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was sentenced to forced labour for life. Prostitutes –‘femmes de mauvaise vie’ – were rounded up and sent to an internment camp at Brens, near Toulouse. It was not long before the regime had its own political police. The Service d’Ordre Légionnaire, an organization which incorporated Colonel de la Rocque’s henchmen from the pre-war Croix de Feu, finally became the Milice Nationale in January 1943. Each member had to take the following oath: ‘I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy.’ Officials and army officers had to take a personal oath of allegiance to the head of state, just as in Nazi Germany. Yet the regime which was supposed to put an end to the rot of scheming politics was riven by factional jealousies.

The personality cult of the Marshal depicted him as far above such concerns. Hundreds of thousands of framed prints of his portrait were sold. For a tradesman it was almost obligatory to display one in his shop window. But these prints were not just amulets to ward off political suspicion. They were also hung in thousands of homes as household icons. Adults sometimes coloured in the ‘kindly blue eyes’ for themselves, as if they had become children once again. Posters of the man who saw himself as the serene grandfather of France proclaimed his simple pieties with the slogan Travail, Famille, Patrie – the National Revolution’s replacement for the republican trinity of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

The idea certainly seems to have formed a psychological barrier against de Gaulle’s attempt to rally the French to ignore the armistice and fight on. The twelve-year-old Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie heard a woman say in outrage: ‘This General dares to take exception to Marshal Pétain.’

On 18 June 1940, the day after his arrival in London, Charles de Gaulle made his famous broadcast on the BBC. The British Foreign Office had been opposed to letting him make a speech which was bound to provoke Marshal Pétain’s new government while the question of the French fleet and other matters were unresolved. But Winston Churchill and his Francophile Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, won the Cabinet round. De Gaulle’s brief speech calling on Frenchmen to join him was immensely powerful. Although few people in France heard it, word spread.

De Gaulle was not an easy man and, unlike Napoleon, did little to encourage warmth or loyalty, except in his immediate entourage. Yet this was the source of his strength. His appeal, like Pétain’s, evaded the politics and factionalism which had been the curse of France.

Spears had observed that the main defeatists were conservatives, yet not all of vieille France had surrendered easily. The defence of the cavalry school at Saumur, when a group of lightly armed subalterns fought off a panzer unit until they ran out of ammunition, was just one example. And many members of the aristocracy were to prove in the next few years by their service under de Gaulle or in the Resistance that they held honour above politics. Such decisions split a number of families.

De Gaulle had accomplished the vital first step: recognition and support from Churchill. On 27 June, Churchill summoned him to Downing Street and said: ‘You are all alone? Very well, then I recognize you all alone!’ The next day de Gaulle received a message through the French Embassy in London – then in a curious state of interregnum – telling him to place himself in a state of arrest in Toulouse within five days. A subsequent court martial in Clermont-Ferrand condemned him to death in absentia for desertion and for entering the service of a foreign power. De Gaulle sent back a message rejecting the sentence as null and void. He would discuss the matter ‘with the people of Vichy after the war’.

Among the few who joined de Gaulle was André Dewavrin, who soon began to organize the Gaullist intelligence service, the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action). Dewavrin, best known by his nom de guerre of Colonel Passy, had many enemies, particularly among the Communists. They put it about that