Alex's Wake (29 page)

A debate ensued over how to respond to the overwhelming might of the German forces. Renaud argued for continuating French defensive efforts, moving the government to French colonies in North Africa, and relying on the French navy rather than its ravaged army. But with the countryside still in chaos, Pétain and others opted simply to surrender. Shortly after noon on June 17, Pétain took to the national airwaves and declared, “France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms. The time has come to stop fighting.” Listening to the radio broadcast while at lunch at a bistro in the southern port city of Marseille, the French composer Darius Milhaud felt his heart break and witnessed other patrons of the restaurant weeping in despair. He wrote later, “I realized clearly that this capitulation would prepare the soil for fascism and its abominable train of monstrous persecutions.”

Five days later, on June 22, the world witnessed one of the most elaborately staged surrender dramas in its anguished annals of humiliation. Adolf Hitler himself insisted that the armistice be signed in the very same railroad car and on the very spot where, twenty-two years earlier, the Germans had surrendered at the end of World War I. Hitler had the train car removed from a museum and brought to a little clearing in the forest of Compiègne, about forty miles north of Paris. French officials signed the armistice, believing it to be a temporary document. A real and lasting peace treaty would emerge after the expected German defeat of Great Britain, which was assumed to be only a few months if not weeks away, now that nearly all of Western Europe had fallen before the might of Germany's
Blitzkrieg
. But at the beginning of June, as France
was falling, British forces staged a miraculous retreat from the French coastal city of Dunkirk, escaping across the English Channel to fight another day. Britain did not fall, so the provisional armistice remained on the books until the Liberation.

Under the terms of the armistice, France was divided into two main parts. The Occupied Zone—about 60 percent of the country, including its most economically robust regions, beginning north of the river Loire and then extending south to the Spanish border to include the entire Atlantic coastline—was administered by a German military governor operating from Paris. The Unoccupied Zone—south and southeastern France, about forty
departements
in all—was ruled by Marshal Pétain and his government, newly removed to the French city of Vichy. Ostensibly the French government administered the entire country, although the armistice acknowledged and respected “the rights of the occupying power.” Everyone was fully aware that all real power flowed from Berlin and not Vichy. Pétain was a puppet.

France was required to deliver to the German police any refugees from the Third Reich whom the government in Berlin might demand. The French negotiators objected to this provision at first, declaring it a betrayal of those who had entered their country seeking asylum from Germany. But when the Germans made it clear that they would not yield on this demand, the French surrendered once again. In the next few months, a band of Gestapo agents visited a number of internment camps in the Unoccupied Zone and made a list of about eight hundred refugees; the Vichy government duly delivered them. Among those sent back to Germany was Herschel Grynszpan, the man who Nazi officials blamed for the pogrom known as
Kristallnacht
, since Grynszpan's assassination of a German diplomat in Paris in early November 1938 ostensibly triggered the campaign of violence. Once returned to Germany, Grynszpan was never seen again.

On July 1, 1940, the French government, including the members of Parliament, gathered in the town of Vichy, located in the Auvergne region of south-central France. Like Martigny-les-Bains and Contrexéville, Vichy long enjoyed a reputation as a spa town because of its thermal waters. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III took the cure five times.
He built lavish homes in Vichy for his mistresses and glittering casinos for his courtiers. Vichy was chosen to be the seat of the new government in part because of its relative proximity to Paris (about four hours by train) and partly, thanks to its Napoleonic legacy, because it was the city with the second-largest hotel capacity in all of France.

Within days, the world would learn of the shocking new direction in which the Vichy government would lead France. On July 10, the senators and deputies who remained from the Leon Blum–led Popular Front National Assembly of 1936 voted overwhelmingly to revoke the constitution of the Third Republic and to grant Pétain full powers to declare a new one. The vote, taken in the ornate Vichy opera house, was 569 to 80; those who voted in the negative were later lauded for their courage and celebrated as the Vichy 80.

Pétain wasted no time putting his new authority to use. Within forty-eight hours, he issued three constitutional edicts. The first one bestowed upon him the title of
Chef de l'État Français
, or head of the French state. The second declared that the head of state possessed a “totality of government power”—legislative, executive, judicial, diplomatic, and administrative—and was thus responsible for creating and executing all of the country's laws. The third edict, dissolving the Senate and Chamber of Deputies indefinitely, condemned France to the authoritarian rule of one man: Marshal Pétain.

On July 12, Pétain addressed the country and declared, “A new order is commencing.” The French national motto—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—forged in the revolutionary fires of 1789, was replaced with a slogan long espoused by right-wing groups: Fatherland, Family, Work. Democratic liberties and guarantees were immediately suspended in favor of a paternalistic, top-down system that emphasized government control of the individual and unfettered corporate power. Pétainists condemned what they called the indecency and depravity of the previous regime, with its tolerance for jazz, short skirts, and birth control, and called for the reintroduction of traditional family values to daily life. The crime of
délit d'opinion
, or felony of thought, became illegal, and citizens were frequently arrested for publishing, or even uttering, criticism of the regime. Former Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, who had essentially
turned over control of the government to Marshal Pétain, was arrested in September 1940 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Almost immediately, the Vichy government began a dual campaign promoting the emergence of this new “true France” and affixing blame for the country's quick and humiliating defeat on the battlefield in the spring. At the heart of both efforts was the desire to weed out “undesirables,” those whose treachery, Pétain believed, had undermined what otherwise would have been a decisive victory against the German invader. These undesirables, long termed the Anti-France by the right wing, included Protestants, Freemasons, foreigners, Communists, and Jews.

Although additional undesirable elements of the French population, including Gypsies, left-wingers, and homosexuals, were targets of official discrimination, the campaign of anti-Semitism that began almost immediately after the establishment of the Vichy government was nothing short of an all-out assault. The French undoubtedly studied the Nazis' Nuremburg Laws for guidance, but the flood of edicts and ordinances that began in July 1940 was not prompted by orders from Berlin. Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, who served as Marshal Pétain's chief of staff, declared unambiguously, “Germany was not at the origin of the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy. This legislation was, if I dare say it, spontaneous, native.” In 1947, Helmut Knochen, a German storm trooper and the director of the security police in France, recalled that “we found no difficulties with the Vichy government in implementing Jewish policy.”

The objective of the new government's initial laws was the restriction of the rights of foreigners living in France, measures that, while affecting foreign Jews, weren't specifically anti-Semitic. On July 13, Pétain issued an edict stating that “only men of French parentage” would be allowed to belong to the civil service. On July 22, another decree was announced, this one allowing the government to revoke the citizenship of all French men and women who had acquired their status since the passage of the liberal naturalization law of 1927. The next day saw the passage of a law that called for the annulment of citizenship and the confiscation of the property of all French nationals who had fled
France after May 10, the start of the German offensive, without an officially recognized reason. This was the first measure that seemed specifically aimed at Jews, and among those singled out was Baron Robert de Rothschild, who had helped to fund the agricultural center at Martigny-les-Bains. The Vichy officials justified this new law by charging that Rothschild and his co-religionists had revealed themselves to be “Jews before they were French” by abandoning their country at the very moment it needed them most; thus, they declared, these people no longer deserved the honor of French citizenship.

Over the next ten weeks, more laws were issued in the Vichy regime's by now undisguised attempt to solve its “Jewish problem.” On August 27, the Daladier-Marchandeau ordinance of 1939, prohibiting anti-Semitism in the press, was repealed, and several notorious Jew-baiting publishers were permitted to renew their activities in print. On August 16, the government announced that, henceforth, only members of the newly created
Ordre des Médecins
would be allowed to practice medicine, whether as doctors, dentists, or pharmacists. The catch was that membership in the
Ordre
was restricted to persons born in France of French fathers, and by now the designation “French” was in the process of being radically redefined. On September 10, a similar decree was announced that affected the practice of law. The Vichy minister of the interior, Marcel Peyrouton, declared that doctors and lawyers were under an obligation to exclude from their ranks those “elements” who by certain “acts or attitudes” had shown themselves “unworthy to exercise their profession in the manner the present situation demands.”

The definition of what constituted a “French” person and what constituted a Jew was spelled out in a decree issued on September 27. Taking its cue from the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the measure stated that anyone who had more than two grandparents “of the Jewish race” was a Jew. The law went on to declare that any Jew who had fled to the Unoccupied Zone was henceforth banned from returning to the Occupied Zone. It also called for a census of Jews in the Occupied Zone to be conducted within the coming month, required that the word
Juif
now be stamped on identity cards belonging to Jews, and called for yellow signs to be placed in the windows of stores owned by Jews.
The signs were to carry the words, in both French and German, “Jewish Business.” Other stores, of their own volition, soon began sporting signs that read “This business is 100 percent French.”

The culmination of this legal attack on the rights and position of Jews living in France was the
Statut des Juifs
, or Statute on Jews, enacted by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940. The law began by reiterating that anyone with more than two Jewish grandparents would be considered a member of the Jewish “race”; from now on spouses of Jews would also be designated Jewish. But the main intent of the statute was to affirm the second-class standing of the Jews of France by specifically banning them from many positions in public life. Henceforth no Jew could be a member of the officer corps in the military or a civil servant, such as a judge, a teacher, or an administrator; no Jew could work as a journalist, a publisher, a radio broadcaster, or an actor on stage or in films; no Jew could work as a banker, a realtor, or a member of the stock exchange.

Other anti-Semitic statutes would follow in the coming months, laws that called for the confiscation of radios and telephones from Jewish homes in France, established curfews that allowed Jews to be on the public streets for only certain hours every day, and confined Jews to using only the last car in the trains of the Paris Métro.

Though the drumbeat of official anti-Semitism had been growing ever louder since the establishment of the Vichy regime in July, the cymbal crash of October 3 was a stunning blow to the Jews of France, who had certainly heard tales of Nazi atrocities from across the German border but who had never expected such measures would be enacted in their homeland. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the CAR director who had met the
St. Louis
passengers at Boulogne-sur-Mer, wrote in his diary after the announcement of the
Statut des Juifs
, “I wept last night like a man who has been suddenly abandoned by the woman who has been the only love of his life, the only guide of his thoughts, the only inspiration of his action.” It would not be long, however, before feelings of betrayal would give way to fears of a far greater danger than a broken heart.

But where the Jews saw peril in the
Statut
, others saw opportunity. If one of the stated goals of the still-new government was the segregation of Jews from mainstream French society, then exceptional vigor in the
pursuit of that goal could only win favor in the eyes of Vichy officials. On October 4, an addendum to the previous day's law authorized officials throughout France to place under confinement or into conditions of forced labor any foreign-born Jews who might be living in their jurisdictions. Thus a young man from Montauban whose meteoric rise through the French bureaucracy had been propelled by tragedy saw his opening.

René Bousquet was born in Montauban in 1909, the son of a radical socialist notary. As a boy, he became fast friends with Adolphe Poult, whose father, Emile Poult, was the chief executive of a successful French confectioner. The firm, Biscuits Poult, was founded in 1883. It manufactured cakes, biscuits, wafers, tarts, and cookies of all shapes and sizes, which were consumed with relish in Montauban, site of its main factory, and throughout France. Emile Poult was thus a wealthy man, and his son Adolphe and René Bousquet spent many happy hours together at the Poult family estate.