The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction in Occupied France, 1940-1944
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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. iv 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 v 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 1 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. 2 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