Voices from the Dark Years (21 page)

Too big for his borrowed boots, Jeanson refused after six weeks to put his name to an editorial committing
Aujourd’hui
to open collaboration – and found himself back in La Santé prison. His replacement Georges Suarez had written anti-German books before the war, but had no problem changing sides and serving German interests so well that he was among the first intellectuals tried and shot for treason after the Liberation. Released from prison, Jeanson was denounced for having written an article justifying the assassination in 1938 of a German embassy counsellor by Herschel Grynszpan, which triggered off the violence in Germany known as Kristallnacht. Summoned to Weber’s office to account for this and other anti-Hitler articles written years before, which had been brought to the Germans’ attention by his old enemies, he landed again in La Santé. Thomas Kernan commented, ‘[He] disappeared into the limbo reserved for renegades, suspect in their own world and thus of no further use to the masters they were ready to serve.’
¹⁵

The second Paris paper to resume publication was
Le Matin
, whose conservative proprietor had no trouble following the shifting priorities of the Propaganda Staffel, one day attacking the Americans, the next praising President Roosevelt and constant only in its hatred of the English. Out of respect for its alliance with Moscow, the German administration authorised
L’Humanité
to reappear, but under the title
La France au Travail
, edited by de Châteaubriand, the tenor of whose editorials was saccharinely pro-German: ‘It is particularly comforting in these times of misfortune to see numerous Paris workers striking up friendships with German soldiers.’
¹⁶

As one door closes … Jean Luchaire, managing editor of
Le Matin
, persuaded Weber to back a new daily
Les Nouveaux Temps –
a clone of the pre-war
Le Temps
, right down to the typefaces used
.
Luchaire’s method of doing business with ladies was on the large couch in his office. While employed as his secretary, future film star Simone Signoret spent most of her time buying flowers for German actresses entertained there and taking phone calls from Abetz’s wife and Achenbach. She also:

watched a whole raft of ladies passing through the padded door [of Luchaire’s office] in the winter of 1940, some because their husbands were prisoners and they wanted them back – one even returned with her husband a few weeks later to say thank you – and others because they needed a quick permit for some commercial enterprise.
¹⁷

In November the respectable right-wing
L’Oeuvre
was taken over by Marcel Déat, a
député
who boasted that he was ‘leader of the French who refused to die for Danzig’. Further right,
Le Cri du Peuple
was subsidised by Abetz to the tune of 250,000 francs a month. Its editor was ex-metalworker Jacques Doriot, the charismatic former No. 2 of the PCF, who had lectured in the USSR, backed Stalin against Trotsky and even visited China for the party before turning his coat to lead the far-right Parti Populaire Français (PPF). Far from biting the hand that fed him, Doriot praised Laval, the New Order and collaboration with as much energy as his 45,000 followers beat up gays. Similarly, in December 1940 editor-in-chief Pierre Brisson wrote in
Le Figaro
that Pétain’s priority for moral revival was ‘worthy of one of the most decisive tests in our history’. He could hardly do otherwise, since the Vichy regime would subsidise his paper to the tune of 2 million francs in 1941 alone. The most infamous occupation rag,
Au Pilori
, was anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic and hawked on the streets by malcontents who had previously sold the monarchist paper
Action Française
.
¹⁸
Its sales rose to 50,000 copies per issue by the end of 1941.

German propaganda had five main themes: it vaunted a mythical partnership between France and Germany, was generally pro-New Order and anti-English, was anti-democracy – especially American democracy – and it was of course anti-Semitic.

Weber was interested also in the quality magazines, for motives that combined profit and their usefulness as propaganda vehicles. In this shady area, the publisher of
Confidences
– a romantic confessions magazine – was invited by Sonderführer Weber to hand over 60 per cent of his shares in return for permission to publish. His refusal was followed by the appearance of a clone under the title
Votre Coeur.
Managing editor of
L’Illustration
, René Baschet, was an avid follower of Pétain and had no problem getting paper and permission to print after his second edition carried a photo-reportage of the Mers el-Kebir incident. Obliged nevertheless to accept from Weber an in-house censor who vetted every line of text and every picture, Baschet eventually sold out under pressure to parties unknown for much less than his magazine had been worth. The most popular woman’s magazine
Marie Claire
had enjoyed a circulation of 2 million copies per issue. Its management’s refusal to sell out saw another clone called
Pour Elle
on the streets within weeks.
¹⁹

After its brief hiatus during the invasion, the French film industry was beginning a boom, with audiences avid for escapist themes. Production soon outstripped that of the Reich. Despite a decree of 9 September 1940 regulating the film business and the setting up of a state organising committee on 2 December, no less than 225 feature films and 400 shorts and cartoons were produced during the occupation.
²⁰

N
OTES

  
1.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 3, p. 241.

  
2.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, pp. 204–5.

  
3.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 255.

  
4.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 3, pp. 122–3.

  
5.
  Le Boterf,
La Vie Parisienne
, Vol. 1, pp. 95–6.

  
6.
  Ibid., p. 11.

  
7.
  Ragache,
La Vie des Ecrivains
, p. 158.

  
8.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 92.

  
9.
  Ragache,
La Vie des Ecrivains
, p. 147.

10.
  L.H. Nicholas,
The Rape of Europa
(London: MacMillan, 1995), p. 157.

11.
  L. Steinberg in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 549.

12.
  Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 253.

13.
  Kernan,
France
, pp. 34–8.

14.
  Quoted in Burrin,
Living with Defeat
, p. 29.

15.
  Kernan,
France
, pp. 28-29.

16.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 64.

17.
  Ibid., p. 50.

18.
  Kernan,
France
, pp. 27–32.

19.
  Ibid.

20.
  Pryce-Jones,
Paris
, p. 164.

10

O
F
B
READ
AND
C
IRCUSES

On 28 June 1940, de Gaulle was recognised as head of the fledgling Free French forces by Churchill. So, by 2 July, when Laval was appointed successor to Pétain, the main actors in France’s tragedy were on the stage of history. Three weeks later came an unmistakable signal from Vichy. In one of the many volte-faces of post-war France, the chief prosecutor at Pétain’s trial in 1945 was the first to volunteer for service on the three-man Commission for Denaturalisation, which began on 22 July to revoke French citizenship granted to foreign-born citizens. Coming out of retirement specially, André Mornet showed his capacity for hard work by revoking nationality from 15,154 persons, including 6,307 Jews, for whom the result was deportation and almost certain death.
¹

Many cases were brought to the notice of the police and the commission by letters of denunciation from neighbours, business competitors and the simply mad, like the woman whose New Year greetings to de Brinon concluded: ‘I would beg you to excuse me from taking fizzy drinks the Jews put the powder from invisible diamonds in its unforgivable it cuts all the fibre of the intestines and the doctors say it’s a natural death.’
²
Saner letters were often signed, ‘A French patriot or An honest Frenchwoman’
.

Paris was still a ghost city of 1.8 million inhabitants instead of the normal 5 million. Few vehicles apart from German ones were on the streets and the café terraces were deserted. In an attempt to bring things back to normal, the Germans ordered the national railway system the SNCF to run refugee specials, and were informed that the best it could manage was to transport 100,000 people per week, at which rate it would take half a year to bring everyone back. Yet by 8 August – the day on which de Gaulle was condemned to death in absentia by a court martial – 500,000 returned Parisians were queuing for the coupons necessary since 3 August for their ration of sugar, bread and pasta, and then queuing again to buy these essentials. Few of them cared that the Masonic orders had been dissolved by decree on 2 August and their assets seized by the state. Police trying to lay hands on the membership lists were for the most part frustrated to find they had been sent out of the country well in advance.

One of the ways in which a society defines itself is by excluding alien elements: in the USSR, the bourgeoisie and foreigners; in Germany, Jews, freemasons, gypsies and ‘deviants’ such as homosexuals. Vichy’s exclusion laws were aimed at immigrants, communists and Jews, who had nothing to do with the defeat. On 13 August, while Stabsmusikmeister Rupf conducted a public concert on the
parvis
in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, Pétain announced in a policy speech that all secret societies were to be made illegal. So eager to please its new masters was the important Félix Potin company that it sacked a Jewish manageress after forty-two years’ loyal service
before
the new legislation was enacted, from fear that ‘the Germans will seize our business … if we keep Jews in our senior management’.
³

Two weeks later, on 27 August, Pétain’s dream of a mass return to the land was announced by posters everywhere featuring grizzled old peasants bequeathing the family plough to their sons, with slogans such as ‘This is a fine weapon, my son. Use it to fight the good fight.’
⁴
Grants were available for families choosing to return to farming. The catch was that they had to have at least one child and the expectation of more. They also had to undertake to remain farmers for at least ten years. With only 1,561 couples signing up, the result was a crushing blow to Pétain’s hopes.