Vichy France and the Resistance

Culture and Ideology

Roderick Kedward, Roger Austin, Roderick Kedward, Roger Austin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book, first published in 1985, examines various aspects of the intellectual achievements of writers and artists in the Vichy period; a strong emphasis on the ambiguity of much of their work emerges from the research. It goes a long way in answering the question of what it was like living under the fascist Vichy regime, and what the collaborators and resistance thought about their purpose and patriotism.

PART ONE: VICHY

1 Political Surveillance and Ideological Control In Vichy France: A Study of Teachers in the Midi, 1940-1944

Roger Austin

Recent work on Vichy France has reflected an interest in the regime’s readiness to promote its ideology through propaganda¹ and through socialising young people in schools and youth movements.² It is now quite clear that Vichy’s reforms of the educational system and its support for youth organisations were not only an attempt to overturn an allegedly republican, bookish and secular system that was held responsible for the defeat in 1940, but also a deliberate attempt to foster political integration in the new state. Work based largely on the archives of the Ministère de l’Education has shown how educational and youth policy evolved from the confused nationalist idealism of 1940 to a cynical sacrifice of the interests of young people in the face of German demands for compulsory labour in 19434. What has not been made clear, however, is the way in which the state developed and made use of an extensive surveillance system not only to monitor teachers as a group and as individuals but to use the intelligence that was collected to try to enforce political loyalty. The way in which this operation was conducted provides insights into how far the regime was concerned to promote ideological control, particularly among primary school teachers in state schools.

This chapter, based on hitherto classified archives, is an interpretative essay which explores how Vichy exercised political control and how effective it was. These issues are analysed and discussed by illustrating what happened in several departments in the Midi. Detailed work in the Lozère, Ardèche and Hérault, with comparable material from the Gard, Aude, Pyrénées-Orientales, Aveyron and Alpes-Maritimes, is beginning to show how widespread Vichy’s political surveillance and control of teachers was. At the same time, analysis at the level of the department is starting to reveal how much latitude local officials exercised in their interpretation of national policy.

The control of teachers functioned through two main channels: firstly, through the official state apparatus of the Ministries of Education and the Interior which often relied on information sent by the Ministry of War, and secondly through populist pressure groups like the war veterans association, the Légion des Anciens Combattants. As we shall see, these two agencies did not always share the same political perspectives.

The Ministry of the Interior and the Prefecture

The responsibilities of the Ministry of the Interior and its local representative the prefect in ensuring the political loyalty of the teaching corps had a tradition which dated back to the Napoleonic era but between 1940-4 prefects not only had a far more sophisticated system of controls at this disposal but particularly strong reasons for wanting to use them. Popular belief in the role of primary school teachers in sapping the morale of the nation was widespread. Even outsiders, like Thomas Kernan, an American based in Paris, were in no doubt about where blame lay in the fall of France. In his book, Report on France, published in 1942, he wrote: ‘If I were asked what group in France, aside from the political leaders, was chiefly responsible for the conquest of France, I’d have to answer: the school teachers.’³ The same view was extensively promoted through the French press both nationally and in regional papers.⁴ Teachers suspected of defeatism, communism or those recently naturalised were particularly likely to be disciplined either by being sacked, prematurely retired, moved to a worse post in their own or another department or temporarily suspended. The legislation to deal with these teachers was passed on 17 July 1940 and empowered prefects to take action against any teacher likely to prove ‘an element of disorder, an inveterate politiciser or incompetent’.⁵ But in addition to taking action against teachers for the role they were believed to have played up to the defeat, French military authorities found new reasons to keep them under surveillance. In October 1940 it was claimed that currents of opposition to the new regime were beginning to form around primary school teachers. In a report on 4 Octber 1940 the surveillance service of the Ministère de la Guerre noted: ‘Left-wing extremists have not lost all hope and it is still amongst primary teachers that one discovers signs of anti-national attitudes.’⁶ Within four days, a circular was transmitted to prefects ordering them to carry out a thorough investigation of the attitude of teachers⁷ and later, that of inspectors.⁸ Two months later, in a classified note from the Minister of the Interior to prefects in December 1940 they were reminded that it was their job to ‘exercise a strict control over the loyalty of primary teachers’ and to take severe sanctions where necessary.⁹

Virtually identical terms were used by the Minister of Education to regional prefects some 15 months later when Jerome Carcopino addressed them in Lyon on 20 March 1942. Prefects had not only to rally primary school teachers to the regime but ‘monitor their attitude and if need be use their powers to dismiss’,¹⁰ he said. There is evidence that in some departments newly appointed prefects wanted to take extremely energetic action. In the Ardèche, where the local branch of the teacher’s union the Syndicat National des Instituteurs had been both strongly pacifist and a staunch defender of teachers’ rights during the 1930s, the prefect planned to take severe measures against ‘anti-national’ teachers.¹¹ Indeed, as early as January 1940, several months before Vichy, the prefect had drawn up a list of teachers suspected of communism who were considered dangerous. They had enjoyed a stay of execution during the phoney war but with the defeat and the demand for a scapegoat, the prefect succeeded in taking more severe action against them than the Ministry of Education thought necessary. In at least two other departments, the Aveyron and the Alpes-Maritimes, there is no doubt that the prefects wanted to go much further than Vichy. From Rodez in the Aveyron the prefect complained in a report to the Ministry of the Interior that he had received no reply to his proposed disciplinary measures¹² while the prefect in Nice grumbled that ‘some departments of central government seem more interested in putting a brake on the National Revolution than in serving it’.¹³ In the Lozère it was the moderating influence of a primary school inspector that was stamped on by an unyielding prefect. The case concerned a popular and competent teacher, a recently naturalised Spaniard suspected by the police of communism. When the education inspector supported a village petition to keep the teacher the prefect commented that ‘it would be dangerous to allow him to corrupt future generations with communist ideas and I am astonished that the primary school inspector does not understand this’.¹⁴

There is considerable evidence from other departments that this case is rather characteristic of the so-called épuration of the teaching profession in 1940. The schools’ inspectors were mainly concerned to get rid of union leaders or incompetent teachers but were -ready to take considerable risks in defending teachers against political charges provided that the teacher was respected in the community and brought credit to the state school, the école publique.¹⁵ New prefects wanted a number of political heads to roll both to satisfy what they believed was popular demand and to give notice to the Ministry of the Interior that they were indeed exercising the ‘strict control on the loyalty of teachers’ that they had been instructed to do in December 1940.¹⁶ What is clear from the way that the purge of teachers was carried out by local prefects is that it had more to do with settling old scores and providing symbolic scapegoats than any wide-scale, root and branch reform of the teaching corps. The numbers involved were extremely small, amounting to some 2-3 per cent in most departments.¹⁷

The political responsiveness of the prefect was, of course, subject to movement over time and space. In three departments under study, the Alpes-Maritimes, the Aveyron and Lozère, the prefects followed up the purge of teachers in 1940 by throwing their colleagues into the front Une of the ideological struggle to win the population over to the National Revolution. The prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, for example, provided the Ministry of the Interior with a quite unsolicited description of the political role that he believed teachers should play. In November 1941¹⁸ he commented that he had once again come to realise ‘the determining influence of the teaching profession on the life of the commune’. He went on to say,

The National Revolution will never really penetrate the countryside except through the teachers: if the Government has at its disposal a body of primary school teachers who are attached to the regime and who are the leading propagandists of its doctrine, the rural masses will be all but won over.

By January 1942, the same prefect was claiming that once the core of troublemakers and agitators had been removed in 1940, the remaining teachers were now making a vital contribution to the ‘work of redressement’, and that the rural teacher was ‘the best propaganda agent available to the government’.¹⁹ In the Lozère, the prefect’s endorsement of an overtly political role for teachers took the form of helping to coordinate the activities of the official ‘propaganda delegate’ to teachers by a thorough vetting of candidates who might be influential among their colleagues.²⁰ In the same report he not only signalled to his superiors a conference given by a local secondary school teacher in July 1942 on ‘France, victim of anglo-bolchevik conspiracy’ but commented ‘I am happy to bring to your attention the excellent attitude of this teacher and his dedication to the cause of the National Revolution’.²¹ At the same time the prefect in the Aveyron expressed the considered view that primary school teachers were, for the most part, ‘the best artisans of the work undertaken by the Marshal’.²² Taken together, these comments suggest that at least some prefects wanted teachers to play a dynamic role that was overtly ideological - they were to be nothing less than crusaders for the National Revolution.

In other departments, however, prefects were more concerned to direct teachers’ energies to what one of them called ‘social action’ whi...