Vichy France by Robert O. Paxton

Author:Robert O. Paxton [Paxton, Robert O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5410-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

From Persuasion to Constraint: The Emerging Police State

The National Revolution has boiled down to the social advancement of the gendarmerie.

—Anatole de Monzie173

NO ONE EXPECTED THE ARMISTICE REGIME TO BE SOFT. The republic had already suspended a number of civil liberties at the start of the war in 1939. Under the provisions of a “state of siege,” the army assumed the supervision of order in the departments and the judicial system was modified. The Communist party, technically Hitler’s ally since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 21, was dissolved on September 26, its newspapers shut down and its political leaders expelled from parliament the following January.174 The post of minister of propaganda was created, and the republic entrusted the business of wartime control of opinion first to playwright Jean Giraudoux and then to Jean Prouvost, textile magnate and newspaper owner. Vichy carried all of these republican emergency devices further and accepted their authoritarian implications more frankly.175

The new regime wanted to be loved as well as feared, however. An immense amount of Vichy effort went into group activities and ceremonial designed to generate public fervor. Its style was the very antithesis of that prickly refractoriness to group discipline personified in Third Republic folk heroes like Marcel Pagnol’s Marseilles cafetier César or the Chaplin of Modern Times. Frenchmen had not designed public ceremonies with such didactic zeal since David worked for the Committee of Public Safety, nor marched in such a profusion of uniforms since the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Jean Guéhenno, coming down from occupied Paris into the Vichy zone for the first time in 1942, found it

a strange land, a sort of principality where everyone from children of six on up, regimented into groups from “Youth” to “Veterans,” wearing Francisques or symbols of the Legion, seemed to be in uniform. Where is France?176

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.