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After the fall of France Pétain was drafted by a reactionary bloc of deputies to reconstruct France by a "national and social revolution." Since that time his announced plans for the elimination of France's "capitalist hierarchies" have remained mere blueprints, while his proposed bans on labor unions, strikes and protests are in force today. He has developed an aptitude for sonorous political pronouncements whose vague and lofty words do little to conceal their totalitarian direction.
Thus last September he wrote in the Revue des Deux Mondes: "Not being in vassalage to any individual interest or group of interests, the new French State has the freedom, the strength and, I may add, the will to play its role of arbiter, and by meting out stern and impartial justice to assure that triumph of the general welfare over individual rights which is so important for the maintenance of national unity."
As long ago as last October, after meeting with Adolf Hitler at Montoire, Marshal Pétain declared significantly—though it was widely discounted at the time—that he and the Führer had reached "agreement on the principle of collaboration."
Last week, in short, it appeared that the Marshal's months of bargaining with Germany had been not so much to guard or improve France's position at the time, as to secure a favorable position for France in the potential Axis Order of the future.
No. 2. But perhaps the best proof of the Marshal's totalitarian sympathies lies in his choice of a No. 2 man to carry out the hard, detailed work of statesmanship that an 85-year-old soldier can hardly be expected to do. When last winter he dismissed Vice Premier Pierre Laval, whose program differed from the Marshal's only in its outspokenness, it was widely interpreted as an anti-Nazi gesture. It was also commonly said that the Marshal had ousted the only French emissary with whom the Nazis would deal. But in Vice Premier Admiral Jean Frangois Darlan the old Marshal picked a successor to Laval who has made himself superbly persona grata at Berchtesgaden and who is, in addition, much less unpopular in France than the scheming M. Laval.
The character portraits of soldiers who go to war are more than likely to be drawn quite differently before and after the fact. Prior to the fall of France, very little was made known about Admiral Darlan to the Allied press save that he was colorless but competent. The archives of London and Washington now reveal France's No. 1 sailor as quite a different personality.
Fifty-nine-year-old Jean Francois Darlan is a spruce, magnetic little figure from his flattish bald head, edged with grey hair, to his impeccably polished shoes. He has the eyes of an amused gambler and his career, as now presented, exhibits him as having the principles of a cat. Two centuries of Darlan merchant mariners (supposedly English long ago) preceded the Admiral's father, who, the Admiral says, "went wrong and became a Minister of Justice." The Admiral was born in the grey old town of Nérac, Gascony, where Darlan père was once Mayor, later a Deputy. The Admiral's godfather was the late Georges Leygues, millionaire Paris retailer and longtime Minister of Marine, who fostered Darlan's career from the beginning.