Read Voices from the Dark Years Online
Authors: Douglas Boyd
Voices from the Dark Years (18 page)
By contrast with Laval’s ostentatious lifestyle, Pétain lived abstemiously in Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc because it was more convenient for meetings than his official residence in the luxury mini-palace of that prolific seventeenth-century letter-writer the Marquise de Sévigné. Gravely acknowledging the acclamation of the public on his morning constitutionals, he was always guarded by the sinister Dr Bernard Ménétrel, whose three young daughters were pressed into service for photo-calls showing the marshal smiling at them with grandfatherly benevolence – which may have been the case, for rumour had it that Ménétral was Pétain’s illegitimate son by the wife of Dr Louis Ménétrel, who had been his personal physician until his death in 1936.
Bernard Ménétrel had been called up as a reservist captain in May 1940, but on his return from Madrid Pétain arranged for him to remain a civilian, ostensibly in order to look after his uncertain health: he needed daily injections from the man whose powers extended far beyond those of physician and private secretary. In the course of time, one in ten of all recipients of the Vichy regime’s medal called the Francisque would owe their awards directly to Ménétrel.
On his travels and even when making speeches on the balconies of public buildings, Pétain always kept his faithful retainer near him. The 400 men of the Gendarmerie Nationale in the marshal’s personal bodyguard were ordered by Ménétrel to allow no one near their charge unless approved by the doctor personally. Even Pétain had to circumvent his vigilant watchdog from time to time, once bending down to peer through the keyhole of his office door to make sure he was not outside before talking off-the-record to a man he knew to be in the Resistance. After appointing the one-legged and one-eyed First World War veteran Xavier Vallat Minister for Jewish Questions
because
he was a lawyer known for his anti-Semitism, Pétain on one occasion sought to restrain him, but used an intermediary to pass on his instructions because he knew Ménétrel would be furious if he found out.
With one exception, introduced to give the illusion that the new government was drawn from all parties, Pétain’s entourage was of the political right. But even this small group of men he had known for years was rarely taken into the marshal’s confidence. He mistrusted everyone around him, reasoning that they and the top civil servants had been collectively responsible for weakening the army he loved and bringing the country to misery and shame. As a career officer, the marshal was accustomed to changing one aide-de-camp for another without any personal feelings for any of them. On meeting his newly appointed
chef de cabinet
Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, he said, ‘I don’t trust anyone, du Moulin – not even you. But at least I can put a name to your face.’
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As with all totalitarian states, paranoia reigned from the outset in Vichy, with even humble secretaries in government office being followed by plainclothes detectives. In the Occupied Zone, arrests were soon taking place of people who refused orders from their new masters. One strange case was that of Rudier, the brass founder who had cast all Rodin’s statues and now refused to make armaments in his workshop. From Fresnes prison he smuggled out a note on a scrap of paper, which an unknown friend took to Berlin and handed to Arno Breker.
After acting as the Führer’s guide on the lightning tour of Paris, Breker had already refused an invitation to return to France from Jacques Benoist-Méchin, who was to become Minister of State charged with Franco-German relations. At the time Rudier’s plea arrived, pro-German intellectual Pierre-Eugène Drieu la Rochelle was in Berlin trying to persuade Breker to mount an exhibition in Paris. To help the old craftsman in prison, Breker accepted Drieu la Rochelle’s invitation and told Albert Speer that he could not cast his work in Germany because all the foundries had been diverted into war work. Could Speer help? In the usual way of the Third Reich, strings were pulled, Rudier was released, his team of ninety skilled workmen exempted from war work, and Speer allocated 30 tons of precious bronze to the casting of Breker’s statues for the exhibition.
Hitler’s favourite sculptor moved into a large requisitioned suite in the Paris Ritz, enjoying the hospitality of 37-year-old Ambassador Abetz and his French wife,
née
Suzanne de Bruycker, as well as
haute cuisine
at restaurants recommended by Rudier. He became a lifeline for French artists in trouble. When fellow sculptor Aristide Maillol’s Jewish mistress was arrested, Breker went straight to Müller, the head of the Gestapo, to get her released. And when in 1943 Pablo Picasso was finally caught red-handed by SS Hauptsturnführer Theo Danneker feathering a bolt-hole in Russia, it was Breker who intervened and saved his skin too – which did not stop Picasso from financing his son’s studies in Switzerland by giving his ex-wife Olga Koklova a sketchbook for her to sell in Geneva for hard cash.
But all this lay in the future. In the summer of 1940, more urgent than the wellbeing of a few artists was the restoration of normal life in those parts of France that had been devastated by the fighting. With 2,500 bridges destroyed and 1,300 railway stations rendered unusable by German action and demolition by the retreating French army, evacuated Parisian railway workers were summoned back to get trains running again in the capital and suburbs, but it took eight days for men who knew the railway network intimately to accomplish what should have been a journey of only 385km. They left Clermont-Ferrand at midday on 28 June and eventually arrived in Paris at midday on 5 July after a zigzag journey avoiding demolished bridges and German-occupied stations, with the blackout regulations making night travel difficult. In the general chaos, they had difficulty finding anything to eat after their provisions ran out.
Things were better on 18 July, when a train left Bordeaux for Paris carrying 1,700 railway workers, 728 employees of the Peugeot car factory and 450 employees of the aircraft industry, whose journey took only eighteen hours, instead of the usual five. Travel priority was also given to civil servants, factory workers and farmers needed back on their land to bring in the harvest. Not until the end of July could the general population return home by train. With a million people then travelling north, the congestion and discomfort in the summer heat can be imagined.
Paris’ pre-war population of 5 million stood at less than 2 million on 27 July. Between then and 8 August, another half-million refugees returned, unaware that from 29 June to 29 July their archbishop had been under house arrest, denied both food and the spiritual comfort of the Mass
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as a way of teaching him who was master. That Cardinal Suhard learned the lesson well and performed the balancing act familiar to many churchmen entrusted both with the spiritual welfare of their flock and the property of the Church, was to earn him Pétain’s support and de Gaulle’s enmity.
For those with anything to sell the Germans, business was better than usual. After years of living under Goering’s dictum that guns were better than butter, off-duty soldiers flocked to street markets and the Paris flea market, buying anything that could be sent home as ‘a present from France’, edible or not. Intellectuals of all ranks discovered the joys of browsing in the boxes of the
bouquinistes
along the embankment of the Seine and finding books in many languages long banned in Germany.
Amateur painters in field-grey set up their easels in the streets of Montmartre. Military bands gave open-air concerts of German music with an extract of Bizet’s
Carmen
as a sop to the natives. At the upper end of the musical scale, the Paris Opéra indulged those with a taste for Wagner so richly in the next four years that his works would be excluded from the repertoire for half a century after the war. The Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Fürtwangler was among the first of the German orchestras to play in the conquered former capital of France and pianist Walter Gieseking was acclaimed by Parisian critics for his interpretations of Debussy and Ravel.
The accountants were also literally having a field day. From the Banque de France down, every financial establishment was required to draw up statements of all balances held on behalf of clients in gold, paper money, foreign exchange and jewellery. Even neutral foreigners were unable to open their own safe deposit boxes to remove documents or riches secreted there. Before the end of July, property of Jews and the absent, including POWs, were seized against paper receipts stamped with Gothic script.
A major attraction of war has always been loot. Yet, in the villages of eastern France, the invaders of 1940 were considered less prone to pilfering than their fathers in 1914 and their grandfathers, who in 1870 had looted all the clocks and watches. However, in the now German areas of Alsace and Lorraine
all
industrial premises belonged to the Reich. June, July and August saw the beginning of organised looting throughout France, with the 7th Army ‘liberating’ from warehouses in the port of Bordeaux 5,718 tonnes of coffee plus 2,315 tonnes of cocoa, 450 tonnes of rice and 4,544 hectolitres – equivalent to 6 million bottles – of wine.
The evacuation of German troops from Lyon, which lay in the Free Zone, was scheduled for 25 June under the Armistice agreement but was delayed by five days to permit the seizure and removal to the Reich of 162 locomotives and 2,800 railway trucks and carriages, 2,500 tonnes of various foodstuffs, 2,000 tonnes of fuel, 310 tonnes of chemicals and 9,600 tonnes of variegated metals. Altogether, one third of all French rolling stock headed east and never came back.
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Before the end of the month, entire oil refineries and rolling mills had been dismantled and were rolling eastwards to enhance the Reich’s manufacturing capacity, along with 22,000 machines from state factories and 3,000 from private enterprise.
If all this was in the tradition of conquering armies, it was also in flagrant contravention of the Hague Conventions forbidding confiscation of civilian property except in conditions of military necessity.
N
OTES
1.
The slang for ‘profiteer’ was ‘
bof’
, standing for
beurre, oeufs, fromage
– butter, eggs and cheese being the three staples from which money was most easily made.
2.
H.R. Kedward,
Resistance in Vichy France
(Oxford: OUP, 1978), p. 36.
3.
‘Vivre dans la défaite est mourir tous les jours.’
4.
Amouroux,
La Vie
, Vol. 1, pp. 384–7.
5.
H. Diamond,
Women and the Second World War in France
(London: Longman, 1999), p. 32.
6.
S. Berton,
Allies at War
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 46.
7.
D. Pryce-Jones,
Paris in the Third Reich
(London: Collins, 1981), p. 148.
8.
More details in Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 150.
9.
1940: La Défaite, p. 512.
10.
Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, pp. 24–5.
11.
H. Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne sous l’Occupation
(Geneva: Famot, 1979), Vol. 3, p. 7.
‘Pour certains, le renom de Paris est tributaire de la beauté de quelques croupes joliment arondies.’
12.
1940: La Défaite
, p. 513.
13.
R. Bédarida,
Les Catholiques dans la Guerre 1935–1945
(Paris: Hachette, 1998), p. 45.
14.
Kernan,
France
, p. 23.
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