General Maxime Weygand, 1867-1965 by Anthony Clayton

Author:Anthony Clayton [Clayton, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, Europe, France, General
ISBN: 9780253015853
Google: B-2eBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-03-06T22:24:55+00:00

6

MINISTER FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE

JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1940

Among the new ministers, Weygand was to be minister for national defense, with Huntziger as minister for war.1 Most of the other ministers, however, reflected the policy aims of Marshal Philippe Pétain, now eighty-four years old, the hero of Verdun, the general who had restored the morale, discipline, and self-respect of the French Army after the “mutinies” of 1917, the only one of the First World War marshals still on his feet, but a man whose mental clarity of vision and analysis was already noted by observers as declining during the course of the day.2 He was no friend of Great Britain; in the bitterness of defeat he saw Britain as simply trying to use France to suit British needs. He had been much influenced by the Spanish Civil War, which confirmed his belief that social order and some form of firm moral regeneration were needed in France. The pattern for this was to be that of the new national slogan, Travail, Famille, Patrie. Youth organizations and schools would be restructured along very authoritarian lines, as would labor and agriculture. These changes would take shape later in the institutions of the “National Revolution,” the semimilitary youth organization Chantiers de la Jeunesse, the Secours National, the Corporation Paysanne, and the Légion Française des Combattants, and in institutionalized anti-Semitism.

In his own words Pétain saw himself as making a supreme self-sacrifice—the gift of his person to the nation. Other political activity that was not supportive of the new regime was divisive and must cease. For a nation suffering something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder following the military defeat, the Marshal appeared to be and presented himself as the savior of the nation, who soldier to soldier had gained an acceptable deal from the Germans. A huge, almost hysterical national popularity cult developed around Pétain and was to last, despite some disenchantment, until the arrival of de Gaulle on French soil in 1944. In June 1940, however, Pétain was receiving some 2,000 laudatory letters every day.

Looking ahead, the tragedy of this fast-aging man, surrounded by fascist and quasi-fascist advisers, was to be a downward path: reluctant concessions to the Germans; anti-Semitic discrimination, with later deportation of French Jews, including children, to extermination camps; and a brutal fascist militia. The later brutality and compromises with the Germans by the ministers of his regime were not clear to foresee in June 1940. It was later that the savior of France was to become the national disgrace, to end his days in prison in ignominy and shame, largely through his own self-importance and delusions of omniscience.

For Weygand, and despite an up-and-down relationship over the years, Pétain was a Marshal of France, the nation’s highest honor, awarded only by a vote in the legislature, and an honor that could never be taken away. For a man whose whole life had been built around the military ethos of discipline and obedience, Weygand believed that even a full general, as he was, should serve a Marshal. Differing

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