Making the best of defeat

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Vae victis, the Roman warning to the defeated, was probably more threatening than sympathetic. Ever after they themselves had been subjugated — forced, literally, to bow their heads under the Samnite yoke — they made a habit of ruthless winning. The defeated could expect slavery and pillage. After June 1940, both were endured by the French for four years which had traumatic consequences. They include the cussedness of France’s foreign policy and her resentment of les Anglo-Saxons. Helping hands too get bitten.

As soon as he entered Paris, General de Gaulle set about fabricating the myth that Paris had ‘liberated herself by her own efforts’, which was much truer of Naples. As Richard Vinen says, the myth of the Resistance derived its strength from everyone’s knowledge that it was false. Had it been true, de Gaulle would have been irrelevant as a rassembleur, a national reconciler. As it was, the disparate groups of résistants, with the Communists at odds with the nationalists, were neither cohesive nor purposeful enough to take control. De Gaulle was as providential in 1944 as the majority of Frenchmen had believed Philippe Pétain to be in 1940.

The latter’s defenders promoted the myth of the Shield and the Spear: the claim that, while Pétain stalled and hoodwinked the Germans by his pretence of collaboration, de Gaulle prepared the shaft that would skewer them. In fact, most Pétainists hated de Gaulle as an insolent upstart; the Communists as a Fascist.

If the Vichy government was stigmatised as a nest of traitors, its legitimacy could hardly be questioned. Nevertheless both Pétain and Pierre Laval, his unloved and unlovely prime minister (who, unlike the Marshal, had openly proclaimed his hopes of a German victory), were condemned to death for treason, though only Laval was executed.