Status Updates From France: The Dark Years 1940...

“Before publishing Les Voyageurs de l’Impériale, Gallimard insisted on cuts to satisfy the censor. Aragon accepted this but when the novel appeared in 1942, it had been so disfigured that there was even a passage which made it appear that Dreyfus had been guilty.” 😳

“One of the government’s main preoccupations was drumming up enthusiasm for the Marshal, but it could not even provide sufficient portraits of him. The Ministry of the Interior had instructed all public buildings to display Petain’s portrait, but in February 1941 the prefect of Belfort complained that of the 392 portraits he had ordered 4 months ago, only 20 had arrived.” 😂

In 1942, Laval’s policy of collaboration had had little chance of success because the Germans hardly wanted anything France had to offer; in 1943 it had no chance of success because the Germans wanted so much that nothing the French offered would be enough. As Goering put it: “If the French hand over until they can’t any more, and if they do it of their own free will, then I’ll say I am collaborating.😳

“Collaboration turned out to be a chimera because Vichy grossly overestimated the degree to which France mattered to Hitler. Vichy Realpolitik was wishful thinking based on a complete misreading of Germany.”

“Darlan took on several portfolios: the Navy, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This did not make for increased efficiency: Darlan held so many offices that in one impersonation he sometimes wrote to himself in another (via subordinates) to refuse a request he had made to himself.” 😅

“For Pétain collaboration was the instrument of the National Revolution; and for Laval the National Revolution the instrument of collaboration.”

"The heterogeneity of the support upon which the regime drew suggests that it is misleading to draw neat boundaries between 'two Frances'. Vichy also drew upon values shared between liberals and non-liberals, Republicans and anti-Republicans. It emerged not only from what divided the French but also from what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, anti-Semitism, ambivalence about modernity."