A Paler Shade of Red: Memoirs of a Radical. W. E. Gutman

“to heighten the perception that reactionaries were orchestrating France’s demise” -- it was far from being a myth. Enfeebled by previous wars, France had fallen long before the German onslaught, not for lack of military assets but for want of pluck and endurance. A susceptibility to, or a curious fascination for, Germany’s hegemonic designs -- deftly marketed by its huge propaganda machine -- hastened the decrepitude and led to the intellectual and moral disintegration of the French ruling classes.

      Weakened by the 1914-1918 war, France had disintegrated long before 1940. It’s not that the military establishment was substandard; its general staff lacked initiative, grit. Corruption was rampant. Historians still ask whether France was asthenic or whether it had been hoodwinked by Germany’s propaganda machine, which had so deftly marketed Hitler’s hallucinatory world vision. This would help speed up the intellectual and moral decrepitude of the French ruling classes, not to mention a large number of actors, artists, writers and journalists.

      Elements of the French army would be contaminated by the Führer’s fanfare. German cinematographer Leni Riefensthal’s Triumph of the Will, a film exalting the Nazi Party rally that became a central motif of Hitler’s dictatorship, won a major award in Paris in 1937. Scores of high-ranking French officers, stirred by the fervor the film conveyed, aroused by the gigantic billowing banners and the upturned faces of Hitler’s cohorts goose-stepping passed his podium, openly endorsed the spread of Nazi ideology “in countries well behind in the application of such lofty human principles.”

      This infatuation was zealously shared by the Catholic Church, whose age-old anti-Semitism harmonized with Germany’s aims, and whose cooperation was to exceed the occupier’s demands. A defeat of Germany, the Vatican had argued, would bring down the autarchic systems that form the first line of defense against Bolshevism and help repulse the immediate communization of Europe. On the other hand, the Holy See had insisted, a victory by France would lead straight to France’s demise and the end of civilization. This was an objective to which, the Church asserted, the Jews were committed. This grotesque assessment was turned to profit not only by racketeers, defeatists and common traitors, but by rich entrepreneurs who had everything to gain from an alliance with Hitler and the Pope -- the arch-enemies of Bolshevism.

      It’s not enough to grasp history. One must become habituated to it.

      *

      We lie, we cheat, we steal by telling ourselves that men deserve to be betrayed, deceived and robbed.

      The argument that the world’s destiny is in the hands of bankers and industrialists is never as aptly demonstrated as in wartime. The lords of capital and the cannon merchants thrive on the menace of conflict and the conduct of war. They prosper when the first shots ring out. Uncovering threats and arousing fear grants them the right to pillage national coffers. Created as special constabularies -- “shock troops” -- against popular uprisings, Nazism and Fascism overstepped the role their mentors had intended. They boiled over and set the world afire. European and American capitalists who, by their generous subsidies, hastened the triumph of German and Italian National Socialism, lived to regret their benevolence. But their contrition rang hollow; they’d bet on the wrong horse. They would eventually recover and engineer other bloody conflicts in the name of free enterprise.

      *

      Among those taking part in the sellout of France were business magnates who believed that the hour of a “white” Internationale had come and that only a pact with Hitler and Mussolini could protect against the Red menace. One of them, multimillionaire perfume tycoon, François Coty, in an arrogant 1934 ghost-written column entitled “France first! Join Hitler against Bolshevism!” denounced [the]

      “... shortsighted, misguided, biased politicians and the malevolent anti-French sect that serves the socio-financial Internationale and perfidiously ascribe to both Hitler and Mussolini a redoubtable belligerence against France....”

      Ostensibly, the “malevolent anti-French sect” Coty referred to was the Jews. Most would pay dearly for this characterization in France and elsewhere in Europe.

      *

      So France fell. The French resisted with reckless bravery, or collaborated with the enemy, or survived, shielding themselves with indifference against everything that wasn’t steak, fries, wine and tobacco. Everyone hatched his own strategy, devised his own survival tactic, all according to their wits or cravings.

      “I welcome our downfall,” said journalist Alain Laubreaux. “Victory would have brought our nation great misfortune.”

      Those who weren’t squirming at such spineless rhetoric were applauding it. Others saw in defeat a kind of divine retribution, cruel but salutary, against a people and a regime that, since 1936, had favored pleasure and ease over duty and accountability. Few Frenchmen advocated open resistance. Many, including some of France's most revered writers, artists and entertainers, chose to weather the occupation, some in opulence and splendor, and, if necessary, to hobnob with the enemy. All later found the words to justify an intimacy with the Germans that, given their celebrity, they had no need to cultivate. Between these two extremes, France bobbed and vacillated and struggled against chaos and incoherence.

      “The country was anesthetized, rendered stupid,” said author Gilles Ragache. In six weeks, more than 100,000 French troops had died on the battlefield. Twice as many were wounded. While most of the five million conscripts never fired a shot or saw a single German, half a million endured the full weight of war. Their sacrifice enabled the most irresolute civilians and military alike to flee toward the south in one tragic, throbbing exodus.

      Inevitably, “national security” -- the catchphrase and clarion call of the diehard elite -- prompted powerful right-wing politicians to issue daily amendments that amounted to drastic amputations on democracy, notably against an independent press that openly espoused liberal causes and which were increasingly seen as willing tools of communism. Many of these measures were directed against Jews.

      Enacted on October 3, 1940, a law barred Jews from political office. The next day, an addendum authorized the internment of foreign Jews. In March 1941, Xavier Vallat, a monarchist named to head a commission on “Jewish matters” [the “aryanization” of France] declared with the sinister aplomb of a psychopath that his anti-Semitism “is as moderate as it is enlightened.” He explained:

      “There is a Jewish problem everywhere there are too many Jews. Now, Jews are perfectly tolerable in homeopathic doses. But after a while, these interlopers become dangerous, first because they are iconoclasts who resist assimilation, secondly because they scorn those who offer them sanctuary and wind up imposing their will upon them.”

      (In 1947, Vallat, an unrepentant anti-Semite received a ten-year prison sentence for his role in the persecution of Jews. Released in 1949, he was granted amnesty in 1954. From 1962 to 1966 he edited the extreme right-wing newspaper, Aspects de la France).

      To forgive is to grant amnesty, not grace.

      In June 1941, two new edicts denied Jews access to law and medical schools. Jewish dentists, pharmacists and midwives had their licenses revoked.

      In May 1942, Jews six years and older were required under penalty of imprisonment to sew a yellow Star of David, bearing in black letters the word Juif, on their outer-garments.

      In July, Jews were barred from restaurants, cafés, theaters, movie houses, concert-halls, food markets, swimming pools, beaches, museums, libraries and sporting venues. In December, a new decree ordered Jews to have their identification and food cards stamped with the word Juif.

      *

      France’s debacle and political backsliding produced a vacuum and fed a cynicism readily exploited by flops, opportunists and small-time crooks who had nothing to lose by espousing the enemy’s cause. One of them, Henri Lafont, would play a brief if tragic role in occupied Paris. Driven by gratitude, or stirred by some inner compulsion to atone for his crimes with a single act of daring and compassion, he would save my father’s life and, without a doubt,