Joan Blanchard

Sincerely yours,

attention.
and I will bring your request to his
office around the middle of November
He is expected to return to the
so without Mr. Klaasen's permission.
feel I can take the liberty of doing
papere for the German book. I do not
to ask me to send you copies of the
Karl Käser called the other day

Dear Mr. Hottmann:

Stanford, California
202 Junherto Serra Boulevard
University of California
Center for Behavioral Studies
Mr. Stanley Hottmann

October 27, 1962

CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDY IN THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

202 Junipero Serra Boulevard • Stanford, California 94305

Telephone (415) 321-2052

November 15, 1965

NOV 18 1965

Professor Henry A. Kissinger
Center for International Affairs
Harvard University
6 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Henry:

Many thanks for your kind letter of November 12 and for the chapters of the German book which I hope to read soon. I cannot tell you how happy we were to see you before you went out to Viet Nam. It was really generous of you to make the detour in order to see us. Needless to say we are tremendously relieved to knowing that you have come back intact. I know that you must be extraordinarily busy right now and also that most of the conclusions of your trip must be kept secret, but we would very much like to have even the briefest notion of your impressions. Forgive me for bothering you, but it is so difficult to make up one's own mind and to understand what is going on just from reading the newspapers, that I would be immensely grateful to you if you could tell me something, even if it is only one or two sentences.

I don't know yet when I will be coming East, but it is not impossible that I may do so at the end of January or early February.

With our best regards,

SH:has

Telephone (415) 321-2052

December 13, 1965

Dear Miss Blanchard,

Would you be so good as to send me the address of a Mr. Van den Beugel in Holland? I do not have it and would like to send him an article of mine.

With best regards,

SH:ht

December 15, 1965

Mr. Stanley Hoffmann
Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences
202 Junipero Serra Boulevard
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Mr. Hoffmann:

Mr. van der Beugel's addresses are
as follows:

Home
Van Ouwenlaan 50
The Hague
The Netherlands

Office
c/o Bilderberg Meetings
1 Smidswater
The Hague
The Netherlands

I hope you are enjoying your year
in California.

Best wishes for a Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year.

Telephone (415) 321-2052

January 17, 1966

Professor Thomas C. Schelling
Harvard University
Center for International Affairs
6 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, Mass. 02138

Dear Tom,

I was delighted to hear that Pierre Hassner will be coming for half a year. Too bad he can't stay longer. He is really a first-rate fellow.

I have two matters I would like to raise with you today. The first one is that of my role at the Center next year. I would be delighted to continue as a research associate so as to continue my work in the West European field as well as in the theory of International Relations. Let me know whether the Center will be willing to continue supporting a fraction of my salary.

The second matter concerns a project I have been thinking about for a couple of weeks. It occurred to me that it might not be a bad idea to put together in a book the various pieces I have written about the Atlantic Community and European Integration. There are five such pieces by now. I have mentioned it to Praeger, who was up here a short while ago, and who has an option on my next book (he just published The State of War). The pieces I refer to have all been published before in various journals-- *Daedalus*, The Journal of Common Market Studies, International Organization. I would probably add a piece to take into account other events of the coming couple of months. Since my connection with the Center has been for the purpose of working precisely on those matters, I wonder whether the Center would be interested in giving *its* *imprimatur* to such a collection of essays? There would be no need for any editing by the Center itself since the editing would be done by Praeger, and anyhow all those pieces (minus the new ones) have been, as I said, published already. What I want to include is, one, *Discord in Community*, published in International Organization, issue on the Atlantic Community; two, two pieces on De Gaulle, a *Review* of his *Memoirs*, published in *World Politics* in October, 1960, and a Study of his Foreign Policy, published in *International Organization* in 1964; three, *Europe's Identity Crisis*, published by *Daedalus* in 1964; four, *The European*

February 8, 1966

Professor Stanley Hoffman
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
202 Junipero Serra Boulevard
Stanford, California 94305

Dear Stanley:

Sorry to delay, but your question was not one that I considered myself authorized to answer without proper consultation. Now I have consulted. We would be delighted to have you continue next year as a Research Associate and will carry some fraction of your salary. To be more specific about it, I ought to know what fraction of your salary you have in mind. Will you take this up with your department or do you want me to; I assume your department cares and wants to share in the decision. For the sake of formality I wish you would give me a brief statement of what you propose to do, but in your case I think this is just a formality. I have not investigated whether we put through a formal appointment but, if that is the way we do it, we will take care of it as soon as I have your department's agreement.

About the book, it sounds like a great idea. We would be delighted to sponsor it.

Your secretary's instincts were pretty sound, weren't they?

TCS:ac
cc. R.R. Bowie
H.A. Kissinger
&.Tommy

[c]

COLLABORATIONISM IN FRANCE DURING WORLD WAR TWO

I

More than twenty years have passed since the liberation of France, and the flood of books about Vichy and the Resistance has not receded. However, there is no satisfactory treatment of the most delicate of all the problems raised by the fall and divisions of France: collaboration with the German occupant. This may be due in part to the nature of the subject. Vichy can be discussed, I won't say objectively, but without reopening the wounds that the events of 1940 - 44 inflicted on French self-confidence and national consciousness. For there is enough evidence behind the thesis of Vichy, the shield that protected the French body politic while London and the Resistance forged a sword, to allow the French public to face without too much shame such facts as Pétain's early popularity and Vichy's original appeal. The Fascist gangs and writers of Paris can be dismissed as a noisy but tiny, repulsive but insignificant minority, a kind of exception that confirms the rule of French decency despite French divisions. To deal with the subject of collaboration as such would make retrospective reassurance far more difficult. For one would have to realize that the cancer which was gnawing at France's sense of national identity had spread much beyond the narrow confines of the "Paris traitors".

The historians and social scientists of a nation where that sense appears to have triumphed at last over the ordeals which twenty five years of ghastly tests had accumulated may feel less inhibited today about the scrutiny of an ugly past. However, there is a second reason for their timidity. The subject is infernally complicated. Vichy, the pluralistic dictatorship, is complex enough. However, it is easier to distinguish phases, clans, ideas and issues within the maze of Pétain's regime than in the story of French collaborationism. A careful historian would have - almost -

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Collaborationism in France during World War Two.

Page 2.

to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have
been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or
practitioners of collaboration. This may help explain why, if
we look for full treatments (rather than sections in books that
deal with broader subjects) we find only two volumes - one, written
by a former collaborationist, (1) who trows amazingly little light or
heat on what purports to be his subject, and another, (2) written
by an incisive young political scientist, who does a fine job of
reviewing themes and factions but is somehow limited by the nature
of her assignment, which was to focus on the press.

There may be a third reason why there is no entirely satisfactory
treatment - and why there may well never be one. Paradoxical as it
may sound, the subject turns out, upon analysis, to be more elusive
than substantial. I do not mean to suggest that there was no
collaboration after all. There was a lot of it. What I want to
suggest is that the subject is interesting only if one looks at it
not from the viewpoint of Franco-German relations in Hitler's
Europe, but from that of Franco-French relations, so to speak. This
paper proposes an analytic distinction between two kinds of behavior.
There was, on the one hand, collaboration with Germany for reasons
of state, i.e. to safeguard French interests in inter-state rela-
tions between the beaten power and the victor. This was to a large
extent the necessary if undesired by-product of the existence of
a French state in Vichy. Even here, what is most enlightening is not
the story of French negotiations with, concessions or resistance
to German officials, but the contrast between Vichy's theory of
(limited) independence and Vichy's practice: a contrast imposed by
the realities of France's situation. On the other hand, there was
collaborationism with the Nazis, in the sense of an openly desired

(1) Saint-Paulien (M-Y Sicard), Histoire de la Collaboration,
L'Esprit nouveau.

(2) Michèle Cotta, La Collaboration, 1940-44, A. Colin, 1944.

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Page 3.

cooperation with and imitation of the German regime. We find in collaborationism not so much seduction by or fascination with the Nazis (although there was some) as a means to a variety of internal ends. In very few cases did the collaborationists know much about what the Nazis were really like; even to the ideological collaborationists, Fascism or National Socialism was more a myth than a political and social reality clearly seen and analyzed. Collaborationism in World War Two can best be viewed as the most extreme form of what I have called elsewhere the breakdown of the Republican synthesis - the "mix" represented by the stalemate society and the parliamentary regime(3). The collaborationists were among the most determined rebels engaged in the destruction of that synthesis. At the same time, practitioners of collaboration and the champions of collaborationism reflected in their behavior many of the very features of the polity against which they had rebelled - features entirely conflicting with those of the foreign regimes the collaborationists appeared to admire, and with those which the Vichy doctrine was calling for.

## II

I am not suggesting that all forms of collaboration were parts of the "Franco-French War". The national situation of France after the Armistice was such that a modicum of collaboration with the victor was inevitable. On the one hand, as art. 3 of the Armistice agreement had stipulated, the French administration in the three-fifths of France occupied by the Germans could not avoid having to collaborate with German military authorities: the coexistence of two bureaucracies in the same territory made it impossible for the French to practice *le silence de la mer*. On the other hand, as the

(3) S. Noymann, C.P. Kindleberger, L. Wylie, J. Pitts, J-B Duroselle, F. Goguel, *In Search of France*, (Harvard University Press, 1963.)

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Page 4.

more
war became always cataclysmic and German needs more intense, the
pressure on French authorities for greater participation in the
German war effort - through the production of weapons for the
to dispatching of workers to German factories - was bound to increase.
Again, a modicum of collaboration was inevitable, for two reasons:
one, since there existed a French government in France, by contrast
with the situation in countries like Belgium or Norway, the Germans
instead of imposing their decisions directly could always put the
French authorities before the dilemma: collaboration or "poloniza-
tion". Even the most rigorously attentiste or anti-German of all
possible Vichy regimes would have had to give in from time to time,
given France's defeat and partial occupation. Two, the Germans de-
tained as hostages for such pressure and blackmail a huge mass of
French war prisoners; until November 1942, the implicit threat
of total occupation was always suspended over Vichy; even after
November 1942, there was always an implicit threat of eliminating
the regime itself, of obliterating its last shreds of authority.
In other words, part of the drama lay in the basic contradiction
that was going to annihilate, over time, all of Vichy's good in-
tentions. There was a French government in France, determined to
save whatever could be saved after the disaster of 1940, rather
than waging battle outside. But the very existence of such a
regime sufficed to turn whatever in other occupied parts of Europe
would have been purely and simply a fact of domination and an
effect of conquest into what might be called "collaboration d'état"
(if I may be forgiven a French play on the two meanings of the
word état). Moreover, the regime's own stake in protecting what
it had saved (the Empire, the fleet and Vichy France), i.e. the
margin between limited independence and "polonization", facilitated
Germany's task and aggravated the bent toward such collaboration.

This is a most important point for three different reasons. First,
Vichy was in an "objectively collaborationist" position, however
much individual Vichyites or the scriptures and servants of the

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Page 5.

National Revolution deserve to be called "subjectively" anti-collaborationist. Many see in de Gaulle's consistent condemnation of Vichy as a regime marked *ab ovo* by the sin of the Armistice a sectarian refusal to acknowledge the services Vichy rendered to the French body politic in preventing polonization. They fail to see the point I am trying to make, and to understand the nature of de Gaulle's concern: he worried about French self-respect, honor and moral integrity rather than French physical integrity. For many of the conservatives who surrounded Pétain, the virtue of the Armistice was that it allowed a French regime to prepare a domestic redressment, prerequisite either to French external recovery in case of an ultimate German victory, or to French mediation in case of a deadlock in the war, or to French revenge. The drama of the situation was that this patriotic dream had no relation to the realities of total war. For in such a war, there would be no opportunity for redressment, no distance from the occupant's demands, and Vichy would be more like a pressed orange than like a tough nut. The drama of Vichy was not in the motives but in the consequences: the circumstances placed l'Etat français in a situation of mandatory involuntary collaboration. Vichy prided itself on its "return to reality", and Laval saw himself as a great realist. But Vichy's return was a mixture of resignation to and obstinate self-delusion about an untenable reality, and Laval's realism led to a series of small Munichs. In order to preserve one's chances, one had to give them up one by one.

Secondly, there was only a short step from involuntary collaboration for reason of state to voluntary collaboration for that reason. If giving in to enemy demands could be justified by the need to save one's last domains and one's hostages, anticipating at least some of those demands, or adopting an "understanding" attitude toward German economic and military imperatives could be defended as a way of warding off dangerous pressures, of enlarging one's domain or of improving the prisoners' or the nation's lot.

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## Collaborationism in France during World War Two.

Page 6.

Many Vichyites who can hardly be accused of pro-Nazi sympathies, and who were sure that their policy was one of serving strictly French interest, moved to voluntary collaboration out of conviction that Germany would win the war. Involuntary collaboration was the price one had to pay for having misjudged France's situation, voluntary collaboration was a price one chose to pay because one misjudged Germany's. This was a slippery slope indeed, for there was no clear yardstick that would have allowed one to know where reason of state ended, and folly began. In the fall of 1940, at Montoire, Pétain's acceptance of the "principle" of collaboration meant that he had put a finger into the machine; that he did not want to put the whole hand into it was proved by his dismissal of Laval, guilty of having pursued a policy of voluntary collaboration with excessive zeal and dangerous concessions. However, Darlan was going to adopt a tactic closer to Laval's than to the "Montoire line", in the first months of his own brief reign. Precisely because voluntary collaboration for national interest reasons was so slippery, when applied to an enemy who promised very little and conceded even less, there would always come a time when the practitioners of that dangerous art would suddenly realize how risky it was, and try to pull back, to withdraw into dilatory procedures and a strict interpretation of the Armistice. But inevitably, the realities would prevail - i.e. the Germans would exploit all the resources which the national situation of France and of Vichy put into their hands, tighten the screws and destroy the Vichy officials who had dared to call a halt.

Thirdly, both involuntary and voluntary "collaboration d'état" provided a backdrop, a cover, a pretext or a springboard for collaborationism, i.e. for what might be called desired or deliberate collaboration. Involuntary collaboration was a reluctant recognition of necessity; voluntary collaboration for reason of state was a foolhardy attempt at exploiting necessity; neither implied acquiescence to Nazi ideology or enthusiasm for the "new order" which Germany was proclaiming in Europe. Collaborationism, however, did entail one at least of the two following things. It could mean the deliberate

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Page 7.

service of the enemy. Such service was perhaps rationalized in
traditional terms of "national interest", yet it was divorced
in daily practice from calculations of net advantages for the
nation and based in the final analysis on calculations of personal
advantage: I am referring here to the various shady characters
like Brinon and Luchaire whose careers had been staked on close
Franco-German relations and who saw in Germany's victory the
condition and guarantee of their own importance. In other cases,
collaborationism meant a deliberate advocacy of cooperation with
a force which, even though it was foreign, was deemed to be the
champion, guarantor or model of the Kind of domestic transformation
such men wanted to impose on France. To simplify, we can disting-
uish between *servile collaborationism* and *ideological collaboration-
ism* (of course, we must remember that these are ideal-types).
Now, neither *servile* nor *ideological collaborationism* would have
been as much at ease as they were - in a country that was basic-
ally deaf to their appeal - if there had been no *collaboration
d'état*. Precisely because the latter always tended to slip from
involuntary to voluntary, the collaborationists could always in-
dulge in one or both of the two following tricks: they could
point with satisfaction to the closeness between their own policy
and the Vichy-sanctioned objective of a collaboration with the
Third Reich - i.e. argue that Vichy's doctrine was their behavior;
and they could point with indignation to the shortcomings, hesit-
ations and betrayals of Vichy - i.e. charge Vichy with sabotaging
its own doctrine. Between a firmly *attentiste* Vichyite, like Pétain's
friend Gillouin, or Maurras, and a Benoist-Méchin or a Drieu, there
was a gigantic distance. Yet the situation of the former provided
a platform for the latter; and the weaknesses of the former pro-
vided a license for the excesses of the latter. Men of little exper-
ience, bad judgment and good faith, like Bichelonne, could move
from voluntary collaboration *d'état* to collaborationism imperceptibly.
Vichy gave its blessing to the ultra-collaborationist volunteers'
legion against Bolchevism. Between voluntary "collaboration d'état",
servile collaborationism and ideological collaborationism, the
difference was often obscure. The rather demonic Laval of 1940, who

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Page 8.

scared Pétain's advisers so much that they had him overthrown, was altogether gambling on improving France's lot by pleasing the winner, enjoying a colossal personal revenge for the humilia-tions of 1936 to 1940 and talking in doctrinaire terms about the death of democracy and the coming of the authoritarian age. The much tamer Laval of 1942, who on the whole withdrew into a be-sieged policy of involuntary collaboration, nevertheless still thought he had to make himself accepted and respected by the Nazis by publicly stating that he wanted a German victory to save Europe from bolchevism. Collaboration, like the French Revolution, is both a savage story of inexpiable inner splits, and "un bloc", insofar as even its more extreme forms were propelled by or developed from given Vichy's situation its more moderate ones. How much a "collaboration d'État" needed to avoid a public break with collaborationism is shown by the efforts of Laval to keep as long as possible the good graces of men like Déat or Luchaire. How much, given the state of French opinion, collaborationism needed to lean on mere collaboration is shown by the fact that in September 1943 even the collaborationists who had lost patience with Laval's temporization still insisted that only he could be France's Premier. The Laval of 1943 needed a Darnand, as a bloody collaborationist cover behind which he could more easily pursue the laborious rearguard action of mere invol-untary collaboration d'état. But Darnand himself, stubborn soldier and simple mind, found in "collaboration d'état" an invitation to collaborationism.

### III

Thus the situation devilishly devised by Hitler in 1940 - one that deprived Germany of some of the immediate advantages of total occupation, yet provided the Nazis with countless opportunities for exploiting French weakness accounts in large part for the phenomenon we discuss. But a coherent polity could have limited the damage from "collaboration d'état". The heart of the matter is that France was not a coherent polity. What made Hitler's apparent "moderation" of June 1940 so machiavellian was its very ability to

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Page 9.

maximize France's inner tensions. A Carthaginian Hitler would have made collaborationism inconceivable, and, in all likelihood, ruled out the very conditions that made "collaboration d'état", i.e. an armistice with a government that chose to stay in metropolitan France. Of course, the very emergence, in the turmoil of Bordeaux, of a government determined to stay in France, indicated that France's cohesion as a polity was shaky. This had always been Hitler's conviction. By making French acceptance of the Armistice terms relatively easy, and by sending back as Ambassador the young Otto Abetz, known by many potential collaborationists as a friend of France, Hitler did his best to exacerbate the "France-French war".

I have tried elsewhere to describe in some detail the forces which, in the 1930s, turned against the "Republican synthesis" and took advantage of the fall of France so as to impose their views. They can be divided into three groups, although there is something arbitrary about a division which exaggerates the sharpness of the distinctions between categories and takes no account of the fluidity of ideas and men. There were the followers of Maurras, who saw in the Republic an evil regime that had both corrupted the French polity, by splintering power and letting "alien" ideologies infect the mind of the public, and weakened French society, by dislodging its "natural elites" from power and letting urbanization, industrialization and proletarization proceed. Then, there was a sprawling mass of conservatives who had turned anti-Republican on grounds not of constitutional principle but of social discontent - because the regime, in the 30s and especially in 1936, had seemed unable to preserve the stability of the "stalemate society", and had thus, in their eyes, lost a legitimacy that had never been better than dependent conditional on the performance of a specific social function.
Finally, there were the Fascists - Fascist political gangs and Fascist intellectuals - with their notions of French regeneration or revitalisation either through direct, plebiscitarian action led by a totalitarian party, or through tough, heroic, virile, redeeming action repudiating Republican talk and democratic decadence.

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Page 10.

One must add to those three groups a significant number of men who could in no way be called Rightists, men who came from parties of the Left and from labor unions - like Déat, Bergery, Dumoulin, Spinasse, Belin - and who would nevertheless end up in the Vichy camp or in the Paris ghetto.

Two feelings served as the cement of those disparate forces. One was anti-Communism. The rise of the Communist party had provided the Right with a convenient devil theory of French upheavals, and provoked the migration away from the Left of the politicians and unionists just mentioned. The other feeling was "appeasement" pacifism, which was much more complex. On the Right, it amounted usually to a determination to avoid a military confrontation with Germany, at least as long as France herself remained in a state of political and social weakness, and as the main beneficiary of such a war would be the Soviet ally. This might be called conditional pacifism; in most cases it had yielded to a kind of resignation to war either after Hitler's invasion of Bohemia; or, at last, after his quarrel with Poland over Danzig. But, in the Fascist Right, there were some individual cases of unconditional pacifism, due to admiration for Nazi Germany and to contempt for French decadence (Rebatet); and there had been one prominent case of unconditional pacifism with no ideological overtones among French Conservatives: that of Laval, who in this respect remained faithful to his distant political origins, and close to the Leftist group. For Pacifism was also unconditional among the ex-Leftists I have mentioned; here, it was often due to a visceral hatred of war, but anti-Communism had played a large part.

In that large mass of men found in and around Vichy early in July 1940, who would be the collaborationists? One can (avec les réserves d'usage) distinguish four groups.

1) There was a group composed largely of journalists, whom it would be difficult to tag as Leftists or Conservatives. They had all been members of the sprawling and largely corrupt journalistic establishment of the Third Republic. They had, over the

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Page 11.

years, either served the cause of Franco-German reconciliation, like Luchaire and Brinon, or absorbed the varieties of pacifism so prevalent in the mid and late thirties. Many of them had come from the circles around Briand and Caillaux (even though Briand was dead by 1933 and, in the days of Munich, Caillaux was far indeed from his attitude of World War I). Others had been close to the Action Française, but found it too stifling and musty, and thought its basic anti-German bias old-fashioned. Laval knew these men well, and used many of them as informal emissaries and intermediaries during the Occupation. For this amorphous group, collaborationism was much less an ideological commitment than a splendid opportunity for jobs. These men were literally put in control of the Paris press and radio by Otto Abetz. This was to be their day, their reward for not having been sufficiently appreciated under the "old regime". Here we come closest to pure opportunism; and yet, we must remember that even servile collaborationism is not entirely mercenary, since it was practiced by men who had become disaffected from the so-called "bellicist" policies of the Third Republic. They were now serving new masters, but without having to suppress old beliefs.

2) There were the Fascist intellectuals: the men of *Je suis partout*, writers like Chateaubriant, Drieu, Abel Bonnard, Céline. The nature of their Fascism has been well analyzed by others. (4) It was, indeed, a Romanticism: elitist, sentimental, both attractive in its nostalgia for rejuvenation and action, and repulsive in its virility pose, its perfume of decadence, its *fin de race* character, and above all its vindictiveness. These were the men to whom the petty, compressed, depressed and querulous France

(4) See in particular Raoul Girardet, Note sur l'Esprit d'un Fascisme français. Revue française de Science Politique, Vol.V No.3, July-Sept.1955, pp.524-546. Paul Serant, *Romantisme fasciste* (Fasquelle, 1959) and Robert J. Soucy, *The nature of Fascism in France, Journal of Contemporary History*, 1966, vol.I No. 1, pp. 27-55.

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Page 12.

of the thirties was anathema, who "were violently opposed - emotionally, intellectually and morally - to bourgeois society and bourgeois values", (5) who saw in democracy a form of bourgeois decadence, and in Marxism a hideous, collectivist degradation of the individual. They were dreaming of a Society that would no longer be based on money, ruled by mediocrity, and wracked by masses. They were driven to collaborationism by two different factors. One was admiration for "Fascist man", for the new type of heroic, fraternal human being which fascism and Nazism had allegedly created. Here we find the one case of actual sympathy for or fascination with the enemy's system - and even here one must qualify this remark by noting that in some instances, it was a fascination with Italian or Spanish Fascism even more than with National-Socialism. The other factor was the intensity of their hatred for the very elements in France which Nazi ideology also aimed at destroying: the Jews and the Communists in particular. Collaborationism here was almost purely ideological - although we must remember that it had the advantage of giving these men an influence they had not enjoyed before.

What is remarkable is the degree to which their ideological pre-
dilection had obscured in their own eyes what might be called the
classic inter-state aspect of the problem. After all, collabora-
tionism also meant subscribing to the victory of Germany over
France. In this respect, the Fascist intellectuals were not of
one mind. Some pre-war Fascists did not slip into collaborationism
precisely because concern for the French nation remained predom-
inant in their minds: neither Thierry-Maulnier, who remembered
his Action française origins, nor Jouvenel, embraced the Nazi
cause. Rebatet, at the other extreme was, as we know, literally
a defeatist, rejoicing in the Découbrés of France. Bonnard, in a
more convoluted way, shared this masochism. But neither Drieu nor

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Page 13.

Brasillach had been unmitigated admirers of Germany; both had advocated French Fascism as the only way of resisting German might, and they had been classically anti-German during the "phony war". From June 1940 to 1943, however, their ideological predispositions overrode their scruples as French citizens: Brasillach subordinated his to his concern for internal French regeneration and (after June 1941) for anti-Communist crusading; Drieu saw in the situation of occupied Europe an opportunity for realizing at last what had been his old dream - that of a unified Europe - and he rationalized away France's humiliation by arguing that every Federation needs a Federator: if it had to be Germany, at least it was a Fascist Germany. It was only in 1943 that Drieu's and Brasillach's ideological faith slumped. Both men discovered that the problem of relations among nations had not been obliterated by ideological transnational solidarities. Drieu had become disenchanted with the quality of German Fascism: he had at last discovered not only that it was not as Socialistic as he had hoped, but also that it was not as universal and European as he had believed. Brasillach began to worry about the degree of "de-nationalization" which collaborationism entailed. Thus, the Fascist intellectuals ended by splitting. Most of them continued to hug the German cause, whatever the cost to France, because the France which was being battered by civil war and Nazi repression was one they hated anyhow: these were the men of resentment, in whom the dream of a new man had less force than the impulse of destruction. Some of them, like the two novelists, quietly stepped back, both because they became appalled by some of the consequences of their original choice, and also because they had begun to discover that their dream had been a delusion.

3) Then, there were the men who, before the war, had aped Fascism by setting up would-be single parties, and ersatz totalitarian movements. Many of the leagues which so upset the Republicans in the 1930s were nothing but rallies of Conservatives who

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Collaboration in France during World War Two.

Page 14.

thought that the best way of restoring the quiet social and
political order of their dreams - one in which elites would
rule so to speak a-politically - was to borrow a plebiscitar-
an leaf from their adversaries' book: a calculation that had
begun with Boulangisme. When Daladier restored order, most of
that agitation stopped; When Vichy appeared, the Conservatives
flocked to it, and, in the Summer of 1940, killed the notion
of a simple party. But, in the 1930s, there had also been
genuine embryos of Fascism: Doriot's PPF, the Cagoule headed by
Delondé, of which Darnand had been a member, and smaller gangs
like Bucard's. Between them and the Conservatives grown tempor-
arily rabid, the differences did not primarily reside in the
realms of social doctrine: for the program of these gangs was
quite fundamentally conservative and appealed to the deep inst-
incts of stability and equilibrium in the stalemate society. (6)
The differences were of two kinds. One was in the realm of pol-
itical doctrine. Whereas the Conservatives wished for a de-polit-
icized society, organized so as to take care of itself without
parties, parliaments and politicians, the Fascists believed that
the "reconciled" society of their programs would need to be
firmly run by a political elite whose dual task would be waging
a permanent battle against the corrupters of France - i.e. purges -
and placing under their own control the various economic and social
activities of the nation - i.e. ruling. The other difference was
in the realm of temper. Both the Conservatives and the Fascists
appealed to the "sans-culottes" heritage, to the Jacobin impulse,
to the plebiscitarian tradition; but the Conservatives deeply
distrusted what they felt they had to use, whereas the Fascists
were in their element. A movement like the Croix de Feu, and a
gang like the P.P.F. both had their share of the modern version
of the urban "sans-culottes": the shopkeepers, restaurateurs,
garage mechanics, employees, traveling salesmen, clerks, etc...

(6) Soucy, Op.cit.; pp. 46 fl.

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Page 15.

But the Conservatives used temporary Jacobin methods for
Girondin ends whereas the Fascists wanted to combine social
stability with permanent political agitation.

The largest contingent of collaborationists was provided by the
Fascist gangs: Doriot's P.P.F., Deloncle's new and adventurous
M.S.B., later Darnand's S.O.L. and Milice. These were the activ-
ists. As in the case of the intellectuals there was one huge
negative component in their ideological collaborationism: the
desire for internal revenge (not only against the Jews and the
Communists and the Republican Left, but also against the tepid
conservatives of Vichy who were trying to set the clock back and
to institutionalize les valeurs du père de famille by reserving
to themselves all the positions of power in the state and by
excommunicating all politics). But whereas the ideological collab-
orationism of Fascist intellectuals was at least partly positive -
in the sense of being moved by the myth of Fascist man - that of
the Fascist gangs was largely imitative. For the other component
was a fascination with the institutional innovation of Fascism
and Nazism - the single party and the para-military elite group,
the armed gang of modern "chevaliers" rooting out asocial weeds,
on behalf of a doctrine of national resurrection, under the
control of a tough political leadership. The development of the
S.O.L. and Milice by Darnand, whose interest in Nazi techniques
led him to become "Obersturmführer" of the Waffen SS, is partic-
ularly significant.

Once again, one finds that ideological predispositions obscured
inter-state considerations. In the intellectuals' case, the
latter were either abolished by defeatism or swept away by illu-
sions about a fraternal European order. In the case of the
gangs, the story is more complex. There was no inherent or pre-
existing sympathy for Nazi Germany, even if there was a desire
to learn from its political techniques. Doriot, after the
crisis that hit the P.P.F. in the post-Munich days, had adopted
the very nationalist stance which the minority of dissidents who

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Page 16.

resigned had advocated. Darnand, a former follower of the
**Action française** had been anti-German most of his life. Collaborationism was merely a foreign policy corollary of a domestic political stance. With Vichy in the hands of **les modérés**, the activists intent on a thorough purging of France and on seizing power for themselves decided to collaborate with those who not only fought the same enemies with the same intensity, but also were most likely to favor groups that imitated Nazi practices. "The enemies of my enemies are my friends; the models of my behavior ought to be my supporters".

The irony lies in the fact that the Germans in France were rather reluctant supporters. They realized correctly that the Fascist gangs were unpopular and isolated. Their existence contributed to France's desired weakness, but the Germans got more advantages out of blackmailing a Vichy leadership group that had a basis of popular support and respectability, than they could have gotten out of putting ill-experienced and widely detested gangs in power. The story of Doriot's relations with Abetz and the Germans is a rather stormy one. Doriot's services were kept at arms' length, and Doriot's long periods of combat in Russia were, for him, escapes from the frustrations of inaction in France, and, for the Germans, convenient ways of keeping the P.P.F. under wraps. As for Darnand, the Germans decided to give arms and access to Northern France to his Milice only when it became clear that he would, in effect, serve as an auxiliary in the fight against the Resistance. Thus, a man like Doriot, who sought in collaborationism an elevator to power, and entirely identified French interests with Germany's in the process, was treated with disdain; but a man like Darnand, convinced that he was serving nothing but the interest of France - yet one which he redefined in intensely and exclusively ideological fashion - was deemed more deserving by the Germans, precisely because he appeared more genuine, less servile - hence more likely to be effective.

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4) Finally, there were the members of the pre-war pacifist and anti-Communist Left. Their case is in many ways the most interesting. For here the elements that led groups 2) and 3) to collaborationism were missing. Here there was no particular enthusiasm for Fascist man, the cult of the virile hero, of youth movements and Olympic games; nor had there been any enthusiasm for totalitarian political techniques: these were former parliamentarians quite at ease in Parliament, former members of the Socialist or Radical parties and of reformist labor unions. And yet, in the summer and fall of 1940, Déat emerges as the champion of the single party and of collaborationism. What had happened? Once more, the explanation is to be found in domestic French terms.

On the one hand, these men, exactly like the conservative Vichyites and the Fascists, had a burning desire to settle accounts with the political class of the fallen regime - with the Socialists, Radicals and C.G.T. leaders who had multiplied mistakes: they had let the Communists impose their bellicism, they had frightened into conservatism the peasants and middle classes which the neo-Socialists and some union leaders of the 30s had wanted to woo, they had failed to wrest control of the French economy from the famous "200 families", from the trusts and munition-makers. On the other hand, the men in this fourth group were temperamentally alienated both from the Conservatives and from the Fascists. Their anti-Communism and their determination to take revenge on what might be called the Popular Front establishment did not spill over into a dogmatic aversion for parliamentarism, for Freemasons and Jews. They remained marked by their Left wing origins - they had been part of the Republican machine (in a way which, for instance, a Doriot had never been, since his career had taken him directly from the Extreme Left to the far Right i.e. from one ghetto to another). They had reasons to hate the bosses of that machine, but not the whole personnel. To Déat and his friends, Vichy's clericalism, ruralism, anti-labor

[L]

Page 18.

corporatism and elitism were unpalatable, and, as Vichy's big business connections. Whereas the Fascist politicians resented only Vichy's aversion for politics, rather than Vichy's social conservatism. Nor did these men have the dictatorial or plebiscitarian temper of a Doriot, and the conspiratorial itch of a Darnand. In the "amalgam" of beneficiaries of France's fall, during the summer of 1940, in that great moment of revenge, they were a minority among minorities: they represented the Left.

Their collaborationism, and Déat's decision to "go Fascist" and build a "single party" of his own, were timely reactions to their predicament. There was no room for these men in Vichy: the regime of Weygand or Bouthillier could absorb one Belin, but it could not accommodate a whole group. Déat decided to do what the Conservatives had done earlier: to appeal to the plebiscitarian impulse, not in order, like La Bocque, to play the pied piper of "order and stability", but so as to fish in the huge pond - now disposable - of former Left wing voters. The time of parliamentary parties was over. The fishing had to be done with the one available and fashionable rod: the pseudo-totalitarian one. Collaborationism was - as for Doriot - an elevator to power. However, Déat and his friends had one asset Doriot did not have: Abetz' sympathies. Hitler's ambassador shrewdly realized that men who came from the Left and who had some good words to say about the Popular Front or the late Republic, and some opposition to clericalism, Vichy militarism, "moral order" and political purges of schoolteachers and local notables, would have more influence among the French than a Doriot or a Bucard. Thus, for Déat, collaborationism was much less a logical commitment than for groups 2) and 3), and far more a tactical necessity. Isolated in the new French order, they could count only on the Germans: the Fascist gangs, at least, had either pre-existing machines of their own, or some sympathies in Vichy, because of the conservative orthodoxy of their social (although not their political) doctrine. Moreover (this is the only area in which ideology played some part), three previous factors made this group's conversion to collaborationism in a totalitarian guise appear less startling:

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Page 19.

anti-Communism, pacifism (which "dictated" cooperation with a power that this group considered to have won the war) and a pre-war, tentative interpretation of Nazi Germany not as a Right wing dictatorship but as a rough, dynamic and demagogic version of what the *néos* had once advocated (*ordre, autorité, nation*): the control of the trusts by the state, a planned economy, an alliance of peasants, workers and lower middle classes; and they now also saw in Nazi Germany a model and matrix for a European economic federation which would exploit rationally the continent's resources.

Thus collaborationism in all its forms - from the purest to the most corrupt - partook of one important feeling: a sense that Germany, whatever reservations one might have had about her before June 1940, was the wave of the future and that one's own political designs could only be carried out by clinging to the policies and by aping the institutions of Hitler's state. So we come back once more, from the other side, of the fence, to a point made earlier: how blurred the distinction was, between voluntary collaboration d'état and collaborationism. For the former also entailed a decision to support German policies. There were, altogether, three differences, which in individual cases dwindled into mere nuances. Collaborationism downplayed calculations in terms of *raison d'état*, ignored the inter-state aspect of Franco-German relations (yet a Darnand, a Benoist-Méchin apparently convinced themselves that ardent collaboration would bring back to France all she had lost). Collaborationism was pushed by men who were out of power, in order to get the political control of France, whereas collaboration d'état corresponded to a different role: that of governing France (yet once risen to power, collaborationists pursued their policy of Darnand). Collaborationism went beyond mere support for German policies, to an imitation of Nazi institutions - and this is what limited its appeal.

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Page 20.

## IV

If one tries to generalize about Frenchmen engaged only in collaboration d'état, and collaborationists, one social difference becomes clear. The Vichyites who were not collaborationists represented a political class which had been, so to speak, in exile or opposition under the Third Republic, and which, as such, had a revenge to take, but these political exiles were socially very well established; they represented the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community, of the social elites of land owners or the professions or the local notables. The drama of the French Right had precisely resided in the divorce between political power, which the Republic had shifted to a political class representative of Gambetta's "nouvelles couches" - the lower middle classes, the peasants, the "petits" - and economic or social power, whose center of gravity had remained much higher on the social ladder. Vichy was a revenge, but one perpetrated by men who felt that they were the natural governing elite of the French state - that they represented French continuity and stability. On the other hand, the collaborationists were to a large extent déclassés - social misfits and political deviants. Not only had they not exerted political power, but they were not among the established "social authorities" either. Their ideas had segregated them both from the Republican establishment - the high commands of the parties and unions - and from the conservative social establishment, suspicious of Fascist gangs, amused by the verve but not converted to the views of Fascist intellectuals. The latter literally constituted cliques of copains, apart from the staid reviews and circles of conservative académiciens; the collaborationist journalists had been living precarious lives as salaried spokesmen for business tycoons or politicians. Collaborationism was largely the bilious outlet of the misfits. They had two good reasons for embracing the German cause: without the Nazis, their chance of gaining power in France was nil; and in Germany, the Nazi party and regime had made use and given a sense of mission to comparable misfits. A century earlier, Blanqui had celebrated in the déclassés the "secret ferment", the "reserve

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force of the revolution"; now, they were the public ferment and reserve force of a very different sort of revolution. Some collaborationists among the most prominent, like Marion or Fontenoy, were men who had gone through a variety of movements or newspapers, at ease nowhere, too cynical for intellectual day-dreams, too undisciplined for the gangs, accumulating only grievances against all established orthodoxies: the Republic's as well as the Conservatives'. Once more, there were important cases of men who straddled the fence between the two milieux of collaboration. In particular, a Laval, who had been for a while a prominent political leader of the French Right, and who had been too intimate with political power in the Third Republic to be quite as much a misfit as the collaborationists, nevertheless was fundamentally a déclassé in Vichy's brand of orthodoxy. For Vichy conservatives were suspicious of parliamentarians (even their own parliamentarians) and the self-made nouveau riche who had travelled a long and shady road from the far Left to the Senate had never become entirely respectable in the circles of la bonne société: too much a statesman for the Paris misfits, he remained a devious and deviant, distrusted and lonely wolf in Vichy.

The other difference is a psychological one. The collaborateurs d'état were men of prudence, temporization, cautious management of a society that needed, they believed, a respite from agitation above all. The collaborationists were activists, muckrakers or crusaders, men of direct action, demagogues and demonstrators. Again, this may throw some light on important individual cases. For there were collaborationists who were neither Fascist intellectuals in quest of a new hero, nor leaders or members of Fascist gangs, who seemed indeed to belong intellectually or socially among conservative notables, and yet who embraced collaborationism with savage ardor: a Philippe Henriot, Catholic polemicist and conservative deputy, was driven to his death by the intensity of his passion.

OCT 7 1968

# The French Psychodrama

## De Gaulle's Anti-Communist Coup

by Stanley Hoffmann

The most interesting aspect of France's great crisis of May-June 1968 is neither its suddenness, nor its scope, nor its spectacular (if perhaps temporary) ending. It is its ambiguity. What remains at stake is nothing less than a nation's capacity to change, not its skin (France has done it often) but its soul.

Lightning revealed, in a flash, the strength of the aspiration to a change in the citizens' perennial attitudes toward authority, in the relation of each individual Frenchman to larger groups within France, in the traditional French conception of freedom. But the crisis also showed the resilience, even within the rebels, of those same old beliefs and patterns of behavior, which they themselves displayed in the midst of their challenge, whose origins had been analyzed over a century ago in Alexis de Tocqueville's study of the Old Regime, and whose characteristics have been examined in depth in Michel Crozier's recent Bureaucratic Phenomenon. Since the rebels could not overcome, in themselves and in the nation, the features they were rising against, can change now be worked out by the very forces they were denouncing? Was their fiasco a paradoxical prelude to the mutation they sought, or a conclusive demonstration of its impossibility?

The crisis of 1968 was largely due to the impact of widespread transformations: in an educational system hit by mass democratization, in an economy hit by the imperatives of growth and competition, in a regime insufficiently responsive to pressures from below. New tensions triggered a demand for total renovation. But they also triggered old reflexes – those which had shaped France's school system, brand of industrialization, and peculiar political regimes, and which will limit the scope and meaning of any reform as long as they themselves have not changed.

The object of the contest, and the key to its fate, is the French style of authority and of change. In a nation riddled by conflicts, the citizens have traditionally preferred, in every group from the family to the state,

to entrust the solution of conflicts to higher authority. But authoritarianism has always been tempered by French individualism: by the citizen's determination to be protected from arbitrariness through a network of bureaucratic rules limiting the scope and intensity of Authority. Hence a permanent series of polar opposites: a rigid, often stifling set of regulations, but also the preservation of the individual's capacity to protest; tight hierarchies controlled by a handful of Important Ones, but also the perpetuation of the Small Ones' escape from involvement and responsibility; centralization coexisting with fragmentation into small groups of castes. Two aspects of this system are especially important: the brittleness of voluntary associations (parties, unions, etc.) which are merely defensive bodies protecting their members against arbitrariness from above, yet expect higher authority to settle their differences and problems; and, of course, the absence of participation and compromise. Liberty is freedom from, not freedom to; it is defined as resistance and non-dependence; compromise is a pejorative word. The two values served by this style are, first, what Crozier has called the flight from face-to-face relations, i.e. the desire for individual apartheid, and, secondly, the desire of every group to preserve its status in society so that the overall equilibrium (a key notion) would, despite all changes, remain essentially intact.

The highest authority, the ultimate source of regulations, is the state. In quiet periods, when the fear of authority dominates, the French prefer a weak parliamentary system, in which the executive does little more than supervise the bureaucracy, and the legislature supervises both. In troubled periods, the need for authority prevails, and the French turn to a savior, who will last only if he does not violate the citizens' opposition to arbitrary rule. Both types of regimes are supposed to preserve the two basic values. In such a system, the pattern of change is quite unique: the way of change is cataclysmic, not gradual, but the scope of change is usually limited, especially as it leaves intact and perpetuates the fundamental style of authority. On the one hand, except in times of turmoil, higher authority, hemmed in as it is, is rarely dynamic. Almost inevitably, in a nation where the bulk of educa-

STANLEY HOFFMANN is professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of In Search of France and author of Gulliver's Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy.

15

THE NEW REPUBLIC

tion and a huge fraction of the economy are public
services, where elected local authorities have little
power and no resources, any large-scale demand for
change will sooner or later be aimed at the state, either
because it failed to protect the citizens from an upset
in the equilibrium, or because its own actions had
caused such an upset. Moreover, the non-participating
citizens, when dissatisfied, behave as rebels rather than
as reformers: their whole way of being, fed by a school
system that leaves little initiative to its subjects, pre-
pares them for wild utopianism, intransigence and
self-righteousness. In other words, in the absence of
"participatory" channels of moderate change, the de-
mand for change will be radical. But on the other hand,
rebels are not revolutionaries either: they are too nega-
tive, too much in love with protest and criticism, too
much concerned with preserving the two basic values.
Therefore, traditionally, the rebellion disappeared
when central authority, aware of the rebels' clumsiness
and inapitude to build something together, granted
some concessions at the right moment. Thus the most
indispensable changes were made possible, while har-
mony was restored, and the pattern reaffirmed, as I
wrote several years ago, "by flexibility on top and ac-
quiescence at the bottom. . . . By an intriguing para-
dox, protest succeeds to the extent to which it con-
tained a kernel of specific grievance but fails to the
extent to which it was a broader challenge of the de-
cision-makers."

At first, the crisis of 1968 was not a reenactment of
the French style of authority, but a revolt against it.
Students challenged their professors, denounced the
centralized controls of the Ministry of Education over
the school and university systems, demanded the two
basic new rights of autonomy for every academic unit,
and co-management within. In most of the professions,
from architecture to medicine, the younger members
challenged their less dynamic but all-powerful elders,
and proclaimed self-rule. The personnel of the state-
run radio and television struck on behalf of objecti-
vity and exerted their own right of self-expression. In
the factories, the younger workers challenged the au-
thority of the *patrons* and occupied the plants as a
prelude to the exercise of "worker power." Not only
was it a rebellion against all establishments and their
rules. It was also a moving orgy of face-to-face rela-
tions, a sudden, joyous, noisy release from silence and
isolation, a delirium of stream-of-consciousness discus-
sions, debates, dialogues. It was no longer the State
that was sovereign, it was the word. In a society of
highly formal, contractual human relations, there was
a surge of spontaneity. In a society of separate indi-
viduals, suspicious groups and poor communications
among them (symbolized by the retarded telephone

system), there was a rush toward community. The
students wanted to join hands with the workers, and
open the University to all. Even the beneficiaries of the
hierarchy: the established professors, the *agréés* of
the University, often took the lead in calling for the
end of their own privileges.

This last point showed, however, that there was less
novelty here than the young revolutionaries believed.
It was not the first time that those who had long
blocked reform by their obstinate attachment to their
privileges were trying to get ahead of a revolution once
it had begun: the first to try to do so had been the
nobles who, on the night of August 4, 1789, abolished
their own special rights. The longing for a thoroughly
decentralized nation, with little or no power on top,
and power in the hands of "those who work where
they work" is as old as French Socialism: overshad-
owed by Marxism, the dream of Fourier, Proudhon,
Sorel had never died in the labor movement, despite
the Paris Commune's debacle in 1871. Nor was there
anything new in the hyperbolic attacks on industrial
society. It had been a constant target, both for an in-
telligentsia that despises mercantile values and applied
sciences, and for a working class half attracted by
material comfort, but half repelled by the injustice of
business authoritarianism or government deafness, in a
fragile and not very dynamic economy easily derailed
by high wages or high social benefits.

More striking was the inability of the rebels really
to step outside the style of authority they were attack-
ing. Centralization was out, but fragmentation was
not: the reforms worked out by the students tended to
make of every school or University a sovereign unit
undisturbed by outside forces of nationwide concerns.
Higher authority was defied, but there was no revolu-
tion in the attitude toward conflicts. On the one hand,
there grew a mystical hope that self-management
would abolish them magically; on the other hand,
there was a significant shift from the reasonable and
positive claim for "participation" to the romantic, ne-
gative and absurd assertion of a right to permanent
challenge (contestation). Groups and men unprepared
for responsibility prided themselves on behaving irre-
sponsibly. As one young teacher put it, approvingly,
"The revolutionaries are men without a program"; as
one inscription on the walls of the Paris Law School
said, "Let us push together but let us not think to-
gether." Instead of motion, movement became an end
in itself, and motions became their own rewards. In-
stead of a program, the non-stop assemblies and com-
mittees all-too-often fell for the grand utopian slogan-
eering typical of French protest, and indicative of a
deep nostalgia for the days when France was the
world's pathfinder, of a desire to take the torch of
revolution away from the Cubans or the Chinese: "Let

16

AUGUST 31, 1968

us change man, let us build a new civilization, let us replace the fallacious tyranny of production and consumption with true socialism," etc. Or else, these meetings ended in discord, with each fragment insisting on the exclusive correctness of its own analysis. Or else, inevitably, they were exploited by less naïve if equally utopian small factions of ideologues: the *groupuscules* of Trotskyites, pro-Chinese or pro-Cuban Communists, etc., whose skillful nihilism merged with, and manipulated, the spontaneous, inexperienced rebellion of unorganized students and young workers. The whole thing had a progressive thrust but little positive content, a good direction but no road map. Once again, it was easier to see what was being opposed than what was being proposed. Auguste Comte's old warning: one can destroy only what one can replace, was hypothetically answered by another statement on a wall: "I have something to say, but I don't know what." Starting as a scream for innovation, the crisis became one more example of the ritual of French protest.

Moreover, not only did the tidal wave of face-to-face relations soak and sweep those who had generously thrown themselves into it, but the other basic value: the fear of a change in the overall equilibrium of groups, professions and statuses remained unchallenged by the onslaught of contestation. Indeed, it inspired this onslaught. For although the occasion of the crisis in education was an extravagant, if familiar, contention of government passivity followed by belated brutality, the real cause was a new and drastic social imbalance. There had been a huge increase in the number of University students, in a system in which access to higher education is open to all the graduates of secondary schools. Young men and women who, fifteen or twenty years ago, would not have gone beyond high school, now invaded the University; most of them came from the more prosperous middle and lower middle classes. But there just weren't enough opportunities available to them, either in a University unprepared for such a flood, or in society—especially as so many students, guided by France's traditional scheme of values, were flocking to the humanities and social sciences, where the outlets were smallest. Tens of thousands of students who had gone through the grueling maze of French exams rightly feared that they would find no jobs appropriate to their knowledge, their labors and their degrees. Hence, paradoxically, a reinforced dislike for "industrial society" which condemned them to being misfits. Their revolt was largely based on their determination to preserve their status—on their own terms: without any *numerus clausus* restricting access to the University, without any forcible shift toward technical education, with adequate jobs for all, and with due legal and administrative protection for their rights and ranks!

As for the industrial crisis, it too had an occasion and a cause. The workers, quite spontaneously, seized the moment when Mr. Pompidou gave in to the students, in order to press for their own demands. But the real reason for those was also a new imbalance over the fears of Gaullist rule; planning and the concern for a more productive economy had resulted in strengthening business and its associations, whereas the workers' rate of material advance had slowed down, and the unions remained divided and weak. Moreover, the mild recession of 1967 had led to considerable unemployment and to cuts in social services. Once again, a movement for change sprang from a desire for protection, from a fear of social retrogradation.

None of this means that the drive toward more dignity—through a less authoritarian, bureaucratic and brutalizing school system, through a more equalitarian and humane industrial system—was not genuine. Nor does it mean that those aspirations must remain thwarted. But it means that the drive itself could not carry its masses to victory: the push carried the seeds of its fiasco. However, the crisis was of such a magnitude that the fiasco would have come much later and much more violently, if it had not been for two sets of political factors: France's Communist Party, and de Gaulle's regime.

As in the past, one of the reasons for the crisis had been the divorce between a troubled society and a political system that was both clumsy and complacent. There had been some educational reform, but it had failed to remodel the University, to free it from bureaucratic strangulation, to give it the freedom and resources to experiment, to integrate teaching and research, to create departments, to make teamwork prevail over formal lecture courses, to curb professional absolutism. Yet it had been just extensive enough to multiply friction between fussy innovations and an old structure, and to antagonize students submitted to perpetual experimentation without fundamental change. Moreover, the last Minister of Education, intellectually lucid but politically too prudent, had stopped innovating—except for the highly unpopular decision, reductantly taken by him under pressure from de Gaulle, to restrict in the future the hitherto free access of students to the University.

As for the economy, de Gaulle had to water down, and practically give up, his old plan for some kind of association between capital and labor in the factories, given the opposition of labor unions (afraid of being "integrated into the system"), of businessmen (fearful about a loss of authority), and of his own Cabinet: so that the only effective measures taken by the Cabinet had been the unpopular ones that I have described

17

THE NEW REPUBLIC

here; moreover, the political procedures for redress just weren't working. Academic reformers and workers were mainly on the Left - which almost assured that they would not be listened to carefully, given the Left's fierce hostility to the Gaullist regime. In the National Assembly elected in March 1967, the Gaullists had no majority, and the coalition of Gaullists with Giscard d'Estaing's group was too sluggish to be reform-minded. Also, in the Fifth Republic, it is anyhow not Parliament that provides the fuel for change. With docile Parliaments since 1962, and surface tranquility in the country, the civil service had become increasingly disdainful of criticism, and oppressively self-confident. When the explosion came, two of de Gaulle's most cherished beliefs were blasted away. He who had created a powerful Presidency capable of ruling France even if French Parliament should again be splintered, now explained that the timidity of the Executive in recent months was due to the absence of a strong majority in the National Assembly (a half-truth concerning the past, but one that could all too easily become a full truth in the post-de Gaulle future). And de Gaulle, who had so often celebrated the "stability, security, solidity" of his constitutional system, discovered that France's troubles had not all been due to weak parliamentary systems, and were not all cur-

able by a "strong state" - not only because a strong state breeds problems of its own, but also because constitutional reform does not by itself solve the deepest of France's difficulties, those that lie in the nature of French society.

And yet, the very divorce between society and politics which contributed to the drama, squashed it. The rebels, in order to succeed, had to topple the regime. But they had no political experience. They were deeply suspicious of the non-Communist Left, whose inefficiency, fragmentation and social conformism had been amply demonstrated. As a relay toward power, they needed the support of the one true, coherent opposition force: the Communist Party. But the Party turned against them - and twice provided a regime that seemed on the verge of collapse with the help it desperately needed. In mid-May, the Communists prevented the liaison between students and young strikers and decided to generalize the strike so as to regain control of it. Shamelessly, they oriented it exclusively toward material issues (wage increases, social security) instead of "co-management," and toward negotiations with Pompidou. In the decisive days of May 28-29, when the agreement thus negotiated mainly between him and the Communists had been rejected by the workers, the rattled Party - still in order to regain control - finally gave a political content to the strike, but chose to call for a "popular government." or popular front. This meant that it had opted for legal, political action within the constitutional framework. But it also meant that it expected Gaullism to collapse, so that there would be a new government and new elections after de Gaulle's fall. This proved to be a fatal mistake. For although de Gaulle's first speech on May 24 had been a flop - which probably encouraged the Party to count him out - the Communists' call provided him with the opportunity to denounce as the real troublemakers, not the students and workers with whom so many sympathized, but the "totalitarian party" which so many disliked and which had imprudently, if legally, laid its claim to power.

After the crisis, and its defeat at the polls on June 23 and 30, the Communist Party's Secretary-General explained that the situation had not been truly revolutionary, that the Party behaved correctly in refusing to fall into a trap laid by adventurers and agents provocateurs, that there would otherwise have been bloodshed and far bigger losses of votes. Perhaps - yet this way of looking at things (with eyes fixed on free elections) contributed decisively to taking the revolution out of the situation. Why did the Party refuse to take any risk other than that of defusing the bomb built by the students and the young workers, for the greatest benefit of a shaken regime which the Communists had denounced for so long? We do not

"I'll get back to running your affairs when I'm not so busy."

18

AUGUST 31, 1968

know whether Moscow had a large role in the French Party's bizarre strategy. (Is the unprecedented failure of the Party to support Moscow in the Czech crisis evidence of its autonomy, or of resentment against its servitude?) But there are at least three reasons that bring us back to the flow of French history.

First, given its Marxist origins, its Leninist model, and its Jacobin conception of seizing power where it is – at the center – the Party had always disdained and distrusted the anarchist or federalist strains in French Socialism: "worker power" in the factory would have weakened the hold of the Communist-led union, the CGT, on the workers. It would have transferred control not merely from the *patrons* to the workers, but also the CGT's representatives to either a majority of the workers (and in many industries, while the CGT was the biggest union, most of the workers were not members of any union) or to other more dynamic minorities. The Communist Party had been molded by the French style of authority. The *groupuscules* of students who had started the revolution were hostile to the Party, precisely because its own rigid centralization, bureaucracy and orthodoxy appeared to them as the twins of the Gaullist regime's. Second, those very features of the Party, and the fact that it had been pretty much on the political defensive for over twenty years (despite recent changes of tactics), made it inordinately and clumsily hostile toward initiatives taken by groups that were either claiming to be to its left, or under no political control at all. Instead of joining such groups so as to dominate them, the Communists' defensive reflex was to oppose them.

Third, and most important, this action reflected the dilemmas and the fate of all anti-regime opposition movements – of the extreme left or of the far right – in France. They proclaim revolutionary goals, but on the one hand, in a country that remains wedded to stability, with a sizable peasant population that often roars but never rises, and middle classes fiercely attached to their possessions and rights, the situation is almost never ripe for a violent seizure of power. On the other hand, if such movements try to reach their goals through parliamentary maneuvers and electoral politics, they get gradually and grudgingly absorbed into the system. This had happened to the Socialists even before 1914: it happened to de Gaulle's RPF in the early 1950's; it was happening to the Communist Party, which had decided some years ago that its best chances of success lay in a reassuring alliance with the non-Communist Federation headed by Miterrand and led by Guy Mollet. When the crisis came, the Party's instinct was to denounce and try to drown a movement that conflicted with such tactics, and to reaffirm its course, in the hope that the voters would be grateful to the Communists both for having helped

improve the workers' material lot, and for having saved France from civil war and illegality. The calculation misfired.

Gaullism, having been caught by surprise as much as, but of course far more generously than, the political opposition (Communists included), first looked as if it would not recover from the shock. When de Gaulle returned from Rumania on May 18, his life's work seemed in ruins. The man who had wanted to unify the French had apparently half of the French in revolt against him. The celebrator of the strong state preferred over a paralyzed administration. The hero who had twice saved the French from disasters provoked by the impotence of their regime now faced a crisis aimed at him. His first reaction, on May 24, was rituelistic and totally inadequate. He announced a referendum – a personal vote of confidence in his own capacity to reform France, a plea to the citizens to delegate to him the power to organize their participation – just as the revolt, which was still spreading, not only seemed to demonstrate that such confidence was gone, but challenged the whole pattern of leaving public affairs to the sovereign wisdom of the highest authority. Had he stuck to his proposal, in a nation which says no more easily than yes in times of anger and in the absence of a savior, all the oppositions could have combined and ousted him.

At this point, two miracles happened. First, de Gaulle, despite his age, his well-known obstinacy, his obvious distress, and his exhaustion, realized immediately that he had blundered and, pragmatic as ever, looked for a new course. Second, the new stand of the Communists provided him exactly with what he needed. Instead of being the toppling target of discontent, pleading with his subjects for their trust, he could again become the nation's savior, leading the citizens in the fight against subversion and chaos. Up to May 30, he had been on the defensive. Now he seized the offensive, as in 1940 and 1958, and made of the obliging Communists the focus of discontent of all those who, by now, felt annoyed or threatened by growing anarchy. It was a sensational coup. By shelving the referendum and dissolving the Assembly he not only disarmed the Communists, who had themselves proposed the electoral arena as a battlefield, he also obliged the French to choose, not between yes and no, but between Gaullist candidates representing both order and reform, and various squabbling kinds of anti-Gaullists, who seemed to stand either for chaos, or for totalitarianism, or for nothing at all. As long as the battle was in the streets (or in the factories), France was faced with the prospect of anarchy or civil war between the rebels and the police (or the army). Once the battle was moved to the polls, a revolt that was

19

THE NEW REPUBLIC

both anti-Gaullist and anti-Communist, and indeed de-
rided all existing political forces, was doomed. Things
were moving back from fragmentation to centraliza-
tion. For in the electoral arena, the Gaullists were
right in saying that the only real forces were the Com-
munist Party and the Gaullist party; it was the former
that helped the latter bring back the revolution into
the electoral cage - then providing de Gaulle with the
opportunity of denouncing the Communists for sub-
version, even though, objectively, they had acted as
Gaullist accomplices, even to the point of offering
themselves as his target!

There is one more paradox. The Constitution, prac-
tices and style of the Fifth Republic are those of the
more authoritarian pole of French political relations.
The revolt, in a nation at peace, no longer troubled by
traumas such as the Algerian war, was partly a rebel-
lion against this kind of system, a longing for a more
relaxed and routine-like authority, of the sort which
French parliamentary Republics had represented. (The
young rebels had, it is true, no real memories of, or
high esteem for, those faded regimes; but de Gaulle's
constant attacks on these regimes may have made them
look less bad in the eyes of people exasperated by his
manner.) And yet, what helped defeat the revolt was
the very nature of the Fifth Republic. A parliamentary
system like the Fourth would have collapsed under the
shock - the Cabinet would probably have fallen, and
chaos resulted, as in May 1958. The Fifth Republic
was the institutionalization of crisis government, with
its powerful Presidency, and the arsenal of executive
controls over Parliament. And even though this crisis
proved that such a political system not only cannot
avoid major crises, but may even provoke some, it also
proved that the regime can then overcome them - at
least as long as the strong Presidency is served by a
strong President, and the Cabinet headed by an able
Prime Minister.

Thus de Gaulle has won – at least a respite. He is
clearly determined not to change anything in the cen-
tral institution (except the Senate). His replacement
of Pompidou was probably due – like all his moves –
to a great variety of reasons, but certainly one of those
was his constantly reasserted conviction that in the
Fifth Republic there should be only one head of the
Executive: the President, elected by the people. The
Prime Minister is not supposed to be an independent
leader who emanates from the majority in Parliament;
he is but a personal representative of the President,
chosen to rule that majority. Insofar as events and
personal abilities had made Pompidou behave more
like the former kind of Premier than like the latter,
constitutional orthodoxy demanded that he be re-
placed, and put, so to speak, in reserve so as to be,

after de Gaulle, what he had tended to become under
him: the second President of the Republic. De Gaulle's
purge of the personnel of the state radio and tele-
vision shows his determination to keep his grip. His
choice of Couve de Murville as Prime Minister shows
both his decision to take personal command of do-
mestic reform (for Couve is primarily a model exec-
utor), and his persistent taste for obfuscation (mis-
ing, in 1944, the leader of the domestic resistance,
Bidault, as his Foreign Minister; making, in 1950, Mich-
chel Debré, the champion of French Algeria, preside
over the giving up of Algeria; taking Pompidou, a man
primarily concerned with domestic affairs, as Prime
Minister for the period in which priority was given to
foreign policy, and now that precedence is at last given
to internal reform, a man who has been in diplomacy
for twenty-five years becomes Prime Minister).

With his renewed power and with his new (or not
so new) team, what will the General do, or rather what
can he do? Having, as usual, understood and tried to
capture and channel the demands from below, he has
annexed the key word, "participation." But the crisis
has raised one fundamental problem: how far can gov-
ernment reforms go in rapidly changing centuries-old
social attitudes and patterns of behavior, short of
brutal revolution? To be sure, there is nothing espe-
cially French about the problem of the big modern
university - about how to keep it a citadel of critical
analysis and free thought, while having it serve its
function as an instrument of social selection and train-
ing. But French peculiarities are making this problem,
and others, more difficult to solve. A reform of the
University that would copy the American system of
diversification and competition among units would be
resisted by professors and students alike, in their lyri-
cal hostility to being "integrated into industrial so-
ciety"; yet meeting the students' demand that there be
no limitation to the access of secondary school grad-
uates to the University (a demand accepted by the
new Minister of Education) only aggravates the im-
balance between the number of students and the op-
portunities for them.

More generally, if the government, as so often in
the past, stills specific grievances by measures decided
from the center and at the top - by fiat - it will only
perpetuate the old system. People below will feel left
out, changes will be absorbed into familiar patterns of
bureaucratic authoritarianism and brittle dissent. And
the fact is that this old system, once the backbone of
a deeply diverse and divided nation, has become
France's straitjacket. For modern industrial society
needs larger and mentally less cramped elites than the
old, more static bourgeois-rural order. In industry, in
education, in the professions, the rigid, authoritarian
elites are often inefficient, precisely because their de-

20

AUGUST 31, 1968

isions are ill-informed, restrictive, and badly applied
by sullen subjects. The centralized bureaucratic state,
while substituting for an anemic capitalism, keeps it
so. As Raymond Aron once suggested, France is less
capitalist and more socialistic than the other advanced
Western nations. Balanced growth requires a revival
of France's provinces, so long deprived of real au-
tonomeny. Above all, the changes listed above require
a different school system, less geared to abstract
thought and essentially critical faculties of the mind
more open to economics and world affairs, and based
on cooperation among students as well as between
them and their teachers. "Participation" has become a
necessity. It is to de Gaulle's credit that even before
the explosion, as some speeches had indicated, he had
understood that participation was the real prerequisite
to any French capacity for a grand role in the world -
his lifelong goal. But his own temper and methods
fit the old style only.

For the old General so often charged with Bonap-
partism, it must be tempting to become, in his last
phase, a kind of anti-Napoleon: the man who would
leave France at peace, more prosperous, and freed
from the yoke of Napoleon's steely centralization. But
can he do it, and even if he were determined to change
himself so far as to give the French once more the ex-
ample of what he expects of them, can it be done -
can they do it? Laws and decrees can establish a new
structure, give greater freedom to cities and regions,
high schools and universities, create a framework for
association within factories: progressive reformers
have been suggesting this for years. But vicious circles
cannot be broken by legal magic and procedural inno-
vations. If the old system prevented orderly change,
democratic participation and compromise, it is also
true that it developed precisely because of France's
lack of taste for and experience with such ways of
thinking and behaving. Will a greater range of free-
dom to act together cure Frenchmen of their practice
of the freedom either to command or to resist? In a
first phase, inevitably, the old mentality will be very
much present; the new bottles will be filled by the
old wine, whose acid may eat into them.

Democratic participation requires not only a new
legal framework, but certain kinds of organizations
and a certain kind of spirit. It needs strong associa-
tions, able to speak for their members, representative
of their constituencies, and capable of taking initia-
tives. At present, neither French labor unions, nor the
student bodies, nor many of the professional organi-
zations meet this requirement. They are what they
have always been: fairly small, badly split, mutually
antagonistic, primarily defensive. Precisely because
they have so often opposed the government intransi-

gently, the regime has, in the past, often done its best
to weaken them. Who will take the initiative of a com-
plete reversal of attitudes - or will each side wait for
the other to reverse itself first? Now, what is just as
necessary is a spirit of cooperation, a willingness to
solve conflicts by bargaining, a drastic shift away from
the old itch to leave decisions to superiors who can
then be blamed, a break with the old tendency for
each group to look only after its interests, and for
central authority to dismiss all such groups as illegiti-
mate nuisances. For so many years, there was no gen-
uine participation because it would have brought forth
the pluralism of cacophony; the absence of participa-
tion bred both the habit of authority-cum-distrust, and
a millennial hope for total change and instant har-
mony, can democratic pluralism, more conflicted than
harmonious, yet more cooperative than cacophonic, be
established at last?

As the crisis showed, when each side calls for par-
ticipation, it still means the miraculous and beneficial
elimination of the other. When it asks for a dialogue,
it means the capitulation of all other views. The only
true revolution would be one that would put an end to
such attitudes, and reverse patterns that started (at
the latest) in the days of Richelieu. The Gaullist state,
confirmed by the voters, can hasten this revolution by
setting a good example - not only in creating a new
legal network of procedures and institutions, but es-
sentially in consulting, listening, bargaining with in-
terested parties before this framework is drawn up.
What will happen if dialogue leads to discord, if the
new University, the new decentralized civil service, the
renovated Senate, the new schemes of workers' partici-
pation have therefore to be either dropped, or estab-
lished imperatively over the screams of the quarreling
factions? Once more, the old method of change would
have triumphed, the old mode of adjustment without
mutation would operate. Given the embittered mood
of many students, the distrust of the labor unions, the
resistance of the business community, the strife among
teachers and in the professions, the sullenness of the
non-Communist Left, the bruised hostility of the Com-
munists, the vindictive and power-greedy feelings of
many Gaullists in the National Assembly, and the
problematic chances of a mutation of de Gaulle's own
personality, the odds for a real revolution are not very
high. Yet the shock of 1968 was deep enough to make
them higher than at any time since the sad fiasco of
the Liberation. The politicians know that this is their
opportunity to make the political system relevant to an
increasingly indifferent or hostile society. If these
chances are not seized, one mural inscription will ap-
pear even more prophetic, as a description of France's
upheaval, than it already seems: "We want a music
that would be savage and ephemeral."

21

[REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY,
Vol. 40, No. 3, SEPTEMBER 1968]

# Collaborationism in France during World War II

Stanley Hoffmann

Harvard University

## I

More than twenty years have passed since the liberation of France, and the flood of books about Vichy and the Resistance has not receded. However, there is no satisfactory treatment of the most delicate of all the problems raised by the fall and divisions of France: collaboration with the German occupant. This may be due in part to the nature of the subject. Vichy can be discussed, I won't say objectively, but without re-opening the wounds that the events of 1940-44 inflicted on French self-confidence and national consciousness. For there is enough evidence behind the thesis of Vichy, the shield that protected the French body politic while London and the Resistance forged a sword, to allow the French public to face without too much shame such facts as Pétain's early popularity and Vichy's original appeal. The Fascist gangs and writers of Paris can be dismissed as a noisy but tiny, repulsive but insignificant, minority, an exception that confirms the rule of French decency despite French divisions. To deal with the subject of collaboration as such would make retrospective reassurance far more difficult. For one would have to realize that the cancer which was gnawing at France's sense of national identity had spread much beyond the narrow confines of the "Paris traitors."

The historians and social scientists of a nation where that sense appeared to have triumphed at last over the ordeals which twenty-five years of ghastly tests had accumulated may feel less inhibited today about the scrutiny of an ugly past. However, there is a second reason for their timidity. The subject is infernally complicated. Vichy, the pluralistic dictatorship, is complex enough. However, it is easier to distinguish phases, clans, ideas, and issues within the maze of Pétain's regime than in the story of French collaborationism. A careful historian would have —almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration. This may help explain why, if we look for full treatments (rather than sections in books that deal with broader subjects), we find only two volumes—one,¹ written by a former collaborationist, who throws amazingly little light or heat on what purports to

¹ Saint-Paulien (M.-Y. Sicard), *Histoire de la collaboration* (Paris, 1964).

376 Stanley Hoffmann

be his subject, and another,² written by an incisive young political scientist, who does a fine job of reviewing themes and factions but is somehow limited by the nature of her assignment, which was to focus on the press.

There may be a third reason why there is no entirely satisfactory treatment—and why there may well never be one. Paradoxical as it may sound, the subject turns out, upon analysis, to be more elusive than substantial. I do not mean to suggest that there was no collaboration after all. There was a lot of it. What I want to suggest is that the subject is interesting only if one looks at it *not* from the viewpoint of Franco-German relations in Hitler's Europe but *from that of Franco-French relations*, so to speak. This paper proposes an analytic distinction between two kinds of behavior. There was, on the one hand, *collaboration with Germany* for reasons of state, that is, to safeguard French interests in interstate relations between the beaten power and the victor. This was to a large extent the necessary if unintended by-product of the existence of a French state in Vichy. Even here, what is most enlightening is not the story of French negotiations, with concessions or resistance to German officials, but the contrast between Vichy's theory of (limited) independence and Vichy's practice—a contrast imposed by the realities of France's situation. On the other hand, there was *collaborationism with the Nazis*, in the sense of an openly desired co-operation with and imitation of the German regime. We find in collaborationism not so much seduction by or fascination with the Nazis (although there was some) as a means to a variety of internal ends. In very few cases did the collaborationists know much about what the Nazis were really like; even to the ideological collaborationists, fascism or national socialism was more a myth than a political and social reality clearly seen and analyzed. Collaborationism in World War II can best be viewed as the most extreme form of what I have called elsewhere the breakdown of the republican synthesis—the “mix” represented by the stalemate society and the parliamentary regime.³ The collaborationists were among the most determined rebels engaged in the destruction of that synthesis. At the same time, the practitioners of collaboration and the champions of collaborationism reflected in their behavior many of the very features of the polity against which they had rebelled—features entirely conflicting with those of the foreign regimes the collaborationists appeared to admire and with those which the Vichy doctrine was calling for.

² Michèle Cotta, *La collaboration, 1940-44* (Paris, 1944).

³ S. Hoffmann, C. P. Kindleberger, L. Wylie, J. Pitts, J.-B. Duroselle, and F. Goguel, *In Search of France* (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). See also S. Hoffmann, "Aspects du régime de Vichy," *Revue française de science politique*, VI, No. 1 (Jan.–March, 1956), 44–69.

Collaborationism in France 377

II

I am not suggesting that all forms of collaboration were parts of the "Franco-French war." The national situation of France after the Armistice was such that a modicum of collaboration with the victor was inevitable. On the one hand, as Article 3 of the Armistice agreement had stipulated, the French administration in the three-fifths of France occupied by the Germans could not avoid having to collaborate with German military authorities; the coexistence of two bureaucracies in the same territory made it impossible for the French to practice *le silence de la mer*. On the other hand, as the war became always more cataclysmic and German needs more intense, the pressure on French authorities for greater participation in the German war effort—through the production of weapons for the German war machine, the export of food products to Germany, the dispatching of workers to German factories—was bound to increase. Again, a modicum of collaboration was inevitable, for two reasons. One, since there existed a French government in France, by contrast with the situation in countries like Belgium or Norway, the Germans instead of imposing their decisions directly could always put the French authorities before the dilemma: collaboration or "polonization." Even the most rigorously *attentiste* or anti-German of all possible Vichy regimes would have had to give in from time to time, given France's defeat and partial occupation. Two, the Germans detained as hostages for such pressure and blackmail a huge mass of French war prisoners; until November 1942 the implicit threat of total occupation was always suspended over Vichy; even after November 1942 there was always an implicit threat of eliminating the regime itself, of obliterating its last shreds of authority. In other words, part of the drama lay in the basic contradiction that was going to annihilate, over time, all of Vichy's good intentions. There was a French government in France, determined to save whatever could be saved after the disaster of 1940, rather than wage battle outside. But the very existence of such a regime sufficed to turn whatever in other occupied parts of Europe would have been purely and simply a fact of domination and an effect of conquest into what might be called "collaboration d'état" (if I may be forgiven a French play on the two meanings of the word état). Moreover, the regime's own stake in protecting what it had saved (the Empire, the fleet, and Vichy France), that is, the margin between limited independence and "polonization," facilitated Germany's task and aggravated the bent toward such collaboration.

378 Stanley Hoffmann

individual Vichyites or the scriptures and servants of the National Revolution deserve to be called "subjectively" anticollaborationist. Many see in de Gaulle's consistent condemnation of Vichy as a regime marked *ab ovo* by the sin of the Armistice a sectarian refusal to acknowledge the services Vichy rendered to the French body politic in preventing polonization. They fail to see the point I am trying to make and to understand the nature of de Gaulle's concern: he worried about French self-respect, honor, and moral integrity rather than French physical integrity. For many of the conservatives who surrounded Pétain, the virtue of the Armistice was that it allowed a French regime to prepare a domestic *redressement*, prerequisite either to French external recovery in case of an ultimate German victory, or to French mediation in case of a deadlock in the war, or to French revenge. The drama of the situation was that this patriotic dream had no relation to the realities of total war. For in such a war, there would be no opportunity for *redressement*, no distance from the occupant's demands, and Vichy would be more like a pressed orange than like a tough nut, as Pucheu discovered when he selected, in effect, German-held hostages for the Nazis to shoot in retaliation for Resistance sabotage. The drama of Vichy was not in the motives but in the consequences and, alas, the ethical value of a policy has to be assessed in light of the outcome, not the intentions: the circumstances placed *l'État français* in a situation of mandatory involuntary collaboration. Vichy prided itself on its "return to reality," and Laval saw himself as a great realist. But Vichy's return was a mixture of resignation to and obstinate self-delusion about an untenable reality, and Laval's realism led to a series of small Munichs. In order to preserve one's chances, one had to give them up one by one.

Second, there was only a short step from *involuntary* collaboration for reason of state to *voluntary* collaboration for that reason. If giving in to enemy demands could be justified by the need to save one's last domains and one's hostages, anticipating at least some of those demands or adopting an "understanding" attitude toward German economic and military imperatives could be defended as a way of warding off dangerous pressures, of enlarging one's domain, or of improving the prisoners' or the nation's lot. Many Vichyites who can hardly be accused of pro-Nazi sympathies and who were sure that their policy was one of serving strictly French interest moved to voluntary collaboration out of conviction that Germany would win the war. Involuntary collaboration was the price one had to pay for having misjudged France's situation; voluntary collaboration was a price one chose to pay because one misjudged Germany's. This was a slippery slope indeed, for there was no clear yardstick that would have allowed one to know where

Collaborationism in France 379

reason of state ended and folly began. In the fall of 1940, at Montoire, Pétain's acceptance of the "principle" of collaboration meant that he had put a finger into the machine. That he did not want to put the whole hand into it was proved by his dismissal of Laval, guilty of having pursued a policy of voluntary collaboration with excessive zeal and dangerous concessions. However, Darlan was going to adopt a tactic closer to Laval's than to the "Montoire line" in the first months of his own brief reign. Precisely because voluntary collaboration for national interest reasons was so slippery, when applied to an enemy who promised very little and conceded even less, there would always come a time when the practitioners of that dangerous art would suddenly realize how risky it was and try to pull back, to withdraw into dilatory procedures and a strict interpretation of the Armistice. But inevitably, the realities would prevail—that is, the Germans would exploit all the resources which the national situation of France and of Vichy put into their hands, tighten the screws, and destroy the Vichy officials who had dared to call a halt.

Third, both involuntary and voluntary collaboration *d'état* provided a backdrop, a cover, a pretext, or a springboard for collaborationism, that is, for what might be called desired or deliberate collaboration. Involuntary collaboration was a reluctant recognition of necessity; voluntary collaboration for reason of state was a foolhardy attempt at exploiting necessity; neither implied acquiescence to Nazi ideology or enthusiasm for the "new order" which Germany was proclaiming in Europe. Collaborationism, however, did entail one, at least, of the two following things. It could mean the deliberate service of the enemy. Such service was perhaps rationalized in traditional terms of "national interest"; yet it was divorced in daily practice from calculations of net advantages for the nation and based in the final analysis on calculations of personal advantage. I am referring here to the various shady characters like Brinon and Luchaire whose careers had been staked on close Franco-German relations and who saw in Germany's victory the condition and guaranty of their own importance. In other cases, collaborationism meant a deliberate advocacy of co-operation with a force which, even though it was foreign, was deemed to be the champion, guarantor, or model of the kind of domestic transformation such men wanted to impose on France. To simplify, we can distinguish between *servile collaboration* and *ideological collaborationism* (of course, we must remember that these are ideal types). Now, neither *servile* nor *ideological* collaborationism would have been as much at ease as they were—in a country that was basically deaf to their appeal—if there had been no collaboration *d'état*. Precisely because the latter always tended to slip

380 Stanley Hoffmann

from involuntary to voluntary, the collaborationists could always indulge
in one or both of the two following tricks: they could point with satisfac-
tion to the closeness between their own policy and the Vichy-sanctioned
objective of a collaboration with the Third Reich—that is, argue that
Vichy's doctrine was their behavior; and they could point with indigna-
tion to the shortcomings, hesitations, and betrayals of Vichy—that is
charge Vichy with sabotaging its own doctrine. Between a firmly at-
tentiste Vichyite, like Pétain's friend Gillouin, or Maurras, and a Ben-
oist-Méchin or a Drieu, there was a gigantic distance. Yet the situation
of the former provided a platform for the latter; and the weaknesses of
the former provided a license for the excesses of the latter. Men of
little experience, bad judgment, and good faith, like Bichelonne, could
move from voluntary *collaboration d'état* to collaborationism imper-
ceptibly. Anti-communism provided a link. Primarily domestic in Vichy,
it allowed servile collaborators to parade behind a cause and served as
a fuel for the internal and external energies of ideological collaborators.
Vichy gave its blessing to the ultra-collaborationist volunteers' legion
against bolshevism. Anglophobia also provided a link. Between volun-
tary *collaboration d'état*, servile collaborationism, and ideological col-
laborationism, the difference was often obscure. The rather demonic
Laval of 1940, who scared Pétain's advisers so much that they had him
overthrown, was altogether gambling on improving France's lot by pleas-
ing the winner, enjoying a colossal personal revenge for the humilia-
tions of 1936 to 1940, and talking in doctrinaire terms about the death
of democracy and the coming of the authoritarian age. The much tamer
Laval of 1942, who on the whole withdrew into a besieged policy of
involuntary collaboration, nevertheless still thought he had to make
himself accepted and respected by the Nazis by publicly stating that he
wanted a German victory to save Europe from bolshevism. Collabora-
tion, like the French Revolution, is both a savage story of inexpiable
inner splits and "*un bloc*," insofar as even its more extreme forms
were propelled by or developed from its more moderate ones. How
much, given Vichy's situation, *collaboration d'état* needed to avoid a
public break with collaborationism is shown by the efforts of Laval to
keep as long as possible the good graces of men like Déat or Luchaire.
How much, given the state of French opinion, collaborationism needed
to lean on mere collaboration is shown by the fact that in September
1943 even the collaborationists who had lost patience with Laval's tem-
porization still insisted that only he could be France's premier. The
Laval of 1943 needed a Darnand as a bloody collaborationist cover
behind which he could more easily pursue the laborious rearguard action
of mere involuntary *collaboration d'état*. But Darnand himself, stub-

Collaborationism in France 381

born soldier and simple mind, found in collaboration d'état an invitation to collaborationism.

### III

Thus, the situation devilishly devised by Hitler in 1940—one that deprived Germany of some of the immediate advantages of total occupation, yet provided the Nazis with countless opportunities for exploiting French weakness—accounts in large part for the phenomenon we discuss. But a coherent polity could have limited the damage from collaboration d'état. The heart of the matter is that France was not a coherent polity. What made Hitler's apparent "moderation" of June 1940 so Machiavellian was its very ability to maximize France's inner tensions. A Carthaginian Hitler would have made collaborationism inconceivable and, in all likelihood, ruled out the very conditions that made for collaboration d'état, that is, an armistice with a government that chose to stay in metropolitan France. Of course, the very emergence, in the turmoil of Bordeaux, of a government determined to stay in France indicated that France's cohesion as a polity was shaky. This had always been Hitler's conviction. By making French acceptance of the Armistice terms relatively easy, and by sending back as ambassador the young Otto Abetz, known by many potential collaborationists as a friend of France, Hitler did his best to exacerbate the "Franco-French war."

I have tried elsewhere to describe in some detail the forces which in the 1930's turned against the "republican synthesis" and took advantage of the fall of France so as to impose their views. They can be divided into three groups, although there is something arbitrary about a division which exaggerates the sharpness of the distinctions between categories and takes no account of the fluidity of ideas and men. (a) There were the followers of Maurras, who saw in the Republic an evil regime that had both corrupted the French polity, by splintering power and letting "alien" ideologies infect the mind of the public, and weakened French society, by dislodging its "natural elites" from power and letting urbanization, industrialization, and proletarization proceed. (b) Then, there was a sprawling mass of conservatives who had turned anti-republican on grounds not of constitutional principle but of social discontent, because the regime, in the thirties and especially in 1936, had seemed unable to preserve the stability of the "stalemate society" and had thus, in their eyes, lost a legitimacy that had never been better than conditional, dependent on the performance of a specific social function. (c) Finally, there were the Fascists—Fascist political gangs and Fascist intellectuals—with their notions of French regeneration or

382 *Stanley Hoffmann*

revitalization either through direct, plebiscitarian action led by a total-
itarian party or through tough, heroic, virile, redeeming action re-
pudiating republican talk and democratic decadence. One must add to
those three groups a significant number of men who could in no way be
called rightists, men who came from parties of the Left and from labor
unions—like Déat, Bergery, Dumoulin, Spinasse, Belin—and who would
nevertheless end up in the Vichy camp or in the Paris ghetto.

Two feelings served as the cement of those disparate forces. One,
already mentioned, was anti-communism. The rise of the Communist
party had provided the Right with a convenient devil theory of French
upheavals and provoked the migration away from the Left of the poli-
ticians and unionists just mentioned. The other feeling was "appease-
ment" pacifism, which was much more complex. On the Right, it
amounted usually to a determination to avoid a military confrontation
with Germany, at least as long as France herself remained in a state of
political and social weakness and as long as the main beneficiary of
such a war would be the Soviet ally. This might be called conditional
pacifism; in most cases, it had yielded to a kind of resignation to war,
either after Hitler's invasion of Bohemia or, at last, after his quarrel
with Poland over Danzig. But, in the Fascist Right, there were some
individual cases of unconditional pacifism, due to admiration for Nazi
Germany and to contempt for French decadence (Rebatet). There had
been one prominent case of unconditional pacifism with no ideological
overtones among French conservatives: that of Laval, who in this one
respect remained faithful to his distant political origins and close to
the leftist group. For pacifism was also unconditional among the ex-
leftists I have mentioned; here, it was often due to a visceral hatred of
war, but anti-communism had played a large part.

In that large mass of men found in and around Vichy early in
July 1940, who would be the collaborationists? One can (avec les ré-
serves d'usage) distinguish four groups.

1. There was a group composed largely of journalists, whom it would be difficult to tag as leftists or conservatives. They had all been members of the sprawling and largely corrupt journalistic establishment of the Third Republic. They had, over the years, either served the cause of Franco-German reconciliation, like Luchaire and Brinon, or absorbed the varieties of pacifism so prevalent in the mid and late thirties. Many of them had come from the circles around Briand and Caillaux (even though Briand was dead by 1933 and, in the days of Munich, Caillaux was far indeed from his attitude of World War I). Others had been close to the Action Française, but found it too stifling and musty

Collaborationism in France 383

and thought its basic anti-German bias old-fashioned. Laval knew these men well and used many of them as informal emissaries and intermediaries during the Occupation. For this amorphous group, collaborationism was much less an ideological commitment than a splendid opportunity for jobs. These men were literally put in control of the Paris press and radio by Otto Abetz. This was to be their day, their reward for not having been sufficiently appreciated under the "old regime." Here we come closest to pure opportunism; and yet, we must remember that even servile collaborationism is not entirely mercenary, since it was practiced by men who had become disaffected from the so-calledalist policies of the Third Republic. They were now serving new masters, but without having to suppress old beliefs.

2. There were the Fascist intellectuals: the men of *Je suis partout*, writers like Chateaubriant, Drieu, Abel Bonnard, Céline. The nature of their fascism has been well analyzed by others.⁴ It was, indeed, a romanticism—elitist, sentimental, both attractive in its nostalgia for rejuvenation and action and repulsive in its virility pose, its perfume of decadence, its *fin de race* character, and above all its vindictiveness. These were the men to whom the petty, compressed, depressed, and querulous France of the thirties was anathema, who “were violently opposed—emotionally, intellectually and morally—to bourgeois society and bourgeois values,”⁵ who saw in democracy a form of bourgeois decadence and in Marxism a hideous, collectivist degradation of the individual. They were dreaming of a society that would no longer be based on money, ruled by mediocrity, and wracked by masses. They were driven to collaborationism by two different factors. One was admiration for “Fascist man,” for the new type of heroic, fraternal human being which fascism and nazism had allegedly created. Here we find the one case of actual sympathy for or fascination with the enemy’s system— and even here one must qualify this remark by noting that in some instances it was a fascination with Italian or Spanish fascism even more than with national-socialism. The other factor was the intensity of their hatred for the very elements in France which Nazi ideology also aimed at destroying: the Jews and the Communists in particular. Collaborationism here was almost purely ideological—although it also had the advantage of giving these men an influence they had not enjoyed before.

⁴ See in particular Raoul Girardet, "Note sur l'esprit d'un fascisme français," *Revue française de science politique*, V, No. 3 (July-Sept., 1955), 524-46; Paul Serant, *Romantisme fasciste* (Paris, 1959); and Robert J. Soucy, "The Nature of Fascism in France," *Journal of Contemporary History*, I, No. 1 (1966), 27-55.

⁵ Soucy, p. 41.

384 *Stanley Hoffmann*

dilection had obscured in their own eyes what might be called the classic interstate aspect of the problem. After all, collaborationism also meant subscribing to the victory of Germany over France. In this respect, the Fascist intellectuals were not of one mind. Some prewar Fascists did not slip into collaborationism, precisely because concern for the French nation remained predominant in their minds; neither Thierry-Maulnier, who remembered his Action Française origins, nor Bertrand de Jouve-enel embraced the Nazi cause. Rebatet, at the other extreme, was, as we know, literally a defeatist, rejoicing in the *décombres* of France. Bonnard, in a more convoluted way, shared this masochism. But neither Drieu nor Brasillach had been unmitigated admirers of Germany; both had advocated French fascism as the only way of resisting German might, and they had been classically anti-German during the "phony war." From June 1940 to 1943, however, their ideological predispositions overrode their scruples as French citizens. Brasillach subordinated his to his concern for internal French regeneration and (after June 1941) for anti-Communist crusading; Drieu saw in the situation of occupied Europe an opportunity for realizing at last what had been an old dream of his—that of a unified Europe with a virile France saved from decadence—and he rationalized away France's humiliation by arguing that every federation needs a federator; if it had to be Germany, at least it was a Fascist Germany.⁶ It was only in 1943 that Drieu's and Brasillach's ideological faith slumped. Both men discovered that the problem of relations among nations had not been obliterated by ideological transnational solidarities. Drieu had become disenchanted with the quality of German fascism; he had at last discovered not only that it was not as socialistic as he had hoped, but also that it was not as universal and European as he had believed. Brasillach began to worry about the degree of "denationalization" which collaborationism entailed. Thus, the Fascist intellectuals ended by splitting. Most of them continued to hug the German cause, whatever the cost to France, because the France which was being battered by civil war and Nazi repression was one they hated anyhow. These were men of resentment, in whom the dream of a new man had less force than the impulse of destruction. Some of them, like the two novelists, quietly stepped back, both because they became appalled by some of the consequences of their original choice and also because they had begun to discover that their dream had been a delusion.

3. Then, there were the men who, before the war, had aped fascism by setting up would-be single parties and ersatz totalitarian movements.

⁶ See Robert Soucy, "Le fascisme de Drieu la Rochelle," *Revue d'histoire de la 2ᵉwä guerre mondiale*, April 1967, pp. 61-84.

Collaborationism in France 385

Many of the leagues which so upset the republicans in the 1930's were nothing but rallies of conservatives who thought that the best way of restoring the quiet social and political order of their dreams—one in which elites would rule, so to speak, apolitically—was to borrow a plebiscitarian leaf from their adversaries' book, a calculation that had begun with Boulangisme. When Daladier restored order, most of that agitation stopped. When Vichy appeared, the conservatives flocked to it and, in the summer of 1940, killed the notion of a simple party. But, in the 1930's, there had also been genuine embryos of fascism: Doriot's PPF, the Cagoule headed by Deloncle, of which Darnand had been a member, and smaller gangs like Bucard's. Between them and the conservatives grown temporarily rabid, the differences did not primarily reside in the realm of social doctrine, for the program of these gangs was quite fundamentally conservative and appealed to the deep instincts of stability and equilibrium in the stalemate society.⁷ The differences were of two kinds. One was in the realm of political doctrine. Whereas the conservatives wished for a depoliticized society, organized so as to take care of itself without parties, parliaments, and politicians, the Fascists believed that the "reconciled" society of their programs would need to be firmly run by a political elite whose dual task would be waging a permanent battle against the corrupters of France—that is, purges— and placing under their own control the various economic and social activities of the nation—that is, ruling. The other difference was in the realm of temper. Both the conservatives and the Fascists appealed to the "sans-culottes" heritage, to the Jacobin impulse, to the plebiscitarian tradition; but the conservatives deeply distrusted what they felt they had to use, whereas the Fascists were in their element. A movement like the Croix de Feu and a gang like the PPF both had their share of the modern version of the urban "sans-culottes": the shopkeepers, restaurateurs, garage mechanics, employees, traveling salesmen, clerks, etc. But the conservatives used temporary Jacobin methods for Girondin ends, whereas the Fascists wanted to combine social stability with permanent political agitation.

The largest contingent of collaborationists was provided by the Fascist gangs: Doriot's PPF, Deloncle's new and adventurous MSR, later Darnand's SOL and Milice. These were the activists. As in the case of the intellectuals, there was one huge negative component in their ideological collaborationism: the desire for internal revenge (not only against the Jews and the Communists and the republican Left, but also against the tepid conservatives of Vichy who were trying to set the clock back and to institutionalize *les valeurs du père de famille* by reserving for

⁷ Soucy, "The Nature of Fascism in France," pp. 44 ff.

386 Stanley Hoffmann

themselves all the positions of power in the state and by excommuni-
cating all politics). But whereas the ideological collaborationism of Fas-
cist intellectuals was at least partly positive—in the sense of being moved
by the myth of Fascist man—that of the Fascist gangs was largely imi-
tative. For the other component was a fascination with the institutional
innovation of fascism and naziism—the single party and the paramilitary
elite group, the armed gang of modern “chevaliers” rooting out asocial
weeds on behalf of a doctrine of national resurrection, under the con-
trol of a tough political leadership. The development of the SOL and
Milice by Darnand, whose interest in Nazi techniques led him to become
*Obersturmführer* of the Waffen SS, is particularly significant.

Once again, one finds that ideological predispositions obscured in-
terstate considerations. In the intellectuals' case, the latter were either
abolished by defeatism or swept away by illusions about a fraternal
European order. In the case of the gangs, the story is more complex.
There was no inherent or pre-existing sympathy for Nazi Germany,
even if there was a desire to learn from its political techniques. Doriot,
after the crisis that hit the PPF in the post-Munich days, had adopted
the very nationalist stance which the minority of dissidents who re-
signed had advocated. Darnand, a former follower of the Action Fran-
çaise, had been anti-German most of his life. Collaborationism was
merely a foreign-policy corollary of a domestic political stance. With
Vichy in the hands of *les modérés*, the activists intent on a thorough
purging of France and on seizing power decided to collaborate with
those who not only fought the same enemies with the same intensity
but who were also most likely to favor groups that imitated Nazi prac-
tices. “The enemies of my enemies are my friends; the models of my
behavior ought to be my supporters.”

The irony lies in the fact that the Germans in France were rather
reluctant supporters. They realized correctly that the Fascist gangs were
unpopular and isolated. Their existence contributed to France's desired
weakness, but the Germans got more advantages out of blackmailing
a Vichy leadership group that had a basis of popular support and
respectability than they could have gotten from putting ill-experienced
and widely detested gangs in power. The story of Doriot's relations with
Abetz and the Germans is a rather stormy one. Doriot's services were
kept at arm's length, and Doriot's long periods of combat in Russia
were, for him, escapes from the frustrations of inaction in France and,
for the Germans, convenient ways of keeping the PPF under wraps. As
for Darnand, the Germans decided to give arms and access to northern
France to his Milice only when it became clear that he would, in effect,
serve as an auxiliary in the fight against the Resistance. Thus, a man like

Collaborationism in France 387

Doriot, who sought in collaborationism an elevator to power and who entirely identified French interests with Germany's in the process, was treated with disdain; but a man like Darnand, convinced that he was serving nothing but the interest of France—an interest which he re-defined in intensely and exclusively ideological fashion—was deemed more deserving by the Germans, precisely because he appeared more genuine, less servile, and hence more likely to be effective.

4. Finally, there were the members of the prewar pacifist and anti-Communist Left. Their case is in many ways the most interesting. For here the elements that led groups 2 and 3 to collaborationism were missing. Here there was no particular enthusiasm for Fascist man, the cult of the virile hero, of youth movements and Olympic games; nor had there been any enthusiasm for totalitarian political techniques. These were former parliamentarians quite at ease in parliament, former members of the Socialist or Radical parties and of reformist labor unions. And yet, in the summer and fall of 1940, Déat emerges as the champion of the single party and of collaborationism. What had happened? Once more, the explanation is to be found in domestic French terms.

On the one hand, these men, exactly like the conservative Vichyites and the Fascists, had a burning desire to settle accounts with the political class of the fallen regime—with the Socialists, Radicals, and CGT leaders who had multiplied mistakes. They had let the Communists impose their bellicism, they had frightened into conservatism the peasants and middle classes which the neo-Socialists and some union leaders of the thirties had wanted to woo, they had failed to wrest control of the French economy from the famous “two hundred families,” from the trusts and munition makers. On the other hand, the men in this fourth group were temperamentally alienated both from the conservatives and from the Fascists. Their anti-communism and their determination to take revenge on what might be called the “Popular Front establishment” did not spill over into a dogmatic aversion for parliamentarism, for Freemasons and Jews. They remained marked by their left-wing origins—they had been part of the republican machine (in a way which a Doriot, for instance, had never been, since his career had taken him directly from the extreme Left to the far Right, i.e., from one ghetto to another). They had reasons to hate the bosses of that machine but not the whole personnel. To Déat and his friends, Vichy's clericalism, ruralism, anti-labor corporatism, and elitism were unpalatable, and so were Vichy's big-business connections, whereas the Fascist politicians resented only Vichy's aversion for politics rather than Vichy's social conservatism. Nor did these men have the dictatorial or

388 Stanley Hoffmann

plebiscitarian temper of a Doriot and the conspiratorial itch of a Darn-
and. In the "amalgam" of beneficiaries of France's fall, during the sum-
mer of 1940, in that great moment of revenge, they were a minority
among minorities; they represented the Left.

Their collaborationism and Déat's decision to "go Fascist" and
build a "single party" of his own were timely reactions to their pre-
dicament. There was no room for these men in Vichy. The regime of
Weygand or Bouthillier could absorb one Belin, but it could not ac-
commodate a whole group. Déat decided to do what the conservatives
had done earlier: to appeal to the plebiscitarian impulse, not in order,
like La Rocque, to play the pied piper of "order and stability," but so
as to fish in the huge pond—now *disponible*—of former left-wing voters.
The time of parliamentary parties was over. The fishing had to be done
with the one available and fashionable rod: the pseudototalitarian one.
Collaborationism was—as for Doriot—an elevator to power. However,
Déat and his friends had one asset Doriot did not have: Abetz' sympath-
ies. Hitler's ambassador shrewdly realized that men who came from
the Left and who had some good words to say about the Popular Front
or the late Republic and some opposition to clericalism, Vichy mili-
tarism, "moral order," and political purges of schoolteachers and local
notables would have more influence among the French than a Doriot
or a Bucard. Thus, for Déat, collaborationism was much less a logical
commitment than for groups 2 and 3, and was far more a tactical nec-
essity. Isolated in the new French order, they could count only on the
Germans; the Fascist gangs, at least, had either pre-existing machines of
their own or some sympathies in Vichy because of the conservative
orthodoxy of their social (although not their political) dotcrine. More-
over (this is the only area in which ideology played some part), three
previous factors made this group's conversion to collaborationism in a
totalitarian guise appear less startling: anti-communism, pacifism (which
"dictated" co-operation with a power that this group considered as
having won the war), and a tentative prewar interpretation of Nazi
Germany not as a right-wing dictatorship but as a rough, dynamic, and
demagogic version of what the *néos* had once advocated, (*ordre, au-
torité, nation*)—the control of the trusts by the state, a planned econ-
omy, an alliance of peasants, workers, and lower middle classes. And
they now also saw in Nazi Germany a model and matrix for a Eu-
ropean economic federation which would exploit rationally the con-
tinent's resources.

Thus, collaborationism in all its forms—from the purest to the most
corrupt—partook of one important feeling: a sense that Germany, what-
ever reservations one might have had about her before June 1940, was

Collaborationism in France 389

the wave of the future and that one's own political designs could only
be carried out by clinging to the policies and by aping the institutions of
Hitler's state. So we come back once more, from the other side of the
fence, to a point made earlier: how blurred the distinction was between
voluntary *collaboration d'état* and collaborationism. For the former
also entailed a decision to support German policies. There were, al-
together, three differences, which in individual cases dwindled into mere
nuances. Collaborationism downplayed calculations in terms of *raison
d'état*, ignored the interstate aspect of Franco-German relations (yet a
Darnand and a Benoist-Méchin apparently convinced themselves that
ardent collaboration would bring back to France all she had lost). Col-
laborationism was pushed by men who were out of power in order to
get the political control of France, whereas *collaboration d'état* cor-
responded to a different role: that of governing France (yet, once risen
to power, collaborationists pursued their policy; cf. Darnand). Col-
laborationism went beyond mere support for German policies to an im-
itation of Nazi institutions—and this is what limited its appeal.

IV

If one tries to generalize about Frenchmen engaged only in *collaboration d'état* and about collaborationists, one social difference becomes clear. The Vichyites who were not collaborationists represented a political class which had been, so to speak, in exile or opposition under the Third Republic and which, as such, had a revenge to take, but these political exiles were socially very well established. They represented the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community, of the social elites of landowners or the professions or the local notables. The drama of the French Right had precisely resided in the divorce between political power, which the Republic had shifted to a political class representative of Gambetta's "nouvelles couches"—the lower middle classes, the peasants, the "petits"—and economic or social power, whose center of gravity had remained much higher on the social ladder. Vichy was a revenge, but one perpetrated by men who felt that they were the natural governing elite of the French state—that they represented French continuity and stability.

On the other hand, the collaborationists were to a large extent *déclassés*—social misfits and political deviants. Not only had they not exerted political power, but they were not among the established “social authorities” either. Their ideas had segregated them both from the republican establishment—the high commands of the parties and unions —and from the conservative social establishment, suspicious of Fascist

390 *Stanley Hoffmann*

gangs, amused by the verve but not converted to the views of Fascist intellectuals. The latter literally constituted cliques of *copains*, apart from the staid reviews and circles of conservative *académiciens*; the collaborationist journalists had been living precarious lives as salaried spokesmen for business tycoons or politicians. Collaborationism was largely the bilious outlet of the misfits. They had two good reasons for embracing the German cause: without the Nazis, their chance of gaining power in France was nil, and in Germany the Nazi party and regime had made use and given a sense of mission to comparable misfits. A century earlier, Blanqui had celebrated in the *déclassés* the "secret ferment," the "reserve force of the revolution"; now, they were the public ferment and reserve force of a very different sort of revolution. Some collaborationists among the most prominent, like Marion or Fontenoy, were men who had gone through a variety of movements or newspapers, at ease nowhere, too cynical for intellectual daydreams, too undisciplined for the gangs, accumulating only grievances against all established orthodoxies: the Republic's as well as the conservatives'. Once more, there were important cases of men who straddled the fence between the two milieux of collaboration. In particular, Laval, who had been for awhile a prominent political leader of the French Right and who had been too intimate with political power in the Third Republic to be quite as much a misfit as the collaborationists, nevertheless was fundamentally a *déclassé* in Vichy's brand of orthodoxy. For Vichy conservatives were suspicious of parliamentarians (even their own parliamentarians), and the self-made *nouveau riche* who had traveled a long and shady road from the far Left to the Senate had never become entirely respectable in the circles of *la bonne société*. Too much a statesman for the Paris misfits, Laval remained a devious and deviant, distrusted and lonely, wolf in Vichy.

The other difference is a psychological one. The *collaborateurs d'état* were men of prudence, temporization, the cautious management of a society that needed, they believed, a respite from agitation above all. The collaborationists were activists, muckrakers or crusaders, men of direct action, demagogues and demonstrators. Again, this may throw some light on important individual cases. For there were collaborationists who were neither Fascist intellectuals in quest of a new hero nor leaders or members of Fascist gangs, who seemed indeed to belong intellectually or socially among conservative notables and yet who embraced collaborationism with savage ardor: a Philippe Henriot, Catholic polemicist and conservative deputy, was driven to his death by the intensity of his passion.

Ultimately, however, it is the historical solidarity of all kinds of

Collaborationism in France 391

collaboration that I want to stress, and not for the sake of paradox. Collaborators and collaborationists agreed in their critique of the "old regime," even if they disagreed in the formulation of remedies. Moreover, in their behavior, they demonstrated that the very values and habits which they wanted to destroy were all-pervasive. Collaboration and collaborationism were not just, respectively, the by-product of a national situation and an extreme reaction against a certain domestic order; they were also the mirror images of the very features which they pretended to supersede. France in the 1930's and during the war can be seen as a huge *autodafé*—I dare not say a *Götterdämmerung*, for it doomed far more dregs than Gods. The fiasco of collaboration is the replica of the republican fiasco—smaller in scope, more extreme in its manifestations.

In the first place, the foreign policy of the Republic had been marked
during the thirties by two essential features. One, a nation weakened
by the bloodbath of World War I, from which it had emerged with the
illusion of victory, had gradually realized that the status quo could not
be defended by her efforts alone.⁸ As a result, French diplomacy had
slipped from the old imperatives of autonomy to increased dependence
on the support and initiatives of external allies, particularly of Britain.
In the thirties, Britain's placidity led to French abandons; British appeasement bolstered and justified French appeasement. The collaborators and collaborationists bitterly denounced the Republic's "abdication"—not for its diplomatic effects but because, they said, it had led France in 1939 to fight for His Majesty a war that was not in France's interest and that Churchill wanted to keep inflicting on France. However, both collaboration d'état and collaborationism subordinated—unwillingly or deliberately—whatever French autonomy was left, or could have been restored, to German primacy. Vichy accepted, one after the other, German demands of the most humiliating sort, and collaborationism went as far as to summon Vichy to do for Germany what had been deemed abominable when "bellicistes" had wanted to do it for the Czechs, Poles, or British, that is, accept total military solidarity in an ideological war.

Two, French diplomacy and strategy in the 1930's had shown remarkably little understanding of events and leaders in foreign countries, and the politicians of the Republic had tended to interpret those men and events in familiar terms—projecting, so to speak, onto the external present either irrelevant French domestic experiences or obsolete international experiences. An educational system that was heavily centered on things French, little avidity for travel, a mixture of intel-

⁸ Compare with England since World War II.

392 Stanley Hoffmann

lectual rigidity and fatigue were largely responsible. Collaborators and collaborationists displayed the same naïveté, complacency, illusions, and ignorance. A Laval remained convinced that he could "handle" Hitler and manipulate the Nazis just as he had managed the French National Assembly or (he thought) Stalin. Vichy believed in the myth of France's qualitative superiority and intellectual skill offsetting Germany's brute force. The collaborationists' ideas of Germany and Italy were Rorschach tests of their own domestic orientations: each clan found in Nazi Germany whatever it wanted to forge in France. In particular, the Fascist intellectuals took Nazi and Fascist vaticinations about the "new man" so seriously that they never really bothered to find out; some clung to the myth until the bitter end, less because they refused to face the facts than because they could not afford to face them, and the two writers who did, as we know, went quietly to their death.

In the second place, the domestic policies of the Republic had been marked by the following features: excessive political fragmentation and instability; the substitution of defensive programs for positive ones and of moralistic or ideological dogmas for concrete reforms; the final triumph of decay beneath surface immobilism. Collaboration and collaborationism can be described in exactly the same way. One, fragmentation and instability reached a rare degree of ridicule. Not only did the rivalry between Déat and Doriot faithfully reproduce, in the Paris microcosm, the old split between Left and Right, but the story of the relations between the various cliques of collaborationists, and between them and Vichy, is of such byzantine complexity that it would take many volumes to tell it. Personal antagonisms, attempts at *noyautage*, expulsions, reconciliations, maneuvers, and manifestos composed a tangled web compared with which parliamentary politics look eminently Cartesian. The height of folly was reached when the exiles who fled to Germany in August 1944 continued to plot, to bicker, and to haggle.

Two, the more one reads the writings of these men—both what they wrote at the time and what they have been pleading since—the more one is struck by the negativism and the hollow moralizing bent of their politics. The Popular Front had been primarily a defensive reaction against the "enemies of the Republic" (as in 1899) rather than a positive alliance to deal with the roots of France's troubles. *Collaboration d'état* was primarily a defense against "polonization" rather than a clear program of French *redressement*; and collaborationism was above all a mobilization against the enemies common to Germany and to the collaborationists—namely, the Jews, the Gaullists, the Communists, the so-called terrorists of 1943-44. The advocates of *collaboration d'état*

Collaborationism in France 393

appealed plaintively to the sense of discipline, moral responsibility, and
civic trust of the citizens. The collaborationists' program seemed evenly
divided between drastic demands for exemplary purges and simple
slogans about social solidarity, moral purification, class co-operation,
etc. Collaboration was presented as a straightforward moral duty: that
of sharing in the construction of the fine new European order. Slogans
were endlessly repeated; here—as in so many platforms of the Re-
public's parties—catchwords had a Pavlovian function and also served
as refuges from real political analysis.

Three, and most importantly, there was again a combination of sur-
face immobility and underlying decay. Pétain remained *la couronne* (as
Drieu and Brasillach had called him), in full serenity and fast senility.
Laval, for more than two years, played a steadfast, sacrificial, and des-
perate role, trying to prevent a complete take-over by the collaboration-
ists. Official doctrine remained intact: the National Revolution within,
the defense of French interests abroad. In July 1944 as in July 1940,
the more extreme collaborationists could only express their displeasure
at Vichy's timidity. Vichy France had not formally become Hitler's ally.
But behind this façade, what foulness! *Collaboration d'état*, in its zigzag-
ging resistance to through-and-through collaborationism, had to yield
inch by inch under pressure, thus demonstrating the absurdity of
Vichy's original wager. In order to ward off pressure, Darlan and
Laval had repeatedly played the game of *donner des gages* to the
collaborationists; the hope was to neutralize them by giving them some
power, the result was to put more and more of their wine into Vichy
water. Vichy's use of men like Benoist-Méchin, Bonnard, Marion,
Brinon, Darnand—individuals deemed preferable to the gang leaders,
or, in the last case, a gang leader deemed acceptable because of his
lack of independent political sense—only succeeded in increasing the
Germans' hold, in delivering to collaborationism essential sectors of the
Vichy state, and in exacerbating the collaborationists' appetite for more.
As for the latter, who faced a formidable challenge—that of seizing
power *and* of converting more Frenchmen to their cause—not only did
they fail, in the end, to get full control of the pitiful *État français*, but
they became precisely what—in their “francocentrism”—they had
neither wanted to become nor sufficiently foreseen that they might be-
come: subaltern agents of the Gestapo, the SS, and the Wehrmacht,
butchers of their compatriots or French voices of Nazi propaganda.
The revulsion which collaboration provoked—even among those con-
servatives who had originally backed Vichy—benefited the very ene-
mies whom Vichy and collaborationists had wanted to destroy: the Re-
public, the democrats, and above all the Communists.

394 *Stanley Hoffmann*

Affinity for Nazi Germany was rarely the dominant motif of French collaboration. Germany was an unmovable force for some, a provisional ally for others. Nevertheless, even when collaboration had “good” motives—the protection or promotion of French interests or the quest for a new man—it was doomed by the convergence of two elements. The objective one was Germany’s defeat; collaboration in most (but not all) of its manifestations was based on an expectation of German victory. The subjective element was the fundamental opportunism that tinged all forms of collaboration; even involuntary *collaboration d’état* sought to exploit Germany’s present superiority (however much one hoped that it would not last) in order to wrest some advantages or preserve some assets, and voluntary *collaboration d’état* as well as collaborationism went much further, either in the same direction or in the direction of using Germany’s triumph for domestic political purposes—of seeing not just in the Republic’s fall but in the Nazis’ glory a “divine surprise.” This is what the bulk of the French could not bring themselves to accept—stunned though they were by defeat and eager to find scapegoats. For they realized that collaborators and collaborationists were blind to what, by the end of 1942, had become the obvious—the fact that in this game only the Germans won, at France’s expense. It was Gribouille’s game. In order to ward off a future, hypothetical evil (the vengeful wrath of a spurned victorious Germany or the horrors of victorious Soviet hordes), one accepted or even increased the immediate, certain, and tangible evils of Nazi occupation and repression. In the end, the much vaunted material benefits to France from co-operation with the victor vanished, but the moral damage spread. *Collaboration d’état* played into German hands, both by saving the Germans from having to rule France directly or from having to let the small cliques of collaborationists mess up things, and by encouraging naïve or fanatic Frenchmen to believe that collaborationism had Pétain’s sanction. And collaborationism played into German hands by allowing the Germans to blackmail Vichy with the threat of letting the tough ones take over.

The more hostile the French became to the obvious implications of collaboration, the more collaboration took on a desperately anti-French tone. A Laval, self-misguided patriot, nevertheless turned into a massochist of unpopularity, determined to save the French despite themselves. The collaborationists became more and more shrill in their call for repression, more and more determined to punish the nation for its resistance to their delirium. In the final analysis, the drama of collaboration, in all its forms, was that what had started as a reaction against certain forces, practices, beliefs, and habits of the fallen regime ended as a reaction against France. The significance of collaboration was not

Collaborationism in France 395

quantitative but qualitative—the triumph of forced or enthusiastic mas-
ochism.

Thus, collaboration was the most hideous aspect of that ugly col-
lective wash of dirty laundry, of that decomposition of a polity that
marked the thirties and the war years. The only merit of collaboration—
apart from the occasional merits of individuals—is that it taught a lesson
about the price of stalemate and the cost of concentration on domestic
settlements of accounts, which post-1945 France, despite all its troubles
and turbulence, appeared not to have forgotten—at least until 1968!

STANLEY HOFFMANN

EDUCATION:

Diplôme, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, 1948

Diplôme, Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales of Paris, 1950

M.A. in Government, Harvard, 1952

Doctorat en Droit, Paris Law School, 1953

PAST POSITIONS:

Assistant Secretary & Research Associate, French Political Science Association, 1952-53 & 1955.

Instructor in Government, Harvard 1955-57

Assistant Professor, 1957-59

Associate Professor, 1959-63

Professor, 1963--

Visiting Professor, Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales, Geneva, and Centre d'Etude des Relations Internationales, Paris, 1960-61

Research Associate, Center for International Affairs, 1961-62

Member, Board of Editors, International Organization

PUBLICATIONS:

Author: *Organisations Internationales et Pouvoirs Politiques des Etats, 1954*

*La Mouvement Poujade, 1956*

Editor & Co-author: *Contemporary Theory in International Relations, 1960*

Co-Author: *In Search of France, 1963*

Author of numerous journal articles

Co-author: In Search of France, 1963

1960

Editor & Co-author: Contemporary Theory in International Relations, 1920

Le Mondement Pontage, 1924

PUBLICATIONS:

Author: Organizations Internationalizes et Benvoirs Politiques

Research Associate, Center for International Affairs, 1961-63

Baria, 1960-61

Professor, 1962--

Associate Professor, 1969-63

Assistant Professor, 1961-62

Instructor in Government, Harvard 1922-27

Science Association, 1925-26 & 1928.

Doctorat en Droit, Baria Law School, 1922

M.A. in Government, Harvard, 1923

Diplôme, Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales of Baria, 1920

Diplôme, Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Bara, 1948

STANLEY HOFFMAN