Professor John Merriman:
Today I want to talk about
the fall of France and then
mostly about collaboration,
and next time I'm going to talk
about resistance;
so, the first part just sort of
briefly.
Looking back on--I ended last
time, or mentioned at the end of
the hour last time that maybe
1936 was a time when Hitler
could've been stopped,
in the Rhineland.
All this business and the fall
of France and the origins of
World War One have to be seen in
the context of--World War One,
there was a sense that
if--after the war there was this
view that wars were started by
evil people in high places who
were doing evil deeds in
conjunction with other people.
And Germany signed on the
dotted line, forced to do so,
saying they had been
responsible for World War One.
And so there was a strong
feeling that Wilson and others
had that if you had an apparatus
like a League of Nations and if
you had open covenants that
everything would be okay,
nobody would ever want to have
another war again.
Well, of course,
Hitler was determined,
from the very beginning,
to have another war again,
and nobody had any illusions
about that.
Mein Kampf was available
in all sorts of languages,
including English--it's the
book that he wrote,
My Struggle,
which he wrote when he was in a
very comfy prison,
after the putsch failed in
Munich in the early 1920s.
And, so, it's possible to argue
that France, which had a whole
series of rather inept leaders,
particularly in the '20s and
the early '30s--not Léon
Blum, who wasn't inept at
all--but there was this feeling
that war,
to have another war was
unthinkable;
and that sort of lies in the
background.
Now, Hitler's preparation for
war and construction of the
building of the newest kind of
weapons pushed them--gave them
an advantage.
Hitler's generals were fairly
sure that he would start the war
in 1940 or 1941,
and the war,
as you know,
starts on the 1st of September,
1939, with the invasion of
Poland.
Now, just--militarily,
why did France fall so rapidly?
You get a sense of this in Marc
Bloch's book.
But the troop strength was
almost equal,
at the beginning of the war,
after the phony war,
at the beginning of the
invasion in 1940 of France.
The Germans had 114 divisions,
the French had ninety-four,
and the British had ten,
and then you have twenty-two
Belgian divisions as well.
So, it's about even,
the number of troop strength.
In tanks the Allies actually
had superiority.
German tanks were lighter,
and were faster,
and in the end that--and the
way they were used,
used not just spread along the
line but used in Panzer
divisions, gave the Germans an
advantage.
And the French tanks had much
more armor, and therefore were
heavier, and couldn't be
maneuvered very rapidly.
But they'd attached a number of
tanks to each division.
They didn't use tanks as really
as the kind of rapid use that
Hitler had tried out on Poland.
The Germans had a clear
superiority in terms of
airpower, particularly in light
bombers and in fighter bombers,
and these were used in Poland;
these had been used in Spain.
So, they had tried these
weapons out.
Now, how do the British and the
French in planning for this war
that came along--?
They believed that the war
would be another kind of war of
attrition and thus--some wag
once said,
and it's tiresome how often
it's repeated,
that in 1914 the French were
prepared to fight the War of
1870/71,
and in 1939 and 1940 they were
prepared to fight the war of
1914.
And there's something to it.
They thought that it would be a
long, drawn-out battle,
in which--that a strong
defensive line,
the Maginot Line,
those fortresses that were
stretched along in Alsace and
Lorraine and up in the Moselle
and other places,
that these would do the trick,
and that in the end that the
sort of firepower of cannons on
defense would be much more
important than the kind of rapid
movement;
whereas the Germans,
having already slaughtered the
Poles, who defended themselves
very heroically but as-- you've
seen,
I'm sure, footage of it,
cavalry sometimes against
tanks, they believed in rapid
movement,
and the word,
the term was the blitzkrieg,
the rapid attack,
the rapid movement.
And, so, one of the problems in
all the planning,
of course, is that the Maginot
Line stops at the Belgian
border,
and so once again you've got
hills and even small mountains,
in the Argonne,
part of Belgium,
and in the east.
And the French are assuming
that the Argonne Forest and the
Ardennes in northeastern France
and in eastern Belgium were
impediments,
physical impediments that would
not allow the Germans to move
through them.
And that's exactly what the
Germans did, with their tank
columns.
And, so, when ten tank
divisions pour into the Ardennes
they simply waste these lighter
French tanks which hadn't been
concentrated in any particular
way,
and in four days the Germans
crossed the Meuse River and are
way inside France.
And the German High Command
thought it would take nine days,
and the French couldn't imagine
that it was going to take nine
days--it takes four days.
And Hitler does make this one
big mistake that allowed Dunkirk
to happen, the withdrawal of so
many British soldiers and French
soldiers.
It's said that he stops the
charge of the tanks,
he refuels, and this really
allows the evacuation at Dunkirk
to occur.
And, so, then all of the sort
of footage that you've seen of
Belgian and French refugees
walking with everything they
could push in wagons or carry
with them or put on their oxen,
or horse-drawn carts,
or in automobiles,
are fleeing the battle zones,
just like the Poles had tried
to do after September 1st,
1939.
And, so, it's just--it's been
repeated again,
it's happened again,
this hell has happened again.
And the difference was in 1940,
of course, you've got the
German fighter planes strafing
these refugees and taking huge
tolls of lives and just sort of
picking them off as they move
anywhere they could move.
And once again southern France
and central France is inundated
with people fleeing the battle.
Lots of Belgians ended up in
our little village,
which then only had about 250
people in it,
fleeing all of this.
And once again another French
government is on the verge of
disaster.
And the armistice is signed,
at Hitler's insistence,
in the railroad car--it wasn't
the same one,
but another railroad car--in
the Forest of Compiègne
where the Germans had signed on
the 11th of November,
1918.
And you've all seen images of
Hitler going off for the first
time in his life to Paris as a
tourist,
and doing this little jig that
was filmed, and going to the
Eiffel Tower,
and the Arc de Triomphe,
and all of this business,
and that was that.
And, of course,
the French--now moving into the
central part of the lecture--a
new French government
collaborates with the Germans,
and that government is known as
Vichy France because France is
divided into two zones,
that that is--and you can read
about this in Chip's book--but
that that is occupied by German
troops,
essentially the north part of
France, and then the so-called
Free Zone which has its capital
in the spa town of Vichy,
in the Allier.
And the word "collaboration,"
the English word collaboration,
a word that you all know used
to mean simply what?
One of the major meanings is,
that you know,
you collaborate with somebody
if--in a section,
you're supposed to,
you and someone else are
supposed to put together a
report on this or that,
or you do a lab report together;
or in psychology people
collaborate with eight other
people and one of the problems
is assessing folks' work for
promotion to see who is the lead
investigator--you collaborate
with people;
you collaborate with your
brothers and sisters on trying
to organize plans for the
holidays, and all that.
That was the use until
1941,1940/1941,
until World War Two.
It still is one of the uses.
And the term collaboration took
on a less neutral meaning,
and collaboration,
because of the experience of
countries like France,
in World War Two,
where in every country people
actively helped the Nazis
achieve their goals.
So, collaboration took on this
sort of sinister term as well,
and the word in French,
a collabo was somebody
who collaborated.
And by the end of 1943 and by
early 1944, if you were a French
collaborator and you woke up one
morning and you found graffiti,
with a K, for the German word
for collaborator on your door,
you were toast,
because that meant that the
maquis were,
that the resisters were capable
enough or were confident enough
to make that kind of threat.
So, the word collaboration has
taken this very,
very different meaning because
of what happened.
And again it's not only France.
In Belgium still it's a very
hotly contested issue because
Flemish were more likely to
collaborate,
rightwing Flemish,
with the Germans,
than Walloons.
And in Hungary,
for example,
where you can go--if you've
been to Budapest,
my second favorite city,
where you see all those
horrible shoes--not horrible
shoes, but they were pulled out
of the Danube river after Jews
and Communists were gunned down
by Hungarian collaborators,
and were left--now they're
still there, sort of
cemented--and there's very small
shoes too--this ghoulish
memorial,
but one that has to be there in
these places in Bulgaria.
The Germans didn't need to do
lots of things because there
were people in every population
that were happy to be there,
better--I mean to see them
there--"better Hitler than
Blum," went the shouts in 1934,
'35 and '36,
and those shouts continued,
of course, in France.
Now, histories have their
history, and there is none in
modern French history more
fascinating,
more passionnant than
the history of collaboration,
in France.
Because even in ma
jeunesse,
even when I was a kid,
the sort of story was that in
France everybody resisted or
almost everybody,
and hardly anybody collaborated.
And that was a myth that was
perpetuated by people who had
collaborated very actively,
very willingly,
very enthusiastically.
And it was also the myth that
was perpetuated by Charles de
Gaulle, because for Charles de
Gaulle,
who assumed the kind of mantle
of the resistance,
what he needed to do was to
make people forget the communist
resistance and to see himself as
this sort of mystical body of
the French people,
that as his voice crackled over
the airwaves,
for those who could hear
it--and many people who hadn't
heard it claimed to have heard
it,
on the 18th of June,
1940--that we must keep
resisting.
It was part of the mantle that
he would assume on his shoulders
before he stomped off to
Columbey-les-Deu
x-Églises,
when he couldn't get his way in
every issue after the war.
But part of the way that France
would, the new France,
would present itself,
it had to be that almost
everybody resisted,
and that only an elite
collaborated.
There was a movie from
1953,1954, a documentary in
which--it's about what happened
to the Jews who taken
from--arrested in July 1942,
in the Marais,
the Jewish quarter of Paris and
on Île Saint-Louis,
and they were taken away,
and first they're put at a camp
at Drancy, a transit camp,
which is north of Paris,
en Drancy,
and in a place that's called
Westbork, or something like
that,
Westerbork, in the transit camp
in the Netherlands;
and Mechelen or Malines in
Belgium.
I have a student who's working
on that topic now.
But in the film,
in the original film,
it's a documentary,
you could see French guards,
gendarmes, they're guarding the
Jews who are there.
And, of course,
when the film was published you
couldn't have a French gendarme
guarding the Jews;
they had to be guarded by
Nazis, didn't they?
So, what they did is they took
the soldier out of the film,
they lifted him right out of
the film,
so he's not in the film,
he disappears from the film.
And until the late 1960s this
myth that everybody had
resisted, or almost everybody
and only the elites had
collaborated-- Pétain and
his inner circle--was the
dominant kind of myth.
And now, since then we've had
what has been called in a very
wonderful book by Henri
Rousseau,
a book that's translated into
English, the Vichy
Syndrome.
Now, Vichy--people who didn't
live through Vichy but they're
trying to find out what
happened.
And two kind of crucial
events--three kind of crucial
events caused people,
this collective memory,
a desire to know what really
happened during this time.
And there are three events,
or a series of events that
happened.
One was that probably,
I guess you could say--and this
is what Rousseau and others have
argued--there was a film called
The Sorrow and the Pity,
which goes on and on,
it's four and a half hours--I
used to show it in this class
and I think I described this
once in here,
it had the reputation for being
a two six-pack film because it
was so long,
and we would show it in WLH,
and at the end--this was when
the drinking age was eighteen,
I assure you--there'd be all
sorts of beer bottles just all
over the place,
it was so long.
And the sound quality isn't
very good, but it's very
important, because what Orphuls,
who was the producer,
did is he went to one single
town, he went to
Clermont-Ferrand,
in Auvergne,
and he looked at what happened
there, at collaboration,
and some of the great scenes in
documentary history are there
when--of the intentional
repression or forgetting,
when the two teachers,
if you've seen the film,
they forget about their Jewish
colleague.
There's amazing things at the
end when they shave the heads of
what they called,
rather crudely,
horizontal collaborators,
women who had slept with German
soldiers,
and at the end of the war
there's these scenes where
they'd shaved their heads,
and hauled them through the
streets, not just in
Clermont-Ferrand.
And at the end there is--I
think I said this the first
day--but there is Maurice
Chevalier who was this sort of
chanteur,
a sort of crooner of your
grandparent's generation who
became the famous French person
in the U.S.,
with his accent,
like zat.
At the very end of the film he
says, "well, you know"--he says,
"you know there are these
stories that I was singing in
Germany but I want to tell you,
I was only singing for
zee boys"--that is,
the people who had gone off and
been captured in the fighting,
or who had gone and had to go
into obligatory service,
which I'll tell you about--work
service--had gone to Germany;
many of them died in the air
raids.
And at the end he's wearing his
white suit, and his straw hat,
and forgetting his own very
plebian origins in Montmartre,
he says, for the Americans who
are going to see this film,
"but I want to assure that I
only sang for zee boys."
And, of course,
it was not the case at all.
But this--what this movie does
is it--and it was only shown in
one theater, in the Marais,
appropriately enough.
I saw it a couple of years
after it came out.
It was still in the same single
theater.
It was made for French TV.
It was never shown on French TV
until 1981, or 1982;
never on French TV,
never, never,
never.
Why?
Because it told the awful
truth, that lots of people
believed "better Hitler than
Blum."
And many people got on a
plateau,
handed to them,
by the outcome of this war,
of this short war,
the kind of regime that they
wanted.
What did they want?
Well, I'll talk more about that
in a minute.
The second kind of event that
happened is-- this makes me feel
old--my friend Bob Paxton,
who is much older than me,
wrote a book called Vichy
France, that was published
in English in 1972,
and en français
in probably '73.
And Vichy France was
about--it took off the--it cut
through this sort of intentional
forgetting of what had happened,
to look at collaboration,
to look at collaboration.
Now, Bob Paxton did not have
the right to use French
documents.
Why?
Archival documents,
the kind that I use studying
earlier periods.
Why?
Because there's a fifty-year
rule;
also, because even when he was
writing on a guy called Georges
Orez who was sort of an
authoritarian crypto-fascist,
and who had a lot of influence
in the Seine-et-Marne,
and in the Loire-et-Cher,
and a lot of departments near
Paris--he was called a
troublemaker by an archivist
because he tried to get
documents that would've
implicated lots of very powerful
families--strikebreaking and
that kind of stuff,
in the 1930s.
But when this book came out it
had a major kind of effect and
it was followed by a book that
he did with Michael Marrus
called Vichy and the
Jews,
a story that I will tell just
in part later.
And this had a huge effect
because suddenly here was this
American, an American historian,
a great historian saying "it
wasn't like you learned in
school, it wasn't like that."
And I remember my wife and I
were in Brusels once,
and we were in a hotel in
Brusels,
in Brussels,
and there was this inevitable
sort of French show where they
bring in six or seven different
people,
and there were skinhead fascist
picketers, picketing Paxton's
presence in this show,
and at one point--it was of
these typical French things
where they bring in somebody who
had lived through the war,
somebody who'd read something
about the war,
and all of that--it was just a
typical machin bidule or
just this thing they kind of
throw together,
but at one point this guy gets
up and he said,
"what could you tell us about
the war?
You didn't know,
you were only twelve-years-old
then, during World War Two," or
whatever Bob was.
But this book had an enormous
impact.
And the power of this book and
of this man--he was once
introduced at the Sorbonne as
the conscience of France,
"Monsieur Paxton,
dans un certain sens,
vous êtes la conscience
de la France."
That's pretty heavy stuff,
by Jean-Pierre Azéma,
who's an historian.
And third, really,
are the trials,
the trials, and as
collaboration came to be
something that people wanted to
know about.
What happened to the Jews?
What happened to the people
that were arrested because they
were communists?
Who were they arrested by?
The Germans would've been happy
to do it, but they were arrested
by the French.
Then they started tracking down
people with rather bad
histories.
And one of the first was a man
named Touvier,
t-o-u-v-i-e-r,
and Touvier was involved in
lots of bad things,
the torture of resisters,
the arrest and deportation,
the certain death of Jews and
Communists and people like that.
And Touvier was hidden by
rightwing Catholic groups--
they're called
anti-gristes in French.
The role of the church in all
of this I better get to in
awhile.
And he was hidden,
he was bounced from monastery
to monastery in the
Alpes-Maritimes,
above Nice and up in the
Alpes-du-Haute-Provence,
and he was hidden,
and they finally tracked the
guy down,
and they put him on trial,
and he was condemned.
And at this trial,
and at others,
Paxton became what they call a
témoin expert,
an expert witness.
Now, that's very important in
French law.
If you have a lawsuit against
somebody who screwed up your
house or your apartment,
for bad work,
they always bring in witnesses
who are experts at carpentry to
say that they screwed up,
or they didn't screw up,
or at what point they screwed
up, et cetera.
But here you've got historians,
and historians have a much
greater public role in France
than in the U.S;
people care about history much
more than they do in the U.S.
And, so, Paxton became this
expert witness in the trial of
Touvier.
And then the trial of Klaus
Barbie, b-a-r-b-i-e,
who had--Klaus Barbie had
tortured people in Lyon,
and Klaus Barbie had a lot of
authority when Marc Bloch,
when he was set up and arrested
on a bridge that goes over the
Sonne and tortured hideously
north of Lyon in a place called
Colons Mont d'Or.
And Klaus Barbie was put on
trial, was brought back.
And Paxton was an expert
witness there too.
Barbie was confronted,
literally, with now very old
ladies that he had tortured
himself during the war.
Torture is not a good thing.
The Americans do it too,
now, and that's not a good
thing, but that's another
subject.
The Americans didn't used to do
things like that but they do
things now like that now.
But Paxton was an expert
witness in this.
And then there was Papon,
Maurice Papon,
and you're old enough to maybe
even know who he is.
Maurice Papon,
he worked in a prefecture in
the Gironde, in Bordeaux,
and he was a functionary.
And Maurice Papon signed the
death certificates essentially
of, oh, hundreds and hundreds of
Jews who were taken to the Gare
Saint-Jean,
in Bordeaux,
and then were transported
toward the death camps,
Auschwitz, and there's actually
one that was in Alsace,
the Germans set it up,
and Treblinka,
and Dachau, and all these
infamous death camps.
And he went on to a very
successful career in the^(
)Fourth and Fifth Republic,
a very kind of important
bureaucrat.
And they caught up to this very
old man.
Do you put really old people on
trial?
Well, Pétain was on
trial after the war and they
allowed him to die on a small
island off the coast of the
Vendais or the Atlantic island.
And there was even a big uproar
about fifteen years ago when
there was a reportage or
there was a documentary,
they had very sort of nice
music and you saw the old man
penning his letters,
et cetera, et cetera.
And there were various attempts
to steal his bones and bury them
in Verdun.
But all of this,
the Vichy syndrome,
this obsession with Vichy was
accentuated by these trials.
And, so, Maurice Papon was put
on trial in 1998 and 1999,
and at one point he escapes.
He was under house-arrest and
he escapes and they arrest him
in a fine restaurant in
Switzerland,
which is where he'd gone with
his friends to try to escape the
trial.
And then the question,
what do you do with him?
But what he said is,
"I was a good bureaucrat."
He said, "my supervisors,
my superiors thought I was
excellent."
And he used that famous
argument that Paxton,
in his book,
Vichy France demolished,
that is the shield argument;
that is, if it wasn't--and this
is the thing that the people
defending Pétain used,
too--that if it wasn't for me,
if it wasn't for we--he always
used the royal we,
Pétain--that then things
would've been even worse.
And Papon said,
"well, if I hadn't signed
this--I was supposed to sign
certificates,
we were supposed to find out
who were Jews,
and if I hadn't signed--I only
signed 400 out of the 600,
or whatever."
Well, n'importe quoi.
But it just was a pathetic
defense.
And then he was found guilty
and then they put him in jail,
under very nice conditions,
for a while,
and then he got very sick.
He just died within the last
year and I think he was ninety
or something like that.
But these trials were sort of
the third aspect or the third
key moment, or three of the key
moments in France coming to
grips with collaboration,
that not everybody resisted,
and it wasn't just elites who
collaborated.
By the way, there was another
guy who was going to go on
trial, a guy called Bousquet,
who was the head of--he was one
of the heads of the police in
Paris, during Vichy.
And he was supposed to go on
trial but he was murdered by
this crazy guy who thought by
killing him he'd give publicity
to his own book,
he'd written this sort of bad
book.
And, so, he went to Bousquet's
apartment and guns him down
before he could go on trial,
so unfortunately Bousquet never
went on trial.
So, from having no official
memory of Vichy,
no--but only sites of memory
that had to do with the
resistance--which I'm going to
talk about next time--that
since,
before you were born,
but France underwent this
re-evaluation--and that was
important for people who had
lost family members because of
Vichy.
It was important for Jews;
some 75,000 Jews never came
back to France.
They tried, of course,
at the beginning--and they did
this in Bulgaria too,
and in Hungary.
They'd first go arrest the
foreign Jews,
not assimilated Jews.
So, the big roundup in July of
1942, the rafle,
that's the French
word--rafle,
sort of sweep,
in the Marais and on Ile
Saint-Louis.
It was not done by the Germans
who would've been very happy to
do it.
They didn't care,
they'd do it--it was done by
the French, it was done by the
French police.
And really, one of the worst
institutions was of course the
milice,
the militia;
the militia,
m-i-l-i-c-e,
the militia,
who are created in January 1943
to get tough on the Jews,
get tough on the resistors,
get tough on the
communists--and these were some
of the worst of the
collaborators.
In the Papon trial it came out,
they interviewed various people
who'd been in prison--they were
very old by then,
obviously--who had been in
prison then in Bordeaux,
around Bordeaux,
and they actually brought some
German soldiers back there,
too.
And one of them testified--I
remember this--he said if we had
a guy, un gars,
a guy who we picked up in a
sweep and he was a resister,
or he was a communist,
or something like that,
if we kind of liked the guy,
and you get on with him after a
couple of days when you're
guarding him,
and you find things in common
that you have--often that wasn't
the case--that if we wanted to
save him from hideous torture we
didn't give him to the French
militia because of what they
would do.
But, of course,
by 1943--more about this
later--but there was a case near
us where this woman who had
denounced a couple of resisters,
and she had--was an open
collaborator and she was--she
lived up in the northern part of
Ardèche,
and she walked across the
bridge across the Rhone one day
to go shopping on the other side
of the river,
in the Drôme,
and some people came up behind
her and put a bullet right
through her head and blew her
head off.
And collaborators had to really
decide what they were up to.
And of course a lot of them,
something like 10,000 were
executed almost immediately in
the days after the war.
But for people--maybe I
mentioned this the first day
when I was trying to tell you
about one of the things that we
do--but for people like my
friend who couldn't remember,
but his brother could remember
the day that the Germans,
in this case,
came into a French suburb,
a place called Le
Perreux-sur-Marne and took his
father who was part Jewish,
who was Greek and took him away.
The Nazis came to get him and
he was denounced by a French
policeman for being Jewish.
And letters of denunciation
were all over the place,
and he wrote a letter of
denunciation.
Those are big costs.
You're not saying so-and-so is
watering their lawn too much,
as they're doing in Atlanta,
which is--it's a bad thing to
water your lawn.
But there was this reportage I
saw the other day about
everybody turning in their
neighbors because they're
watering their lawn.
But you write something to the
French militia saying
so-and-so's a Jew,
you're selling out- you're
selling their life away;
or so-and-so's a communist,
or so-and-so's a resistor.
And for this guy,
his father was taken away with
a wife after the war.
Every Saturday when she went to
the market she saw the same
policeman directing traffic
there who had denounced her
husband,
who was responsible,
in a personal way,
not just sort of an indirect
way, a personal way for the
death of her husband.
And for people like that there
was sort of a satisfaction.
You can well imagine.
Even if you're not somebody
like, somebody of vengeance;
I would've gone--spent years
tracking these people down.
But she wasn't like that.
But there would be a moment of
vindication when the textbooks
begin to change.
That's something, too.
My kids are in seconde
in France, and the textbooks,
really, now they're starting to
change about the way the whole
period was covered.
But that's something that comes
out of this.
So, histories have their
histories as well.
And the next history,
by the way--and not to sort of
leap ahead--that was sort of
unveiled will be,
of course, the Algerian War and
all of that.
And the same kind of talk shows
that they're beginning to-that
they've had now for the last
fifteen years on French TV all
the time,
and documentaries they never
would have shown before will
start to happen,
about the Algerian War too.
And also for those generations
passing away,
it's important for them to talk
about these things;
and you're not in the situation
as I described in the case of
World War One,
there's only one single former
soldier who was in World War One
is still alive in Britain.
If you saw the Ken Burns thing
about World War Two,
they did a lot of interviews
with people now they're
eighty-four,
eighty-five,
eighty-six or
eighty-two--extraordinarily
lucid.
So, there's lots more that can
be done.
Now, what did people who
collaborated want?
First of all,
just quelques mots at
the beginning,
a few things at the beginning.
Whereas in voting Left in
France--you could do a map and
place a map on that,
and place it on a map of
de-Christianization,
and the French Revolution,
and the elections of 1849--I've
said this before--and there'd be
a remarkable similarity and
hardly any changes at all.
That's not true in terms of
collaboration,
nor is it true in resistance.
Collaborators didn't come from
one certain region as opposed to
another, which is largely the
case in Belgium.
There were collaborators
everywhere.
They don't come from one social
class, either.
Now, in one of the haunting
images of--in this film,
The Sorrow and the Pity,
there's a guy called Christian
de la Mazière,
who's of noble vintage,
and he's interviewed in a
smoking,
this sort of smoking jacket,
in his chateau.
And he's very bright and he's
very articulate,
and he describes why he
liked--why he was happy to go
and fight along the Nazi
soldiers in the east,
in what was called the Waffen
SS, these divisions.
And he's so articulate.
And you think,
how can a smart guy like that
ever do these things?
How can he hate Jews?
How can he want to see them die?
How can he want to see
communists put up against the
wall and gunned down?
Working-class guys from the
Nord or peasants from the
Auvergne.
And he explains it.
Now, you're more apt to have
upper-class people collaborate,
just as in the attraction of
National Socialism in Germany,
it's the middle classes that
ago that way first;
and it's true in France in the
1930s as well.
But you can't make any--there
were working-class people
collaborators as well.
You can't make any of these
kinds of generalizations.
What about religion?
Now, the role of the Pope in
all of this is nauseating.
The Pope knew,
he did nothing,
he did zero,
zero,
nothing, and they knew,
he knew.
When Roosevelt and these people
knew also, is that they knew
earlier and they didn't do
anything about it.
There's various reasons they
didn't bomb the death camps,
but if you bomb the death camps
then you're killing a lot of
people in the death camps and
all of that.
It's not so easy.
But the Catholic Church,
the church hierarchy generally
was extremely collaborationist,
because--but the Bishop of
Toulouse was a very heroic guy
who in his sermons would say
"leave these people alone."
And the Bishop of Aldi,
which is about a forty-five
minute drive away,
to the northeast,
was a notorious collaborator.
Also I'll talk more about
priests.
Priests are community leaders
in many parts of France.
Some of them were happy to see
the Germans come and some of
them were not,
and some of them were
collaborators and some of them
didn't.
And some of them got theirs
after the war.
There was a priest in a village
near us and he had had
Déat, who was a notorious
fascist, into this sort of
public reception and all that.
In 1944, August,
up against the wall--you can
still see the bullet holes
there, where they gunned them
down, people that collaborated.
A village near Limoges--I've
spent a lot of time in Limoges.
There's a place called--where
is it, there's a bike guy from
there, Poulidor,
Raymond Poulidor,
Saint-Leonarde.
In Saint-Leonarde,
in 1944, August,
they're partying.
Someone says,
"where's the gendarme that sold
these people away,
where is he?
He's got an aunt in Limoges."
A friend of mine,
a former, a guy I knew from the
archives, a
gardien--well,
he was my friend,
he was my compagnon,
as he would call me.
And he saw this because he was
a refugee from Lorraine.
Somebody said,
"where is the guy?"
"The guy's in,
the f-guy is there,
he's in Limoges."
So, they stop partying,
they walk to Limoges--nobody
had cars or gas--they go to the
aunt's house,
he's there, bam;
and they put him at the head of
this procession,
a cortège,
and they're all shouting and
singing,
and they--before they're going
to party they put him against
the wall and brrrk,
like that, and that's the end
of that.
So, these things evoked very
strong memories for these
people.
But the church's role--the
church got what it wanted,
in many ways--no divorce.
There were two people executed
for abortion,
actually, only two,
but still that's a lot,
for practicing abortion;
no divorce, et cetera,
et cetera.
But that's not the only story.
There were people who moved
from the Catholic Left into the
resistance.
Many of them joined the
Communist Party subsequently.
But anyway, it's not that open
and shut.
But what do these people want,
who were collaborators?
Here's a couple of scenes,
a bunch of scenes.
First of all the argument that
Pétain made after the war
was that-- again it's the shield
argument--is that by
collaborating with the Germans
you were preserving the French
State.
But as Paxton said,
with amazing eloquence,
he said, "they may have saved
the French State but they
destroyed the French nation."
What does the French nation
mean?
Liberty, equality,
fraternity--not patrie,
and work, and all that,
God, et cetera,
that they put on the coins
during Vichy.
But they would say,
"we are maintaining the
innocence--the independence of
France."
And the innocence--that was the
right slip there--the innocence
of France, because the view had
to be that we were martyred by
the loss of autonomy and we'll
get it back by doing what the
Germans want,
by helping them rebuild
economically.
The Germans wanted to take
industrial, convert it to war
use and that kind of thing--
we'll do what they want.
So, that's one theme.
But the shield argument has
pretty much been denounced.
Second, xenophobia,
that the xenophobia that
characterized the French Right
in the 1920s and 1930s;
the racism and xenophobia
became State policy.
The foreign Jews were shipped
off, but also lots of
quote/unquote "French Jews."
I'm not making that
differentiation,
this is one that they made.
Actually, there's a hotel
called Lutétia,
which is a very fancy hotel,
at Sèvres-Babylon,
and that was a place where
people came after the war,
when Jews came back.
If you made it back,
you went there,
you went there every damn day
to see if somebody from your
family was coming back;
and most of them didn't come
back, most of them didn't come
back.
But the xenophobia was no
Italians, no Spanish,
especially communists--again
the fear of Marxism,
et cetera, et cetera.
They put the Spanish refugees
in camps, the Republic had,
the Popular Front had,
at the end of the Popular
Front, and camps up in the
Pyrén&eac
ute;es-Orientales,
between Perpignan and the sea,
places like Argeles and all of
that.
That was what was given to them
on the plateau--on the
platter, is to make xenophobia
part of state policy.
Third, and this is a subset but
it should stand by itself,
is anti-Semitism,
that the French Vichy
regime--let me interject the
fact that it's only in November
of 1942 that the Germans occupy
the Vichy zone,
because the resistance is
mobilizing--that the French put
in laws about Jews,
depriving Jews of rights that
the Germans didn't even ask them
to do, in terms of saying,
"well, if you are Jewish
because your grandmother or your
grandfather was Jewish"--I don't
remember exactly the laws.
But the laws in some ways are
even harsher than the infamous
Nuremberg laws of the Reich.
They put in even harsher laws,
and they did it because they
wanted to, not because the
Germans were saying you do this;
"better Hitler than Blum," and
that's the way that Vichy wanted
it, that's the way that Vichy
wanted it.
And as the Jews disappeared,
as they disappeared to Drancy
and to these other places,
how many priests said--and
again I'm not being provocative;
and I went to a Jesuit school,
for better or for worse--"there
go the Christ-killers,
there they go," in the little
trains bouncing along,
off to Drancy and then off to
the camp.
So, anti-Semitism becomes
official policy.
Pétain was a notorious
anti-Semite.
The High Command of the French
Army was replete with
anti-Semitism,
had always been that way.
Alfred Dreyfus,
it was better that one Jew
perish or die in Devil's Island
than it was that the army
be--that its honor be
compromised.
That's the way they viewed it;
it was supported by the
assumptionists and all these
other people.
So, that's an important point
as well.
But there are other themes,
too, that if you read things
that they wrote at the time,
that the collaborators wrote,
if you read the proclamations
of Pétain,
if you read the kind of
spin--they didn't call it that
then--around the Marshall,
who was always supposed to be
described as walking with a
sprightly step;
it was rather like when they
were trying to describe Reagan
who at the end of his reign was
totally out of it,
and he's always supposed to be
described--I'm not comparing
Reagan to Pétain,
but there you're talking about
very old people.
But he's always supposed to be
described in a way that he,
his personal,
his body,
his being represents what the
Right considered to be wrong
with France;
that he was a dictator,
he was an authoritarian,
finished the France of
aperitif,
finished the France of
quarreling fragments or factions
in the Chambre des
Deputées.
And, so, by the way the
fascists, the role of the actual
fascists, it's rather similar to
what happened in Spain,
but I don't have time to do
this now, but the Phalange in
Spain were the real fascists,
and they're kind of kept at an
arm's length by Franco.
The real fascists in all of
this, not the authoritarian
Right ones but--and they share a
lot in common,
all the themes I'm talking
about were shared by both of
them--but they were kind of kept
at an arm's length in Paris and
this kind of stuff.
But anyway, decadence that
Vichy is going to be an answer
to decadence.
Drieu de la Rochelle said,
"I am a Fascist because I have
measured the progress of
decadence in Europe and I
believe--I've seen that fascism
is the only means of limiting
and reducing decadence."
And this is a term that kind of
comes up over and over again.
Second, the church--I've
already said that--but that give
France--there are all sorts of
conversions of the prayer,
the Our Father,
in the Catholic Church.
I don't know if it was in the
Protestant churches too,
whatever--"Our Father who art
in heaven," and all that;
on earth, so that we may live.
Give us our day,
our daily bread.
Give France back her life,
et cetera, et cetera;
that the answer to the
decadence of France is going to
be to refine those old Christian
Catholic values,
associated with Joan of Arc,
by the way, the sort of revival
of fanaticism about Joan of Arc,
and that this is an important
part of the whole thing;
that it would be returned to
moral order.
Remember the Government of the
Moral Order of the 1870s.
It's a return to moral order,
when things are passed down
from moral authorities
represented by the church in
conjunction with Pétain.
So, it's sort of like a
monarchy, really.
But, so, the role of religion
and of church and all of this is
going to be important.
The Boy Scouts,
for example,
scouting has always had very
close ties in France to the
Catholic Church,
and it's still very
controversial there now.
Third, nationalism,
that if you've just been blown
away in yet another--not yet
another,
not World War One,
it was not a rapid defeat,
it was a victory,
a long victory--but as in
1870/1871 that France's
independence is that of a nation
whose image has been transformed
away from liberty,
fraternity, equality--the hell
with all of that,
from their point of view,
into this world of order and
work and patrie,
religion;
patrie goes on the coins.
And in doing that,
in saying that,
this nationalism becomes one
that is exclusionary.
That's one of the
characteristics of these
rightwing movements all over
Europe.
Hitler says--or the mayor of
Vienna said, "I decide who's a
Jew"--this in the 1890s--Hitler
says,
"we will determine who's a Jew
and then we will kill them."
And then Pétain,
who's very happy to see the
Jews go, he could've cared less;
Pétain's the hero of
Verdun, and so there's no room
in the Pantheon,
not of the Republic,
but of the Marshall,
for Jews--that's part of the
nationalist method,
message and method,
of this--it's there.
Next, well authority, authority;
authority comes top down--I'm
kind of repeating myself but you
get the point--authority comes
from top down.
It doesn't come from people
elected to represent the
Haute-Garonne,
Toulouse's region,
and sitting in the Palais
Bourbon, in the political club,
authority comes from the top
down--this is the 1920s,
'30s and '40s--and that's what
they viewed as a very good
thing.
Next peasantism,
that "true France" is what they
called it, true France,
the real France,
not the France of Jews,
not the France of
grèves--no
strikes,
strikes are illegal.
Not the France of working class
organizations,
no CGT, organized workers need
not apply, need not exist,
et cetera, et cetera,
and all of this.
Virtue is found in the soil,
and Joan of Arc who's a peasant
girl from--I've been to her
house,
or what they claim is her
house, in the Meuse and in the
east of France,
she becomes a symbol of not
only of sort this nationalism,
chasing away the Brits and all
of this before she's burned in
Rouen--or the English,
they weren't British then--but
becomes virtue in herself of
being attached to the soil;
that cities are places where
Jews hang out,
cities are places where
organized workers hang out,
and that the true France is
that of peasants and the soil.
And, so, these groups like the
chantiers de la jeunesse,
which are the sort of workshops
or work areas of youth where
they're supposed to get up early
in the morning;
instead of smoking a pack of
Gauloises before noon,
they're supposed to get
up--which is a terrible
thing--they're supposed to get
up and not drink apéro at
11:30,
but are supposed to maybe go
running a little,
and collapse wheezing along,
and then jump into some pond
like the Nazis did--were
supposed to do that in the
Pomeranian,
frozen Pomeranian lakes,
that this is learning about the
true France which is this--the
decline of France is going to be
putting people back on the soil,
putting them to work,
and all that.
And then there's finally--and
then I'm going to have to stop,
but I'm basically done--
there's this corporatism,
which was mostly just window
dressing.
It's corporatism--they'd read
something about Italian fascism,
and Mussolini tries to organize
industries hierarchically,
making the argument that
workers and bosses who are in,
say, metallurgical production
have the same interests,
which of course is ridiculous.
But if you organize things
corporately speaking you won't
have strikes because they're
illegal,
and then if you get people to
buy into the nation the way that
many German workers did,
but not all,
then you will solve your social
problems and you won't have
anybody,
everybody will get up and be
chanting--saying their prayers
in the morning on their knees,
and schools,
the Marianne is gone from the
walls, the crucifixes are there,
and you will have this happy
vision, one that the good
fortune, as they believed in it,
of France's--the decadent
France's defeat by all these
strong, marching Teutonic
warriors who had given France
the possibly of creating this
brave new world,
without communists,
without Jews,
without gays,
without abortion,
without strikes,
et cetera, et cetera.
But it didn't work out that
way, happily,
and by--as I said,
by the end of 1943 if you woke
up and you saw a K had been
written on your door you better
get your toothbrush and get
ready to move,
because things began to change.
And why they begin to change,
and the origins of the
resistance, and who resisted is
a fascinating topic,
and that's the one we're gonna
do next Monday,
I'm going to New Mexico between
then and now but I will see you
on Monday.
