France during World War II: From Defeat to Liberation

Chapter 3: Collaboration

3 Collaboration With the signing of the armistice agreement in June 1940, the French state accepted collaboration with the Nazi occupying power. Henceforth the new order was contingent upon a German victory in World War II. During the history of Vichy, no leader who reached the top disagreed with this position. Only Marshal Weygand, who came close to being named Pétain’s right-hand man, dissented from it. The others, Laval, Flandin, Darlan, and Pétain, accepted subservience to Germany as the price of losing the war. They only disagreed over the extent and degree to which France should collaborate. On a different level, that of civil society, collaboration was a fact of life after June 1940, and not something that was necessarily accepted or embraced. The French had no choice but to live cheek by jowl with the Germans. This was especially true in the Occupied Zone, which comprised two-thirds of France. In the southern Free Zone, occupation was not directly experienced before the German invasion of it in November 1942. But throughout France the economic impact of collaboration was felt very early. By the fall of 1940 food supplies were low, and rationing had to be implemented. Although the south was slower to reject collaboration, by 1941 the French overwhelmingly opposed the German presence and hoped that the English would win the war. The disconnect between French citizens and their government increased over time as Vichy pursued greater collaboration with the Nazis. Although public opinion was well known to Pétain and other government officials, Vichy did very little to appease the growing anticollaborationist sentiment. Once again, authoritarian principles of governance trumped listening to the people. 68 | france during world war ii In this chapter, we will investigate collaboration from two perspectives . The first, and most important, is state collaboration, which became the central driving force of Vichy policy. The second is nonstate collaboration. In some cases it was ideological and in other cases opportunistic in motivation. Finally, there is accommodation with the occupying Germans, something that few could avoid if they wished to live a relatively normal life after the defeat. State Collaboration State collaboration began in June 1940 with the signing of the armistice . Yet, no one in the French government openly discussed the matter at first. When Pétain appealed to the legislature for full powers in July, he referred vaguely to the need to integrate France into ‘‘the continental system of production and exchange.’’ Toward the end of the month the new minister of the interior, the neo-socialist Adrian Marquet, proclaimed: ‘‘A new deal will be born in Europe. France must participate in it.’’1 But no one concluded that this meant collaborating with the Germans to the exclusion of the British. Pétain approached collaboration from a purely pragmatic perspective : the Germans had won the war and France could gain a privileged economic place in the new world order only if it collaborated. Pierre Laval agreed with Pétain, but he was far more zealous in pursuing close relations with Germany. During July and August 1940, Laval went to Paris on three occasions to negotiate an agreement with the Germans. Even though Laval expressed pro-German sentiments, condemned de Gaulle, and called for the defeat of Great Britain in front of Nazi diplomats and generals, telling German Ambassador Otto Abetz on one occasion that he wanted France to ‘‘make her modest contribution to the final overthrow of Britain,’’ he did not convince the Germans of the benefits of total collaboration. The Germans did not want French military aid, which was Laval’s main offer in return for a privileged position in the Nazi pantheon of nations, and had already received in the armistice everything they wanted from France. Still, Pétain continued to believe that Laval could work out a deal with the Nazis. He did not know that Hitler had no intention of granting conces- Collaboration | 69 sions to France, which he wanted to destroy after the war had been won.2 As Philippe Burrin has pointed out, Vichy’s leaders did not understand Nazism, which they thought was a militaristic reincarnation of traditional Pan-Germanism. The Nazis had only contempt for France, both on racial grounds and because of its apparent lack of military prowess. Otto Abetz, the Nazi front man in Paris, seemed to be a typical Francophile German who offered the ‘‘hope...