Unless the whole world was deceived, the Vichy Government last week squarely and publicly placed its bet on Germany to win World War II. Not only did it yield to Germany, which men in France today must necessarily do, but it also signaled its full intent to collaborate with the Nazis in forming a New European Order. The world over, democratic Frenchmen felt that at last they knew the full extent to which the great French democratic tradition had been abandoned by the men of Vichy.
One evening the aged voice of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain crackled for two brief minutes out of the little radio cabinets in French parlors and shops:
Frenchmen: You have learned that Admiral Dorian recently conferred with Chancellor Hitler. I had approved this meeting in principle. The new interview Permits us to light up the road into the future and to continue the conversations that had been begun with the German Government.
It is no longer a question today of public opinion, often uneasy and badly informed, being able to estimate the chances we are taking or measure the risks we take or judge our acts.
For you, the French people, it is simply a question of following me without mental reservations along the path of honor and national interest.
If through our close discipline and our public spirit we can conduct the negotiations in progress, France will surmount her defeat and preserve in the world her rank as a European and colonial power.
That, my dear friends, is all that I have to say to you today.
That was all—yet there were paragraphs to be gathered between the lines. This aged voice decrying public opinion was the voice which, last December, had dismissed Vice Premier Pierre Laval with the suggestion that public opinion would not support his policies. This was the voice which had last referred to "honor" by saying that it would prevent action against a former ally. This was the voice which millions had hoped, however much it was forced to say yes to the Nazis, would never echo them.
Last week the U.S. Ambassador to France, Admiral Leahy, called on Marshal Pétain and reminded him of his frequent oral assurance that Vichy would never add to her commitments to Germany under the Armistice. The Marshal had nothing to say about that, but he repeated his belief, often privately expressed, that Germany would win the war.
Other Vichy voices supplemented the Marshal's words, continued sounding the knell of French democratic hopes. The Vichy-controlled press was thick with phrases like "the common purpose of the European community. . . ." Said Vichy's official information service:
"In May 1940, when France was left in the lurch by Britain, America did not see fit to answer her appeal. Today France, anxious to preserve her position as a great power as well as the integrity of her territory and of her Empire, has certainly the right to envisage with her victory the conditions of a common reorganization of continental Europe. This in no way means that she has the intention of attacking Britain, much less the United States."