Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (16 page)

On the hot and sunny morning of 9 July, Clara and Aldebert watched the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate convene in the theatre of the Vichy Casino. Other fashionable, well-dressed women joined Clara in the gallery to witness the death of the Third Republic. By 395 votes to three, the lower house abolished the 1875 Constitution. The Senate, urged by Pierre Laval and its president, Jules Jeanneney, voted for abolition 225 votes to one. The dissenter was Aldebert’s 75-year-old brother, Pierre, Marquis de Chambrun. He was the Senate’s sole American member, who had come from German-occupied Lozère with his wife, Clara’s cousin Margaret, to defend the Republic. Despite her brother-in-law’s republican convictions, Clara’s sympathies lay with Laval and Pétain’s project for a new France of order, hierarchy and discipline.

When the next day, 10 July, dawned, Polly Peabody noticed a change of mood in Vichy: ‘During that morning, the halls of the big hotels, the streets, the public squares, were full of little groups of agitated men, discussing, arguing, weeping, repudiating blame, while some paced nervously up and down alone, their eyes riveted on the ground.’ The people outside wept and argued, and the two houses of parliament met together in the Casino as the Assemblée Nationale. The resolution before them was whether to grant ‘full powers to the Government of the Republic under the authority and signature of Maréchal Pétain in order that he may promulgate by one or more acts a new Constitution for the French State’. Short of declaring war, which would require the Assembly’s approval, Pétain would be given carte blanche to rule by decree. The morning session was held in secret, although few of the parliamentarians used the opportunity to launch a vigorous opposition to the proposed dictatorship. In a committee meeting that afternoon, Laval inserted language into the resolution that increased Pétain’s executive and legislative authority–eradicating the Republic’s separation of powers. The Free Zone would be a tyranny, royalist in its prerogatives yet subject to the fiat of the occupier in the north.

In the late afternoon, the National Assembly reconvened in public. Observing from the visitors’ gallery were Ambassador Bullitt, Clara de Chambrun, Polly Peabody and the grandes dames of the emerging Vichy elite. Edouard Herriot, president of the Chamber of Deputies, rose to declare that the absence of the legislators most likely to vote against the motion made the exercise a sham. William Bullitt cabled President Roosevelt that Herriot’s speech was

Laval added that he, Maréchal Pétain and other patriotic Frenchmen, in contrast, had refused to abandon the sacred soil. The implication was that parliamentarians, like Georges Mandel, who sought to carry on the war from North Africa were deserters. (When the deputies disembarked from the
Massilia
in Casablanca, the Pétain government’s representatives arrested them.)

In the early evening, the votes were cast: 509 for Pétain’s dictatorial powers against eighty opposed. Bullitt heard a lone voice cry out, ‘
Vive la République, quand même!
’ ‘Long live the Republic, just the same!’ He noted, ‘The last scene of the tragedy of the death of the French Republic was well placed in a theatre.’

Among the eighty dissidents was Pierre de Chambrun, the only senator to vote against abolishing the Constitution the day before. When Maréchal Pétain saw Aldebert de Chambrun, he called to him in the street, ‘Say there, Aldebert, your brother voted against my constitution. ’ De Chambrun replied, ‘Yes. You know, he has always been a liberal … the only one in the family.’

Senator Henry-Haye took Polly to meet Maréchal Pétain, who had been awaiting the result at his usual table in the Hôtel du Parc’s Chanteclerc restaurant. ‘I was introduced as the young American girl who had travelled through chaotic Europe doing a lot of things and who still wanted to do a little more for France,’ Polly wrote. ‘The Marshal arose and shook my hand, and said something about admiring American girls because they were so “
débrouillardes
” [resourceful] and, unlike French girls, managed everything by themselves, without any help.’ Pétain invited her to sit, and he told her, ‘I am going to Versailles in two weeks. This time I have quite made up my mind. I have sent word to the Germans to evacuate the premises.’ The 22 June Armistice Agreement permitted the French government to move to Versailles, but Pétain had no force with which to compel the German occupier to evacuate any premises. Perhaps he was bluffing to impress the
débrouillarde
American girl. He even told her that he ‘had had his suitcase more or less ready’. Like most of France that summer, Polly was sympathetic to the aged roué: ‘Of all the people, young and old, who were present, the Marshal was probably the oldest and yet he looked far younger than many of his juniors … he struck me as being what, for want of a better expression, I would call a “fine figure of a man”, and very alert to the happenings of the moment, that is to say, as many happenings as reached his ears, for I think that a lot was carefully kept from him.’

Maréchal Philippe Pétain had become, at the age of 84, both ‘head of state’ in the so-called French State that replaced the French Republic and prime minister. His deputy, or vice-president of the council of ministers, was Pierre Laval. The only people, as well as the only Americans, on intimate terms with the two most powerful men of the new Vichy regime were Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun. Pétain was an old friend, who had been Aldebert’s military instructor and his commander in the Great War and Morocco. Laval’s family and the Chambruns had been close since their children married in 1935. Clara, although enthusiastic about the new leadership, spotted danger in the court forming around Pétain: ‘Without suspecting that his entourage was working for its own aggrandizement, the Marshal became in fact their prisoner.’ She watched the old soldier being cut off from reality: ‘A row of high screens separated the regular habitués of the Hotel du Parc from the Chief of State and the guests whom he daily invited.’ Her scepticism did not prevent her from succumbing to the reflected attention. ‘What a kowtowing and flattery went on: What glances of envy were darted in our direction when, as he often did, Marshal Pétain came to join us for coffee in our corner!’

William Bullitt, despite his respect for Pétain, preferred not to be accredited to the Vichy government. Roosevelt had asked for Bullitt’s help in the 1940 presidential elections, when he would stand for an unprecedented third term. He also dangled in front of his outspoken ambassador the possibility of a cabinet appointment if he won. Bullitt left Vichy for Spain with his secretary, Carmel Offie, and his Chantilly neighbours, the Gilroys. He had issued Dudley Gilroy, a reserve officer in the British Army, an American passport to help him over the Spanish border. The Spaniards were sending British subjects back to France, where they risked internment. As cover, Bullitt listed the Gilroys as his valet and maid. Dudley carried off his part, but the regal Frances aroused suspicion. One Spanish official commented, ‘She is not a maid.’ Carmel Offie took him aside and said, ‘Of course not. Don’t you understand that the ambassador has a mistress?’ The Spaniard admitted them at once.

In Bullitt’s absence, Robert Murphy became chargé d’affaires at Vichy. ‘In those first weeks at Vichy,’ the red-haired Milwaukeean wrote,

Washington maintained diplomatic relations with the Vichy government. At the same time, Roosevelt circumvented America’s 1939 Neutrality Act by sending weapons to Britain. Murphy and his small staff worked late into the night, doing political and consular work. He set out to ‘sell’ the American position of pro-British neutrality to Pétain and Laval. ‘The old soldier and the suave lawyer-politician,’ Murphy wrote of the head of state and his vice-premier, ‘had almost nothing in common except their conviction that Germany had won the war and that Frenchmen must somehow adapt themselves to this fact.’ He recalled his first meeting with Pétain in July 1940:

Count René de Chambrun arrived in Vichy on 19 August. Clara had not seen her only son for more than two months. A frontline soldier during the Battle of France, René had served as a lieutenant on the Maginot Line. The high command promoted him to captain and assigned him as liaison officer to the British forces at the front. His brief mission to England convinced him that Britain would hold if America provided aid. At Ambassador Bullitt’s suggestion, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud posted René to Washington as a temporary military attaché to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to send weapons to Britain. René spent two months in America, seeing Roosevelt, his cabinet, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press and Republican isolationists like his Aunt Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Ohio Senator Robert Taft. On returning to France via Spain, René went first to Châteldon to see his wife, Josée. The next day, at Vichy’s Hôtel du Parc, he told Clara and Aldebert what he had accomplished in the land of their births.

It was an impressive story. On 12 June, two days before Paris fell, René’s Yankee Clipper touched down in the water off Long Island’s La Guardia Field. A Pan Am employee handed René an urgent message from Marguerite Lehand, FDR’s longtime private secretary and, unknown to René, sometime mistress of Ambassador Bullitt. It asked him to call President Roosevelt as soon as he reached his hotel, the old Ritz, in Manhattan. When he called, ‘Missy’ Lehand told him, ‘The president wants to see you as soon as possible.’ René turned up at the White House the next day to be greeted by the president, ‘Happy to receive you, cousin!’ Roosevelt asked, ‘Are you going to win this war?’ René answered, ‘That depends very much on you.’ Later, FDR welcomed him to the presidential yacht, the converted 165-foot Coast Guard cutter
Potomac
. Also on board were financier Averell Harriman, who was advising Roosevelt on foreign affairs despite his business interests in Germany, and Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins. René wrote later to a friend about the cruise: ‘Radiograms reporting the advance of the German army through France kept coming in and when it was about 7 p.m. the President was informed that the German army had crossed the Loire. He turned towards me and said, with deep feeling in his voice: “René, the show is over” and then, after a silence of a few seconds, he added, “I really think Britain will be unable to hold out.”’

René repeated what he had told Bullitt at the embassy in Paris: ‘I maintain that Britain, entrenched in her island, is invincible, thanks to her fleet, her fighter force, which is becoming the best in the world, a good antiaircraft defense, which must be reinforced immediately, and ground forces, which have been miraculously rescued.’ Roosevelt, a sagacious politician whose private views already accorded with René’s, needed less persuading than René imagined. He had already arranged for 3,100 planes purchased by France but embargoed under the Neutrality Act to be sent via Canada to Britain.

Running for his third term as president, Roosevelt had pledged not to send American boys to die in Europe. Yet he was trying to help the British to stop the Germans and their threat to American interests in the western hemisphere. FDR saw in his young Franco-American cousin an ally who could lobby for the additional arms that Britain needed without seeming too close to the administration. FDR wrote a list of twenty-two influential Americans that René needed to persuade. They included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Treasury Secretary Hans Morgenthau and
New York Daily News
publisher Joe Patterson. When Missy Lehand suggested René meet important women, FDR added a twenty-third name, his wife Eleanor’s. René saw Mrs Roosevelt, who was also his cousin, the next day. He toured the United States, using family members, like his Aunt Alice, who was as powerful within the conservative wing of the Republican Party as his cousin Eleanor was among New Deal Democrats. Alice, Teddy Roosevelt’s only daughter and René’s ‘favorite aunt on both sides of the Atlantic’, arranged an important dinner with Senate Republican leader Robert Taft and Joe Patterson. René undoubtedly knew that his mother disliked Aunt Alice. Clara had sided with her brother, Congressman Nicholas Longworth, in his many marital disputes with his wife, who was notoriously temperamental. Alice had once caught her husband in flagrante with her closest friend, Cissy Patterson. Although the flamboyant and red-headed Cissy was Joe’s sister, she went to work for his national newspaper rival, William Randolph Hearst, as editor of the
Washington Herald
. Whenever she could, Cissy published malicious gossip about Alice. René may have been aware of the tortuous background, but the dinner was business. He convinced both Taft and Joe Patterson not to oppose FDR’s proposed increase in military spending. Producing more American weapons would make some available to Britain.