England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Meanwhile, the new regime was quick to introduce legislation that was a dream come true for every Frenchman who was anti-Semitic enough to have really meant it when he said, ‘Better Hitler than Blum.’ First came the announcement that only those who could prove that they had no Jewish blood could be employed by the civil service. Then a commission was appointed to review French citizenships granted under the generous Naturalization Act of 1927 that had encouraged the Russian Jews displaced by the Bolsheviks to settle in France six years before the more prescient of their German co-religionists started to arrive.

  Once the initial moves had been made against ‘the Déicides’, as the Monarchists and Catholic reactionaries of Action Française generally referred to the main civilian victims of Nazi terror, the persecution of the Freemasons began under a law banning all secret societies. As well as introducing new and blatantly discriminatory laws, Vichy also repealed a recent piece of liberal legislation that had put a France a good sixty years ahead of its time as far as the rest of western Europe was concerned. In April 1939 the Marchandeau Law governing newspaper practice had been amended to make it an offence to publish articles intended to incite hatred ‘towards a group of persons who belong by origin to a particular race or religion’. The law was scrapped on the grounds that it gave the Jews a special status.

  The mechanism to do all this was put into place exactly a week after Mers-el-Kébir, when the full National Assembly – the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate – had convened at Vichy’s Grand Casino and voted themselves out of existence. The Third Republic, founded in 1875, was finished and there were no plans for a fourth. Republics had been replaced by L’Etat Frangais – the French state – which was going to restore traditional values and had started with the national motto, scrapping Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité for the moral certainties of Travail, Familie, Patrie – Work, Family, Fatherland.

  Head of state, with all the executive and legislative powers previously shared between the Assembly, Prime Minister and President, was Maréchal Philippe Pétain who was the only man who could order that the National Assembly be reconvened. To advise him, though he could take or leave their advice, the Maréchal had a twelve-man Council of Ministers. Among them were Baudouin, who remained Foreign Minister, while Général Weygand, the man who had predicted England’s neck would be ‘wrung like a chicken’s’ in three weeks, was Defence Minister and in charge of the 100,000 or so troops Vichy was permitted to retain at home and abroad under the armistice.

  Much to Weygand’s disgust Pétain’s deputy and successor, should the octogenarian’s health ever take a turn for the worst, was none other than Pierre Laval: Time magazine’s Man of the Year 1931, the former Prime Minister and one of the shambolic champions of the smoke-filled rooms of the Third Republic’s last chaotic decade. As far as Weygand was concerned, Laval was the epitome of all that had brought France to its knees. Pétain shared Weygand’s antipathy for the rumpled, chain-smoking Laval whose manners he found deplorable, particularly his generous distribution of the product of his eighty-a-day habit whenever they spoke. Nonetheless, he was deeply indebted to him, admitting: ‘I could have done nothing without him.’

  When the Paris press had vanished along with its readers, it was Laval’s Radio Lyon and provincial daily Le Moniteur du Puy-de-Dôme which had derided Paul Reynaud’s talk of fighting on from abroad and helped to make the word émigré a fashionable insult. It was Laval who persuaded President Albert Lebrun to step aside and allow Pétain a free hand under a changed constitution. It was Laval’s charm and advocacy that convinced all but 80 of the 649 National Assembly members who had got to Vichy to vote for its extinction for the good of their country. Pétain had described Laval’s performance as nothing less than ‘extraordinary’.

  Which it was. When he had finished, Laval had proudly informed Monsieur Ie Maréchal that he now had more power over his subjects than Louis XIV. But he knew that as a puppet master he would have his work cut out, not least because of the old soldier’s disconcerting tendency to have his strings pulled by the last minister who spoke to him between his early dinner and bed. Even so, Laval was determined to use this Pétain interlude between the French and the inevitable British armistice to prove to the Germans that he was the best man to take France into Europe’s New Order.

  Towards the end of the summer, as the Luftwaffe’s first assault on England neared its climax, Robert Murphy, the US chargé d’affaires in Vichy, was invited to an informal lunch at the chateau Laval owned in nearby Châteldon, his birthplace and, before the bright son of a local café owner and butcher went into politics, best known for a sparkling mineral water that rivalled Vichy’s. Since leaving Paris this was where Laval and his wife lived, and sometimes their only child Josée, whose husband Count René Chambrun was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette, a lineage that provided honorary US citizenship in recognition of his ancestor’s contribution to American independence. The Chambruns had recently acquired a more relevant transatlantic link too. Count Chambrun’s American mother Clara Longworth was connected to the Roosevelts through her brother Nicholas’s marriage to Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the twenty-sixth President of the United States, Theodore, a cousin of the present occupant of the White House.

  After lunch, Laval took his guest for a walk around the grounds which included scaling a small hill where, Murphy was informed, Jeanne d’Arc’s army had once defeated the English.

  Then he led me into the great drawing room, one wall of which was covered with an enormous oil painting, showing British soldiers storming the very hill and being repulsed by French defenders. Laval described the French victory of four centuries ago as though it had happened yesterday. Obviously, he had staged for my benefit this little lesson in Anglo-French historical conflicts … I asked him why he personally was so bitter about the British? Talking very rapidly, he recounted a litany of incidents – financial, political and military – in which the British during his own career had thwarted France and him as Premier and Foreign Minister. During World War One, he declared, the British had let France bear the brunt of the bloodletting, so that France had lost 1,500,000 killed, from which loss the nation never recovered. This time the British had tried the same trick again, he cried, but this time the British and not the French would pay for the war.

  Few Frenchmen wished to defend the Anglo-Saxons after Mers-el-Kébir. But it was typical of the dark-skinned Laval that he should go with the flow and accept as well all the new legislation against the Jews, if only to belie old rumours among the anti-Semitic ascendancy that his own business success was due to Sephardic genes. ‘Swarthy as a Greek’, said a careful Time in its 1931 profile. Nor had Laval ever belonged to France’s extreme right. His natural habitat was the ruling consensus and his instinct for compromise could make him as reversible as his palindromic surname.

  Laval had not worn uniform during 1914–18. Pre-war national service had been shortened by a medical discharge for varicose veins and, in any case, MPs were exempt from conscription though many volunteered. In 1914 he had started the war as a pacifist and a lawyer famous for his defence of militant trade unionists framed as anarchists. At this point he was aligned to the former premier and socialist Joseph Caillaux who advocated a negotiated peace with Germany. By 1918 Caillaux’s unfashionable views would see him stripped of parliamentary immunity and in jail facing treason charges of which he was eventually acquitted.* Long before that Laval, calling himself an independent socialist, had with characteristic footwork shifted his allegiance to the successful nationalist Georges Clemenceau. As far as party politics were concerned, he was to remain of no fixed abode for the rest of his career.

  With his usual energy Laval now committed himself to finding a way of getting alongside the Germans. He was by no means the only one trying to do this. For the foreseeable future, having influence with their conquerors was obviously going to be the main key to power in Vichy. Laval’s rivals all had their own reasons for trying to beat a path t
o the Nazi camp and they were all irritated that others were doing the same.

  Pétain and Baudouin, the man the maréchal had decided should continue to be Foreign Secretary, were both trying through Franco’s Madrid to reach Joachim von Ribbentrop, the French- and English-speaking former Hussar officer and wine merchant who had become Hitler’s Foreign Minister. Meanwhile in Wiesbaden, at the secretariat of the Franco-German Armistice Commission, Général Huntziger was trying to talk to Wehrmacht commander Feldmarschal Wilhelm Keitel about the release of over 1.5 million French prisoners of war. Then there was René Fonck, Pétain’s knight of the air with his access to Goering, not only head of the Luftwaffe but deputy Führer.

  Laval tried a different route. Otto Abetz was a Francophile young diplomat – his wife was French – recently returned to Paris as the German Foreign Ministry’s liaison with the military. A former Karlsruhe girls’ school arts teacher with the blond good looks Hollywood liked for its Nazis, he had just turned 37 and was considered one of Ribbentrop’s high-fliers, though it was only three years since he had joined the Foreign Service and with it the Nazi Party. In his teaching days he had been a pacifist dedicated to the idea that Germany and France should never fight each other again and the founder of the Sohlberg Circle, a Franco-German cultural group.

  But the eve of continental Europe’s third war between its most powerful neighbours in less than a century found Abetz a direct Ribbentrop appointee to the Paris Embassy where he funded French anti-Semites of all shades from conservative Catholics to anticlerical Fascists and convinced Hitlerites. Most of his clients were journalists or publishers and Abetz could argue that he had not reneged on his youthful pacifism for one moment: all believed that a war with Nazi Germany would be criminal folly. By the summer of 1939, when the French finally lost patience and expelled him for subversive activities, Abetz’s slush fund, which also covered lavish entertaining and trips to Germany, was estimated by the British Embassy at £2,000 a month, enough to buy Laval’s chateau with change for a champagne party.

  In the first weeks of the occupation Abetz’s main task was to search out major artworks and place them in German custody, especially the Jewish-owned. But though he went diligently about these duties they were swiftly taken over by Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher high priest of Aryan racial superiority, whose Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg was hoovering up all it could find. In any case, Ribbentrop had better uses for his protégé. Anxious to play his own role in Franco-German relations, on 5 August 1940 he started by appointing Abetz German ambassador to France though he could not yet be accredited to Pétain’s État Français as formally a state of war still existed between France and Germany.

  By this time Laval had already become the only Vichy minister to have returned to Paris on official business almost two months ahead of Foreign Minister Baudouin. His first meeting with Abetz was on 19 July. It was arranged through the journalist Jean Luchaire, probably the German’s closest French friend whose former secretary, Suzanne de Bruyckner, had become his wife. Luchaire had campaigned for closer ties with Germany long before the Nazis came to power and as a young man had been a protégé of the socialist Aristide Briand, 1926 Nobel Peace Prize winner, eleven times French premier and probably the first great democratic statesman to advocate a European federal union of some kind. At one point Briand had subsidized Notre Temps, the weekly political commentary Luchaire started and edited; but since Briand’s death in 1932 he had discovered another prophet and Abetz was about to fund his latest venture, a Paris evening paper called Les Nouveaux Temps that would preach the joys of the New Order and run lots of pictures of Corinne Luchaire, his good-looking film actress daughter.

  When Luchaire approached Abetz with Laval’s request for a meeting he must have been delighted. A former Prime Minister was certainly an improvement on his pre-war raft of ranters from Paris’s political demimonde, some of whom he was busy rescuing from the various stalags and offlags where the fortunes of war had recently marooned them. Among the latest was Louis Darquier, a monocled buffoon, bar-room brawler and phoney aristocrat who called himself Darquier de Pellepoix. Lieutenant Darquier, captured with his anti-tank unit, was president of the Comité antijuif de France and editing proprietor of the fortnightly La France enchaînée, which had discovered that Churchill, Eden and Duff Cooper all had Jewish blood or money or both. It had been the only publication to be successfully closed down under the Marchandeau Law but by that time Abetz had got his money’s worth. Laval and the new ambassador got on well from the start. ‘Neither a thug nor a fool,’ recalled the Frenchman. ‘At least one could negotiate with him.’ Relations were also good with Abetz’s senior staff: Ernst Achenbach, his deputy, who had an American wife, and Dr Friedrich Grimm, an expert on international law.

  Towards the end of August Laval was back in Paris having a meeting with Grimm which lasted almost three hours as he made his case for the mutual benefits that would accrue from Germany making a lenient final peace treaty. He argued, and this must have been the first time the Germans heard it from one of the Third Republic’s major political players, that France’s natural partner was no longer Britain but Germany. Of course, it had been France, prodded by the English, who had so unwisely declared war on the Reich and they must expect to pay a penalty for such criminal foolishness. But it would be unfair if their English accomplices, the ones who had led them astray, got off with a lesser penalty. And the more decisive the defeat Germany inflicted on Britain the less severe France’s reparation would need to be.

  For instance, if France was (once again) required to give up Strasbourg and the rest of Alsace then it might be compensated with one of Britain’s African possessions. What was needed, said Laval, was not revenge and a harsh victor’s peace like the Treaty of Versailles which he, as was well known, had voted against. What was needed was a reconciliation that would mark the beginning of a new age of Franco-German cooperation: one that would lay the foundations for a powerful and united Europe. It is unclear whether Laval thought the English should be allowed to play any part in this. Certainly, in 1940 he would not have been the only Frenchman to think La perfide Albion should be left to contemplate its misdeeds amid the impenetrable fogs and mists of their rainswept offshore island.

  But if Laval’s words stirred Abetz’s embassy they appear to have caused few ripples among the higher echelons of the Reich where France was yesterday’s victory and all eyes were on the rainswept islanders in question. On the same day that Laval had his first meeting with Abetz, Hitler made a public offer of peace to the British. ‘I believe I can do this not as someone who has been defeated, but as a victor speaking reason,’ he had told the party luminaries in the Kroll Opera House. It was one of Berlin’s long and sultry July evenings and his speech, which was an enjoyable summary of Germany’s war to date, had started shortly after seven. At 9.30 it was still not quite dark when people began to emerge and start looking for cars and chauffeurs, the peace gesture most had been expecting, in many cases dreading, still ringing in their ears, for Hitler knew what to save for the last minutes:

  I feel obliged, in this hour, by my conscience to direct once more an appeal of reason to England … I see no compelling grounds for the continuation of this war. Herr Churchill may dismiss this declaration of mine, screaming that it is a result of my fears and of my doubts about our final victory. In that case, I have freed my conscience about what is to come.

  Six days later German radio was still broadcasting its latest patriotic song: ‘Wir Fahren Gegen England’ – We’re Going Against England – and the front page of the Völkischer Beobachter announced: ENGLAND HAS CHOSEN WAR. ‘Everyone had feared that England would grasp the Führer’s offer of peace,’ wrote Joseph Goebbels in his diary. ‘The war against England will be a relief. That is what the German people want.’

  Laval too. Churchill’s decision to play the match into extra time, however hopeless the score, had given him the chance to unveil his plan for a new European entente to Dr Gri
mm. And Laval wanted everybody to know that he was the man the Germans spoke to in Vichy. When the American Murphy, a regular caller at his office on the floor below Pétain’s quarters in the Hotel du Parc, happened to be present when Abetz’s deputy Achenbach telephoned, Laval motioned the US consul to pick up an extension and listen in.

  It developed that Laval had sent the German embassy a list of about ten concessions he hoped the Germans would make to fortify his own position … Speaking in French Achenbach was very businesslike. He took up Laval’s requests one by one replying either ‘No’ or ‘Yes’. Only two minor concessions were granted. But after Achenbach had hung up, Laval turned to me with a satisfied air and said, ‘I just wanted you to see how well things are going between us and the Germans.’ I thought at first that he must be speaking sarcastically but he was quite earnest … Adroit lawyer that he was, he apparently had sold himself on his case and was determined to prosecute it to the limit.

  Then, towards the end of September, Churchill did something that not only appeared to justify Laval’s optimism but even raised hopes that France might get its peace treaty with Germany before the British had been defeated. At the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden Général Paul Doyen, who had succeeded Huntziger as chief French delegate, told his German equivalent: ‘We find ourselves in a situation without precedent in history. You are making war on England but we are too and yet we are in a state of war with you.’

  Chapter Nine

  The Gambia, a British colony never more than 30 miles wide, was a deep wound in the bulbous flank of French West Africa following the banks of its eponymous river 295 miles eastward towards its source. Both north and south of this slither of Anglo-Saxon impertinence lay the vastness of Senegal. It was therefore an ideally placed salient from which to insert Gaullist agents into Vichy-held territory and was where, on 20 September 1940, Commandant Hettier de Boislambert and two officer companions, all in civilian clothes, left the colony’s Atlantic estuary capital of Bathurst bound for the port of Dakar. They did not go there directly but were put ashore at the fishing village of Fandiougne on the Saloum river estuary from where they acquired motor transport to take them north over uncertain roads to Dakar, which was about 70 miles away.