Joining Vichy

To join Vichy is to survive without pride.

Vichy France, is unheroic World War II, no plucky London withstanding the Blitz, not brutal Soviet Russia smashing Hitler on the Eastern Front, not even a pitiful victim like Denmark that no reasonable person expected to do better than she did. France, more than any other great power, had won World War I and had come out of that war as (perhaps) the most powerful nation in the world.

She frittered all this away and by the Second World War, France had lost something, ended up losing a war, and concluded an armistice with Germany. She did not, quite, surrender, but the unending armistice with the Nazis was like unending fatal cancer: increasing pain and destruction. Those French who did not surrender, did not even live under direct German occupation, but tried to keep France going in unoccupied France, did what they could and every day what they did was less the best of France and more the worst of France: Vichy France. French antisemitism was ancient, the Nazis demanded ever more of what many Frenchmen were too willing to do, and one hundred thousand French Jewish people were murdered. Unoccupied is the best that can be said for the rump of France left by Hitler, the victorious Axis was all around this French area centered in resort of Vichy.

All of us wish to think that if we were in Vichy, we would have joined the resistance. Most did not. We hope that at least we would play a “double game:” officially doing what had to be done while keeping free France alive as much as possible. Vichy, after all, did some things. She kept the huge French fleet out of German hands and North Africa autonomous from the Germans. They made Hitler’s job harder in Vichy by being a speed bump to Hitler’s desires, though each year the barrier to Hitler’s desires grew smaller until in the end it was just a feeble sign of protest. Mostly the “double game” was more an excuse for how little could actually be done and the resistance, at least in Vichy, did not get going until the fact that the Germans were losing the war became obvious.

What if the Germans had won as seemed obvious in 1940? Would Vichy have been like the Russians who resisted Bolshevik tyranny in Russia only to wear down with time? White Russian generals ended up fighting for the Reds and Russia. People who went to liturgy on the sly still worked daily for the atheist regime. Many were martyred, but most compromised, a sort of Vichy Russia with no American liberation.

Vichy is to choose “between” in a world with no between. 

You might not have to join the resistance, but with Hitler, or Stalin for that matter, compromise destroys everything. They are not the normal muddle that usually faces us, but ruthless uncompromising evil.

What can be learned from Vichy?

Humility first, because if you have not been a good person trapped in Vichy, you have no idea what you will do.

You can live in Vichy, even doing some good, but the minute you do evil, Hitler owns you. For the weak, there is a way to escape in Vichy. Nobody is required to be a hero. In fact, it is morally perilous to venture beyond where your own virtue can take you as the Apostle Peter discovered when he was brave enough to follow Jesus to the courtyard, but too cowardly to avoid denying him. The honest baker can go “with this tray like always,” but if the secret police come and ask him to inform, or the impressment gangs take his son, or he is told to do evil in a hundred different ways, he cannot begin or he will not stop.

Vichy will decay to Nazi-puppet France. To be important in Vichy is, perhaps, morally impossible and so exile (as de Gaulle did) may be the only choice. If Petain, the heroic Victor of Verdun, could not find a middle way, then none of us likely can. Vichy forces the good man to aim low and be still or to go be a hero. Most of us in this God-protected Republic are ready for neither option. We aim high still, as high as our God given talents, or we dream of heroic deeds.

Vichy makes this hard and real.

The French Republic faced her Vichy moment. May God forbid and may we fight with all we have to avoid such a choice in our time for this great Republic.