Patriots and Patriotism Vichy

Patriots and Patriotism in Vichy FranceAuthor(s): H. R. KedwardReviewed work(s):Source: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, Vol. 32 (1982), pp. 175-192Published by: Royal Historical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679022 .Accessed: 09/07/2012 18:32

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PATRIOTS AND PATRIOTISM IN VICHY FRANCE

By H. R. Kedward, M.A., B.Phil., F.R.Hist.S.

READ AT THE SOCIETY S CONFERENCE I2 SEPTEMBER 198I

THERE are certain moments in history when major events, individual experience, and ideology coincide to such a remarkable extent that historians have to pause and look up from their patient plotting of the vagaries of humanity. One such moment was the summer of I940 in France.

The event was the defeat and occupation of France in a mere six

weeks; the individual experience was that of the 'Exode', the flight of millions of people from the north and east of France in an attempt to avoid the German armies; and the ideology was that of the Nationalist

Right, in particular the Action Francaise led by Charles Maurras, which had made a doctrine out of anti-Dreyfusism and for over forty years had paraded the weakness and decadence of the Third Republic and parliamentary democracy. All three coincided to produce the

phenomenon of Ptainism, an example of Gramscian hegemony if ever there was one, though infinitely shorter in duration than such notable modern hegemonies as laissez-faire liberalism, American frontier mentality, or the post-war planned economy. Like these, Petainism com- bined the voluntary conviction of ordinary people, the arguments of common sense and the full force of every apparatus of persuasion; education, church, police, courts and the media. Like these too it stood as the embodiment of patriotism.

The triumph in I940 of the Nationalist doctrine was all the more acute because it had been widely dismissed as anachronistic and irrelevant in the France of the I920s and 1930s. The victory of France over Germany in 198 had made the prophets of republican weakness look foolish and hysterical, and by the mid 1920s the failure of Action Francaise to work out an economic or social analysis to do justice to the class struggle, was losing it the respect of the younger intellectuals of the Right, who began to experiment with fascism.' In the 1930S the

process went even further; the Nationalists looked in grave danger of

submitting entirely to the newer forces of fascism, and even Charles Maurras began to play down the anti-Germanism which had been

1See Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Je suis partout (La Table Ronde, I973), and J. Plumyene et R. Lasierra. Les Fascismesfranfais 1923-63 (Editions du Seuil, I963).

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central to his analysis of what constituted the true France. For him the defeat of I940 came just in time: he could rescue the declining funds of monarchism and invest them in Petain, and there was just enough life in the Nationalist tradition to ensure that it was Petain, Darlan, Lamirand, Vallat and Borotra who gave the ideological lead to Vichy and not the brasher acolytes of fascism in Paris. What had

appeared to be a faded nostalgia for the past became the active power of the present, and its very resilience and survival brought it converts who felt forced to admit that it must have been right all along. This was an important part of the contrition felt by many French people in

I940. The constitutional pivot of Nationalism was a strong leader, unfet-

tered by parliamentary democracy. Jacques Bainville, the royalist historian with a gift for popularizing his elitist history, had rescued the art of dictatorship from the outer darkness to which the Revolution had condemned it, and although he died before the Vichy period, his books were sold in enormous quantities during the reign of Petain.2 Maurras, a positivist to the end, instantly accepted the fact of Petain and trimmed his monarchism accordingly, and although Alexander Werth has successfully lampooned the meeting of Maurras and Petain, conjured up by Rene Benjamin, essentially Benjamin was right. There was a kind of Nationalist idyll in the first few months of Vichy in which such exchanges could take place without any sense of self-

parody.3 Subsequently Petain was raised to a Christ-like position, well above

the stature of modern kings. Gifts of local soil, carefully cut into small sods and labelled from their place of origin, were laid in caskets at his feet; his portrait was raised behind the high altars in front of the saints of the reredos, and he entered the towns of the south to be hailed as

greater than Joan of Arc. In his first broadcast he could not have offered his person as a gift to France had he not been aware at some level that myth and history had crossed their respective thresholds.4

The language and imagery of Petainism have been so cleverly presented and satirised by Gerard Miller that it has become a problem to present them in any other way. Prefaced by the acclaim of Roland

Barthes, his book selects the richest texts from the Petainist canon of

2 W. R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist history in Twentieth century France (Louisiana, I979), pp. 527-8.

3A. Werth, France 1940-55 (London, 1957), p. 66. Cf. R. Benjamin, Le Marichal et son

peuple (Plon, 1941), which begins: 'Quelle faveur de vivre au temps d'un homme dont on sait, dont on est suir que, depassant l'histoire, il entrera d'emblee dans la legende, tellement l'aventure de sa vie emporte les coeurs, tellement elle appelle le poete,plus que l'historien. Haute destin6e! C'est celle du Mar6chal.'

4 'Je fais a la France le don de ma personne pour attenuer son malheur.' (Lesparoles et les ecrits du Marechal Petain. La Legion franqaise. n.d. Appel du 17 juin 1940.)

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belief and shows their disdain for the very people they manipulate, their deep patriarchal and racial prejudices, their fraudulence, and their ultimate responsibility for all that was worst and most idiotic in Vichy France.5 But such is the absurdist force of Miller's presentation that we may well ask why any French person took any of it seriously. Satire exposes but rarely explains, and despite Miller's perceptive analysis there is still considerable need to explain the phenomenon of Petainism, though American historians led by Hoffmann and Paxton have done much of the hard work already.6 Above all there is a need to see Petainism as something which came from below, as well as from above, and to analyse its failures in these terms. But before suggesting ways in which this can be done there is an important perspective to establish to the nature of Vichy France.

Of all the major European countries in the 1930S, France was the only one to answer the twin challenge of economic depression and fascism with a programme of socialist measures and a powerful reassertion of left-wing confidence. So great was the humiliation of France in I940 that historians have been slow to acknowledge the unique achievement of France in 1936. At a time when orthodox pressures were to economize, to protect the owners of capital and to limit the advance of social welfare, the Popular Front extracted a massive pay increase from the employers, introduced the forty-hour week, and established an immediate fortnight of paid holidays ('conges payes') for all urban workers. These reforms dragged French industrial relations into the twentieth century. The pay award severely curtailed the individual power of the industrial and business employer; the 'conges payes' made a substantial breach in the exclusive privileges of the middle classes, and the forty-hour week expressed a new morality of work backed by collective bargaining.

For a society whose long-entrenched social conservatism was a by- word in Europe, contrasting oddly with its political radicalism, this victory of the forces of the Left and their programme of social change was a veritable revolution, producing a potent resentment and fear in those who had campaigned for two years against the Popular Front and had lost. In electoral terms they constituted almost half the adult male population, and within that percentage were most of the repre- sentatives of the 'patronat', the financial leadership of the country and the owners of real estate. Over the next three years, from 1936-9, they fought to obstruct the changes and to devalue them in patriotic terms as a betrayal of French interests. The combination of paternalism and capital interests evident at Vichy and ennobled by the speeches of

5 Gerard Miller, Les pousse-au-jouir du marechal Petain (Editions du Seuil, 1975). 6S. Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal. France since the i93os (New York, 1974). R. 0.

Paxton, Vichy France. Old Guard and New Order, ig4o-44 (New York, 1972).

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I78 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Petain, can be seen as a climax in the campaign to reverse the achievements of 1936. Petain was personally insistent that the leaders of the Popular Front should be brought to trial for what he deemed was a betrayal of the French nation, and in the process Leon Blum was accused, inter alia, of a form of social treason. Within the Vichy government itself, the world of high finance and capital enterprise was well represented, and Vichy's labour legislation, culminating in the 'Charte du Travail', was firmly weighted towards the employers however it tried to disguise this fact in a make-believe language of corporatism.7

In this perspective, Petainism and Vichy should be portrayed not so much as the triumph of an anti-republican tradition, epitomized by Maurras and the Action Fran~aise, as the reaction of a threatened class against the recent encroachments of trade unionism and social- ism. 1940 is less the death of the Third Republic than the final death of the Popular Front. Structurally, it is possible to argue that Vichy perpetuated the socially conservative nature of France, briefly chal- lenged and interrupted by the changes of I936. Such indeed is the conclusion of Communist historiography in France; it is also the implicitjudgement of Charles Moraze in his classic study of the French bourgeoisie, published in 1946, and of the shrewd Catholic resister, Charles d'Aragon, in his observations about the south-west of France.8 It is also a justifiable conclusion to draw from the reports of Vichy prefects sent to the Minister of the Interior from 1940-44.

The two great evils chastised by the new prefects were the apparent opposites, communism and egoism. Communism meant demanding the higher wages and other socio-economic rights guaranteed by the Popular Front but whittled away either before or during the war. Egoism meant the same. Within a month or so of each prefect taking up his position the reports begin to include a section headed 'Menees antinationales' and increasingly the 'classe ouvriere' was either impli- citly or explicitly associated with these devious activities. It need not be a class or individuals named as such; it was often alluded to as a traditional frame of mind. In the Tarn, the Prefect saw the problem in the winter of I940-4I as one of holding down a working-class tradition which had sentJeanJaures and Albert Thomas to the Cham- ber of Deputies, and which had registered its greatest success in the Popular Front. The centre of disaffection, he reported, was Castres, the birthplace ofJaures where unemployment in the textile industry

7The 'Charte du Travail' was finally enacted in October 1941, after more than fifteen months deliberation. It can be seen as marking the last act in Vichy's 'Revolution Nationale'. See Principes de la Renovation Nationale, published by Vichy in 1941, Section III, Travail.

8 Charles Moraze, La France Bourgeoise (Colin, 1946). Charles d'Aragon, La Resistance sans Heroisme (Editions du Seuil, 1977).


was particularly high.9 The Prefect in the Ain, an industrious pursuer and would-be converter of Communists, reported excitedly in Nov- ember I940 that the wildest supporters of the Popular Front were finding the Vichy government's policy acceptable and even beneficial, and in February 1941 he referred to two Petainist demonstrations at Oyonnax which, he said, had done much to reassure government supporters that even this working-class town could successfully be brought into the bosom of the nation ('giron national').10 By contrast, the sections of the reports headed 'bourgeoisie' or 'industriels et com- mergants' do not suggest that these eminently republican classes of society were the carriers of that other grievous 'malady' of France, diagnosed by the Action Francaise, namely the liberal-democratic- capitalist tradition. It would appear that the Petainist prefects were considerably more affected by the socio-economic conflicts deriving from, or aggravated by, the period of the Popular Front, than by the older ideological conflicts opposing a monarchical type of organic society to the liberal Republic.

The Prefect at Dijon in the C6te-d'Or was one exception to this, but his indirect criticism of the government's failure to oppose the egoisms of capitalism as fervently as those of the working class, carried a judgement on his fellow Prefects as well. In a long report for November 1940, he complained that the population was not seriously facing up to its national duties in the new situation, but was persisting in pre- war modes of thought. He gave as an example a deputation of tram workers who came to ask whether or not the 'conges payes' would continue. It is one of the countless instances in this high period of Petainism when the 'conges payes' are given a symbolic status to signify all that is egoistic and antipatriotic, but the Prefect goes on to say in May I94I that the government itself can be accused of failing in the ideological battle for a new France. Under the guise of corporatism, he reported, the government could be seen as restoring all the initiative and power to the big industrialists."

Without a good deal more evidence from these reports it would be unwise to claim here that the Prefects spoke clearly for a class which had been threatened by the Popular Front, but a more detailed survey would, I believe, show that Petainism at this level is better defined in the socio-economic terms of class than in the cultural and intellectual terms of the old Nationalist tradition, or what Paxton has called the 'Old Guard'. It is not that Paxton limits his analysis to the Nationalist perspective. On the contrary he pointed firmly to the complexity of Vichy, with its echelons of technocratic defenders of capital oddly

9Archives Nationales, Paris [A.N.], FIC III I I93 (Tarn), ioJan, 194I. 'OA.N., FIC III I 35 (Ain), 15 Nov. 1940, 3 Feb. 1941.

A.N., FIC III I48 (Cote-d'Or), 20 Nov. 1940, 14 May i94I.

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180 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

arrayed alongside proponents of the Ancien Regime. All one might add is that in class terms their differences may be less striking.

The Petainism of 1940 thus appears to be composed of three elements: the person of Petain with his charisma as father, leader and

martyr; the ideology of Nationalism; and the sectional interests of the

privileged classes presented as the interests of the nation. According to the interpretation so convincingly advanced by Gerard Miller, the demoralized people of France were manipulated by the patriotic language of all three. True, they were. But manipulation as an ex-

planation of public attitudes easily becomes an elitist position even when the intention is quite the opposite. It tends to deny authentic

experience and language to ordinary people and to see those in power as the only measurable source of language and ideology. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this, as the arguments of structuralists and linguistic analysis have amply demonstrated, and no one can

easily deny that language structures imposed from above are mani-

pulative. But even within these structures there is a relationship of

language to experience which can either cut across the process of

manipulation or exist alongside it, and through this relationship the

importance of events in human affairs is constantly reasserted. This becomes an essential point to reaffirm when the experience of

a great mass of people is at issue, for their experience should receive the same historical validation as the experience of those more able to control the systems, ideologies and patterns of which so much is now known. In I940 the most significant popular experience was the 'Exode' which involved almost all French people either as refugees or as those affected by them. Gerard Miller sees the language and images of the 'Exode' as an example of the manipulative power of Petainism, even in the period before he became the head of the government.'2 But if the authenticity of the day-to-day experience of the 'Exode' is asserted, the language and images become less a product of Petainism than a formative element in its creation, a part of the historical

conjuncture which is so much a feature of 1940. And if this is the case, then the very nature of Petainism has to be redefined in a way which does justice to this element.

For a month from the middle of May 1940 the people of France lived more on rumour than on factual information. Not surprisingly many of the rumours reflected the deep public ambivalence towards autho-

rity which existed under the Third Republic, and still exists today, so that on the one hand it was widely rumoured that the Prime Minister Reynaud had run away with the Loterie Nationale, and that was all one could expect from those in power, while on the other hand there

12 Miller, Les pousse-au-jouir, pp. 20-2.


was the constant rumour that the authorities would soon take charge of the situation and issue instructions. Rapidly, however, a more consistent resentment towards the mayors, prefects, civil servants and

government of the day became the norm, fuelled by the information, both rumoured and factual, that in many of the towns overrun by the Germans the authorities had left first, leaving the people to their own individual or collective devices. One of the most analytic surveys of the 'Exode', undertaken shortly afterwards by a team of academics at

Rennes, explains much of the panic by reference to the failures of the administration, and since it was not published until after the war it was not designed as propaganda for Vichy.'3 What it says in measured terms is duplicated by almost all the private memoirs of the 'Exode', whether published under the Vichy regime or since. The language varies in its intensity from writer to writer, but there is a consistent indictment of what people felt to be the height of irresponsibility by those in positions of authority. In Versailles on 13 June the 'mairie' is said to have issued the bland instruction, 'Ordre d'evacuation. La mairie invite tout le monde a fuir'14 and that was the extent of the

organization provided. Four days before, one of the local schoolteach- ers had said to his class of fourteen-year-olds, 'I1 faut partir. Prenez votre bicyclette et fuyez. Les Allemands arretent et deportent lesjeunes gens. Laissez vos parents s'il le faut, mais vous, partez!'l5

In a bitter account by a metal worker, Georges Adrey, who declared himself in I941 to be a socialist and pacifist, the authorities from the

government downwards were accused of gross betrayal and neg- ligence. After pushing his wheelbarrow of belongings from Paris to

Orleans, he claimed that in no town through which he had passed had he found any French official giving either news or guidance. He described the chaos and bewilderment, the looting and the fear which have since been documented in endless detail, and summarized his

anger with the terse statement that the government had simply abandoned the population to the Germans.16 Writing after the Liberation, Jerome Tharaud described the 'Exode' as a phenomenon unknown since the barbarian invasions of the fourth century, saying that he was no more than a leaf swept along by a whirlwind. On the way to Tours the sense of futility and despair was heightened by the experience of

being sent endlessly round in circles: the crowds were moved on by 'gendarmes ou des civils armes de batons, qui nous refoulaient sans cesse

'3Andre Meynier, Les Deplacements de la population vers la Bretagne en 1940-41 (Les Nourritures Terrestres, Rennes, 1950), p. 36.

14 Michel Bertrand, 'L'Exode juin 1940', Bibliotheque du Travail n?489, 196 I. '5Ibid. 16 Georges Adrey, Journal d'un replii. I juin-26juin 194o (Reni Debresse, I941), pp. 47-

48.

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dans un dedale de boue, dont nous n'arrivons pas a sortir.'l7 The sense of helpless anonymity which Tharaud underlined in his account is visually presented in the etchings by Abel Renault which accompany the text. Using a realism free of sentimentality or flamboyance, Renault stressed despair above all other emotions in the faces of his crowds. In neither words nor pictures is there any attempt to make a political point.18 By contrast, the well-known publicistJean de la Hire, who was soon to be eulogizing Hitler and the German presence in France, gave a flagrantly ideological account of the 'Exode'; yet some of his comments undoubtedly coincided in temperament with the feelings of vast numbers of refugees. The one people, he claimed, who ought to have been told to stay, not leave, were the municipal authorities, yet Mandel, he stated, had told them in a circular of Io June to go and join the government and the politicians.19 Despite the claim by Vidalenc in his pioneer study of the 'Exode' that leaving was a first act of Resistance,20 this was not exactly how many people saw it. Their own departure was usually explained in just such terms of defiance, but the prior departure of the authorities was more often seen as a form of betrayal, and a betrayal in the terms of the administration itself which had called on all French people to fulfil their duties or be seen as traitors to the nation.21

If these and many other first-hand accounts of the 'Exode' are read, not just for the experiences they contain but also for the language in which they are expressed, it is apparent that words associated with the administration, the bureaucracy, the government of the day and the politicians quickly become ones with strong anti-patriotic conno- tations used to communicate feelings of despair, betrayal, anger, resentment and victimization, whereas more idealistic words signifying leadership, a caring authority, powers of decision and flexibility become the good, warm words of hope, recovery and patriotism. The survey completed at Rennes concluded that the training given to administrators had produced an inflexible mentality:

'Trop de dirigeants n'ont qu'une culture partielle, etroitement 17 Abel Renault etJerome Tharaud, L'Exodemai-juin I94o (Flammarion, I 944), Preface. 18 Ibid. There are seventeen etchings, and the text is signed by both Jerome and Jean

Tharaud. 19Jean de la Hire, Les horreurs que nous avons vues. Le crime des evacuations (Tallendrier,

1940), p. 20. He later published Hitler et nous (1942) and Mort aux Anglais. Vive la France (1942).

20Jean Vidalenc, L'Exode de mai-juin g40o (P.U.F., 1957), p. I. 21 Cf. directive issued by the Prefect of the C6tes-du-Nord to the mayors of his depart-

ment on 14 May I940 which began, 'L'Allemagne, apres huit mois d'hesitations, s'est decid6e a attaquer la FRANCE. L'effort de l'ennemi est forcene. II doit vaincre ou perir. Nous aussi. C'est pourquoi tout Francais qui ne comprendrait pas son devoir s'excluerait lui-meme de la grande famille francaise. II serait immediatement traite comme il convient de traiter les traitres a leur Pays.' Document communicated to author by G. Le Marec.


mathematique. Les formules et les techniques ne suffisent pas a former des chefs, si derriere les formules ils ne savent pas trouver ce qui seul importe, l'homme.'22

This is not to say that all local authorities failed the test of the 'Exode'. In the areas which received the refugees this was far from the case, but even where the victims of the 'Exode' were well and efficiently received there was a tendency to identify this success with individual leadership and the triumph of personality and imagination over system and regulations. At Annemasse a local draper, Jean Deffaugt, became mayor simply because he took a vigorous lead in dealing with the refugees. He had no previous political or administrative experience.23 In Cahors, one of the most overcrowded towns at the height of the 'Exode', the novelist Roland Dorgeles found the ex-Minister Anatole de Monzie a name to conjure with. Previously deputy-mayor, de Monzie was now 'maire des refugies. I1 y excelle. II ordonne, imagine, improvise.' His achievements became known throughout the region; 'Allons a Cahors, Monzie nous depannera.'24

Projected onto a national scale the qualities of leadership shown locally by de Monzie and Deffaugt were those offered by Petain in his first broadcast of 17 June 1940 and they were exactly the qualities formulated by the refugees well before Petain's assumption of power. To agree with everyone else on the roads that someone, somewhere, should do something was not to become a believer in the merits of dictatorship, but it was to encounter sympathetically the images of personal authority and leadership, and to invest them with all the sanctity of patriotism, still more the desperate patriotism of crisis.

Just as important was the language and imagery of an organic, interdependent society produced by the experience of the 'Exode'. Town-dwellers looked desperately to the countryside for food and shelter, peasants found themselves in unfamiliar large towns still clutching a couple of hens or leading their cow, Parisians were at the mercy of the provinces, the North went to the South or the West, and people of all classes encountered each other on the roads. 'Nous avons rencontre un tas de gens,' wrote Alice Wisler, 'nous avons adresse la parole a des inconnus ...'25 'Un des beaux c6tes de cette guerre,' said the metalworker, Georges Adrey, 'c'est precisement la solidarite et la bonne entente qui regnent entre les refugies. Le malheur rapproche les hommes et renverse les barrieres sociales. On s'aide les uns les autres....'26 It is

22 Meynier, Les Deplacements, p. 98. 23 Author's interview, May 1969. 24 Roland Dorgeles, Vacancesforc6es (Editions Vialetay, 1956), p. 29. 25 Alice Wisler, Je suis une Ivacuee. Juin ig40 (n.d., n.l.). 26 Georges Adrey, Journal d'un replie, p. 48.

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a picture which contrasts strangely with his own subsequent account of looting and theft, but both types of behaviour, altruism and selfish- ness, are observed by many as affirming the interdependence of the

experience. A Parisian colonel's wife, Christiane Fournier, with her two children and dog, was refused shelter by a peasant woman between Agen and Moissac, but was generously sheltered by a neigh- bouring peasant family a little further down the road. Her reaction to both situations underlined her utter dependence on the peasantry for the simplest of necessities, even though she had enough money to buy sheets at an exorbitant price at Meyssiac and to have a tent specially made for her when she reached Perigueux. She then camped for several weeks on a hillside near the prehistoric cave of Chancelade, and for the children it became more of a holiday, 'le camping force'.27

This phrase, 'le camping force', is frequently found in the memoirs of the 'Exode', and it naturally suggests comparisons with the annual summer exodus undertaken by the French, a privilege extended as a

right to the working people of the towns in I936. Indeed there are many points of similarity, and for some the 'Exode' was little more than a departure in May orJune to holiday houses or flats which they had booked for July and August.28 Dorgeles called his account of the 'Exode', Vacancesforcees, and an industrialist, Rene Baudoin, entitled his booklet, Camping, juin I940. He enjoyed the gentle ride through the countryside, taking minor roads where there were no refugees on foot and where 'la vie redevient belle', and his conclusion states that personally he and his family suffered nothing. He learnt, he said, a

great deal from the experience and now knew what was needed to rescue France; a reassertion of command by the elite sectors of society.29 Although this is obviously dictated by the predicament of France in I940, it was also common for people before the war to draw moral, political and ideological lessons from the summer holidays. For

example, a careful thesis of 1939 by Jean-Victor Parant, written in Toulouse on the evidence of the 'conges payes', ends with his conviction that workers on holiday will break out of their narrow socio-economic confines. The experience, he says,

'contribuera a leur rendre lajoie de vivre que la lutte des classes leur avait enlevee. II sera pour eux l'occasion de rencontres multiples avec les autres classes de la societe.... Le touriste ouvrier comprendra mieux le role bienfaisant de la division du travail dans la nation. II saisira le caractere bienfaisant et necessaire de la patrie.... Par le 27 Christiane Fournier, L'Exode de trois parmi les autres (Editions de la N.R.I., Vinh-

Annam, 1942), pp. 82, 103, I23-4. 28 For the theme of 'l'Exode' as a holiday, see R. Cobb, Promenades (Oxford, 1980),

ch. 6. 29 Ren6 Baudoin, Camping, juin 940o (Rodstein, I940), p. 8.

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tourisme populaire nous pourrons aller vers une meilleure organi- sation sociale.'30

The sentiments could easily be those of an ardent Petainist of 1940 and

may suggest that we should not make too much of the organic, interdependent language produced by the 'Exode', not least because it is often argued that any widening of personal and social horizons leads to greater tolerance of other sections of society. But the opposite is quite frequently the case, and it is when a comparison is made of the

antagonisms and animosities produced or strengthened by the 'conges payes', and those expressed during the 'Exode', that a fundamental difference can be found.

Despite Parant's enthusiastic corporatism of 1939, there is much evidence that the 'conges payes' also intensified class antagonisms. Workers, liberated for a fortnight by the Front Populaire, expressed a certain class and political triumph in their enjoyment of the newly- won, and hard-won, right to an annual holiday at the employers' expense. The C.G.T. created its own 'bureau de tourisme populaire' for its members, and separate trade unions began to buy holiday property for their workers, such as the chateau at Vouzeron bought by the metalworkers. The youth hostels of France had been pioneered by the left wing Catholic movement inspired by Marc Sangnier, but

despite the anti-capitalist credentials of Sangnier, supporters of the

Popular Front were encouraged to look for hostels and camp sites with a working class clientele. Youth organisations belonging to the Socialist

party were organized by Georges Monnet and his wife, and in their

camps at Cap Breton the tents were divided into four villages called, 'L'Amitie', 'Espagne rouge', 'Frente popular', and 'Europe libre'.31 The arrival of these workers on beaches and in holiday towns previously monopolized by the bourgeoisie, provoked numerous protests in the press which had opposed the Popular Front, and in Combat, a

magazine run by Thierry Maulnier andJean de Fabregue, the 'conges payes' were described as 'le viol des loisirs par le Front Populaire'.32 In Nice certain shops put up notices saying 'Interdit aux conges payes', and the special reduced rail tickets ('billet Lagrange') offered to workers could not be used on the days when the bulk of the bourgeoisie were

leaving or returning,33 a precaution which had a logistic rationale but suggested a class separation of types ofholidaymakers. This suggestion

30J.-V. Parant, Le probleme du tourisme populaire (Pichon et Durand-Auzias, 1939), p. 207.

31 Maurice Chavardes, Et936. La Victoiredu Front Populaire (Calmann-Levy, 1966), p. 262.

32 Ibid. 33 Fran(oise Cribier, Lagrandemigration d'etedes citadinsdeFrance (Paris, C.N.R.S., 1969),

p. 46.

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was openly endorsed by Le Figaro of 5 August which sent a journalist to accompany 'le train rouge' from Paris to Menton bearing workers on their way to the Mediterranean, while for the Socialists Le Populaire of 31 July had issued a holiday rallying cry, 'Trop longtemps vous avez regarde partir les autres. A votre tour maintenant d'echapper a la fournaise.'

There was little of this kind of class rivalry overtly expressed in the 'Exode'. There were antagonisms of all kinds, many of a class nature, but the tendency was not to generalize from them or parade them aggressively, but to treat them as unfortunate, unusual and un- patriotic. The kind of working class defiance, widely parodied in 1936 as workers in tents singing l'Internationale while stirring the mayon- naise, was not in evidence in 1940, and the bourgeois hostility typified by the exclusive Nice shops was not openly vaunted. The eminently respectable republican daily for Toulouse, La Depeche, filled its columns with expressions of social duty, compassion and collective good will towards the millions who were stranded in the South West. 'Nos freres, les refugies' was the caption to a photograph of the 'Exode' on 19June, and the towns of the area saw the challenge of the refugees as one involving the commitment of the whole of society.34 The class differences in the experience of the refugees, for example between those with cars and those on foot, were noticed by several memoirists, but rarely given a political or ideological connotation. More often the internal social divisions were projected outwards, and the incidence of antisemitism was pronounced at the height of the 'Exode'. As a car pushed its way past it became acceptable to say, 'There go the rich Jews' rather than 'There go the rich'.

To summarize the width of experience in the Exode is not easy, and perhaps not advisable,35 but it seems possible to argue that visions of incisive leadership were accompanied by visions, equal in emotive power, of an organic and interdependent community, in which people would share and cooperate because they were all members of the same society. Such visions contributed to the making of Petainism, and it would be difficult to maintain that they were merely a product of an imposed ideological system and therefore inauthentic.

It is much more a question of conjuncture. Within the Nationalist Right, Maurice Barres had developed a subjective definition of truth,

34 La Depeche. See 22June 1940, for Cahors and Montauban, and 23June for Toulouse and Albi.

35The main difficulty has already been mentioned, i.e. that many memoirs of the Exode were published under Vichy and may therefore be inadmissible evidence in the case being argued here. This cannot be denied, but at the same time no one doing oral research into the period, as well as reading memoirs and ephemera, can fail to be struck by the similarity of the language used by those who accepted Vichy and by those who opposed it, once they talk about the experience of the 'Exode'.


which allied itself to the positivist analysis of Charles Maurras. Where Maurras said, 'This is true', Barres said, 'I know this is true'. In Scenes et Doctrines du Nationalisme he argued that Dreyfus was a traitor because he, Barres, could sense at once the presence of a traitor when Dreyfus stepped into the dock at Rennes. Truth is not something you can learn, he wrote,'... c'est de trouver un certain point, un point unique, celui-la, nul autre, d'oi toutes choses nous apparaissent avec des pro- portions vraies.'36 If 1940 was a triumph for the so-called objective analysis of Maurras, who immediately assumed the role of a vindicated prophet, it was also a posthumous justification for Barres. Throughout France, individual men and women reasoned from their own experience of chaos, rout and confusion that France had been betrayed, deserted and misled by its rulers. Petain in his early speeches recognized both sources of knowledge. He rehearsed the arguments of Maurras and Bainville reproduced regularly in the pages of Action Franfaise and he nurtured the experience of the refugees, helping them to consolidate and generalize from the truths which they had individually asserted. From above he spoke in the language of an ideology which had cultivated a particular imagery of patriotism since the 89os. It spoke of 'la terre et les morts', of 'grands chefs' and strong authoritative government, of families and family relationships, of the value of rootedness and rural society, of the hearth and the village community, of an organic, corporate society. From below, the French people who filled the roads and railways in May and June 1940 to escape the German advance, made their own way into this imagery. They looked for the safety of the countryside, its food and its reassurance, they became dependent on the collective and organic survivalism of society, and they called for leadership and personal attention.

They made their way most literally into the language and images of rural and provincial France. Crossing the Loire was the symbolic moment when people began to believe they were safe, and those fortunate enough to get that far found the tranquillity of life in departments like the Dordogne and the Correze a dramatic contrast to their experience further north. In many cases expectations of plentiful food were cruelly disappointed, but whatever the outcome, those from Paris and the North underwent a month or more of intimate education in the values and attitudes of the provinces. Robert Charbonnier, a driver in private employment in Provins, drove a camion full of family and friends as far as the Correze and wrote a diary account of his eventful journey from 13 June I940 until I July, ending with a description of his stay in the small commune of Eyrein. He describes the area as 'un drole de pays tres en retard comme culture', but he was forced to get to know it well in order to find enough food for all his

36 Maurice Barres, Scenes et Doctrines du JNationalisme, i (Plon, I925), p. 13.

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dependants. He was not overjoyed by the experience, even though certain individuals were remarkably generous and he could describe the meals they finally put together as luxurious. But the people in general he found 'pas tres serviables' and he could hardly wait to leave this 'sal pays' and return to Provins. In many ways the diary, which has never been published, is an unexceptional document, but that is also its value. With its very basic concerns, expressed in simple language, it is an excellent record of the day-to-day survivalism of the 'Exode' and the utter dependence of the refugees on unfamiliar people in unknown parts of France.37 Many of the worst prejudices about peasant and provincial life were undoubtedly strengthened by this encounter, but it was not in the refugees' interests to express them openly, given the imbalance of power in the situation.

The fact that one half of France had been conquered and the other half had not, was, of course, a product of circumstances and not a value judgement on the two regions, but it was easy to make false comparisons on this basis, particularly to the disadvantage of Paris which had failed to repeat the resistance of I87I or the battle of the Marne. Provincial pride in what became the southern, or unoccupied, zone after the armistice, was enhanced by the history of the 'Exode' and the distinction between those who fled and those who received was often translated into evaluative terms. Anatole de Monzie said to Dorgeles, 'Eh bien, la province a du bon quand les choses vont mal.'38 The refugees had good reason to resent the implication of such re- marks, but good reason also to indulge them, at least for the length of their stay. Even before Petain consecrated the peasantry as the lifeblood of the nation, and Vichy legislation encouraged 'un retour a la terre', the inhabitants of an urban France whose modernity had failed to protect their homes and their lives, had immediate cause to be recep- tive to what seemed the more resilient values of the countryside.39

37 I am greatly indebted to Professor John Renwick for permission to use this hand- written document which is in his possession and which he kindly brought to my attention. It was written between 8 and I I July and is headed 'Evacuations de la Guerre I939- I940'. There is no indication of the author's political opinions, but his reaction to the armistice can be said to be typical of the vast majority of France at the time '... nous apprenons que la France est forcee de demander un armistice ce qui fait (quoique nous soyons vaincus) pousser un soupir de soulagement a tout le monde car c'est la fin de bien des tueries, de misere, et de souffrance.'

38 Dorgeles, Vacancesforcees, p. 30. 9 Gerard Miller has an excellent passage to make the point that the 'Exode' took

people into the apparently unchanging world of rural France; but despite his brilliant choice of words he turns his conclusion away from further insights into the authenticity of this experience. 'Ils fuient des territoires qui, de se montrer perm6ables a l'invasion, ne sont plus francais bien avant d'etre occupes par les Allemands: qu'est-ce qu'une terre qui ne protege plus les siens? Les Francais veulent se r6fugier en France, et c'est ce dont le discours petainiste saura leur donner l'illusion.' (Miller, Les-pousse-au-jouir, p. 21.)


If there were as many as forty million French people affected by anything in I940,40 it was by the language and imagery which expressed the hopes of basic survival, words which were felt to be good, simple, warm and protective: mere, famille, enfant, pere, nourriture, gentillesse, ferme, village, terre, sante, dignite, courage, honneur, joie, esprit, fraternite, relevement, renaissance, amour, paysans, la France eternelle. In the summer of 1940, and arguably until the end of 1941, Petainism monopolized these words through the conjuncture I have tried to describe.

There was no historical determinism which made sure that this conjuncture was permanent or even long lived. It was too much the product of special circumstances which events had produced and further events could alter. Neither Maurras in his dogmatism, nor Petain in his narcissism, realized this.41 Barres might well have done so. The mistake made by Petain and his disciples, was to assume that the entry of the mass of the people into the imagery of Nationalism was some sort of ideological conversion. It may have been for some, but certainly not for forty millions.42 A central dynamic of the years 1940- 44 is the growing claim of Resistance individuals and movements on the very language and imagery which the ideological Petainists believed was inalienably theirs. Resistance was initially as much a struggle for words and consciousness as a question of parachutes, arms and clandestine operations. Still more, like the shaping of consciousness in 1940, it was far from being an imposition by intellectuals and ideologues from above. Ordinary people, reacting to day-to-day situations, realigned the words which had so solidly buttressed Petain at the height of his power, and transferred them to Resistance.

By 1942 the poet Eluard could affirm the gains made by Resistance in this realignment of experience and consciousness. In homage to Gabriel Peri he wrote:

'II y a des mots qui font vivre Et ce sont des mots innocents Le mot chaleur le mot confiance Amour justice et le mot liberte Le mot enfant et le mot gentillesse Et certains noms de fleurs et certains noms de fruits

40 Cf. Amouroux's much discussed title for the second volume of his Grande Histoire des Franfais sous l'Occupation, which he called Quarante Millions de Petainistes (Laffont, I977).

41 The blindness of Maurras to anything which could upset his ideological 'victory' of 1940 is evident in the doctrinaire elitism of La Seule France published in 194I (Lardanchet, Lyon).

42Cf. Robert Lafont, La Revendication occitane (Flammarion, 1974). In his section on the war he points out that leading Occitanists sent a list of regional claims to Petain in 1940, accompanied by a note of fidelity to the Marshal, but he continues, 'Cette dimarche correspond a un choix ideologique anterieur pour quelque-uns des signataires ...; pour d'autres ... elle est purement conjoncturale' (p. 253).

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I90 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Le mot courage et le mot decouvrir Et le mot frere et le mot camarade Et certain noms de femmes et d'amis Ajoutons-y Peri.'

It is Eluard's claim that all these words, which he calls life-giving words, or words made flesh, are Resistance words. They could not be associated with anything else.43 In 1942 this was still a bold claim. It could not have been made with any degree of realism in the summer of 1940, even for the words 'camarade' or 'liberte'. In the history of Resistance, I940 is very much a year of silence, with the notable exceptions which have received full historical treatment. Many people who felt uneasy with Petain admitted to a period when they found words difficult to use or even to find, and it is no mere literary symbol when Vercors writes his Silence de la Mer in i94I. Throughout the novel the sympathetic German, a francophile common in the corridors of Vichy, has all the words. It is Vercors' simple but powerful ploy to tantalize and even alienate the Resistance reader with this fact in order to make the disjunction of words and reality such a brutal one at the end. The novel, like Eluard's poem, confirms Resisters in their growing conviction that words and images were there which must be won and used.44

If Petain and the Vichy government were blind to the changed attitudes which Vercors, and thousands of ordinary people were be- ginning to express in I94I-2, it was not for want of evidence easily available. The magazine La France Libre published in London might at least have given the Nationalist ideologues a moment's reflection. In the earliest issues there were already photographs of French farms, villages and countryside, inserted often without verbal comment as images of telling power strengthening the appeal not of Petainism but of the Free French. An exile's vision of France was not unlike that of the refugees, and the iconography of the Free French was remarkably similar in the first two years to that of Petainism, less as a result of ideology than of experience. In the issue of 15 January I942, the

magazine included a 'photoreportage' on France I940-4I called 'Ici la France', the word 'ici' being of obvious significance. The first photograph is of cows walking along a country lane towards a farm, the second of a peasant ploughing behind his team of horses, the third of sheaves of corn, the fourth of lost, refugee children, and the fifth to the thirteenth of children, families, widows and the rural hearth.45

43 Paul Eluard. 'Gabriel Peri' (I941-2) Peri, a leading Communist of the I930s, was shot as a hostage late in 1941, in an act of German reprisal, abetted by the Service Speciale of Vichy.

44 Vercors, Le Silence de la Mer (Editions de Minuit 1941-2, published clandestinely). 45La France Libre (Hamish Hamilton, London, 15 Jan. I942: supplement photo-

graphique).


Photographs of exactly the same content were the staple imagery of Petainism in 1940-4 ,46 but the Petainists should have noticed that their monopoly was not unchallenged.

Within France there was monthly confirmation that the conjuncture of 1940 was only temporary from within Vichy itself, but it was not heeded. Mistaking the product of circumstance for a long-term ideological consensus, Petain felt permanently safe and failed to scru- tinize his own actions and those of his government in stringent political terms. He should have paid attention to his prefects' reports. With all allowance made for careerism, tactical 'double-jeu' and regional var- iations, the reports are an amazingly open record of the speed with which Vichy alienated the vast majority of the population whom Petain believed to be his. Given the tacit, if not overt, support with which it started, the Vichy regime contrived to divide the country, under the guise of uniting it, within much less than two years, and these were not the years of maximum German pressure. In doing so it not only revealed its class bias but also fatally undermined its rural base. By early 1943 the idyll of a rural France, so strenuously promoted by the regime, was dead. The ideologists of Vichy had failed to under- stand that peasants were not a species apart, but, like other sectors of society, would only support a regime which continued to bring them benefit and protection. With varying degrees of outrage and astonish- ment the urban-based prefects begin referring to the discontent of the peasants as early as November I940,47 and during 1941-3 there are increasing references to the 'ingrained egoism and cupidity of the peasantry'.48 Such is the collapse of Vichy's own rural pretensions that the prefect of the Lozere inJanuary I943 attacks the inhabitants of his rural department for being 'trop exclusivement attaches a leur sol'.49

This does not mean an instant shift of peasant enthusiasm to the Resistance. What it does mean is that Vichy became a political disaster more quickly and more thoroughly than is sometimes thought. The prefect of the Lot would seem to have pointed to the extent of the disaster in December 1942. The Vichy term, 'Revolution Nationale', he reported is now greeted with laughter; the population has abandoned the internal politics of the government.50 Well before this, the hard-pressed prefect of the C6te-d'Or had urged Vichy to improve its

46 See, for exampl;e, La France Nouvelle Travaille 194I (Edition du Secretariat General de l'Information, s.d.).

47A.N., FIC III II93 (Tarn), 5 Nov. I940; FIC III II35 (Ain), 15 Nov. I940. See also, FIC III I 163 (Lot), i March I941; FIC III 193 (Tarn), 30 Sept 1941; FIC III 1148 (C6te-d'Or), 4 Oct. I941.

48e.g. A.N., FIC III 1193 (Tarn), 3I Dec. 1941; FIC III II48 (C6te-d'Or), I Oct. 1942.

49 A.N., FIC III I I65 (Lozere), 5 Jan. I943. 50 A.N., FIC III I 63 (Lot), 5 Dec. 1942.

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propaganda. He felt quite unable to explain government policy to the people of his area. That was in August I941.51

The evidence was there, but Vichy refused to change course. On the contrary it became increasingly dependent on collaboration with

Germany to justify its raison d'etre, a collaboration which had not been

reciprocal in the first place. There was no way Petainism could flourish or even survive as a patriotic force while its politics were so blatantly destructive of all internal cohesion and confidence. In November I942 Petain was urged to leave France, when the Germans occupied the southern zone, and there has been much debate about whether or not he should have left at that point and gone to North Africa. Jean Borotra has said that Petain sacrificed himself yet again and refused to abandon France.52 Had he really been concerned with sacrifice Petain would have abandoned not France but Petainism.

By prolonging it beyond its historical conjuncture he did everything of which the refugees accused the authorities in May and June I940. He misled those who trusted him and betrayed those who expected protection. Petain may well have claimed to be a patriot, as much in

I944 as in I940, but patriotism no longer claimed Petain. By I944 its

imagery and its language were firmly associated elsewhere. The ultimate absurdity of Petainism is not its language of care, concern and

protection, nor even its imagery of rural life and peasant values. As is evident from contemporary movements of ecology and regionalism, of

community care and local politics, this language has no inevitable

place on political Right or Left. The absurdity was that Petain could not see that his monopoly of this language had gone, or could not

appreciate why. There is more to patriotism in Vichy France than the protective,

defensive kind on which I have concentrated here. There was, of course, the outward-going Resistance patriotism full of risks and un- certainties, which is what is normally meant by the word during this

period. But there is nothing shameful about the defensive kind until it is used to promote the kind of insularity and racial phobia which

Vichy deliberately encouraged, and Petain did nothing to oppose. Those who demanded protection in 1940 and felt Petain provided it, and who then turned against him when his inactivity, his class and racial prejudices and his government's collaboration betrayed their trust, may not all have become the kind of Resisters, rightly referred to as 'les patriotes'. But at least they showed discrimination in their shift of patriotic allegiance. It may not be heroic, but it may well be

argued that this is an improvement on 'my country right or wrong'. 51A.N., FIC IlI I I48 (C6te-d'Or), 25 Aug. I941. 52 Author's interview, April I980.

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Documents

Patriots and Patriotism Vichy