National Regeneration in Vichy France

Ideas and Policies, 1930–1944

Debbie Lackerstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317089971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The creators of the Vichy regime did not intend merely to shield France from the worst effects of military defeat and occupation; rather the leaders of Vichy were inspired by a will to regenerate France, to establish an authoritarian new order that would repair the degenerative effects of parliamentary democracy and liberal society. Their plan to effect this change took the form of a far-reaching programme they called the National Revolution. This is the first study of the National Revolution as the expression of Vichy's ideology and aims. It reveals the variety and complexity of both right wing and other strands of French thought in the context of the turbulent years of the 1930s - when Vichy's history really begins - and under the Occupation, when internal rivalries and divisions, as well as the pressures of war, doomed Vichy's programme of national regeneration. The book is structured around a consideration of the rhetoric of right-wing ideology and such key catchwords as 'decadence', 'action', 'order', 'realism' and 'new man', and shows how these phrases only served to mask the political and ideological incoherence of the Vichy government.

Chapter 1
The Realities of Power under Occupation

The Vichy government was born out of defeat. It represented a determination to hold on to the vestiges of national power and an intention to address the causes of the defeat by accomplishing a massive programme of reform. But the National Revolution was conceived by France’s leaders in the immediate aftermath of defeat, before they knew the realities of power under the Occupation. These realities were the politics of government and collaboration and the shifting course of the war. They were complex and dynamic forces that defined and constantly redefined the possibilities and limits of reform. Beyond those limits lay silence, ineffectiveness or resistance.

Power in Occupied France was characterised by division and competition. Within the Vichy government, there were several competing sources of power. Pétain, or more accurately Pétainism, was the force which bound them together. Popular support for Pétain, a good measure of which he retained long after support for the regime and its policies began to wane, made him indispensable to the German occupiers and personally inviolable to critics of government reforms. Pétain was subject to many influences from his large and changing entourage of advisers. Beneath him, the state power structures – the various ministries and individuals who controlled them and the bureaucrats who made them work – represented different and at times conflicting agendas, priorities and strategies.

Beyond the government structures, the collaborationists in Paris challenged Vichy’s power through constant, critical attacks in the press. Their collective aim was to sway public opinion, win favour from the Germans and gain inroads into power. However, each collaborationist leader tried to put himself and his organisation forward as the man and single party to lead France in the Nazi New European Order.

Over-arching all sources of French power were the German occupation forces. They too had several overlapping agencies. At the highest levels of political and military command, the Nazi leadership distrusted any real possibility of French national revival and were wary of too much power being concentrated in the hands of a dominant national leader. They were willing to tolerate plans for reform or ideological or cultural rapprochement only in so far as they did not affect the public order and economic pillage that collaboration facilitated. Within Occupied France, however, the diplomatic face of German control was Otto Abetz, a man who had a genuine affection for French culture and had worked in support of Franco-German cooperation and cultural ties since the 1920s. Abetz was appointed ambassador to France in 1940, but he took up residence in occupied Paris, not Vichy – a clear indication of where real power rested. Abetz wanted stronger ties between the two nations and a more popular form of collaboration. He therefore supported Laval over Pétain and Paris over Vichy and some collaborationist leaders over others, but in all cases he played one against the other to promote German interests. Other German agencies in France, the military and the SS police and racial organisations, operated in overlapping spheres of influence. This created further levels of division, confusion and competition. The relative power of these agencies, the dominance of some over others, shifted as the war progressed and the nature of the Occupation changed. Overall, the power of the military decreased relative to SS organisations as the Germans began to implement their racial policies but German control in general tightened as their need to maintain order and to exploit resources became more acute. We should not forget that German plans and the wider course of the war overshadowed all politics in Occupied France.1

For all these reasons, the nature and dynamic of power under the Occupation is best understood in phases. The four phases below are divided according to the changing internal power structures in France and reflect the changing pressures of occupation and the wider war.

From Utopia to Disillusion: July–December 1940

Pierre Laval was the real architect of the Vichy regime. It was Laval, that quintessential politician of the Third Republic, who convinced a majority of parliamentarians to dissolve the National Assembly and vote full powers to Pétain. This they did on 10 July 1940. The following day, Pétain promulgated the acts that created the new Etat Français and that gave him, as its head, extraordinary power. He appointed Laval as the vice-president of the Conseil d’Etat and as his successor. The short time from mid July until the end of 1940 defines the period when the Vichy regime was most secure. During this time many flocked to the cause of the National Revolution and reformists were most confident and enthusiastic in their plans to shape a new France out of defeat.

Confidence and enthusiasm was not the general mood. France was still suffering immense uncertainty and confusion and the massive trauma of defeat left a complication of emotions and misconceptions: relief that France would not suffer Polandisation, that the occupiers behaved ‘correctly’ and that the Armistice terms did not appear to be severe; expectation that the war in Europe would soon be over and that the occupation would be temporary; and residual resentment against Britain, renewed by the shock of its attack on the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir. Such feelings produced mass support for Pétain. Above all, people had confidence in Pétain’s promise of protection; his calls for national reform and renewal to eliminate the weaknesses that had brought the nation to such a pass seemed part of that protection. With mass support, with only the barest stirrings of resistance and with the agreement on a policy of collaboration sealed at the Hitler–Pétain meeting at Montoire in October, the new regime seemed unassailable.

The summer of 1940 was also the period when Vichy’s political culture was at its most diverse. Support for Pétain and the lack of any challenge to his contention that France’s defeat indicated a deeper, national decay gave the new government licence for a sweeping programme of political, social and moral reform. In his first radio address to the nation as Head of State, Pétain announced his plan to ‘return to France the strengths that she has lost’.2 Among the many critics of the Third Republic there was real enthusiasm for the prospect and possibilities of far reaching change. Many idealists and hopeful reformists, along with the simply ambitious, gravitated to the new seat of government. For them, despite the terrible fate that France had suffered and from which the nation was still reeling, the summer of 1940 was ‘the time of all utopias’.3

Above all, it was the traditional Right – the Church, the military, supporters of Charles Maurras and the Action Française, and the opponents of liberalism, unionism and the left – who seemed to have found their utopia at Vichy. This group filled most, though not all, of the positions of power and leadership and Pétain’s speeches echoed their voices. Nevertheless, the highest level of the power structure was divided by different political tendencies and allegiances and by petty personal conflicts and palace intrigues. There was immediate animosity between Laval and Pétain. The ministries were not equal: the vengeful and power-hungry Raphaël Alibert, the first Minister for Justice, had little in common with his more cautious colleagues from social-Catholic backgrounds.4 Below all the froth of political intrigue, a relatively small group of technocrats and civil servants rode the ministerial changes and gave continuity and stability to the regime. Despite these differences, the first months of Vichy’s existence were a period of relative innocence and hope for far reaching change.

Change, however, did not come soon enough for some. The sense of utopia soon began to evaporate. Disappointment and disillusionment followed quickly for the intellectuals and more radical elements of the right, well before the continuation of the war and the realities of foreign occupation began to impact fully on the general population. Many radical right-wing intellectuals had been attracted to Vichy by the scent of imminent change, but what they found there was a rarefied atmosphere of inane and backward provincialism. One such intellectual was Lucien Rebatet, a leading nonconformist of the thirties who had been increasingly attracted to fascism. After he became an avowed Nazi supporter under the Occupation, he reflected on the lost opportunities of this period. His book, Les Décombres, was the most celebrated criticism of the failures of the Maurrassian right into which he had been bred. Rebatet claimed that he had been genuinely hopeful that some real change would result from the diverse mixture of people he found at Vichy in the first weeks of its creation, but that he soon sniffed the air of ‘extravagant frivolity’ and had become quickly convinced of the regime’s total lack of substance:

Good God, what did it mean, this prancing, this tinkling of spurs, these breastplates, this garnishing of generals, the day after the most thorough thrashing that we had received and lived through for at least five centuries? … Were a few sprinklings of holy water sufficient to wash away the heap of pus that had poisoned France?5

Rebatet’s pen was venomously spiteful and partisan, but other, more measured observers who flocked optimistically to Vichy after the defeat, also attest to their rapid disillusion. Anatole de Monzie was an independent, high-minded politician who had held several cabinet positions in the inter-war period. Immediately after the defeat, he gave his support to Pétain but became frustrated with the government’s inaction. An acute observer of men and politics, he soon discerned that weakness and the illusion of power lay at the core of Vichy’s caution. The regime, he concluded, was made up of ‘men of straw and laws of straw’.6

Elements of the radical right and avowed fascists who had left Paris for Vichy soon returned to the old centre of government. Jacques Doriot, the leader of the most powerful openly fascist league of the 1930s, the Parti Populaire Français (PPF), tried at first to find a place at Vichy but found it impossible to break through Pétain’s entourage. He blamed the continuing influence of ‘men of the past’ for the regime’s faint heartedness and lack of vigour and decided to return to Paris where, a supporter later claimed, he realised that the ‘real’ National Revolution would be made.7 The radical right claimed to find in occupied Paris an air of realism that was palpably lacking at Vichy. By realism they meant in part an ideological affinity with the Nazis but fundamentally they realised that real power resided in Paris.8 The collabos or ultras as they became popularly known, immediately began to compete for the patronage of the various official German government representations and offices in Paris.

For the occupiers, there was obviously some political advantage in maintaining a constant challenge to the security of Vichy. The German military authorities supervised the exploitation of French resources and internal security until 1942 when they became even more crucial to German war aims and the SS assumed such responsibilities. In this early stage of the Occupation, the most important sources of patronage and finance were the Propaganda Department (Propaganda Abteilung) and the German Embassy, two offices with somewhat overlapping functions and which did not always see eye to eye. The Propaganda Department promoted active propaganda and ‘cultural events’ and controlled the radio, cinema and all print media through its allocation of supplies. It kept close control over the Occupied press and required the publication of certain articles. No such pressure could be exerted from Vichy, with the result that collaborationist papers often ignored government propaganda and failed to censor critics. The main function of the German Embassy was to coordinate all factions of collaboration – the official collaboration with Vichy as well as the various collaborationist groups and individuals in Paris – but under Abetz the Embassy also became the main patron and centre of cultural affairs. Abetz courted theatrical, literary and pro-German journalistic circles, all of which flourished as they always had done in the old centre of power.9

Generous German finance allowed collaborationists to gain paramount influence in the Parisian press and radio. Some conservative, Maurrassian publications moved to the Unoccupied Zone where they followed a pro Vichy line, though not without some criticism of the government. The German-financed Parisian press, on the other hand, never swerved from a straight collaborationist line, even if some papers tried to attract a niche readership or attached themselves to certain leagues or factions.10 All the Parisian press attacked the priorities and methods, if not the principles, of the National Revolution. They accused Vichy of a lack of contact with everyday realities and ordinary lives and played upon the hopes of winning better conditions and the release of prisoners of war in pressing for more active collaboration. They also began to call for the setting up of a single party and totalitarian state structures in imitation of the ‘successful’ Nazi model. Above all, and though Pétain himself remained above direct reproach, they attacked ceaselessly what they deemed to be an anonymous and reactionary ‘old guard’ of intriguers and incompetents at Vichy who were undermining France’s future.11

The opposition between Paris and Vichy was now set and their battle for supremacy was to endure throughout the Occupation. However, divisions between Paris and Vichy were not always clear cut and their opposition was not simply the opposition of radical and conservative. Within both centres there was diversity (less so in Paris) and competition for power. Collaborationists soon began a protracted struggle for dominance which lasted the whole Occupation. If France was to be governed by a single party system along Nazi lines, then there had to be some form of amalgamation of groups, there could be only one leader and none was willing to stand aside for another. Instead, the collaborationists competed for patronage and were played, one against the other, by various, competing German agencies.

It was, however, tensions within Vichy government circles that brought about the end of the first political phase of the regime. Pétain believed in collaboration and played a major role in instituting policies of political revenge in order to establish his power but he and his supporters were most concerned with the National Revolution. Laval took the lead in negotiations with the Germans and in manipulating the developing factions in government. It was for political reasons, not ideological differences, that Pétain sacked Laval on 13 December 1940 (as well as from a personal dislike for a man who seemed to exemplify much that was reprehensible in the body politic of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Regeneration
• 1 The Realities of Power under Occupation
• 2 Decadence
• 3 Order
• 4 New Order
• 5 Action
• 6 Action under Occupation
• 7 Realism
• 8 Realism under Occupation
• 9 Imagining the New Man
• 10 Creating the New Man
• 11 Defending the New Man
• Conclusion Appeals to Renewal and Sirens of Decline
• Bibliography
• Index