The terrible strain and disillusionment of World War I weighed heavily on French cultural life during the interwar era, leading to the development of the literary and artistic movement called Dadaism. Its program of calculated nonsense was inspired by a deep revulsion against the insanity of war and the positivist view that the world had sense and meaning. Dadaism soon gave way, though, to the more durable Surrealist movement, whose principal theorist and founder was the poet André Breton. The declared goal of Surrealist writers and artists was to free man’s unconscious impulses from the distorting controls of rational reflection; creativity, they said, came from deep nonrational drives.
A number of France’s most notable writers, however, remained within the older humanistic tradition; yet they likewise reflected the doubts and neuroses of an age of crisis. Marcel Proust, whose massive multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) began to appear in 1913, used the stream-of-consciousness technique to probe, in minutely introspective fashion, into the recesses of his own mind and memory. André Gide, in similarly sensitive and introspective fashion, wrestled with the psychological difficulties arising from the conflict between a bourgeois society’s values and the individual’s instinctive drives.
As the mood of crisis deepened in the 1930s, so did the intensity of the challenge to old values, bringing forth men of frankly fascist temper, such as Robert Brasillach, and brutally nihilistic literary experimenters, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Other writers continued to create works in the older tradition, including the supple, sensual explorations of (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette; the social commentary of Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, and François Mauriac; the Neoromantic novels of André Malraux, preaching a modern gospel of heroic activism; the first writings of Jean-Paul Sartre; and the essays of Emmanuel Mounier, who was to inspire the new Catholic left after World War II. France since 1940 Wartime France
The German victory left the French groping for a new policy and new leadership. Some 30 prominent politicians—among them Édouard Daladier and Pierre Mendès-France—left for North Africa to set up a government-in-exile there; but Pétain blocked that enterprise by ordering their arrest on arrival in Morocco. The undersecretary of war in the fallen Reynaud cabinet, Charles de Gaulle" class="md-crosslink">General Charles de Gaulle, had already flown to London and in a radio appeal on June 18, 1940, summoned French patriots to continue the fight; but few heard or heeded his call in the first weeks. It was to Pétain, rather, that most of the nation looked for salvation. The Vichy government
Parliament met at Vichy on July 9–10 to consider France’s future. The session was dominated by Pierre Laval, Pétain’s vice premier, who was already emerging as the strongman of the government. Laval, convinced that Germany had won the war and would thenceforth control the Continent, saw it as his duty to adapt France to the new authoritarian age. By skillful manipulation, he persuaded parliament to vote itself and the Third Republic out of existence. The vote (569 to 80) authorized Pétain to draft a new constitution. The draft was never completed, but Pétain and his advisers did embark on a series of piecemeal reforms, which they labeled the National Revolution. Soon the elements of a corporative state began to emerge, and steps were taken to decentralize France by reviving the old provinces. In the early stages of Vichy, Pétain’s inner circle—except for Laval and a few others—was made up of right-wing traditionalists and authoritarians. The real pro-fascists, such as Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat, who wanted a system modeled frankly on those of Hitler and Mussolini, soon left Vichy and settled in Paris, where they accepted German subsidies and intrigued against Pétain.
In December 1940 Pétain dismissed Laval and placed him briefly under house arrest. Laval had offended Pétain and his followers by his arrogance and his obvious taste for intrigue. His critics charged him also with attempting to bring Vichy France back into the war in alliance with the Germans. Both Laval and Pétain had accepted Hitler’s invitation to a meeting at Montoire on October 24, 1940, and, during the weeks that followed, the French leaders had publicly advocated Franco-German “collaboration.” Whether Laval hoped for a real Franco-German alliance remains somewhat controversial. If so, it was a futile effort because Hitler had no interest in accepting France as a trusted partner; “collaboration” remained a French and not a German slogan. Hitler tolerated the temporary existence of a quasi-independent Vichy state as a useful device to help police the country and to collect the enormously inflated occupation costs imposed by the armistice.
Laval was succeeded by another prewar politician, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, and he, in turn, by Admiral François Darlan, who was intensely anti-British and an intriguer by nature who followed a devious path that involved continuing efforts at active collaboration with the Germans. Hitler, meanwhile, concentrated on draining France of raw materials and foodstuffs that were useful for the conduct of the war.
In April 1942 Pétain restored Laval to power, partly under German pressure. Laval retained that post until the collapse of Vichy in 1944. His role was increasingly difficult because the terrible drain of the war in the Soviet Union caused the Germans to increase their exactions. The Germans were short of manpower for their factories, and Laval, under heavy pressure, agreed to the conscription of able-bodied French workers, allegedly in return for the release of some French prisoners of war. He also assumed the task of repressing the French underground movement, whose activities hampered the delivery of supplies and men to Germany. After the war, Laval and his friends were to argue that he had played a “double game” of limited collaboration to protect France against a worse fate.
Most of Vichy’s remaining autonomy and authority was destroyed in November 1942, in direct consequence of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa. Vichy troops in Morocco and Algeria briefly resisted the American invasion, then capitulated when Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting Algiers at the time, negotiated an armistice. On November 11 Hitler ordered his troops in the occupied zone to cross the demarcation line and to take over all of France. The Vichy government survived, but only on German sufferance—a shadowy regime with little power and declining prestige. The Resistance
Vichy’s decline was paralleled by the rise of the anti-German underground. Within weeks of the 1940 collapse, tiny groups of men and women had begun to resist. Some collected military intelligence for transmission to London; some organized escape routes for British airmen who had been shot down; some circulated anti-German leaflets; some engaged in sabotage of railways and German installations. The Resistance movement received an important infusion of strength in June 1941, when Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union brought the French Communist Party into active participation in the anti-German struggle. It was further reinforced by the German decision to conscript French workers; many draftees took to the hills and joined guerrilla bands that took the name Maquis (meaning “underbrush”). A kind of national unity was finally achieved in May 1943, when de Gaulle’s personal representative, Jean Moulin, succeeded in establishing a National Resistance Council (Conseil National de la Résistance) that joined all the major movements into one federation.