FRANCE: Basket of Crabs

Last week Vichy was the hastily fortified ghost capital of a rapidly dissolving Government. Outside the town, French Forces of the Interior were in control. Telephone & telegraph lines were cut, road and rail traffic halted. Inside, the futile skeleton of what had been Marshal Petain’s Government click-clacked through motions of governing which were really a dance of death.

Said a Frenchman: “Vichy? It is a basket of crabs.” Petty officials spent their time compiling dossiers on each other, hoping that they could save themselves by betraying their colleagues to the liberating Allies. One thick accusation by X against Y reached London on the same day as a bulgy dossier by Y against X.

“Not of My Own Volition.” Most of the king crabs had already scuttled out of the Vichy basket. The smaller fry had sidled off by the hundred to join the FFI or the Maquis.

The whereabouts of doddering old Chief of State Marshal Henri Philippe Petain was uncertain. Many Frenchmen were sure that he would be in Paris to meet the victorious Allies, if the Nazis did not kidnap him. But, a fortnight before, Petain had told diplomats still in Vichy: “Should it become known that I have left … I wish to make it clear that I will not leave of my own volition.”

Chief of Government Pierre Laval was, by reports, in Paris. With him he carried the bulky manuscript of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. On it he reportedly had worked for a year, scribbling hundreds of pages to prove that he was first & last a Frenchman with the interests of France at heart, after that a pro-Allied, anti-Nazi Frenchman who did the best he could.

Next, De Gaulle. Reports that a French division under General Jacques Leclerc, hero of the Fighting French African campaign, would spearhead the Allied advance into Paris threw most Vichyites into a panic. But a few of the tougher-minded among them banked on a political fact: General Charles de Gaulle, who at last report was in Cherbourg, was no longer the head of an overseas resistance movement, but the leader of a great nation. Part of his job was to heal as well as to purge.

For most of the scuttling collaborationist crabs, survival, as in all great political upheavals, was first a question of chance, then of making themselves small and scarce.