M. R. D. Foot on the new, English translation of Simon Kitson’s book
This short, telling book — it has barely 160 pages of actual text — first came out two years ago in French. It takes a fresh look at Pétain’s French state, which tried to govern defeated France from Vichy from 1940 to 1944; the unfamiliar angle of sight reveals several surprises. Those of us who do not live under authoritarian regimes are always curious about what life in them is like; here is fresh fuel for our curiosity, neatly set out by an expert.
The French intelligence services had a visceral dislike both of Great Britain (which they usually called ‘Angleterre’) and of Germany. German spying on the two-fifths of defeated France that were not yet occupied was even more widespread than it had been before the military collapse of May and June 1940. To combat it, the Vichy regime set up two secret services: Travaux Ruraux (TR), Country Works, splendid cover in a state that stressed agriculture as a vital industry, and the Bureau des Menées Antinationales (BMA), the armed forces’ counter-espionage branch. The BMA so much annoyed the Germans with its efficiency that they insisted that it be put down; which it was in August 1942, replaced at once — in the very document that put it down — by a still more secret Service de Sécurité Militaire (SSM), which continued in existence after the Germans occupied the whole of France in November 1942 (as a riposte to the Anglo-American landings in North Africa). Thereafter the SSM worked independently of its Vichy creators.
Simon Kitson, a don at Birmingham, has delved deep into the archives and memoirs of all three of these services and of the routine French police bureaucracy.
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