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France Forever has a membership of 6,000, offices in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Cleveland, California and Louisiana (where waiters and patrons alike of Antoine's, Galatoire's and other famed restaurants belong). Most of its members are U. S. citizens of French extraction who have lived in France. It broadcasts to France, both Occupied and Unoccupied, to North Africa, Free French Africa and French Indo-China; studies letters written from France and her colonies; uses them for propaganda purposes.
Many a Frenchman now in the U. S. hesitates to support France Forever for fear of reprisals against his family in France. To Engineer Houdry there is no middle ground between being for and against Adolf Hitler. "We are at war with Hitler and his bandits," says he. "We have got to fight those sons of bitches. A Frenchman who does not fight now is just plain skunk."
Most troubled of all the exiles and Francophiles in the U. S. are those who, for one reason or another, are wholeheartedly with neither Vichy nor De Gaulle. These include sincere humanitarians such as General Pershing and the Quakers; such longtime Francophiles as J. P. Morgan's sister Anne, who drove an ambulance in France last May and June and who, since the Vichy Government came to power, has let her American Friends of France lapse. And they include such patriotic and tough-minded French citizens as Count Raoul de Roussy de Sales, onetime U. S. correspondent for Paris-soir, and Eve Curie, who is in danger of losing her citizenship through a decree enacted in Vichy this week denationalizing those who "engage in propaganda calculated to hinder national reconstruction."
This group believes that France Forever does not go far enough, that the De Gaulle movement must have a political aim if it is to succeed in reconquering France. That aim: to bring true political, economic and intellectual freedom to the Western world. It is an aim not dissimilar from that of British liberals who conceive of the war as social revolution (TIME, Feb. 17). This French group believes that Vichy is committed to collaboration, if not to capitulation, and that collaboration will be used by appeasement-minded people in the U. S. to argue that Hitler can be got along with.
U. S. Policy toward the Vichy Government is partly responsible for the confusion in the U. S. about Vichy. U. S. policy, as well as it can be defined, is both humanitarian and opportunistic. It is to send relief to France as long as—but no longer than—the sending of relief stiffens Marshal Pétain's backbone and keeps Vichy from all-out collaboration with Hitler. The hope is that so long as France, and Spain as well, depend on the U. S. for food, Hitler cannot present a united, totalitarian Europe to the world. And if that day is postponed long enough, it may never come. Some other day, conceivably, France may once again throw in her lot with her old Ally.
All of which has helped the task of French Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye, who with unconcealed satisfaction often gazes at a huge picture over the mantel in his chancellery. It is a photograph of Marshal Pétain, and under it is this inscription :