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A propaganda poster from c.1940-1942 contrasting the stability of a France built on the ideological foundations of the Vichy regime (Travail, famille, patrie) with the instability of that built on values associated with the Third Republic

The National Revolution (French: Révolution nationale) was a phrase popularised under the Vichy France during World War II. Although its precise meaning and scope was ambiguous, it is often referred to as its state ideology of Marshall Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime installed after the fall of the French Third Republic in July 1940.

The National Revolution is often seen as embodying Vichy's emphasis on Pétain's cult of personality, French nationalism and national renewal, anti-parliamentarianism, the promotion of traditional "French" values, economic and social corporatism, antisemitism, anti-communism, and anti-Masonry.

Origin

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The term national revolution had been used in political discussion on the far-right in France since at least 1933.[1] It expressed a rejection of the idea of "international" revolution proposed by socialists and communists but was otherwise vague although it implied wide-ranging social, economic, and political change.[2]

  • Richard Vinen states that "the words were open to an almost infinite variety of interpretations. Almost all Vichy projects were subject to considerable disagreement and almost none came to fruition."[3]
  • "Vichy was not a Maurrassian regime" and it was unclear, in any case, what Maurras would have wanted.[4] "Pétain had respected Maurras, but, according to his own chef de cabinet, had probably not read more than twenty pages of his work."[5] Although supported by many monarchists, Pétain did not himself support monarchy or the restoration.[6]

Vinen emphasises that it was initially uncertain what Pétain represented and "the implications of supporting Pétain in July 1940 were not clear".[7]

  • Occupation costs take up a massive proportion of state revenue, being about 58% of the total and limiting opportunity to implement new idealistic policy priorities.[8]

Vichy ideology

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Ideology affected by regime's supporters, who include

  • Maurrasians, Action Francaise etc.
  • Conservative republicans. "Traditionalists" like thes want a return to traditional values, promotion of farmers and peasant values against urban and industrial ones, provincial culture, family values, and the rejection of "materialism, individulism and egoism" and in which traditional elites regained their natural authority.[9] Corporatism and Catholicism[10]
  • "Modernizers" who hoped for radical technocratic overhaul of the French state and society[11] Example of Darlan. Rejected traditionalists' backwards looking views.[10] Economic integration with Germany and rest of German-occupied Europe.[10]
  • Fascists who share elements of both traditionalistic and modernizer worldviews but differs in "its revolutionary nature, its populism, and its proposensity for violence"[12] Largely mistrusted by Vichy after hoping to form a single party, so instead leave Vichy en masse and return to Paris and look to collaboratism with Germans.[12]


  • Although Pétain's supporterters wrote widely about the national revolution, he said remarkably little about his own vision. His "silence" was emphasised as a virtue by Vichy propaganda which allowed him to adopt a posture of "ambiguity". "By not identifying himself too precisely with particular projects he avoided being discredited when thos eporjects failed."[13]
  • "scholars continue to draw distinctions between state collabo¬ ration and collaborationism, between those who collaborated for personal gain and collaborationists motivated by ideology, between attentiste and activist interpretations of collaboration, between all forms of collaboration and the Vichy regime as a whole, and so on."[9]

Aspects

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Authoritarianism

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Nationalism

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folklore, regional culture, authenticity of French peasant-farmer culture,

Economic organisation

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Corporatism

Labour, social class, and gender

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Légion Française des Combattants

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Antisemitism, xenophobia, and anti-masonry

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Anti-liberalism and anti-communism

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Maréchalisme

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Personal popularity of Pétain, especially in 1940. Towns and streets named after him across France.[15] French people drew a distinction between Pétain and the rest of the Vichy regime throughout the wartime period.[16]

Vichy leaders and officials were "remarkably isolated from the bulk of the French population"[17] and had little sense of public opinion.[17]

Pétain's personal popularity contrasted with Laval's unpopularity. As Vinen noted, "[h]ow people judged the Vichy regime depended particularly on how they understood the relation between Pétain and Laval".[18]

Not a specific political position. Historians emphasise different forms of sentiment including maréchalo-résistant to describe those who enthused about Pétain but remained anti-German and participated in the French Resistance.[19]

National Revolution and the French colonial empire

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The National Revolution with local allegorical depictions of labour, family, and nation on a postage stamp from French Indochina (1943).

Although French Equatorial Africa and some smaller colonies defected to the Free French after the French defeat, Vichy initially retained control over the extensive parts of the empire including its North African territories, French West Africa, Indochina, and Madagascar. Gradual Allied and Free French encroachment meant, however, that only Indochina remained under Vichy control by August 1943.[20] The historian Ruth Ginio has argued that Pétain perceived the French colonial empire as his regime's "most vital diplomatic card" which was important in compensating for his regime's weaknesses by providing "huge tracts of territory, manpower, resources, and prestige".[21]

  • French commentators were divided about whether the ideals of the National Revolution should be brought to the colonial empire[22]
  • Support for Vichy and right-wing ideals among French settlers.[23]
  • Vichy ideals consciously exported to the French colonies through the Ministry of the Colonies.[24]
  • REpublican ideals had never been fully honoured in the colonial empire and "their elimination in 1940 caused less of a stir in areas where they had always been dead letters"[25]
  • Madagascar's sympathetic governors Cayla and Annet "ushered in a variety of authoritarian, far-rightist schemes, be they economic, social, or cultural" as well as metropolitan-style measures such as persecution of Jews and freemasons and the personality cult around Pétain.[26]
  • Emphasis on forced labour
  • State-sponsored physical education to counter the supposedly degenerating effects of the tropical climate.[27]
  • Persecution of Jews, denaturalisation of "native" Jews in Algeria... Even in colonies with very few Jews such as Madagascar, Vichy introduced a requirement that the 26 Jewish residents register themselves and their property in June 1941.[28] 15 colonial civil servants were dismissed for being Jewish and 30 for being freemasons in Indochina and a quota was imposed on Jewish students at the University of Hannoi.[29]
  • Freemasons dismissed from jobs, and Protestants suspected of Anglophilia.[30]
  • Youth movements and the Légion.[31] Legion in Indochina is particularly active growing from 2,637 members in January 1942 to more than 7,000 by 1943 out of a total European population of only 34,000.[32]
  • Indochina becomes ideologically "an outpost of the Pétainist National REvolution, in many ways more fervent than France itself" under the impetus of Decoux.[33]
  • Petainism compared with Confucianism in Vietnamese culture and its appeal to conservative local elites.[34] "The almost Machiavellian conflating of Vietnamese traditionalism and Vichy volkism would become a cornerstone of National Revolutionary propaganda in Indochina."[35] "Nostalgic folklorism" of Vichy leads to promotion of "a "return" to a wide range of Indochinese customs- in reality the invention of a set of traditions - be they in the form of folk songs, anthems , or rituals of government" such as the promotion of Cambodian and Laosian monarchies and the cult of the medieval folk hero Trần Quốc Toản who was likened to Joan of Arc.[36]

Meaning

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"I have never known what the National Revolution was, it was never defined and it was an expression that personally I never used [...] Everyone put his own desire, ideal and the regime that he saw into these words, but the National Revolution was never defined in any form at any time."

Pierre Laval, speaking during his trial for collaboration in 1945.[37]

The Révolution nationale was never fully defined by the Vichy regime although it was frequently invoked by its most enthusiastic supporters. Philippe Pétain himself was rumoured to dislike the term and only used it four times in his wartime speeches.[37] As a result, different factions formed different views of what it meant which conformed with their own ideological views about the regime and the postwar future.[37]


Origins

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The term national revolution had been widely used by the far-right in pre-war France at least as early as 1933.Ideology

See also

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Citations

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  1. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 71.
  2. ^ Vinen 2006, pp. 71–73.
  3. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 72.
  4. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 73.
  5. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 73-4.
  6. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 74.
  7. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 50.
  8. ^ Fishman 1991, p. 54.
  9. ^ a b Fishman 1991, p. 40.
  10. ^ a b c Fishman 1991, p. 41.
  11. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 75.
  12. ^ a b Fishman 1991, p. 42.
  13. ^ Vinen 2006, pp. 76–7.
  14. ^ a b Fishman 1991, p. xvii.
  15. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 77.
  16. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 89.
  17. ^ a b Vinen 2006, p. 85.
  18. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 80.
  19. ^ Vinen 2006, p. 78.
  20. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 3.
  21. ^ Ginio 2000, p. 293.
  22. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 18–19.
  23. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 44.
  24. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 20.
  25. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 19.
  26. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 38.
  27. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 42–43.
  28. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 47.
  29. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 144–5.
  30. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 48.
  31. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 49.
  32. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 149.
  33. ^ Jennings 2004, p. 131.
  34. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 130, 135.
  35. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 151.
  36. ^ Jennings 2004, pp. 154–5.
  37. ^ a b c Vinen 2006, p. 76.

References

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  • Vinen, Richard (2006). The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-713-99496-4.
  • Ginio, Ruth (2000). "Marshal Petain Spoke to Schoolchildren: Vichy Propaganda in French West Africa, 1940-1943". The International Journal of African Historical Studies. 33 (2): 291–312. doi:10.2307/220650. ISSN 0361-7882. JSTOR 220650.
  • Jennings, Eric T. (2004). Vichy in the tropics: Pétain's national revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-4179-8.
  • Fishman, Sarah (1991). We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-04774-6.
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