- France on German Time
This April 1998, a French civil servant named Maurice Papon—the number two man at the Bordeaux prefecture in charge of Jewish affairs—was sentenced to ten years in prison for his complicity in the deportation of 1,560 Jews during the Nazi Occupation of France. This was the last of a series of French trials for Crimes against Humanity, reexamining the role of the French between 1940 and 1944 and asking, in particular, who was responsible for the deportation of some 76,000 Jews from French territory during the Nazi Occupation. Among the mass of publications during this period of intense reexamination, Philippe Burrin’s 1995 La France à l’heure allemande, now available in American translation, emerges as the most challenging, original, and synthetic new study of the French experience under Vichy.
The trauma that was being rehearsed in the Papon trial begins with France’s military defeat at the hands of the Nazis in June 1940. After the defeat and the signing of an armistice, the country was divided into two zones: the zone occupied and administered by the Germans, located on the strategic coasts and around Paris, and an unoccupied zone in the center of the country. The French government fled Paris when the war started, and now it set up headquarters in the unoccupied zone, in Vichy, a spa town. Our shorthand for that government, Vichy France, comes from the name of the town. A place where people [End Page 99] had once gone to drink the waters for their health now furnished the backdrop for Marshal Pétain’s right-wing “National Revolution,” the supposed cure for what had ailed France during the Popular Front of the 1930s. According to Pétain, those ills were parliamentary democracy, instability, cosmopolitanism, rampant freemasonry, and Jewish influence. The National Assembly had voted Pétain “full powers” in 1940, on the eve of defeat, and dissolved the previous constitution. Pétain promised to provide France with a shield against the German occupiers: “I make to France the gift of my person, to attenuate her suffering,” he had pronounced in his avuncular way in his first radio speech after the fall. 1 He failed. With prime minister Pierre Laval as his chief negotiator and henchman, Pétain made deal after deal, concession after concession to the Nazis. Ultimately, in 1942, with the threat of the Allied invasion of North Africa motivating them, the Germans crossed over the demarcation line dividing the two zones. They occupied all of France. By 1944, Vichy was nothing more than a puppet government, Pétain a rubber-stamper for the Nazis.
So, in the beginning, in 1940, not only had France fallen; she was shattered in two. Mail from the occupied to the unoccupied zone was limited to fill-in-the-blank postcards. It was illegal to travel between the two zones without a pass. There were hundreds of everyday details that could serve as emblems of this world arbitrarily divided, this world turned upside down. One of them was the fact that Pétain, in Vichy, sent a man as his “ambassador” to the Germans in Paris, one hundred and fifty miles away. A Vichy ambassador to Paris would be the equivalent of Williamsburg sending an ambassador to Washington, D.C. It was a theatrical fiction that Vichy was its own power and, even in the occupied zone, it was also a myth that the Germans took total control. The reality was far more complex.
Germany made the big decisions, but the Germans simply didn’t have enough people to run everything. Their presence consisted of the Wehrmacht soldiers, the S.S., the Gestapo, the military leaders in charge of the administration of occupied France, and their diplomatic and cultural representatives.
Meanwhile, in both zones, the French administration from the prewar years continued to operate much as before: a system with prefects and subprefects like Maurice Papon, a government-regulated school system with its rectors and instructors, a national judicial system with its appointed...