The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (69 page)

French student observed: “The
boche
is well disciplined; in Poland, he

is ordered to murder and rape: he murders and rapes. In France, he

must smile and excuse himself.”4 After more than three centuries of

empire building, most Frenchmen understood that imperial conquest

meant domination and extraction.

Faced with the prospect of a total Nazi victory, Prime Minister

Paul Reynaud’s government made choices that struck many contemporary observers as cowardly but were typical of how defeated peoples responded to an imperial conquest. While some of Reynaud’s

military advisors called for a last stand in Brittany under the cover

of the British navy, the speed of the Nazi advance ruled this out.

The prime minister also appealed to Franklin Roosevelt for military

aid, but the American president provided only words of encouragement. Desperate to keep the French fi ghting, the British government offered to create a permanent political union with France that

would have entailed common citizenship, economic integration, and

full cooperation in postwar reconstruction. Right-wing politicians

blocked the proposal by depicting it as a British plot to turn France

into a dominion.

Instead, French leaders recalled Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain,

the eighty-four-year-old hero of World War I, to take control of the

government and salvage what remained of France’s pride and sovereignty. Pétain had made his reputation defending the Verdun fortress

against relentless German attacks and was one of the forty “immortals” in the Académie Française. Now he concluded that France’s

cause was lost, and on June 17 he made a radio broadcast announcing

his intention to seek a negotiated peace with Germany to preserve

France’s autonomy, fl eet, and empire. In doing so, Pétain overruled a

faction in the cabinet that called for a French government in exile, and

he had the parliamentary deputies who escaped to Morocco arrested

and brought home.

Casting himself as the savior of France, Pétain signed an armistice

with the Nazis on June 22, 1940, in the same railway car in which

Germany had accepted the Allied powers’ terms for the end of the

First World War. The agreement was not a formal peace treaty but a

France under the Nazis 355

temporary truce under the international law of belligerent occupation

that theoretically left French sovereignty intact. Both sides expected

the British to come to terms with the Germans and bring the fi ghting

in the west to a quick end. Ultimately, however, the Franco-German

armistice lasted more than fi ve years as the war dragged on.

While Pétain miscalculated tragically, the continuing confl ict saved

the French from bearing the full weight of imperial subjecthood. Hitler could not spare the resources to rule France directly while Germany remained at war with Britain and later the Soviet Union and

the United States. At the very least, a hostile exiled French government and army in North Africa would have tied down his forces and

put the French Empire in Allied hands. Scheming to turn Pétain into

a client, the Nazis were relatively restrained in dictating the terms of

the armistice, which in essence imposed a system of indirect imperial

rule on France. The agreement froze the German advance and divided

the country into an occupied northern zone and an autonomous

southern zone that remained under Pétain’s
état français
(French

state). This arrangement left the strategic Atlantic coast and France’s

industrial and agricultural heartlands in German hands, but Pétain’s

regime, which took its informal name from the marshal’s capital at

Vichy, retained technical sovereignty over the entire country. In the

occupied north, the French prefects and bureaucrats who in practice

worked for the German military administration continued to answer

to Pétain as the legitimate ruler of France.

Under the terms of the armistice, Vichy France nominally became

a neutral power with the right to legislate and govern, but it bore little resemblance to the republican regime that it replaced. On July 10,

1940, the French parliament voted overwhelmingly to give Pétain

absolute and authoritarian legislative and executive powers. But this

was just the illusion of sovereignty. The armistice forced the French to

pay the crippling costs of their own occupation, a fi gure that amounted

to twenty million reichsmarks per day. The Vichy regime could not

enact policies that confl icted with Germany’s interests as the “occupying power,” and the French army demobilized its major combat

units and surrendered its heavy weapons. The two million prisoners

of war in Germany also stayed in captivity as hostages to ensure that

the French remained cooperative and compliant. In the end, Pétain’s

only major achievement was keeping the fl eet and overseas empire

under French control.

356 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

The Vichy authorities claimed that they came to terms with the

Nazis to protect France from the destruction of total war and the full

weight of imperial domination. Pétain clung to the illusion of sovereignty and promised the French public that “the government remains

free, France will be administered by Frenchmen.”5 Pierre Laval, the

Vichy minister of state, recalled the devastation of occupied France in

World War I and asked rhetorically after the German defeat in 1945:

“Would it have been in the greater interest of France to abandon it

to disorder and to the cruel domination of the conqueror rather than

to make the attempt . . . to hold off the conqueror by negotiation?”6

The Atrebatian chieftain Togodumnus, the Visigothic nobleman Theodemir, the Inkan prince Manqu, and the Bengali
nawab
Mir Jafar all

would have understood these sentiments. The Vichy regime also had

much in common with the Italian notables who retained their status

by rallying to Napoleon and with the Kikuyu elites who tried to make

the most of their subjecthood by becoming colonial chiefs.

In signing the armistice agreement, Pétain and his allies assured

themselves that they were working in partnership with the Germans

rather than working for them as imperial subjects. They gambled that

a quick Nazi victory would pave the way for a formal peace treaty,

thereby ensuring France a prominent place in a new German Europe.

As the right-wing ex-communist Jacques Doriot insisted: “France

must pass from the camp of the conquered into the camp of the conquerors.”7 The Vichyites justifi ed this desertion from the Allied cause

by claiming that Britain conspired to destroy France by encouraging

French forces to fi ght on while secretly negotiating a separate peace

with Germany. On July 3, 1940, the British appeared to confi rm these

allegations when the Royal Navy attacked the Algerian ports of Oran

and Mers-el-Kebir to keep the French fl eet out of Nazi hands. The

raid, which destroyed a battleship and killed more than thirteen hundred sailors, led Pétain to break off diplomatic relations with Britain.

History has judged the Vichy regime harshly, but in the summer

of 1940 the French public largely supported Pétain’s actions. Recalling the millions left dead and maimed from four years of carnage

in the Great War, many people praised Pétain for sparing precious

French blood. In casting about for scapegoats they blamed incompetent generals, cowardly Belgians, perfi dious Britons, decadent and

atheistic French socialists, two-faced domestic communists, and Jewish plotters for France’s quick defeat. General Charles de Gaulle, the

France under the Nazis 357

great hero of the resistance who fl ed to London after the armistice,

initially had little success in rallying the French. Most people ignored

his defi ant call to reject Pétain and fi ght on:

France has lost a battle! But France has not lost the war! Nothing

is lost, because this war is a world war. In the free world, there are

tremendous forces which have not yet been engaged. The day will

come when these forces will crush the enemy. France, on that day,

must be present at the victory. Then she will recover her liberty and

her greatness.8

This passionate appeal fell on deaf ears, and most of the fi fteen

thousand French soldiers that the British evacuated from Dunkirk

chose to return home to occupied France rather than join his Free

French forces. Most Frenchmen wanted peace in 1940, which allowed

Pétain to strip de Gaulle of his rank and ignore the British-sponsored

Provisional French National Committee.

Just as Christian Iberians blamed the Umayyad invasion on Roderic’s violation of Hercules’s tower, and the peoples of the Andean

and East African highlands used millenarian tales of pestilential butterfl ies and fi re-belching iron snakes to explain how they fell victim

to foreign invaders, many Frenchmen similarly equated the Nazi

invasion with the end of the world. Religious pilgrimages increased

in the fi rst year of the occupation as many sought help from the

Virgin Mary and Catholic saints. Aiming to turn this millenarian

catastrophe into an opportunity for national redemption, the Vichyites pledged to create a revitalized France that would return to global

preeminence.

Pétain and his followers should have known better. No imperial

power ever allowed its subjects any measure of real autonomy. Hitler never ceased to view France as a mortal enemy and simply used

Pétain and his allies as a means to an end. According to one of his confi dants, the Nazi
Führer
(leader) had decided France’s fate in 1939:

I shall come to France as a liberator. We shall present ourselves to the

French petite bourgeoisie as the champions of a fair social order and

eternal peace. . . . I shall long since have established contacts with men

who will form a new government, a government that suits me. We

shall fi nd plenty of men of that kind. We shall not even need to buy

them. They will come to us of their own accord, driven by ambition,

blindness, partisan discord and pride.9

358 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Hitler always intended to impose the full weight of imperial

subjecthood on the French by destroying them as a nation and

co-opting and subverting their own institutions to wring as much

wealth out of them as possible. Not surprisingly, Pétain’s vision of

a new France evaporated in the face of Nazi exploitation, and the

marshal found himself and his government reduced to the status of

imperial puppets.

In attempting to work with Hitler, the Vichyites introduced a new

term into the vocabulary of empire:
collaboration
. In its most literal

and benign sense, the word referred to some sort of mutually benefi cial joint project or venture. But in the context of the Second World

War it came to mean traitorous cooperation with the Nazis. Pétain

spoke of “setting out along the road of collaboration” in seeking a

working relationship with the Germans, a strategy that Togodumnus,

Theodemir, Manqu, Mir Jafar, and Koitalel’s son Lelimo all would

have understood. Like his forerunners, the French marshal hoped to

salvage a measure of dignity, autonomy, and prestige from the collapse of the old order and sought power and infl uence in the new

imperial world.

Nevertheless, defeat did not obligate Pétain and his allies to collaborate. Like most people in occupied Europe, many Frenchmen adopted

a strategy of
attentisme
(wait and see) instead of allying with the

Nazis or the puppet Vichy regime. The Vichyites, however, viewed

the Third Republic’s defeat as an opportunity to remake France in

their own image. Unlike the Italians who rallied to Napoleon or the

Kenyan chiefs who made British indirect rule possible, they did not

profi t personally from collaboration. Pétain lived simply in a Vichy

hotel room, and his state minister, Pierre Laval, was already rich. Hoping to exercise the same kind of civilizing infl uence on the Germans

that the ancient Greeks had on the Romans, the Vichyites gambled

that the Nazis would have to give them a real measure of autonomy

to make their empire work. The French were imperial rulers themselves, and if they had bothered to understand the realities of imperial subjecthood, they would have realized that this assumption was

tragically naive.

Conventional narratives of this dark period in European history

rightly cast the German subjugation of France as brutal, totalitarian, and above all profoundly unjust. More fundamentally, European

historians tend to depict the Nazi regime as exceptional and unique

France under the Nazis 359

in its violence and barbarity. To be sure, the crimes of the Holocaust

are without parallel in human history, but the Nazis clearly have

their place in the long history of empire. The Martiniquais poet Aimé

Césaire was certainly correct in arguing that Hitler “applied to Europe

colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of

Africa.”10 While they were criminals of the highest order, the Nazis

at least exposed the hypocrisy of the new imperialism by treating the

French like Africans and Asians. Many Frenchmen would have been