New Order in the South

In a 3,500-word declaration by Premier Henri Philippe Petain, Free France got its New Order last week. The 84-year-old Marshal announced that, departing from the "universal bankruptcy of economic liberalism," France would seek a "harmonious combination of authority and liberty." The New Order would ban strikes and lockouts, break power trusts, regulate prices, control foreign commerce and exchange, abolish the gold standard, break away from traditional friendships and enmities, drop the Entente Cordiale with Great Britain, reinstate "true nationalism," base all French foreign relations upon collaboration with Germany.

For France it was a brand-new dogma embroidered with brand-new catchwords and justified by brand-new reasoning. Rousseau's "natural equality of men," for which Frenchmen once fought a bloody revolution, would be discarded for a "social hierarchy" under which rich & poor, high & low, would have equal opportunities to prove their worth by serving the totalitarian State. The only "right" accorded impartially to all Frenchmen would be to work. Liberty, Petain told his countrymen, had not existed in France for 20 years. "Besides, what would abstract liberty be worth in 1940 to an unemployed workman or the proprietor of a small ruined business beyond freedom to suffer without redress in the midst of a vanquished nation?"

No "servile imitation of foreign experiments," the New Order nevertheless recognized that "some of these experiments possess common sense and beauty." Frenchmen were quick to note that the manifesto of the New Order included no discussion of a constitution, contained no references to any parliamentary body. Alarmed, the semi-official Temps urged, "The institutions of the New France must doubtless be partially elective."

Petain told his own country. He made only suggestions to the nation which will, unless defeated, give France its actual Order when it gets around to it. "Doubtless Germany . . . can choose between the traditional peace of suppression and a wholly new peace of collaboration. Germany may prefer the new method to the misery, strife, repressions and conflicts of peace in the old manner. . . . First choice of course rests with the victor. . . .If all roads are closed to us, we shall know how to suffer and wait." Thus France knelt to her conqueror.

Voice of Vichy. The leaders of unoccupied France worked hard last week to appear original in their self-assigned role, but in more ways than one they echoed their German and Italian conquerors.

> They became outspoken in their desire to see Britain defeated, in their displeasure over increased U. S. aid to their late ally. Pierre Laval's Moniteur denounced news of U. S. support for Britain as "hypocritical rumors which are poisoning a large part of public opinion."

> They ordered extensive anti-Communist raids, detained 20,000 aliens in concentration camps while the Gestapo checked names and records.

> They continued to find war-guilt culprits, arresting two of France's foremost airplane manufacturers, Paul Louis Weiller and Marcel Bloch, allegedly because Weiller sold French aircraft patents to Japan and Italy and Bloch exploited the war to extort excessive profits from the Government. The extent of the Vichy purge led Marcel Beat, who had gone back to Paris after plugging for his Parti Unique at Vichy all summer, to speak of "white terror" in unoccupied France.

> They disenfranchised all native Jews in Algeria.*

>Finding little response to their appeal for enlistment in an armistice army for three to twelve years at 2 1/2-c- a day, they decided to keep in uniform 60,000 soldiers scheduled to be demobilized in October.

> They restricted the employment of women by establishing percentage quotas. They also provided a retirement pension of 3,000 francs ($60) a year for wage earners over 60 who promise not to accept another paid job.

> They announced a moral reform in the cinema with a complete revision of 10,000 films.

But in the face of the worst wheat harvest in 40 years they awaited with helpless impotency a winter of dire privation.

Voice of France. Meantime, in occupied and unoccupied France numerous incidents revealed that the France of "50 million Frenchmen" was not yet counted out.

> Despite severe reprisals, including the shooting of local notables and imposition of huge community fines, the toll of murdered German officers and soldiers reached 15.

> Demonstrations for General Charles de Gaulle continued even as military tribunals were set up to impose the death penalty on his adherents. At Caen, in Normandy, thousands filed past to drop flowers on the grave of a British aviator.

> Severe censorship, exercised personally by Pierre Laval, could not prevent French papers from expressing increasing admiration for Britain. Action Franc,aise saluted "the brave and heroic resistance of the English people," and Paris-soir, printed in Censor Laval's own print shop at Clermont-Ferrand, praised R. A. F. fighters as "excellent and worthy of the great responsibility which is theirs."

> Workers at the reopened Renault factories at Billancourt rebelled against German-imposed working conditions, even after 14 had been executed.

> A policy of nonproducing among the farmers led Nazi Minister of Agriculture Richard Walther Darre to denounce "the unbelievable and voluntary laziness of the French peasants."

> The German commander of troops in southwestern France was compelled to forbid German soldiers to parade and sing because crowds of young Frenchmen goose-stepped behind them whistling the Marseillaise.

Unable to stifle the voice of France, the leaders of unoccupied France hoped Berlin would not hear it.

* German authorities in occupied France ordered 50,000 Jews to register and Jewish merchants to post "Jewish Enterprise" signs in German and French in their windows before Oct. 31.

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