Fascism a la Francaise

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by Richard Grenier

IT WAS a splendid myth. France, defeated on the battlefield but unbowed in spirit, fought on magnificently in the Resistance against the Nazi beast and played a major role in its own Liberation. As one man, the French fought the German conqueror bitterly, bleeding him white, until France's Second Armored Division invaded Normandy and restored the country to freedom. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Hoist the tricolore. Let freedom ring.

Year by year pieces of this fiction have fallen away. But it is only now, with most of the active participants gone from the scene, that France is finally coming to terms with its wartime history.

During his last days on earth, the late Socialist president Francois Mitterrand still insisted that France was in no way responsible for the actions of the illegitimate regime of Vichy -- the puppet government which Frenchmen set up in southern France after the defeat of 1940. Himself a decorated official of that puppet government, Mitterrand absolved France of all Vichy's sins. Vichy wasn't France. The real France had nothing to do with the 774,721 Jews the Vichy regime deported during the war, virtually none of whom survived. Yet France's record was unlike that of any other country occupied by Nazi Germany. Its Third Republic legally and democratically voted itself out of existence in 1940, creating in its place Petain and Laval's "French State," technically neutral and sovereign. Again, like no other country overrun by the Germans, France was without a government in exile. The United States granted Vichy full diplomatic recognition, thus acknowledging the puppet regime's legitimacy, and it sent Admiral Leahy to its capital as American ambassador.

Another aspect of 1940 France that the mythmakers were not eager to bring to light was the number of Frenchmen who, if embarrassed by France's military defeat, actually agreed with Nazi ideas. Mieux vaut Hitler que le Front Populaire, the saying had it: Better Hitler than the Popular Front (the Socialist - Communist alliance that briefly ruled France in the late 1930s). A period quite lost to popular memory now -- although certainly not lost in 1940 -- was the earlier part of the twentieth century when not Berlin or Vienna but Paris was universally recognized as the capital of the authoritarian, anti-Semitic European Right. Indeed, not very long before that, during the Dreyfus Affair, great mobs had surged through the Paris streets crying, "Death to the Jews!"

At the end of World War II, the story of France's behavior under German rule was simply suppressed -- a suppression greatly facilitated by the terms of the general amnesty. The Fourth Republic forbade any public reference to what the French call faits de guerre, wartime events. Vichy leader Marshal Petain was convicted of treason, and his prime minister, Pierre Laval, was executed -- as were some 3,700 other Frenchmen convicted of open collaboration with the enemy. However, the huge corps of civil servants -- in France an elite group with high social standing -- which for years had obediently carried out Nazi orders, was virtually untouched.

But now the floodgates have opened and the story of wartime France is coming out with a rush -- to the astonishment of the younger generation of Frenchmen, to many of whom it seems like the history of a foreign country. Two years ago President Jacques Chirac, 13 years old at war's end, apologized to the Jewish people and abandoned the official government position that when French police rounded up thousands of Jews in July 1942, it was an action of the Nazi Occupation authorities and had nothing to do with France.

Only last month, Archbishop Olivier de Berranger shook the nation to its roots. Speaking in the name of all France's Catholic cardinals and bishops, he humbly apologized to Jews for the Church's silence in the face of French collaboration with the "murderous process" of the Nazi Holocaust, and begged the Jewish people for forgiveness. The French Church had in fact not been merely silent: Cardinal Baudrillart, then rector of the Catholic Institute in Paris, was an ardent Nazi supporter and called Adolf Hitler's mission noble and inspiring. "We beg the pardon of God," Archbishop Berranger said in a tone of anguish never heard from him in public before, "and we ask the Jewish people to hear this word of repentance." And now the French police have apologized. The French medical association has apologized. Everyone is apologizing.

But a high point came in October when, after all these many years, France placed on trial the celebrated Maurice Papon, who, as the Vichy regime's secretary general of the Gironde Department surrounding Bordeaux, coldly deported over 1,600 Jews, including many small children. As fate would have it, this same Papon, efficient and industrious, rose to considerable prominence in postwar France, serving as police commissioner of Paris during the Algerian War and later as budget minister under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.