… Le bonhomme a une culotte courte dont sortent des cuisses maigres et des jambes verdâtres de vieux monsieur. Ses genoux polis, émergeant de gros bas de laine, ont quelque-chose de faible et de fatigué qui ne va pas avec l’aspect martial du reste …12
… Une musique défilait, jouant les Allobroges de la façon la plus martiale. Derrière la clique, des civils coiffés de bérets, bardés de croix et surmontés d’un drapeau tricolore large comme une voile de brigantine, marchaient au pas. Les badauds se découvrirent …13
(Jean Dutourd, Au Bon Beurre)
In his study, Les Collaborateurs, the French historian Pascal Ory makes a very valuable point on the need on the part of the occupants, but recently installed and still in the process of setting up house for what looked like a long, comfortable and enjoyable stay, to reassure their perhaps unwilling, certainly surprised and bewildered hosts, the occupés, through a sense of continuity, however artificial and deliberately misleading that sense may have been. The main thing was to convince middle-of-the-road opinion – the timorous, the peaceable, the unadventurous, those always concerned above all to keep out of trouble and to avert their gaze from those who might be in trouble – that, for all essentials, life was much the same as it had been, and that all the old, reassuring landmarks were still in place.
It was a clever gambit, for instance, to have ensured that the Nouvelle Revue Française should continue to appear, under its familiar red, black and white cover, with contributions by most of the big names of the Paris literary scene, with the same publisher, and under the editorship of Drieu la Rochelle, who, in thus supplying the appearance of continuity and lending his celebrated name to a prestigious publication, rendered the Germans a signal service. It was even more imaginative to have revived the very fashionable Comoedia, the favourite review of le Tout-Paris, after an eclipse of six years. Not just back to 1939, but back to 1936, but a 1936 that contained no alarming hint of the Front Populaire. The implication of the reappearance of Comoedia, also in its familiar cover, this time a glossy yellow, in the autumn of 1940 was that social life and entertainment, perhaps momentarily disturbed by the ‘phoney war’, would be resumed on a peacetime scale, even on a more ambitious scale than in peacetime.
Equally, L’Oeuvre, from its letterpress, looks exactly like the pre-1939 newspaper, it still bears the name of its founder, Gustave Théry, and its editor, Jean Piot, though the contents are now rather different, and the famous column on the third page, a daily exercise in the use of the French conditional (‘le Maréchal Goering serait sur le point de donner sa démission’, ‘… Dans une réunion de gauleiters, Hitler aurait déclaré …’, ‘… L’Allemagne serait sur le point de manquer des matières premières les plus essentielles à son effort …’) of the supposedly well-informed Geneviève Tabouis, had gone. The conditional was in any case little suited to a situation when there could be no doubt about the present and little doubt about the immediate future, and when the immediate and shattering past belonged to a passé défini. The guessing game was over, la pythonisse was momentarily out of business. L’Oeuvre was still sufficiently like the prewar daily to have much the same appeal to a largely anticlerical, pacifist and rather naggingly disrespectful readership consisting largely of schoolteachers; and the groups, so often identical, were to be among the earliest and most enthusiastic adherents to the various brands of Parisian collaboration. L’Oeuvre continued to bang away at its traditional têtes de turc – generals, képis à feuilles de chêne, académiciens à bicornes, priests with shovel hats, cigar-smoking capitalists – in the equally familiar column of Georges de la Fouchardière; and to these could now be added the more clerical exponents of the New Moral Order emanating, in waves of unction, from Vichy. The paper even gained a certain number of new recruits from among the more pacifist ranks of the Canard enchaîné. At the same time, a very different clientèle could find reassurance in the reappearance, in its familiar dowdiness, of L’Illustration. Had the underground leadership of the French Communist party had its way, another clientèle might have had its needs supplied with the official reappearance of L’Humanité. The Germans had been approached, in August 1940, with that in mind. But, after some hesitation, they quietly shelved the proposal.
It is not just a matter of convincing people that life in defeat and dishonour is not dramatically different from life before defeat and dishonour; it is also a matter of disguising the more brutal facts of occupation and exploitation, repression, and lack of liberty. Thus there is a double face to occupation, perhaps even more in Paris than in Vichy: the ultracollaborationists preach the New Order, and, with abject eagerness and cruel joy, scream for vengeance, both on the personnel of the previous régime and on specifically designated groups such as Jews and Freemasons. But old, familiar institutions survive, the calendar of la rentrée, rather to the disappointment of Guéhenno, is much as it had always been, at least in Paris, where continuity matters most, and where no schools had been destroyed or requisitioned by the Germans. No stations, no boulevards, no streets are renamed, though one or two statues do disappear, the school term starts on time, the old textbooks are still in use, even though certain pupils gradually fall out, in the discreet, almost painless manner described a bit later, and in the context of Lyon, by Georgette Elgey, in her schoolgirl diary, La Fenêtre Ouverte. Perhaps the hysteria of Céline’s style is stepped up a little bit; but the general tone of hate, spite, abjection, and, above all, palpable lack of talent links the press of collaboration with that of the prewar extreme right. The only difference is that calls for vengeance against named individuals may now be more than a mere literary exercise in nastiness.
Perhaps, indeed, things are very much as they had always been for a great many ordinary people, and defeat, its face once recognized, its magnitude taken in, might even be an object of relief. Certainly it would seem, once the dust had settled on those two terrible summer months of 1940, that the world had not come to an end, and that, indeed, the physical environment, especially that of Paris, had remained intact and recognizable. It was no doubt a bit of a shock at first to take in the sudden presence of German soldiers on the café terraces; but these could no doubt be assimilated, and so dismissed, as a new breed of tourists – in uniform, it is true, but with cameras slung over their shoulders, and certainly fair game for the Pigalle touts and for the vendors of dirty postcards. By all accounts, the new military tourists behaved quite well, did not smash the place up, did not commit the sort of excesses that had often brought the BEF a bad name in the towns of the Northeast.
By September, more and more people were starting to reappear in the occupied capital. The editors and the staff of the dailies were the first on the road back north, followed, soon, by most of the leading Paris publishers, drawn back as much by habit as by the belief that, barring a cataclysm far worse than a total military collapse and an unprecedented national humiliation, books simply could not be published from provincial towns (and, indeed, through the Vichy period, very few were). The police, on the orders of M. Langeron, had never left, had stayed put, in order to make contact with the German military authorities. Theatres and cinemas were quick to reopen – nightclubs probably never closed – ready to serve the needs of the new uniformed tourists.
It was with a sentiment of profound relief, of homecoming, that more and more Parisians followed, so that, by the autumn, once the bits and pieces had been collected and reassembled in familiar patterns, people could once more settle down to family life and the family routine, not just in the Vichy zone, but also in the Paris region. If Jacques Chardonne, from the safety of the Charente, could welcome German victory and the rapidity of national collapse with the rather abject phrase: ‘Barbezieux n’a pas voulu la guerre’ (what town had in fact welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939 in France, or, indeed, in Britain?), it was a sentiment that could be expressed, with even more conviction, in Paris, thus preserved intact for the future of European civilization. One would simply have to manage without the absent prisoners of war; indeed, it was a patriotic duty to manage without them, so that things could get back to normal. Parisians seem to have adjusted themselves without too much difficulty to carrying on short-handed. Perhaps it was as much a matter of difference of location as of basic selfishness. East Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg were a very long way from Paris, and though those in these distant stalags might find their thoughts returning to the familiar movement and bustle of la rentrée and to the light of early October in the Ile-de-France, those on the spot could hardly place themselves even in imagination in an alien topography of fir, silver birch, scattered lakes, marshland and sand. From such personal accounts as have survived, what seems to have been the greatest preoccupation of the prisoners was the growing conviction that, back in Paris, they were becoming forgotten, that life was going on without them, and that their places had been taken even in bed.
Such a sentiment of relief, both physical and moral, derived both from the resumption of normal family life by the imperative calendar of the French educational system, and from the discovery that outwardly Paris had not changed, was indeed intact, resulted in a sense of apparent continuity and was something that the Germans had every reason to encourage, and that any intelligent occupants in similar circumstances would encourage. Let Paris run itself. The prefect of police was in place, the agents had never left, the pompiers and the boueux were back, the restaurants had reopened, just as if la rentrée de 40 had been like any other rentrée, and both Parisians and Germans could now settle down to all the familiar pleasures and excitements of October, no doubt even with the oyster stalls back in place. It was in September/October that Montherlant published his hymn of praise to the virile German army, to the virile young German tankistes. Let France prostrate herself to her proud conqueror, let Paris be the first to be raped by the travellers from the East.
And thus one can readily appreciate that one of the broader, gently sloping channels leading first to the mental acceptance of defeat and humiliation, of the fait accompli, then to semicollaboration, and eventually to full-scale collaboration, might start off from a prewar position of pacifism, of opposition to certain types of weapons. But another channel might spring from indifference to public issues and from a desperate attachment to privacy. Most people want to be reassured, and will indeed cling to reassurance all the more desperately in the face of apparent disaster. The first requirement of any occupant is to supply that reassurance; no matter what is to come later, or even what is the price to be paid from now onwards, in the form of crippling indemnities, there is always plenty of time for the revelation of such unpleasantnesses. Meanwhile, what a tremendous relief to be invited, politely and firmly, to carry on as before, under the wonderfully welcome programme of ‘business as usual’! One could hardly have hoped for anything better.
Hence the posters of the correct German soldiers lifting up little French children. The setting up of an occupation regime is a matter that goes on behind temporary screens, rather like those on a building site. Even later, the torture places and the killing sites are discreetly placed; they do not advertise themselves with brass plates or in neon lights, lurking, on the contrary, behind meaningless initials sprouting in a thick foliage of Ks, Ws and Zs. No doubt, during these years, most people would have tended to avoid the avenue Foch or the rue Lauriston, or, if they had to take those routes, to look the other way until one was past the danger spot. Indeed, many people seem to have avoided even mentioning such addresses, as if, like evoking Monfaucon, they would bring bad luck. And it was some time before the Germans started covering the walls of Paris with the black and red posters of executions. In 1942 and in 1943, the Parisian Jews destined for the death camps were taken away to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and to Drancy in the familiar green buses of everyday usage, as if this too were but a routine journey on one of the usual routes; indeed, some of the poor children thus transported may have been under the impression that the journey would end at the Bon Marché or the Printemps, though their parents would have known better. The decision to use such transport seems, on the part of the prefecture of police and the prefecture of the Seine, like some hideous reminder of les taxis de la Marne of the summer of 1914. More likely, it was not deliberate, the buses simply being the only form of mass transport available. But the very familiarity of the means employed adds to the horror of the journey.
Of course, in the Nord, people would not have been fooled by this sort of thing, for they had been through the experience before and they were only too aware of a continuity of a very different kind, that of enemy exactions and brutalities, insensitivity, and that, too, of widespread physical destruction. But the Germans were not concerned to reassure people who knew what it was all about. The Parisians were new to the game. The white barriers must have come as a bit of a shock at first, forcing pedestrians to abandon familiar itineraries or to cross over to the other side of the street. But the agents de police looked much the same and wore familiar uniforms, like those British bobbies in the Channel Islands. There was a great chasm between 1939 and 1940; but it is in the nature of humble, comfort-loving and prudent people to avert their eyes from chasms, and to cling to the familiar calendar as a source of private strength. For some people, indeed, the world really did come to a sudden end in May/June 1940 – plenty of soldiers were killed, many civilians perished on the roads or in urban bombardments, and prisoners of war would have months, even years, to reflect daily on the gulf between freedom and captivity, between a private existence and the promiscuity of the prison camp. But here was Paris, as beautiful as ever, in its autumn glory, its gardens full of happy children, its monuments being admired by German soldiers, its lycées and schools disgorging their usual noisy, satchelled battalions late in the afternoon. No, the world had not come to an end; and life was still there to be lived.
Another reaction would be to seek refuge in the privacy of work and memory. The occupation years were years of stocktaking for many people, who turned to their diaries for comfort and who plunged themselves into academic work, completing their theses huddling in cold rooms. Nineteen forty-two and 1943 witnessed some celebrated soutenances both at the Sorbonne and in provincial universities. This applied as much to history as to medicine or law. To some extent at least, outside realities could be shut out, and many people must have followed the example of Proust in contriving for themselves cork-lined rooms. Indeed, some people even had constructed rooms within rooms, not so much in order to surround themselves in a double envelope of privacy as to conserve what little heat was available during the bitter winters of occupation.
For those who did venture out, or who had to venture out, what could be more reassuring than seeing all – or nearly all – the familiar names, and discovering that entertainment and leisure, social life, and literary and cultural occasions were being provided for as before, even if they had to end in the evening earlier than usual? The most valuable form of propaganda is the acte de présence, the reassurance of a daily roll call of neighbourhood, of sociability, and of the annual smart society calendar: the same postman delivers the same papers and reviews, in the same covers, though with subtly different contents. Most of the neighbours are now back from what has turned out in the end to have been an unusually prolonged and, indeed, unusual, holiday. There are the same faces at the local street market, though the market itself already has rather less to supply. Even the university term gets off at much the usual date – something that has never happened since 1968; and the well-known professors are back in their amphithéâtres. The intellectual establishment is more or less au complet. All that is being asked of most of the famous names is simply to be cited, to be noted down in the press: Gide, Sartre, MacOrlan, Aymé, Cocteau, Colette, Queneau, Simenon, all find their way into the pages of familiar reviews, even if they do not write anything that can be interpreted as political, as expressing an adherence to the new order of things. That is something that can be left to more committed writers and artists. All that is demanded of the great names is to be there, and to be seen to be there. Acte de présence.
Of course some writers, both living and dead, were misused. Some unpublished stories of Eugène Dabit, who had died in 1936, were reproduced in the collaborationist review, Germinal, in 1943, despite the protests of his widow. The dead could be annexed to the New Order, as well as the living, and the presence – hardly surprising – of the son of Péguy on an editorial board of a Parisian review might be seen as enlisting the pseudopeasant and the pilgrim to Chartres in the cause.
Literature, at least as viewed from Paris, or, for that matter, from the Guéret of Jouhandeau, from the Bordeaux of Mauriac, could offer at least the illusion of a continuity that tended to disguise the realities of national defeat and exploitation at the hands of a ruthless foreign power motivated by a detestable ideology. But, as Pascal Ory argues so convincingly, there was much more political continuity between 1934 or 1936 and the années noires than has generally been realized by historians, who were concerned to see 1940 as a break in French political narrative. There was a pétainisme before Vichy – Pétain himself had been a defeatist as early as 1917 – and, like so many old men who were childless, he had long been obsessed with what he saw as the related problems of youth, education and family. A new, more politically aware Pétain had come on the scene in about 1934, and the Marshal had acquired some highly dubious friends during his time as ambassador to Spain just before the outbreak of war. Neither Pétain nor pétainisme was born overnight. Other strands of collaborationism can be traced back to the various ex-service associations that grew up after the First World War; others again date from 6th and 12th February 1934, from the experience of the Front Populaire and of the Spanish Civil War; others from attitudes to Munich. France had lived in what seemed like an atmosphere of moral civil war and of approaching real civil war at least from 1934. The putschists of the 6 février were later to turn up either in Vichy or in Paris – more often, first in Vichy, then in Paris. Most of those who had opted for Franco found their way early on to the Hôtel du Parc. The group that formed up round Abetz and Luchaire had long been associated with les amitiés franco-allemandes or with organizations deriving from the League of Nations (in which Luchaire had been a high-ranking official in the 1920s).
Among the first wave of vichyssois, there was a considerable contingent of maurrassiens. The anti-Semites of 1940 had been virulently anti-Semitic since 1924, some even longer; Drumont’s widow was even enlisted in the occupation period in order to give anti-Semitism a more distant historical reference. Laval had been a defeatist in 1917 and had sought an alliance with Mussolini in 1935. Doriot had started on his sweaty journey towards the PPF and the SS as early as 1933; Déat, who had talked and written high-flown philosophical nonsense ever since his schooldays, had discovered in himself all the marks of a leader as early as 1934 and had been embittered by his inability to persuade others of his merits in this respect.
Indeed, in the second half of the thirties, just as there had existed a number of competing youth movements, not all of them composed of youths, unless it were in the sense that la jeunesse réside dans le coeur, there had arisen something of a plethora of apprentis-dictateurs and self-proclaimed saviours, a rivalry which split French fascism already into a number of competing splinter groups. Small clubs composed of technocrats had formed secret societies and conspiracies, for the purpose of subverting parliamentary democracy under the impact of the Stavisky affair, which had also caused the ruin of l’inspecteur Bonny, so that 1940 found him unemployed, available and ready to serve in the newly formed French Gestapo of the rue Lauriston. Even Petiot appears to have had several murders to his name, in the Auxerre region, before he had set up shop in the quartier Saint-Lazare and in the rue Lesueur; but these had been young peasant girls, including a female domestic. Jews were a new departure, resulting from the favourable opportunities offered by the chain of escape running from Antwerp, through Paris, to the Spanish frontier. And here too there is an obvious line of continuity from Landru to the mad doctor. The sieur de Gambais had specialized in elderly widows who were refugees from the occupied departments of the Northeast and who thus would not have any relatives close by to ask awkward questions. Both Landru and Petiot took advantage of the exceptional circumstances offered by a wartime situation to carry out, for a time with impunity, their private campaigns of extermination. Petiot, in the course of his trial, was even to refer to his ingenious predecessor. He may also have found inspiration in the example set by Eugène Weidmann, who killed a dozen people in the Paris region in the course of 1937, l’année Expo. A number of the killers recruited into the Milice had been killers, either on their own account, or in the service of OVRA, or in gangs operating in Marseille, throughout the second half of the thirties.
Perhaps such continuity should be sought both still further back and in regional and collective terms. Montherlant, Brasillach and Déat all had doting mothers who believed in their sons’ genius, spoilt the little horrors, and indulged their cruellest fantasies. Brasillach constructed for himself a spurious Catalan ancestry and throughout his adolescence lived in a fantasy world of medieval troubadours. He was lonely and moody. Montherlant likewise turned to a self-invented Spain, indulging in dreams of aristocratic derring-do. All three seem to have discovered the artistic beauty of cruelty in adolescence, Déat even managing to induce one of his schoolfellows to commit suicide, in a sort of Gidean acte gratuit. All three could be described as adolescent nihilists of the right; at the same time, incapable of fully coming to terms with an adult world, they tended to cling to the inventions of a perverted childhood. Montherlant and Brasillach shared a delight in bullfighting and an obsession with virility. Believing that the English considered bullfighting a cruel and disgusting sport, they drew from this assumption – one very much to our credit, even if undeserved – a lasting anglophobia, directed, as in the case of de Maupassant’s Miss Harriet, against the long-toothed Misses. Like Peyrefitte, another spoilt and very depraved boy, who majored in collaboration as a result of his active pederasty, they were both from the Southwest. Giono was from the Southeast. Darnand had spent most of his life in Nice, recruiting there the hard core of his killers. There were a great many southerners in the ranks of ultracollaborationism; most of them came from Catholic backgrounds, none was a Protestant. There were a great many Corsicans and North Africans among the killers; some of the latter were to graduate in the fifties to positions in the FLN in the Paris region.
Many were the sort of simple souls who were ready to invest in overall solutions and all-embracing definitions. Quite a few had early succumbed, in the thirties, to the pseudoscientific quackeries of eugenics and neopositivist biology of the type promoted so successfully by Dr. Alexis Carrel. Their vocabulary litanizes l’élan vital, their papers and reviews favour ‘dynamic’ and imperative titles such as L’Elan, they have a fondness for simple verbs of movement and action or of concrete engineering – agir, construire, refaire, and repartir – their treatises grope blindly towards simplistic solutions presented in messy imprecision. It is the journey that matters, getting there, rather than what is at the end of the road, because movement is the supreme, liberating action.
Energy is the thing, so there is a repetition of the vocabulary of mountain climbing: pic, jalon, posons de nouveaux jalons. And everything is new: ancien smells of the Third Republic; vieux and vieille hint at decay and corruption, doubt and indifference. Their speeches harp on virility (‘élites viriles et scientifiques’) and vitality (‘… un univers tout physique, où triomphe une vitalité brute …’, ‘… un lyrisme de l’énergie vitale …’). A strange choice of words for movements mostly concerned with death.
Their speeches echo ‘energy’, both human and scientific, ‘loyalty’, ‘fidelity’, both given solemn illustration by elaborate oath taking; and their programmes bear such energizing, and ultimately meaningless, titles as Vouloir. The adjectives most favoured are net, sain, propre, franc, hardi; their recruits, looking straight ahead towards a golden future yet to be revealed (and which will end up in the flooded tunnels of the Berlin subway) ont le regard hardi, les yeux clairs. All this implies a great deal of washing, preferably stripped to the waist, in freezing water. Fascism constantly emphasizes physical cleanliness and rippling muscles. The enemies of fascism are not only degenerate, but weak and, presumably, unwashed. It is a language of infinitives and of short, sharp adjectives borrowed as much from boy scoutism and from the on-your-toes literature of the Auberges de la Jeunesse (an ambience originally very Front Populaire, but easily transformed into healthy, open-air collectivism, former ajistes being numerous in all the youth movements of the Paris groups) as from the presbytère and the parish bulletin.
Perhaps, in the Vichy zone, there is rather more stress on moral qualities; but both sides agree in favouring cleanliness as a symbol of renewal and of the break with a dirty past: clean pants, clean bottoms, clean white socks, clean necks, scrubbed faces, clipped hair, chins up, the proud béret, the ideal covering for the French head, le regard en avant, and forward – no matter whither, but forward. It is also a vocabulary that puts much stress on leadership – there are Grands – and that makes reiterative use of the word cadre. In short, a language of ‘doing’ and ‘being’ rather than of ‘thinking’; and ‘doing’ and ‘being’ in groups. How, one wonders, did the lonely, narcissistic, self-centred Drieu ever get into such a sweaty (but honest sweat, of course, the fruit of effort) collective galère? Perhaps with him, as no doubt with other intellectuals, it was all an exercise in fantasy, because it was in such marked contrast to the realities of their sybaritical daily manner of life.
So much of all this emphasis on ‘doing’ seems to echo a desperate need to escape from boredom and self-hatred. It is certainly pretty hard work reading this sort of stuff, though it is no worse than being subjected to long passages of equally ‘joyful’, equally ‘energizing’ Soviet uplift of exactly the same period, as if in illustration of the common theme of the two immense and rival pavilions of the 1937 Expo: Soviet youth, male and female and equally muscle-bound, hurling invisible javelins at Nazi youth, male and female and equally muscle-bound and similarly engaged. At the time, the Canard had joked about the similarity. The paper did not know what France would be in for three years later. Nothing is more revealing of the total indigence of fascism and collaborationism than a language constructed for cretins and scoutmasters.
A few years in a medical school or in the French navy could also offer a promising grounding in this or that form of Paris collaborationism. The cult of violence, apparently as appealing to former pacifists as to lifelong truands, could explain the ready transition from militancy in the ranks of the PCF to militancy in those of the PPF. In both, the faithful would have grown hoarse shouting simple slogans of hate; it was merely a matter of barking different words, it was still barking. Apprentis-fascistes were more likely to be practising Catholics than practising Protestants. Anglophobia could also be a common starting point, drawing recruits as much from the extreme left, from munichois pacifists and defeatists anxious to avoid war at any price, as from the old, italophil, fascist right. (The same was true – though, to a lesser degree – of americanophobia. It was typical of the confused thinking and inverted standards of these generally mediocre people, still set in an already irrelevant historical context, that they thought Britain still a much greater potential threat to French interests and ambitions than the United States; in this respect, Duhamel and Céline had been precursors, and it was gaullisme that would provide the new wave of americanophobes.) An almost congenital anglophobia could mobilize such enthusiastic adherents to the New European Order as admirals Platon and Auphan, the naval writer Paul Chack, the journalist Georges Blond, the author of the spiteful and childish L’Angleterre en guerre (Blond was later to write an enthusiastic account of D Day and the Normandy campaign, having adjusted himself to a new set of circumstances that had seemed highly unlikely in 1940), Jean Hérold-Paquis, Henri Béraud, and, any time between August 1939 and June 1941, Jacques Duclos, Marcel Cachin (who, in August 1940, called on the workers of Paris and its suburbs to fraternize with the German soldiers) and the other leaders of the clandestine Communist party. The England that they all so resolutely hated and so stridently denounced was a pretty amazing place, a land inhabited by T. E. Lawrence (apparently granted the gift of everlasting life), and run by a semioccult cavalerie de Saint-Georges that operated through a European network of Masonic lodges.
Of this mixed and very confused group, only Platon and one other French admiral had ever crossed the Channel. The two had stayed for some days, in June/July 1940, at the Randolph Hotel, Oxford, as guests of the British government; they had also been granted dining rights at All Souls College, the fellows of which they had endeavoured to persuade of the urgent need for Britain to conclude an honourable peace with a victorious Reich, while there was still time and while Hitler was willing to offer generous terms. Their advice had not been appreciated.
Anglophobia undoubtedly drew sustenance from the events of the summer of 1940. The French felt, not unreasonably, that we had let them down – a member of the Anglo-French Purchasing Commission, set up in London at the outbreak of war, himself an almost professional anglophil, wrote me a furiously anti-English letter in June 1940 on the subject of the young men whom he could see, from his office, exercising their dogs in St. James’s Park, while the young men of France bled to death because Britain had denied them air cover, carried out Dunkirk and left the French on the beaches. (He had recovered his anglophilia when I met him by chance in the Paris métro in October 1944.) But perhaps a more important reason for anglophobia in 1940 was that the British had had the presumption not to have heeded the admirals’ no doubt well-meaning advice and had gone on fighting after the French had opted for an armistice, a decision on our part that was an implicit condemnation of Vichy.
This was Britain’s real crime, yet at the same time one that could not be openly stated. It was one that could unite in common hostility to the inconvenient, impossible and obstinate island such disparate elements as the French admirals and the officer corps of la Royale, nurtured in anglophobia from generation to generation, Paris ultracollaborationists, former pacifists, ambitious professional ‘Europeans’, Catholic admirers of Franco, anti-Semites and anti-Protestants and members of the Communist party. The very existence of Vichy and all the Paris forms of collaboration based their most convincing arguments on the assumption, shared by the majority of the French, and indeed by world opinion, that the war was all but over in the summer of 1940, and that it only remained now for Germany to get on with the constructive work of laying down the details of the New European Order, an Order in which France, by a display of willingness and good behaviour, could aspire at least to a subsidiary rôle. But if the war were to continue, if only for a few more months or another year, the bargain concluded in the summer of 1940 between Vichy and the Germans would have lost most of its value. The war had to come to a halt there and then, in order to justify Vichy’s betrayal and to render complete the sense of relief felt by Parisian pacifists and nazis. Hence Jean Hérold-Paquis’s cries of rage against a Britain that had to be destroyed, because Britain now remained the one obstacle to a German peace, was getting in the way, and was upsetting a timetable on which both the early Vichyssois and the Paris collaborationists had been counting. Britain’s continued resistance threw all such long-lasting schemes completely out of joint, even lending to the future an inappropriate, annoying uncertainty. The French defeat had been so complete that it was inconceivable that it could not have been complete for Britain too. In the summer of 1940, a great many patriotic Frenchmen may have followed a similar line of argument. A year later, by June 1941, the situation had changed radically. Now, with Britain allied to the Soviet Union, both Vichy and the Paris groups could find a new moral argument for anglophobia, while the Communists might have been converted to a grudging admission that Britain had been right all the time and that the war which she had persisted in carrying on was indeed one directed against fascism. But, already in the summer of 1940, the decision taken by the British government to carry on the war alone, or with such allies as could be gathered together in Britain or overseas, had undermined the very raison d’être of Vichy, placing the southern government in the same invidious position as that adopted by Leopold III, the self-styled roi prisonnier, who had likewise calculated on the totality and permanence of German victory.
In the twenties, there had been more Latin fascists; even in the thirties the Italians had lavished more money on the venal right-wing Paris press – Le Matin, Le Merle blanc, Le Jour, L’Ami du peuple, and so on – than had the Germans, latecomers in this respect. But in the second half of the thirties, the maurrassien-type italophils were giving way to more Germanic fascists, especially among the very young. Hitler’s Germany seemed the land of limitless energy, the regime of the future. Hitlerism also had a strong appeal to pederasts, practising or concealed, though many of these, once Vichy had been set up, gravitated towards movements such as les Chantiers de la Jeunesse, Jeunes de France, and so on. Homosexuals as a group had a built-in interest in a change of regime, though Paris offered them a more favourable climate than the clerical espionage of Vichy’s New Moral Order.
Another way to define the mentality of the collaborationist would be to enumerate what he lacked, for, of necessity, he must have been either an amputated or an uncompleted individual. Goodness, sympathy, love, charity, compassion and doubt would be among the missing parts. Intelligence would rarely be there, save in a warped and twisted form. Pleasure – simple pleasure, based on common observation, on the movement of the crowd, or on the speckled skies of the Ile-de-France – would have been left out, pleasure being confined to boisterous collective occasions, marching songs, vast fascist family gatherings, the right-wing equivalent of the annual September Fête de l’Huma, and offering much the same emotional appeal. There would be no place at all for laughter, save in a cruel, mocking form at caricatures of Jews, Bolsheviks, and Anglo-Saxons. The enjoyment of one’s own company would have been a crippling disqualification, though it failed to disqualify the introverted Drieu and the narcissistic Brasillach and the silly, pretentious literary gamin, Cocteau, drawn to collaborationism as a form of épater le bourgeois. As Brasillach was to urge, perhaps in an effort to convince himself and to escape from the bitter loneliness of his own private fantasies, fascism was about being together, just like Communism. So loners should not apply to either.
Delight in female company, for its own sake, would be a serious disadvantage, for a ‘virile’ antifeminism was the mark of the hero, of le Chef, and Costals was as true, as integral a fascist as his creator, Montherlant. Drieu might be allowed the benefit of the doubt, for he had many lady friends, though he treated them all abominably. The rôle of women was to be the object of masculine conquest and to provide le repos de guerrier. Montherlant went even further, assigning to France a feminine rôle in a sexual relationship with a triumphant and virile Germany: a marriage that was a recurrent theme in collaborationist literature, and that had its parallel in the proposed alliance between a purely rural France and a highly industrialized Germany – the marriage of Ceres and Vulcan, another pipe dream of the Paris collaborationist press, but one that also had an increasing ring of truth as the occupying authorities set about pillaging France of her resources in food and drink. Indeed, Vulcan could be seen any day, attablé, in any of the smarter Paris restaurants, an immense napkin under his chin. A few favoured Parisians might even be invited to his table, to take part in this Franco-German communion.
In short, collaborationists were, by definition, by the mere fact of their choice, very nasty people; it was their sheer nastiness that had got them there, to the end of the journey, though they might combine nastiness and a taste for gratuitous cruelty with stupidity, a hatred of the truth, and an ability to succumb to lies and to slogans, if repeated enough. Some collaborationists were quite clever, though one should not make too much of the cleverness of people who had backed the wrong horse (in the case of Drieu, there seems to have been a positive exultation in having done just that; in that of Laval, it would have been more a matter of peasant obstinacy, a reluctance to admit that he had made a most appalling mistake). Others were stupid, muddled, misguided; a few may even have been victims of circumstances, of time, place and opportunity. It might have been just a matter of having been in Paris, rather than, let us say, in Lyon or Toulouse, in the autumn and winter of 1940 (and a great many early gaullistes owed their recruitment into the new movement to the fact that they had happened to have been already in London in June/July 1940). Often there is only a very thin line between commitment to collaborationism, to resistance, or to gaullisme; one should not exclude the elements of luck and of chance, especially in the lottery of wartime that puts a special premium on unpredictability and that may hand out, with equally blind impartiality, the winning number or the tarot card of death.
There is at least some satisfaction in the fact that so many of them got what they wanted: death. For the ultimate realization of fascism and Nazism, the one thing that they are good at, is death. In the midst of so much confused thinking, the one matter on which the French fascists displayed some lucidity, some awareness of reality, is when they described themselves as revolutionaries. Here indeed they could commune with the holy band of the saints and martyrs, of Saint-Just and the communards, of Robespierre and Babeuf, of Delescluze and Rigault. Indeed, we find both Germinal and Drieu drawing just such parallels, the latter, in his last work, evoking a reconciliation between Saint-Just and Charlotte Corday, and envisaging an eventual alliance between fascism and Communism. Indeed, why not? The cult of death has had many devotees in many places. After all, the last stage of commitment would be to be among the killers of the Milice, or fighting in the Berlin subway, in May 1945, alongside fifteen-year-old members of the Hitlerjugend. Drieu, always a loner, much attached to his privacy, and perhaps therefore not a real fascist but rather an aesthete who toyed with the dark beauties of fascism, took his own life, also in 1945.
These then were the purs, the fascists à part entière, who travelled the whole distance, whether to Sigmaringen or to Berlin, and who even seem to have taken a sort of perverted pride in the totality of their commitment, in the uniqueness of an experience that set them aside from the rest of the community, as self-appointed exclus, people who had burnt their boats, and for whom there could be no way back, only a way forward, to ultimate destruction, mercenaries in the armies of the night, still fighting for a regime that was already in an advanced stage of disintegration and in a cause that had totally failed. The awareness of their rejection seems to have strengthened their resolve to go on to the end, as if in fidelity to themselves and to illustrate the purity of their fanaticism. To have pulled out, in 1944 or 1945, would not merely have been a disavowal of everything that they had stood for since 1940, or even earlier; it would also have been an admission that the Third Reich did not represent the golden and joyous future, and that the Nuremberg rallies would end, not in a vast vista of architectural marvels, but on a scene of total destruction; and these totalitarians, like their Stalinist counterparts, had always been futurists. ‘England shall be destroyed, like Carthage,’ screamed Jean Hérold-Paquis, night after night, on Radio Paris. England had not been destroyed, or at least not in the manner that he had so joyously evoked, and Paquis had been shot.
Déat, on the other hand, accompanied by his wife Hélène, managed to get across the Alps, to be taken in by a monastery in the Dolomites. Thence he had made his discreet way to Turin, where he was to live a further twelve or thirteen years, undetected by the Liberation Questura, teaching French to the sons and daughters of pious Catholic families. One only hopes that the French he taught was not of the obscure, tangled and Germanic kind that had characterized his so-called philosophical writings and his vapid political manifestoes. At least, there is a fitting artistry in this transformation of the would-be Chef of the parti unique that never was – and, indeed, as far as the Paris Germans were concerned, never could be, because they were determined throughout that French political power should be dispersed over a wide spectrum of rival movements – into the bearded Monsieur Dubois, professeur de français, recommended from one family to another. For Déat was a normalien type, the lower-middle-class scholarship boy who had fought his way up through the French educational system, and who had excelled in that perverse and muddy discipline, la philo. Déat, who owed everything to a Third Republic that he set out, for once quite successfully, to subvert, should never have left the classroom in the first place; now he was back in it. He had not been made for a world of action, agir was not the right word for this verbose, confused and turgid hack-philosopher; discourir, enseigner – pointing the pedagogic finger – were verbs that would have suited him better. He had hardly been a success as a fascist; as a collaborationist, he had carried little weight, the Germans merely tolerating him and his movement, using them as counterweights to the much more formidable Doriot and his PPF, a movement that had some genuine populist undertones. There was nothing populist about Déat, who had never felt at ease when confronted with a crowd. Now, in his Turin obscurity, this failed collaborationist and failed politician was granted the rare grace of retirement, was allowed to grow old – he died in his sixties – and old age is something that is generally denied, perhaps mercifully, to a committed fascist, for a true fascist must remain eternally young, fascism representing the forward march of virile youth, as they stride out shoulder to shoulder before clusters of flags blowing in the wind. It is just possible that, in this process of quiet, unruffled ageing, something of his fascism may have slipped away from him; it is even possible that the conversion of this convinced anticlerical, who had repeatedly condemned Christianity, along with most of his companions and rivals of the Paris group, as the religion of the weak and the defeated, the resigned and the slavish, may have been sincere, and that he had repented. One would like to think so, though the spectacle of a repentant fascist seems pretty improbable. He had certainly been very lucky. Whether he complained of his fate we do not know. What his widow has since complained of is the lack of interest shown, by subsequent generations, in her husband’s political career. And so it was with excitement and a touching eagerness that she received the visit of a young English researcher, Dr. Clive Youlden, concerned to rescue Marcel Déat from obscurity.
Céline was also very lucky; but when the Danes put him in prison, he complained bitterly; he had previously complained about the remaining Hitlerites, and when de Gaulle pardoned him, he went on complaining. What Degrelle did with himself in Franco’s Spain, we do not know. What is certain is that ‘Rex’ must have lost his virile good looks years ago, putting on weight, acquiring an un-Mussolinian chin, even if he managed to retain, in exile, the warmth, inventiveness and crudity of his Walloon patois, his most convincing passport to a fascist sort of populism which had earned for him the early admiration of the equally crude Doriot.
Any anatomy of a fascist must, of necessity, be a composite one. For there are many approaches to that totalitarian goal, many incidents on the way, revelation can take many different forms, and there is no iron law that prevents a fascist from turning himself into a Communist, though the reverse process seems to have been rather commoner, especially in 1940/1. Fascism is always violent, indeed violence is its raison d’être, its alibi for an absence of any coherent doctrine. Yet collaborationism might spring initially from a horror of violence and from a rejection of war. There was a large contingent of lifelong pacifists in the ranks of Paris collaborationism, including such veteran campaigners as Félicien Challaye. So there could be a place for such people in the German system, at least in 1940, at a time when, as far as the Germans were concerned, the more pacifists there were in France, the better. They would show less tolerance of French pacifism after 1943; but that is to look ahead. Indeed, the Nazis had long taken an active interest in pacifist movements and declarations, especially in Denmark and in Britain, and conscientious objection, of course unthinkable in the Third Reich, was something to be encouraged among potential adversaries. As it turned out, the Germans were to become victims of their own propaganda, for, as Richard Griffiths has shown, they had greatly exaggerated the strength of the pacifist groups in Britain, convincing themselves that British opinion was totally hostile to the possibility of war, and that morale was so low that the country was like a rotten fruit, ready to fall to a determined aggressor.
In terms of individual commitment, too, there is no ready-made portrait of a fascist. The narcissistic and dandyish van Severen had little in common with the freebooting Staf de Clercq; van Severen had even come to accept the possibility of extending Verdinaso to include Walloons, while de Clercq remained in the stricter tradition of Flemish nationalism, treason and separatism. The very basic Degrelle is far removed from the conceited, cosmopolitan de Man, who, like many Belgians of the older generation, had been partly educated at German universities. Déat was the very opposite to Doriot. Bonnard was sui generis, illustrating his own extravagant form of fascism under his nickname of gestapette. Leopold III, certainly an apprenti fasciste, and anything but a constitutional monarch, had seen himself, in the summer of 1940, as a Belgian Pétain, a view, however, not shared by most of his subjects. Then there were the separatists among the national minorities. Members of the PNB, the pro-German Breton movement, closely linked to the PPF, reached fascism through anti-Parisian fanaticism, using the admirable opportunity afforded by the circumstances of occupation to mark out the ‘foreigners’, the mocos, that is to say Frenchmen, who had reached positions of influence in the peninsula. Both Breton and Flemish fascists tended to identify the hated democratic foe with southerners. For moco, read méridional. At the lower échelons, there are plenty of people who embraced fascism for what they could get out of it: power, a sense of self-importance, dressing up, loot, revenge, killing.
But each, at some stage, had made the choice, had opted for fascism and collaborationism, often for what looked like a going concern, the politics of the future, something certainly worth getting in on, and as soon as possible. (One indication of the firmness of collaborationist stances would be the speed with which one returned to a Paris left open to all manner of personal initiatives, a conquered city indeed, wide open not just to the conquerors, but to ingenious Frenchmen who, in the course of l’Exode, perhaps as early as mid-June, had realized that the empty capital was beckoning them and that no time was to be lost in getting back there, à contre-courant, before the population as a whole started flowing back.) For, in the summer and autumn of 1940, it would have been quite apparent to those back in Paris, or to those who had never left, that the Germans had a great deal to offer: money power, influence, free travel, lecture tours in the Reich, flattery, applause, agreeable social engagements, grand lunches and dinners, elaborate parties, access to editorial chairs, even the possibility, hitherto undreamt of, of publication. The opportunity would seem all the greater because Vichy had drained away most of the official organizations and higher échelons of a truncated French state. Here then was an unprecedented opportunity for the new men, the true revolutionaries. In this respect, early Paris collaborationism represented a vast new deal, in terms of jobs, money and influence. First come, first served. Commitment to collaborationism could be commanded quite as much by self-interest and conceit as by fanaticism. Probably, in most cases, it would have been a bit of both. The Germans, on their part, were keen to set up as soon as possible an alternative personnel that could be used to circumscribe Vichy, possibly even to replace it; so they would naturally most favour those who approached them first. All the ultracollaborationists were already in place and active by the autumn of 1940. With the implementation, in the Occupied Zone, of Vichy anti-Semitic legislation, collaboration would offer more solid inducements, in the form of the confiscated flats and property of leading Paris Jews.
Fascism and collaborationism are not diseases of the blood, nor are they hereditary, though, in Catholic or autocratic circles, it might have been quite possible to have been born with maurrasisme, a virus that had been spreading its ravages now for forty years, not merely in France, but also in Belgium, where it had provided the point of departure of both Degrelle and van Severen, and in French Canada, where it had been a powerful stimulus to Québecois neutralism and ultraclericalism. In the second generation, maurrasisme might develop into something even worse: from la France seule to l’Europe nouvelle. (The Paris collaborators would refer to la France seule derisively, but not inaccurately, as la Provence seule, though Maurras had in fact set up l’Action Française in Lyon. And, in any case, la France seule was hardly a programme for 1940, when France, far from being alone, found herself saddled with one powerful, and one ignoble, neighbour indeed sharing in her national territory.) Let us say that, given a certain family background and a certain regional upbringing, some might be more predisposed to the disease than others. There were other external influences, including age, class background, and the experience of the previous years. Those who had made a mess of their careers in the 1930s, and who had blamed anyone but themselves for the fact, those who had gone bankrupt, had been caught with their hand in the till, had been condemned for minor sexual offences, or had been involved in something disgraceful and had been found out would naturally welcome the opportunity to make a fresh start and to avenge themselves on a social system and on a political regime that, as they would see it, had let them down. Tiffauges, the resourceful hero of Le Roi des Aulnes, would have done well in the Paris of collaboration; as it was, he was spared that temptation by being taken off as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he readily acclimatized to an entirely new situation in a totally alien environment. There were no doubt armies of unknown Tiffauges hanging about outside the Majestic, or the Meurice, craning over the white barriers, pleading with the German sentinels to let them in, in the summer of 1940. Certainly a great many of these early recruits to Paris collaborationism possessed casiers judiciaires that had seen better days and that were far removed from virginity. But people like Déat, whose political career during the thirties had limped from failure to failure, from miscalculation to miscalculation, no doubt represented a more typical example of this form of ratisme.
Paris collaborationism, even at its prime, in 1940 and 1941, when it drew much strength from the likelihood of the war soon being over with the imposition of a German peace, represented a series of minority movements that involved only a small proportion of the population. In 1940 and 1941, it was unable to draw in large crowds, and meetings, however well publicized, seem to have been ill attended. Later, after 1942, any public meeting was likely to be ill attended, especially by young people, who stood in fear of being caught in a joint Franco-German police operation designed to net recalcitrant conscripts for the STO. Any exact statistics as to membership are impossible to come by, the collaborationist groups being already very secretive at the time, no doubt in order to conceal their pitiful resources and their lack of appeal, while membership lists, both for Paris and for other towns, have had a habit of disappearing from the records since the Liberation. But it seems certain that collaborationism represented a movement involving less than ten percent of the population of the capital. The appeal of Vichy, at least between the summer of 1940 and the spring of 1941, was much wider; but, after 1942, the divergence between the Parisian and the Vichy forms of collaborationism became less marked, with the leaders of the Parisian movements moving into official positions of power within the Etat Français, which was increasingly taken over by personalities such as Henriot and Darnand.
There seems to exist some sort of historical law, if indeed one believes in such things, as a consequence of which regimes that owe their existence to a combination of treason, sabotage and conspiracy (to the quick seizing of the opportunity presented, all at once, by a total military collapse, by the failure of military leadership, and by an unprecedented national humiliation) show an almost hysterical, querulous concern for the outward trappings and panoplies of nationalism. From the start, both Vichy and the German-controlled movements in Paris draped themselves in the French flag – later there was even an abortive légion tricolore – their numerous, and rival, youth organizations starting and closing the day with elaborate ceremonies centred on the raising or the lowering of the tricolore. Old emblems, such as Joan of Arc and Bayard, Sully and Henri IV were trundled out, to witness whether for the New Moral Order or for the New European Order. And great ingenuity and silliness were deployed in the invention, or the alleged reinvention, of new symbols of la francité, an ugly word that in pétainiste usage, seems to have owed something to Franco’s equally spurious and clumsy la hispanidad. As the stress on atonement and redemption became more abject, as the insistence on the renewing virtues of national socialism became more compelling, so attachment to the manifestations of la francité became more inane. Perhaps these did not in fact amount to very much; if it were merely a matter of wearing a francisque in one’s button hole in order to express one’s new orthodoxy, it was small enough a price to pay. And the francisques were both cheap and mass-produced (in small towns like Thiers and Riom). So Vichy might have been described as the first of the ‘button regimes’, a variety later to be annexed by a wide range of organizations committed to the ostentatious, plastic display of the new orthodoxies of the far left.
La francité also had to be decently, even dowdily clothed, though in a variety of uniforms – in these years of military collapse and national disgrace, there never had been so many uniforms – all of them healthy-looking, displaying less leg above the knee in the Vichy area, more leg above the knee in the German-occupied area, though, in both zones, skirts would remain equally long. Fine marching legs and knobbly knees would be masculine legs and knees. Women were not expected to do much marching, though they could be expected to salute. And there were even new forms of saluting, Frankish forms as befitted young people who were to grow up franc and loyal.
Whatever the variations of the uniforms, all had in common a headdress, the béret, though, even here, size and shape could indicate a wide range of commitment, from fussy Vichy orthodoxy to the madder fringes of ultracollaborationism. It was generally agreed that the beret was the proper headgear of the true Frenchman and Frenchwoman but there was considerable disagreement as to size and shape; and there were after all a great many forms of berets from Borotra-style Basque variety, to prewar ligue Alpine style, as favoured by the Jeunesses Patriotes (as it turned out, a double misnomer, as they were pro-Italian and contained in their ranks quite a number of old men). Nor could the beret, in its simplest form, be wholly disassociated from the hateful memory of the Front Populaire. Close-fitting, covered in grease, and worn almost over the ears, it might even have protected the heads of an engine-driver and his fireman. Let then such memories be erased. Now, at least, there could be no questioning the fact that the beret was the proper couvre-chef of la francité. Nor could there be any doubt that its only acceptable colour was dark blue. White would be fey, hinting of the garçonnes of the disgraceful 1920s, green might do for Dorgère’s rural fascists but it was not sufficiently austere, purple, lilac, and lie de vin were yet to come, following the formation of paratroop regiments. A dark blue beret was now the national headdress of the rejuvenated, regenerated French; it could match a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers or ample skirt, or shorts worn with white stockings. Vichy could be both a blue-and-white regime (les couleurs de la santé) or a clerical harmony of blues and blacks. Red was out of the question, harking back as it did to the red ties of the faucons rouges of the Jeunesses Socialistes that were worn with light blue shirts. Dark blue also hinted at sobriety, the colour of the uniforms of those who attended Juilly or Stanislas. It was also the colour of the navy. But later, Darnand, emulating no doubt the SS, imposed a black beret on la Milice.
One sees a multitude of berets when one looks at group photographs dating from les années noires – and there were of course quite an unusual number of these: back rows standing, middle rows seated, with the important figures in the middle, their rank indicated by their long Alpine walking sticks (la cordée was another key word in the Vichy vocabulary, which made much of the invigorating tonic of mountaineering), front rows cross-legged on the ground, arms folded over knees and covering long white stockings, as one would expect of a regime that had put a whole population back to school in order to relearn the simple rules of simple living and ‘togetherness’. One is confronted with rows of heads all topped with berets, pushed over the eyes, forcing up the chins and obliging the wearers to look downwards, le regard clair (and preferably blue) and, of course, franc (this regime of hypocrisy and double-entendre made much of its frankness and its crisp, plain speaking) as they stare resolutely into whatever gleaming future – perhaps bleu azur, or, in the case of Paris, brown or black – their particular organization might be peddling: Travail, Famille, Patrie, or le Nouvel Ordre Européen. Young girls, future mothers (one hopes – anyhow one can make it jolly difficult for them not to be), look out confidently, yet wistfully, under their berets, placed at an angle, not rakish, but giving a very slight suggestion of chic; for the new Frenchwoman, while destined for maternity, is not a prude. And so the snapshot of Yvette Marie, somewhat gawky in her dark blue jacket and long black skirt, her beret apparently very insecure on top of her corncoloured hair, stares at me, with the hint of a smile, across the abyss that separates 1942 from July 1944. Is she witnessing fervently for the Marshal, as she stands rather uncertainly to attention? Or is she merely doing what the others do? It is hard to say. What is certain is that, after June 1944, the beret would be hidden away in a drawer, as if, poor thing, it had been an active participant in the inanities and the equivocations of a recent regime now rejected with contumely. Yvette could now display her Norman hair uncovered or with a silk foulard tied round it.
The Chantiers de la Jeunesse favour the beret worn straight; but some of the Vichy Ministers stare out dolefully (they would have been even more doleful if they had known what was coming to them), as if they were already in some doubt about the golden future, from under a floppy beret worn at a rakish angle and giving hints of a buccaneer disposition, however incongruous in an ageing académicien. Priests and monks, generally visible, hovering in the middle distance, as if anxious not to push themselves forward too obviously but rather to maintain a discreet presence as guarantors of the moral order, in photographs of Vichy ceremonials, have likewise caught the prevailing message, discarding their shovel hats for tight-fitting berets which will stay on while they play volleyball, their soutanes tied up, or while they stride up mountains; their berets sit awkwardly on their round heads, suggesting a rather recent conversion to a vestimentary francité. But members of the hierarchy retain their furry black hats; the purportedly classless beret, Vichy’s rather obvious claim to a populist base, was perhaps too egalitarian for the princes of the Church. Hospital nurses, on the other hand, wear berets, pulled well back, like dark blue haloes, when they are walking out. Under Vichy rules of fashion and deportment, berets are not to be pushed insolently and provocatively forward, over freckled snub noses, an angle suggestive of the frivolity of the previous regime. Nor are they to dangle just above the Gauloise stuck to the lower lip, a position more suited to louche characters in René Clair films of the thirties. As the Marshal of France, wearing a homburg hat and carrying a walking-stick, goes on his progresses through small provincial towns, their fine avenues of peeling plane trees throwing deep shadows on the ground, and emphasizing the southernness of the truncated kingdom that had fallen to this Picard peasant, he is greeted by young girls and boys, by municipal authorities and by high officials of la Révolution Nationale, all wearing the national beret (perhaps it was the only thing that was national about a revolution that was in fact a counterrevolution?). At larger gatherings, as witnessed from a rostrum or a balcony, a position favoured by newsreel cameramen in order to indicate massive attendance and enthusiasm, one is confronted with an immense sea of eddying berets, like some strange form of cultivation, a mushroom farm in which the mushrooms have turned blue, or like the much magnified pullulations of corpuscles. In a disarmed and defeated nation, in which a large section of the population has taken to wearing a variety of uniforms belonging to rival or parallel youth movements, the beret has become the common emblem of French alertness. Toujours prêt!
Indeed, as little was left to chance, once the regime had been set up in Vichy, one suspects that one of the Vichy leaders with strong southern connections – Laval seems the most likely candidate, even though himself far too attached to the vestimentary traditions of the old Chamber of Deputies ever to have worn a beret – must have hit on the fact that berets are made of a particular sort of resistant and moisture-absorbing felt, one of the rare products of an underprivileged Midi dotted with small, semirural industries, situated in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
The beret seems actually to have made its first appearance among the shepherds of the Basque country and of the sandy, watery Landes – of the Alps or the Massif Central. (Among its increasingly rare wearers at the present day, one would still find a faithful clientèle in the supporters of the rugby clubs of the Southwest.) Some time in the second decade of the present century, the beret had started to travel northwards, from its homelands in the Mediterranean strip or along the Spanish frontier, to cross the Loire, and invade Paris, capping first of all schoolboys and schoolgirls, displacing sailor hats with long ribbons, then moving on to crown adult heads, depriving them of bowlers, boaters and panamas. It would be interesting to discover at what date the beret first appeared on the counters of the Bon Marché or the Samaritaine and when it gained droit de cité in their catalogues. But, certainly, by the 1920s, it had conquered Paris – had indeed become the very emblem of francophilia on unsuitable Anglo-Saxon heads and thus was the surest way of drawing attention to the possession of a British or an American passport – ousting, in the quartier du Montparnasse, the wide-brimmed black hats previously favoured by poets, painters and writers. Only the ceinture rouge remained impenetrable to the dark blue invasion from the south, the salopards en casquette remaining faithful to the proletarian cap right up to the outbreak of the Second World War. The milieu, equally conservative, stuck to the long-peaked variety of cap that had been rendered fashionable by the bad boys of the rue de Lappe and of la Bastoche. The beret, apostle of the Midi, in its northward march never really penetrated the wool towns of the Northeast, nor indeed Belgium. But now, with France, or the least significant part of France, subjected to a southern regime, with Vercingétorix and the paysans du Cantal rediscovered, along with many other Gaulish oddities, it was appropriate that the beret should at last be awarded official national status, the visible affirmation of la francité, in the form of an exemplary, and no doubt profitable, revanche du Midi.
Who supplied the suddenly immense needs for this new emblem of moral regeneration? Were they made in humble workshops in hill villages of the Pays Basque or of the Haute-Provence? Did they emerge, in shoals, like jellyfish in a warm Mediterranean Sea, from some pious oeuvre – Bon Pasteur, Notre Dame du Puy – run by nuns, well-pressed and in soft resistant felt, their linings in brightly coloured silk, the work of girls recently fallen and already working their way up the slow ladder of moral regeneration, in fact just the sort of oeuvre to find favour in the clerical circles of Vichy? Or were they made in the prisons of the Southern Zone, Roanne, Saint-Joseph, les Baumettes? Was there even some central organization, patronized by the primate of the Gauls: l’Oeuvre Nationale du Béret? Was their manufacture subjected to state planning? Did Borotra or Taittinger set the operation in motion? Or was it due to the initiative of a retired officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, a regiment that was closely involved with the early ethos of the new regime? These are all questions for the eager, enquiring social historian.
One thing that is evident, even to the eye, is that Vichy and Paris collaborationism, for once in agreement in promoting an emblem that both reassured as a reminder that one could still be French, and even more French than ever, despite national humiliation, and that represented the quintessence of la francité, eventually finished the beret off, not all at once, but on a steadily declining course. The beret had somehow lost its innocence, it had become politically contaminated, it could no longer perch on the awkward, gawky head of Monsieur Hulot, who would have to wear a little hat instead, nor on that of poor Bourvil, his inane, moonlike countenance and bovine expression so well attuned, however, to such a covering, especially in its pancake version. There was nothing clownlike any more about the beret, henceforth associated with organized killing and violence, in dubious causes, the wine-coloured emblem of les paras, and the badge of other young men who were neither comedians, nor eccentrics, nor private, retiring individualists, hiding in the shade of its modest blueness. Nowadays, in Paris at least, it is rarely seen, save on the heads of aged and tottering canons of the chapter of Notre-Dame, in stained cassocks and black boots, figures from a very distant past, as they emerge from matins in the cathedral. Washed out, its colour going under the impact of rain and of a boiling sun, it may have managed to survive, in a few remote villages, protecting the heads of elderly smallholders dressed in faded blue smocks; but, nowadays, even Pagnol’s joueurs de pétanque would have adopted a different headgear, perhaps even the peaked cap of pseudosailors, while the new fascists of the left would publicize their bloody convictions under Castro-style bush-hats.
In a new history of contemporary France, the volume for the period 1930 to 1944 could be described, and effectively terminated, under the title: ‘L’Age du Béret’, each period having to be the age of something, preferably something simple and easily identifiable. This would be the final word on the subject of a form of headgear that had much to recommend it, because it was cheap, waterproof, convenient and very fetching when placed above a freckled nose; it could be stowed away in a pocket; and it had, for forty or fifty years, served to distinguish Frenchmen and Frenchwomen – not least of its merits was that it was common to both sexes – from other Europeans, to give them an unassertive, sensible national identity, starting from the top.
Its undeserved history could be interpreted as an allegory on the theme of lost innocence and on that of a false continuity, abused in a public effort to reassure, to make people believe that nothing much had changed, that things were much as they had been before (barring a few minor amputations such as the discreet removal of the Jews, the persecution of the Freemasons, the stealthy handing over of Luis Companys to the Franco authorities), that France had indeed survived, a France of a sort, barely recognizable in terms of the much decried and relatively decent Third Republic. What a shame that the sneaking crimes of Vichy, and those – at least more obvious, more brazenly advertised – of Paris, should have been given this banal and sensible cover!
Would it not be much the same in England under a foreign occupation? Would not bowlers and umbrellas survive in the City? Would not school caps still perch on the round heads of schoolboys? Would not schoolgirls still wear straw hats or amazing boaters with red bands around them? Could not blazers be accommodated to the needs of collaborationism (when, after all, they have done years of yeoman service in the cause of apartheid)? Would not cricket caps, along with the game itself, be encouraged, even patronized, by l’occupant, in an effort to prove that things were much as usual, that the county matches would still go on (and the counties would be given their old names back), and that there would always be a Fourth of June? Would not a separatist Scotland, set up by l’occupant, impose the wearing of the kilt and penalize those who persisted in sticking to trousers, in an effort to affirm a national identity acquired as a consequence of defeat and as a fringe benefit of occupation? Would there not be morris dancers on every village green? Would not a truncated Wales be given over to harp playing and ancient song? I leave these hypotheses to novelists such as Kingsley Amis and Len Deighton. But let us not be deceived into believing, in terms of our fortunate past, that the history of Vichy, especially in its insistence on an apparent, but in fact contrived, continuity, has nothing to teach us.