The French Goebbels

In the summer of 1944 Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was the setting for a state funeral in what was to be the last symbolic act of the regime of Marshall Petain that had governed France with ever diminishing authority since 1940. There was something bizarrely unreal about the whole occasion. To the north-west of the capital the Allies were fighting to break out of Normandy; within six weeks they would arrive in Paris itself. To all but the most deluded it was clear that the Germans were losing the war.

But still the funeral was conducted with due solemnity. The man being honoured was Philippe Henriot, appointed Vichy’s head of propaganda in January 1944, who had been assassinated by the Resistance on 28 June. Why was this considered necessary? Quite simply because, in the twilight of collaboration, it was Henriot who had become the voice of Vichy, not Petain or Pierre Laval, his prime minister. And a highly effective voice he was too, so effective that the Free French, broadcasting from London, had taken to calling him the French Goebbels.

Henriot, besides being a skilled radio broadcaster, possessed one key advantage: the French may have been tired of the war, even more tired of the German occupiers, but they were still immensely fearful of the destructive consequences of liberation. For weeks prior to the Normandy landings Allied bombing raids on France had increased in intensity, providing Henriot with plenty of material for his twice-daily broadcasts. He contrasted the suffering of his fellow countrymen with those who had taken refuge with de Gaulle in England. And the native Resistance, the Maquis, he told his listeners, was made up of communists, terrorists, criminals and gangsters. The true heroes of France, he said, were the men of the Milice, Vichy’s paramilitary police force, who would restore order to a chaotic world.

Henriot had an interesting background, emerging from the Catholic and Anti-Semitic right that had felt itself increasingly beleaguered ever since the days of the affaire Dreyfus earlier in the century, which had introduced one of the great fault lines into French political life. At the beginning of the war he had also been strongly anti-German, a patriot like most patriots of the day who rallied to Marshall Petain after the fall of France and not to the band of émigrés who followed Charles de Gaulle to London. He was a French patriot, yes, a believer in the nation’s Catholic civilization and a hater not just of Jews, whom he did not consider to be French, but of communists.

This fear and hatred of communism is the key to understanding the most crucial metamorphosis in Henriot’s career. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 he saw Germany as the great cleansing force, one that that would deliver Christian civilization from the contagion of communism.

In the early months of 1944, such was Henriot’s effectiveness, the French were fighting a civil war ‘on air.’ Resistance agents had reported that his broadcasts were having a strong influence on a fearful and uncertain population. From London a counter-attack was launched, with a number of people, headed by Maurice Schumann, warning people against Henriot’s seductive words. He continually referred to the exiles as the “the Jewish shirkers in London”, who responded by calling him a “Judas”, seemingly quite unaware of the irony here.

Counter-broadcasts were not enough. In the end the only way to stop Henriot was to kill him. That same evening Schumann proclaimed that “We will not hide our joy at this event. France will do very well without the voice of Philippe Henriot.” The rest was silence.

De Gaulle and the Myth of Resistance

Tomorrow is one of the most famous days in French history. It marks the anniversary in 1940 when Charles de Gaulle appealed on BBC radio in London to his countrymen urging them to continue to resist the Germans, even though the government of the day had formally surrendered to the invading army. Famous, yes, an event being marked by commemorations across the land. President Sarkozy himself will attend a ceremony at Mont Valereien near Paris, where a memorial to the French Resistance is situated, before flying to London to visit studio B2, from where de Gaulle made his broadcast, saying, in noble words, that "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not and will not be extinguished."

There is only one small problem: it’s a myth. Oh, not the broadcast; that's real enough, something that happened because Winston Churchill, the prime minister, allowed it to happen in the face of opposition from the rest of the war cabinet. It's a myth because de Gaulle was probably heard by enough people to fill a village hall. The chances are, moreover, few of those who did listen on that bleak day in French history, when a great part of the nation was on the road fleeing from the German advance, had ever heard of this figure, a senior soldier but a minor politician. It's a myth - and here is the uncomfortable truth -because the vast bulk of the French population were relieved by the call for the armistice. The vast bulk of the French population rallied behind another soldier altogether and were to remain behind him for years to come. He was Philippe Petain, the new Prime Minister and subsequently head of the French state established at Vichy.

But history is often made retrospectively. De Gaulle, in the end, was on the side of the winners and Petain, Petain, whose side was he on? The losers, the answer has to come because he was tried and condemned as a traitor in 1945. But Petain was not Pierre Laval, who did more or less take the side of losers he believed were to be winners; Petain, rather like de Gaulle, took the side of France, though there are few now who would admit to this, preferring to sweep Vichy into a shameful oblivion. There is much about the Vichy regime that is shameful but the shame is not Petain's it is not even Laval's: the shame is France’s

No matter; in the end the obscure figure in London, stiff, totally lacking in humour, unimaginative and uncompromising came like a new Joan of Arc to save the conscience of the nation. He came in time to create the myth of resistance passing into shameful memory the realities of collaboration. Thus is history born; thus are nations made.

Mendacious Mitterrand

Following on from my recent piece on Sarkozy’s visit to Rwanda I though I would add a separate article on Francois Mitterrand, the man who was president of France at the time of the genocide, the man who bears a singular responsibility for what happened, the man whose ignorance and turpitude made him conceivably the worst head of state the French have ever known, not excluding Marshal Petain, his hero and avatar.

What an odd thing, is it not, for a socialist to have an old reactionary like Petain as a hero. Ah, but you see, this is where we begin, with confusion, inconsistency and the worst forms of opportunism imaginable. In political terms the French are quite capable of switching from the camp of Caesar to the camp of Brutus, without any major qualms of conscience. But try to imagine being in the camp of Caesar and Brutus at one and the same time. Can you picture such a thing; can you understand such a thing? If you can you are already on the way to understanding the kind of man Mitterrand was.

I don’t really want to dig too deeply into old ground; there is plenty of material already on this man’s shady past and I suspect that there will be more to come in time. Let me just say that when it came to reconstructing the record Mitterrand had a tendency to be not just economical with the truth but parsimonious in the extreme, at least until the full story came out when Pierre Péan, an investigative journalist, published Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, a study of the man’s life and actions between 1934 and 1947. By one of those small ironies that fate enjoys it was published in 1994, the year Mitterrand acted as godfather to the Rwandan Holocaust.

Before this book appeared Mitterrand had either lied about his past or suffered from a highly convenient amnesia. In his youth he had supported the Popular Front, the socialist-communist alliance presided over by Leon Blum. In the war, after he escaped from a German POW camp, he became “a resister after no great agonising”, to use his own words. The truth is quite different. His associations were not with the Popular Front but with Action Française, the Croix de Feu, Le Camelots du Roi and the Cagoulards, monarchist, racist, anti-Semitic and terrorist organisations, some of whom specialised in political assassination, including the planned assassination of Leon Blum.

Mitterrand’s motto really should have been ‘don’t mention the war’, or at least don’t mention all of it. Once back in France he became a minor Vichy functionary. This was not just a job; he wasn’t just another bureaucrat, dedicated to serving authority, regardless of its political complexion. No; this was born of conviction, of support for what the Petainists called the ‘National Revolution.’ His sympathies are revealed in two articles he published in 1942, once criticising France for “150 years of mistakes”; criticising it, in other words, for the Revolution of 1789 and all that came thereafter. In the other article he approves the formation of the Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL), though lamenting its lack of “fanaticism”. He need not have worried about that, for the following year the SOL became the Milice, notorious for torturing and murdering members of the Resistance and collaborating in the Holocaust.

After Péan’s book appeared Mitterrand made all sorts of implausible excuses, more lies and dissimulation. But there was one particularly revealing admission in a television interview. In a response to a question about Vichy’s Jewish Statute he said that it was a piece of legislation against foreign Jews about which he had known nothing.

All I can say is that he must have been both blind and deaf not to know of this Statute. But that’s not the crucial point, no; the Statute was directed against all Jews, but even if it had not been this hardly makes it more defensible, as one author wrote. There he is, still the residual Vichyist, still holding the prejudices of that benighted age, still distinguishing between French and ‘foreign’ Jews. He could not condemn the past because he was the past.

Yes, he was the past and by his friends the French should have known him; friends like the notorious René Bousquet, the former secretary-general of the Vichy police, the man responsible for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris in 1942, in which some 13,000 Jews were sent to their deaths. In 1992 when a committee dedicated to remembering this outrage tried to get an official apology for the actions of Vichy against the Jews Mitterrand refused. The apology came in due course, but it was made by Jacques Chirac, his Gaullist successor, in yet another peculiar irony.

So, there we have it, there we have a taste of the career of France’s first socialist president. De Gaulle was right; Mitterrand was a ghost who came from the deepest depths of the collaboration. His career should have ended in 1945 but for the forgetfulness that descended on France, encouraged by de Gaulle himself. To have a man like Mitterrand as president says a lot about French socialism; says a lot about France.

Vichy and the Jews

There was a strong ideological underpinning to anti-Semitism in wartime France, going back to the Dreyfus Affair and before. Even so, the conduct of the Vichy state cannot be explained simply by reference to a pre-history of a prejudice, nor, indeed, by the presence of German troops on French soil. This question raises a complex set of issues, but let me simplify it to this: the action of the Petain government in relation to the Jews was conditioned, more than anything else, by a determination to preserve French autonomy and freedom of action, paradoxical as it sounds. For example, the first Jewish Statute of October 1940 owed nothing whatsoever to German pressure. More than this, when the Germans started to adopt their own policy in the Occupied Zone Vichy followed closely on, not because it 'feared' for its own people, but because of concerns over the disunity of France, over divergence between the free and the occupied zones.

Remember too that Vichy claimed authority, or attempted to claim authority, over all of France, not just the south. Admiral Darlan, Prime Minister of France from December 1940 to April 1942, created the Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs in March 1941 entirely on his own initiative, for the simple reason that he wanted to pre-empt a German plan to set up their own agency, operating in the north alone. Also the General Union of the Israelites of France, a Jewish umbrella organisation on the lines of the Eastern European Judenräte, was established by Vichy in November 1941 solely to steal a march on the Germans. This attempt to keep up with the Germans, to ensure policy that applied to the whole and not the part, meant that anti-Semitism moved in an ever more radical spiral. But it was urged on by men like Pierre Laval, who replaced Darlan as Prime Minister in April 1942, and René Bousquet, who had responsibility for the police, men who were not ideologically anti-Semitic, for political and organisational reasons; for reasons, in other words, of national prestige and autonomy. This does nothing to lessen the moral turpitude involved in a policy that ensured greater safety for French Jews in areas under the control of the Italian Fascists, areas where they were safe from their own police.

Defending Pierre Laval

In thinking about any particular figure, any person of prominence, either living or dead, I try to imagine what kind of defence could be mounted at the bar of history before which they stand on arraignment. I suppose I think of myself as barrister, preparing cases for the defence, perhaps even trying to defend the indefensible.

There are some cases, I confess, where I would simply refuse the brief. I despise Tony Blair, Fidel Castro and Lenin too much ever to offer a defence, even under compulsion. There are also some beyond all defence s far as I am concerned. Here Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin and Hitler come to mind. But I might, without too much compulsion, offer an effective argument in favour of Mussolini, Franco and Philippe Petain. I would certainly use all the power I could muster to have Juan Peron and Engelbert Dollfuss acquitted. But let me offer a more tricky case, one I discussed with a group of French friends-that of Pierre Laval, twice prime minister of the Vichy administration, and a man much loathed in his native land. So, here is my argument, part defence and part plea in mitigation.

Poor Pierre Laval, most definitely the 'man you love to hate.' Even Marshall Petain, head of the Vichy state, said of him Ce Laval-quel fumier! (What horse shit) In a poll carried out Novelle Litterairies in 1980 on the fairness of his post-war trial, only 2% of the respondents said that he should have been acquitted. Indeed, Laval has become the ultimate scapegoat, the French Judas. There are still those who would excuse Petain, believing he acted for noble if misguided motives. Nobody defends or excuses Laval, who is held to represent the 'unacceptable face' of Vichy. Even his appearance was against him; he seems the very quintessence of the shifty and disreputable politician. He was the ultimate wheeler-dealer, reflected even in his nickname, the 'horse trader.'

What is to be said in his favour? Very little, I suppose, but I will try my best.
First and foremost, he set out to preserve his country, not to betray it. He was never in that sense a Quisling, and senior French fascists were kept out of the Vichy administration. His task, as he saw it, was to continue the work of Aristide Briand in ending the enmity between France and Germany. But whereas Briand had Gustav Stresemann, Laval had Hitler. He was also mindful of the fate of Poland under the Nazis, and saw active collaboration as a way of preventing a similar fate befalling France, thus ensuring that the country would have a role to play in the post-war settlement.

He did not 'believe' in a German victory; but he did expect it. His chief aim was to conclude a treaty that would end the occupation, bring French prisoners of war home, and secure France's overseas empire. His chief failure was that he never really understood that the Germans were not at all interested in maintaining a 'reasonable relationship', only in securing French support in advancing their war aims. Even his scheme to bring the prisoners of war home in return for sending French workers to Germany produced little in the way of practical returns, France giving far more than it received. He did his best to save the French Jews from deportation, but only at the sacrifice of those not of French nationality, which had the effect of turning his horse-trading into the grossest forms of moral turpitude.

He may indeed have been right, that things would have been worse without him, a defence that he made at his 'trial' in 1945. To the very end he preserved the semblance of an independent French state, and kept his long-standing promise that he would never consent to a declaration of war. The problem was that he simply lost all sight of the big picture, and that the collaboration which he believed would save France forced him into ever decreasing circle of compromise and betrayal. A more prudent politician would have said much and given little. Laval said much and gave even more. He remains a victim, to the end, of his own misconceptions; not a bad man, just a misguided one.

Castle to Castle

Who was Céline? Why, Céline was Céline, a misanthrope and cultural pessimist, who found in Fascism a way of giving some degree of coherence to his thoughts. But he was far too eccentric, far too much of an individualist, ever to be constrained by an ideological straightjacket. You see, Céline does not discriminate in the forms of prejudice he displays: he hates everybody, regardless of race or creed! Castle to Castle (D'un château l'autre), his post-war account of Vichy in exile, in the sheer intensity of the prose, the machine-gun staccato of his delivery, the passion with which he carries his thoughts forward, displays for me the blackest of black humour and satanic irony, though I admit this may not have been the author's intention! Intentionally or not, he makes the absurd look absurd; and what better way of perceiving the dust of Vichy!