FRANCE'S NEW DREYFUS CASE IN REVERSE
Barnes, Harry Elmer
France's New Dreyfus Case In Reverse By HARRY ELMER BARNES EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second and last of a seriex of articles analyzing the Petain case. IN my first article on Marshal Petain I...
...This is the only marked resemblance that Petain's political and economic theories bear to Fascism, but administrative Syndicalism is not identical with Fascism...
...Whatever military strength France exhibited between the 2 World Wrars was due primarily to the foresight and efforts of Marshal Petain...
...29, 1943, in which Von Ribbentrop denounced Petain for his "constant struggle against, and permanent resistance to" Nazi policies relative to Vichy France...
...I>e Gaulle responded with touching tributes to the greatness of Petain's character and his military genius, one of the most impressive coming in a book written as late as 1938...
...It was Gen...
...Weygand, rather than Petain, who repeatedly informed his government that it was impossible to continue active warfare against the Germans...
...When the catastrophe came, the politicians, the profiteers, the cowards, and the weaklings deserted the wrecked ship like a lot of dirty rats...
...He was responsible for the reorganization of the French Army after the War and for the planning of the new French defense system...
...The core of Petain's political philosophy is a sentimental Catholic nationalism, of which Joan of Arc is the great symbol to him...
...But the technique of assuring and executing this control Petain takes over from the French administrative Syndicalism of Emil Durkheim and others...
...Though Petain was surely not an enthusiastic republican, he was a military man, par excellence, who served loyally whatever type of government ruled France...
...Then, if ever, France required the services of a brave patriot who was willing to stick by his country in her hour of greatest need...
...His ideals of the perfect state do not fall into any single pattern of political life...
...As a matter of fact, the Armistice probably saved Britain by giving the British a breathing-spell which they desperately needed for recovery and reorganization after the shock of disaster at Dunkirk...
...It was a hopeless situation...
...It was Petain who discovered de Gaulle, as a young officer, and gave him his first military position...
...His acquittal would not have proved his innocence, nor is his conviction any more convincing relative to his guilt...
...In fact, in an article written in 1935, he predicted with striking accuracy just the sort of Blitzkrieg which conquered France in the Spring of 1940...
...From the leader of French Catholic...
...All this stands out in marked contrast to the lethargy and complacency of the Popular Front on military and defense matters...
...WHEN we come to consider the political, social and economic ideals of Marshal Petain, the facts are clear, if not at all simple...
...The Nazi tribute, albeit an ill-natured tribute, to Petain's courageous defense of French interests under the Nazi regime, is best presented in an heated letter from Von Ribbentrop to Petain, on Nov...
...When this proved impossible, in June, 1940, he did what any great French leader, who was not a traitor, a coward, or both, would have done, namely, to stand by his country and get what he could for it under the heel of the conqueror...
...But one, who, like Petain, admires Montaigne, can respect one who sincerely entertains views other than his own...
...He was not one of the rats who deserted the ship, to flee to foreign countries, live on the fat of the land, and hurl epithets at the man who was facing unflinchingly the task of leading France through the greatest trials and tribulations of her history since Jijlius Caesar entered Gaul in March, 58 B. C. ' Even Leon Marchal, in his bitterly anti-Vichy book, gives Petain personally a clean bill of health and shows clearly that he did his best to defend French interests against brutal Nazi pressure...
...IN my first article on Marshal Petain I made it clear that Petain was the one great military genius that the first World War brought forth in Franee and that he did more than any other Frenchman to save France from defeat at the hands of the Germans...
...When the victory is won, when we have planted our flags on the ruins of Berlin, let us give a thought to one of the first artificers of our victory, Henri Philippe Petain, Marshal of France...
...He is under constant, cruel pressure from the invaders, which make it extremely difficult for him to accomplish much that he desires for the relief of France...
...If he was forced to keep officials under him whose motives and policies are questionable, that he could not help...
...WE could find nothing more fitting with which to conclude this brief survey of Petain's career and ideas than the resolute and clear-cut appraisal of the Marshal's place in history by Col...
...Joan is the perpetual reminder that France can rise from the abyss and triumph over all difficulties...
...de Gaulle has commuted that sentence to life imprisonment...
...Foch would not even have been able to do this if Petain had not previously saved him from the serious results of his premature impetuosity...
...Marshal Petain stuck by his country instead of running away from it in the hour of danger and need...
...He especially warned that satisfactory and safe relations with Germany could not be maintained unless France kept full military parity with Germany in numbers and military technique, and was in a position to meet force with force...
...The Marshal was sentenced to death by the High Court of Justice on a charge of intelligence with the enemy, and Gen...
...Petain has been accused of being a monarchist, a Fascist, and so on...
...In my opinion, no nobler character has lived in the whole history of France than Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and I believe that he has been maligned by writers who are not fitted by either integrity of character or real devotion to France, to hand the Marshal his boots...
...He had something less than any use for Pierre Laval...
...But they all rest upon a revitalized French family life, which will increase the birthrate and instil patriotic fervor into the children of France...
...Charles Sweeny, in his important book, Moment of Truth: "Before we close the French scene let us bow in homage before the old Marshal in his agony...
...As Stanton Leeds put it: "Petain, the most influential of all the generals, was a republican, who, more than anyone else, saved the regime at the time of the Stavisky scandal...
...He has been greatly influenced by the French Catholic social reformer, Frederic Le Play, who stressed the importance of reviving the patriarchal French family, with its discipline and fecundity, the fundamental social importance of natural geographical regionalism, and the basic role of agriculture in a sound economy...
...What these reforms have been, on paper at least, is well described by Paul Vaucher in his notable article on "The National Revolution in France," in the Political Science Quarterly, March, 1942...
...In his proposed reforms of French political and economic life Petain has logically and resolutely attempted to put the above ideals into action...
...And I believe that their lies both contaminate and jeopardize their sound political and economic ideals and reduce their service in the task of rehabilitating France...
...This has been admitted by honest British military authorities...
...Petain, rather than de Gaulle, was the great protagonist of the mechanization of the French military system...
...from Bossuet he has derived only the idea of an authoritative state in which the Chief is responsible, not so much to the people, as for the people and their welfare...
...When it comes to the problem of what the Chief should do for his people, Petain seeks "guidance in far more recent French political and economic literature...
...These experts unanimously and vigorously expressed the opinion that any thought of continuing the war in North Africa was utterly foolhardy...
...Moreover, it was Petain who broke the force of the great Ludendorff drive against the French and British in the Spring and Summer of 1918...
...The quasi-socialistic state that Petain envisages is one that operates through a corporative structure...
...I embrace most of the political philosophy of his current assailants, but I do not like their lies...
...He had started such teachings before de Gaulle was born...
...But Petain is realist enough to know that the era of monarchy belongs to the past...
...Now, from the safe haven of the United States or England, they spew out their venom on those—captain and crew and steerage passengers alike—who stayed with the ship and are still striving to bring her to a safe port...
...Foch did little more than to assume i formal direction of the relatively easy task of driving back an enemy which Petain had already blocked, tricked and decimated...
...It is obvious that the outcome of the Marshal's recent trial will have little bearing on the real facts in his case...
...The verdict of history will probably be that nobody else could have done better than Marshal Petain in holding off the Nazis and getting as good conditions as possible for his people under Vichy rule...
...While the Republic was in existence, Petain remained thoroughly loyal to it...
...Before Petain requested an Armistice, the government had sent 3 of its foremost military experts by airplane to North Africa to ascertain the possibility of continuing war in that area...
...These concentrate around the effort to set up an authoritarian state, employing corporations of professions to carry out an elaborate program of planned society, which will integrate agriculture, manufacturing, and trade in the interests of a more prosperous France...
...For two years, in spite of slander and abuse, he has served us well, if we are now in North Africa, if Frenchmen all over the world are uniting behind us, we owe it to him, to his courage, his tenacity, his heroism...
...But his critics saw to it first that they were safely out of the reach of any German guns or gauleiters...
...It has been easy enough to sit in a luxurious London hotel or in a New York City penthouse and criticize the Marshal for not spitting in Hitler's face...
...The ferocious energy of Georges Clemenceau, "The Tiger," would have counted for little if Petain had not withstood the Germans at Verdun or had failed to check the paralyzing mutiny in the French armed forces...
...Socialism, Count Albert de Mun, Petain has taken the notion that the state must assume wide control over economic life...
...He is not a royalist...
...Yet, most of the books which have been written denouncing Petain for undermining French defense before 1939 have been written by members of the defeatist Popular Front bloc...
...THROUGHOUT the whole decade of the '30s, Petain labored valiantly, unceasingly, and almost single-handedly in behalf of the- thorough mechanization of the French Army, and particularly in urging the construction of a French air force which would match or surpass that of Nazi Germany...
...WHEN the French military situation became hopeless...
...One can fairly and intelligently judge Petain as Chief-of-State at Vichy only by viewing his acts against the historical background...
...It could be used by the most radical economic reformers, and has been so advocated by none other than the radical French Syndicalists themselves...
...As Minister of War, in 1935, he secured unprecedented appropriations for the strengthening of both the Army and the defense system...
...German resistance and the difficulties of the Vichy regime have prevented most of these reforms from going beyond paper, but they reveal clearly enough the ideas and policies of Marshal Petain as a statesman and a social planner...
...Her name and deeds constantly recur in his speeches on France in her late hour of peril...
...The chief political mentor of Marshal Petain is Bishop Bossuet, the great French protagonist of the divine right of kings...
...ANYBODY who knows my intellectual and political philosophy will know at once that a military career, devotion to Catholic authoritarianism, intense nationalism, and the like, are the last things to charm me personally...
...But any fanaticism, characteristic of many patriots and ardent churchmen, has been mitigated in Petain's mind by his admiration for the tolerance and urbanity of Montaigne, his favorite French author...
...We may recall that Alfred Dreyfus was convicted in his original trial and served some years of his prison sentence in the "hellhole" of Devil's Island...
...When Admiral Leahy returned to the United States, in the Summer of 1942, after having served as our Ambassador to Vichy, he gave out the following statement: "My relations with Marshal Petain, for whom I entertain a high personal regard, were, throughout my stay in France, close, cordial, and helpful to the interests of his people...
...We shall now examine Petain's career after the Armistice of 1918, in so far as it bears upon French defense and public policy...
...More than any other man in France, Petain had sought vainly to make France capable of withstanding the German military assault...
...Far from being a collaborationist with the Nazis before the war, Petain stood out beyond any other prominent French public figure in warning his fellow-countrymen of the danger of the Nazi military threat, and urging them to be prepared to meet it...
...Indeed, it is extremely probable that, if a stand had been made in North Africa in June, 1940, the Nazis would have poured into North Africa and seized the whole Mediterranean basin before the Summer was over...
...Of all the many notorious errors which have been written about military affairs since 1939, none is more absurd than the allegation that the French Army could have retired to North Africa in 1940 and fought on for a time with conspicuous success...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 35
