The crucial paragraph is just below here for those that can't be bothered reading it all, but I would recommend you do:
Blood and Iron versus Bread and Wine, the Sad Fate of France in a German Europe
At the beginning of Arthur Koestler’s extraordinary book ‘The Scum of the Earth’ he ponders on what was - in 1939 - the great unsolved problem of Europe. How could France, a country of bread and wine, co-exist next door to Germany, a nation of blood and iron? Germany must surely dominate, thanks to its greater population and its industrial and economic might. The war of 1871, and French defeat by Prussia, had shown how powerful Germany was. The costly victory of 1918 had shown just how much blood France would have to shed to stay out of Germany’s shadow.
Yet France was still, in 1939, not willing to accept German domination of Europe.
Koestler, a Communist ex-spy and journalist, a Hungarian national and general troublemaker, was rounded up by the French Republic on the outbreak of war and put into a grim prison camp for subversive aliens, at Le Vernet in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Somehow, he got out again, just in time to be caught in Paris as the Germans arrived, and to be rounded up again.
The story of his escape, quite possibly mendacious, is at the heart of this neglected book, and is a great evocation of the absurdities, terrors, miseries and hilarities of a great nation collapsing.
I have never been one of the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’ mockers of France. France is a martial nation and its people know how to fight, as I should have thought Verdun proved beyond any doubt (that’s if you had forgotten Austerlitz, Marengo, Jena and a dozen other Napoleonic triumphs, and the awkward fact that England lost the Hundred Years War – plus the even more annoying fact, for those who jeer about there being no French military victories, that the decisive American triumph over Britain at Yorktown was really the work of the French Admiral de Grasse, and of French army officers such as Lafayette. French soldiers fought on long after British troops had left via Dunkirk, and the garrison of one part of the Maginot Line refused to surrender to the Germans until personally ordered to do so by the Minister of Defence).
The story of the final days of an independent France, the last meeting of a Free National Assembly, the last editions of free newspapers, is a bitterly sad one, and I see no reason to believe things would have been much different if the Germans had been able to get their army on to our Island.
So then we come to Vichy, that very curious episode, disowned by modern France but organically connected to it. Vichy was an anomaly, and like all anomalies it is very instructive. We’ve almost all seen the film ‘Casablanca’ and its ambiguous villain-cum-hero Captain Renault is by far the most interesting person in it (By the way, as far as I can discover, ‘the ‘Marseillaise’ remained the French national anthem under Vichy, which makes a bit of a nonsense of the ‘duel of the anthems’ scene in which singing it is shown as an act of rebellion). Reflecting that ambiguity, the USA and Canada both had diplomatic relations with the officially neutral Petain regime until well into the war (The US Ambassador, Admiral Leahy, was recalled in the summer of 1942). The USSR recognised Petain until June 1941, when Vichy supported Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
By contrast, British troops and airmen, especially in the Middle east, were several times in direct and often rather bitter combat with Vichy military units. The British attack on the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940 had provided the foundation for a lasting enmity. A recent interesting book (‘England’s last war Against France’ by Colin Smith describes this rather sad conflict).
Just as the French resistance has been magnified in later years, the extent of French acceptance of the German New Order has been minimised.
After Charles de Gaulle, who by sheer force of personality revived France as a major country and maintained its independence of action within the European Union (as it then was not), the most important French politician of recent times was Francois Mitterrand, the last Socialist president of that country.
There is still what is called ‘controversy’ about exactly what Francois Mitterrand was doing in the Vichy era. His modern supporters make out that, even if he appeared to be working for the Vichy regime (as he did appear to be) he was in reality toiling under cover for the Resistance. He is even supposed to have accepted a medal from the Petain state, the Francisque, because he had been ordered to accept it for the purposes of maintaining his Resistance cover.
Well, maybe. When the award of the Francisque to Mitterrrand was originally revealed in post-war France, he denied having received it at all. Why do that if he had accepted it as cover for some noble act of courage in the resistance? Then there was the odd story of his arranging to have a wreath laid annually on the grave of Marshal Petain (the Vichy head of state). My guess is that , like many intelligent Frenchmen of the time, he was facing both ways, waiting to see who won. Maybe he continued to face both ways, just a little, and perhaps to feel that he had good excuses for doing so.
We have to remember that until the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942, most people on the European continent were resigned to living under Berlin domination for the foreseeable future. Typical of these was the interesting (and ultimately repellent and disgraceful) Pierre Laval, an originally socialist politician of some significance and intelligence, who concluded in 1940 that the future was German and acted accordingly, so ending his days in front of a firing squad after a pretty wretched parody of a trial. I wonder who his British equivalent would have been, had the situation arisen?
But to return to Mitterrand, he was President of France when German diplomatic power once again became irresistibly dominant on the European landmass, after reunification of Germany in 1989. And it was under his Presidency that France participated in the accelerated integration of Europe pushed through by another French socialist, Jacques Delors, and the European Community became the embryo state now known as the European Union. It is my theory that this EU, though not as some say a ‘Fourth Reich’ does attempt to deal with Koestler’s conundrum – how can France, proud, patriotic, independent-minded, co-exist with Germany without losing her dignity? The French, confronted with the horrible choice between the two ‘V’s, Verdun or Vichy, can hardly be blamed if instead they choose Brussels. Nor can the Low Countries and Denmark, who have well understood since 1940 that their sovereignty is conditional upon German goodwill (by the way, the model occupation of Denmark by Germany is a historical episode which has had far too little attention. Denmark had a Social Democratic government and a functioning Parliament until the end of 1941, though it was under Berlin control at the time). As for Italy, well, that’s still more complicated. This isn’t the occasion for a re-examination of the Hoare-Laval Pact, but I wonder what would have happened if it had gone ahead. Yes, it was the same Pierre Laval.
For France (whose dreams of independent power perished, as did ours, at Suez in 1956), the EU has been a clever arrangement to provide grandeur and soothe feelings in a time of decline. I have discussed elsewhere the Elysee Treaty of 1963, under which France long ago agreed to share domination of Europe with Germany. The bargain has been very fruitful for France because of the Common Agricultural Policy, because of France’s unchallenged seat on the United Nations Security Council, because of France’s continued maintenance of a nuclear strike force and of some of the most significant conventional armed forces in the world, not to mention maintaining its equivalent of the British Commonwealth, the ‘Francophonie’.
Germany, meanwhile, has been able to get on quietly with becoming the industrial and economic superpower of Europe, the chief power in the European Central Bank, using the Euro as a means to devalue the Deutschemark and so aid its exports to non-EU countries. It has also been able to resume, peacefully, the diplomatic directions which it has been seeking since 1871 – domination of the Balkans and the Baltic states, also of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Carpathia and the Western Ukraine (look at the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for a map of pre-Hitler German aims in the east, plainly stated, and see how many of them have now been achieved under the banner of the EU).
I do not think a new president in France will really be able to challenge this arrangement, or much want to, whatever the election rhetoric may have been. The whole EU seems to me to be an admission that it simply is not worth anyone trying to question German pre-eminence any more. That is what pro-EU apologists mean when they say that the EU has ‘prevented war in Europe since 1945’. It has prevented it by bringing about longstanding German foreign policy aims, by consent and peacefully, and without the national humiliation and bankruptcy attendant on war and subjugation.
By the way, these German aims pre-existed Hitler and were held to by democratic and respectable German statesmen, including some of the July plotters who sought to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi state. They should not be confused with the National Socialist polices of extermination and racial murder with which they became entangled after 1933.
This seldom mentioned but often remembered period of modern European history, the period of unquestioned German dominance between Dunkirk and Stalingrad, is one of the many reasons why Britain, which was not militarily defeated or occupied, and did not suffer a tyranny of its own making before 1945, simply is not suited to EU membership.
I mention it because of claims that Francois Hollande will challenge Angela Merkel over aspects of EU rule. I honestly doubt it. That conflict is over.
The wider question, of whether the poorer, smaller countries at the fringes of Europe are prepared to stay inside the Eurozone to suit German aims, is a different one. Unlike the central part of the European project, which is ugly but conforms to the facts of life and power, the relationship between the northern and southern European countries looks to me to be unsustainable. Spain, Greece and Portugal badly need to devalue, which means leaving the Eurozone. I am not sure how this can be avoided for much longer, though the current awful situation has endured long after many believed it would collapse.
