I imagine that all of your lives are moving smoothly along without giving any thought at all to Vichy France. And I wouldn’t, in any way at all, want to disturb that smooth flow except that this has become a minor preoccupation of mine and I want to share some of the stray thoughts that have been in my mind because of it.
Vichy was the regime that emerged in the south of France — the ‘Unoccupied Zone’ — as a result of the fall of France in 1940. In his book on Vichy, written in 1972, Robert Paxton documents the prevailing sensibility towards Vichy among the French, which is that it was “four years to strike from our history,” as one book was actually titled. As Paxton himself writes, his in-depth, authoritative work ‘failed’ because it was “too unexpected.” Everybody in post-war France treated Vichy as an aberration — as a desperation resorted to in the chaos of the fall of France and as swiftly dispensed with and disregarded in the aftermath of the Liberation of 1944. But Paxton held onto the shadow of Vichy — and I’m holding onto to sort of the coattails of Paxton — out of a belief that there were important lessons to be accrued from Vichy in much the way that there were unassimilated lessons to be taken from fascism in general. “Fascism has not yet run its course,” Paxton forebodingly writes.
The chief lesson, as Paxton discovered, is that the conventional narrative of Nazi Germany forcing a settlement on France and France being compelled to adapt to it is unavailing. The truer, and stranger, story of Vichy is, as Paxton writes, that “collaboration was a French proposal that Hitler ultimately rejected.” And, in fact, Vichy’s attitude, from 1940 to 1942, was remarkably supine, based on an idea that Germany would ultimately reward France for having proactively adopted a miniature Nazi state. Really, under the auspices of Marshal Pétain’s ‘National Revolution,’ Vichy attempted to inculcate what it took to be a winning Fascist formula in a French context, and if that did not succeed in winning complete collaboration from Nazi Germany, it was solely that Hitler was such a uniquely difficult interlocutor — that Hitler was interested in France for the purposes of revenge and of loot and not at all compelled, despite his own economic interest, in bringing France into a ‘new European order.’
The underlying premise of Vichy was that the Third Republic — convened in 1870 and shakily guiding France up until 1940 — had failed abysmally. Paxton is convincing in describing how French politics, on both left and right, was united in rejecting the Third Republic, long before the advent of German Nazism, and to the point where even the post-war liberation regime made no attempt at all to reconstitute the Third Republic. Instead, argues Paxton, both left and right, for their own reasons, believed the Third Republic to be fundamentally flawed — and that France had been in a state of “incipient civil war in the 1930s” for reasons unconnected to Hitler.
Virtually as soon as the French Army collapsed, Vichy responded. The idea was that the Third Republic had delegitimized itself on the field of battle — the Germans had “deserved to win,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin — and the decision to appeal to Marshal Pétain and for Pétain to then institute a ‘National Revolution’ were both greeted with near-unanimous acceptance by the populace of Unoccupied France.
The institution of Vichy provoked an upsurge in public sentiment that would be swiftly forgotten after the war, but was nonetheless organic and deeply felt. As the French right-wing figure Charles Maurras remarked, the events of 1940 were “a divine surprise.” From a more unexpected quarter, the novelist André Gide argued that the German victory spelled the end of “excessive freedom” and of “the sorry reign of indulgence.”
The extent of Vichy’s sudden popularity led to an onslaught of conspiracy theories, and, to be honest, it seems like there was something to them (at the very least, the OSS — the forerunner of the CIA — took the theories seriously). The gist of the conspiracy theories was that the collapse of France wasn’t entirely unexpected; that a pre-war elite, dominant above all within the armed forces, essentially took France’s defeat as foreordained and attempted to use the opportunity to impose the ‘revolution from above.’ That whole premise became subject to vigorous post-war debate with the general consensus that there hadn’t been an actual conspiracy but that the Vichy political structure, influenced by far-right ideas throughout the 1930s, was awfully quick to put into place a system derived from Fascist ideology.
Questions of exactly how Vichy came into being are really of interest only to historians. What matters is the basic dynamic — that faith within a democratic structure collapsed internally, long before a battlefield defeat. In an age of ‘illiberalism,’ it’s worth figuring out how that could have happened. Basically — as Paxton would have put it — both left and right failed to agree on an underlying governing structure. The right was more or less in open rebellion from 1934 on (with the poetically redolent date of February 6 as the signal for disenfranchisement with the regime) and with the left more participatory in the republic’s structures but internally divided between liberalism, Communism, and the sort of performatively left politics of the Popular Front. All of this, by now, is probably starting to feel a bit familiar.
In post-war polemic, blame went to the right for being, essentially, traitorous. It’s hard to argue with that except that, when Pétain came to power, he seemed to be speaking, with startling unanimity, for the center as well: even in the face of Hitler and of defeat, the center recoiled from any association with Communism.
The overriding sense with the establishment of Vichy was of relief; Paxton writes that it met with the same level of near-universal affirmation in 1940 that the Liberation did in 1944. Vichy’s establishment itself wasn’t particularly controversial — assuming that France’s armed forces had lost, some political entity would have had to come into being. But more startling was the vote on July 10 to scrap the entire apparatus of Third Republic constitutionalism and to invest ‘full powers’ in Marshal Pétain. Unfortunately for that programme, Pétain, in his 80s, was nearing senility, and Vichy went on to suffer the usual fate of Fascist regimes: underneath the appearance of unity, quarreling potentates siphoned off wealth and power for their own organizations. The foreign policy — of attempting to be more German than the Germans, to the point of organizing reprisals and of rounding up Jews — ran aground on Hitler’s lack of interest in anything that Vichy was doing. And the careful establishment of zones of sovereignty floundered when the Nazis, at the moment that it was expedient for them in 1942, simply disregarded the promises that they had made and seized all of Vichy territory. As Churchill laconically wrote in The Hinge of Fate of the German advance, “So much for Vichy.”
That evident failure of Vichy policy made it easy to forget how popular the regime had been for two years and how eagerly the principles of autocracy were adopted. There was a period of collaboration in 1940-41 that the Vichyites described as “rose et idyllique.” The National Revolution — with its slogan of ‘Work, Family, Homeland,’ its ubiquitous portraits of Marshal Pétain, its saccharine youth leagues — struck conservatives as exactly the sort of moralistic, family-oriented society that they had been dreaming of throughout the inter-war period. Technocrats eagerly pushed a vision of pan-European prosperity — “the insertion of the future into the present,” as Vichy’s minister of industrial production enthusiastically put it.
And with the apparent successes of Vichy in the ‘rose et idyllique’ period was a surprisingly widespread sense that events had thoroughly repudiated the individualistic society of the early part of the 20th century. “Those very features which had made France so delightful and artistically creative had ill-fitted her for the new harsh age,” wrote Paxton paraphrasing the view of the poet Paul Valéry. The Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier regarded 1940 as “the judgment of history upon a whole liberal, secular, individualist worldview.” The law professor Nesmes-Desmarets wrote, “The National Revolution has done more in a year than the previous regime managed to do in a century.”
What all of this suggests — and Paxton himself seems to have been clearly surprised to uncover everything he did — was that the way we tended to think about totalitarianism was a bit too programmatic, a bit too determined by the single case of Nazi Germany. It wasn’t just the diabolical energy of Hitler that could make liberal democracies fall; it was completely possible, as in the case of 1930s France, for a republic to lose faith in itself, to start longing (near-suicidally) for autocracy and domination. There is a kind of cold shadow cast by the experience of Vichy and which connects to our era. ‘Illiberalism’ isn’t just conniving strong men or jack-booted thugs. Illiberalism emerges when both wings become too fanatical, when the center panics and revolts against the democratic structure (Paxton tries out a definition of Fascism as “hard measures by a frightened middle class”), when there is no one left who believes in the republic. In those circumstances, a republic can fall in plain sight, with no one really noticing or mourning it (as was the case in the vote of July 10). Democracies — as the West discovered in the 1920s and ‘30s — are very fragile institutions. Their survival depends not just on constant ‘vigilance’ against enemies (people seem to be good at doing that) but an unflagging belief in their intrinsic worth even at moments when sentiment across the political spectrum seems to have turned against them.
Nice. Having grown up in France at a time when the memory of Vichy was very much part of our elder's lived experience, I find your conclusions compelling. If anything, I would suggest you underestimate the ease with which a Republic slides into Fascism--as if Fascism were little more than an extension of liberal Republicanism. Not my thought alone, the historian Gérard Noirel, in "Les Origines républicaines de Vichy," makes a similar point in regards to the IIIrd Republic's attitude towards immigrants, for instance.
Cordially,
I've heard of Paxton's book, sounds like a sweet read! And not to worry, thinking about Vichy doesn't disrupt my routine at all; if you're ever in Poland you'd be amazed by the presence of historical magazines that focus on even darker chapters of the war. But if you really want to disrupt other people's routines, one topic that might ruffle a few feathers would be how Roosevelt and especially his secretary of state were staunchly pro-Vichy and anti-De Gaulle until it was no longer a question but a certainty that De Gaulle was the future of France. We have to admire wartime Roosevelt out of consideration for the war, but he was not the most celebratory "foreign policy" president we've had by a long shot.
Petain was a tragic figure. The Lion of Verdun, who virtually singlehandedly defeated the Germans at that gruesome battle. And then he becomes the leader of Vichy. For that reason I certainly don't regard that epoch as being in any way simple for the French. Maybe for the reds. On a random note, I look forward in the next year to reading Andre Gide's travels to the USSR, where he went as a true believer and what he saw changed his mind.