Vichy France
France During the German Occupation, 1940—1944.
by Philip W. Whitcomb.
The Hoover Institution. 3 vols. 1644 pp. $20.00.

Filial piety is a virtue—children should be jealous of their parents’ reputation. And Pierre Laval’s horrible end in no way relieves us of the obligation to assess his tangled role during the German occupation of France. For both these reasons, there is nothing intrinsically reprehensible about the attempt of Laval’s daughter, Mme. de Chambrun, to promote a kinder historical view of her father by collecting statements from those living in France at the time and other supporting documents. But there should surely have been some doubts about sponsoring the publication of Mme. de Cham-brun’s documents on the part of the responsible authorities at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, at Stanford University—sponsoring them, moreover, without any clear explanation that the documents were collected with a particular partisan end in view. For this collection—even if “published in accordance with the policy of making available to scholars and to a broader public unique collections of historically important documentation bearing upon various aspects of recent world affairs”—does not at all compare with other, unbiased volumes from the Hoover Institution. The sympathies of the translator of these volumes, the journalist Philip W. Whitcomb, emerge from his references to “Maréchal Pétain’s dedication to the principle that a new France should be born” and to Pierre Laval’s “determination that an old France should not die.” By publishing this tendentious work under such a misleading title, the Hoover Institution, to which so many of us owe so much, has greatly damaged its reputation and the reputation of American historical scholarship in Europe.

When these volumes were first published in 1957 in French, they provoked an outburst of protests from French historians concerned with the Vichy government and the Resistance. A group of them, indeed, produced a systematic refutation¹—each main theme of the volumes was taken up and the evidence separately dissected. The refutation did not use statements made long after the event, as these books largely do, but reviewed the contemporary record of events in all its darkness and horror. The picture that emerged was very different from Mr. Whitcomb’s.

It should be emphasized that the Vichy period already has an important literature; copious firsthand contemporary material is available from both French and German sources. Previous collections of documents published by the Hoover Institution have always given ample references to other source materials and to the bibliography of the subject. Mr. Whitcomb’s presentation fails to do anything of the kind. Instead, Mr. Whitcomb has the effrontery to say that he hopes his own experiences in France “will warn professional historians against accepting any one source or group of sources without checking against many other sources of a contrary character.” It is precisely the existence of such sources that his compilation ignores. It is not simply that other sources exist which are as damning to Pétain and Laval as these are favorable to them; it is that they are sources of a quite different kind—archival records of the brutal facts, not glosses made afterwards.

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To begin with, there is the question of the 1940 armistice itself: what was Pétain’s intention in demanding it? was there any alternative? For the solving of these questions, Mme. de Chambrun’s documents provide no new material. They do make an untenable claim—namely, that the armistice itself included the requirement of “collaboration,” which made it impossible for the Vichy government to behave otherwise. This is deliberate mystification. What the armistice required of the French was that the administration in the occupied areas should cooperate in keeping the ordinary public services going. This had nothing to do with political collaboration. On the contrary, these documents simply add further proof of two facts already abundantly documented elsewhere—namely, that even before the military collapse Laval had cherished the notion of basing French policy on political collaboration with Nazi Germany, and that he wanted to destroy the traditional structure of parliamentary government in France. It is also clear that in these schemes Pétain had long been destined for a vital role.

A brief attempt is made in the volumes under review to revive the thesis that Pétain was acting in secret agreement with Britain. The falsity of this claim, too, had been demonstrated in detail in various writings by General Schmitt, who turned to the theme in his critique of the French version of the Hoover volumes. No question of a political agreement ever arose between Vichy and London. The French were solely concerned with the minimizing of the hardships of the blockade; the British wanted to avoid making things too hard for the French—but this was subject to the overriding necessity of the struggle against Germany. London would undoubtedly have liked to get Vichy to resist the Germans, but all its efforts in that direction failed.

“Collaboration” in the precise sense of the word does not figure largely in these volumes. This is partly because Laval himself was out of power for most of the period before April 1942; and, after November 1942, the question was one of total French subordination to Germany rather than of mere collaboration. Nevertheless, collaboration was the issue in two periods—between the Montoire Pétain-Hitler meeting in October 1940 and the first removal of Laval in December; and again at the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, when there were negotiations for France’s entry into the war on Germany’s side. What brought these negotiations to nothing was Hitler’s indecisiveness as to what would best suit Germany, rather than any reluctance on the part of Laval and Darlan. Here the German archival evidence would seem to be conclusive. The legend that Laval and Pétain simply sought to preserve France’s strength against the day of liberation will not stand up against the evidence of Vichy’s direct initiatives to be allotted an active role in Hitler’s “New Order.” Vichy policies made sense only on the presumption of a German victory, just as de Gaulle’s policies made sense on the presumption that the Allies would win in the end.

For example, German economic exploitation went far beyond the claims which the French had originally accepted in the armistice. The extra French payments enabled the Germans to plunder France with her own money. Cathala, Laval’s finance minister from 1942 to 1944, makes the point here that many vital decisions which contributed to the debilitation of France were made before Laval took over in April 1942. But the idea that the extra financial contributions were wrung by force from a reluctant Laval will not stand up under examination. Laval himself wrote on January 12, 1943, to the German negotiator on the question: “I have stated to you that France’s payments have gone beyond the idea of occupation costs and constitute in reality a French contribution to the defense of Europe: that it was in a wish to collaborate and to make . . . an effective contribution to Germany’s war effort that I accepted these supplementary payments.”

Also, counting prisoners of war and civilian deportees together, France supplied more male labor to Germany than any other invaded country, Russia included—and this does not take into account the casualties of war, the prisoners and deportees who never returned, and the victims of German massacres and murders in France itself. To give a picture of France under the occupation deserving of the name, something should have been quoted at firsthand of the experiences of such citizens; but here we have only the apologias of the men in power.

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On the tragedy of the Jews in France, we are already all too well informed, thanks largely to the devoted work and methodical publications of the Paris Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, which has placed on permanent record the ghastly evidence provided by the captured German documents. The evidence assembled makes it quite clear that the compilers of the Hoover Institution volumes have shown their usual disingenuousness concerning the Vichy record on Jewish questions.

In the French cooperative refutation to which we have referred, M. J. Billig, who himself worked with the Centre and was a member of the French delegation at the Nuremberg war criminals’ trial, has pointed out a number of the patent dishonesties in these books. Thus, the testimony of a certain Antignac is quoted without noting that he was head of the police section dealing with the anti-Jewish measures, and that he was sentenced to death for his crimes. Again, we find the president of the French Union for the “Defense of the Race” declaring that his organization did not indulge in any anti-Semitic propaganda. This overlooks (as do the Whitcomb volumes generally) the fact that the Vichy radio gave itself to propagating the more extreme versions of Nazi anti-Semitism.

The main document here is the testimony of Xavier Vallat, who was responsible for Jewish affairs during Darlan’s tenure of the Vichy premiership; this piece of mendacity has been published before. Vallat does not deny his personal anti-Semitism, but gives a completely fraudulent account of the extent of the measures taken to purge French professional and economic life of Jews—measures as severe in the unoccupied as in the Nazi-occupied zone. There is no mention of such important events as the law of October 1940 permitting the internment of foreign Jews residing in France. Vallat gives the impression that he is talking of a few dangerous or criminal individuals when he alludes to what were in fact massive transfers of Jews from internment in the unoccupied zone to camps in the north, and so ultimately to deportation and death. He passes over the fact that the mass arrests which took place in the German-occupied zone were begun by the French authorities.

On the “final solution,” the attempt to deport all Jews in France (as in the rest of Europe) to extermination camps, the Hoover Institution volumes are practically silent. Their only concern is to depict Laval and his collaborators as trying to delay handing over at least the “native” French Jews. But while it is true that the French police originally refused collaboration in the interning of French Jews, the impression is falsely conveyed that this halted the general round-up of Jews.

That Laval himself was particularly anti-Semitic is improbable; but he headed the French government when the law of October 1940 was promulgated, and this law introduced the whole principle of racial differentiation into French administration. Laval’s purpose is actually confirmed in one of the documents now printed; believing as he did that France had to become an active partner with Nazi Germany, he had to make the French State one with which the Nazis could collaborate, and this involved accepting the principles of racism.

It may be true that even more Jews would have died but for the delays imposed by Laval and others in handing them over to the Germans. But two facts should be borne in mind. In the first place, Laval had to reckon with public opinion to some extent, and increasingly so as the maquis became more active. Secondly, the suggestion that if he had resisted further the Germans might have replaced him by some mere Quisling—a Doriot or Déat—overlooks the German interest in keeping France governed by an administration with at least some roots in the country. The alternative was too expensive, and the extermination camps were busy enough so that they could wait a little longer for the remaining French Jews. It was the Resistance and the Allies who saved them in the end.

This is not, of course, to suggest that those responsible for the Hoover volumes are particularly indifferent to the terrible sufferings inflicted upon the Jews of France under the regime they are defending. There is no anti-Jewish discrimination here, for they also fail to give a proper picture of what happened to the people of Alsace-Lorraine, to the other civilian internees and deportees, and to the prisoners of war. The treatment of the Jewish question is only part of a general attempt to make the whole Vichy regime (except for Darnand and the milice) qualify for the epithet of resisters, while the genuine resistance movement is ignored or traduced.

Only the most cynical view of history could permit the equating of those who perpetrated or condoned the massive crimes committed in France in 1940-44 and those who strove, often at terrible risk, to avert them or to overthrow their perpetrators. Where collaboration was embarked on as part of a policy which looked toward the permanent domination of Europe by Nazi Germany—and such was Laval’s policy—it can only be condoned if Nazism itself is condoned. In the publication of these volumes, there enters a question of morality, as well as of scholarship.

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¹ La France sous l'Occupation, by P. Arnoult and others, with a preface by Daniel Mayer (Presses Universitaires de France, 1959).