Free Vichy France by Robert O. Paxton

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    More people and institutions have helped with this work than I can readily acknowledge or ever hope to repay. Research in France on several occasions was made possible by the University of California Summer Faculty Fellowship program, the American Philosophical Society, and the Research Council of the State University of New York. The Institute of Social Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley purchased microfilm for me, and the Institute of International Study at Berkeley supported a summer of work in the captured German archives in Washington.
    The staffs of several institutions helped me far beyond mere performance of duty: the U.S. National Archives (especially Dr. Robert Wolf), the Hoover Institution (especially Mrs. Agnes Peterson, curator of the Western and Central European Collections), the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, and the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale et Contemporaine, also in Paris.
    Research assistance by Janis Trapans in the German archives, Claudio Segrè in captured Italian archives, and Mrs. Mary Lynn McDougall in social statistics was invaluable. Others whose help was indispensable are M. Henri Noguères of Paris, Warden F. W.Deakin of Saint Antony’s College, Oxford, Professor René Rémond of the Institut d’études politiques in Paris, and Professor Stanley Hoffmann of Harvard. Stanley Hoffmann’s perceptions have crept into the very language in which modern France is discussed, on both sides of the Atlantic, to the point where my intellectual debt to him is too pervasive to calculate. More concretely, he read this work in manuscript form and saved me from several gaffes. So did Konrad Bieber, Richard F. Kuisel, Arno J. Mayer, and Judith H. Wishnia. I thank them all.
    Arlene Jacobs typed a complicated manuscript in record time, and Carol Brown Janeway was a knowledgeable, wise, and sympathetic editor. I am indebted to Enrique Ucelay Da Cal for preparing the index.
    These friends and helpers are in no way responsible, of course, for whatever errors, perversities of judgment, or downright idiosyncrasies may appear in this book. Those belong altogether to the author.

In the space of several days, we have lost all certainty. We are on a terrifying and irresistible slope. Nothing that we could fear is impossible; we can fear and imagine absolutely anything.
— Paul Valéry, 18 June 1940

 
     
    APPENDICES,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Appendix A
The War Question of January 1942
    No Vichy controversy better illustrates the pitfalls of seizing a few documents out of context than the war question of January 1942. Otto Abetz’ July 1943 memoir, published as Pétain et les allemands: Mémorandum d’Abetz sur les relations franco-allemandes (Paris, 1945), claimed that Vichy had wanted to declare war on the Allies following Pearl Harbor, in exchange for political concessions, but that Hitler had missed that opportunity. The prosecution before the High Court of Justice, following up this lead, got French military justice officials in Germany to look for corroboration. They unearthed Abetz’ telegram no. 126 to Ribbentrop of 13 January 1942 (now microfilmed as T-120/405/214258–60 and T-120/898/291966–68) reporting that a rump session of the Vichy cabinet (Pétain, Darlan, Moysset, Romier, Bouthillier, Pucheu, with Benoist-Méchin also present) voted on January 11 in favor of declaring war on the Allies. In November 1945 a sealed dossier of thirty-eight documents that Benoist-Méchin had given Darlan, probably in April 1942, turned up at the Quai d’ Orsay. It contained, among other papers about Franco-German relations in 1941 and 1942, two letters by Benoist-Méchin to Darlan, dated 9 and 12 January 1942, concerning French readiness to declare war on the Allies in exchange for a “profound modification” of the current Franco-German relationship. These documents figured prominently in the later trials, such as those of Jacques