There was a dark stain on the wall of the village schoolroom where the portrait of Marshal Pétain had been for the previous four years. But the poster bearing the Marshal’s new year address to the schoolchildren of France dated 1st January 1944, though somewhat tattered, was still up on the wall beside the blackboard, as though, in this Norman village, the authorities were still undecided as to the future in immediate political terms, and, in typical Norman manner, were keeping all their options open. Or perhaps no one had thought of taking the message down. And so there it continued to address itself, in somewhat querulous terms, to an empty, indifferent, dusty room, the July sun lighting up oblique shafts of rising chalk. Classes had been interrupted, presumably since D Day, and the Marshal’s ancient voice spoke into emptiness, over one of those huge chasms that, every now and then, mark the broken progress of French history, from regime to regime.
There is always something rather pathetic about the tattered relics of defeated regimes, rather like the brutally scattered intimacies that lie about on recent battlefields: postcards of French villages with German writing on them, and strands of bloodstained clothing that caught the eye of Poincaré, when, in September 1914, he was visiting the site of the Battle of the Marne. The poster headed with the double-bladed francisque spoke of hopes that seemed incredibly ancient and of a paternalism that had lost its relevance, as if France had outgrown the stress on redemption and atonement that had been Pétain’s particular message ever since the terrible summer of 1940. It seemed indeed as impossibly dated as the letter, written in green ink on squared school exercise book paper, in Slovak, some of the writing dissolving in blotches of water, the paper covered in mud, that had been brought to me by an eager local: a message, apparently addressed to a wife or to a mother in some Slovak village that had never reached its destination.
I can remember to this day the gist of the Marshal’s message, and even more its tone, almost as if one could hear the old man’s rather halting speech, as, patiently and didactically, he spelled out what he wanted to say to his little friends:
Mes chers petits amis, à cette époque de l’année, et chaque année [and this would indeed have been the fourth time] ma pensée va vers vous. Mes meilleures années sont celles que j’ai passées sur les bancs de l’école [and a village school, too, somewhere in the Pas-de-Calais]. Mes chers petits amis, ne copiez pas, ne trichez pas, nommez entre vous un chef de classe, constituez dans chaque classe un comité d’honneur6
and so on and so on, ending on the injunction: ‘ce qu’il faut à la France, à notre cher pays, ce ne sont pas des intelligences, ce sont des caractères’, a message the gist of which would have seemed entirely familiar to any English public schoolboy brought up in the early thirties. It was as if one had come in at the tail end of an act witnessed many times before. Until that day in early July 1944, I had tended to regard Philippe Pétain almost as evil incarnate, certainly more wicked, because more damaging, than Pierre Laval. Now he seemed to have borrowed both the language and even some of the clothing of a French Baden-Powell. One almost expected to see him on the lawn outside the Hôtel du Parc, wearing shorts, displaying nobbly knees, in an effort, rather touching, to bridge the gap of seventy-odd years that separated him from his dear little friends, the hope of the future, the guarantors of France’s moral regeneration. It is hard to think of an old man who spoke in such genuine and clearly deeply felt grandfatherly tones as a politician of consummate wickedness who had anaesthetized and deceived his people into semicollaboration. There was a tired candour about the old man’s nostalgia for a very, very distant youth (after all, when he had been sitting on the hard school bench, it would not have been very long after the Franco-Prussian War, as if this Picard peasant had been destined to experience three wars in the most war-torn area of France). And in this candour there was no doubt an element of loss and compensation. Like so many childless people, Philippe Pétain delighted in the company of little boys and little girls, to whom he could address himself at their own mental level. So many of the Marshal’s speeches seem to have been drawn heavily from the uplifting sayings of L’Almanach Vermot, and even his conversations were peppered with lapalissades, as if he had been a military Monsieur Prudhomme. ‘Alibert, parle-moi des Chinois, ils sont jaunes, n’est-ce pas? Je n’aime pas les jaunes.’
Of course, this childlike stance could be combined with an elephantine memory for slight and with an anti-English bias that dated back to Doullens. Yet, undoubtedly, an important element in the public style and language of l’Etat Français is its archaic dottiness. ‘Labourage et pâturage sont les deux mamelles de la France,’ as proclaimed on the Vichy banknotes, would hardly seem relevant to the priorities of a regime very largely run by technocrats and high-ranking civil servants, at last released from the trammels of parliamentary control and free to plan the immediate future without interference from troublesome deputies. Perhaps, though, it did vaguely reflect the rural values of an Auvergne all at once promoted to the status of the centre of political patronage and influence.
There was much that was dotty about Vichy, particularly in its period of relative innocence and hope, in the period 1940–41, when the regime has been described as la république flottante. It was certainly not a republic, and, in the end, it did not float, leaving, on the contrary, the main elements of the French Mediterranean fleet at the bottom of Toulon harbour. But, as long as Darlan was prime minister as well as minister of the interior, local administration was given over to landlocked naval officers, with amiraux and vice-amiraux as prefects, capitaines de vaisseau as sous-préfets, indeed a unique example in modern French history of the navy, la Royale, being put to some use, even if that use was fairly detestable. For naval officers eagerly led the crusade against Jews and Freemasons, serving as the zealous executants of Vichy’s anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic legislation that, incidentally, owed absolutely nothing to German prompting, the German authorities, both in Vichy and in Paris, being perfectly happy to let the French get on with whatever form of persecution they wished to inflict on their compatriots. La république flottante was, in historical terms, the most anti-British regime France has ever possessed. It was a bitter disappointment to Darlan that he was cheated of the opportunity of actually going to war with Britain.
Vichy has also been described, at least in its initial stages, as la république des recalés, a regime of dunces, representing, in educational terms, what was so clearly spelt out in the Marshal’s new year message of 1944. Of course they were not all dunces, for Vichy put in positions of unrestricted power technocrats and civil servants of great experience, specialists like the father of the historian Le Roy Ladurie, syndicalists like Belin, financial experts like Bouthillier. But the entourage of the Marshal at least up to November 1942 was drawn from Stanislas and from l’enseignement libre. As the French hierarchy was quick to realize, and to rejoice, moral values would mean a Moral Order, putting the clock back on Ferry and on sixty years of laïcité. Instituteurs and professeurs de lycée were in for a rough time, and the way was open for clean living, the open air, the hewing of wood and the drawing of water, songs round the blazing campfire set in the midst of the forest, a minister of youth, as well as a minister of sport (both offices, incidentally, inherited from the hated Popular Front) and much public official concern for the problems of youth – though, by 1943, under overwhelming German pressure, that concern would often take the form of helping with the deportation of young men over eighteen to work in German war factories. The STO certainly stripped bare the equivocations of Vichy youth policies and lost the regime the support of middle-class parents. Even so, any regime that places character and honour at a higher priority than intelligence is fairly eccentric.
Because of the terms of the Armistice and thanks above all to the initiative of Pierre Laval, who, as well as having been député-maire of Aubervilliers, was the châtelain of Châteldon, twelve kilometres from Vichy, and already by the end of 1940, linked to the new capital by a macadam road, Vichy France at once emerged as a geographical object of wonder. It was as if l’Hexagone had been turned upside-down, with, for the first time in history, the capital of France placed in a watering-place in the underprivileged and backward Massif Central. In historical terms, the geographical aberration that was Vichy could be described as la revanche du Midi and, indeed, as the temporary solution of what generations of southern politicians have described as le problème du Midi, even if that problem was of their own making or existed only in the imagination of poets and félibriges. It is not surprising that, even forty years on, Vichy should be recalled as a lost golden age in places like Clermont-Ferrand, Thiers, Vichy and Moulins, and among the rural population of the Auvergne and the Bourbonnais. It is true that, in intent at least, it was as highly centralized as had been the Third Republic; but the centre was not in Paris, temporarily disinherited, cut off from favour and patronage, and merely the capital of anti-Vichy collaboration – in intent, at least, because in practice, thanks to the Germans, the writ of Vichy did not extend very far, being largely confined to the landlocked, truncated territory of la France Non-Occupée, and almost completely excluded from the industrial area extending from the Belgian frontier to the course of the Somme.
What the French of my generation are most likely to recall about the Vichy interlude, whatever their political affiliations, is its bizarre and recalcitrant geography, its many, and dangerous, frontiers and the relative impenetrability of the five distinct regions into which France was now divided: a geography of fear and danger that made of once sleepy little provincial towns like Niort, Orthez, Moulins, Montluçon, perilous passages de ligne where the traveller had to run the gauntlet of the watchful double filter of the gendarmerie and the Feldgendarmerie, both forces working in harmony and both employing well-tended Alsatian dogs. A geography that made of each of the Paris termini the potential end of the line for the résistant and for the Allied agent, as well as for the black marketeer. A geography that, till 1942, established a militarily patrolled frontier along the course of the Somme, cutting off the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais and much of the Somme from the rest of France, while, at the same time, removing the frontier that divided the Nord from Belgium. A geography that made any coastal area inaccessible to the ordinary traveller, that took the Haut- and Bas-Rhin and the Moselle out of France altogether, to form a new Gau of the Third Reich, and that placed the southern Alpine departments under Italian military occupation. So much of the literature of the Vichy period relates to the anxieties of a midnight passage de ligne, in the inexorable silence of a stationary train that seems unlikely ever to get up steam again; and to be crawling on hands and knees through the undergrowth, in dread fear of the sudden yellow probe of the tentative finger of a searchlight. By multiplying the internal frontiers, the Germans had multiplied the internal dangers of travel and had deliberately set about isolating the French from one another.
The result is that it is almost impossible to write the history of Vichy for France as a whole (and, for Alsatians and German-speaking Lorrainers, it is not even French history; for the inhabitants of the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, the occupation years related much more to the history of Belgium than to that of France). Just as the Marshal, in his initial appeal, had sought to rebuild a shattered and humiliated France on the basis of the family unit, the Germans had ensured that the experience of occupation should differ radically from place to place. As it turned out, the Normans, at least the Lower ones, got off rather lightly, indeed often did quite well out of the German occupation; the Auvergnats too prospered, but the Marseillais and the Niçois starved. In Paris, social life went on with a gay intensity, reaching a climax of inventiveness in 1943, when, among other works, one of Sartre’s plays had its highly successful premiere in the presence of le Tout-Paris and the leading literary lights of the German military hierarchy. There were areas of resistance and areas of attentisme. Toulouse went one way, Bordeaux the other, as if in conformity to some well-tried historical law governing the always contrary attitudes of the inhabitants of the two southwestern towns.
If Vichy remained, predictably, vichyssois, Montpellier never was. Both the history of collaboration and that of resistance can be studied only in local or, at most, regional terms. In Paris, in the summer and winter of 1940, the working-class population of the northeastern arrondissements could be seen fraternizing with the German soldiers, sitting with them on the café terraces of Belleville and Ménilmontant, while the western arrondissements remained shuttered and silent at least till September 1940, when social life started to pick up once more. But, after June 1941, there would be no more fraternization in the XVIIIme, the XIXme and the XXme. Between June 1940 and June 1941, the highly intelligent young men in charge of German occupation in the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, in the textile and mining towns, made a point of making contact with Communist trade union officials of the CGT, while by-passing the official Vichy syndicat unique imposed by Belin, because they were concerned to get the population back to work, the mills and mines reopened. But, of course, all that too changed overnight in June 1941.
Of all the areas of a fragmented France, the one that remained the most impenetrable to Vichy persuasion and influence was the Northeast. This was as much the result of historical experience as of deliberate German policy. The Germans, from the time of the Armistice in June 1940, placed the Northeast under the military governor of Belgium, von Falkenhausen, creating a new unit under the denomination of Belgium and Northern France. There may have been annexionist arrière-pensées in thus differentiating between Belgium and the Northeast, and the rest of France. Certainly this was the view of the inhabitants of the Nord. Or the Germans may simply have decided to do in 1940 what they had done, in Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Douai, Cambrai and Valenciennes in 1914, when the Occupied Departments had been placed under the authority of von Bissing, the military governor in Brussels. Certainly there was a degree of continuity in German policy. For instance, the Kommandantur of Roubaix appointed in 1940 was the nephew of the one appointed in 1914. What is more, he arrived fully provided with his uncle’s fiches. Those who had been arrested and deported in 1915 or 1916 were redeported in 1940. These included the maire, a veteran Guesdiste, Jean Le Bas, who had been released, at the insistence of Alfonso XIII, in 1916, and who died in Mauthausen in 1943. It was much the same in Lille, Douai and Valenciennes. The Germans had long memories; so did the Roubaisiens and the Lillois; and each lived up to the historical expectations of the other, though the Germans were not quite so brutal and rapacious in the second occupation as they had been in the first.
The Nord was the only part of France in which the Germans were referred to exclusively as les boches in the Second World War as well as in the First. Here, no fridolins, no verts-de-gris, no chleuhs, just the old, familiar boches. Perhaps, among the garrison troops of Lille, there was even a return of the Bavarians, familiar uniforms there from 1914 to 1918, though they would no longer have been distinguishable to the civilian population. Perhaps, in 1940, occupant and occupé resumed a tentative, all-purpose dialogue composed of chtimi and South German slang? Certainly one of the leading German officials in Lille, Carlo Schmid, director of the OFK 670, was bilingual, with a French mother, and strong sympathies for the type of Christian socialist currents that had long existed among the Catholic working classes and patronat of the wool towns of the Franco-Belgian border; Schmid had direct access to the local Catholic hierarchy, and was able to induce some local leaders of what had been Catholic boy scout movements to moderate the gaulliste fervour of Boulonnais lycéens. Another German, General Bertram, at one time garrison commander of Lille, was the brother of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Breslau; and, in his relations with the powerful and enormously respected Cardinal Liénart, this stood him in good stead, in an area of France in which the clergy were especially influential, even among a section of the working class.
It is hard to know what the Germans had in mind for the future either of Belgium or of French Flanders and French Wallonia. In the Nord, they seem to have given little encouragement to l’abbé Gantois, curé of Watten, the leader of a pan-Flemish separatist movement, the Vlaamsch Verbond voor Frankrijk, though he got some financial assistance from Ribbentrop’s people. Certainly they treated the Belgians much better than they did the French, so that in 1944, as I was able to experience, conditions were far better outre-Quiévrain than on the LRT side of the frontier. It is likely that the main concern of the military authorities in this absolutely vital area of supply and communications was to keep the trains running, the factories open, the coastal defences in the making supplied with a work force, and the movement of troop trains concealed from Allied agents. Above all, at least up till 1942, they managed to keep Vichy emissaries at arm’s length, so that the préfet du Nord, Carles, found himself much of the time in an administrative vacuum.
In this, the Germans were no doubt helped by the attitude of the inhabitants, for many of whom Vichy would have seemed a complete irrelevance, even though Pétain, like de Gaulle, was an enfant du pays. In both wars, the chtimis had had the disagreeable experience of having been treated almost as foreigners, as les boches du Nord, not only by southerners and people from central France, but also by Parisians. And both wars greatly strengthened this sense of apartness, even of rejection. Had the Lillois not been told that, were it not for their beastly frontier and their silly tradition of patriotism, dating from 1793, there would never have been a war in the first place, and that both wars had been their wars? As refugees returned to the Nord, after l’Exode, in the summer and autumn of 1940, they were able to see on the ground the evidence of the hardness of the fighting in the summer; burnt-out tanks and scout cars, German as well as French, abandoned guns, all witnessing to the intensity of the fighting rather than to the suddenness of total collapse.
It was widely held, in the Nord, in the summer and autumn of 1940, that the Armistice had been concluded at the instance both of southern politicians and of southern public opinion, in order to save the Midi from becoming a battleground; and from this it was an easy step to go on to suggest that at the time of the Armistice, military victory had been just round the corner, and that France had been cheated of such a victory by the selfishness and the cowardice of Laval and other Auvergnats, of Marquet and other Bordelais. And it followed from such convictions that, as France had fought well, there was no need to drape her in sackcloth and to wallow tearfully in atonement. Even Pétain, the sauveur for so many Frenchmen living far from the frontiers, would seem a very distant, and, indeed, somewhat irrelevant, saviour. And whom was he going to save them from? Certainly not from the Germans, very much back again, and here to stay, settling in, even requisitioning the same buildings and houses as in 1914. And here too, as in 1916 and 1917, were the Germans building new railway lines, tying the Nord more intimately to Brussels, to Liège and to the Rhineland, as well as to the Ardennes, Luxembourg and Alsace, as if they were planning for a distant, but stable, après-guerre of permanent occupation or annexation. New lines did indeed seem to spell an unshakable confidence in some sort of pan-German New European Order. People who felt that they were likely to have to go, cutting their losses, taking what they could away with them, stripping the place, as they had done in the first months of war, in the summer and autumn of 1914, would not have taken the trouble to have new lines constructed.
And of course there were other, more familiar patterns of German behaviour: the confiscation of carrier pigeons, in an urban zone in which every miner and every mill worker would be a colombophile; the confiscation of wireless sets; the increasing collusion between the German armed forces and the development of a black market, based largely on tobacco smuggling from Belgium (though, in both wars, smuggling might as readily lead to resistance as to economic collaboration); and two generations of horizontales (some perhaps the daughters of the first lot) who, in 1918 and 1944, might suffer the same humiliating fate of having their heads shaven, generally by patriotes and résistants of the eleventh hour, the octobrists of 1918, the résistants de septembre of 1944. In this area of France there had grown up a sort of intimacy between occupant and occupé based on long familiarity and, in 1917/8, common privations, on a peculiar blending of mutual loathing and mutual respect, a pas de deux that would exclude a third party, and that, in physical terms, resulted, in both four-year cycles, in the birth of an unknown number of small Franco-Germans, their origins hidden under the merciful veil of the formula: né de père inconnu. Certainly there were plenty of these among the orphans kept by the Bon Pasteur in Lille in 1944/5. Vichy would not understand such particular problems. And the enemy presence would still be more familiar than an inhabitant of Marseille or of Perpignan. The chtimis derived a sense of identity from their exclusion from what had been the common national experience in both wars. They knew their Germans, knew too, in a way that Laval and many of the Vichy ministers did not, that there was not a deal to be done with the Germans. It was a matter as much of hard experience as of patriotism.
Then there was, at least in the Nord and the Pas-de-Calais, if not in the more rural Ardennes, the tradition of anglophilia dating back at least to the 1870s and 1880s, and extending from the factory owners to the professional and working classes. Roubaix is the only place in France in which I have encountered Frenchmen speaking English either with a Bradford accent or with an Australian one. Over the interwar years, a steady stream of mill owners’ sons from Roubaix-Tourcoing had been sent to the Bradford Institute of Wool Technology for their professional training, while a number of purchasers had been despatched down under. Roubaix was the second town in France – le Havre was the first – to form a football club (Le Racing Club de Roubaix), association football having been brought there, in 1877, by two Yorkshire textile engineers; the game then spread gradually inwards from the Channel coast. In 1939, the trainer of the stade was a Lancashire man. Again, from the 1880s, the prestigious Faculté des Lettres de Lille, a showpiece of secular education, emerged as the principal centre in France for English studies, exporting to Paris and to Lyon a string of celebrated anglicistes, while retaining, in the Lycée Faidherbe, the best teachers of English in the country. When, in the winter of 1914, the Germans authorized the reopening of about half of the Lille schools, the first subject on the programme to be reestablished was English. I don’t know what the Bavarian command made of that! It was the same in Douai, when, with the reestablishment of the école technique in the winter of 1916, English and typing were the first subjects to be reintroduced. All French educational institutions existing in England and in Scotland still form part of the Académie de Lille.
This tradition of anglophilia, at first professional and educational or deriving from common habits of leisure, was given a much more intimate, concrete, and indeed, physical form, from the autumn of 1918 and much of 1919, and often resulting in intermarriage between Thomas Atkins and Mlle. from Armentières (or from Lille, Hem, Loos, Douai, Bapaume, Albert, Béthune) in 1919 and 1920, disproving the gist of the famous song: ‘Après la guerre finie, soldier anglais parti.’ An unknown number stayed, never returning to England, blending into the general population in the course of the next twenty years, many of them by 1940 grandfathers, and speaking an odd blend of English and chtimi. Most such marriages concerned soldiers of working-class origin and represented for the husbands often considerable social advancement; some married into family occupations – an estaminet, a garage, a grocery, a butcher’s – other became football coaches, a few worked in the mills. It was a phenomenon exclusive to the working class, illustrating, once again, the greater adaptability of the other ranks than of the officer corps to the standards of foreign communities. There were many similar marriages, in this part of France, in 1944/5, when, again, most of the British husbands stayed on in the Nord.
The British were back again, with the BEF, in large numbers and with plenty of money, during the period of the ‘phoney war’, their presence certainly welcomed by the keepers of estaminets and by the younger feminine population. According to a local historian, there was a massive increase both of venereal diseases and of alcoholism in Douai, inducing the prefect to limit the opening hours of drinking establishments. It was no doubt the same in Lille and in other towns in the British area. But there was more to it than such basic commercial considerations. (It should be added that advantages enjoyed by the British troops hardly endeared them to the poorly paid French servicemen stationed in the same area.) British soldiers and airmen were still being hidden both by farmers and townsmen as late as June 1941, a year after Dunkirk, despite the execution of several people caught housing Allied personnel or passing them on down the line of escape routes towards the Midi and Spain.
The population of the Nord was not as massively anglophil as it had been in 1918 and 1919. This time, anglophilia was tempered by subtle class distinctions, the professional and working classes looking to Britain for deliverance as early as the winter of 1940, when the BBC was listened to with pathetic regularity by the textile engineers and the mill workers of Roubaix. But the patronat, the peasantry, and the Catholic hierarchy displayed a more ambivalent attitude, and one often receptive to the endearments of Vichy’s Moral Order and to the regime’s emphasis on discipline, authority and atonement. Both Liénart and Dutoit were sympathetic to la Révolution Nationale, both had been personally acquainted with Pétain from a very early age; both failed to come out openly against the STO, thus alienating many of the young. Both signed the famous open letter, organized by van Roey in 1943, on the subject of the bombing of open cities. Whereas, in the First World War, the lead had been taken by the notables, including the lainiers of Roubaix-Tourcoing, some of whom had been deported in 1915, in the Second, it was taken by the railway workers, the miners, the mill workers, the jocistes (a group of Belgian inspiration), many urban and country curés (several of whom were either shot or deported), the occasional pasteur, the schoolteachers and the textile engineers. The experience of the Front Populaire had left deep scars in this part of France, leading part of the patronat into instinctive anti-Communism. The Germans also offered many economic inducements to those mill owners who were prepared to work for the German domestic market. It should be added, in their defence, that they were also concerned to see that their work force was employed and that those thus employed might escape the STO.
There were more early gaullistes here than in any other part of France, not just because de Gaulle was a Lillois and his wife a Calaisienne, but because gaullisme was early identified, no doubt wrongly, with British fortunes. Nor was it an empty anglophilia, consisting of graffiti on lycée walls and similar gestures. From 1943 onwards, and above all between April and July 1944, an immense amount of information reached Britain from this crucial area of France, especially from railway engineers and cheminots, relating to German troop movements from the Pas-de-Calais to Normandy, and to what was going on in Watten (where the abbé Gantois must have been a very lonely voice among his parishioners). In such a heavily populated area, large-scale military forms of resistance were impossible. But information was much more valuable than random attacks on military personnel. The Lillois and the Roubaisiens considered it their natural reward that they should have been liberated, in September 1944, by the British. They had never expected any other outcome. In this sense, popular attitudes corresponded much more closely to those of the Belgians than to those of other parts of France. The Belgians, too, looked to London, where their government in exile had been established in December 1940; and the Belgians had the advantage of not having been faced with a Vichy-type alternative and the apparent promise of safeguarding at least some tatters of national sovereignty. Leopold III was no Pétain. Walloon Belgium at least had displayed an equally firm and touching anglophilia, in both wars, even if the Flemish population, led by their clergy, had been less enthusiastic, if not openly hostile. Many Belgian children born between 1900 and 1910, had spent the whole of the First World War with English foster parents, returning home in 1918 as lifelong anglophils.
In social terms, the frontier had always been nonexistent, merely an invitation to a mutual concern with contraband and to the development of a common esprit fraudeur. People from both sides of the frontier had long been in the habit of congregating, at weekends, in the zone neutre for cockfights, illegal in both countries. In retrospect, it would seem that the Germans had committed a serious error, both times, in thus grouping together two areas, the populations of which had so much in common in terms of urban occupations, social attitudes, Christian socialism and leisure enjoyments, the pigeons of working-class colombophiles making regular weekend flights, in peacetime, over a frontier which divided houses, cafés, estaminets and tavernes. Of course, the Germans were concerned to fragment French unity; and, had they been victorious, it is likely that both Belgium and the French departments under Brussels military rule would have formed a satellite state under the aegis of the Third Reich.
For all these reasons, the echoes of Vichy propaganda were very muted in the Northeast, while much Vichy legislation remained there lettre-morte. Few Vichy ministers or notabilities were ever seen in the Nord, the Germans often denying them entry. Pétain never visited his native department. The prefect, Carles, spent much of the period in an administrative vacuum and in 1941 he often had the greatest difficulty in forming the délégations spéciales, made up of personalities known for their sympathy for the Révolution Nationale, that were to replace the elected municipalities of 1939 (most of which were dominated by the SFIO and by the PCF). The Nord was an area of traditional municipalism, and during the first occupation, as we have seen, it was the municipalities that had managed more or less to keep some sort of life going for the civilian population, printing their own money, and constituting the only French authority that the German military command had been prepared to recognize. A northern maire was perhaps a greater personage than in any other part of France, indeed more equivalent to a Belgian bourgmestre. And some maires had very long runs: Augustin Laurent, in Lille, 40 years, Victor Provo, in Roubaix, ever since the Liberation; and such interference from Vichy met with much local resentment. In times of crisis, each town, each commune, had been driven back on its own resources and had been in the habit of taking its own initiatives.
Even the anti-Semitic legislation was applied here in a piecemeal fashion, and many Antwerp Jews were passed down the lines of escape through the Nord. A joint operation was carried out on 15th September 1942 by the Feldgendarmerie and four French agents de police, using lists drawn up two years earlier by the French authorities (prefects and subprefects and local commissariats), in which 516 Jews were rounded up in the Nord and deported to Auschwitz (only 25 returned). The Jewish population of the department had in fact been much in excess of this figure; and many municipalities had ‘lost’ the lists drawn up in accordance with the Vichy anti-Semitic legislation of the summer of 1940. And the étoile jaune, so prominent in Vichy, was hardly ever seen here before 1944.
The Germans also saw to it that Vichy youth organizations, the chantiers and so on, should not be allowed to develop in an area in which there remained a large pool of available manpower in the eighteen to thirty-five age group. The Germans, under the impetus of the Sauckel Organization, which recruited French labour for war work in Germany, had their own notions as to how French youth could be best employed, and in the Northeast, Vichy’s much publicized concern for the so-called sacrificed generation would have appeared as a hollow mockery. In his pioneering study based on the correspondence between the prefect Carles and successive Vichy ministers of youth and education, Bill Halls, an English historian, has shown how totally irrelevant to conditions existing in the Nord were the directives pouring out from the provisional seat of government. Nor was there the possibility, in this heavily populated area, of forming a maquis composed of réfractaires from the STO. At best, the only positive response to Vichy youth policies came from the hierarchy.
Darlan’s own brand of anglophobia had small appeal to a population that had never contributed, in significant numbers, to the recruitment of the French navy; and, in the summer of 1940, Abrial, the furiously anglophobe naval commander of Dunkirk, had himself set up in Vichy, along with Platon, back from Oxford.
But Paris was equally unsuccessful. In Douai, a town of 40,000 inhabitants, the figures for the membership of collaborationist organizations are derisory: the RNP, 4 members; the Milice, 1; the LVF, 2; the PPF, 80, many of them ex-Communist militants; the VVVF, 4, all of them apparently drawn by the promise – unfulfilled – of German rations: a total of 120 collaborators, of whom one, a doctor, a correspondent of the SS Racial Institute in Berlin, was shot in July 1946. Here, out-and-out collaboration was suspect as being either Parisian, or of southern origin, or both (as in the case of Brasillach and Montherlant). Even Gantois had to admit, in 1943, that ‘Dietsland’ had little appeal, and that only a complete recolonization of French Flanders and the expulsion of the francophone majority would have made the formation of a Greater Flanders viable. Indeed, the greatest fear felt by the inhabitants of the Nord during the occupation years was that, in the event of a German victory, they would all be uprooted and transported to central France, where their sudden and massive arrival would be bound to be resented by the local population. They knew, from previous bitter experience, that refugees from the Nord would encounter little sympathy and much hostility from the peasants of the Nivernais, the Mâconnais, the Bourbonnais and the Beaujolais.
It could of course be argued – and Gantois argued thus – that, in linguistic terms, even de Gaulle was of Flemish origin; but the origin was a very long time ago; and it would have been hard to convince every inhabitant of the Nord whose surname began with de or with van that he was, in some vague way, not really French, and that he should learn what was proclaimed as his native language, Flemish. Furthermore, in this industrial area, there was considerable sympathy for the Soviet Union, and the LVF was hardly likely to find many recruits in the Anzin coal basin or in Hénin-Liétard, places in which the cadres of the PCF, underground since 1939, had managed to subsist, with much support from the local population. Thorez, though in exile, was after all himself an enfant du pays. The strength of the clandestine Communist party may be gauged from the severity of the judicial repression meted out to its militants by the French courts. The Section Spéciale of the Douai Appeal Court, set up in September 1941, tried nearly two thousand (1,966) suspected party members, 1,706 men and 260 women, condemning five of them to the guillotine, for alleged acts of terrorism.
Of course, in this industrial area, there was plenty of economic collaboration, and, as during the previous occupation, there existed an ill-defined nether zone in which black marketeers, smokeleers and members of the supply services of the German army met in shady places – in Roubaix, mostly in the estaminets near the station – to carry out mutually profitable transactions. The German military authorities themselves directly contributed to the vast growth of the black market in cigarettes and tobacco by removing, for the period 1940/2, the customs barrier between France and Belgium, though it was later reestablished. Common shortage of raw materials inspired the inventiveness of Roubaix mill owners and textile engineers in the search for ersatz materials, resulting, for instance, in the Penel-Flipo factory hitting on the highly profitable tapis-boulgomme, a form of synthetic rubber which remained much in demand long after the Liberation. There was an equally illdefined frontier between professional crime and operations that could be described as a form of resistance, especially in the supply of faux papiers. Despite the curfew and the extreme food shortages of the winter of 1943/4, Lille contained well-known pleasure spots where it was possible to eat extremely well and to enjoy agreeable female company. The Café Métropole, run by Freddie Beaufort, who had a finger in many pies and who was tried and acquitted after the Liberation, was the meeting place of many mysterious figures, among them the black-clothed Delrue, who figures so prominently in Lageat’s book, Robert des Halles, and who, once on the run from Loos, eventually escaped to Paris, transferring from resistance to full-scale banditry. Lille, where most of the population was pitifully, and indeed visibly, undernourished by the time of the arrival of the British, was as much a capital of pleasure as Brussels, itself the capital of a European black market that extended from Poland to Brest. The statement that on s’amusait bien à Lille pendant l’occupation, though it provoked indignant protests at a recent colloquium organized by the Revue du Nord, was not denied by most of the participants. In the nature of things, frontier populations are seldom among the most virtuous, and in this part of France there was a long tradition of law-breaking.
But the principal appeal of Vichy – and one that took in so many patriotic Frenchmen, at least in 1940/1 – namely that the Marshal placed a screen, however fragile, between the civilian population and the German military authorities, would fall flat in an area under direct and complete military occupation. In Lille and elsewhere, even simple operations involving the French gendarmerie would always be carried out jointly with the Feldgendarmerie, emphasizing the fact of the enemy presence. Even more, le Nouvel Ordre Européen that had such an insistent appeal to the handful of Paris out-and-outers, would be shown up as a derisory, yet familiar, sham in departments that equated an onerous and often brutal German presence with an only too familiar ordre européen ancien (for, already, in 1914–18, the more theoretical of the German occupants were talking in terms of a new order for Mitteleuropa, of which French Flanders was apparently destined to be a part). No Lillois, no Roubaisien, no Tourcennois was likely to be deceived by such geopolitical appeals. To him, the New Order would look only too familiar – the curfew, passes required even to leave the town, white barriers outside German establishments, the obligation to get off the pavement if members of the armed forces were passing, massive deportations (only the initials of the STO were new, and the fact that young girls were not taken, much to the relief and even surprise of the Lillois and the inhabitants of the other towns of the Nord), billeting, requisitioning, the bitter winters of deprivation, the coal barges frozen in the canals, their contents providing momentary relief – a familiar combination of miseries and minor vexations harking back to the previous occupation and to the frightful winter of 1917/18. By his bark and his boot, General Niehof, the irascible garrison commander of Lille, seemed to the older Lillois to have taken his cue from his Bavarian predecessor. And, in both wars, Loos, the sinister and sad-sounding Loos (as if it represented indeed the loss of hope), spelt out summary execution, torture and interrogation, whether at the hands of the Abwehr, of the Gestapo, of the Sûreté, or of all three combined.
There was nothing novel about the German presence. To many it must have seemed as an endemic evil, recurring in a four-year cycle, roughly every twenty years. Van der Meersch, the author of Invasion 14, published in 1935, was at the time of his death in 1952 well on with its sequel, Invasion 40, a book in which I was myself to have some sort of emblematic part. Indeed, the Germans themselves seem to have been governed by precedent. Their Flemish policies, their annexationist ambitions, their plans for economic exploitation, even their clumsy attempts to promote the knowledge of German, in an area of France where English speakers were more numerous than anywhere else, by the provision of night schools at which the pupils would be provided with pastries and goodies, were all based on blueprints that had been drawn up, with minute care about detail, in 1913 or earlier, and that had been taken down from dusty shelves, for further use, in 1940. The Germans, it is true, had learnt something: the second occupation was less vexatious in terms of humiliation, the German soldiers being rather better behaved and better disciplined than their predecessors. But, otherwise, it was the mixture as before. So you could not fool a chtimi – ‘unboche est toujours un boche’, even though friendly relations might often develop between individual soldiers and civilians. The result was that this was a much more clear-cut world than, let us say, the Dordogne of Lacombe Lucien, the Paris of Monsieur Klein, the Puy-de-Dôme of Laval, the Alpes-Maritimes of the Milice, the Allier of Pascal Jardin, the Haute-Garonne of Catalan anarchism, or, indeed, the Midi generally, where Vichy might draw on considerable local support, at least up till the summer of 1942. It is also true that the Northeast was more patriotic, and had always been so.
But patriotism came easily to a frontier region always the first to experience the fire of war and invasion. I can recall the pride of Georges Lefebvre when he reminded his pupils that his great-uncle had taken part in the defence of Lille, in 1793, in the ranks of the garde nationale lilloise, under attack from the enemy armies. In the Nord, there could be no équivoque, for there existed no choice. Vichy was a very long way away; it was almost impossible to travel even to Paris or to Rouen; above all, the Germans were everywhere. Both Vichy and Paris would seem irrelevant – even Carles must have seemed irrelevant, the representative of a distant and shadowy French government. There is nothing that more unites a community, contributing to its collective identity and thus to its apartness, than the double experience of occupation. It was an experience denied to much of the rest of France, at least up till November 1942. Vichy propaganda on the subject of Joan of Arc, meeting with some response elsewhere (in parts of Normandy) fell completely flat in the Nord, the inhabitants of which, even schoolboys, knew who the national enemy was. Even after November 1942, in what had been the Nonoccupied Zone, the German presence in the Massif Central and the Southwest was unobtrusive. A recent study, published in Cahiers d’histoire, on the subject of the German troops stationed in and around Lyon, is a case in point. Most were young men in training, destined for the Russian Front. Few were ever seen in central Lyon, and the city was merely a temporary stage, on the way to a long journey east. It was only when the Germans started withdrawing from the Southwest, in the summer of 1944, that they often became vicious. It would be uncharitable and indecent to suggest that the inhabitants of the Nord, because they had suffered so much, in two wars, were in some ways more fortunate than their compatriots. But at least for them the moral position was much clearer.
In historical terms, ever since the 1790s, there has been much emphasis on what has been called, by several generations of historians, politicians (mostly southern) and travellers, le problème du Midi, however that may be defined. It has generally been a ‘problem’ largely of southern invention, arising out of a sense of deprivation and from hostility to Paris. Its most recent, and silliest, expression is l’Occitanie, wherever that may be. Any Lillois would have his own views on the subject: the South had always been a drain on the country; the méridionaux were empty braggarts and cowards, totally unreliable as soldiers, lazy and mendacious, lying about in the sun all day or playing pétanque, or sipping pastis; the territory was inhabited exclusively by eloquent and boastful Tartarins, while the northerner worked, scrubbed, whitened his front step and produced large families. I do not know whether General de Gaulle, certainly the most famous northerner, ever actually made the statement, so often attributed to him: la France se termine à Lyon. But it is one that could be echoed by many of his fellow chtimis. All right, if boche du Nord applied to people who were diligent, house-proud, clean to the point of fanaticism, then they were indeed boches du Nord, and proud of it. My purpose is to suggest that there is – or has been – un problème du Nord, derived from regional experience and a sense of apartness, and from a historical identity closely linked with that of Walloon Belgium. Despite a long Jacobin tradition, a new history of France, cognizant of regional stresses, might take the title of an English novel, North and South. Probably the problème du Nord has now been diluted into a great sense of identity with Brussels and the EEC, a system which has brought the Nord enormous advantages. But, in the past, it did exist in the form of a clutter of regional attitudes and prejudices of which I had direct experience, in 1944/45, in the course of a year spent in Roubaix (I was there too for VE Day). Both Lille and Roubaix have their own anthems, now appropriate mainly to football occasions (the former, ‘Le Petit Quinquin’, the latter the more obvious ‘Roubaix, Roubaix’), which were sung in unison on the trains that took the young Roubaisiens and Roubaisiennes off to forced labour in the Ardennes in the spring of 1915. What town can do better than have its own municipal anthem!