Turning the page: this is the imperative that guides the French leaders at the end of the Second World War. There have indeed been a few trials of collaborators, including the resounding one of former Marshal Philippe Pétain in July 1945, but this so-called “legal” purge aims above all to dissuade wild courts and improvised lynchings, responsible for 5,000 deaths since the summer of 1944. The essential thing is to eliminate the taboo of collaboration, hidden behind the Gaullist myth of “resistance” which undermines the role of the Vichy regime and glorifies the maquisards.
“We follow the storyinsisted Charles de Gaulle, during a visit to Vichy (Allier) in 1959. We are one people, whatever happened to us. The adventures could have been what they were. The events are what they were.” Full of indulgence, the statement seems intended to make the episode a “parenthesis” for the purposes of national reconciliation. Let’s make a clean slate of the past, then? Not quite. Because, to everyone’s surprise, the legacy of the Vichy regime is very much alive today, maintained by certain rules which still regulate our daily lives.
Monthly siren, pay-as-you-go pension, IV license…
The siren that sounds every first Wednesday of the month? An invention of the period intended to strengthen passive defense. The prohibited direction sign? Introduced by the Germans to replace a French-speaking sign that the occupier did not understand. Mandatory display of prices in stores? Retirement by pay-as-you-go? Sports at the baccalaureate? More concrete actions from the legislators of the Vichy regime.
In the absence of a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate, reduced to silence by the occupier, the dictatorship of Philippe Pétain proved particularly effective in introducing new legislation. Where usually months of negotiations were necessary to produce a decree, it now only takes a few days. The result was a veritable legislative bulimia: 16,786 laws and decrees were promulgated under the Vichy regime, between July 1940 and August 1944, or more than eleven new laws per day!
After the Liberation, rather than drawing a line under all the measures put in place during the Occupation, the Provisional Government of the French Republic (June 1944 – October 1946) reserved the possibility of repealing them on a case by case basis. The so-called “reestablishment of republican legality” ordinance, published on August 9, 1944, does not completely wipe the Vichy slate clean, since everything is not to be thrown away in the laws and decrees promulgated since July 1940. In fact, certain measures are part of the continuity of the projects initiated during the IIIe Republic (1870-1940) and affect areas very far from any ideology: agriculture, town planning, infrastructure…
Thus, subtle measures introduced (or finalized) by the legislators of the Vichy regime survive to the present day. This is the case with License IV which regulates the sale of alcoholic beverages in bars: introduced on September 24, 1941, it is part of the anti-alcoholism crusade dear to the occupier. Aiming at the “regeneration of the race” through sport and health, the fate of sports federations owed much to the patronage of the French state of the time, which considered effort and discipline as the driving forces of the nation. We will inherit from this period the addition of a sports test to the baccalaureate in 1941, which will become compulsory in 1959.
The business world also bears the imprint of the Vichy regime. Because it was under the Occupation that the function of CEO (president and managing director) was invented, as well as the establishment committees, which have since become works councils, with the aim of strengthening collaboration between unions and employers. Company canteens are also a legacy of this era, as are meal vouchers, a corporatist version of the ration tickets in force during the Second World War.
Towards institutionalized policing
Certain measures prove less subtle in terms of their ideological anchoring, which has not prevented them from surviving on the tablets of the law until today. Take for example the offense of failure to assist a person in danger, introduced on October 25, 1941. The dictatorship of Philippe Pétain uses it to force its fellow citizens to denounce “terrorist” attacks of which they are aware. If today it represents a noble gesture, who could have imagined that it once rewarded denunciation against the Resistance?
Indeed, national security is one of the imperatives that guides the Vichy bureaucrats. Thus, the creation of the national police (April 23, 1941) allowed the collaborationist regime to become an instrument of coordinated repression, which carried out the Vél d’Hiv roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942. While the compulsory possession of an identity card (law of October 27, 1940) distinguished Jews from other citizens and facilitated, administratively, their persecution. Stamped with a national number, unique to each individual, the latter became our Social Security number… In addition, it was at the same time that the famous “S file” (for “state security”) was established, which listed individuals in the sights of the authorities.
On a social level, the family policy is clear in the leaflets of the Vichy regime: glorification of large families, ban on abortion and divorce, establishment of Mother’s Day… Philippe Pétain even offers to be the official godfather of a child, on the condition that the latter comes from a family of fifteen! Anxious to protect childhood, Vichy France relaxed the repression of juvenile delinquency (law of July 27, 1942) and introduced the law on the protection of births (September 2, 1941), which supports anonymous childbirth to limit infanticide and abortion. Pioneering measures that herald childbirth under X.
Thus, in certain respects, post-war France is still somewhat in the era of Vichy and therefore of Berlin. Because it was under former Marshal Pétain that the tricolor clocks were put in tune with those of the Third Reich, while France and Germany are not really on the same longitude. The ultimate illustration of this heritage that has become everyday, the French hands still remain there today, although they were formerly aligned with the Greenwich meridian, London time.
