the primary vehicles by which Resistance organizations in France sought to articulate an alternative to Vichy’s brand of national-moral reconstruction.254 At the very core of this discourse, once again, lay the French Revolution and its legacy. The previous chapter touched on some of the ways in which the Vichy regime utilized its own (negative) partisan memory of the

251 More generally, Burrin has observed that French society “has tended to conceive of its conflicts in historical terms and to conceive of its history in terms of conflict.” See Burrin, “Vichy,” in Realms of Memory, 182. 252 For an excellent description of the historical foundations of the “Republican Consensus”, see John Girling, France: Political and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1998), 48-58. 253 Lackerstein, Regeneration, 64. 254 See Ethan Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 153-155.

Revolution in its quest for national renewal; among other things the present chapter aims to demonstrate the centrality of revolutionary memory to the Resistance and its opposing rhetoric of reconstruction.

In Marianne into Battle, his classic study of modern republican political symbolism,

Maurice Agulhon argued that, “France being what it is, the historiography of the Revolution, the embattled heart of the national identity, is a field for more ideological battle than erudite debates.”255 There is more than a grain of truth to this otherwise laconic observation, especially when considered in the context of occupied France. As Ethan Katz has written, “[i]n the ongoing struggle over the meaning of the Revolution, the Occupation period proved to be the climactic and decisive moment of the twentieth century.”256 While Vichy’s relationship to the popular memory of 1789 was at best highly ambiguous, if not downright negative,257 the

Resistance, writes Katz, increasingly found that wartime circumstances offered an uncanny opportunity to give the memory of the Revolution a new dynamism that it had failed to carry under the Third Republic. Resisters turned to the celebration of revolutionary figures, values and events as a daily weapon against fascism, a means of attaining legitimacy, and a model for the new revolutionary society that they hoped to found in post-war France.258

An analysis of the clandestine Resistance press between 1940 and 1944 reveals a sustained preoccupation with national memory, particularly (though not exclusively) that of the left, broadly defined. During this period, dozens of underground journals were draped with

255 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), 27. 256 Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 154. 257 For an excellent overview of Vichy’s relationship to the legacy of the French Revolution, see Bertram M. Gordon, “National Movements and the French Revolution: The Justification of the French Revolution in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Vichy France,” in L'Image de la Révolution française: bicentenaire de la Révolution Française 1789-1989, Volume 3, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989), 1662-1670. 258 Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 154.

allusions to figures and events from France’s radical, revolutionary past.259 This sometimes took quite a general form, for example, when a journal was named for the revolutionary period, as was the case with La Révolution française, or Valmy (named after the famous battle of

September 1792, in which French soldiers, including volunteers, defeated an army of Prussian mercenaries en route to Paris).260 In some cases the names of historical newspapers, illustrious precursors in the revolutionary struggle, were even revived. For example, L’Insurgé, a socialist newspaper published out of Lyon, derived inspiration from the Paris Commune. Similarly, Le

Père Duchesne, the long-defunct newspaper of the radical Hébertists from 1790 to 1794, was resuscitated in April 1942 by the military wing of the PCF, the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans

Français.261 In its inaugural issue, an anonymous editorial drew a line from the 1790s to the

1940s when it explained that the paper had taken its name “because in the period of the Great

Revolution . . . one which pledged the death of tyrants, the people of ’93 regained some of its breath and some of its anger in a journal called Le Père Duchesne.”262

The mastheads of many papers made reference to the past by way of highly emotive slogans from the revolutionary period. Alongside its usual epigram, which consisted of a statement from Georges Clemenceau, former Prime Minister of France and firebrand First World

War leader, the November 1942 issue of Combat included an excerpt from the Montagnarde

259 In some cases these allusions extended much farther than the revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century. For example, Libérer et fédérer, out of Toulouse, complained that the second anniversary celebrations of the Pétainist Légion française des combattants, which was held at Gergovie, a small town near Clermont-Ferrand, was an insult to the patriotic memory of Vercingetorix, the hero of the Gauls who had defeated the army of Julius Caesar at that location some two thousand years before. See 1-09-1942, “La manifestation de la Légion à Gergovie,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 2). 260 There were at least two clandestine journals with this name: Valmy!, which commenced publication in September 1943 and was produced by the Limousin committee of the communist Front national, and Valmy, which began publication as early as January 1941. 261 Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 53-54. See also Kedward, “Mapping the Resistance,” 494. 262 04-1942d., “Doulere et Fureur! ” Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans, la Liberté ou la Mort. (No number given).

Declaration—which accompanied the ratification of the constitution of the First Republic in June

1793—reminding readers that “When the government violates the peoples’ rights, insurrection is for the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”263 Le Père

Duchesne concluded its September 1942 issue with several excerpts from the speeches of

Maximilien Robespierre, as well as from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, from 1789.264 Emblazoned on the masthead of L’Insurgé was a variation on the revolutionary phrase par excellence: “Liberté, égalité. Mort aux Tyrans,” which was attributed to the National

Convention of 1792.265 Some papers were more subtle in their evocation of revolutionary memory. For example, each issue of Le Père Duchesne, from April 1942 onwards, was dated in relation to the First French Republic, founded in September 1792. A September 1943 issue, for example, included both the standard Gregorian date, as well as the inscription, “152nd year” of the (long-defunct) First Republic.266

In these publications, members of the Resistance drew a clear parallel between their own desires for radical political transformation and the achievements of their historical predecessors.

The armed struggle against the Vichy regime and the German occupation in the 1940s was presented in the clandestine press as part of a continuum begun in 1789, and readers were constantly encouraged to view the present struggle through the lens of the revolutionary past. Of course, this past was sometimes used to legitimize more narrow political claims. For example, shortly after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Normandy edition of L’Humanité, the

PCF daily, offered the following, decidedly pro-Soviet interpretation of modern history:

1789 – France gives liberty to the world!

263 11-1942d., Combat: organe du Mouvement de la libération française (No. 36). 264 09-1942d., Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans, la Liberté ou la Mort. (No number given). 265 See, for example, 06-1942d., L’Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. 4). 266 See 09-1943d., Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans, la Liberté ou la Mort (No. spécial).

1941 – the USSR defends this liberty threatened by fascism! Frenchmen! Each Russian victory is a step towards the liberation of your country. Help the Russians by all means.267

Yet the past was usually employed in a much more ecumenical way, most often as a general call to battle—whether in a literal or a figurative sense—for a reconstructed France. This was exactly what the authors of the monthly review Les Cahiers politiques, published by the

Comité général d études of the Free French in London, had in mind when they called for a “new

French revolution” in July 1943. Whereas previous attempts at radical change—the July

Revolution of 1830, the Paris Commune of 1871, among others—had failed because of narrow

“partisan antics,” the society for which De Gaulle and the Free French (and, as the article implies, the entire Resistance) were fighting would transcend traditional political fault lines:

Uniting patriots and republicans [read here ‘right and left’] for the national insurrection, combining virile Frenchmen from all points of the spectrum, the new French revolution will bring together, for the first time in a single bundle, all the most beautiful traditions of our history. It will be a revolution of chevaliers and of Jacobins.268

That the circle around De Gaulle would have emphasized the moderate face of the nation’s revolutionary heritage would certainly not have surprised many members of the metropolitan Resistance for whom “those in London,” to borrow Pétain’s derisive phrase, were sometimes viewed as opportunistic, not to mention reactionary, fellow travelers in the fight for a new France.269 Yet even those groups within the Resistance that called for a more radical postwar transformation tended to shy away from overt statements of class or partisan interest.

267 12-07-1941, L'Humanité. Ed. régionale [Normandie] du Parti communiste français (No. 35). 268 07-1943, “Pour une Nouvelle Révolution Française, ” Les Cahiers politiques (No 2). 269 See Jackson, “Anti-Gaullism in France,” 43-65, especially 46.

Thus, when the radical republican-socialist organization Libérer et fédérer pleaded its case in

July 1942 for comprehensive political change after the war—“this is not a simple programme of reforms, it calls for a real revolution”270—it did so by way of an appeal to the memory of the

French Revolution that emphasized national unity over class division: “[we call for] a revolution which, like that of ’89, brings out of the deepest layers of the people a new elite, a new mystique, a new vitality; which places a new France at the vanguard of civilization, of liberty and of justice.”271

Much more important than the ability to channel partisan interests into a specific interpretation of the past was the ability to demonstrate the relevance of the past in the context of the present patriotic fight against Vichy and the German occupation, and even more importantly, for a revitalized postwar France.272 Indeed, the clandestine press of the period conveyed the impression that the battles of the French Revolution were being fought all over again, and that the struggles of the past were inextricably linked to those of the present. For example, in May

1942, Le Père Duchesne drew a direct line from May 1792—when the Marseillaise was first disseminated throughout France—to the Second World War when it criticized Vichy authorities for not celebrating the song’s one hundred fiftieth anniversary; “How could they?” an anonymous author asked, with palpable sarcasm. “Should traitors and cowards [at Vichy] be expected to remain faithful, should the servants of tyrants need to be reminded that the revolutionary hymn that they tarnish in their ceremonies is the war song of a people who has

270 14-07-1942, “Gagner la guerre et gagner la Paix,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 1). Emphasis added. 271 Ibid. 272 Typical of this tendency was an article published in Libérer et fédérer that detailed the many “Lessons of the Paris Commune” that should be applied to the struggle for a liberated France. See 05-1943d., “Les Leçons de la Commune Paris,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 9).

violently shaken off its chains?”273 In September of the same year, under a headline proclaiming

“the spirit of Valmy and the spirit of the Bastille,” Libérer et fédérer promised its readers that

“France will be renewed on the way to the Bastille and on the road to Valmy!”274

Indeed, both the storming of the Bastille and the battle of Valmy were being waged anew.

On 15 July, 1943, the front page of Le Franc-Tireur, the journal of one of the largest and most staunchly republican organizations in the Unoccupied Zone, optimistically proclaimed that within a year’s time “Europe will no longer be a Nazi Bastille.”275 At the same time L’Insurgé, too, seized on the Bastille metaphor, proclaiming that in 1789 “the proletariat, united with the middle classes, [took] the Bastille and gave Liberty to the French”, while in 1943 the French working class is similarly ready “to liberate themselves of fascism, war, misery and the modern feudalism of capitalism.”276 When Valmy!, published by the Limousin committee of the PCF- sponsored Front National, reported on the liberation of Corsica in October 1943—the first metropolitan region of France to be emancipated from Vichy or German rule—it was touted on the paper's front page as a “New Victory of Valmy.”277 When the Limousin Front National had launched its journal a month earlier, it explained its choice of name in terms that once again inserted the past into the present:

Valmy! . . . We chose this title over any other because it appears on the occasion of the commemoration of the anniversary of the victory of Valmy. It is the symbol of the struggle of the French people against bloodthirsty despots. It is the rallying cry for all the patriots who, without distinction of philosophical or religious opinion, stand up against the enemies from both outside

273 05-1942d., “Mai 1792-Mai 1942,” Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans. La liberté ou la mort (No number given). 274 01-09-1942, “L’esprit de Valmy et l’esprit de la Bastille,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 1). 275 15-07-1943, “AVANT LE 14 JUILLET 1944, L’Europe ne sera plus une Bastille nazie,” Le Franc-tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. (Edition Zone-Sud) (No. 20). 276 [circa 14-07] 1943, “Pour notre Libération contre tous les fascismes, 14 JUILLET DE COMBAT,” L'Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. 17) 277 10-1943d., “CORSE… Nouvelle Victoire de Valmy,” Valmy!: organe régional du Comité limousin du Front national de lutte pour la liberté et l'indépendance de la France (No. 2).

and within. . . . The epic of [Valmy] was one of the reasons for the admiration of the Revolution by the French people. It has instilled, from our childhood, the enthusiasm which forms us: that which Hitler called the spirit of ’89, and against which he mounts such violence, but also fear . . . Today, the term Valmy has for all the oppressed a sublime ring because it brings us closer to our own age, in which we are threatened with destruction by Nazi barbarism.278

Yet few historical symbols exerted the same widespread, seemingly universal appeal for the Resistance as the 14th of July. A national holiday since the late 1870s, the 14th of July was subjected to a project of revision by Vichy authorities almost immediately after the dissolution of the Third Republic in July 1940, as was discussed in the previous chapter. While the new government continued to observe the 14th of July—“more by political necessity than by choice,” according to Ethan Katz279—the overall meaning of the day was substantially altered. Where the

14th had long been a day of joyous celebration, Vichy transformed the occasion into a solemn

“day of mourning” akin to 11th of November.280 All references to the day’s revolutionary, republican and/or celebratory origins were expunged from the official commemoration of the

14th; in their place, French men and women were expected to reflect on the causes of the nation’s catastrophic defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, so as to—in the words of Pétain—“make this holiday a day of sadness and of meditation.”281

As in other areas, the treatment of the 14th of July by the Resistance represented a complete inversion of the anti-republican and anti-revolutionary memory perpetuated by Vichy.

A look at the coverage of the day in various Resistance newspapers reveals an increasingly militant attitude vis-à-vis the 14th, with each year’s celebration outdoing the last in terms of the

278 09-1943d., “20 SEPTEMBRE 1792, 20 SEPTEMBRE 1943,” Valmy!: organe régional du Comité limousin du Front national de lutte pour la liberté et l'indépendance de la France (No. 1). 279 Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 155. 280 Idem, 155-156. 281 Pétain quoted in Idem, 157.

boldness of its anti-Vichy and anti-Nazi message. For example, the July 1941 issue of Valmy282 offered the following patriotic warning:

In the glorious times of the Revolution, when the armies of tyranny were menacing our soil, the Commune of Paris declared the COUNTRY IN DANGER. Today, when tyranny is rife in the country of liberty, and the enemy tramples on French soil, THE COUNTRY IS IN MORTAL DANGER. . . . Long live the Republic, Long live Liberty.283

The same issue concluded once again with quotations from the speeches of various revolutionary figures, such as Mirabeau and Lamartine. The following year, in July 1942,

Libérer et fédérer was even more eloquent in its demand that the French embrace once again their revolutionary heritage. “Slyly struck off the calendar of Vichy,” the paper’s anonymous front page article insisted that the fateful date of 14 July acquires today, once again, its original meaning and all of its evocative and stimulating force. . . . [The time has come] to show the enemy and his supporters, the traitors, that like our ancestors of the 14th of July, 1789, we are ready to storm the fortress of our own oppression. . . . Long live Liberty! Long live the Republic! Long live revolutionary France!284

A similar message had been simultaneously disseminated throughout the Occupied Zone that year as well. On 10 July, 1942, Libération, a weekly journal produced in Paris by individuals with ties to De Gaulle and the Free French in London, placed the 14th of July in the context of national history; in fact, Libération made almost no distinction between the enemies of the

282 Not to be confused with the aforementioned Valmy! produced by the PCF-aligned Front National. 283 07-1941d., “14 JUILLET 1941,” Valmy. Organe de la résistance française à l'oppression (No number given). Emphasis in original. 284 14-07-1942, “Manifestez le 14 juillet!,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 1).

revolutionary era and those of the present when it explained, by way of a paraphrasing of the

Marseillaise, that today, like yesterday, ‘patriots’ are those who defend both the soil of the country as well as republican liberties against the renewed conspiracy of ‘foreign cohorts’ and of those traitors who are the ‘disgrace of all parties’ that have already denounced the young MARSEILLAISE. . . . Long live the Republic! Long live France!285

By all accounts this message was widely heeded. According to Combat’s coverage of the

1942 Bastille Day demonstrations throughout the Unoccupied Zone, “The 14th of July 1942

[was] a landmark in the history of national recovery.”286 This was not merely propaganda: throughout the cities and towns of southern France, men and women gathered in significant numbers (given the circumstances) at public squares, and especially at republican statues and monuments, to register their patriotic fervour in the face of the increasingly harsh German occupation and the Vichy regime’s repression of domestic opposition—5,000 in Clermont-

Ferrand, 30,000 in Toulouse, and as many as 100,000 in Lyon.287 By 1944, the final year of the occupation, calls for the commemoration of the 14th of July were at their most strident. That year the Nord and Pas-de-Calais edition of Libération, along with many other clandestine journals, marked Bastille Day by reprinting the official “Appeal of the National Committee of the

Resistance for the 14th of July 1944.” This document represented something of a climax in the tendency of the Resistance to link the political victories of the past with the struggles of the present by launching an appeal to the patriotic memory of the revolutionary period that, at least figuratively, erased the intervening century-and-a-half. For example, the “Appeal” concluded

285 10-07-1942, “QUATORZE JUILLET,” Libération: organe des Français libres (No. 83). The passages with quotation marks come from the lyrics to the Marseillaise. 286 07-1942d., “14 Juillet 1942,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No number given). 287 Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 161.

100

with the following lines: “. . . May the audacity of our ancestors in the great days of our history inspire us once again. May the élan which threw the people of Paris on the Bastille on 14 July

1789, the spirit of Valmy and the breath of the Marseillaise, give rise to a new Nation.” 288

While it is tempting to view this engagement with national memory as a distraction from the practical tasks of resistance, such as intelligence gathering or military sabotage, this interpretation would miss a fundamental point: Resistance organisations referred to the past as a tool of ideological mobilization. In the struggle for a reconstructed France, one that would be purged of the negative influences acquired under Vichy and the German occupation, pointing to the nation’s revolutionary and republican past—albeit a highly simplified and idealized one— was often the most potent way of describing one’s vision of the future. While for Vichy, reconstruction was comprised largely of a revision, if not a wholesale abandonment, of the nation’s revolutionary past, for the Resistance, national-moral reconstruction represented above all a recapitulation of this legacy.

3. A Republic—But What Kind?

In keeping with their utilization of revolutionary memory, the majority of Resistance papers promoted the idea of republicanism, if somewhat loosely defined. The reinstatement of a French

Republic was a postwar goal shared by the vast majority of Resistance movements, and in fact one of the most frequent and impassioned historical allusions to fill the pages of the clandestine press was the lionization of the French Republic in its various historical guises. This was an appeal that in many ways transcended the various political cleavages that characterized the

288 14-07-1944, “14 JUILLET DE COMBAT,” Libération du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais. Organe du Mouvement de la libération nationale (No. 1); See also Katz, “Memory at the Front,” 163.

101

Resistance throughout its wartime existence.289 In its first issue, published in April 1943, Les

Cahiers politiques included a lengthy article entitled “Why I am Republican.” Its consideration of the question from a variety of political and philosophical perspectives was meant to provide some evidence for the universal applicability of the republican project.290

Yet as the term was utilized by the journalists of the Resistance, the concept of a

Republic was as much a political value as a formal system of governance. As with so many of the postwar goals of the Resistance, the reinstatement of the Republic was enunciated in historical, patriotic, and above all emotional terms. Commenting on the recent Bastille Day demonstrations held in July 1942, La Franc-Tireur drew an unequivocal link between the French

Revolution—the spirit of which is reborn, in spite of Vichy and German oppression, as “a new

‘89”—and the establishment of a postwar Republic, the only political regime, the article maintains, worthy of “the great mass of French people, with its passion for Liberty.”291 The

Republic, and in particular its symbolic representations, were thus used to legitimize the struggle against Vichy and the Germans. For example, the 1 May, 1943 issue of Combat included a call for mass demonstrations to mark International Workers’ Day, the traditional celebration of which had been severely curtailed by the regime. Combat’s instructions were very simple, its attack on

Vichy much more implicit than overt:

. . . spend the course of the afternoon of the 1st of May in front of a monument that symbolizes all that we remain attached to—either a statue of the REPUBLIC or of LIBERTY; failing that, gather in front of the town hall of your locality, an expression of communal liberty and of all that

289 Sweets, The Politics of Resistance, 149-150. 290 See 04-1943d., “POURQUOI JE SUIS REPUBLICAIN,” Les Cahiers politiques (No. 1). 291 08-1942d., “VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!” Le Franc-Tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. Edition Zone-Sud (No. 10).

102

we have been deprived of since the regime, born of the defeat, delivered us, bound hand and foot, to the enemy. . . . 292

This was to be a positive, as opposed to negative, protest. In short, workers, should they wish to register their dissatisfaction with Vichy, were asked, not to gather in front of the symbols of the regime’s power—say, a representation of Pétain—but close to republican symbols or institutions. Similar instructions were issued for Bastille Day celebrations by a local communist publication in Lyon.293

That a democratic Republic should be formed after the war to replace an increasingly authoritarian Vichy regime was a fact virtually taken for granted by a large portion of the

Resistance. Indeed, the two concepts—the Resistance and the Republic—were often unequivocally linked: to be in favour of the one was to be in favour of the other. Emblematic of this tendency was an article published in the September 1943 issue of Combat, one that shed considerable light on the organization’s postwar political goals. “We want a Republic,” the paper explained, “because for the past two years the fate of the Republic and that of the Resistance have been indissolubly linked and also because the French nation can only be fully expressed through republican institutions.”294 Similarly, at around the same time Le Père Duchesne drew a binary opposition between Vichy and the Resistance when it compared the former to the tyranny of the Ancien Régime. Employing a historical reference once again, the paper warned its readers that despite Pétain’s comments to the contrary,

292 01-05-1943, “Encore un ‘Premier Mai’ de guerre,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (“Supplément”). Emphasis in original. 293 06-1942d., “Le 14 Juillet 1942,” La Voix du peuple : édition de la Région lyonnaise du Parti communiste (No number given). 294 09-1942d., “COMBAT ET RÉVOLUTION,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 34).

103

Vichy is not the Moral Order. Vichy has returned France to the past, if not worse. The Prefects [departmental governors], those black kings of the National Revolution, have the right to imprison without trial: la lettre de cachet [the Royal decrees by which individuals were imprisoned without appeal under the Old Regime]. Read the law . . . concerning the consolidation of peasant property [promulgated by Vichy]: it is a return to the [medieval] law of the birthright. Long live the Republic!!!295

Yet in championing the return of the Republic, the Resistance went beyond a simple restoration of the prewar regime. While Resistance organizations agreed almost unanimously on the need for a republican form of government to replace Vichy and German rule, the devil, as always, was in the details: precisely what kind of Republic would be instated at the Liberation?

The answer to this question was given in a short article published by Le Franc-Tireur in August

1942: “This time we have to make a true Republic, one that is better and more beautiful than the old one.”296

Though admittedly vague, these sentiments were increasingly to be found in the pages of the clandestine press as the occupation continued. While their vision for the future of the nation may have been violently at odds, on this point at least both Vichy and the Resistance shared a certain interpretation of the recent past: in particular, to use the words of Richard Kuisel, that the decadent and corrupt “Third Republic was dead and unworthy of resuscitation.”297 For example, in the September 1942 issue of Combat, which included “Combat and Revolution,” the organization’s political manifesto, the call for a new Republic was made a centerpiece of the organization’s goals for the immediate postwar period. Its authors were unequivocal: “What we want is the Fourth Republic. [Because] at the most crucial hour of its history the Third Republic

295 04-1942d., “VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!” Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans. La liberté ou la mort (No number given). Emphasis in original. 296 08-1942d., “VIVE LA RÉPUBLIQUE!” Le Franc-Tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. Edition Zone-Sud (No. 10). 297 Kuisel, Capitalism and the State, 157.

104

was not defended; what’s more, it committed suicide. It belongs to the past.”298 While just over a year later, the same paper conceded that there would inevitably be some continuity between the prewar Third Republic and its postwar successor, it nonetheless called for the establishment of a completely new political regime in postwar France.299

While many within the Resistance shared the basic assumption that the Third Republic should not, or could not, be reinstated, the ultimate reason for the degeneration of the former regime was of course different depending on who you asked; some, especially on the left, were more strident in their denunciations of the prewar political system. For example, the September

1942 issue of the left-wing Libérer et fédérer offered this sociological, as opposed to strictly military, interpretation of the country’s defeat in 1940:

The Third Republic has brought about the military defeat and the collapse of all the nation’s institutions because it was based on the maintenance of a senseless illusion of being able to realize . . . through the gradual generalization of bourgeois taste, a unique and invulnerable form of civilization.300

A month later, another socialist publication, L’Insurgé, went even further in its call for a comprehensive overhaul of the country’s political system. In the article “Who are we? What do we want?” the paper claimed that

. . . the entire socio-political structure of the Third Republic was dominated by capitalist interests. The Third Republic is dead because it was rotten, because domestic reactionaries would rather accept foreign domination than grant the concessions that are logically due to the

298 09-1942d., “COMBAT ET RÉVOLUTION,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 34). 299 12-1943d., “Un Gouvernement d’Union,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 52). 300 01-09-1942, “Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 2).

105

workers, because those same people are alienated from the affairs of the majority and because . . . [they] care only about their own particular interests . . .301 Moreover, the same article had this to say about the group’s ultimate political goals:

We fight for the construction of a new Republic that, this time, must be a social Republic, a Republic of workers . . . This new French Republic of workers will not be opposed to other peoples, but rather will be united with the other socialist Republics that the workers of other countries will build. It will be one of the pillars of the real New Europe, of the socialist Europe.302

Comments like these begin to reveal the extent of frustration on the part of many within the Resistance not only with German rule, but with the entire social and political fabric of prewar

France as well. Indeed, in some cases the German occupation is treated as merely a superficial manifestation of the underlying structural causes of France’s decline. Put differently, the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction enunciated by much of the Resistance identified both external and internal agents of national degeneration—the German occupation, certainly, but also the

French themselves. For example, on the front page of Jeune garde, which was produced by

Libérer et fédérer and aimed at a younger readership, one could read an article warning of the treachery of the German occupation authorities, particularly the deportation of French workers to

Germany,303 next to an article calling for a “Struggle against individual egotism,”304 as well as one arguing for the establishment of socialism in France.305

301 10-1942d., “Qui sommes-nous? Que voulons-nous?” L'Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. spécial 9). 302 Ibid. 303 See for example 03-1944d., “Jeunes de la classe 44, N’ALLEZ PAS EN Allemagne,” Jeune garde. Organe national de la Jeune garde socialiste (Mouvement Libérer et fédérer) (No. 2). 304 See 03-1944d., “Pour sauver la France, Luttons contre l’egoisme individuel,” Jeune garde. Organe national de la Jeune garde socialiste (Mouvement Libérer et fédérer) (No. 2). 305 See 03-1944d., “Unité et Socialisme,” Jeune garde. Organe national de la Jeune garde socialiste (Mouvement Libérer et fédérer) (No. 2).

106

In other words, the attachment to Republican symbolism on the part of the Resistance went far beyond the bounds of what one might normally think of as politics. This is primarily because the very concept of ‘the Republic’ had itself been substantially broadened by the trauma of defeat and occupation. While the Republic “first appeared in France as a system of government and model of sovereignty . . . [it] subsequently developed into nothing less than a comprehensive worldview and way of organizing and understanding history.”306 As such, the

French Republic, as the term was used by the intellectuals of the Resistance, was much more than a form of government; it was a powerful emotional symbol that in sum came to represent

France’s democratic and revolutionary—not to mention anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy—national identity.

4. Winning the War, Winning the Peace

Throughout the course of the German occupation the various strands of the Resistance, though initially scattered and isolated, coalesced around a set of shared assumptions that included the causes of the country’s defeat in 1940, the consequences of Franco-German collaboration, and ultimately the path towards postwar national-moral reconstruction. For the socialists at L’Insurgé it was the “banks and the trusts [large corporations]” that knowingly provoked the defeat of

France in June 1940. In the journal’s June 1942 issue, for instance, an anonymous article proceeded to charge these individuals, if not liberal capitalism itself, with perpetrating “a plot against the entire nation, against its history, against its present life, against its future, against all

306 This is the judgement of Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson, two leading historians on the history of republicanism in France. Quoted in Edward Berenson and Vincent Duclerc, “Introduction: Transatlantic Histories of France,” trans., Arthur Goldhammer, in The French Republic: History, Values, Debates, ed. Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011), 1. For an overview of the Republic as a “comprehensive worldview,” see Idem, 1-8.

107

its institutions.”307 Specifically, L’Insurgé accused the banks and the trusts of foisting on the country “the policy that after the absurd Treaty of Versailles and the equally absurd bullying inflicted on the Weimar Republic, . . . [led] to Hitler . . . to Munich, to the war, to fascism.”308

For Le France-Tireur, while France had been “peaceful and pacifist” prior to the outbreak of war with Germany, this was “Peacefulness bordering on recklessness. Pacifism bordering on blindness. . . . The political parties, regardless of who they are, [thus] carry some part of the responsibility for this disaster.”309

On the matter of Franco-German collaboration, the inaugural issue of Combat included a balance sheet of the consequences of the armistice that included some of the following: the territorial and spiritual division of France . . . ; the systematic stripping of our unfortunate country of all her wealth . . . ; the lowering of the standard of living of workers . . . ; the destruction of our currency to pay the daily costs of the army of occupation; German propaganda in our colonies . . . ; the degradation of French thought with the aid of the national press and radio.310

The same article struck a note of defiance when it claimed that although “France is in the process of losing its body and soul . . . the French people . . . are no longer in support of collaborating with imbeciles, cowards or traitors.”311

While evicting the German war machine from French territory was certainly one of the main priorities of the Resistance, this was widely recognized as merely a first step in what would ultimately be the postwar reconstruction of France by the French themselves; in this point, too,

307 06-1942d., “J’ACCUSE . . .” L’Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. 4). 308 Ibid. 309 12-1941d., “RASSEMBLEMENT!” Le Franc-Tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. Edition Zone- Sud (No. 1). 310 12-1941d., “Appel,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 1). 311 Ibid.

108

both Vichy and the Resistance shared similar views on the insular, self-referential nature of national renewal. This represents perhaps one of the most widely-held assumptions on the part of the Resistance—that, in the words of Combat, “the ordeal [of occupation and collaboration] has revealed that . . . the danger to the nation’s existence comes not only from outside . . .”312 As the war progressed, the Resistance grew increasingly attentive to domestic political issues, especially those thought to be most germane to the immediate postwar period.313 To borrow a phrase that frequently appeared in the pages of Libérer et fedérer, national-moral reconstruction was dependent not just upon winning the war—it hinged even more so on the ability of the

Resistance to “win the peace.”314

Of the latter, Combat gave a description in April 1943 that included the “liberation of

French territory, the overthrow of the Vichy regime, the chastisement of traitors, the recovery of liberties, and the restoration of a renovated republic.”315 To these general postwar goals, which were shared by many, other organizations within the Resistance added a variety of other perspectives. For example, under the headline “The Tasks of Tomorrow,” a February 1943 issue of the short-lived Demain spoke of the necessity to prepare the Resistance for the potential challenges which could accompany the overthrow of the Vichy regime. “The solution [to these problems] must not be improvised in the hours after the Liberation. It is necessary today to prepare for tomorrow.”316 On July 14th of the previous year, Libérer et fedérer had struck a

312 05-1942d., “DÉCLARATION,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 2). 313 For example, a 1943 issue of L’Insurgé claimed that “In recent months the political problems of the liberation of our territory and the immediate postwar period have aroused a more vivid interest amongst the Resistance.” See 1943 (no other date included), “Pas seulement les hommes mais aussi l’Etat,” L'Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. 23). 314 “Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix, ” one of the paper’s regular columns, offered a space for speculation on issues relevant to the postwar life of France. See for example 14-07-1942, “Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix: ce que nous sommes, ce que nous voulons, ” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 1). 315 15-04-1943, “LE PEUPLE A CHOISI,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 43). 316 02-1943d., “LES TACHES DE DEMAIN,” Demain. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (No number given).

109

similar tone when it warned its readers that “the battle for peace cannot be improvised any more than the military battle can be.” Its description of the potential challenges of the postwar situation provides some sense of what ‘winning the peace’ meant for many within the Resistance. Above all, it precluded any return, after the war’s end, to the old way of doing things:

From 1914 to 1918 France remained fully absorbed by its war effort. Placed brusquely before the problems of peace for which it had not been prepared, the country was left feeble and divided, and twenty years after having won the war it lost the peace, it collapsed. . . . Winning the peace: it is the realization of the ideal of justice and freedom for which people are struggling right now, [it is] the union of the European nations so as to create the conditions for a durable peace . . .317

Moreover, the January 1943 issue of the same paper spoke of the need to establish “new political morals” in liberated France. “Of all the problems that the [postwar] Revolution will have to solve,” claimed the authors, “that of political morals is . . . the most important, most urgent, and also the most difficult. . . . [This is because] it is not possible to build a free and fair

France without an atmosphere of political loyalty, disinterestedness, and virtue . . .”318 A year later, the same publication went further when it claimed that “The first revolutionary act of liberated France will be, without doubt, the access of women to the political life [of the country] .

. .”319 It is significant that the writers at Libérer et fedérer used the term ‘revolution’ in the context of their discussion of winning the peace. While the exact definition of this term no doubt shifted from group to group, the emphasis placed on the comprehensive, revolutionary transformation of French society in the wake of the German occupation, and especially Vichy’s policy of collaboration, was nonetheless one of the main components of the rhetoric of national-

317 14-07-1942, ““Gagner la guerre et gagner la paix: ce que nous sommes, ce que nous voulons, ” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 1). 318 01-1943d., “DES MOEURS NOUVELLES!” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 5). 319 01-1944d., “Pour l’access des femmes à la vie politique,” Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France (No. 15).

110

moral reconstruction put forth by the Resistance. In the words of Combat’s manifesto, published in the September 1942 issue of its journal, the overthrow of Vichy is “only preliminary to the reconstruction of France . . .”320 For the socialists at L’Insurgé, a military victory over Vichy and the Germans was simply not good enough; the complete overhaul of French society was what reconstruction really meant, since a simple military victory followed by a return to the old political forms [will not] mark the defeat of fascism. Fascism will not be totally annihilated [until] the day when the social and economic conditions favorable to its appearance have been removed. That is to say, when we have accomplished the Social Revolution.321

5. The Resistance versus Vichy: Two Versions of a Single History

In opposition to Vichy, most movements within the Resistance articulated severe criticisms of the regime and its policies; but whereas Pétain had earlier seemed somewhat immune to these denunciations, blame now extended to the dictator himself. Recall, for example, Vérités— merged with the broadsheet Liberté and re-launched as Combat in late 1941—which in its public condemnation of the regime, refused to indict Pétain more than a year into his tenure as Head of

State. Less than one year later, however, the same journal was devoting its entire front page to an open “Letter to Marshal Pétain,” in which the leader’s many failings were catalogued. From abandoning the military struggle against Nazi Germany on 17 June, 1940, to the suppression of individual liberties and worse—“parodies of justice, the police state, the detestable anti-Semitic laws, the omnipotence of the trusts, unemployment and the development of famine”322—Pétain’s image had by May 1942 sunk a remarkable degree in the pages of Combat: according to the

320 09-1942d., “Combat et Révolution,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de libération française (No. 34). 321 09-1942d., “ASPIRATIONS DU PUEPLE FRANÇAIS,” L'Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne (No. 7). 322 05-1942d., “Lettre au Maréchal PÉTAIN,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de la libération française (No. 1).

111

journal’s authors, it was now the Marshal himself that was responsible for the country’s misfortune.323 By the following February, “Pétain and his clique,” along with the “odious”

National Revolution, had been deemed a complete and utter failure by Combat, and they were henceforth treated as monstrous aberrations in the nation’s history.324

In this sense, the rhetoric employed by the Resistance diverged completely from that put forth by Pétain and the Vichy regime; the assumptions on which both groups’ views of reconstruction were based, and especially their interpretation of the nation’s recent history, were in many cases vastly different, if not mutually exclusive. In the present context, it is worth emphasizing the separate uses to which this history was put as both groups articulated their own competing visions of postwar society; in this arena, too, Vichy and the Resistance could not have been farther apart. There is a certain irony to this fact. While Vichy attempted to forge—or, as its supporters no doubt liked to think, rediscover—what it considered an authentic French national identity, it did so by way of an appeal to a highly specific, and it must be said anachronistic, interpretation of modern French history. Indeed, as was demonstrated in the previous chapter, the regime actually sought to downplay, if not to erase altogether, those aspects of the past— particularly the French Revolution and the legacy of republican democracy—that stood in the way of its project. The irony, simply put, consisted of the fact that the regime, backward-looking and conservative in the strictest sense of those words, sought to return to the past by actually erasing large portions of the nation’s history.

323 For another extensive catalogue of the regime’s failures in the eyes of Combat, see 12-1942d., “1940-1942 Inventaire de faillite,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de la libération française (Supplément). 324 See 02-1942d., “Feue la Révolution Nationale,” Combat: organe du Mouvement de la libération française (No. 41). The same article also includes one of the more light-hearted criticisms of the dictator’s advanced age: “Pétain, who is late to his vocations; colonel at 56 years, revolutionary at 84 years! Imagine the centenary?”

112

At the risk of oversimplifying an otherwise complex phenomenon, the Resistance desired the opposite—the construction of what it thought of as a radically new society by rescuing, and indeed clinging to, those aspects of the nation’s past that were downplayed by Vichy and—the two are not unconnected—which were thought to form the cornerstone of the nation’s progressive, revolutionary identity. In this sense, one could argue that the term ‘reconstruction’ is itself slightly misleading when used in the context of the Resistance organizations discussed in this chapter. With the very significant exception of De Gaulle, who sought what was seen by many as a ‘restoration’ of the prewar socio-political framework,325 the Resistance did not want to reconstruct that which had been swept aside by the defeat of 1940 and the establishment of the

Vichy regime. Rather, it called for the construction, from the ground up as it were, of a radically new society by appealing to national history; an attempt, in other words, to forge a radically new future by rescuing a battered revolutionary past.

325 Jackson, “Anti-Gaullism in France, 46.

113

CONCLUSION. NATIONAL-MORAL RECONSTRUCTION AT THE LIBERATION

Paris was officially liberated from German occupation on 25 August, 1944, by an improvised combination of members of the domestic Resistance, French regular troops loyal to de Gaulle, and remnants of the U.S. Third Army. Though the capital, which had served as the nucleus of the

German-controlled Occupied Zone, had never fallen under the direct purview of Pétain’s l'État français, the departure of German troops nonetheless symbolized for many the ultimate liquidation of the Vichy regime.326 By September, Pétain, along with his most steadfast supporters—whose ranks were swelled by a coterie of even more hard-core Nazi sympathizers— had been forced into exile at Sigmaringen, in southwest Germany, where he would remain a virtual prisoner of his onetime collaborators until the end of the war several months later.

With the end of the German occupation, the discourse over reconstruction in France assumed a more physical form. This was to be expected: material reconstruction, largely deferred during the Vichy period, was now a pressing concern. The final months of the war had resulted in unprecedented damage to French infrastructure and industry. While for the French, the human cost of the Second World War had been considerably less than that suffered as a result of the

Great War—though in France, as elsewhere in Europe, losses were higher amongst civilians than the military between 1939 and 1945—material damage was far more extensive than had

326 For a discussion of the symbolic connotations of the concept of ‘liberation’ during this period, see Michael Kelly, “War and culture: the lessons of postwar France,” Synergies: Royaume-Uni et Irlande 1 (2008): 92-94.

114

previously occurred. Compared to the thirteen départements seriously damaged in 1918, no less than seventy-four were similarly affected in 1945. In total, a quarter of all buildings in France had been destroyed by the fighting; 75 percent of the country’s marine ports rendered inoperative; and 6.5 million acres of farmland, in what was often considered a country of farmers, classified by the state as unusable.327

While after 1945, physical rebuilding would thus come to occupy a much larger share of the French public’s attention, the concept of national-moral reconstruction employed throughout this study did not disappear altogether at the war’s end. Since the impact of the defeat and occupation had touched virtually the entire social and political fabric of the country in 1940, postwar reconstruction in France would necessarily be a complex undertaking, one that would result in a significant shift in the balance of political power in France. In the words of Andrew

Williams, “Rebuilding France [after 1945] would not be the same as rebuilding Britain, since it was accepted that France needed . . . a radically new mode of political organization.”328 The

American journalist Janet Flanner, who had resumed her role as the Paris correspondent for The

New Yorker magazine shortly after the departure of German troops from the capital, lamented the fact that “French politics, unfortunately, will have to start up again.” Commenting on the state of the political scene in December 1944, Flanner—who filed her reports under the pen-name

‘Genêt’—offered a prescient description of how the downfall of the Vichy regime had managed to upturn the status quo of the occupation period while simultaneously preserving something of the rhetoric of national-moral reconstruction that had animated the regime in the first place. “So far,” wrote Flanner,

327 Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 17-18, 70. 328 Andrew Williams, “France and the New World Order, 1940-1947,” Modern & Contemporary France 8.2 (2000): 194.

115

General de Gaulle has no political party; instead, he has popularity. What program he has is social; his slogan is “Rénovation,” which means reforming France out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Even people who are against him believe that he has been the saviour of France. The grand old political parties have not yet raised their heads or voices to say what they think of rénovation. Nobody in France any longer has the courage to describe himself as a conservative and at the other end of the line there is also lacking a party of revolution. The Communists are now, realistically, the party for construction. The Communists, who were the great heroes of the resistance, are also, as a result of their excellently organized underground years, the best-organized party in France. They have just accepted affiliation with the weakened Socialist group, as a healthy man might take on an invalid wife. French Communism seems to be something very different from what it was in the old international days, since now it is avowedly pro-French. On the extreme right is what remains of the rich owner class, who seem readier than they were during the Front Populaire for a sort of belated New Deal. . . . Citizens who vote have to have political parties to vote for, but what France needs most . . . is not the salvation offered by any one political party but a revival of morality, to be practiced alike by the governing and the governed.329

These comments are also suggestive of the extent to which the political landscape had changed as a result of the liberation. Another indication of this fact came with the purge of the

French press in the summer of 1944. By government decree, the very same papers—Combat,

Franc-Tireur, Defense de la France, etc.—that had once been published anonymously and under threat of torture and execution, were now installed in the former offices of publications deemed by the state to have been collaborationist or overtly pro-Vichy during the occupation. In this regard, at least, prewar politics had been turned on its head. While in 1939, newspapers supportive of right-wing political parties comprised nearly 30 percent of overall circulation, that share was down by two thirds as of 1947.330

Yet while men like Albert Camus, who had risen to national prominence during the

Liberation as the editor of Combat, proclaimed optimistically that the resistance to Vichy and

Nazi rule would give way, naturally, to a political and social revolution, this was not exactly the

329 Janet Flanner (Genêt), Paris Journal, Volume One: 1944-1955, ed. William Shawn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 9-10. 330 See Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 117-119.

116

case.331 As Jean-Pierre Rioux has argued, the liberation of France was not a revolution—it was, rather, a reinstatement of the prewar political order in many respects. Even while Allied armies continued to battle the last remnants of the German military in France, De Gaulle, who had assumed the leadership of the newly created Provisional Government of the French Republic in the summer of 1944, sent numerous commissaires de la République throughout the country whose task it was to impose state (which is to say republican) authority over various locally improvised powers. In this way the Provisional Government demonstrated its desire to reconstruct the French state “in its pre-war forms.”332 On 9 September, 1944, a government of

“national unanimity” was set up in Paris. This body was officially recognized by the Allied powers on 23 October, after which republican authority was once again firmly established.333

The difference between the wartime and immediate postwar regimes was less a matter of physical versus national-moral reconstruction as it was the external versus internal focus of their respective concepts of renewal. Pétain, after all, spoke of reconstruction in terms of an explicitly internal phenomenon: French society itself constituted the raw material from which the regime hoped to consolidate the nation’s ‘authentic’ cultural identity, and while Franco-German collaboration presented a moment of great opportunity in the regime’s attempt to realize this goal, it was in some senses merely a pretext, no matter how significant. This belief was summed up by the regime, for example, on the first anniversary of the establishment of the Compagnons de France, one of the largest youth organizations in the Unoccupied Zone, when it described reconstruction in the following terms: “We believe that to whichever side the victory goes,

331 See, for example, Albert Camus, “From Resistance to Revolution,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Camus at Combat: Writing, 1944-1947, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 12-13. 332 Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 43-44, quotation from 44. 333 Idem, 47.

117

France should owe her salvation only to her own strength, recreated by the efforts of her own sons.”334

By contrast, in the immediate postwar period reconstruction was governed by external as much as internal realities. Of course, France itself, which had suffered extensive physical damage in the final months of the war, would be the primary recipient of national renewal after the liberation. Yet the source of reconstruction came to a large extent from outside. Following the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on 9 May, 1945, the Provisional Government under De Gaulle would make defeated Germany the centerpiece of its reconstruction effort as it sought to extract from its former occupier the material resources with which to rebuild physically. Once the cause of French humiliation, Germany would now be the source of French renewal.335

The differences here are intriguing, as both the wartime and postwar regimes maintained an almost inverse relationship to the wider political realities that governed their conduct. At a time when France labored under external pressure more than ever, Vichy, the so-called ‘shield’ against Nazi Germany, claimed to focus solely on internal reform; yet when France’s international influence was at a new low as a result of its defeat in 1940, as well as the rising tide of decolonization and the realignment of international politics brought about by the end of the

Second World War and the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, De Gaulle tried hard to regain something of the Great Power status the country had enjoyed before its defeat.

334 See Paul J. Kingston, “Gerontocracy, propaganda and Youth: Youth propaganda in France, 1940-1942,” FSC i (1990), 188. 335 William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944- 1954 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998), 41.

118

But even more to the point, the liberation of France resulted in the substitution, once again, of one national narrative for another. Whereas in the summer of 1940, the Third

Republic—and indeed, republican democracy in general—had been consigned to oblivion by

Pétain and his supporters, by the fall of 1944 Vichy would be the new Ancien Régime. Pétain was put on trial in the summer of 1945. He was condemned to death for treason to the ‘real’

France—or at least the republican/Gaullist version of it—though his life, unlike that of Louis

XVI in 1793, was spared. With this sentence, as well as the trials and executions of former collaborationists, the newly emergent Fourth Republic passed judgment on the past in the hope of closing the wound opened in June 1940. It was not to be, however, for one simple reason: the conflict over national-moral reconstruction that had played out under the occupation had ended in 1944 in a very real civil war.

119

Bibliography

Primary Sources Pétain’s Speeches Pétain, Philippe. Discours aux Français : 17 juin 1940-20 août 1944. Edited by Jean-Claude Barbas. Paris : Albin Michel, 1989. ------. “La politique sociale de l’avenir.” Revue des Deux Mondes. 15 September, 1940.

Resistance Journals Les Cahiers politiques. Combat: organe du Mouvement de la libération française. Demain. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Le Franc-Tireur: organe des Mouvements unis de résistance. Edition Zone-Sud. L'Humanité. Ed. régionale [Normandie] du Parti communiste français. L’Insurgé: organe socialiste de la libération prolétarienne. Jeune garde. Organe national de la Jeune garde socialiste (Mouvement Libérer et fédérer). Libération du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais. Organe du Mouvement de la libération nationale. Libération: organe des Français libres. Libérer et fédérer: organe du Mouvement révolutionnaire pour la libération et la reconstruction de la France. Le Père Duchesne. Haine aux tyrans, la Liberté ou la Mort. Valmy. Organe de la résistance française à l'oppression. Valmy!: organe régional du Comité limousin du Front national de lutte pour la liberté et l'indépendance de la France. La Voix du peuple : édition de la Région lyonnaise du Parti communiste.

120

Images Gervereau, Laurent and Denis Peschanski, eds. La Propagande sous Vichy, 1940-1944. Nanterre: Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, 1990. http://chan.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/sdx-23b1-20090531-chan-pleade- 2/pl/toc.xsp?id=FRDAFANCH0098_72AJ_2_d0e7433&qid=sdx_q0&fmt=tab&idtoc=FRDAFA NCH0098_72AJ_2-pleadetoc&base=fa&n=19&ss=true&as=true&ai=standard| http://www.histoire-fr.com/troisieme_republique_seconde_guerre_mondiale_3.htm

Secondary Sources Agulhon, Maurice. Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789- 1880. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Arnold, Edward J. “Preface.” The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le pen. Edited and translated by Edward J. Arnold. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Austin, Roger. “Propaganda and Public Opinion in Vichy France: The Department of Hérault, 1940-1944.” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 455-482. Azéma, Jean-Pierre. From Munich to the Liberation, 1938-1944. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Bartov, Omer. “Martyr’s Vengeance: Memory, Trauma, and Fear of War in France, 1918-1940.” Historical Reflections/Refléctions Historiques 22.1 (1996): 47-76. Baruch, Marc Olivier. “Charisma and Hybrid Legitimacy in Pétain’s État français.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.2. (2006): 215-224. Berenson, Edward and Vincent Duclerc. “Introduction: Transatlantic Histories of France. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. The French Republic: History, Values, Debates. Edited by Edward Berenson, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2011. Blum, Léon. For All Mankind. Trans. W. Pickles. London: Victor Gollancz, 1946. Bruce, Robert B. Pétain: Verdun to Vichy. Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2008. Burrin, Philippe. Living with Defeat: France under the German Occupation, 1940-1944. Trans. Janet Lloyd. London: Arnold, 1996.

121

------. “Vichy.” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman under the direction of Pierre Nora. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Camus, Albert. “From Resistance to Revolution.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Camus at Combat: Writing, 1944-1947. Edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Cazorla-Sanchez, Antonio. Franco: The Biography of the Myth. London: Routledge, 2013. Champoux, Richard J. “The Massilia Affair.” Journal of Contemporary History 10.2 (1975): 283-300. Clout, Hugh. After the Ruins: Restoring the Countryside of Northern France After the Great War. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1996. ------. “Restoring the Ruins: the social context of reconstruction in the countrysides of northern France in the aftermath of the Great War.” Landscape Research 21.3 (1996): 213-230 Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Conway, Martin. “Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model.” European History Quarterly 32.1 (2002): 59-84. Cot, Pierre. , “Morale in France During the War.” American Journal of Sociology 47.3 (1941): 439-451 van Creveld, Martin. “25 October 1940: A Historical Puzzle.” Journal of Contemporary History 6.3 (1971): 87-96. Davies, Peter. The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present: From de Maistre to Le Pen. London: Routledge, 2002. ------. France and the Second World War: Resistance, Occupation and Liberation. London:

Routledge, 2000.

Diefendorf, Jeffry M. In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World

War II. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

Dixon, John. “Manipulators of Vichy Propaganda: A Case Study in Personality.” Vichy France

122

and the Resistance: Culture and Ideology. Edited by Roderick Kedward and Roger

Austin. London Croom Helm, 1985.

Eatwell, Roger. “New Styles of Dictatorship and Leadership in Interwar Europe.” Totalitarian

Movements and Political Religions 7.2 (2006) 127-137.

Fishman, Sarah. “Grand Delusions: The Unintended Consequences of Vichy France’s Prisoner of War Propaganda.” Journal of Contemporary History 26.2 (1991): 229-254. Flanner, Janet (Genêt). Paris Journal, Volume One: 1944-1955. Edited by William Shawn. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. “France: Schizophrenic Headache.” Time. 13 April, 1942. Furet, Francois. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Deborah Furet. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. de Gaulle, Charles. The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle: The Call to Honor, 1940-1942. Trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. Gildea, Robert. “Resistance, Reprisals and Community in Occupied France.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 163-185. ------. The Past in French History. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Girling, John. France: Political and Social Change. London: Routledge, 1998. von der Goltz, Anna and Robert Gildea. “Flawed Saviours: The Myths of Hindenburg and Pétain.” European History Quarterly 39.3 (2009): 439-464. Gordon, Bertram M. “National Movements and the French Revolution: The Justification of the French Revolution in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Vichy France.” L'Image de la Révolution francaise: bicentenaire de la Révolution Française 1789-1989, Volume 3. Edited by Michel Vovelle. Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. ------. “Staging the Nation’s Rebirth: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Context of Fascist Studies.” Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and

123

Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925-1945. Edited by Günter Berghaus. Providence: Berghahn, 1996. ------. “The Palingenetic Political Community: Rethinking the Legitimation of Totalitarian Regimes in Inter-War Europe.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3.3 (2002): 24-43. Hammer, Ellen. “Hindsight on Vichy.” Political Science Quarterly 61.2 (1946): 177-188. Hawes, Stephen. “The individual and the resistance community in France.” Resistance in Europe, 1939-1945. Edited by Stephen Hawes and Ralph White. London: Penguin, 1976. Hitchcock, William I. France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. Hoffmann, Stanley. “Collaborationsim in France during World War II.” The Journal of Modern History 40.3 (1968): 375-395. ------. “The Trauma of 1940: A Disaster and its Traces.” Historical Reflections/Refléctions

Historiques 22.1 (1996): 287-301.

------. Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s. New York: Viking, 1974. ------. “Heroic Leadership: The Case of Modern France.” Political Leadership in Industrialized Societies: Studies in Comparative Leadership. Edited by Lewis J. Edinger. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967. Imlay, Talbot C. “Paul Reynaud and France’s Response to Nazi Germany, 1938-1940.” French Historical Studies 26.3 (2003): 497-538. Irvine, William D. “Domestic Politics and the Fall of France in 1940.” Historical Reflections/Reflections Historiques 22.1 (1996): 77-90. Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. ------. The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003. ------. “Vichy and Fascism.” The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le pen Edited and translated by Edward J. Arnold. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. ------. “General de Gaulle and His Enemies: Anti-Gaullism in France Since 1940.” Transactions

124

of the Royal Historical Society 9 (1999): 43-65. Jennings, Eric. “’Reinventing Jeanne’: The Iconology of Joan of Arc in Vichy Schoolbooks, 1940-1944.” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 711-734. ------. Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Jobs, Richard Ivan. Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France After the Second World War. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Judt, Tony. “’We Have Discovered History’: Defeat, Resistance, and the Intellectuals in France.” The Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 147-172. Kalman, Samuel. The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de feu. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008. Katz, Ethan. “Memory at the Front: The struggle over revolutionary commemoration in Occupied France, 1940-1944.” Journal of European Studies 35.2 (2005): 89-104. Kedward, H.R. “Patriots and Patriotism in Vichy France.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 32 (1982): 175-192. ------. “Mapping the Resistance: An Essay on Roots and Routes.” Modern & Contemporary France 2.4 (2012): 491-503. ------. “Charles Maurras and the True France.” Ideas into Politics: Aspects of European History, 1880-1950. Edited by R.J. Bullen, H. Pogge von Strandmann and A.B. Polonksy. Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984. Kelly, Michael. “War and culture: the lessons of postwar France.” Synergies: Royaume-Uni et Irlande 1 (2008): 91-100. Kershaw, Ian. The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. King, Jonathan H. “Emmanuel d’Astier and the Nature of the French Resistance.” Journal of Contemporary History 8.4 (1973): 25-31. Kingston, Paul J. “Gerontocracy, propaganda and Youth: Youth propaganda in France, 1940-

125

1942.” FSC i (1990): 183-212.

Koreman, Megan. “The Collaborator’s Penance: The Local Purge, 1944-5.” Contemporary European History 6.2 (1997): 177-192. Kuisel, Richard F. “The Legend of the Vichy Synarchy.” French Historical Studies 6.3 (1970): 365-398. Lackerstein, Debbie. National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies, 1930-1944.

Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Lebovics, Herman. True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945. Ithaca: Cornell

UP, 1992.

Lemmes, Fabian. “Collaboration in wartime France, 1940-1944.” European Review of History

15.2 (2008): 157-177.

Lipgens, Walter. “Ideas of the French Resistance on the Postwar International Order.” Documents on the History of European Integration. Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union, 1939-1945. Edited by Walter Lipgens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985. Lottman, Herbert R. Pétain: Hero or Traitor, The Untold Story. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Mazgaj, Paul. Imagining Fascism: The Cultural Politics of the French Young Right, 1930-1945. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007. Mazower, Mark. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin, 2008. ------. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage, 2000. Michel, Henri. “The Psychology of the French Resistor.” Journal of Contemporary History 5.3 (1970): 159-175 Milward, Alan S. The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

126

Murdoch, Brian. Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular lyrics of two world wars. London: Routledge, 1990. Némirovsky, Irène. Suite française. Trans. Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf, 2006. Newsome, W. Brian. French Urban Planning, 1940-1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Nora, Pierre. “Conflicts and Divisions.” Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions. Edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman under the direction of Pierre Nora. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Novick, Peter. The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968. Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995. ------. “Franco, the Spanish Falange and the Institutionalisation of Mission.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 7.2 (2006): 191-201. ------. Fascism: Comparison and Definition. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1980. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order, 1940-1944. New York: Knopf, 1972. ------. Paxton, Robert O. “Vichy Lives!—In a Way.” Review of L’Héritage de Vichy: Ces 100

mesures toujours en vigueur, by Cécile Desprairies. The New York Review of Books. 25

April, 2013.

Pearson, Chris. Scarred Landscapes: War and Nature in Vichy France. Basingstoke: Palgrave

MacMillan, 2008.

Philippe, Bernard and Henri Dubief. The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914-1938. Trans.

Anthony Forster. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.

Pike, David Wingeate. “Between the Two Junes: French Communists from the Collapse of

France to the Invasion of Russia.” Journal of Contemporary History 28.3 (1993): 465-

485.

“Programme du C.N.R.” Les Idées Politiques et Sociales de la Résistance: Documents

127

Clandestins, 1940-1944. Edited by Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch. Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France, 1954.

Rioux, Jean-Pierre. The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958. Trans. Godfrey Rogers. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1987.

------. “La Guerre Franco française.” War and Society in Twentieth-Century France. Edited by

Michael Scriven and Peter Wagstaff. New York: Berg, 1991.

Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944. Trans. Arthur

Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1994.

Roy, Jules. The Trial of Marshal Pétain. Trans. Robert Baldick. New York: Harper & Row,

1968.

Shennan, Andrew. Rethinking France: Plans for Renewal, 1940-1946. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1989.

Shields, James. The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen. New York: Routledge,

2007.

Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2006. Richard Swedberg, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 2005.

Sweets, John F. The Politics of Resistance in France, 1940-1944: A History of the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1976. Taylor, Lynne. “The Parti Communiste Français and the French resistance in the Second World

War.” Resistance and Revolution in Mediterranean Europe, 1939-1948. Edited by Tony

Judt. London: Routledge, 1989.

128

Todorov, Tzvetan. A French Tragedy: Scenes of a Civil War, Summer 1944. Trans. Mary Byrd

Kelly. Hanover, N.H.: UP of New England, 1996.

Tumblety, Joan. “’Civil Wars of the Mind’: The Commemoration of the 1789 Revolution in the

Parisian Press of the Radical Right, 1939.” European History Quarterly 30.3 (2000):

389-429.

Viejo-Rose, Dacia. Reconstructing Spain: Cultural Heritage and Memory after the Civil War. Brighten: Sussex Academic Press, 2011. Weber, Eugen. The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s. New York: Norton, 1996. Wieviorka, Olivier. Orphans of the Republic: The Nation’s Legislators in Vichy. Trans. George Holoch. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2009. ------. “France.” Resistance in Western Europe. Edited by Bob Moore. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

Williams, Andrew. “France and the New World Order, 1940-1947.” Modern & Contemporary

France 8.2 (2000): 191-202.

Young, Robert J. France and the Origins of the Second World War. Houndsmills: MacMillan, 1996. Zdatny, Steven. “Coiffeurs in Vichy France: Artisans and the ‘National Revolution.’” Contemporary European History 5.3 (1996): 371-399.