The History of Modern France by Jonathan Fenby

Author:Jonathan Fenby [Fenby, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

PART 4

VICHY, DE GAULLE AND THE UNLOVED REPUBLIC

1940–1958

15

TWO FRANCES

The legend that, apart from a small group of Fascists and crooks round the geriatric Marshal, France resisted the Germans for four years is just that. The varnishing of history was adopted when Allied troops liberated the country in 1944 and Charles de Gaulle argued that his Free French movement in London, not the Vichy regime under Pétain, represented the indivisible Republic. For decades, the extent of collaboration was obfuscated and the persecution of the Jews forgotten in favour of a more comforting account of ‘passive resistance’. Simone Veil, the concentration camp survivor and future minister, recalled how wounded she had been when she returned to France and found a wall of indifference. The showing on television of the ground-breaking documentary, Le Chagrin et la Pitié (Sorrow and Pity) about the reality of the Occupation was delayed for a dozen years (Veil, now a minister, was a leading figure in the opposition to showing it – she said on the grounds that the director wanted too much money). It took an American historian, Robert Paxton, to show how the French had done the Nazis’ work for them, and it was not until 1995 that a President of the Republic publicly recognised France’s responsibility for deporting tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps.

Dedicated collaborators were certainly in a minority, but so were those who actively resisted, at least until the landing of American and British troops on the Channel coast in 1944 swelled the ranks of ‘resisters of the last hour’. Members of the National Assembly and Senate voted almost unanimously for the Marshal to become head of state with legislative and executive powers. Laval warned that, if they did not do so, the Germans would occupy the whole country. Having done as he instructed, parliament was dissolved until the Victor of Verdun saw fit to reconvene it, which he did not.

For most of the French, especially those in the occupied zone, the next four years were a time of ambiguity and of surviving till the country was delivered back to itself by the Allied powers. While there was no shortage of real heroes and villains and occasional strikes and food riots, with widespread evasion of rules and regulations, most people watched and waited, playing both sides of the street if they could, as epitomised by the quintessentially ambiguous future president, François Mitterrand, who accepted a decoration from Pétain but also entered the Resistance.

The divide widens

The years before the debacle of 1940 had greatly accentuated the long-running conflict between the Republic, claiming the inheritance of the Revolution, and its opponents. They saw in Pétain the reactionary father figure France needed, who would preside over the creation of a new political and social system that would represent national values more truly than the Third Republic had done, realising the dreams nurtured by the hard right for three-quarters of a century. Opponents of the republican order jubilated. Maurras said the Marshal’s assumption of

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