Vichy France (28 page)

When youth matters were placed under the Education Ministry in September 1940, Georges Lamirand became secretary-general in charge of youth affairs. Lamirand, a practicing engineer, had a career in the steel business and became the director of the great Renault works at Billancourt after the armistice of 1940. What recommended him as director of Vichy’s
youth programs, however, were his place among the fervent disciples of the late Marshal Lyautey and his active Catholicism. Lyautey’s numerous disciples at Vichy (Lamirand, veterans’ leader Francois Valentin, social organizer Robert Garric, Ambassador to the Vatican Vladimir d’Ormesson) were dedicated to applying the master’s ideals of social paternalism to the problems of industrial society. Lamirand’s 1932 book on the social role of the engineer, with a preface by Lyautey himself, consciously paralleled Lyautey’s famous 1890 essay, “The Social Role of the Officer.” Like Lyautey’s officer with his soldiers, Lamirand’s engineer was a “leader” who knew how to bring his men to a sense of participation within “the present order of things” by a mixture of warm human relations and sense of command, thereby creating a “stable social balance.”
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Lamirand believed that his style of “serve and command” was a middle way, going beyond both “liberal opportunism” and impersonal material paternalism to provide “a new order built on justice and solidarity, calmly and peaceably.” In particular, he thought it would have prevented the workers’ upheaval of May–June 1936.
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Lyautey and Pétain had got along badly, but a young man who promised to win social peace through leadership was welcome at Vichy. Lamirand remained in charge of Vichy youth programs from September 1940 to February 1943, an exceptional length of service for that regime.

A young inspector of finance, Henri Dhavernas, was director of the Compagnons for a time. He was replaced in the fall of 1941 by a more positive figure, Colonel Tournemire, an officer on armistice leave. Colonel Tournemire had belonged to an officer’s group working secretly after 1936 to root communism out of the army.
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It was the army that eventually came closest to creating a single Vichy youth movement. The Chantiers de la Jeunesse
began in the summer of 1940 as an emergency measure to remove draft-age unemployed from dangerous cities and put them to work in the forests. By January 1941 it had become a form of national service. With the draft suspended, all young men were required to spend eight months of their twenty-first year in a Chantier. There they did needed forestry work, but the chief intention was moral education. Under artillery officer and former scout leader General de la Porte du Theil, the Chantiers spent part of the day at physical labor and part attending courses on the social order and on a view of French history that, German intelligence found to its unease, derived from the
Action française
nationalist historian Jacques Bainville. Eventually the whole young male population of the unoccupied zone spent some time in the Chantiers.
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It is doubtful that Vichy’s efforts to indoctrinate French youth bore much fruit. Only the Chantiers affected large numbers, and there a good bit of time was spent producing a desperately needed substitute fuel, charcoal. Its saccharine moralism didn’t appeal to all youths. More disastrously, the Chantiers were drawn up by 1943 into the maw of factory work in Germany. What must be stressed is that the Chantiers and other youth groups were not a clandestine force for a return to war with the Allies, but an instrument of indoctrination. Despite their high suspicions, the Germans could find nothing out of line at the Chantiers. General de la Porte du Theil himself was in North Africa on inspection when the Allies landed in November 1942, and he returned to Vichy to pursue what he regarded as his real work: the supervision of the young. The North African Chantiers went over in a body to the Allied side, and indeed General de la Porte du Theil was deported in December 1943, but his aim had always been social order in a neutral France.
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At the most sophisticated level, Vichy also set up a half dozen
écoles de cadres
, or leadership training schools, the most celebrated of which was the school at Uriage, a chateau near Grenoble. Here, under the leadership of Major Pierre Dunoyer de Segonzac, the cream of young civil servants and intellectuals camped and studied in an exalted atmosphere strongly colored by Emmanuel Mounier’s “Personalism”: the effort to restore individual human worth lost in the industrial revolution. They tried to prepare leaders for the Vichy youth movements not from books but by “lived experience.” The Uriage school went underground in a body when France was totally occupied in November 1942, but it had been no less committed to its version of the National Revolution.
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Moral Order: The Family

M
ARSHAL
P
ÉTAIN
,
A DISCREET ROUÉ
,
HAD MARRIED A
divorcée in 1920, at the age of 64. He was childless. His 1940 government included two upper-class illegitimate children, Paul Baudouin and General Maxime Weygand. Under this somewhat dubious patronage, the Vichy government worked to promote the solidarity and fecundity of the French family.

The declining French birthrate lay at the very core of French alarm about decadence in the early twentieth century. The concern aroused by the census results of 1891 and 1896 had already produced some action during the Third Republic. The post-World War I “horizon blue” parliament had outlawed birth
control in 1920. A long campaign for some more positive governmental promotion of larger families finally produced a system of incentive payments, the family allowances of the Family Code of 29 July 1939. Much of Vichy’s family program simply continued this interwar campaign more vigorously along the same lines. Daladier’s 1939 Family Code, for instance, had already favored resettlement of farms by providing loans to young settlers whose interest and payments decreased with each successive child; it had breached the Napoleonic concept of equal inheritance by providing that the son who stays home and works a farm inherits a greater share of it than his city brothers and sisters; it had tightened the laws against abortion and had gone back to an earlier concept of adoption in which the child was totally integrated into his new family and totally severed from his old, putting the emphasis on the solidarity of the new family rather than on the identity of the adopted child as an individual. Traditionalists at Vichy were delighted to carry these lines of policy forward.
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Vichy family policy rested on much franker organicist social theory, however, than Daladier’s essentially pragmatic Family Code. Expanding Frédéric Le Play’s nineteenth-century arguments that the Revolution of 1789 had begun the decline of the French family by equal inheritance and overemphasis upon the individual, Vichy family theorists blamed the Third Republic for an antifamily climate of high divorce, legalized prostitution, alcoholism, and rampant individual license. The remedy was a replacement of republican individualism with a reemphasis upon “real” organic social units, intermediary bodies rooted in the biological and social nature of things, such as the family. The right of families, declared Pétain, “takes precedence over the state as well as over the rights of individuals.” The family is the “cell of French life.” Jean Ybarnégaray promised to make the Ministry of Health and the Family a Ministry of Population, proposing a
campaign against venereal disease and also threatening “sanitary and racial control” over immigration and naturalization.
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An obvious target was divorce. The law of 1884 permitting divorce had been untouchable under the Third Republic, and indeed even the Vichy regime could not go as far as Italy and outlaw divorce altogether. The 1884 law, however, had been the work of a Radical Republican and a Jew, Alfred Naquet (he was also a Boulangist, but that fact spoiled the argument), and so could be drastically modified. The law of 2 April 1941 forbade any divorce during the first three years of a marriage. After that, mistreatment or serious injury were possible grounds. Adultery was not an explicit ground for divorce, although Justice Minister Barthélemy instructed the courts to be more rigorous in its repression. He also instructed the courts to interpret the divorce law as strictly as possible and to apply the new law retroactively to cases already under way.
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The regime also favored fathers of large families and discriminated against fathers of small ones. In Vichy’s concept of functional representation, the function of paternity was given high place. Alongside representatives of such other “healthy elements” as veterans, officers, and peasants, fathers of large families were given statutory seats on all sorts of committees, from the Budget Committee that replaced parliament’s finance committee down to city councils.
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Childless fathers, by contrast, got poorer jobs. In the judicial system, for example, single or childless men were not considered for better posts unless they indicated a willingness to serve wherever the government chose to assign them.
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Maternity was glorified at home but accorded no public role outside. There was a pragmatic reason in times of unemployment
to reduce the number of working women, as was done by a law of 11 October 1940.
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But contemplating the different elementary education offered girls by the 15 August 1941 school program, for example,
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one is forced to conclude that Vichy preferred women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Women had not had the vote under the Third Republic, of course (they were enfranchised in 1946), though Léon Blum had appointed women to two minor cabinet posts in 1936.

The occupation was an unpropitious time to try to raise the birthrate. Two million Frenchmen were in prisoner-of-war camps, many families were divided by the Demarcation Line, and other interruptions of young lives such as labor service in Germany were to come. Nevertheless, signs of an increased birthrate were already apparent from the beginning of the war.
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By the war’s end, the French birthrate had reached its highest point in a century. Prosperous families as well as poor ones began having more children, so the family allocations are certainly not the only explanation. Neither is the usual birthrate rise that comes at any war’s end, for it began in the darkest days. Vichy’s family policy was closer to republican policy here than in most other areas, and it is likely that together they touched some national response that prepared the way for the great postwar baby boom.

France for the French
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D
EFEAT SHARPENED A DEFENSIVE XENOPHOBIA THAT
had been already growing through the 1930’s. A depression diminishes
hospitality. Before the depression, France had relied on large numbers of foreign workmen to round out her own insufficient labor force, especially Poles in the mines of the north and Spanish and Italian agricultural labor in the south. In 1930, no less than 7 percent of the entire French population consisted of foreign workmen. That proportion was of course much higher in areas where they were concentrated, such as the Polish communities in the Nord.
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Then unemployment turned foreign workmen into an object of hostility and retaliation. Quotas were imposed, beginning in 1932. Foreign labor became a frequent scapegoat in radical right newspapers, such as Colonel de la Rocque’s
Le Flambeau.
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To labor was added a flood of refugees in the late 1930’s. Thousands of Spanish loyalists managed to cross the Pyrenees when the Spanish Republic ended its struggle against Franco in 1939. Jews from Germany and Austria had increased with the Nuremberg decrees of November 1938. The Polish campaign of September 1939 sent another wave to the west. Of some 300,000 Jews in France in 1939 (mostly in the Paris region), about half were foreign, and about half of those who were French citizens had one or more foreign parents. Xavier Vallat, among others, thought France was approaching “saturation.”
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France had been the traditional refuge for exiles. The war, however, made them an embarrassment. They endangered neutral relations with Spain, for example. When Pétain was sent to be the first French ambassador to Franco in 1939, the control of Spanish republican exile movements in France was one of the major issues to be settled. The main purpose for which Daladier recognized Franco, after all, was to keep Spain neutral in case of a war between Germany and France.
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Furthermore, the presence
of so many Spanish “Reds” made French conservatives nervous. They could remember that Pétain had had to shut Russian soldiers up in Courtines during the mutinies of 1917. As for the Jewish refugees, they also were politically suspect, and a source of trouble. German refugees led to Article 19, perhaps the most humiliating section of the armistice, which required France to hand over German citizens to Germany on demand, thus abridging France’s right to provide political asylum.

The Third Republic had already imposed stringent security measures on foreigners before the outbreak of the war (laws of 2 and 14 May 1938). Arthur Koestler describes his four months in 1939–40 in the “Concentration Camp for Undesirable Aliens” (mostly German Jewish and Spanish refugees) at Le Vernet, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in
Scum of the Earth.
And one will recall the internment of Ernie Levy’s family in the camp at Gurs in May 1940 in André Schwarz-Bart’s
Last of the Just.
The Vichy government went further. With unemployment even higher than in the depression, and fearful of the refugees’ potential for disorder, the government voted itself the power to intern all foreign men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five as long as there was an excess of labor in the economy.
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Thus Vichy had already set up its own concentration camp system.