France

Emile Chabal

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509530045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

France is the most-visited country in the world. It attracts millions of tourists, most of whom come in search of beautiful architecture, good food, and fine art. But appearances can be deceptive. France is not only a place of culture and glamour; it also carries the bitter memories of violence, division and broken promises. In this arresting book, Emile Chabal, a leading specialist of contemporary France, tells the story of a paradoxical country. From the calamitous defeat by Hitler's armies in 1940 to the spectacular gilets jaunes protests, he explores the contradictions that have shaped French history over the last eighty years. The picture that emerges is one of a nation struggling to reconcile its core political values with the realities of a diverse society. Listen to the author talk about the book with Roxanne Panchasi on the New Books Network Podcast

1
Defeat and Resistance

It is impossible to overstate the impact of the fall of France in June 1940. When the Germans invaded, it was the third time in less than a century that France had been occupied by its neighbour. In 1870–1, the Franco-Prussian War ended with a humiliating defeat for the French armies, the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, the annexation of the eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine, and a violent urban insurrection in the form of the Paris Commune. After nursing their broken pride for almost half a century, the French were given the chance to redeem themselves in 1914. But the First World War was a poisoned chalice. The Allied armies did eventually prevail – and many of the territories lost in 1870 were returned to France – but the war took an immense toll on French society. More than 7.8 million French soldiers were called up and 1.5 million of them died on the killing fields of Verdun, the Marne and the Somme. Never had so many French people perished in a single conflict. The human costs were profound, and, still today, almost every French town and village has a memorial to those who died.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that the terrifying spectacle of the rapidly advancing Nazi army in late spring 1940 struck fear into the French population. Hundreds of thousands of people in northern France ran from their homes. Horses, carts, cars and vans clogged the roads as families fled an enemy they knew and feared. The French army, which had been preparing for just this eventuality, was completely outmanoeuvred; its tactics failed, and its soldiers were unable to halt the inexorable progress of the Wehrmacht. With the chastening British retreat at Dunkirk – a retreat that was only possible thanks to the sacrifice of French soldiers – the French army was left to its fate. It withdrew, until it could withdraw no more. Paris fell on 14 June, and, on 22 June, Philippe Pétain signed the armistice agreement that divided France into a northern occupied zone and a southern ‘free’ zone. In a mere six weeks, one of continental Europe’s great powers had been humbled, its sophisticated armies scattered and its government dismantled.

In the Shadow of Defeat

One of the paradoxes of the fall of France was that it was both an enormous surprise and an event foretold. Clearly, no one expected the tactics of the French army to fail so spectacularly. Few could have foreseen the speed with which the Nazis crushed their opponents. Although the subjugation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the obliteration of Poland in 1939 had given ample warning of the potential of Hitler’s army, it was the fall of France that symbolized German military dominance over Europe. Henceforth, no European power would underestimate the ruthless efficiency of the German military machine.

But, if the shock of 1940 was real, the fear of defeat was nothing new. For decades, many French people believed their country had been going awry. Most conservatives, for instance, abhorred the parliamentary regime of the Third Republic, which had been in place since 1870, and were neither surprised nor particularly upset to see it fall apart in 1940. Those of a more fascist or anti-Semitic bent were equally nonplussed at the collapse of the Third Republic. They were not going to mourn the passing of a political system that had made it possible for a socialist and communist Popular Front government to take power in 1936, under the stewardship of the country’s most famous Jew, Léon Blum. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, French communists had maintained since the 1920s that France was a bourgeois, capitalist society. For them, the economic depression of the 1930s and the rise of fascism in Europe were harbingers of the terminal crisis of capitalism, and the defeat of 1940 was a logical outcome of this process. Even those of a moderate, liberal bent – many of whom had been the most enthusiastic supporters of the Third Republic – had spent years bemoaning the rigidity of France’s institutions and the inability of the French to adapt, not least to the reality of German economic development.

The fall of France laid bare these divisions. As many had predicted, the parliamentary institutions of the Third Republic were unable to survive the defeat. In an act of collective suicide, the members of the Assemblée nationale voted 569 to 80 (with 20 abstentions) to hand ‘full control’ of government to Pétain on 10 July 1940. This piece of legislation brought a de facto end to the Third Republic. In so doing, it confirmed what many on the right and left of the political spectrum had long suspected, namely that parliamentary democracy had run its course. It also fitted a much longer pattern in modern French history of authoritarian regimes dissolving parliamentary structures. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte terminated the French Revolution in a dramatic coup d’état. Just over 50 years later, his nephew Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte repeated the trick by bringing the democratic revolutionary wave of 1848 to a close with a coup d’état in 1851. Even if the circumstances in 1940 were not as favourable as those of 1799 or 1851, the same pattern played out again, as Pétain took the helm of what was left of the French government. Most French people hoped that he would be a reassuring leader who would raise the country from the depths of defeat and occupation.

Unfortunately, this is not what happened. For a start, the independence of the French government – now based in Vichy, in the southern ‘free’ zone – was severely compromised. Nominally, the Vichy regime administered metropolitan French territory and the entire French colonial empire; it also maintained its own civil service, army and police. In practice, Paris and the most economically productive regions of northern and eastern France were under direct German control, while the Vichy regime gradually lost its grip on far-flung colonial territories under pressure from the Free French resistance, the British and the Japanese. To make matters worse, the British had paralysed the French fleet in order to stop it falling into German hands, most famously in the devastating attack on the naval base at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, and the French army had been effectively neutralized by the direct German occupation of the entire Atlantic coastline. This amputation of France’s military might was followed by the systematic exploitation of the French economy for the Nazi war effort. Factories and equipment were repurposed to produce arms and supplies, and French workers were used to fill the insatiable German demand for highly skilled labour, especially after the implementation of the Service du travail obligatoire (STO, Obligatory Labour Service) in February 1943. If the occupation of France was relatively benign, at least in comparison to the brutality of Nazi rule in Eastern Europe, there was no mistaking the Nazis’ main purpose. They intended to bleed the country dry.

The growing privations of daily life – the rations, the shortages, the requisitioning of food and men – did not stop the ideologues of the Vichy regime from announcing their intention to begin a ‘National Revolution’ to redress France. The aim was to combine elements of Catholic traditionalism, secular conservatism and homegrown fascism in order to create an integrated, harmonious society that would be structured around the cardinal values of ‘travail, famille, patrie’ (work, family, nation). The architects of the Vichy state intended to use the unusual circumstances of defeat and subjugation to recreate France. And, by transforming the famous republican slogan of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (liberty, equality, fraternity), they explicitly sought to position themselves within a long tradition of counter-revolution.

For a while, it seemed to be working. The Vichy regime benefited from a certain degree of popularity, and most French people accepted the realities of German occupation. It helped that almost all opponents of collaboration – whether communist or right-wing nationalist – were either shot, detained, deported, in exile or forced into silence. Nevertheless, collaboration took place at every level of French society, from civil servants and university professors to small business owners and prostitutes. There was little outright resistance to German occupation in the north, even less to the authoritarian policies of the Vichy regime in the south. The authorities in both zones benefited from a widespread culture of distrust, as many people turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews and other ‘undesirables’, and some even denounced the supposed misdeeds of their friends, neighbours and family members. Tacit and explicit forms of social control, as well as a good deal of war fatigue, gave the appearance of social consensus.

Unlike in 1799 or 1851, however, there was no getting away from the fact that this anti-democratic revolution was built on top of defeat. While Pétain could argue in 1940 that the Vichy regime was the best option in a bad situation, these claims became increasingly tenuous as the war dragged on. The imposition of direct German rule over the whole of metropolitan France in November 1942 and, especially, the implementation of the STO highlighted the degree to which the Vichy regime was powerless to prevent the exploitation of the country, its resources and its people. Farmers began to hoard their food; young labour conscripts started to abscond; and disgruntled workers turned towards the small groups of violent resisters scattered across provincial France. With the progress of the Allied war effort, it seemed as if the tide might be turning. Shunned by its supporters and detested by its opponents, the Vichy regime felt its legitimacy ebb away.

By 1944, it was clear that the Nazis’ days were numbered. Just as the fall of France had announced the beginning of the ‘real’ war in the West, so the two decisive engagements of the Western Front in 1944 – the Allied landings in Normandy in June and the Côte d’Azur in August – marked the beginning of the end of the conflict. On the face of it, both engagements appeared to be an unqualified success for the French since they led to the liberation of the country and the final defeat of Hitler. Helped by small, coordinated resistance activities, the Allied armies slowly pushed back the same army that had triumphantly driven into northern France more than four years earlier. In a moment of immense significance, the newly proclaimed leader of France – Charles de Gaulle – gave a rousing speech from the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on 25 August to celebrate the liberation of the capital city. His was a call to arms and an exhortation. He urged his fellow citizens to show themselves ‘worthy of France’ and its great history. It was exactly what the French needed to hear after the humiliation of occupation.

Yet the unravelling of the German occupation could not hide the harsh legacies of defeat. The scars of 1940 were unmistakable. At the end of the war, France’s towns and cities, above all in the north, had been flattened by bombing. The country had lost 20% of its housing stock, with countless other residential buildings, factories, warehouses and workshops damaged in battle. Agricultural production had collapsed. Most communication networks – from telephones to railways – were in terrible condition. There were human consequences, too. Mob violence broke out across France after the Liberation, as self-appointed vigilante groups took revenge on alleged collaborators. In total, almost 9,000 were killed in extra-judicial violence. Elsewhere, women accused of collaboration horizontale (horizontal collaboration, or having sex with the enemy) were paraded through the streets with shaved heads and civil servants who had served the Vichy regime hurriedly burnished their resistance credentials in the hope that they would be rehabilitated and allowed to continue working for the state. Even at a geopolitical level, France had lost its place at the high table of global diplomacy. De Gaulle never forgave the British and Americans for not inviting him to participate in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 that set the future shape of Europe.

The French made numerous attempts to shake off these lingering embarrassments of defeat in the years after 1944. The Gouvernement provisoire de la République Française (GPRF, Provisional Government of the French Republic), which ran France from June 1944 to October 1946, annulled the Vichy regime and announced an ambitious programme for the reconstruction of the country. The variety of different political tendencies represented in the provisional government – including communists – meant that the proposals had a more radical and social tinge than any other legislative package since the Popular Front of 1936. The promulgation of a new constitution in October 1946 saw the birth of the Fourth Republic, which was supposed to establish a robust parliamentary democracy, untainted by the shameful capitulation of its predecessor.

A symbol of this new dawn was the enfranchisement of women. France was one of the last European countries to give women the vote, and their belated inclusion in the political community in 1945 marked a definitive break with the past. Alongside an expanded franchise, the politicians and administrators of the Fourth Republic set about implementing some of the reforms promised by the GPRF. Many businesses were (re)nationalized, the tax system was modernized and a vast new social security system was established, part of which involved building hundreds of thousands of new social housing units from the mid-1950s onwards. As many historians of the period now recognize, the reconstruction of France in the decades after the Second World War was an immense peaceful revolution that transformed the character, structure, social relations and culture of France. This collective effort did much to erase the ugly memories of the so-called années noires (dark years) of the German occupation.

But memories of the war persisted just below the surface. Except for a few prominent trials of political and intellectual figures, of which the most famous was that of the writer Robert Brasillach, who was executed in February 1945, most people suspected of collaboration were quietly rehabilitated thanks to one of the three amnesty laws of 1947, 1951 and 1953. The administrative architecture and personnel of the Fourth Republic were virtually unchanged from those of the Vichy regime, both at a national level and at a local level. Meanwhile, many victims, especially those who had been prisoners of war or forced labourers, demanded recognition by the state, as did prominent (usually male) members of the various resistance movements. Their attempts to fix a positive memory of unified French resistance to the occupation obscured the troubling reality of a population that had often worked with the Nazis, even when it meant acquiescing in the persecution of the Jews. For their part, French Jews who survived the Holocaust avoided public commemoration, preferring private religious ceremonies to remember the tragedy that had befallen their community.

Underneath the veneer of reconstruction, then, many French people continued to carry the weight of 1940. For the most part, this was invisible, but occasionally it exploded in spectacular fashion. As we will see later, it was the obsessive desire on the part of the French military high command to avoid a repeat of 1940 that led to the catastrophic and protracted military engagements in Indochina and in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. The infamous French defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in spring 1954 was a distillation of these memories; this was the first time that a major European imperial power had been beaten in open combat by a supposedly ill-trained indigenous guerrilla force. It was a similar story in Algeria, where the French tried to avoid a repeat, not only of 1940, but also of 1954. In the end, they only succeeded in enflaming the multiple layers of anti-colonial violence that led to one of the bloodiest wars of decolonization anywhere in the world. De Gaulle tried his best to portray the Évian Accords, which brought an end to the Algerian War in March 1962, as a victory for French diplomacy. The reality was that this was yet another defeat. Try as they might, the French were not able to shake off the legacy of 1940.

It was perhaps inevitable that, after engulfing the colonies, the spectre of defeat would eventually return to haunt metropolitan France. Already, the mixed memories of the war ran as a thread through the protests of 1968. The baby-boom generation at the forefront of the demonstrations began to demand that their parents explain the silences surrounding collaboration and the deportation of the Jews. The more radical amongst them compared de Gaulle to Hitler, and chanted ‘we are all German Jews’, while riot police tried to keep the unruly mob at bay. But state repression and censorship were not enough to contain the contradictions of defeat. In the 1970s and 1980s, the French were forced to confront the uncomfortable realities of occupied France through a series of epoch-making films and documentaries. The most famous of these was Marcel Ophuls’s fourhour epic Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow ...