Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

were offered little choice, but the majority seemedto welcome that. A minority of eighty brave men led by Léon Blum opposed the motion. The following day Marshal Pétain’s French State came into being, with Pierre Laval as the first Prime Minister. Pétain felt able to congratulate himself that at last the country was no longer ‘rotted by politics’.
    The most fervent support for Pétain’s regime might best be summed up as provincial prejudice.
Vieille France
– that arch-conservative ‘old France’ symbolized by a ferociously illiberal clergy and a
petite noblesse
that was both impoverished and resentful – still cursed the principles of 1789. A number of them continued to wear a white carnation in their buttonhole and a black tie on the anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution, and stuck postage stamps with the Republican symbol of Marianne upside down on their letters. In their eyes, the demonic successors of the French Revolution included the Communards of 1871, all those who had supported Dreyfus against the General Staff, the mutineers of 1917, the political leaders of the inter-war years, and the industrial workers who had benefited from the Popular Front’s reforms in 1936. The right believed that these, not the complacent General Staff, had dragged France down to defeat. This counterpart to Germany’s conspiracy theory after the First World War, the ‘stab in the back’, was also deeply imbued with anti-Semitism. On 3 July, Britain joined the front rank of Vichy’s hate figures when the French naval squadron at Mers-el-Kebir rejected an ultimatum to sail out of reach of the Germans and was destroyed by the Royal Navy.
    In October, the character of the German occupation was defined at the small town of Montoire in Touraine. Hitler’s train halted there for a meeting with Pierre Laval, who greeted the Führer effusively. He promised to persuade Pétain to come to Montoire forty-eight hours later. After the Hitler–Laval meeting was over, the train travelled through the night to arrive in Hendaye on the Spanish frontier, where Hitler had a meeting with General Franco.
    The train then returned to Montoire, where Marshal Pétain arrived on 24 October, having travelled from Vichy in secret. The contrast between decay and modern military power could hardly have appeared greater. In this little provincial station stood Hitler’s special train, a gleaming beast in armoured steel with flak guns mounted on a wagonat the rear. The platforms were guarded by a large detachment of his personal SS bodyguard. Marshal Pétain’s
chef de cabinet,
Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, was struck by Hitler’s resemblance to his photographs: ‘the gaze fixed and severe, the peaked hat too high and too large’. The oblivious old Marshal in a shabby gabardine greeted the Führer, stretching out his hand ‘
d’un geste de souverain
’.
    Pétain felt he had obtained what he wanted from this encounter. France retained its empire, its fleet, and guarantees covering the unoccupied zone. Ignoring the events of the past six years, he treated Hitler as a man of his word. After the meeting at Montoire, Pétain’s supporters went further. They persuaded themselves that the old man had somehow managed to outfox the Führer; his principal apologists even called this agreement ‘the diplomatic Verdun’. But the ‘path of collaboration’ on which he had embarked with the occupying power offered up exactly what Hitler wanted: a country promising to police itself in the Nazi interest.
    All the self-deception of Pétainism was revealed in a New Year message addressed to ‘
Messieurs et très chers collaborateurs
’ from the Bishop of Arras, Mgr Henri-Édouard Dutoit. This cleric’s pseudo-Cartesian formulation only drew further attention to the false basis of his reasoning. ‘I collaborate: therefore I am no longer the slave who is forbidden to speak and act, and only good to obey orders. I collaborate: therefore I have the right to contribute my own thought and individual effort to the common cause.’ *
    This imaginary autonomy described by the Bishop of Arras was so important to the Vichy regime that until 1942 the Germans needed little more than 30,000 men – less than twice the size of the Paris police force – to keep the whole of France in order. Vichy bent over backwards to help the occupier – a policy that was taken to appalling lengths when assisting with the deportation of Jews to Germany.
    Pétain’s