FRANCE: Homeward Bound

No sooner had Moltke’s German Army withdrawn from Paris in 1871 than its citizens began fighting among themselves. Paris, besieged four months by Germany. held out two more months against France. Many Frenchmen died before order was restored under the Third Republic.

Mindful of historic precedent, old Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, Chief of State, showed no eagerness last week to see German troops withdrawn once more from Paris. Instead, he worked overtime at Vichy, provisional capital of unoccupied France, to persuade the German-French Armistice Commission to fulfill its promise, let his Government settle down in Paris under Nazi protection.

Vichy itself was described as a hotbed of political intrigue, with Communists, leaders of the “old gang,” Fascists of all stripes struggling to get control of the State. Ex-President Albert Lebrun had departed for Switzerland. The Hotel du Pare, headquarters of the Government, was packed with visitors, politicians, newsmen. Marshal Petain held court in a corner of the lounge, ate behind a screen in the hotel dining room. Dark little Vice Premier Pierre Laval dashed off communiqués, handed them out personally in the lobby. Early each morning an airplane took off from Vichy, headed northeast toward Wiesbaden, Germany, where the Armistice Commission sat.

To Paris one morning went Léon Nöel, a member of the Commission, to negotiate with General Alfred von Vollard Bockelberg, the German military governor of the Paris region. Nazis were in no hurry to arrange the transfer. For one thing, they could still detect a faint, sweet odor of republicanism in Pétain’s authoritarian regime. Then there was the problem of finding quarters: most of the old Government’s buildings in Paris and Versailles were occupied by Germans.

Reconstruction. Meanwhile, in Vichy, Petain and his Cabinet methodically set about the task of rebuilding ravaged France. There were shortages of almost everything needed to keep life going: milk and butter, meat, sugar, soap, raw materials in general. Some foods were plentiful, but were withheld from hungry citizens by the breakdown of communications. Virtually all gasoline was in German hands; so were the northern coal mines, undamaged by the Nazi advance. Coffee and other imports were scarce.

The problem of restoring France’s econ omy was chiefly a question of finding men to do the work. One of the points that Marshal Pétain discussed with the Armis tice Commission was the return of 1,500,000 French prisoners of war, still held in German prison camps. In central and southern France were 10,000,000 refugees waiting to be conveyed back into territory occupied by Nazis. There were 1,200,000 Belgians waiting to be sent back to Belgium. To repair railroads and highways, reconstruct bridges destroyed by German bombs, the Premier last week mobilized 100,000 workers.

It was clear that what remained of France had resigned itself to becoming an agrarian State. With few industries, only two great cities (Marseille and Lyon), a population consisting mainly of peasant landowners, the France that curves about the Mediterranean had no other choice. Its chief products are poultry and cheese, wine and tobacco, truffles, pâté de foie gras. The silk industry has its own cocoons in southern Cévennes. There are tall pine forests along the Atlantic coast. Most of Petain’s decrees last week dealt with family life and rural homesteads. One law provided that small estates (worth less than 400,000 francs) may be exempt from an old law dividing them among the heirs, in order to keep rural lands intact for farming.

Church and State. Whether the new France rising from the ruins of the old constituted a Fascist dictatorship or something else agitated the outside world more than it bothered Frenchmen. Pierre Laval, strolling in the park at Vichy told newsmen that the Pétain Government’s policies will be “audacious but generous.” They sounded neither generous nor audacious.

France, said Laval, will ban all strikes and lockouts; will banish “international doctrines,” bar from power any politician who ever played with the Popular Front of Léon Blum, Edouard Daladier; will oppose any effort to stimulate class consciousness, do all in its power to insure “a friendly press.” Laval’s France is through being “a humanitarian crusader for other nations,” will hereafter look out for herself alone. By way of looking after France’s interest, the Pétain Government sent Great Britain, France’s former ally, a demand for reparations for the damage done when British and French warships met in a naval battle off Africa on July 3.

But these policies did not necessarily add up to a Fascist State, nor to making Laval quite the Little Man that he was pictured by Cartoonist Herblock of the Pittsburgh Press. Friend of France with kind words for harassed Marshal Pétain was Catholic Monsignor Mark Boehm. Writing in Rome for the Vatican City newspaper, Osservatore Romano, Mgr. Boehm saw “the good Marshal” using an authoritarian regime to create “a civic conscience that opens and prepares the way for … strengthening the moral conscience. . . .” Praise from the Vatican newspaper was the next best thing to a blessing by the Pope, but it sounded strange other than as a good-will gesture toward what remains of France. Marshal Petain, 84, brought up in the Catholic faith, has never been renowned for his devotion. Once he said that he would rather be buried in the battlefield of Verdun than in the hallowed ground of a churchyard.

Resurgent Cities. On all the roads leading north last week, ancient, lumbering Paris busses, loaded down with refugees and their belongings, headed back toward the capital they fled last month. One column three miles long, containing 140 busses, passed through Vichy.

The Parisians who returned found Paris a strangely empty city, with all but 1,051,506 of its 2,829,746 population gone. Parisian women looked wan and pale—they had given up their plucked brows and painted nails to please Adolf Hitler’s stern warriors. But cafés were open: Maxim’s, Larue’s, the Café de Paris were crowded with German officers and their girls, paying German money (at Hitler’s rate of exchange) for French food.

Paris did its best to remain Paris.