IV.5. WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID

4.5. MENU: What happened? The war did

AFTER THE NAZI DEFEAT CONSERVATIVES COULD NOT OPPOSE THE REFORMS THE LEFT PUT THROUGH

The many who had collaborated were in hiding, in prison or shot. 

Plaque next to railroad tracks in working-class Ménilmontant

Such memorials to fighters killed during the Liberation dot the city, except in the conservative west. 

The right,

before the war and during it

• "Better Hitler than Blum" (the Socialist leader)

• Conservatives who joined the Resistance

*    *    *

Next,

"Better Hitler than Blum" 

"BETTER HITLER THAN BLUM" (THE SOCIALIST LEADER)

 

THE RIGHT'S SLOGAN AFTER THE VICTORY OF THE SOCIALIST POPULAR FRONT 

 (IN 1936)

It brings the 40-hour, collective bargaining, two weeks of paid vacation...

      Herodotus

We have mentioned the 13th's tumult of March 1934

and Simone de Beauvoir,

who described a café during the Occupation,

narrates the ambiance in February 1936,

two months before the elections that brought

the first triumph of the left:

"The 'patriots' had wanted to give the funerals of Bainville [a royalist historian and journalist] the glow of national mourning. On coming back from the ceremony on the boulevard Saint-Germain they passed the car that was taking Léon Blum to the Chamber; they stopped it, molested the occupants, seriously wounding Blum before the police intervened. There were arrests; Maurras [leader of a far-right movement], who had written violent articles against Blum, was pursued for provoking murder and condemned to several months in  prison. The Popular Front organized a massive demonstration against Blum's aggressors [...]. Meetings, demonstrations [from the left] confirmed the imminence of victory... ."

-- The prime of life, 1960, 271-272 (my trans.)

# # #

France was the only occupied country to legally elect a puppet regime (the Vichy government). Many conservatives backed it even as German defeat loomed, because they feared the left. 

 The messaging:

 

     "The Soviets pull the strings of the POPULAR FRONT"

Newspaper excerpts from the Pas-de-Calais region in Normandy

For an enlarged picture and 10 other posters of the time, please click

"The Popular Front, Bolshevism's henchman? Beware of Communist hypocrisy / Vote France / The real peril / How Communists are preparing the revolution in France / For or against the Popular Front"  

The puppet government's "National Revolution" compares a corrupt, internationalist Left with an upstanding, family-oriented, nationalist Right.

Collaboration protected France from the most extreme German demands, but... 

• Freed their forces to dominate the rest of Europe.

• The French police deported Jews and Resistance fighters much more effectively than a foreign force could have done.   

# # #

So the Resistance came mainly from the left and after the invasion of the USSR (in June 1941), was largely Communist: It called itself "the party of the 75,000 shot."  

Publication unknown (photo from loose magazine pages found at a flea market)

Communists leave prison to be shot (in 1943).

An exaggeration, said de Gaulle,

but true enough to make Communists'

coming to power in Western Europe likely:

That is the reason for the Marshall Plan.

*    *    *
Next,
Conservatives who joined the Resistance

CONSERVATIVES WHO JOINED THE RESISTANCE

SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND JEAN MOULIN, ARE FAMOUS

As well, in the cemetery reserved to families of noble victims of the guillotine, plaques honor Resistance members who died in concentration camps...

The Picpus cemetery: please click and scroll down. 

Others left memories alone.

# # #

To be sure, the left-right alliance was ambiguous.

De Gaulle is accused of betraying Communist fighters at the end of the war.* Conservative fighters had nothing to do with that drama, but they shared the Left's patriotism, not its vision of social justice. 

* Wikipedia, which follows the mainstream, says he only abandoned them. 

Fighting alongside people whose ideals were entirely different

must have made the choice still harder.

By wrenching themselves away from the prejudices and interests 

of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect.

Plaque at the Picpus cemetery

Remember before God

Jean Marie Philibert Victurnien

Marquis de Laguiche

Croix de Guerre 14-18

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

Born July 9 1889

Deported to Buchenwald and Neu-Strasstrier *

Killed by the SS at Shildau on April 17 1945

and his son

Claude Pascal Marie de la Guiche

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

S/L de la 1er R.M.S.M. de la Div. Leclerc * *

Fallen in Haute-Sarthe * * *

on August 11 1944 at age 22

*Salt mines: "...we left Buchenwald for a destination unknown to us, which turned out to be the salt mines of Neu-Strassfurt." Most of the 459 French prisoners who were sent there died.

-- Text found thanks to information provided by Michael Zwerger, German manager

** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, including Alamein in 1943, landed in Normandy with the Leclerc Division in June '44 and fought on until the end of the war. 

-- Marc Ambrose-Rendu, military historian, personal communication

*** Haute-Sarthe: the Loire Valley

# # #

After the war,
certain survivors from both sides

became well-known politicians.

They might meet for dinner 

in the private salon of a restaurant

known for its discretion (please scroll down).

Sure not to appear together in the next day's press,  
they would recall the time 
when they were brothers in arms. 

-- Told me by the late gastronomical critic Henri Viard

End of Part IV.

*     *     *

Part V,

What Opéra tours won't say