FRANCE: Vale Vichy

The leafless little parks of Vichy seemed even more forlorn than before. The name Pétain might keep for many a touch of magic—a legendary gleam that shone out of the mud of Verdun. But the man Pétain, watery-eyed and old, and his regime, for months largely fictional, seemed indisputably through.

The Pétain regime had been even briefer than the interim Directory which, during 1795-99, compromised the French Revolution’s ideals and opened the control gates to Napoleon. No longer able to maintain the fiction of personal power, Pétain handed over the destinies of the country he professed to love to the hands of a man abhorred throughout France. To Pierre Laval, Adolf Hitler’s Auvergne shyster, Pétain gave a dictator’s power to rule by decree. For himself, Pétain succeeded in preserving at least the voice to appeal to the wavering loyalty of French soldiers in North Africa:

“I remain your guide. You have but one duty: Obey. You have but one government, over which I have been given power to govern. You have but one country, France, which I incarnate.”

Villain. Less foggy were the words of Dictator-Gauleiter Laval. To his spitting hatred of the British, Laval added the U.S. and President Roosevelt. He dug back to the conquests of French Quebec and the West Indies for charges of Anglo-Saxon imperial cupidity. These he twisted into a cry that success of the Anglo-American alliance would mean domination by “Jews and Communists.” Where he had once “hoped” for a German victory, Laval now said he was certain of it. Hedging, he added: “An entente with Germany is the only guarantee for peace in Europe.”

To the men of Vichy the shift of power meant quick promotions for the violently pro-Nazi; quick resignations for others; for still others, a ratlike scurry across the Mediterranean to the side of Admiral Jean François Darlan, Marshal Pétain’s retired colleague General Maxime Weygand refused to reassume his African command and was promptly seized by the Nazis as a hostage for brave old General Henri Honoré Giraud who had got across the Mediterranean to join the Allies.

To the United Nations, the Vichy power shift meant that France might re-enter the war as a military ally of Germany. Laval spoke bombastically of a legion of youth to recapture Algeria. There was still talk of a quick peace treaty “guaranteeing” the French Empire. Such a treaty, superseding the armistice violated when the Germans moved into Unoccupied France, would make military collaboration “legal.”

How Laval could rally the French to fight Allied troops was a problem for the oily little lawyer to figure out for himself. Last week Jacques Doriot, another collaborator of Laval’s soiled stripe, got clubbed in Paris. Near Lyon, 5,000 peasants and townspeople gathered for the funeral of British aviators who crashed returning from Italy.

Vichyite. Pierre Laval’s services to Germany have long been obvious, even candid. Marshal Pétain may even imagine that, at bottom, he has been opposed to Adolf Hitler.

Thrifty, earthy Alsace parents sent young Pétain through St. Cyr military academy, later left him a small fortune. He took on the prevailing St. Cyr color—reaction, royalism, distrust of politics. He also developed a love of off-tune brass bands, climbing trees, skipping rope, floating paper boats in a tub of water, watching animals at the zoo.

At the start of World War I, Colonel Pétain, 54, was about to be retired. A careful planner and able artillery tactician, frugal with the lives of his men, he rose to command of the Second Army at the defense of Verdun in 1916. To him was credited the line: “They shall not pass.” When the armies of the Crown Prince were crushed in 130 days of fighting that covered an advance of only four miles and cost 300,000 lives, Pétain emerged as a legendary hero. But numerous French leaders of the time later accused him of an insidious defeatism which seemed likely to give up the battle.

Before World War II, Pétain’s name was involved with the fascist Cagoulard attempt to seize power. As Ambassador to Spain, he and Dictator Franco were as close as two eggs in a pan. In the spring of 1940 a cry for the “Strong Man”

Pétain resounded through reactionary French circles. It was Pétain’s voice on the stormy night of June 16, 1940 that informed the French people that their Government would not fight on from North Africa. His large, angular handwriting was on the armistice signed in the Forest of Compiègne. His governmental planning killed the French parliament, tried to impose on France a corporate state complete with antiSemitism.

Victim. The Pétain regime allowed French industry, wealth and manpower to be siphoned into the Third Reich. History will decide whether Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain aided Hitler deliberately or not. Last week the question, like his regime, seemed unimportant.