Third, Pétain, with all his senility, must have realized that it is not nearly as certain now that Germany will win, as it was when he surrendered. The Russian resistance, much as Pétain hates and despises Bolshevism, must have made him think; and the growing belligerence of America must have had some effect upon him. As he becomes less and less convinced that Germany is certain to win he should logically become less submissive to the Germans. On the other hand, he is not likely to revolt openly until he is convinced Germany will lose; and the only way to give him such conviction is for the United States to enter the war.
Q. What would Hitler do if he finally tired of fooling with Vichy?
A. He would simply march in and occupy all of France. He could do it with a handful of divisions, since the French have been totally disarmed or at least as fully disarmed as it was possible for the Germans to do. But from then on he would have the trouble of administering the whole country and collecting the taxes which Pétain collects for him now. I do not think he is anxious to increase his responsibilities that way now. Pétain knows this too, and that stiffens the old man’s backbone a little. Essentially though the Vichy attitude will always depend on the question who is going to win the war. I should think that when the defeat of Hitler is assured, the Vichy government may be overthrown and another or Free French, de Gaulle government may re-enter the war on our side. Pétain and Darlan it seems to me are too compromised ever to do that.
Q. What about Darlan?
A. Darlan undoubtedly sees more clearly than Pétain, but he is less honorable; indeed I have heard highly placed Englishmen who knew him intimately curse him with concentrated bitterness as the vilest traitor of the lot. Few people would describe Pétain as consciously dishonorable. Few of the men around Pétain are spared the charge by Frenchmen who know them best.
Darlan has no respect from anybody. He has been all his life a political sailor, having had his start from his father, one-time Minister of Justice. His politics were consistently opportunistic. Today he helps head a government that has suppressed Freemasonry; yet he was a Freemason when to be a Freemason was an asset. He helps keep Leon Blum in confinement; yet he supported Blum when Blum was in power. He is now the fiercest advocate of fighting England; yet until Reynaud fell he supported the policy of moving the government to North Africa and carrying on.
He switched when he perceived the chance of becoming head man in the appeasement government. His change of heart was literally overnight. In London immediately after the fall of France, an old friend of mine, an officer of the French Navy whose ship had broken away and come to England, told me Darlan had issued an order to all vessels of the Navy that with the signing of the Armistice they should make for French African or other friendly ports and prepare to go on with the war; twenty-four hours later another code message from Darlan countermanded the order and directed all ships to make for French ports. In the interval Darlan had been promised a seat next to the Chief of the Vichy State.
Nothing in Darlan’s record indicates that he has ever acted except for the purpose of furthering his career; he is characterized by the French as the perfect careerist, and the word has even less flattering connotations in French than in English. The one instinct in him which seems to have persisted without variance is his hatred of the British, based upon the centuries-old rivalry of the French and British navies. While the French were in the war we Americans forgot that the memory of Trafalgar is for the French Navy, or for its older officers anyway, stronger than the memory of the four years of Franco-British comradeship on the battlefields of 1914-1918.
In Darlan this feeling was always strong. At the London Naval Conference of 1930 he fought for parity with the British, but they refused it to him, with a prescience blessed by the event. Suppose the French had possessed as powerful a navy as the British when the French Army fell and Darlan had commanded a force able to challenge the British! After the Battle of Oran, July 3, 1940 when the British, rightly suspecting the intentions of Darlan, attempted to disable the French Fleet at Mers-el Kebir in order to prevent its falling into the hands of the Germans, Darlan led the outcry against the “perfidious” assault. The British are convinced that if ever the chance comes Darlan will use every means in his power to injure them. Whatever his motives may have been at the beginning for joining the capitulation, Darlan like most of the men of Vichy has by now so compromised himself with the French people that, as one French friend of mine expressed it: “If Germany is defeated the best these men of Vichy could hope for would be dishonorable, furtive retirement, but I think most of them would be killed.”
And if Germany wins? For a while Darlan and his colleagues seemed to feel confident that Hitler would be good to them, but now he exclaims: “If we do not get an honorable peace, if France is cut up into many departments and deprived of important overseas territories, and enters diminished and bruised into the New Europe, it will not recover and our children will live in the misery and hatred which breed war.” These words of the appeaser indicate that he has already discerned the outlines of the fate Hitler has in store for France; yet what is the alternative for him and those like him now? Free Frenchmen declare the alternative is death, as traitors.