England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  Abetz had organized chauffeur-driven official cars and the party, with its accompanying bodyguards and secretaries, left Paris on the road to the south-west following the same route taken only four months before by Prime Minister Reynaud and France’s last elected government. Like them they broke their journey at Tours just outside the Vichy zone where Abetz, who had told Laval he did not know the exact venue for the meeting, had to visit the local Wehrmacht headquarters to find out where they had to go next. When he emerged they turned north, back-tracking slightly into the fading greenness of the Loire, for it was now almost dusk. It was about then that Abetz felt the time was right to drop his bombshell. ‘I must warn you,’ he said, ‘that it’s not only Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop you’re going to see. It is also Chancellor Hitler.’

  ‘Merde, alors!’ gasped Laval. It had never occurred to him that they were travelling this fast.

  Hitler was going on his private train Amerika, two locomotives hauling an imposing composition of comfort and firepower, to keep a rendezvous with Franco on the Spanish border. He hoped to persuade the Caudillo to join the Axis and announce Spain’s declaration of war against Britain by launching, with German air support, a surprise attack on Gibraltar. The Führer had decided that on the way he would also make contact with the French and see if, after their surprising performance at Dakar, they too were ready to take the plunge and go to war with Britain in a Continental Coalition alongside Germany and Italy. France, after all, had already gone rather further along this route than Spain and bombed Gibraltar. Between them a united Latin front of Italy, Spain and France should, even without Germany’s help, be able to drive the British out of the Mediterranean.

  But there was a snag. They all had competing claims to large stretches of North Africa where Mussolini wanted to add French Tunisia to Italian Libya plus a generous slice of Algeria, while Spain demanded French and Spanish Morocco be joined together under Madrid. Vichy was only too aware of its neighbours’ ambitions which had long been aired and during Armistice Commission talks at Wiesbaden had made a simple and undeniable response: Gaullist dissidence would always thrive on Axis threats to French colonies just as Anglo-Gaullist aggression, as Dakar proved, bred loyalty to Vichy.

  Hitler’s meeting with Laval took place at the country railway station at Montoire-sur-le-Loir which was in the occupied zone and until then best known as the birthplace of Pierre Ronsard, the sixteenth-century poet. It was not normally garrisoned but since early morning the pretty little provincial town with its frescoed chapel and stunning bridge had been full of German troops and French police; all the school children had been given the day off and told to stay at home with their parents. Montoire, hardly more than a village, had been chosen as the venue for this initial contact because it was about as remote as you could get and still be on a railway line that could get you to and from the Spanish border. Its other attraction was that its train station came at the end of a tunnel long enough, if necessary, to accommodate the fifteen items of rolling stock carrying Amerika’s beds, bathrooms, restaurants, kitchens, conference room, communications centre, SS platoon and anti-aircraft guns. RAF raids on la France profonde were hardly commonplace in October 1940; they had far too much else on their plate elsewhere. But if agents of the ubiquitous British secret service did manage to tip them off that Adolf Hitler was paying Montoire a visit Amerika could withdraw into a bomb-proof carapace while the RAF wiped the rest of the town off the map.

  Laval was no stranger to tyrants. As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister he had had regular meetings with Mussolini and at least two with Stalin. After he got over his shock, his first encounter with Hitler was a brief and businesslike affair during which Laval told him, ‘If you offer us a just peace which takes into account our honour and interests, anything may be possible.’

  The meeting lasted about forty-five minutes and, as far as its instigator was concerned, its main purpose seems to have been to lay down an agenda – ‘a clarification of fundamentals’ – for a meeting he proposed with Pétain to take place at the same venue on his return from his discussions with Franco. Hitler lost no time in outlining how he saw the immediate future and France’s possible part in it. Laval, in his lawyerly way, took notes.

  Intends mobilise entire continent against England … Franco-German relations depend on their response to this. If France prepared to gamble on near certainty of imminent German victory when it comes to a proper peace agreement she would not have to pay the kind of financial compensation inflicted on Germany in 1918. But if France hoped for the exhaustion of Germany and played the waiting game and England offered a compromise peace first then she should expect to pay considerable reparations for the mounting costs of this war. ‘I will not add to Germany’s suffering by sparing France.’

  Having enthusiastically accepted, on the maréchal’s behalf, Hitler’s invitation to meet them at Montoire on 24 October on his return from the Spanish frontier, Laval rushed back to Vichy with the Führer’s glad tidings. ‘We shall have to endure English reprisals,’ Laval warned the following afternoon at a full meeting of the Council of Ministers at the Hotel du Pare. ‘But we must take every risk in order to seize this magnificent opportunity.’ Anything less, he said, would be ‘a crime against France’. Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, as everybody present expected he would, disagreed, saying he was ‘absolutely hostile to a declaration of war against England’. Pétain said he was right and must come along to Montoire with them and tell Hitler. Laval said that Baudouin could not come because his friend Ambassador Abetz would not allow it. Pétain said he must. Laval said in that case they could go to Montoire without him. Pétain climbed down. Baudouin resigned and Laval, while remaining Pétain’s deputy, was also made the new Foreign Minister.

  At some point during this meeting what a later generation might call a ‘photo opportunity’ was arranged and the picture released by the American Associated Press which, like other neutral news agencies, had opened a bureau in Vichy along with its rival, United Press. All ten of them are seated around a long table, Maréchal Pétain, Général Huntziger (War Minister) and Amiral Darlan (Minister of the Marine) dressed like their civilian colleagues in suits and ties, the hatless Darlan at the end of the table doffing a rare public sighting of his bald pate. Presumably the photograph was intended to demonstrate consensus and scotch rumours of factionalism but by far the most striking thing about the picture is the way the youngish-looking man with a full head of dark hair seated next to Pétain’s white moustache is glaring at Pierre Laval across the table. This is Paul Baudouin, the former Foreign Minister.

  There were no Anglophiles in Pétain’s Cabinet, the very notion a contradiction in terms. It was Baudouin who had broken off diplomatic relations with Britain but this was in response to Mers-el-Kébir when Darlan was demanding blood for blood and the prospect of outright war was first raised. Quite apart from his desire to avoid full-scale hostilities, Baudouin did not think that France’s best interests were served by breaking off all communication with their old ally. Vichy’s diplomats were not discouraged from cocktail party contact with their British counterparts in Europe’s neutral capitals. Madrid saw the most intercourse but it also happened at Lisbon and Geneva. Nor had Baudouin expelled Ottawa’s consul in Vichy, a French Canadian named Pierre Dupuy, though his government, like the rest of the British Empire, mostly pursued their war against the Axis under London’s guidance. Dupuy, said Churchill, was ‘a window upon a courtyard on which we have no other access’. But briefly, and coinciding with the Montoire meetings, there was another.

  Professor Louis Rougier, who taught philosophy at Besancon University, which is about 30 miles from the Swiss border in the Jura Mountains, had turned up at Baudouin’s office six days before Pétain’s Cabinet meeting on Montoire. He announced that he could get to England and was willing to act as an intermediary between Pétain and Churchill. Rougier’s motives are uncertain. He was reasonably well known in French academic circles and also abroad: in
1921 his first book – Philosophy and the New Physics – had been published in English translation. By 1940 his views were regarded as mildly eccentric though no more than might be expected of a fiftyish professor of philosophy. His conservative politics – a visit to the Soviet Union had cured him of any faith in planned economies – were certainly in tune with Vichyite thinking and he preached a pragmatism where, as far as government was concerned, what worked was more important than a belief in what ought to work. But presumably he did not, in that Catholic bastion, air his views on religion, which were not merely anticlerical but built on his firm disapproval of the entire Christian dogma.

  Rougier’s arrival in London and his first talks at the Foreign Office coincided with Laval’s first meeting with Hitler and the beginning of the Luftwaffe’s intensive night raids on London that had just seen the destruction of the high altar at St Paul’s. Among other things, Pétain had asked him to suggest a modus vivendi to the British over Africa: Vichy would leave to rot those places that had already rallied to de Gaulle as long as London promised not to encourage the Gaullists to spread their poison in any more loyal Vichy colonies. There was also a request for the BBC to tone down its criticism of Pétain in its French language broadcasts. In this Rougier was pushing at an open door because it had already been decided that insulting the hero of Verdun was about as helpful as calling Joan of Arc a floozie.

  Having jumped the first hurdle at the Foreign Office, the next day Rougier met Lord Halifax and the Foreign Secretary was sufficiently impressed to arrange a meeting with Churchill on the 25th, which he would also attend. This was the day after Pétain had met Hitler at Montoire on his way back from a very unsatisfactory meeting with Franco at the border town of Hendaye where the wide-gauge Spanish track met the narrow-gauge French one and the views of the two dictators were as incompatible as their locomotives. It turned out that Franco, though he made all the right noises, was not quite ready to join Hitler’s Pan-European alliance against Britain. Spain was wasted by civil war, famine stalked the land, and in the ruins of Madrid there was the start of a typhoid epidemic; in any case, he was by no means convinced that Germany would win. ‘The English will fight and go on fighting and never give in,’ he told his generals, pointing out that the Admiralty would almost certainly want to console itself for the loss of Gibraltar by seizing Spain’s Canary Islands.

  Hitler was unaccustomed to Franco’s kind of stonewalling. ‘I’d rather have three or four of my teeth out than negotiate with that Jesuit swine again,’ he confided to Mussolini. Pétain had been much more obliging as Professor Rougier was about to find out. Ushered into 10 Downing Street by Halifax, he was greeted by an angry-looking Churchill brandishing a photograph of Pétain in his full Maréchal’s regalia giving Hitler a firm handshake. The Führer was wearing the contrived uniform in which he had been appearing in public ever since the war started: a kind of double-breasted suit with brass buttons and pinned to his left breast the Iron Cross First Class awarded for the courage Corporal Hitler had displayed in the trenches, mostly fighting against the British whose gas temporarily blinded him. Both men were captured gazing at each other with what appeared to be deep mutual respect and at the end of the meeting Hitler had stuck out his hand and the old maréchal instinctively took it. There was hardly a newspaper in the world that had not used the photographic evidence.

  Churchill exploded all over the unfortunate Rougier, accusing Pétain of signing a peace treaty with Hitler and threatening to have the RAF, which had recently bombed Hamburg and Berlin though to little effect, visit Vichy and eliminate this nest of traitors. Rougier, of course, had no knowledge of the Hitler meeting, having left France several days before it was arranged and it must have been as much of a shock to him as it was to the British. Somehow he managed to persuade the Prime Minister that he was certain Pétain was merely trying to alleviate the conditions of the armistice and that his regime reflected a variety of views, some pro-British. No doubt his case was helped by Churchill’s own reluctance to give up hope of a major defection from the Vichy camp. ‘It passes my comprehension why no French leaders secede to Africa where they would have an empire, the command of the seas and all the frozen French gold in the United States,’ he had recently written to Sir Samuel Hoare, in 1935 Foreign Secretary and appeaser with Laval of Mussolini’s Ethiopian invasion and now Britain’s wartime flattery to Franco as ambassador in Madrid. ‘Surely the opportunity is the most splendid offered to daring men.’

  With this in mind Rougier was given a message for General Weygand in Algiers whom he was visiting via Spain on his way back to Vichy. The minutes of the professor’s conversations with the Prime Minister and Halifax had been typed up and agreed by both parties. Across this procès-verbal Churchill wrote in his neat hand: ‘If General Weygand will raise the standard in North Africa, he can count on the renewal of the wholehearted collaboration of the governments and peoples of the British Empire and a share of the assistance afforded by the US.’

  Weygand had been surprised and delighted by England’s ability to survive air attacks and last longer than the three weeks he had predicted in the summer. It meant that French North Africa and Darlan’s ships remained a wonderful trump card, a guarantee that the Germans would keep their word and not occupy Vichy France for fear of losing these assets to the English. But to ‘raise his standard’, as Churchill with all his regard for knightly virtue had put it, would require Britain to raise a strong enough army to land in North Africa with the sole intention of using it as a springboard to liberate France. This might take years. ‘If they come to North Africa with four divisions, I’ll fire on them,’ Weygand informed Rougier. ‘If they come with twenty divisions, I’ll welcome them.’

  Weygand regarded the Montoire meetings as further proof, if any was needed, of Laval’s chicanery and attached no blame to the maréchal. Pétain, who had overnighted at Tours, was in good spirits during the next day’s leisurely return to Vichy via a good lunch with friends at Azay-le-Ferron and streets lined with flag-waving school children in Chäteauroux and a couple of other market towns with their inevitable place de Verdun and monument to the fallen. Only when he got back to Vichy to be confronted by the reproachful faces of some of his Cabinet and see, for the first time, the full horror of the photo ambush Dr Goebbels’s spin doctors had so easily exploited, did this proud and vain old man realize that he had some explaining to do.

  He chose to do it in a live radio broadcast and not one of his best ones, for the weather was getting colder and he was developing a bit of a cough. ‘Last Thursday I met the Chancellor of the Reich,’ he began. ‘I responded freely to the Führer’s invitation. I underwent no diktat, no pressure from him. This meeting has raised hopes and caused anxieties. I owe you some explanation.’

  Then came the sentence in which a Latin-stemmed noun, a word with the same meaning and spelling in both French and English, started its journey into wartime obloquy. ‘A collaboration was envisaged between our two countries,’ he announced. ‘I accepted the principle. The details will be discussed later. In the near future, the weight of suffering of our country could be lightened, the fate of our prisoners ameliorated, occupation costs reduced, the demarcation line made more flexible … This policy is mine. It is me alone that history will judge.’

  As history did. Certainly, calling somebody who worked with the German occupiers a collaborateur dates from here. A secret six-paragraph procès-verbal was drawn up setting out what had been agreed at Montoire including the Führer’s determination ‘to see France occupy in the New Europe, the place to which she is entitled, and to have the French people participate in the co-operation of European peoples’. Paragraph two was the nearest Hitler could get to a French declaration of war against Britain: ‘The Axis powers and France have an identical interest in seeing the defeat of England accomplished as soon as possible. Consequently, the French government will support, within the limits of its ability, the measures which the Axis Powers may take to this end.’
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br />   But even Laval baulked at the prospect of a formal declaration of war against Britain, pleading that the French people were not yet ready for it. What France was prepared to do, he said, was resist à la Dakar any English inroads against their colonies. ‘But in the beginning, as Maréchal Pétain has pointed out, it was necessary to proceed slowly and with caution.’

  In some accounts Hitler is said to have been disappointed by Pétain, though instinctively he preferred the soldier to Laval whom he described as ‘a dirty democratic cheapjack politician who doesn’t believe what he says’. But Erich Kordt, a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford whose Anglophile ways had not stopped Ribbentrop (whom Kordt despised making him his most senior Berlin based diplomat,* believed that for Hitler the main purpose of the Montoire and Hendaye meetings was to show the British that a sizable European bloc was coalescing in willing coalition around Germany and the odds against them were mounting. How much longer did this isolated offshore island expect to hold out?

  If this was the case he succeeded admirably. Both the British and the Americans were rattled. Churchill got George VI to send to Pétain, via the Canadian consul Dupuy, a personal message from one head of state to another pledging Britain’s continued goodwill towards France and appealing to him not to endanger its old ally by doing more than the armistice required. President Roosevelt took one look at the Montoire handshake, decided that Vichy were about to put the French fleet at Germany’s disposal, and fired off a protest that was much more strongly worded though possibly weaker on syntax: