Vichy?

After the interminable blather of the “fascism debate,” it was a relief to have the always thoughtful John Ganz propose a different twentieth-century analogy for America’s current political dangers. We’re not Nazi Germany, he wrote in his January 21 column, we’re Vichy: not a full-blown fascist regime, but a “partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist” one. Everyone in the former “resistance” is exhausted, Ganz wrote, and some of them seem to be, well, giving up and collaborating, just like the French in 1940. He was following upon a number of people warning about “Vichy Democrats” bending the knee to Donald Trump (for instance this Esquire column), and The Guardian has now chimed in with a long story about “Vichy America.”

As the great historian of Vichy Robert Paxton pointed out in the story, the analogy doesn’t really work: “We have not been invaded, defeated and occupied by a foreign power, only by the reactionary half of our own population.” But then, historical analogies of this sort usually don’t work. They are seductive, especially when World War II is involved. It was the great moral cause, the great battle of good and evil. Find a way to associate yourself with the good side, and you are relieved of actually having to argue your case. The alternative is Hitler! It’s no surprise that virtually every American military intervention of the postwar period was justified with the “Munich analogy”: If we don’t strike now, the argument went, we’ll be doing just what Chamberlain did at Munich in 1938, and appeasing an evil enemy. The reductio ad nauseam of this rhetorical strategy came in 2008, when a conservative commentator named Kevin James went on MSNBC and accused Barack Obama of appeasement—just like at Munich!—for advocating a withdrawal from Iraq. As the host, Chris Matthews, pushed him, it became obvious that James had no idea what had happened at Munich in 1938, or who any of the protagonists were.

But I do understand the particular attraction of Vichy as an analogy. As I have written before (including here, in The Nation, and here, in The New Republic) the moral drama of Vichy France is one of the starkest and most fascinating in all of modern history. In Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR, resistance was usually tantamount to suicide. The totalitarian state had such massive weight that it quickly and thoroughly crushed nearly everyone who dared stand up against it. But in occupied France, people had more of a real choice. Yes, resisting was hugely dangerous, and many paid for it with their lives, including the great historian Marc Bloch, and De Gaulle’s representative in France, Jean Moulin. But there were networks, places to hide. The German occupation force of 300,000 was spread thin and couldn’t count on the cooperation of all the population, or even of all Vichy officials. So did one resist? Collaborate? Simply keep one’s head down? It is no surprise that so many great writers and filmmakers have chosen occupied France as a setting: Patrick Modiano, Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Costa-Gavras, not to mention Irène Nemirovsky, who died in Auschwitz. Un village français, a 72-part French television series in a small town during the Occupation, is incredibly gripping (even when it veers into soap opera), and helped keep my spouse and myself sane during the COVID lockdowns.

Of course, the calculations changed over time. In the immediate aftermath of France’s sudden and overwhelming defeat, the shock was so severe that most of the French greeted the assumption of power by Marshal Philippe Pétain, one of the great heroes of World War I, with relief. He offered himself as a “shield” for a broken country. But soon enough, it became clear that the shield was more of a net in which the French were trapped. The ultra right-wing Pétain, and the mix of reactionaries and fascists who swarmed around him, were not content with accepting defeat, setting up a neutral regime in the unoccupied zone of southern France, and cooperating with the Germans where necessary. Instead, they took advantage of the catastrophic defeat to start a “national revolution” aimed at erasing seventy years of a republican regime, purging the left, deporting unwanted foreigners, and instilling the French with supposedly proper values. The slogan “Work, Family, Fatherland” replaced “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Within a few months, the regime enacted formal, harsh discrimination against Jews. For a couple of years, it remained easy to rationalize support for Vichy with the thought that Germany seemed the inevitable victor of the war, and only by accommodating to it, ideologically, could France hope to have a place within the new world order. But even for the rationalizers, collaboration still meant moral compromise, or worse.

Yet resistance posed moral dilemmas of its own. The Germans responded to attacks on their forces with large-scale execution of French hostages. Soon after the allied landings in Normandy, an SS unit massacred the entire population of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane: 543 men, women, and children. Yes, resistance was still justified by the greater goal of defeating Germany, but the decision to carry out attacks was often agonizing, nonetheless.

And sometimes, there were no good answers at all, as Le village français powerfully illustrates. One of its central characters is a small-town doctor who, in the chaos of the defeat of 1940, with no one else available, takes over as mayor. He has to collaborate with the German authorities but tries to keep them at arms’ length. Then, in response to an attack by the Resistance, they give him a choice. They tell him that in reprisal they will execute 20 hostages. But he and the local sub-prefect can lower the number to 10, if they personally choose the victims. After agonizing about the issue, they agree. After the Liberation in 1944, both men are arrested, and the sub-prefect ends up on the gallows.

Does any of this have much relevance to American politics today? For the most part, not really. The United States is not under occupation. No opponents of the regime are getting arrested, far less shot. Yes, that could happen. A lot of things could happen, many of them very bad. The Trump administration is making a radical, deliberately chaotic, and in part blatantly illegal attempt to wreck much of the federal government and to reshape the country’s foreign relations. For the moment, it is unclear how successful its efforts will prove, or whether they will lead to a full-scale overturning of the rule of law. The Democratic opposition has been woefully disorganized and passive. All of this makes the current moment the most consequential in recent American history, but there are many possible historical analogies beyond France in 1940: Germany in 1933; Italy in 1922; Hungary in 2010 (the most explicit model for Trump); and why not France in 1799, for that matter? No telling for the moment which of these, if any, will have much relevance to American events. As noted, historical analogies are usually misleading.

But there is one aspect of American politics for me that does, in fact, hearken back to Vichy: the abject and despicable conduct of so many Republicans. So many of them—J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Mitch McConnell, etc. etc.—once denounced Trump as a liar, conman and imbecile. Everything that has happened since has only proven their point, but pure cowardice has led them to bend the knee and repeat Trump’s imbecilic talking points. For every true idiot like Tommy Tuberville in the rank of Senate Republicans there are a dozen others who actually know better. If they could vote by secret ballot, catastrophic appointments like Hegseth, Gabbard and Kennedy would all go down to certain defeat. Their conduct recalls that of Quislings and collaborators in many brutal twentieth-century regimes, but, again, under most of these regimes, resistance was not a viable option. In the United States today, as in Vichy, it is.