Troubled Exiles

(See Cover)

From Vichy last week came news that Chief of State Marshal Henri Philippe Petain was moving ever closer toward the "collaboration" that Adolf Hitler wants. The Marshal appointed a new Ministry in which the name of no enemy of collaboration appeared, a new five-man Cabinet top-heavy with portfolios for the man who has taken over the task of arranging collaboration, Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan. The Admiral is now Premier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Navy, Minister of the Interior, and the Marshal's designated successor.

In Paris newspaper and radio attacks on the "Vichy vermin" suddenly stopped. At a dinner given by German industrialists the two chief proponents of all-out collaboration (i.e., submission), square-shouldered Jacques Doriot and round-shouldered Marcel Deat, had been told to try to smooth Paris-Vichy relations and they appointed a committee to do so. Two members of this committee promptly got jobs with the Vichy Government: Doriot's lieutenant, Paul Marion, as Secretary for Information, and one Benoist Mechin, editorial writer for the anti-Semitic Gringoire, as Assistant General Secretary to Admiral Darlan.

Probably because it could not do otherwise, perhaps on orders relayed from Berlin to Paris to Vichy, Marshal Petain's Government bowed to the Japanese dictate in French Indo-China. At Gannat near Vichy a military court passed its first sentences on Army and Navy officers accused of helping "Free French" General Charles de Gaulle. Four of them were sentenced to ten to 20 years at hard labor for spreading De Gaulle propaganda in the armed forces.

All this was bad news for De Gaullist Frenchmen and for all those Frenchmen, in and out of France, who want Great Britain to win the war and France to help her to do so. In New York General de Gaulle's political representative, Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, announced that the General would not recognize any infringement on French territory consented to by Vichy. In Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa, De Gaullist General Edgard Rene Marie de Larminat accused Vichy of allowing the Germans to disorganize French North African possessions, declared that French aircraft factories were making war planes for Germany. In London Count Jacques de Sieyes, De Gaullist agent newly arrived from the U. S., announced: "The French people are not only starving, but absolutely ready for revolt -- if they had the means to carry it out."

Many Frances. Pundits have said that there are now three Frances: Occupied France, Unoccupied France and the "Free France" of General de Gaulle. It is not so simple as that. Through sentiment, self-interest and necessity Frenchmen have become so divided among themselves that to be a Frenchman is to be the victim of many contradictions and confusions. For example:

> In Paris a small group of politicians and would-be Gauleiters control the press and the radio, try to sell their brand of collaboration to the French people. But the people of Occupied France, in daily contact with their conquerors, detest them only a little less than they hate the traitors who collaborate with them in spreading anti-British propaganda (see cut, p. 25). These people put their hopes in De Gaulle.

> In Unoccupied France, where there are no Germans, there is less hatred of them. In Unoccupied France some hatred of Great Britain remains, both for France's defeat and for the blockade that has brought hunger and suffering. The people of Unoccupied France have put their faith in Marshal Petain, who seems to stand for a France on French soil, even if it is an impotent France.

> In the colonies and in neutral countries Frenchmen are divided into many groups, of which at least four are significant: those who are pro-Vichy; those who are pro-De Gaulle; those who are more extreme than De Gaulle and who believe in the revolutionary character of the war against Hitler; those who, because their people at home are suffering, would help them even at the cost of nullifying the British blockade. Nowhere has this division of Frenchmen caused such a division of public opinion as it has among U. S. citizens.

U. S. citizens have a traditional love for France, more sentimental than rational. It is based largely on Lafayette and legend. When the French Government of Marshal Petain asked for an armistice most of these U. S. citizens felt that their sentimental faith had been misplaced. They reacted much as did Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay in a sonnet entitled The Old Men of Vichy, which ended:

"Only the young, who had so much to give,

Gave France their all; the old whose valorous past

(In anecdote not only: in bronze cast)

Might teach a frightened courage how to live,

Wheedled by knaves, from action fugitive,

Sold their sons' hopes, to make their porridge last."

By last week this emotional reaction had mostly spent itself. But U. S. citizens were still confused about France. Well they might be, for they, like the Frenchmen who had come to live among them, were being pulled this way & that by French pressure groups. One group told them that to help France was to help Germany. Another group said:

"We believe that some consideration should be given to the French requests for food from abroad. We have 16,000,000 French people, in addition to the 3,500,000 foreign refugees of all nationalities. . . . We are seeking more food for all of these. . . . I hope the British will realize that this has nothing to do with the prosecution of the war. I hope the United States Government will also realize this."

Salon v. Saloon. That statement was made by a balding, crinkly-eyed little man who used to be known as the socialite Mayor of Versailles. Gaston Henry-Haye was a moderately successful businessman when he entered politics in 1928 by running for Deputy from Versailles. Behind him was the record of an officer who had spent 18 days before Verdun, coming down from the lines with just five other members of his company. In 1935 he became a Senator and the same year was elected Mayor of Versailles. As a Mayor he got to know such eminent U. S. citizens as John D. Rockefeller Jr. (who restored much of Versailles), General John J. Pershing (whose statue stands at Versailles) and Mrs. Harrison Williams ("best-dressed U. S. woman"). As a Senator he was active in the France-Germany Committee, of which Fernand de Brinon and Otto Abetz were leaders. All three became Ambassadors after the Franco-German Armistice: Abetz became Germany's Ambassador to Paris, De Brinon Vichy's Ambassador to Paris, Henry-Haye Vichy's Ambassador to the U. S.

Gaston Henry-Haye never met Hitler and there is no record that his activities toward appeasing Germany were less patriotic than those of Neville Chamberlain and many another man of property and peace. Nevertheless, when he arrived in the U. S. as Ambassador, the mass of U. S. citizens instinctively distrusted him because of his background. They have continued to distrust him because Ambassador Henry-Haye has chosen to plead his cause largely among intimates in U. S. salons rather than among the masses in U. S. saloons. His pride, his bitterness that France with her 100,000 World War II dead and her 2,000,000 prisoners should fare so badly in the popular opinion of friends of her better days, prevents him from making a wider appeal. When he says: "I am pro-French," as a soldier of France he expects to be believed.

Ambassador Henry-Haye arrived last September with a twofold job: 1) to win friends for the Vichy Government; 2) to get food and medical supplies to Unoccupied France. In the six months he has been at his post he has done his job so well that last week his appointment was renewed for another six months. (Under French law M. Henry-Haye, as a Senator, may hold his Ambassadorship only under a temporary six-months appointment.) The somewhat qualified esteem in which his Government is now held in the U. S. is due to a great extent to the Ambassador's work, but perhaps because of its inconspicuousness his work has not been properly appreciated.

The French Ambassador has two busy aides in his press attache, Captain Charles Emmanuel Brousse, bomber-squadron commander in World War I, and his longtime friend and assistant military attache, one-eyed Lieut. Colonel Georges Bertrand-Vigne, another soldier of Verdun and Narvik. In addition he numbers among his good friends the elegant Mrs. Williams, ageless Lady Mendl, Count Rene de Chambrun (Pierre Laval's son-in-law, who quit the U. S. for France after Laval's fall), Jeweler Pierre Carder (longtime paterfamilias of the French colony in Manhattan), onetime U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt (who helped to get him his appointment) and, of course, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and General John J. Pershing.

Through such friends as these, and through their friends, rather than by a direct approach, the Ambassador has managed to get a sympathetic hearing for his point of view in places where it does plenty of good. U. S. citizens in a position to influence U. S. public opinion have become familiar with the Vichy thesis:

France did not collapse; France was beaten after a hopeless fight. Under the terms of the Armistice France may do nothing to help Britain--but France will do nothing to help Germany. France must collaborate with Germany until Germany loses the war, but France hopes Germany will lose. Meanwhile France must be fed, because starvation will drive France into Germany's arms.

This thesis appeals to U. S. citizens on humanitarian grounds, if not on logical ones. By last week no less than 15 organizations working for French relief were able to unite into a body called The Coordinating Council for French Relief, with headquarters in Manhattan's French Chamber of Commerce, of which Pierre Carder is president. Most of this relief is distributed through The American Friends Service Committee, which is the only organization with representatives in France. The Quaker Committee has been distributing about $50,000 worth of food, clothing and medical supplies a month in Occupied and Unoccupied France.

And in Washington last week the American Red Cross announced that it had chartered a second "mercy ship," the S.S. Exmouth, to carry $1,250,000 worth of relief supplies to Unoccupied France. The first ship, the S.S. Cold Harbor, is expected at Marseille next week. When it arrives the people of Unoccupied France will stage a three-day celebration.

Pressure for more relief will undoubtedly increase. With it will increase pressure for relaxation of the British blockade. This is what the Ambassador wants. But many Frenchmen in the U. S. are convinced that, whatever the consequences, to win the war Britain must maintain an airtight blockade. This, they say, is the real reason why U. S. citizens should distrust Ambassador Henry-Haye.

France Forever. Gaston Henry-Haye's opposite in almost every respect, physical, social and intellectual, is the founder of France Forever (France Quand-Meme), Engineer Eugene Jules Houdry of Philadelphia. Engineer Houdry is rich from his oil-cracking patents, hard-boiled by nature. "The French people are not going to kiss the bottom of Mr. Hitler," says he.

France Forever was founded last June 29, eight days after the Franco-German Armistice, in the Manhattan apartment of Dr. Albert C. J. Simard, fashionable gland specialist and then president of the French War Veterans in the U. S. Other founders were General de Gaulle's representative, Jacques de Sieyes, who is president of Patou (perfume); Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, longtime French commercial attache in Washington; Captain Roger Etienne Brunschwig, founder of the French "Broken Faces"; Frederic G. Hoffherr, Barnard and Columbia professor, who became France Forever's publicity director. France Forever is General de Gaulle's agency in the U. S., expects to attain Embassy status if Unoccupied France is ever taken over by Germany.

France Forever has a membership of 6,000, offices in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, California and Louisiana (where waiters and patrons alike of Antoine's, Galatoire's and other famed restaurants belong). Most of its members are U. S. citizens of French extraction who have lived in France. It broadcasts to France, both Occupied and Unoccupied, to North Africa, Free French Africa and French Indo-China; studies letters written from France and her colonies; uses them for propaganda purposes.

Many a Frenchman now in the U. S. hesitates to support France Forever for fear of reprisals against his family in France. To Engineer Houdry there is no middle ground between being for and against Adolf Hitler. "We are at war with Hitler and his bandits," says he. "We have got to fight those sons of bitches. A Frenchman who does not fight now is just plain skunk."

Most troubled of all the exiles and Francophiles in the U. S. are those who, for one reason or another, are wholeheartedly with neither Vichy nor De Gaulle. These include sincere humanitarians such as General Pershing and the Quakers; such longtime Francophiles as J. P. Morgan's sister Anne, who drove an ambulance in France last May and June and who, since the Vichy Government came to power, has let her American Friends of France lapse. And they include such patriotic and tough-minded French citizens as Count Raoul de Roussy de Sales, onetime U. S. correspondent for Paris-soir, and Eve Curie, who is in danger of losing her citizenship through a decree enacted in Vichy this week denationalizing those who "engage in propaganda calculated to hinder national reconstruction."

This group believes that France Forever does not go far enough, that the De Gaulle movement must have a political aim if it is to succeed in reconquering France. That aim: to bring true political, economic and intellectual freedom to the Western world. It is an aim not dissimilar from that of British liberals who conceive of the war as social revolution (TIME, Feb. 17). This French group believes that Vichy is committed to collaboration, if not to capitulation, and that collaboration will be used by appeasement-minded people in the U. S. to argue that Hitler can be got along with.

U. S. Policy toward the Vichy Government is partly responsible for the confusion in the U. S. about Vichy. U. S. policy, as well as it can be defined, is both humanitarian and opportunistic. It is to send relief to France as long as--but no longer than--the sending of relief stiffens Marshal Petain's backbone and keeps Vichy from all-out collaboration with Hitler. The hope is that so long as France, and Spain as well, depend on the U. S. for food, Hitler cannot present a united, totalitarian Europe to the world. And if that day is postponed long enough, it may never come. Some other day, conceivably, France may once again throw in her lot with her old Ally.

All of which has helped the task of French Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye, who with unconcealed satisfaction often gazes at a huge picture over the mantel in his chancellery. It is a photograph of Marshal Petain, and under it is this inscription :

To Monsieur Henry-Haye, Ambassador of France to the United States. May this picture remind him of the grandeur of his mission and give him the necessary inspiration for the best interests of our two countries.

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