FRANCE: Herriot’s Rump

Last week the second biggest news out of Vichyfrance (see p. 15) concerned the kind of man that Vichyfrance loathes and abhors: big, genial 69-year-old Edouard Herriot, three-time Premier of France, a generous, cultured, democratic gentleman. Recently secluded somewhere in Vichyfrance, he has not let Vichyfascism shut him up. He had the gizzard to contribute to the September American Mercury a nostalgic article extolling the French democratic tradition. Wrote he: “Among the memories which fill my journal, the most precious to me in these tragic days we are living through are the ones which bring back the beginnings of my cordial relations with two nations for which my admiration is today more fervent than ever—Great Britain and the United States. . . . I wanted to show that I was bound and always will be bound to Great Britain and the United States. . . . I would not bring this article to a close . . . without sending from the depths of my solitude my greetings to the great people of the United States, where differing opinions may be freely expressed and where every one, whatever his political group, cherishes a respect for the human being and for moral law.”

Last week it was reported from Vichy that Edouard Herriot was heading a secretly-meeting rump parliament of 100 French Senators and Deputies opposed to the Nazi-powered Vichy regime. Credence was speedily lent this report by Vichy decree. Senators and Deputies were ordered to stop meeting officially or semiofficially in Vichy, to move their offices to Châtel-guyon-les-Bains, a tiny spa 45 miles from Vichy.

Probably the Vichy Government would hesitate to jail or purge 100 elected representatives of the French people from many different parts of France. Although Vichy has abolished Parliament in fact, it has always been skittish about getting rid of the appearance. Parliament’s pay was stopped by Vichy’s order on Sept. 1, but Marshal Pétain’s own acts provide that Parliament shall remain “in existence” until a new Constitution provides for new assemblies. Moreover, the present French Constitution states that the French Parliament shall meet in the capital, and last week this pretense was kept up—Parliament’s sign remained on its erstwhile Vichy headquarters.

In any event, if Edouard Herriot were really heading a subversive rump parliament last week, he could scarcely have felt easy about his own future. Vichy was getting fascistically tougher than ever. It was the first anniversary of Marshal Pétain’s French Legion—veterans of two wars who support the Marshal. For three days there was Nazi-style mummery. By foot and airplane some 20,000 Legionnaires carried torches, lit from the eternal flame at the Unknown Soldier’s tomb in Paris, to many parts of Vichyfrance and the Empire. Finally, in Vichy’s stadium Marshal Pétain addressed tens of thousands of Legionnaires. There he pronounced them the one and only political party in France—his own counterpart of the German National Socialists.

“Rally to us,” said the Marshal, “the hesitating and the discontented, who, in their incomprehension of our disaster and its consequences, continue to cherish the illusions of the past. You will impose silence on their criticisms, sly or tumultuous. . . .”