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H-DIPLO Roundtable Review of Julian Jackson's _France: The Dark Years
1940-1944_ (Oxford, 2001)

Roundtable Editor: Peter Jackson

Roundtable Participants: Jackie Clarke, Rod Kedward, Simon Kitson, Peter
Jackson

H-Diplo Roundtable Editor: Diane Labrosse

[Please note that all diacritics have been removed -- DL]

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Jackie Clarke
University of Southampton


"It is not enough to write a good history book [...]; it helps to write it
at the right time".  This is Julian Jackson's comment on the impact of
Robert Paxton's _Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order_ published in 1972.
Some months ago, Robert Zaretsky's review of Jackson's _France: The Dark
Years 1940-1944_ on H-France highlighted the extent to which Jackson's
interpretation, and Vichy historiography generally, remain in Paxton's
debt; yet Jackson's book is also a very different venture from that of
Paxton thirty years ago and it is perhaps these differences which make
this too a book of its time.

Vichy historiography is undoubtedly, to borrow Zaretsky's phrase, the
house that Paxton built; but in 1972 what was most significant about
Paxton's book was the house that it demolished.  Paxton's task was to
explode a myth and his passionate deployment of new archive material made
his work one of the great historiographical demolition jobs of its
generation.  In contrast, Jackson's book takes stock of three very
productive decades of research, focusing not just on Vichy but on a host
of other aspects of life in France from the defeat to the liberation.  No
other work rivals this study in scope.  Moreover, it has appeared at a
moment when our understanding of the period has become increasingly
complex and fragmented, and when collective memory of the occupation years
has lost something of the moral clarity that once seemed to prevail; in
this sense, the early 1970s were surely simpler times.  One of Jackson's
achievements is to have written a book for complex times, while retaining
the clear sense of moral and political responsibility that has long
characterised the best work in the field.

If Jackson is an accomplished historian of wartime France, it is firstly
because he is such a perceptive historian of the pre-war years.  Like
Philippe Burrin's _La France a l'heure allemande_, _The Dark Years_
benefits from its author's eye for the political complexities and
ideological ambiguities of the interwar period.  The first hundred pages
of Jackson's study are devoted to pre-war "anticipations", the sheer size
of the volume allowing a coverage that other works of synthesis could
rarely hope to match.  H.R. Kedward's _Occupied France: Collaboration and
Resistance_, continues to enthuse new generations of students, but at only
96 pages long it can scarcely be compared with Jackson's vast survey.
Though rather longer, Jean-Pierre Azema's _De Munich a la Liberation_
really does begin in 1938 and makes only limited reference to issues such
as the legacy of the Popular Front or interwar pacifism.  Thus, one of the
originalities of Jackson's treatment is the extent to which it builds on a
now substantial body of work exploring continuitiesparticularly cultural
and ideological continuitiesbetween the France of the Third Republic and
that of the Occupation.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, many insights flow from astute observation
of individual itineraries and engagements.  Daniel Halevy's evolution from
left Republicanism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair to conservative
anti-Republicanism in the 1930s becomes emblematic in Jackson's account of
a declining faith in the Republic that marked a significant section of the
French elite before 1940.  At the same time, Jackson invites us to reflect
on the trajectory of Francois Perroux, the communitarian economist of the
1930s, who was actively involved in several Vichy projects, before
pioneering the application of Keynesianism in France after 1945 and
contributing to the development of Third World economics.  Many of the
pre-war itineraries discussed did culminate in support for Vichy in 1940,
but Jackson is careful throughout not to set up a teleology.  Indeed his
preference for the term "anticipations" rather than continuities is not
without significance in this respect.  He avoids an excessively
dichotomous discussion about breaks versus continuities, concluding that,
without the radical discontinuity represented by defeat in 1940, "there
would have been no Vichy regime", though without the pre-war trends which
he analyses, "the Vichy regime would not have taken the form that it did"
(p.27).  If there was an internal crisis in France in the 1930s, Jackson
reminds us, the Vichy regime was not simply the product of that crisis,
not least as a provisional solution had already been provided by Daladier
in 1938 (p.143).

Jackson's portrait of pre-war France is one which privileges not just the
political polarisation of the Popular Front years, but the phenomenon of
political fragmentation which co-existed with and to some extent fuelled
that polarisation; likewise, it highlights the historical significance of
ideas that have sometimes been dismissed as vague or marginal.  Thus,
Jackson constantly places at the centre of his narrative figures whose
positions might appear ambiguous, unexpected or contradictory.  Jackson's
Vichy is more influenced by liberal conservatives such Lucien Romier or
Henri Moysset than by Maurrassians and social Catholics (p.153); he argues
against those who dismiss the _non-conformistes_ too readily (pp.60-62);
he reminds us that there were anti-Semites and pro-Petainists within the
Resistance (pp.3-4); and fittingly, the book begins and ends with Peguy.
We are invited to read Peguy's various incarnations as a Socialist, a
Republican, a Catholic and a patriot as simultaneously held principles
rather than as a series of changes of heart (p.5).  Thus, Peguy functions
here not as another example of loss of faith in the Republic in the
post-Dreyfus era, but as a model for thinking about individuals and ideas
that seem to elude easy categorisation.

This readiness to reflect on categories that have been fundamental in our
attempts to map the French political landscape runs throughout the book:
polarised frameworks of analysis are revealed again and again as
restrictive or inadequate.  Yet, Jackson often seems reluctant to follow
the logic of this argument and tends to retain categories whose usefulness
he calls into question.  This is true, for example, of his discussion of
the tensions between "traditionalists" and "modernizers" at Vichy.
Acknowledging that competing visions within the regime cannot be reduced
to a simple pattern, Jackson nonetheless points to the "extreme polarity"
between "those favouring an organicist, Catholic society and a
decentralized, minimalist State and those who favoured an interventionist
state, mobilizing activist popular support and working for economic
rationalization and efficiency" (p.155).  It is argued that, used loosely,
this definition of the gulf between "traditionalists" and "modernizers"
remains useful.  Yet Jackson's own counter-examples are sufficiently
compelling to raise fundamental questions about the implications of
retaining the tradition versus modernity binary.  Many social Catholics,
we are told, were traditionalists in social policy but modernizers when it
came to the economy; Raphael Alibert was at once a Maurrassian
traditionalist and a modernizing member of Redressement Francais; Darlan
was a traditionalist in family policy but an economic modernizer; while
the tensions between corporatists and syndicalists do not fit the model at
all (p.155).  Indeed, one wonders how many "modernizers" were _not_ social
conservatives, particularly given the recurrence of this pattern in other
political families, such as post-war Gaullism.

It is true that there were tensions at Vichy between different kinds of
elites and different social and economic models.  This was symptomatic of
longer-term changes in the organisation of the state and the economy, the
role of technical elites and the structure of the French middle class. One
of the dangers of mapping the tensions within the regime in binary terms
is that we lose this perspective and see only divergences between
factions.  It is notable in this respect that in order to maintain the
integrity of the category "modernizer" we seem to have to hold the social
apart from the economic.  This is a move that tends to distort the class
politics of the regime and particularly of those classified as
modernizers.  The distorting effect is apparent when Jackson suggests, for
example, that while traditionalists saw corporatism as a means of
eliminating class conflict, modernizers saw it as a means of bringing
businesses into an institutional structure that would allow a
rationalization of the economy.  He concludes that "the two shared only a
common rejection of liberalism" (p.161).  Yet the elimination of class
conflict did have a place in the rationalizing agenda that had taken shape
between the wars.  This can be seen in groups like _Redressement
francais_, _Nouveaux Cahiers_, _X-Crise_ and Jean Coutrot's _Centre
d'etudes des problemes humains_, which provided an intellectual home for
those Jackson would identify as modernizers.  When Auguste Detoeuf and
Gerard Bardet took up office at Vichy institutions (the _Comite
d'organisation_ for the electrical industry and the _Centre d'information
interprofessionnelle_ respectively), they emerged from a milieu of
industrialists and organisers that had been exploring the idea of the
"organised profession" for several years.  There is a risk then that the
divergences between those labelled "traditionalists" and "modernizers"
obscure the extent to which they were disputing the same territory.  They
had in common not just their anti-liberalism, but a desire to abolish the
politics of class struggle.

As the most complete synthesis of existing research in the field,
Jackson's account is also notable for what it _cannot_ say about Vichy's
"modernizers".  Not surprisingly, the "modernizing" tendency has largely
been the domain of economic historians (broadly defined), while those
interested in the political culture or cultural politics of the regime
have been more likely to focus on areas dominated by "traditionalists"
(e.g. family and youth policy).  As a result, unlike other aspects of the
regime, the role of technical and industrial elites is more likely to be
discussed in terms of institutions or effectiveness than in terms of
discourse or ideology.  In this way the historiography risks perpetuating
assumptions about the political and ideological neutrality of technical
solutions, assumptions that are characteristic of technocratic thought
itself.  Nowhere is this problem more clearly illustrated than in the
mythologized figure of Jean Bichelonne, who constantly figures in
discussions of this subject as the archetypal Vichy technocrat.  We know
relatively little about Bichelonne and have no scholarly biography of him,
for example.  As a result, it has become standard practice to cite one of
several anecdotes about his computer-like brain, reinforcing the myth of
technocracy as apolitical by casting Bichelonne as little more than a
machine.  Noting the limitations of the sources on which he is forced to
rely, Jackson reproaches Bichelonne for his political naivety, but his
discussion broadly conforms to the standard model (p.163).  By its
limitations as well its strengths then, Jackson's discussion of tradition
and modernity at Vichy may have thrown up enough questions to invite
future researchers to go rather further in rethinking these issues than he
himself has been ready or able to go.

The most fundamental opposition structuring our understanding of the
period is of course that between collaboration and resistance, and here
Jackson debates rather more explicitly the issues raised by his own call
for a more nuanced understanding of positions adopted in occupied France.
He points to the limited usefulness of the terms "collaboration" and
"resistance", appearing to suggest at one point that "it might be more
useful to jettison these categories [...] for all but the small activist
minorities" (p.242).  He is led to this suggestion by the near
impossibility of shoe-horning into this framework figures like Frederic
Joliot, who accepted German scientists in his nuclear laboratory in Paris
in order to continue his work there, but who also became a leading figure
in the Communist Resistance.  Jackson goes on to admire the work of
Philippe Burrin, describing his concept of "accommodation", a less morally
laden term than collaboration, as "extremely useful"  (p.243).  Yet he is
reluctant to embrace Burrin's terminology wholeheartedly, retaining the
term collaboration throughout much of his discussion.

There are good reasons for this and the issue certainly requires further
debate.  Jackson reminds us that "the concept of collaboration eventually
came to structure the way people perceived their own conduct and the
conduct of others" and that, in this sense at least, "collaboration
existed" (p.243).  He also argues that, in a context where the category of
resistance is currently being expanded, as a result of the recent
exploration of resistance as a broad social (rather than institutional)
phenomenon, it is "illogical" to narrow the definition of collaboration
(p.243).  However, this is only illogical if logic demands that the terms
resistance and collaboration remain symmetrical; and part of the problem
here is surely that these terms are not symmetrical at all.  The extension
of the category "resistance" has been facilitated by the fact that it
draws on an existing scholarly concept in the social sciences, where
"everyday resistance" against political regimes or managerial practices
has been analysed in a framework which is not derived from the specific
historical experience of wartime France.  There is no equivalent sense of
the term collaboration, despite the more neutral meaning of the word in
everyday French and English.  Thus, as Jackson himself points out,
collaboration is "a historically contingent category" which had virtually
no currency in France before the Occupation and whose meaning is defined
by that wartime experience (p.243).  In his view, this is an argument for
retaining the concept, yet it also draws our attention to the need to
treat it not just as a _category_ of analysis, but as an _object_ of
analysis in itself.  Of course I am not suggesting that resistance is a
neutral, scientific and non-historically contingent category.  But it does
seem to me arguable that the term collaboration remains so marked by the
specific historical context which produced it, that it resists
reappropriation as a more nuanced, scholarly concept to a rather greater
degree than the term resistance.

Having said that, Jackson is right to identify a difficulty in moving away
from the concept of collaboration. But the problem is not logical; it is
political.  Indeed, although this may be obscured initially by Jackson's
choice of words, he has too astute a sense of the politics of history to
overlook this.  He remarks in his epilogue that "the line between nuance
and apologetics is delicate" (p.621).  Thus, if he treads more gingerly
around the category of collaboration than around some other issues, it is
surely first and foremost because he does not wish to cross this line.
Rightly, I think, Jackson argues that historians seeking to introduce a
greater sense of nuance or complexity into our understanding of occupied
France run the risk of supplying ammunition to those whose intentions are
apologetic or revisionist (p.619).  This is part of what makes the line
between nuance and apologetics so delicate; it also places a heavy burden
of responsibility on historians of the period.

Jackson's discussion of Henry Rousso's recent work is illuminating on
these issues.  Although he is careful to note that Rousso himself has no
hidden revisionist agenda and is on record as having denounced pro-Vichy
revisionism, Jackson does suggest that "in other hands", Rousso's critique
of "judeo-centrism" in the memory of the Occupation, "could become
apologetic" (p.619).  If anything, Jackson lets Rousso off lightly here.
[1] In the introduction to _Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas_, co-authored
by Eric Conan and Rousso, the authors lament that their earlier work has
often been subject to appropriations and misuses which they could not have
anticipated. [2] Yet the kind of language which Conan and Rousso go on to
use in that volume makes this defence seem, at best, naive and at worst,
disingenuous.  For example, it would have been possible to raise
legitimate questions about the impact of a phase in national memory that
paid particular attention to the persecution of Jews, without coining the
rather glib term "judeo-centrism", which resonates so clearly with a
number of well-worn anti-Semitic myths.  At a time when the French far
right had shown how successfully it could exploit the strategy of dressing
racism up in "respectable" language, this conceptualisation seems
ill-judged to say the least.  In the same volume we are told that while
anti-Semitic policy was certainly not insignificant, it is "_un des
aspects parmis d'autres de l'Occupation_". [3] For Rousso to say this in
1994, as one of France's best-known and most authoritative interpreters of
the Occupation period, without explicitly distancing himself from Le Pen's
infamous "_point de detail_" remarks, is practically to invite a
revisionist appropriation of the argumenteven if Rousso is no Le Pen.

Returning to the issue of collaboration, this salutary example begs the
question of whether we can restrict the use of the term "collaboration",
without serving an apologetic agenda.  It is a pity, from this point of
view, that Jackson does not have space for a more extended discussion of
Burrin's work, for the latter provides perhaps the best evidence that this
can indeed be achieved.  It is certainly easy to see how Burrin's emphasis
on the constraints of occupation and his concept of accommodation could be
used to support an apologetic narrative.  But Burrin sees the danger here
of collapsing moral distinctions in a narrative that denies moral and
political responsibility and tells us that everyone was just getting by as
best they could.  In response, his account retains a keen sense of the
politicisation of everyday life and the line where accommodation blurs
into collaboration.  Far from denying political responsibility he reminds
us that "_personne ne fut dispense d'un choix"_. [4] To this extent, I
would argue that it is possible to go rather further down Burrin[]s road
than Jackson seems prepared to go, without making the mistake of Rousso
and Conan.

Doubtless, not everyone will agree with this analysis.  Yet such
disagreements ultimately testify to the importance of the issues raised by
Jackson.  While his is certainly the most complete synthesis of research
on "the dark years" that we have and is likely to remain so for a number
of years, it is not a book which seeks to have the last word on the
subject.  Rather it concludes with a call for continuing investigation of
and debate about the complexities of occupied France.  Few could have
promoted this debate with the style and insight that Julian Jackson has
brought to the task.

Jackie Clarke, University of Southampton

Notes:

[1] K H Adler develops the critique further in a recent but as yet
unpublished paper, "Vichy History: The Obsessive Turn?" University of
Oxford, 28 November 2002.

[2]Eric Conan & Henry Rouso, _Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas_ (Fayard
1994), pp.13-14.

[3] Ibid., p. 269.

[4] Philippe Burrin, _La France a l'heure allemande_ (Seuil 1995), p.10.

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