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Maréchal Philippe Pétain had become, at the age of 84, both ‘head of state’ in the so-called French State that replaced the French Republic and prime minister. His deputy, or vice-president of the council of ministers, was Pierre Laval. The only people, as well as the only Americans, on intimate terms with the two most powerful men of the new Vichy regime were Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun. Pétain was an old friend, who had been Aldebert’s military instructor and his commander in the Great War and Morocco. Laval’s family and the Chambruns had been close since their children married in 1935. Clara, although enthusiastic about the new leadership, spotted danger in the court forming around Pétain: ‘Without suspecting that his entourage was working for its own aggrandizement, the Marshal became in fact their prisoner.’ She watched the old soldier being cut off from reality: ‘A row of high screens separated the regular habitués of the Hotel du Parc from the Chief of State and the guests whom he daily invited.’ Her scepticism did not prevent her from succumbing to the reflected attention. ‘What a kowtowing and flattery went on: What glances of envy were darted in our direction when, as he often did, Marshal Pétain came to join us for coffee in our corner!’

William Bullitt, despite his respect for Pétain, preferred not to be accredited to the Vichy government. Roosevelt had asked for Bullitt’s help in the 1940 presidential elections, when he would stand for an unprecedented third term. He also dangled in front of his outspoken ambassador the possibility of a cabinet appointment if he won. Bullitt left Vichy for Spain with his secretary, Carmel Offie, and his Chantilly neighbours, the Gilroys. He had issued Dudley Gilroy, a reserve officer in the British Army, an American passport to help him over the Spanish border. The Spaniards were sending British subjects back to France, where they risked internment. As cover, Bullitt listed the Gilroys as his valet and maid. Dudley carried off his part, but the regal Frances aroused suspicion. One Spanish official commented, ‘She is not a maid.’ Carmel Offie took him aside and said, ‘Of course not. Don’t you understand that the ambassador has a mistress?’ The Spaniard admitted them at once.

In Bullitt’s absence, Robert Murphy became chargé d’affaires at Vichy. ‘In those first weeks at Vichy,’ the red-haired Milwaukeean wrote,

I think most of us felt as if we had been knocked on the head and were slowly recovering our senses. History has rarely, if ever, moved with such dizzy speed as in that summer, and it seemed almost impossible to readjust our thoughts to a Europe dominated by one man, as in the Napoleonic era more than a century before. In this new Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere, Vichy seemed an appropriate capital for that portion of France, one-third of the country, which the German armistice permitted Frenchmen still to govern. Offices were located in gambling casinos, music halls, and tourist hotels designed to lighten the hours of health-seekers. The Hotel du Parc, long popular with fashionable invalids, became the seat of government. All of us felt absurdly isolated in this inbred community, making our diplomatic rounds in this artificial, gaudy, improvised political center which nobody expected to serve this purpose for long.

Washington maintained diplomatic relations with the Vichy government. At the same time, Roosevelt circumvented America’s 1939 Neutrality Act by sending weapons to Britain. Murphy and his small staff worked late into the night, doing political and consular work. He set out to ‘sell’ the American position of pro-British neutrality to Pétain and Laval. ‘The old soldier and the suave lawyer-politician,’ Murphy wrote of the head of state and his vice-premier, ‘had almost nothing in common except their conviction that Germany had won the war and that Frenchmen must somehow adapt themselves to this fact.’ He recalled his first meeting with Pétain in July 1940:

The Marshal was then eighty-four years old and in his eyes I was