Vichy Chooses

Unless the whole world was deceived, the Vichy Government last week squarely and publicly placed its bet on Germany to win World War II. Not only did it yield to Germany, which men in France today must necessarily do, but it also signaled its full intent to collaborate with the Nazis in forming a New European Order. The world over, democratic Frenchmen felt that at last they knew the full extent to which the great French democratic tradition had been abandoned by the men of Vichy.

One evening the aged voice of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain crackled for two brief minutes out of the little radio cabinets in French parlors and shops: Frenchmen: You have learned that Admiral Dorian recently conferred with Chancellor Hitler. I had approved this meeting in principle. The new interview Permits us to light up the road into the future and to continue the conversations that had been begun with the German Government. It is no longer a question today of public opinion, often uneasy and badly informed, being able to estimate the chances we are taking or measure the risks we take or judge our acts. For you, the French people, it is simply a question of following me without mental reservations along the path of honor and national interest. If through our close discipline and our public spirit we can conduct the negotiations in progress, France will surmount her defeat and preserve in the world her rank as a European and colonial power. That, my dear friends, is all that I have to say to you today.

That was all--yet there were paragraphs to be gathered between the lines. This aged voice decrying public opinion was the voice which, last December, had dismissed Vice Premier Pierre Laval with the suggestion that public opinion would not support his policies. This was the voice which had last referred to "honor" by saying that it would prevent action against a former ally. This was the voice which millions had hoped, however much it was forced to say yes to the Nazis, would never echo them.

Last week the U.S. Ambassador to France, Admiral Leahy, called on Marshal Petain and reminded him of his frequent oral assurance that Vichy would never add to her commitments to Germany under the Armistice. The Marshal had nothing to say about that, but he repeated his belief, often privately expressed, that Germany would win the war.

Other Vichy voices supplemented the Marshal's words, continued sounding the knell of French democratic hopes. The Vichy-controlled press was thick with phrases like "the common purpose of the European community. . . ." Said Vichy's official information service: "In May 1940, when France was left in the lurch by Britain, America did not see fit to answer her appeal. Today France, anxious to preserve her position as a great power as well as the integrity of her territory and of her Empire, has certainly the right to envisage with her victory the conditions of a common reorganization of continental Europe. This in no way means that she has the intention of attacking Britain, much less the United States."

These were vague voices of propagandist explanation. No public announcement was made as to exactly what Adolf Hitler and Admiral Darlan had agreed on. Presumably there were many details left to work out. But the consensus of rumor held that: > The line of demarcation between Occupied and Unoccupied France would be opened for the passage of goods, money, mail. > The French daily payment of 400,000,000 francs for maintaining Germany's occupying Army would be cut as much as 25%. > Some 250,000 of the 1,800,000 French war prisoners in Germany would be sent home in time for late spring sowing, and more later. > The line of demarcation would be changed, giving Paris and four-fifths of France to Marshal Petain, leaving Germany the coal and iron mines and industrial areas of the north, and the Channel invasion area. > The Nazis would be allowed to pass through France and into Spain for an attack on Gibraltar. > The Nazis would get control of the rest of the French Navy. > The Nazis would get the full collaboration of France in the production of war materials, possibly full economic collaboration of all sorts. While in Germany last fortnight Admiral Darlan had talked lengthily with Germany's potent economic adviser, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht.

So much for rumors. These were facts: > The Nazis were already in French-mandated Syria en route to Iraq and the Suez Canal. Last week Vichy lamely excused the alighting of Nazi planes on Syrian airports as "forced landings." > > The Nazis were already heavily fortifying French Morocco, where General Maxime Weygand, Commander of the French North African Army, has winked at Nazi activities. The Moroccan port of Casablanca, on the Atlantic, was already in use as a Nazi submarine base.

It seemed beyond question last week that a considerable force of Nazis was already in Dakar on the West African coast, closest port in either Europe or Africa to the Americas.

To many, the Vichy-Nazi collaboration portended events far outreaching Europe and Africa--of the gravest world import.

Wrote Pundit Walter Lippmann: "For the Americas the decisive phase of the war has begun with Marshal Petain's announcement that France and the French colonial Empire are to be put, regardless of what the French people may think, at the disposal of Hitler. The French Empire . . . occupies positions of the greatest importance in the Caribbean . . . Atlantic . . Mediterranean . . . Red Sea . . . Indian Ocean . . Pacific. . . .

"The Vichy surrender is described by the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin as a blow to the United States. It is a blow to the United States. ... It is in fact the most serious threat to the independence and security of the Western Hemisphere that has occurred since Napoleon III invaded Mexico on the eve of the Civil War. For by the action of the Vichy Government Hitler ... is now facing the continents of the Western Hemisphere.' Every French officer who adheres to Vichy, every French diplomat who adheres to Vichy, and every gun, ship and airplane they can command, is now under the orders of the Axis."

In addition economic collaboration was well under way. A barter system for foodstuffs and many other commodities was doing big business between France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg--and Hungary and Rumania were reported about to join up. With a lid artificially clamped on the prices of French securities, Germans were buying heavily into French banks and business houses. It was announced that French and German insurance companies would shortly fix a standard rate schedule among themselves.

"Racial" collaboration was in frightening motion. Three weeks ago Adolf Hitler made the Jews of Occupied France equal to the Jews of Germany--forbade them practically all business or professional activity, stipulated that if by reason of the new law they were obliged to leave any occupation, they were entitled to no compensation.

Twenty-seven Jewish banking and brokerage houses in Unoccupied France were forced to accept non-Jewish "provisional" managers, and the Vichy Propaganda and Information Secretariat declared: "Measures the French Government will take in drafting future statutes will be humane but firm. The intention is simply to put [Jews] in a position where they can no longer harm the country. They will be removed from every job where they have a hand on the lever of any French activity --banks, industry, commerce, press, radio, cinema, publishing and the theater, as well as public administration."

Recently, also, the French democratic tradition suffered perhaps its greatest purely symbolic defeat. Marshal Petain kicked France's hallowed Bastille Day into discard, replaced it with a new national holiday for which he picked May Day. The former French labor festival also happens to be the Marshal's own Saint's Day.

The abandonment of French democracy has, of course, deep roots in the character of France's present head men. Eleven months of relentless German pressure might have forced some civilian leaders of conquered France to yield a great deal, without turning them into fascists. But few of France's professional soldiers have any deep appreciation of democracy. In retrospect it seemed last week that Vichy's action was a foregone conclusion, especially after the great recent Nazi victories.

Stubbornly patriotic as Marshal Petain may be, his patriotism has never emphasized or even reflected the French egalitarian spirit. Even as an officer in World War I he was a professed Royalist, often expressing dislike for liberalism and democratic institutions. In 1934 when the Fascist Croix de Feu attempted a coup d'etat, its demand was for the Hero of Verdun as head of Government. Again, in 1937 when the Cagoulards (Hooded Ones) were caught in what seemed a foolish revolutionary plot, their aim was to make Petain dictator.

During the Spanish Civil War the Marshal strongly favored the cause of his old war-college student and personal friend, Francisco Franco. During the Nazi Blitzkrieg on France, a Petain Ministry was favored by the appeasement group in the French Cabinet. Recalled from his Ambassadorship in Madrid, the Marshal headed the Cabinet faction which opposed Winston Churchill's offer of a French-British union.

After the fall of France Petain was drafted by a reactionary bloc of deputies to reconstruct France by a "national and social revolution." Since that time his announced plans for the elimination of France's "capitalist hierarchies" have remained mere blueprints, while his proposed bans on labor unions, strikes and protests are in force today. He has developed an aptitude for sonorous political pronouncements whose vague and lofty words do little to conceal their totalitarian direction.

Thus last September he wrote in the Revue des Deux Mondes: "Not being in vassalage to any individual interest or group of interests, the new French State has the freedom, the strength and, I may add, the will to play its role of arbiter, and by meting out stern and impartial justice to assure that triumph of the general welfare over individual rights which is so important for the maintenance of national unity."

As long ago as last October, after meeting with Adolf Hitler at Montoire, Marshal Petain declared significantly--though it was widely discounted at the time--that he and the Fuehrer had reached "agreement on the principle of collaboration."

Last week, in short, it appeared that the Marshal's months of bargaining with Germany had been not so much to guard or improve France's position at the time, as to secure a favorable position for France in the potential Axis Order of the future.

No. 2. But perhaps the best proof of the Marshal's totalitarian sympathies lies in his choice of a No. 2 man to carry out the hard, detailed work of statesmanship that an 85-year-old soldier can hardly be expected to do. When last winter he dismissed Vice Premier Pierre Laval, whose program differed from the Marshal's only in its outspokenness, it was widely interpreted as an anti-Nazi gesture. It was also commonly said that the Marshal had ousted the only French emissary with whom the Nazis would deal. But in Vice Premier Admiral Jean Frangois Darlan the old Marshal picked a successor to Laval who has made himself superbly persona grata at Berchtesgaden and who is, in addition, much less unpopular in France than the scheming M. Laval.

The character portraits of soldiers who go to war are more than likely to be drawn quite differently before and after the fact. Prior to the fall of France, very little was made known about Admiral Darlan to the Allied press save that he was colorless but competent. The archives of London and Washington now reveal France's No. 1 sailor as quite a different personality.

Fifty-nine-year-old Jean Francois Darlan is a spruce, magnetic little figure from his flattish bald head, edged with grey hair, to his impeccably polished shoes. He has the eyes of an amused gambler and his career, as now presented, exhibits him as having the principles of a cat. Two centuries of Darlan merchant mariners (supposedly English long ago) preceded the Admiral's father, who, the Admiral says, "went wrong and became a Minister of Justice." The Admiral was born in the grey old town of Nerac, Gascony, where Darlan pere was once Mayor, later a Deputy. The Admiral's godfather was the late Georges Leygues, millionaire Paris retailer and longtime Minister of Marine, who fostered Darlan's career from the beginning.

Young Darlan's school record at the Paris Lycee St. Louis was only average and his teachers there were astonished when he began to shine in his second year at the Ecole Navale (France's Annapolis). A connection has often been suggested between his luster and the fact that his sister had just married Capitaine de Vaisseau Keraudren, then Aide-de-Camp to the President of the Republic. At school Darlan's wild arm-waving while he talked earned him the nickname "The Bass Drummer," upon which he often capitalized by standing on a chair to exhibit the idiosyncrasy. At the Ecole Navale he successfully cultivated the sons of admirals and other personages.

After being commissioned he made a short China Sea debut, but much of his early naval life was spent in teaching posts ashore, almost all of his later career in Navy politics in Paris. He became a gunnery expert--often called the best in the French Navy today--and was a fervid big-navy exponent, doing much to promote the construction of France's four 35,000-ton battleships, which were laid down just too late for World War II.

But the Darlan career has been chiefly a triumph of political luck and wangling. During World War I he obtained the command of 25 mobile naval guns ashore, fighting at the Somme and Verdun. He later explained that he had wanted the job because as a Navy officer under Army officers he would get more attention, attract more patronage.

In 1925 his real ascendancy began when he became Assistant Chef de Cabinet under his Godfather Leygues at the Ministry of Marine. Under Godfather Leygues there were never delays in Darlan's promotions. At 48 he became the youngest rear admiral in 50 years of French naval history. Godfather Leygues gave him the Order of Commander of the Legion of Honor, and in 1933 left the Admiral most of the big Leygues fortune. When Darlan became Chief of Staff he recommended himself for the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Since the fall of France Marshal Petain has given him the title of Admiral of the Fleet, not used since 1870. Darlan tried to have himself called Admiral of France, which would have ranked him with Marshal of France Petain.

Everybody's Friend. The Admiral has constantly and glibly shifted his politics to suit his career, always obliging the man in charge--whether Blum or Chautemps or Daladier--just as today he obliges Adolf Hitler. Whenever Governments changed, Darlan usually called in the newspapermen and asked them to forecast him as the next Minister of Marine. He is a great eater and drinker, and on the night France collapsed he luxuriated so heartily and publicly at Bordeaux's Chapon Fin that the next day a number of his brother officers, with an ethical fastidiousness almost Japanese, resigned their commissions out of shame.

While the British Navy still seemed to rule the seas, Darlan favored the British. He had been Chief of the Naval General Staff since 1936, and at the beginning of the war he was indeed so floridly Anglophile that Vice Admiral Emile Muselier (now an ardent De Gaullist) cabled him: "You are renouncing the whole of the French naval policy dating back to the 18th Century and abandoning the sovereign rights of France." In 1939 fluently English-speaking Admiral Darlan reviewed the British Reserve Fleet at Portland with King George. After Dunkirk, King George gave Darlan a special decoration for the evacuation, although Darlan had not been there. But after the Armistice, when he became Vichy's Minister of Marine, Darlan's viewpoint on the British underwent a change.

It has become axiomatic that most French naval officers have abhorred the British ever since they attacked the French Fleet at Oran, not so much because the French were shot down like sitting ducks, but because the British action showed so little faith in the honor of the French naval tradition. It is also axiomatic that the opinion of the French Navy's seamen is so doubtful that they might mutiny against any orders to fight Britain. At any rate, the Admiral of the French Fleet today loathes the British. Of Dunkirk he has recently said: "That was glorious. I also remember Oran. That was shameful." Of the British blockade he has said: "Germans are more generous and more understanding of the needs of humanity than the English." And the Admiral still has a Navy to command. According to estimates: By British action, or by defection to the Free French forces, France has lost nine battleships, four cruisers, 15 destroyers and four submarines.

France still has one battleship, 13 cruisers, some 20 destroyers and some 50 submarines.

Darlan's political intrigues have brought him few if any friends among France's naval aristocracy, which, by tradition at least, keeps its mind on warships. He has a wife, as retiring as the Admiral is not, and a son, Alain, who recently quit the Navy, where he had been a code officer, in favor of the insurance business. Social superiors of Darlan like to call attention to his French-bourgeois habit of wearing a wing collar, which has earned him the nickname of "The Tax Collector." But all this the Admiral can and does ignore. "I am a dur and have a tough skull," he has said.

He is Commander of France's only surviving, if heavily battered, military arm, and second in command of France. Marshal Petain has made him not only Vice Premier but also Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interior, the Navy, and Propaganda and Information--and by Constitutional Act he stands in succession to the Marshal himself. Under these titles and perquisites he is a neat French edition of the able, scheming, ruthless personality-type which has been a boon to Fascism wherever it has risen.

Last week Vichy put on sale throughout Unoccupied France 50,000 handsome portraits of Vice Premier Admiral Jean Francois Darlan--suitable for framing.

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