Over the years I've visited old stories about the Germans, Hitler youth, skinhead resurgence, etc., without ever crossing the border into Vichy. French seemed too hard to pronounce and wasn't offered in my high school. But now, by choosing another tyne of the spork in the road, I'm seeing more sides of the shallow wiki-places to be seen on Our Friend, The Internet.
That's the problem with idle hands sometimes. A little free time allows room for all these questions to clank around my head, noisily enough to keep me from sleep, but the loudest when I should at least be trying to rest.
NOTE TO SELF: Remember the practice on meditation, the Zen focus that seems so healthy while facilitating travel and quieting my mind.
And about those French - Maybe, just maybe, a very tiny part of the puzzle, this post war mix of all levels of collaborators with all minds of resistance, helps explain in part just why these folks, the sophisticated French, for god's sake, a people with created the notions of 1789, with sophistication embedded in their bones, why do these folks seem so f-ing weird?
Well, of course, it's stupid to think that sixty million people will be driven by any less than sixty million motives, i.e. they're probably no "weirder" than any other group of people.
And another thing, I am asking you, Deutschland - after taking so many centuries to finally become a unified state, why did nationalism drive you Boche so fanatically. And from where exactly did that word Boche come, and how is it pronounced?
MEANWHILE,
what I am learning about Vichy?
- Well, first of all, even bad politicians demand comfort from their constituents/subjects. The folks who surrendered to Hitler of course chose a resort town with fine hotels, spas, and casinos to seat their occupied, sold out government of France.
- It (Vichy collaboration) may have seemed like the best of bad choices, but how could the anti Semitism be justified? Easily enough I suppose for any number of Christians, especially those under duress, or already so inclined.
- The quality of mercy is not strained - even if The Merchant was anti Semitic.
In defense of my ignorance of a torn nation, I was only 8 when Marcel Ophuls presented Le Chagrin et la pitie. Hell, the Civil War of 1860 is still being fought in parts of the U.S. France with only sixty years to "heal", must still have a few bodies to bury.
What I imagine about then...
Sitting in some hot crowded street cafe, loud locals and runaways to Bordeaux, drunk and fearful, hoping their boat comes in before the troops arrive. I cannot imagine why any of the refugee-wannabees / hopeful-evacuees could have any faith that anyone would save them at that point, just after the rout at Dunkirk. Anyone here means the leaders of the antique regimes that did not exactly win well in its youth. The allied fascists must have been delighted for a moment, figuring the NSDAP was the beast to bet on, sensing some hope, not the treason they might be shot for in just a few years.
What I'm learning now...
For instance there's the addition to my vocabulary (from which reference site I forget)
HEGEMONY (hegemonic): The processes by which dominant culture maintains its dominant position: for example, the use of institutions to formalize power; the employment of a bureaucracy to make power seem abstract (and, therefore, not attached to any one individual); the inculcation of the populace in the ideals hegemonic group through education, advertising, publication, etc.; the mobilization of a police force as well as military personnel to subdue opposition.
There's the history I first learned in my reading about de Gaulle and Petain:
Mers El Kebir
The Algerian harbor of allied intervention against Vichy ships.
The Lion swallowed the Frog that day to prevent some of the French Navy from becoming part of the German Navy.
The British and French could not reach an understanding, so the Brits killed more than a thousand French sailors, in 1940, in the summer of surrender.
To be fair, war is bad. France planned its share of action against the Brits, it's just that the old saw about Googling "French Military Victories" has teeth here.
So much to learn.
When I just imagine all that allied double crossing during War, my own naivete and gullibility shocks and embarrasses me. My troubles only grow as I try to learn keyboard tricks for the additional alphabet characters attached to so many French vowels. In the back of my head some synapses, Greek chorus like, keep singing "the medium is the massage".
The Cast of Vichy Characters, a starting line up:
- Charles de Gaulle: Among other more incrdible feats, he spent his years in WWI as a German POW attempting numerous escapes and avoiding firearm assaults and influenza infections.
- Philippe Petain: Fame first at Verdun in 1916, the Marshal was something like eighty-four years old when he began his role in Vichy, once respected by de Gaulle, his death penalty for his treason conviction was commuted by deGaulle, and he died in a prison-ish hospital in 1951 at the age of 243 or so. Recently, I enjoyed this book, Petain, Hero or Traitor: The Untold Story,ISBN: 0688037569, by Herbert R. Lottman.
- Maurice Gamelin: a general of the third republic, eventually sent to prison in Germany by the Vichy folk after the Riom trials.
- Edouard Daladier: leading member of the Radicals, the Popular Front of French Third Republic, arrested by Vichy-men, spent several years as Buchenwald inmate.
- Leon Blum: Jewish PM three times even, Popular Front man, after an eloquent performance at the farce of Riom imprisoned in Germany, barely escaping with his life.
- Paul Reynaud : A third republic PM, a minister of Justice, agreed with Chamberlain either to or not to accept aseparatee peace with Germans, spent several years as Nazi prisoner but survived the war.
- Pierre Laval: Admiral pro Nazi, wildly unappreciated for his collaborations.
- Francois Darlan - Vichy leader, somewhat less a Nazi than Laval, assassinated in Algiers in 1942, apparently by the Free French fighters. It seems that many of the French were more anti British than pro German.
- Maxime Weygand: soldier of both world wars, Vichy political leader, served in the Vichy government as minister of defense, anti Dreyfuss in his youth, held by Germans for about 3 years, considered a collaborator but exonerated by some French in 1948.
you said green was your favorite color, r.i.p. dad
