Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [3]
Another contentious area is the long-standing demonization of Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime. The utterly shameful examples of Vichy collaboration in the round-up of French and foreign Jews for the Germans have been highlighted in recent years by the scandalously belated and unsatisfactory trials of old men. It took fifty years for a French president – Jacques Chirac in 1995 – to acknowledge publicly that ‘France accomplished something irreparable’ by assisting the ‘criminal folly of the occupier’. The Vichy police’s excess of zeal greatly undermined the usual Pétainist defence that the ‘path of collaboration’ with the occupying power was the right one to take. But once again, those who have not suffered defeat and occupation must study the situation as it was felt then by individuals and communities – rumours are as important in history as archivally demonstrable facts – in order to avoid the artificial wisdom of hindsight. The primary duty of the historian is to understand. It is not to cast stones in moral outrage.
Nobody threw stones more gladly and more recklessly than the young, post-Liberation intellectuals, flexing rediscovered political and literary muscles after the atrophy of the Pétainist years. They saw themselves as the spiritual descendants of the revolutionaries of 1789. Pétainism in their view was the modern-dress version of monarcho-clerical reaction, the Whites of Old France. They admired the Communists and the hardy Red Army, while despising the US military, which they considered pampered and commercialized. Thus the post-Liberation period brought together in a fascinating fashion the tensions of the past and the present: the guerre franco-française between Old France and the anti-clerical left; the battle between intellectual traditions; and the resentments between the Old World and the New, with the Franco-American love-hate relationship. Some of them are still very much with us today.
Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper
Part One
A TALE OF TWO COUNTRIES
1
The Marshal and the General
In the early evening of Tuesday, 11 June 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain and General Charles de Gaulle caught sight of each other as they were about to enter the Château du Muguet. It was a month and a day since the German invasion of France had begun. They had not seen each other for over two years, and this was to be one of their last encounters. Each would soon proclaim himself the leader of France, and their respective versions of the state would condemn the other as a traitor.
Pétain and de Gaulle had travelled separately along roads encumbered with refugees and dispirited troops. That morning the château, near Briare on the River Loire, due south of Paris, had become the temporary residence of General Weygand, the commander-in-chief, who had just decided to abandon the capital to the Germans. A conference of the Supreme Inter-Allied Command was assembling to discuss the disaster. The British side, led by Winston Churchill, was expected at any moment. Escorted by a squadron of Hurricanes, the Prime Minister and his colleagues had flown on a circuitous route from England to land at Briare’s deserted airfield.
Marshal Pétain, born in the final year of the Crimean War, was now eighty-four. He was proud of his appearance, especially his flowing white moustache. When he removed his scarlet and gold képi, revealing a bald dome, he had the air of a Gallic elder. The only colour left in his marmoreal face came from the eyes, which, although watery, remained a startling blue. The ‘bons yeux bleus du Maréchal’ were to provide a favourite refrain in the personality cult of his Vichy regime.
Charles de Gaulle was then forty-nine. He was unusually tall and the impression he gave of towering over P