Missing hard truth about Vichy, but ably cataloguing its mean history

VERDICT ON VICHY: POWER AND PREJUDICE IN THE VICHY FRANCE REGIME

By Michael Curtis

Arcade, $28.95, 419 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY ROGER KAPLAN

In June of 1940 the French armies in the eastern provinces were outflanked by German divisions commanded by Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel; there was one exception to the rout, a tank counterattack on the Moselle led by an obscure brigadier named Charles de Gaulle. He noted that the Wehrmacht was applying tactics he had developed in the previous decade, failing to sell them to his superiors, including one of his mentors, Philippe Petain.

After serving briefly in the last cabinet of the Third Republic, de Gaulle fled to London and called on his countrymen to continue the war out of bases in the Empire. “We have lost a battle,” he said, “but this is a world war.” Soon, he continued (if I may paraphrase), the rear bases of the free world, including the United States, would be in it and would ineluctably bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany. Few heard him, fewer believed him.

A few stragglers made it to London, forming the first units of what would become Fighting France, which would, indeed, continue the war, first in Africa and later in Italy and points north.

Petain, meanwhile, heard the call of the parliamentarians to form a new government and negotiate an armistice. Which he did, and which he followed with the burial of the Third Republic in favor of a new regime, called the French state (Etat francais, as opposed to the traditional Republique francaise).

Since the Germans were in Paris and indeed most of France north of the Loire and along the entire Atlantic coast Petain and the parliamentarians who had voted for him (the minority either faded into the night or made their way to London) betook themselves to a little spa town, Vichy, which is pleasant and boring (the spring water is reputed to be good for the digestion) in the middle of the country. The idea of a “world war” in a place like this was — probably still is (I was there a few years ago) — incomprehensible, indeed the idea of a “world” outside France was probably incomprehensible (today, less so).

And this is the main point, temperamentally speaking, about the Vichy regime, which seems to completely escape Michael Curtis, a Rutgers historian, who in “Verdict on Vichy” cannot write a simple clear sentence when a wooden academic one, loaded down with participles and aimless subordinate clauses, is available. He does not grasp how isolated and indeed isolationist France’s political culture was in those awful decades of the 1930s and 1940s.

It renders him incapable of explaining the real, horrible truth about Vichy: which is that it was not a “right-wing” phenomenon or a “fascist” phenomenon or any other kind of ideological phenomenon, it was above all a French phenomenon. “I am giving myself to France,” Petain stated, and he really meant it, and people really understood what he meant, far better than they understood de Gaulle.

Right wingers and left wingers went to London, and what became the “interior Resistance” of Hollywood (and later French) legend was at first a mainly conservative movement, led by army officers like Henri Frenay and patriots whose first instinct, in many cases, had been to support Petain as the least awful alternative to being crushed like Poland.

By corollary, many on the left went with Petain, though it is certainly true that his ideologists, such as they were — Vichy was above all a shabby place, mentally, morally, intellectually, and every other way — came mainly from the right. But it is important to recall that they also came, in very important ways, from the left.

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