French and Germans, Germans and French

A Personal Interpretation of France under Two Occupations, 1914–1918/1940–1944

Richard Cobb

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781512603385
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The noted historian Richard Cobb presents an engaging synthesis of research, combined with highly original observations and analyses of the war years in France. The reader is given access to a unique private chronicle of the relations between occupants and occupés, which provides the "I was there" understanding that is a hallmark of Cobb's well-known ability to humanize history. The author characterizes this work as "an essay in interpretation and imagination, an evocation drawing heavily on literary, or semi-literary, sources and even on autobiography, rather than a straight piece of history. The book is about people, individuals, rather than about institutions and administration." A recognized classic is now back in print.

II THE SECOND OCCUPATION, 1940–1945

2. VICHY AND THE NORD

There was a dark stain on the wall of the village schoolroom where the portrait of Marshal Pétain had been for the previous four years. But the poster bearing the Marshal’s new year address to the schoolchildren of France dated 1st January 1944, though somewhat tattered, was still up on the wall beside the blackboard, as though, in this Norman village, the authorities were still undecided as to the future in immediate political terms, and, in typical Norman manner, were keeping all their options open. Or perhaps no one had thought of taking the message down. And so there it continued to address itself, in somewhat querulous terms, to an empty, indifferent, dusty room, the July sun lighting up oblique shafts of rising chalk. Classes had been interrupted, presumably since D Day, and the Marshal’s ancient voice spoke into emptiness, over one of those huge chasms that, every now and then, mark the broken progress of French history, from regime to regime.

There is always something rather pathetic about the tattered relics of defeated regimes, rather like the brutally scattered intimacies that lie about on recent battlefields: postcards of French villages with German writing on them, and strands of bloodstained clothing that caught the eye of Poincaré, when, in September 1914, he was visiting the site of the Battle of the Marne. The poster headed with the double-bladed francisque spoke of hopes that seemed incredibly ancient and of a paternalism that had lost its relevance, as if France had outgrown the stress on redemption and atonement that had been Pétain’s particular message ever since the terrible summer of 1940. It seemed indeed as impossibly dated as the letter, written in green ink on squared school exercise book paper, in Slovak, some of the writing dissolving in blotches of water, the paper covered in mud, that had been brought to me by an eager local: a message, apparently addressed to a wife or to a mother in some Slovak village that had never reached its destination.

I can remember to this day the gist of the Marshal’s message, and even more its tone, almost as if one could hear the old man’s rather halting speech, as, patiently and didactically, he spelled out what he wanted to say to his little friends:

Mes chers petits amis, à cette époque de l’année, et chaque année [and this would indeed have been the fourth time] ma pensée va vers vous. Mes meilleures années sont celles que j’ai passées sur les bancs de l’école [and a village school, too, somewhere in the Pas-de-Calais]. Mes chers petits amis, ne copiez pas, ne trichez pas, nommez entre vous un chef de classe, constituez dans chaque classe un comité d’honneur

and so on and so on, ending on the injunction: “ce qu’il faut à la France, à notre cher pays, ce ne sont pas des intelligences, ce sont des caractères,” a message the gist of which would have seemed entirely familiar to any English public schoolboy brought up in the early thirties. It was as if one had come in at the tail end of an act witnessed many times before. Until that day in early July 1944, I had tended to regard Philippe Pétain almost as evil incarnate, certainly more wicked, because more damaging, than Pierre Laval. Now he seemed to have borrowed both the language and even some of the clothing of a French Baden-Powell. One almost expected to see him on the lawn outside the Hôtel du Parc, wearing shorts, displaying nobbly knees, in an effort, rather touching, to bridge the gap of seventy-odd years that separated him from his dear little friends, the hope of the future, the guarantors of France’s moral regeneration. It is hard to think of an old man who spoke in such genuine and clearly deeply felt grandfatherly tones as a politician of consummate wickedness who had anaesthetized and deceived his people into semicollaboration. There was a tired candour about the old man’s nostalgia for a very, very distant youth (after all, when he had been sitting on the hard school bench, it would not have been very long after the Franco-Prussian War, as if this Picard peasant had been destined to experience three wars in the most war-torn area of France). And in this candour there was no doubt an element of loss and compensation. Like so many childless people, Philippe Pétain delighted in the company of little boys and little girls, to whom he could address himself at their own mental level. So many of the Marshal’s speeches seem to have been drawn heavily from the uplifting sayings of L’Almanach Vermot, and even his conversations were peppered with lapalissades, as if he had been a military Monsieur Prudhomme. “Alibert, parle-moi des Chinois, ils sont jaunes, n’est-ce pas? Je n’aime pas les jaunes.”

Of course, this childlike stance could be combined with an elephantine memory for slight and with an anti-English bias that dated back to Doullens. Yet, undoubtedly, an important element in the public style and language of l’Etat Français is its archaic dottiness. “Labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles de la France,” as proclaimed on the Vichy banknotes, would hardly seem relevant to the priorities of a regime very largely run by technocrats and high-ranking civil servants, at last released from the trammels of parliamentary control and free to plan the immediate future without interference from troublesome deputies. Perhaps, though, it did vaguely reflect the rural values of an Auvergne all at once promoted to the status of the centre of political patronage and influence.

There was much that was dotty about Vichy, particularly in its period of relative innocence and hope, in the period 1940–41, when the regime has been described as la république flottante. It was certainly not a republic, and, in the end, it did not float, leaving, on the contrary, the main elements of the French Mediterranean fleet at the bottom of Toulon harbour. But, as long as Darlan was prime minister as well as minister of the interior, local administration was given over to landlocked naval officers, with amiraux and vice-amiraux as prefects, capitaines de vaisseau as sous-préfets, indeed a unique example in modern French history of the navy, la Royale, being put to some use, even if that use was fairly detestable. For naval officers eagerly led the crusade against Jews and Freemasons, serving as the zealous executants of Vichy’s anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic legislation that, incidentally, owed absolutely nothing to German prompting, the German authorities, both in Vichy and in Paris, being perfectly happy to let the French get on with whatever form of persecution they wished to inflict on their compatriots. La république flottante was, in historical terms, the most anti-British regime France has ever possessed. It was a bitter disappointment to Darlan that he was cheated of the opportunity of actually going to war with Britain.

Vichy has also been described, at least in its initial stages, as la république des recalés, a regime of dunces, representing, in educational terms, what was so clearly spelt out in the Marshal’s new year message of 1944. Of course they were not all dunces, for Vichy put in positions of unrestricted power technocrats and civil servants of great experience, specialists like the father of the historian Le Roy Ladurie, syndicalists like Belin, financial experts like Bouthillier. But the entourage of the Marshal at least up to November 1942 was drawn from Stanislas and from l’enseignement libre. As the French hierarchy was quick to realize, and to rejoice, moral values would mean a Moral Order, putting the clock back on Ferry and on sixty years of laïcité. Instituteurs and professeurs de lycée were in for a rough time, and the way was open for clean living, the open air, the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, songs round the blazing campfire set in the midst of the forest, a minister of youth, as well as a minister of sport (both offices, incidentally, inherited from the hated Popular Front) and much public official concern for the problems of youth—though, by 1943, under overwhelming German pressure, that concern would often take the form of helping with the deportation of young men over eighteen to work in German war factories. The STO certainly stripped bare the equivocations of Vichy youth policies and lost the regime the support of middle-class parents. Even so, any regime that places character and honour at a higher priority than intelligence is fairly eccentric.

Because of the terms of the Armistice and thanks above all to the initiative of Pierre Laval, who, as well as having been député-maire of Aubervilliers, was the châtelain of Châteldon, twelve kilometres from Vichy, and already by the end of 1940, linked to the new capital by a macadam road, Vichy France at once emerged as a geographical object of wonder. It was as if l’Hexagone had been turned upside-down, with, for the first time in history, the capital of France placed in a watering-place in the underprivileged and backward Massif Central. In historical terms, the geographical aberration that was Vichy could be described as la revanche du Midi and, indeed, as the temporary solution of what generations of southern politicians have described as le problème du Midi, even if that problem was of their own making or existed only in the imagination of poets and félibriges. It is not surprising that, even forty years on, Vichy should be recalled as a lost golden age in places like Clermont-Ferrand, Thiers, Vichy and Moulins, and among the rural population of the Auvergne and the Bourbonnais. It is true that, in intent at least, it was as highly centralized as had been the Third Republic; but the centre was not in Paris, temporarily disinherited, cut off from favour and patronage, and merely the capital of anti-Vichy collaboration—in intent, at least, because in practice, thanks to the Germans, the writ of Vichy did not extend very far, being largely confined to the landlocked, truncated territory of la France Non-Occupée, and almost completely excluded from the industrial area extending from the Belgian frontier to the course of the Somme.

What the French of my generation are most likely to recall about the Vichy interlude, whatever their political affiliations, is its bizarre and recalcitrant geography, its many, and dangerous, frontiers and the relative impenetrability of the five distinct regions into which France was now divided: a geography of fear and danger that made of once sleepy little provincial towns like Niort, Orthez, Moulins, Montluçon, perilous passages de ligne where the traveller had to run the gauntlet of the watchful double filter of the gendarmerie and the Feldgendarmerie, both forces working in harmony and both employing well-tended Alsatian dogs. A geography that made of each of the Paris termini the potential end of the line for the résistant and for the Allied agent, as well as for the black marketeer. A geography that, till 1942, established a militarily patrolled frontier along the course of the Somme, cutting off the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais and much of the Somme from the rest of France, while, at the same time, removing the frontier that divided the Nord from Belgium. A geography that made any coastal area inaccessible to the ordinary traveller, that took the Haut- and Bas-Rhin and the Moselle out of France altogether, to form a new Gau of the Third Reich, and that placed the southern Alpine departments under Italian military occupation. So much of the literature of the Vichy period relates to the anxieties of a midnight passage de ligne, in the inexorable silence of a stationary train that seems unlikely ever to get up steam again; and to be crawling on hands and knees through the undergrowth, in dread fear of the sudden yellow probe of the tentative finger of a searchlight. By multiplying the internal frontiers, the Germans had multiplied the internal dangers of travel and had deliberately set about isolating the French from one another.

The result is that it is almost impossible to write the history of Vichy for France as a whole (and, for Alsatians and German-speaking Lorrainers, it is not even French history; for the inhabitants of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, the occupation years related much more to the history of Belgium than to that of France). Just as the Marshal, in his initial appeal, had sought to rebuild a shattered and humiliated France on the basis of the family unit, the Germans had ensured that the experience of occupation should differ radically from place to place. As it turned out, the Normans, at least the Lower ones, got off rather lightly, indeed often did quite well out of the German occupation; the Auvergnats too prospered, but the Marseillais and the Niçois starved. In Paris, social life went on with a gay intensity, reaching a climax of inventiveness in 1943, when, among other works, one of Sartre’s plays had its highly successful premiere in the presence of le Tout-Paris and the leading literary lights of the German military hierarchy. There were areas of resistance and areas of attentisme. Toulouse went one way, Bordeaux the other, as if in conformity to some well-tried historical law governing the always contrary attitudes of the inhabitants of the two southwestern towns.

If Vichy remained, predictably, vichyssois, Montpellier never was. Both the history of collaboration and that of resistance can be studied only in local or, at most, regional terms. In Paris, in the summer and winter of 1940, the working-class population of the northeastern arrondissements could be seen fraternizing with the German soldiers, sitting with them on the café terraces of Belleville and Ménilmontant, while the western arrondissements remained shuttered and silent at least till September 1940, when social life started to pick up once more. But, after June 1941, there would be no more fraternization in the XVIIIme, the XIXme and the XXme. Between June 1940 and June 1941, the highly intelligent young men in charge of German occupation in the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, in the textile and mining towns, made a point of making contact with Communist trade union officials of the CGT, while by-passing the official Vichy syndicat unique imposed by Belin, because they were concerned to get the population back to work, the mills and mines reopened. But, of course, all that too changed overnight in June 1941.

Of all the areas of a fragmented France, the one that remained the most impenetrable to Vichy persuasion and influence was the Northeast. This was as much the result of historical experience as of deliberate German policy. The Germans, from the time of the Armistice in June 1940, placed the Northeast under the military governor of Belgium, von Falkenhausen, creating a new unit under the denomination of Belgium and Northern France. There may have been annexionist arrière-pensées in thus differentiating between Belgium and the Northeast, and the rest of France. Certainly this was the view of the inhabitants of the Nord. Or the Germans may simply have decided to do in 1940 what they had done, in Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Douai, Cambrai and Valenciennes in 1914, when the Occupied Departments had been placed under the authority of von Bissing, the military governor in Brussels. Certainly there was a degree of continuity in German policy. For instance, the Kommandantur of Roubaix appointed in 1940 was the nephew of the one appointed in 1914. What is more, he arrived fully provided with his uncle’s fiches. Those who had been arrested and deported in 1915 or 1916 were redeported in 1940. These included the maire, a veteran Guesdiste, Jean Le Bas, who had been released, at the insistence of Alfonso XIII, in 1916, and who died in Mauthausen in 1943. It was much the same in Lille, Douai and Valenciennes. The Germans had long memories; so did the Roubaisiens and the Lillois; and each lived up to the historical expectations of the other, though the Germans were not quite so brutal and rapacious in the second occupation as they had been in the first.

The Nord was the only part of France in which the Germans were referred to exclusively as les boches in the Second World War as well as in the First. Here, no fridolins, no verts-de-gris, no chleuhs, just the old, familiar boches. Perhaps, among the garrison troops of Lille, there was even a return of the Bavarians, familiar uniforms there from 1914 to 1918, though they would no longer have been distinguishable to the civilian population. Perhaps, in 1940, occupant and occupé resumed a tentative, all-purpose dialogue composed of chtimi and South German slang? Certainly one of the leading German officials in Lille, Carlo Schmid, director of the OKF 670, was bilingual, with a French mother, and strong sympathies for the type of Christian socialist currents that had long existed among the Catholic working classes and patronat of the wool towns of the Franco-Belgian border; Schmid had direct access to the local Catholic hierarchy, and was able to induce some local leaders of what had been Catholic boy scout movements to moderate the gaulliste fervour of Boulonnais lycéens. Another German, General Bertram, at one time garrison commander of Lille, was the brother of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Breslau; and, in his relations with the powerful and enormously respected Cardinal Liénart, this stood him in good stead, in an area of France in which the clergy were especially influential, even among a section of the working class.

It is hard to know what the Germans had in mind for the future either of Belgium or of French Flanders and French Wallonia. In the Nord, they seem to have given little encouragement to l’abbé Gantois, curé of Watten, the leader of a pan-Flemish separatist movement, the Vlaamsch Verbond voor Frankrijk, though he got some financial assistance from Ribbentrop’s people. Certainly they treated the Belgians much better than they did the French, so that in 1944, as I was able to experience, conditions were far better outre-Quiévrain than on the LRT side of the frontier. It is likely that the main concern of the military authorities in this absolutely vital area of supply and communications was to keep the trains running, the factories open, the coastal defences in the making supplied with a work force, and the...