by Douglas Boyd
As time went by, prudent French gastronomes avoided La Palette in Boulevard Montparnasse, frequented by the Resistance and watched by the Gestapo. Singer Tino Rossi was among the few uncommitted patrons at the Alexis bistro near Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, where one risked finding one’s table surrounded by Jacques Doriot and the top brass of the PPF. Few could do more than gaze through the windows. The Journal Officiel announced on 18 September a subsidy of 150 francs for seeds and tools to encourage everyone to take an allotment and grow his own food.
Just as the civilian population was thinking itself safe from the violence of war, a new enemy appeared. From bases across the Channel, RAF bombers raided ports where German invasion preparations were going on. From there, the targets spread to submarine bases, factories and airfields, many of them in or near centres of population. Between September and May of 1941 the naval town of Brest suffered seventy-eight raids, causing the mayor to appeal to Pétain: ‘The women and children have to take refuge at night in the caves in the cliffs around town and in a tramway tunnel.’
At the eastern end of the Channel coast in Dunkirk, where 82 per cent of houses had been destroyed in the May fighting, the first RAF raid on 28 July was followed by a massive raid on 8 August. The occupation troops took priority in the shelters, leaving most civilians cowering in cellars beneath the ruins of their homes. Few people in Britain knew or cared that between 60,000 and 67,000 innocent French civilians were killed and around 72,000 seriously wounded8 by bombs which bore cheeky messages scrawled in chalk like ‘Here’s one for Adolf’. The addressee was for the time safe; each mis-directed delivery merely adding to the misery of his French victims. After Mers el-Kebir it was yet another reason to wonder who was the real enemy and posters all along the Channel coast asked, ‘And these were your allies?’
With big business seeking new opportunities, the occupation administration was one step ahead, requiring each section of industry and commerce in August to form a Comité d’Organisation Nationale. The initials CON were unfortunate, since con is both a female body part and a rude word for ‘silly’ – as in English. Even after it was reabbreviated to CO, there was no doubt for whose benefit these organising committees had been set up, although they were ostensibly intended for updating business methods and re-equipping factories to prepare French firms for competition in a German-dominated United States of Europe.
A series of laws dated 18, 20 and 31 October and 9 and 16 November 1940 completely revised French corporation law. As in the European Community, which Britain joined in 1973, young and ambitious businessmen snatched the opportunity to enhance their careers by working for the COs. In the absence of trade unions and parliamentary democracy, considerable power accrued to them, largely through their authority to impose sanctions on companies who failed to march in step with the New Order. The inherent problem from the start was one endemic in totalitarian economies: a proliferation of ‘organising bodies’ whose members had to pay the costs of a flood-tide of time-wasting paperwork. Some companies belonged to more than one CO; others had no idea to which they belonged. Many companies believed they were being discriminated against when the restricted resources were carved up. Whilst major companies could keep abreast of all the bureaucracy, smaller ones found that they were pawns being moved now by German orders or lack of them, now by the OCPRI – the central office for distribution of industrial products. It was a dream-world, in which the Germans insisted on by-passing the COs and placing orders direct, reducing them to collecting statistics for their German masters.
Some COs did work. Banking, then with no need of raw materials or expensive machines, was enjoying a boom in export credits to cover orders from the Reich. Henri Ardant, MD of Société Générale, considered it so vital for French banking to integrate itself into the new united Europe that he jumped at the chance to run the banking CO established on 13 June 1941. His connections with the SS hierarchy were so close that the former SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen said at his post-war trial, ‘He gave us all the information we wanted from the point of view of both banking and finance.’9
Money is money, whether German or French, so that remark should be taken in the context of Dr Schaeffer’s memories of hospitality and warm personal relationships with the directors of most of the major banks during the time he ran the Bankenaufsichtsamt. By 15 September 1940 everyone holding a bank account had to provide proof of Aryan descent before being allowed to use it. Safe-deposit boxes of all Jews who had not returned to Paris were opened and contents confiscated. The result was a harvest for the Reich because in 1939 Paris had had the largest Jewish population of any city except Warsaw and New York, including 150,000 to 200,000 stateless refugees from Nazi Germany and Poland. That bedfellows are not always lovers is demonstrated by the management of the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie being very close to Schaeffer for business reasons, yet protecting Jewish employees from the second Statut des Juifs in June 1941 by finding work for them to do at home and continuing to pay their salaries.10
In September the Paris Bourse stock exchange reopened in Vichy – so unsuccessfully that the Germans eventually give permission to reopen in Paris sans the Jewish members. On one afternoon that month, Thomas Kernan looked out of the window of his office to see gangs of what he called ‘pimply youths’ in the Blackshirt uniforms of the Jeune Front movement smashing the windows of Jewish-owned shops on the Champs Elysées. He watched an appalled Wehrmacht officer collar one young hooligan, but release him after being shown an SD identity card. Robert Hersant, leader of the Jeune Front, later found himself in trouble for saying, ‘I don’t want any Boches around me. I use the Germans, but I detest them.’11
On 30 September the Louvre museum reopened its doors on a collection considerably reduced by all the looting – official and unofficial. The following day, Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin noted in his diary that Pétain had been at his most intransigent in cabinet when drafting the first Statut des Juifs, which came into effect on 3 October 1940 – from when all Jews had to register their presence at the local Hôtel de Ville. Nobel prize-winning philosopher Henri Bergson, a sick 81-year-old who had converted to Catholicism, went to register out of despair and to express solidarity with the persecuted minority among whom he had grown up.
The statute specified that no Jew was allowed to serve in the educational or judicial systems, the armed services, the civil service, press or entertainment, nor to present himself for election to public office. Jews were also forbidden to queue, without doing which they could not buy food. They had to hand in their radios and were forbidden to use telephone kiosks. The PTT was instructed to disconnect Jewish subscribers and remove their handsets.
The Director of Education for the Seine département, which then included greater Paris, sent to all head teachers a circular of which this is an extract:
The Law of 3 October regarding the status of Jews stipulates as follows:
Art 1. ‘Jew’ in the context of this law means any person having three grandparents of the Jewish race, or two grandparents if married to a Jew.
Art 2. The following public service employment is barred to Jews:
Art 3. … the teaching profession …
Article 7 continued:
The Jewish state employees affected … will cease to exercise their functions within two months of the promulgation of this law. They will be permitted to claim their pension rights, providing they have sufficient pensionable years of service or be entitled to a proportional pension if they have served at least fifteen years. Those who fall into neither category will have their cases settled within a period to be determined by the administration.
By his circular of 21 October, the Secretary of State for Education has informed me that by ‘teachers’ is meant all civil servants whose professional activity brings them into regular and direct contact with pupils and whose authority affects the teaching and indirectly the pupils, viz. primary school and other teachers, heads of schools, etc.
&nb
sp; Shortage of paper caused the circular to be issued on paper headed République Française with the old revolutionary slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, which was hardly appropriate in the circumstances.
No less ominously, the prefects who controlled regional government in France were given power to intern foreign Jews. The concentration camp at Gurs, where refugees from the Spanish Civil War had been held, was among those taken over for ‘foreign undesirables’.12 Three days later, Algerian Jews were deprived of citizenship, which had been theirs by right since 1871. Towards the end of the year Jewish-born Catholic priest Abbé Glasberg managed to get into the camp at Gurs and reported the ‘inhuman conditions’ to his superiors. On the instructions of Cardinal Gerlier, Monsignor Guerry went to Vichy in December to hand a protest at the unchristian treatment of the detainees to the Minister of the Interior, but got no further than the minister’s chef de cabinet.
On 12 October Wehrmacht sappers blew up the monument in Reims to the black colonial soldiers who had died for France in the First World War, exposing in the granite base a document acknowledging their important contribution to victory. In Paris, the sappers also dismantled the statue in Denys-Cochin square of General Charles Mangin, a hero of the first war. The reason? When commanding his regiment of Senegalese soldiers occupying the Rhineland in 1918, Mangin had ordered mayors in his area to supply whores for military brothels and over-ruled the protests of local mayors by saying, ‘Don’t worry, meine Herren, German women are none too good for my Senegalese soldiers.’
In September and October Laval travelled repeatedly to Paris for meetings with the Germans, which enabled his many enemies in Vichy to turn the marshal more and more against him. On 22 October Laval met Hitler at Montoire in central France, to prepare the way for Pétain’s meeting with the Führer two days later. Hitler was on his return journey from a meeting with Franco, at which his expectation that the caudillo would repay German help in the civil war by offering military support had foundered on the German refusal to promise in return control of French North Africa. On 25 May Laval would tell his dinner guests: ‘My meeting with Hitler at Montoire was a moving surprise. Rejecting any idea of vengeance, Hitler is prepared to admit France into the New Europe he will create when the war is over.’
After the Hitler-Pétain meeting, photographs of them shaking hands at Montoire made the front pages of newspapers all over the world. In a letter thanking Cardinal Baudrillart for supporting him, Pétain wrote: ‘I want the people to trust me blindly, as three million of them did when I was their commander when they faced the enemy. Later, they will come to understand what my plan was.’13
On 30 October, Pétain broadcast an appeal for collaboration as a way of ‘making the best of it’. Prophetically, he added: ‘I went freely to talk to the Führer. I was subjected to no Diktat or pressure. A collaboration, which I accept in principle, has been planned between our two countries. It must be sincere. This policy is mine. It is me alone that history will judge.’
If most of their elders were too numb or too self-interested to react, the youth of Paris thought it was time to protest when the German authorities ordered the rector of Paris University to forbid any demonstration on 11 November – the anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First World War.14 The Sorbonne had reopened in July to prevent its buildings being requisitioned. Handwritten notes were passed hand-to-hand among high school and university students, summoning thousands to a rally at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The demonstration was suppressed by French police and German troops, with a force that seemed excessive to at least one Wehrmacht officer. Book censor Gerhard Heller was ordered to leave his office and join troops re-establishing order. When four apprehended students were placed in his custody, he marched them inside the building at pistol-point – but then told them to make themselves scarce.
Next day, the university was closed down. It was a black day even for the dark years, as far as education was concerned. A purge of left-wing teachers included PCF member Georges Guingouin, who refused to toe the pro-German party line and went underground, organising resistance in the Limousin area. Another independent-minded young communist, 18-year-old student Pierre Daix from Rennes was arrested on 26 November for his part in the Armistice Day demonstration. Emerging from prison in March 1941, Daix became a member of one of the PCF action groups after Hitler invaded the USSR in June of that year. Arrested in January 1943, he was transported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was lucky not to be murdered by other communist prisoners for failing to obey every order from Moscow.
On a more trivial level, the law also caught up with Thomas Kernan in November 1940 – for a minor infringement of blackout regulations committed way back in June! The wheels of justice were grinding as slowly as usual and the cataclysm of defeat did not stop him being fined. Cycling home from the tribunal in November, he counted the cars on the streets. One passed every five minutes.15 The silence was that of the countryside, broken only by birdsong and crickets in the gardens. At night, the stars could be seen again from the centre of Paris for the first time in a century – so little illumination was emitted by the blue-painted panes of the street lamps and similarly blue-lensed cycle lamps.
Hitler’s love of animals earned a respite for the French circus. Deprived of fodder for their herbivores and meat for their carnivores, the great names of French circus were hiring out docile animals to pull ploughs in anticipation of a bleak war until the Cirque d’Hiver and Cirque Medrano, made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, and where Buster Keaton would make his comeback in 1947, were taken over by the enterprising Busch family. On 20 December the Cirque d’Hiver added ‘Busch’ to its name and opened with matinees and evening shows each day except Sunday, when continuous performance was the rule. Nobody seemed to notice that one of the white-faced clowns had two small squares of black on his upper lip, remarkably reminiscent of the moustache of a certain Austrian ex-corporal. To compensate for the missing international acts, music-hall turns were added to the bill, with Charles Trenet and Les Petits Chanteurs de l’Opéra performing between the elephants and the lions. From there, it was a logical step to go on tour in the Reich, where the fodder rationed in France was freely available for a travelling circus.
Two weeks after the marshal’s meeting with Hitler at Montoire came proof, if proof were needed, that Hitler’s handshake did not mean he was going soft on the self-confessed master-collaborator: 70,000 Lorrains who did not wish to be German were expelled from their homes and dumped by special trains in Lyons on a one-way ticket. Furious at the way Laval had made him Hitler’s dupe, Pétain decided to get rid of him. On 13 December the last straw came when Baudouin hinted that the German invitation for the marshal to attend a ceremony at Les Invalides, marking the return of the ashes of Napoleon’s son the Duke of Reichstadt from Vienna on 15 December, was a plot between them and Laval to kidnap him.
The marshal invented a subterfuge. Asking all the ministers at that day’s cabinet meeting to write a letter of resignation that would not be accepted, but held ‘just in case’, he then told Laval and one other minister that their resignations had been accepted. Laval turned white with anger. ‘You are a weathercock,’ he yelled, ‘which turns with the wind.’ After he stormed out, slamming the door, Pétain scribbled a note that smacked of a commanding officer reprimanding a wayward subaltern: ‘M. Laval will be confined to his quarters for two days.’
The Hôtel du Parc was packed with a new breed of secret police – the so-called Groupes de Protection (GP). Laval’s office phones were dead. At 10.30 p.m. the American UPI correspondent appeared somewhat roughed up by the guards to inform Laval that his driver had been arrested and his car confiscated. Trying to leave the building, Laval was detained by the head of the Police Nationale and Gen Laure, who showed him Pétain’s note, which they were treating as a warrant to place him under house arrest. Driven under escort to Châteldon, Laval found himself, his wife and daughter prisoners in
their own home. Thus neither the head of state nor the head of government attended the midnight ceremony at Les Invalides, the French government being represented by Darlan and de Brinon. Hitler was furious at being spurned, but popular reaction in France to this non-event was, ‘He should have sent us some of our own coal back, not just these useless ashes’.
By an oversight, Laval’s radio had not been removed from the chateau so that he heard the marshal broadcast the severing of relations with him ‘for reasons of internal policy’. On the Tuesday, chef de cabinet du Moulin arrived at Châteldon to announce that the family was free, confessing that Laval had been the victim of a conspiracy playing upon Pétain’s paranoia. In the privacy of the Pavillon Sévigné back in Vichy, the marshal apologised, saying that he had no idea Madame Laval and her daughter had been inconvenienced. In the same breath he offered his erstwhile prisoner the Ministry of the Interior, which was turned down, followed by those of Agriculture and Industrial Production – both of which Laval also rejected, as Pétain had known he would.
In a prison cell after the Liberation, preparing the defence he was not allowed to present in court, Laval wrote of this time:
I learned from the Police Nationale, who had guarded me at Châteldon that on Thursday 19 November the official guard [on my house] was to have been replaced by a unit of the GP, of which a man called Norey was instructed to shoot me on the false pretext that I was trying to escape.16
