National Regeneration in Vichy France by Debbie Lackerstein

Author:Debbie Lackerstein [Lackerstein, Debbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781317089988
Google: bNkGDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-22T01:27:49+00:00

In revolution, everything is action, everything is creation, everything is impulse, everything is animation. One must act, act again, act always. One must see the big picture, conceive vast programmes and make them happen, bashing the tambourine. Revolution is the mystique of action’.11

The debate over the nature of revolution in Occupied France was also taken up by the review, Idées, and its stable of young nonconformist intellectuals. Many had been seduced from Action Française conformity though the call to action in the 1930s. They gravitated to Vichy, rather than Paris, after the defeat with high hopes for the National Revolution but they were critical of the traditionalist and reactionary influences they found there. A series of articles published in 1942 reflects the complex variations in attitudes amongst this group of young intellectuals. In mid year, the editor, René Vincent, was critical of the government’s slowness in legislating for change: revolution was more than mere laws and institutions, he wrote; it depended on changing spirit, values and ideals and would be achieved through the process of rediscovering France’s national traditions. He was not overly concerned, however: the slowness was, he wrote, a ‘childhood sickness’ of a state revolution and the growing pains could be solved by heeding the advice of the leader, Pétain. He could even see some advantages in such a revolution in the security, discipline and realism that the state could ensure as the pure mystique of revolution, while necessary to keep the revolution moving, could destroy it by tempting it into illusion. The National Revolution, he claimed, did not lack ideas, doctrine or theoreticians but had been forced to improvise on the ruins of the old regime, without the benefit of an organised party. Several months later, however, Vincent had become impatient with the lack of enthusiasm to bring about fundamental change and called for a revolutionary elite who could cut through the bureaucratisation of the National Revolution.12

Jean-Pierre Maxence had travelled further down the path of radicalisation in the late 1930s and saw France’s defeat as an opportunity for sweeping away old traditions and joining the new Europe. In the Idées in 1942 he called for a ‘revolutionary revolution’, declaring ‘A spoken revolution is a still born revolution, a ghost of a revolution. For two years we have been speaking ours’. At Vichy mere sketches of ideas, rare and fragile truths and timid hopes were drowned in a flood of words, he claimed. Each embryonic act or promise of action ‘dries under the sun of comment’. Real revolution, Maxence wrote, is profoundly violent; it fights and never gives up and every day that it fails to scratch with its claw is a day lost. Real revolutionaries think, eat and bleed revolution as a way of life, a personal mission. The revolutionary had to be serene, without illusion and beyond hope or despair as the destiny of France was at stake: ‘Revolution … is a question of life or death, of dignity or slavery’. Maxence recognised that Vichy’s alibi was always ‘tomorrow’.

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