De Gaulle, the man who must be loved

From "Destin Français" by Éric Zemmour

READ THE PREVIOUS ENTRY - “PÉTAIN, THE MAN WHO MUST BE LOATHED”

The accounts were finally settled. Late, but completely. The accounts of the 1930s. The accounts of the war and the debacle. For the Marshal, as for the General, it was the Republic that had lost the war. It had to pay! When the Bonapartes were defeated militarily, their imperial regimes immediately collapsed. It is right, it is legitimate, that the Republic, losing the war in its turn - and in what manner! - should disappear body and soul.

“I thought that we, the heirs of one hundred and fifty years of error, were hardly responsible,” wrote a young man of 26, in an article published in December 1942, in France, magazine of the new state. His name was François Mitterrand. And de Gaulle himself, in the 1950s, still vituperated in front of Claude Guy: “To hear them [the Republicans] tell it, France began to resound in 1789! Incredible mockery: on the contrary, it's been since 1789 that we've never stopped declining.”

The Republic had been incapable of defining an independent foreign policy and a coherent military strategy. The Republic and its small staff of local and national elected officials, of short-sighted arrondissementiers whom they both despise. Like Pétain, de Gaulle surrounded himself in power with unelected technicians, even if - like Pétain - he had to tolerate the presence of the old parliamentary staff. De Gaulle was not mistaken when he spoke of the motivations of his opponents. He confided to Claude Mauriac: “It was the State they recognized in me, and it was the State they were fighting in me. And it's worth noting that they only fought Marshal Pétain because of the good he offered them. Those who opposed Pétain only criticized him for infringing their parliamentary prerogatives!”
No one was fooled at the time. Claude Mauriac continues: “De Gaulle explained to my father [François Mauriac] that there had been two kinds of Resistance - between which no agreement, after the Liberation, was possible: ‘Mine - yours - which was resistance to the enemy - and then the political resistance - which was anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, but in no way national...’”
After General de Gaulle's return to “business”, François Mauriac wrote in his notebook: “If I surrendered so easily to the new institutions of the Fifth Republic, it's because for forty years of my life, I followed every morning, as no doubt de Gaulle himself did, in L'Action française, the implacable analysis of French parliamentary life and its slow corruption [...] what must be said is that de Gaulle continued, in a way, not on the blackboard, but on this crucified body of the fatherland, finally taken down from the cross, the proof begun by Maurras.” Maurras, who had seen the advent of Pétain as a “divine surprise”. Maurras, of whom Raymond Aron would write, in Le Figaro of December 17, 1964: “Charles de Gaulle would have accomplished, within the republican framework, many of the transformations that Charles Maurras would have been wrong to believe impossible without the Restoration.”

THE COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE MONARCHY AND THE REPUBLIC

De Gaulle, after Pétain, finally found a compromise between the monarchy and the republic, and established a personal, authoritarian regime that neither wanted to be a tyranny nor a totalitarianism. Pétain had refused to set up a unique party, but couldn't help seizing all powers - executive, legislative and judicial - in a culpable confusion. De Gaulle was more skilful, and better at keeping up appearances, even if the reality was a concentration of powers unprecedented in a Republic. A consular Republic.

Neither Rome, nor Berlin, nor Moscow. The challenge ran throughout the 20th century: how to harness the power of the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that emerged after the First World War to regenerate France, while preserving its “soul”? As early as July 10, 1940, the terms of the equation had been laid down in a remarkable speech by Pierre-Étienne Flandin, which met with general approval, including that of “his friend” Pierre Laval himself: “Nothing would be worse... than a slavish copy of institutions from which we would perhaps take only what is mediocre or bad, and from which we would not, on the contrary, assimilate what is strong. We must take their strength, but clearly eliminate their weaknesses, and, if the term isn't too strong, this sort of contempt for human personality... There is something in the freedom of our villages and towns that enchants anyone who sets foot on the soil of France. The land of France must remain the land of France...”

Neither Rome, nor Berlin, nor Moscow. Nor London nor Washington either. Rather Rome, Berlin, Moscow, London, and Washington. A “French” synthesis of authoritarian regimes that would spare essential freedoms. By the end of the war, even the most determined collaborators, those who did not hesitate to call themselves “fascists”, would feel that they had failed to safeguard the “soul of France”. In January 1944, Robert Brasillach explained to a group of students “that the ideal regime would be one that would reconcile the ideas of grandeur, national socialism, the exaltation of youth, the authority of the State, which [he] felt were included in fascism, with that respect for individual liberty which is the undisputed prerogative of the English Constitution.”

How to dismantle the Third Republic, and its chronic inability to govern the nation, while at the same time respecting the freedoms that the Third Republic, for its own glory, had enshrined in the marble of its great laws? Carried away by its vindictiveness, and the still stinging memory of military defeat, the Vichy regime was to destroy one without safeguarding the others. Better educated by experience, the Gaullist government managed to distinguish between the two, even though its opponents at the time spent their time denouncing the Gaullist “dictatorship” and its contempt for freedoms.

Both Pétain and de Gaulle sought a synthesis between the liberal and socialist orders, between right-wing and left-wing values, between national and social realities. General de Gaulle himself admitted as much in his Mémoires de guerre: “If, in the financial and economic spheres, these technocrats [of Vichy] had conducted themselves, despite all their shortcomings, with undeniable skill, on the other hand, the social doctrines of the national revolution - corporative organization, the Labor Charter, family privileges - contained ideas that were not without appeal.”

Since the early 1930s, the country's elites - polytechnicians and Sciences Po graduates alike - had been fulminating against the Third Republic's inability to meet the challenges of modernity. They felt that the liberalism and parliamentarianism of the 19th century were no longer suited to the times, and cursed a regime paralyzed by selfish individualism and party shenanigans.
In Vichy, as in Paris, they denounced the “decadence” of a society of small traders and peasants, and promised to revive anemic growth through a “concerted economy.” They will demand - and obtain - a return to state control of the economy, of the state by the executive, and of the executive by technocracy. As patriots, these iconoclasts are looking for a French way that rejects communism, fascism and Nazism, as well as American mass consumerism. They rejected both totalitarianism and individualism, forging a synthesis that combined efficiency and spiritualism, integration into large economic entities and patriotism, free markets and planning.
These syntheses will not be found in a day; there will be evolutions, trial and error, sometimes tragic. They will be called “non-conformists”, “Vichyists”, “Resistance fighters”, “Gaullists”, “Socialists”. Their bosses were successively Daladier, Reynaud, Pétain and de Gaulle. The same men passed through Paris, Vichy, London and Algiers. There was a “Vichy before Vichy” in the authoritarian turn taken by the Third Republic at the end of the 1930s, and there would be a Vichy after Vichy, at the Liberation, and in 1958, when General de Gaulle returned.

TRANSWAR

At the time of the Papon trial in 1997, Olivier Guichard pointed out that three of the four Prime Ministers under General de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou had been civil servants of the "French State" (Debré, Chaban-Delmas, Couve de Murville). Until November 1942, all civil servants obeyed Marshal Pétain, whose power was not challenged by the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Édouard Herriot, the President of the Senate, Jules Jeanneney, or the representatives of foreign powers.
Japanese historians use the neologism “transwar” to refer to the period 1930-1950. We could easily apply this notion to the French situation. The same men, the same ideas, the same policies were all present. The economic planning developed from 1941 onwards became the Commissariat au Plan in 1945. François Perroux and André Vincent founded the forerunner of INSEE, the statistical tool of national accounting, and introduced Keynesian ideas to France. The 1940 law on the board of directors of public limited companies and the 1943 law on the liability of company chairmen paved the way for the 1966 reform of corporate law. In 1945, the creation of the Works Council, a major social achievement of the Liberation, was an offshoot of the Social Works Council provided for in the Labor Charter of October 26, 1941. The Fondation Carrel prefigures Alfred Sauvy's Ined. The foundation's head, Adolphe Landry, was Alfred Sauvy's teacher. He was also a friend of Robert Debré, Michel's father, whom he introduced to demographic issues.
The family policy introduced in 1938 by the Third Republic would not be altered in any way by Vichy, and was reinforced at the Liberation. The famous “baby boom” of births, that surprising French demographic spring after the long winter of the 19th century, began, despite its American nickname, in 1941. It was as if France, which had almost died from its victory in 1918, was resurrecting from its defeat in 1940. Pierre Laroque, the founder of Social Security at the Liberation, worked for Vichy before his Jewish origins forced him to step aside. Raoul Dautry and Jean Lacoste both worked for Vichy, becoming ministers under the Fourth French Republic. Michel Debré under the Fifth. Paul Baudoin, Jean Bichelonne, Yves Bouteillier, Henri Dhavernas, Robert Garric, Georges Lamirand and François Lehideux worked for Vichy. Paul Delouvrier, who developed the La Défense district under General de Gaulle in the 1960s, had been trained at the Uriage executive school created by Vichy. The same school where Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of Le Monde newspaper, had cut his teeth. The farmers' corporations and the professional orders for doctors and architects were maintained after the Liberation, as were all Vichy's social policies: compulsory identity cards, protection of delinquent children, creation of a minimum living wage, introduction of a pay-as-you-go pension system, development of family allowances, emancipation of married women, introduction of the Highway Code and the Town Planning Code, occupational medicine, compulsory medical check-ups at school, etc.

THE TECHNOCRATS OF VICHY, THOSE UNKNOWN FATHERS OF THE “THIRTY GLORIOUS”

Contrary to the carefully nurtured doxa, the Liberation was not a rupture, but a continuity. The technocrats of Vichy are indeed the unknown fathers of the “Trente Glorieuses”. And the hated fathers of post-war French culture. Jean Vilar, Jean Dasté and André Clavé, the masters of the great popular theater that took off after the Liberation, all began their careers with Jeune France, the artistic group sponsored by Vichy.
At the Liberation, the veterans of the Front Populaire and the Communists reached a compromise with the veterans of Vichyism, around an ideology that brought them together, a mixture of pacifism and anti-Americanism. In theater, cinema and radio, and later on television in the 1960s, the same aesthetic, the same concern for “French quality”, rooted in the Vichy era, scorned the "scene" of the 1930s, dominated by Hollywood productions and boulevard theater. The ideology had shifted to the left, but the executives had emerged from the Occupation. Public bodies such as the CNC (for cinema) and Sofirad (for radio) were first set up under Vichy. State radio played a decisive role on the airwaves, whatever the regime.
Institutions, the economy, social affairs, culture, the media: everything passed through Vichy, and suffered Vichy's indelible, if hidden, imprint. As the American historian Philip Nord explains with finesse: “Vichy acted as a relay station, selecting a certain number of causes and principles that had emerged in the final years of the Third Republic and transmitting them to the Fourth Republic.”

Of course, the condition of Jews radically isolates Vichy. Of course, the two statutes concerning Jews and professional bans were abolished at the Liberation. Of course, we know from the testimony of a Vichy minister, Paul Baudoin, that Marshal Pétain insisted, during the Council of Ministers of October 1, 1940, that there should be no more Jews in the Education and Justice Departments. But the same Marshal Pétain refused to allow Jews to wear the yellow star in the free zone, and did not prohibit mixed marriages in the German manner. A policy of discriminatory treatment of Jews satisfied the circles around Action Française, who felt that the power and social success of the Jews had been excessive before the war. That they behaved towards the French population like a “ruling race installed in the midst of a native and inferior population”, in the words of Pétain's Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélemy.

Our contemporary historians believe that Vichy took these anti-Jewish measures of its own initiative, without any pressure from the occupying forces. But no one notes that the same Paul Baudoin, whose testimony is so useful in attesting to the Marshal's rigor with regard to the Jews, refers to the Council of Ministers of September 10, 1940 as follows: “It is becoming increasingly obvious that, despite the repugnance of almost the entire council - and Laval is one of the most opposed to anti-Jewish measures - if we continue to refrain from any intervention in this question, the Germans will take brutal decisions in the occupied zone, perhaps even extending the application of their racial laws purely and simply to occupied France.”
It's no secret that the French police arrested foreign Jews during the Vél'd'Hiv roundup in July 1942. But everyone is unaware, or chooses to be, that the first Vél'd'Hiv roundup was carried out by Paul Reynaud's government on May 15, 1940: five thousand German Jewish women were taken to the Gurs camp. Prior to this, the decree-laws of November 12, 1938 and November 18, 1939, issued by the Daladier government, had led to the internment in camps of foreign Jews, mainly Germans and Austrians, estimated by Serge Klarsfeld at seventeen thousand.

FRENCH ISRAELITES AND FOREIGN JEWS

To fully understand the situation, one must bear in mind that the Jewish population of France had reached three hundred thousand in 1939, compared with ninety thousand at the beginning of the 20th century. Most of them lived in the Paris region. This immigration from Germany, Poland and Russia worried and exasperated even French Jews. The president of the Consistoire Israélite himself, Jacques Helbronner, from an old Alsatian family, a senior civil servant and patriot, also carefully distinguished between foreign Jews and French Israelites. At the end of 1941, in the presence of Abbot Glosberg and Father Chaillet, who were organizing the protection and rescue of foreign Jewish refugees, he dissuaded Cardinal Gerbier from intervening on behalf of the latter, who were interned in transit camps: “You don't understand that if we raise this issue, tomorrow similar measures could be taken against French Israelites. The Cardinal must not intervene on behalf of foreigners. It can only worsen our situation.” Helbronner would be deported and assassinated at Auschwitz in November 1943.

The son of an Italian Jew from Livorno, André Suarès wrote bluntly in 1938 in his anti-Nazi pamphlet Sur l'Europe: “I'm against the Jews if they are in a separate band and if they are not incorporated, soul and flesh, honor and interest, into the nation where they claim to live: are they or are they not? Let them think about it and choose. It depends on them, as much and sometimes more than on those who insult, praise, or hate them. When the choice is made, if they want to be a people within the people, a state within the state, they won't have to complain about being treated like strangers and rejected. To be loved, you have to be lovable; you have to make yourself tolerable to be tolerated.”

In the autumn of 1940, when the status of the Jews had just been made public, Jacques Helbronner sent Marshal Pétain a "Note sur la question juive" (Note on the Jewish question), which is worth quoting at length: “From the end of the 19th century, a danger had been apparent in the eyes of French Israelites, who could not help worrying as successive governments opened France's borders to foreigners persecuted in their own countries, and gave them ever greater access to French nationality. And yet, among the refugees driven from their homelands by shy nationalism, Jews made up the bulk of those taking refuge in France [...]. The invasion took on increasingly worrying proportions as Nazism developed and conquered Europe. Despite warnings from French Jewry, the governments of France did nothing (on the contrary) to avert the danger. The reaction against the invasion of foreigners resulted in a normal anti-Semitism whose victims today are the old French families of the Israelite religion.”

The failure of the Evian conference (July 6-14, 1938) had shown that no European country, nor the United States, was willing to accept these Jewish immigrants, provoking the hateful sarcasm of Nazi dignitaries. When, on the eve of the Vél'd'Hiv roundup on July 17, 1942, the American ambassador in Vichy telephoned Laval to dissuade him from handing these Jews over to the Germans, the latter offered to send them to the United States, which the American politely refused.
The status of Jews in October 1940, and the discrimination and professional bans they faced, went unnoticed. Those in the population who took an interest in it, despite the debacle, the anguish of prisoners who did not return and the food supply, approved of it. Even in London, the few who rallied to the Gaullist plume, mostly from the ranks of Action Française, thought no differently on the subject than the rest of the French population, and the Jews who shared their tables had to endure their jibes, which sometimes turned into slurs.

For this reason, Radio Londres hardly ever attacked Vichy on this theme. In London, as in Vichy, the distinction between French Israelites and foreign Jews is a truism. Only the Germans and the fiercest anti-Semitic collaborators would lump all Jews together in the same basket of opprobrium. De Gaulle never mentioned the fate of the Jews in his war memoirs, and neither did Churchill. At the Pétain trial, neither the High Court nor General de Gaulle blamed him for the delivery of foreign Jews.

“A SHEEPFOLD, MISTER MARSHALL”

For the Germans, this distinction was only a first step. After the foreign Jews would come the turn of the French Jews. They therefore urged the Vichy government to transform the French into foreigners. A law for the denaturalization of French Jews naturalized since January 1, 1927 was prepared by René Bousquet, signed by Pierre Laval; but Pétain, after a discreet but effective intervention by the Church, refused to ratify it on August 14, 1943. In the process, he now prohibited the French police from participating in the arrests. Keeping promises made to Helbronner and other notable Israelites, Pétain warned that he would oppose similar treatment between “rooted” Jews, “war decorated”, and immigrant Jews. The Germans didn't want to believe it. Thus began a hunt for Jews, by the SS and the Militia, furious as well as disorderly, which no longer distinguished between French and foreigners. It is the “polandization” so feared by Pétain, which clearly proves a contrario the protective role played by a State, whatever it may be, as confirmed by the examples always cited - rightly - of Denmark or even from Italy.

At the Liberation, the SS representative in Paris who negotiated with Bousquet, Karl Albrecht Oberg, was arrested by the Americans. Extradited to France in June 1954 and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Interned in Mulhouse, he was discreetly released by decision of General de Gaulle on November 28, 1962. The measure was part of Franco-German reconciliation. Oberg died a free man on June 3, 1965 in Flensburg…

Neither Pétain nor de Gaulle would immediately understand that this old “Jewish question” of the 19th century was changing its nature. The Maurrassian vituperations against “the State within the State”, the denunciations of the excessive influence of the Jews, but also of the Protestants or the Freemasons, which for centuries had been seen as a fierce defense, in the manner of Richelieu against the Huguenots, of the integrity of the State against the “lobbies” and the minorities, all this verbal and largely rhetorical violence was no longer relevant at a time when the Nazi exterminator was implementing his “final solution”, as of January 1942. In Vichy, but also in London, as in Washington or Moscow, few people understood what was really happening. Also in 1914, the old-timers recall, the propaganda claimed that the Germans were killing children! But one of Pétain's intellectuals, René Gillouin, particularly perceptive, undoubtedly because of his Protestant origins, nevertheless warned Pétain in August 1941: “The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which remained like a stain on the glory of Louis XIV, will appear like a sheepfold next to your Jewish laws, Mr. Marshal.”

The Marshal's Cassandra would end up being right, but years, even decades, after the war. There too, there again, there above all, the equivocal finesse of the games in troubled waters and of the double discourses, which the Vichy regime favored, will be swept away by the Manichaeism of passions. As historian Annie Kriegel noted with powerful intuition on March 25, 1991: “There is a young historical school which wants to wage a sort of private civil war described as heroic against the Vichy government. It seems absurd to me to reverse things to the point of saying that not only was the government complicit, but that it took the initiative in an enterprise of repression of the Jews. I sometimes wonder if, contrary to common belief, the part of sacrifice in the policy and conduct of Marshal Pétain did not have more certain and positive effects on the salvation of the Jews than on the destiny of France."

At the Liberation, the High Consultative Committee of Population and Family (HCPF), led by a former member of Doriot's French Popular Party (PPF), Georges Mauco (sitting alongside him were Robert Debré and Alfred Sauvy), further recommended immigration services to take into account “ethnic, health, demographic, and geographic considerations”. The committee then plead in favor of family immigration of European origin, close to what it called the “French ethnicity”. The Minister of Public Health and Population, Pierre Pflimlin, approved. De Gaulle, who had become president of the provisional government, in a letter to René Pleven, found that there were already far too many Mediterraneans in the composition of the French people, and wanted immigration from northern Europe to be encouraged. It was the Council of State, then chaired by René Cassin himself, which rejected the opinion of the High Committee. The author of the future Universal Declaration of Human Rights could not tolerate that France wanted to choose, among the foreigners it welcomed, those who were the most easily assimilated. This is how the immigration of workers from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, would begin.

IN NEED OF ALLIES

This detour via the Council of State is useful for measuring what will be the unacknowledged and unspeakable drama of the Gaullian gesture. In order to oppose Marshal Pétain, with whom he shared most ideas, in order to delegitimize the Vichy regime and to fight it victoriously, to replace him as legitimate and then legal power, General de Gaulle needed allies, even if they were the furthest from what he was and thought. Even if they were his adversaries, even his political enemies. He could refuse nothing to this great jurist that was René Cassin, who had found the legal trick to make “null and void, the acts of the de facto government known as the Vichy government.” He also had to accept the return of the hated political parties of the Third Republic, within the Council of the Resistance, to the great dismay of his first supporters. He had to show his suspicious American godfathers that he was not the fascist dictator they suspected him of being. From 1941, he agreed to add to the proud motto of the original free France, Honor and Fatherland¹, the republican trilogy that he had initially disdained: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

The worst was yet to come. He had to ally himself with the communists who had only entered into active resistance after the big Soviet brother had been attacked by the German army, since June 1941. The entry of the “Party” was resounding on August 21 1941: one of its militants, who went down in history under the name “Colonel Fabien,” assassinated the German officer Moser, with a bullet in the back, at the Barbès subway station. This crime was not only contrary to the rules of the armistice, but above all to the code of honor of war. Pétain. like de Gaulle, but also the leaders of the Resistance, Henri Fresnay, Emmanuel d'Astier and Jean-Pierre Lévy, all condemned the act of Colonel Fabien. The Germans, enraged, murdered a hundred hostages in retaliation. Even as Admiral Darlan was on the verge of obtaining a pardon for the great resistance fighter Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves, arrested shortly before, instead he was executed.

“A MAN ADRIFT”

The communists were engaged in the mess of civil war. They murdered German soldiers, but also and above all French people, magistrates, trade unionists, police officers, all those they deemed “collaborators”, “enemies of the proletarian”. In 1942 alone, the communists committed fifty attacks. This communist activism would provoke both the creation of the Militia by the Laval government, in January 1943, and the arrival of the SS, sent by Hitler to ensure the security of German troops, whose senior officers did not want to alter the “correct” relations that they had until then maintained with the French population.

1944 would therefore be the year of civil war. Between resistants and collabos, between Gaullists and Pétainists, between communists and fascists. The communists had succeeded. Both Pétain and de Gaulle were overwhelmed, no longer in control of anything. Since November 1942, and the invasion of the free zone by the German army, Pétain had embodied a puppet power. Already on April 20, 1942, receiving a few ministers who had resigned from the Darlan government, even though he was being forced by the Germans to retake the Laval he vomited, Pétain confided to them: “Pity me, because you know, now, I am nothing more than a man adrift.”

His drift comes from afar. From his lack of audacity, his wait-and-see attitude, his opportunism elevated to a principle of political survival. On December 13, 1940, to everyone's surprise, he got rid of Pierre Laval and put Pierre-Étienne Flandin in his place as head of government. Laval embodied the integration without ulterior motives – up to a formal military alliance – of France into a new European order dominated by Germany. Flandin wanted to resist the Germans and guarantee the French independence provided for by the armistice. The two lines have their coherence and an undeniable breadth of views; but Pétain refused to choose between the two and ended up on February 9, 1941, under pressure from the Germans, forced to get rid of Flandin.

But it was on November 11, 1942 that he himself signed the end of his regime, his political death, and his tragic destiny in History. The Germans were preparing to invade the free zone, in order to respond to the American landing in North Africa. Pétain would no longer have sovereign territory. Soon, he would no longer have either a fleet that would scuttle itself, or an empire that would willingly submit to Uncle Sam. Those close to him urged Pétain to leave for North Africa. A plane was ready. Pétain hesitated, then refused. We will never know what was decisive: his great age, his panicky fear of flying (Stalin took the plane for the first time to go to the Tehran conference in 1943; and never took it again), his desire to protect the French to the end, his enjoyment of the national powers, even if artificial. “A pilot must remain at the helm during the storm,” he explained later, “if I had left, it would have been the regime of Poland for France… You don’t know what that is, the regime of Poland. France would have died.”
He was the one who died. He would no longer protect the French or the Jews, French and foreigners alike, who were harassed by the SS and the militia, under the exclusive orders of Laval, who had returned with all powers. He did not avoid the civil war he claimed to ward off. He associated his name, his aura as winner of Verdun and his regime with Laval's policy of frank collaboration. He was startled, frightened, repulsed. One day, he called out to Darquier de Pellepoix, the Commissioner for Jewish Questions, whom the Germans and Laval had imposed on him, to replace Xavier Vallat, in a sad tone: “Mr. torturer…”
Yet he had foreseen it. He had confided to Admiral Auphan, his Secretary of State for the Navy from April to November 1942: “It will be fine if the war only lasts three months, but if it lasts another three years, we will be Polandized.”

The entry into the war of French Africa, alongside the allies, under the orders of Darlan, Pétain's heir apparent, had definitively opened German eyes to Vichy's double game; but Darlan would be assassinated by a young Gaullist activist. Pétain's last card had fallen.

THE BLOOD PACT

De Gaulle triumphs. Starting from November 1942, for many French people, Pétainists in July 1940, de Gaulle became what the Marshal was: the symbol of French renaissance. But to ensure his fragile power over the Resistance, which guaranteed his legitimacy among the allies, de Gaulle had to give pledges to the communists. This is the reason why he refused the pardon of Pucheu, the very type of the technocrat who became a minister under Vichy, and of Darnand (the founder of the Militia). Each time, de Gaulle conveys his respect and personal consideration to the condemned men he could not save.

These two executions announce the “purge”, its exceptional justice, its sordid settling of scores, its condemned to death not because they are guilty but because they are defeated, or because they bear an aristocratic name, or possess necessarily ill-gotten wealth, these women shorn and molested, raped and murdered. The purge is the blood pact that de Gaulle is forced to conclude with the communists, just as Napoleon had to execute the Duke of Enghien to ensure the support of the regicidal Jacobins on the eve of his imperial coronation.
De Gaulle recounts in his Mémoires de guerre how he stopped the spiralling civil war, by disarming the communist militias, in Toulouse in particular. But it was in Moscow, with Stalin, that he sought an end to hostilities. The price to pay would be high. It would be the return of Maurice Thorez, the general secretary of the Communist Party, deserter in 1940, minister in 1945. De Gaulle is forced to offer those he would describe in a few years as “separatists” with inexhaustible horns of abundance like EDF (Électricité De France) and, even more seriously, the direction of youthful minds through union control over National Education. By controlling schools, universities and culture, the communists would be able to format the brains of the generation which, two decades later, would call de Gaulle a “fascist” and a “Petainist”.

This is the paradox of De Gaulle, but also of Pétain: two men of order who take the lead in revolutions, even if they want them to be national. If the two men were not fooled by the words, the words were indeed spoken. As Emmanuel Berl notes, “the words would accomplish their work.”
Pétain's left, around Laval, child of Briand and Caillaux, led him despite the marshal himself into “a collaboration which desired the victory of Germany”, in the name of peace and Europe. De Gaulle's left brought him back to party rule in a Fourth Republic which proved to be little better than the Third, and which ejected its guardian after a few months.
The left had long had a weakness for Pétain. At the Marshal's trial, Reynaud said: “Pétain had the audience of the left because he was the man of the defense and the defense was of the left.” At the time, the left was, however, wary of de Gaulle who advocated both the offensive and the professional army. When Pétain became ambassador to Madrid, Léon Blum declared: “The noblest, the most humane of our military leaders is out of place with General Franco.” It was the Left, as the historian Simon Epstein demonstrated in his master book, A French Paradox, which joined Vichy en masse, to forge a Europe finally pacified and united under the leadership of Germany. This Left which, allied with the technocrats, keen on efficiency above all, would give economic reality to the policy of collaboration.

In February 1941, the Darlan cabinet brought into the government Jacques Benoist-Méchin, François Lehideux, Paul Marion, Pierre Pucheu, all members of the Worms bank. They transmitted a report to Berlin on the European economic organization. For our dashing technocrats, the modernization of the French economy required its integration into an entity led by Germany. Pucheu then declared: “We are convinced that it is our duty to bring about the victory of Europe from the defeat of France.”

THE CHAIR OF TALLEYRAND AND CHATEAUBRIAND

Voluntarily or not, the so-called “national” revolution contributed to integrating France into the new European order, established by Germany. But de Gaulle loses nothing by waiting. Voluntarily or not, entry into the Common Market in 1957, ratified by Gaullian France in 1958, would also contribute to integrating France into the European order established by the United States. The Allied victory over Germany snatched France from its destiny as a large region of the German Empire; but it was to ensure its destiny as a French-speaking dominion in the new Western empire which was established in 1945, under American hegemony. An America which immediately sponsored an integrated Europe where German economic power would soon assert itself. One evening in 1969, during a reception at the Élysée, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's minister, teasing his old host, asked him how he intended to contain the irresistible domination of German economic power over Europe. De Gaulle replied point-for-tat: “Through war!” Another day, he will blurt out to Admiral Flohic: “We’ll have to punch them in the face!”
Pétain no longer mattered to Hitler the moment the war became global. De Gaulle no longer mattered to the Americans from the moment the competition with the Soviet Union turned into the Cold War. All historians explain that the iconoclastic audacity of General de Gaulle in June 1940 ensured France's presence at the victorious table, and its permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But de Gaulle was not invited to the Yalta conference in February 1945 by the big three, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

Mauriac wrote with a melancholic pen that, for the first time in history, including after our worst defeats, the chair of Talleyrand and Chateaubriand had remained empty. “When we are not at the table,” say the Poles, accustomed to suffering the cruel whims of the Empires whose neighbors they are, “it is because we are on the menu.” General de Gaulle, at Yalta, was not at the big table. He was also not informed of the landing of allied troops on June 6, 1944 on the Normandy coast. And had to fight like hell to keep away the American currency that the American military administration, AMGOT, was preparing to pour into occupied France.

De Gaulle like Pétain did what they could to save France's place in the concert of the great powers. Each in their own way, they refused to mourn the France of 1918. Each in their own way, each in their place. Knowing very well what the other was doing. In all conscience, even if they said the opposite. They both failed. They both pursued an illusion: the illusion of power for Pétain, the illusion of grandeur for de Gaulle. “The real tragedy of 1940,” explains Guy Dupré in his masterpiece, Le Grand Coucher, “is that it was performed like an opera-bouffe, where we saw a providential general taking over from a providential marshal to prevent a truly bloody fifth set. Marshal Shield (pierced) allowed the French to endure the Occupation in a rather gentle manner and General Section (of the sword) persuaded them that they had participated in the victory of arms.”

THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD

Before being forcibly transferred by the Germans to Sigmaringen, Pétain delivered his final message to the French on August 11, 1944, which sounded like his testament: “The intractable patriotism of some has deprived me of the only weapons that the armistice had left me. The collaborationist fanaticism of others has continued to stimulate the demands and alert the mistrust of the Germans. On the one hand, when I negotiated for France, I was denounced as an auxiliary of Germany. On the other hand, men who saw the salvation of France only in German victory denounced my wait-and-see attitude as a betrayal... If it is true that de Gaulle boldly raised the sword of France, history will not forget that I patiently held the shield of the French…”
In 1947, de Gaulle confided to Colonel Rémy: “France must always have two strings to its bow. In June 40, it needed the Pétain string as well as the de Gaulle one.”

The sword and the shield, in fact. In the facts. The sword and the shield in the heads. In their heads.
The quarrel between Pétain and de Gaulle is philosophical: what is a nation? A territory, a people, an administration, or a spirit, values, an idea? The vast majority of France in 1940 responded “one territory, one people, one administration”; today’s France, in its vast majority, and in any case through the voice of its political and intellectual elites, responds with “a spirit, values, a certain idea.”

Raymond Cartier writes in his book on The Second World War: “Two patriotisms are face to face. One thinks that it is possible to transport the flame of the homeland outside the homeland. The other believes that there is strength and truth only in the native soil... The facts do not prove either one right or the other. Those who left returned with the halo of victory – but what would they have found without the work of conservation of those who stayed? The fierce accusations with which they have been pursuing for a quarter of a century will lose their meaning for later generations. They will not see traitors and heroes, capitulators and adventurers, but only French people torn apart by a tragic conflict.”

He was wrong on the judgment of posterity. Modern France forged together, beyond hatred and ideological opposition, by Pétain and de Gaulle, would be brought down by this new generation of which they had been the tutelary fathers, this famous generation known as the “baby boom”, which would soon become the ungrateful generation 68. This began by putting its two mentors in the same bag of insults. To throw down de Gaulle, then in power, the left-wing youth assimilated him to Pétain. To better demonize him, fascisize him and overthrow him. It was de Gaulle = Pétain, like CRS = SS. Then, on the contrary, came the time when left-wing intellectuals rediscovered the General. After his departure from power and his death in 1970.
With his 1984 biography, Jean Lacouture is a milestone. De Gaulle is no longer the putschist general, with reactionary ideas, authoritarian tendencies, agent of the “trusts” and the bourgeoisie. He is the man of all daring, of all rebellions, the man who says no. He became, with Régis Debray, the standard bearer of the revolt of nations against empires, a sort of Richelieu fighting the last Holy German-American Empire. With Bernard-Henri Lévy, he embodies the man with the soles of wind who takes his homeland with him into exile, a sort of sublime wandering Jew, while Pétain is the name of the odious homeland of the earth and the dead, fascist because rooted. This last analysis is the furthest from the will of General de Gaulle; the one that most distorts his message, what he was and what he said. This is undoubtedly why it stood out. The rooted man, the unwilling emigrant, has transformed into a paragon of uprooting. The fervent Catholic and lukewarm republican into a secular and cosmopolitan republican. The man who said to Claude Guy “You see, Blum is a man who has never been able to pursue any national end, applying himself in everything to remaining foreign to France” is designated as the standard bearer of a universalist anti-racism.

SPEECH OF JACQUES CHIRAC AT THE VEL’ D’HIV

The France forged between the 1930s and 1950s was destroyed culturally in 1968, and economically in 1983, with the great European and liberal turn of the left. Then returned everything that had denounced and fought against these “non-conformist” elites who had ended up building modern France: economic liberalism, the party regime, individualism, internationalism, pacifism, the submission of France to the Anglo-Saxon ally (America having replaced England), the fascination with the successes of Germany, the sanctification of Europe in the name of peace, the domination of finance and the disdain of industry, up until the death of “French quality” defeated in theater, cinema and television by the boulevard, Hollywood productions, and the stupefaction of mass vulgarity.

Ever since Jacques Chirac's speech at the Vél'd'Hiv in 1995, recognizing the responsibility of the French state in the roundup of July 17, 1942, the Gaullian fiction of an illegitimate and illegal Vichy has lived. Pétain has once again become the head of the French state for eternity, but it is to better demonize the French, Pétain and the French state, the state and France. De Gaulle is for eternity the rebel general in exile, but it is to better empty his meaning, and even to better destroy everything he wanted to accomplish. This is the great inversion. It's 1940, but in reverse. Pétain is the man to be hated, de Gaulle, the man to be loved. “France finally has a man to love”, we read in a 1940 newspaper… “Pétain, is France”, they proclaimed in 1940. “De Gaulle, is France”, they say today. “Marshal Pétain’s words,” wrote François Mauriac, on the evening of June 25, 1940, “made an almost timeless sound.” A few years later, the same Mauriac wrote: “General de Gaulle remains today what he was, from our collapse to our liberation, a timeless voice…”

Pétain is buried under stones, de Gaulle under flowers. Pétain is the cursed soldier, de Gaulle, the father of the nation. Pétain is the name to loathe at city dinners; de Gaulle is the name that must be glorified if you want to be invited to dinners in town.

It’s the great inversion. It's 1940, but in reverse. Pétain is Gaullized, de Gaulle is Pétainized.

1. This is the motto of the Order of the Legion of Honor, established by Napoleon I