France 1940 by Philip Nord

Author:Philip Nord
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780300189872
Publisher: Yale University Press

PART III

DEATH COMES TO THE REPUBLIC

CHAPTER 5

ARMISTICE

France’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate met in joint session on 10 July. The setting was Vichy, a spa town in the Auvergne. The assembled representatives authorized Marshal Pétain to draft a new constitution and to govern with a free hand in the interim, and they did so by a crushing majority: 569 voices in favor with just 80 opposing and 20 abstentions. This was an awful and spectacular act of political “hara-kiri,”1 a suicide all the more appalling because it cleared the path for a new, authoritarian order to emerge. How had it come to this?

The political collapse of the Third Republic was a tragedy in two acts. The first opened on 5 June when the Germans launched an assault on the Somme–Aisne line. They met with stiff initial resistance but then broke through, pitching toward Paris. The French government was obliged to abandon the capital on 10 June and beat a retreat to the provinces. It relocated to the Touraine, just south of the Loire, a natural barrier which, it was hoped, might provide beleaguered decision-makers with a moment to recoup. Once there, Premier Reynaud convened a series of cabinet meetings at the château de Cangy, and the prospect of an armistice, already a subject of simmering differences, was confronted head-on. Reynaud was dead set against giving up the fight and cast about for alternatives. Winston Churchill flew to the region for a pair of summit talks—Supreme War Councils as they were called—hoping to stiffen French resolve. All the debate, often tense and tempestuous, did not result in a concerted course of action, nor did it slow the German advance. On 14 June a second government transplantation was improvised, this time to Bordeaux. Being a port city, it was well situated for further relocations. Indeed it was from there that a diehard Charles de Gaulle would fly into London exile on 17 June, and that a boatload of no less resolute parliamentarians would sail on the passenger liner Massilia en route to French North Africa on 21 June. Yet prior to all such departures Reynaud himself had thrown in the towel. He had hoped the United States might come to France’s rescue, but it would not, a demurral made crystal clear to him by the American ambassador’s second-in-command, Freeman Matthews, on the morning of 16 June. Reynaud resigned that very day in favor of Marshal Pétain, who was standard-bearer of the pro-armistice faction.

The second act of the drama was less compressed than the first but not by much, unfolding across a span of three and a half weeks from Pétain’s accession to office through the vote of 10 July. Pétain addressed the nation on multiple occasions during this period, and it became clear that he meant not just to bring hostilities to a close, but to take charge. On the matter of the armistice, Hitler gave a lending hand, setting terms that were intended to be hard to swallow but not too

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