(See Cover)
From Vichy last week came news that Chief of State Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was moving ever closer toward the "collaboration" that Adolf Hitler wants. The Marshal appointed a new Ministry in which the name of no enemy of collaboration appeared, a new five-man Cabinet top-heavy with portfolios for the man who has taken over the task of arranging collaboration, Admiral Jean François Darlan. The Admiral is now Premier, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Navy, Minister of the Interior, and the Marshal's designated successor.
In Paris newspaper and radio attacks on the "Vichy vermin" suddenly stopped. At a dinner given by German industrialists the two chief proponents of all-out collaboration (i.e., submission), square-shouldered Jacques Doriot and round-shouldered Marcel Déat, had been told to try to smooth Paris-Vichy relations and they appointed a committee to do so. Two members of this committee promptly got jobs with the Vichy Government: Doriot's lieutenant, Paul Marion, as Secretary for Information, and one Benoist Mechin, editorial writer for the anti-Semitic Gringoire, as Assistant General Secretary to Admiral Darlan.
Probably because it could not do otherwise, perhaps on orders relayed from Berlin to Paris to Vichy, Marshal Pétain's Government bowed to the Japanese dictate in French Indo-China. At Gannat near Vichy a military court passed its first sentences on Army and Navy officers accused of helping "Free French" General Charles de Gaulle. Four of them were sentenced to ten to 20 years at hard labor for spreading De Gaulle propaganda in the armed forces.
All this was bad news for De Gaullist Frenchmen and for all those Frenchmen, in and out of France, who want Great Britain to win the war and France to help her to do so. In New York General de Gaulle's political representative, Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, announced that the General would not recognize any infringement on French territory consented to by Vichy. In Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa, De Gaullist General Edgard René Marie de Larminat accused Vichy of allowing the Germans to disorganize French North African possessions, declared that French aircraft factories were making war planes for Germany. In London Count Jacques de Sieyes, De Gaullist agent newly arrived from the U. S., announced: "The French people are not only starving, but absolutely ready for revolt — if they had the means to carry it out."
Many Frances. Pundits have said that there are now three Frances: Occupied France, Unoccupied France and the "Free France" of General de Gaulle. It is not so simple as that. Through sentiment, self-interest and necessity Frenchmen have become so divided among themselves that to be a Frenchman is to be the victim of many contradictions and confusions. For example:
> In Paris a small group of politicians and would-be Gauleiters control the press and the radio, try to sell their brand of collaboration to the French people. But the people of Occupied France, in daily contact with their conquerors, detest them only a little less than they hate the traitors who collaborate with them in spreading anti-British propaganda (see cut, p. 25). These people put their hopes in De Gaulle.