“‘Vichy Republican?’ French City of Vichy Sues for Slander.”
For the moment, no such headline has appeared in the French press. But if our chattering class continues to use the phrase -- used this week by George Will and seemingly coined by the filmmaker Ken Burns -- the Vichyssois might start to take exception. The moniker, they could justly claim, conceals as much as it reveals in the parallel between this American moment and what the French call les années noires.
What Burns, Will, and Co. overlook is that the Vichy regime took power at a moment when France’s political, civil, and military institutions disintegrated under the hammer blows of the German blitzkrieg. Stunned by France’s sudden and seismic military defeat, even men who would become celebrated resistance fighters did not resist. For example, after his failed suicide in 1940, the iconic resistance leader Jean Moulin returned to his post as prefect and, for a few months, worked smoothly with the local German military authorities. The famed novelist François Mauriac, who subsequently became the voice of Catholic resistance, dismissed Charles de Gaulle as “purely symbolic and impractical.”
The writer Simone de Beauvoir rightly described this period of utter confusion and chaos as a temporal “no-man’s land.” By contrast, the long 16 months of the primaries and presidential campaign offered a landscape the so-called Vichy Republicans had ample time to recognize. If we think of the GOP as a Maginot Line, Trump did not outflank it. Instead he asked for the keys and lumbered right through.
No less important, the motivations of French politicians who supported Philippe Pétain’s assumption of power in 1940 differ considerably from Republican politicians who fell in with Trump’s rise to power in 2016.
Unlike our former real estate and reality show star, Pétain was a celebrated war hero who had positioned himself above parties and politics. In a word, to be a Pétainist in 1940, unlike a Trumpista in 2016, did not initially mean what it eventually came to mean. Rather than a German collaborationist -- which he eventually revealed himself to be -- Pétain first appeared to a traumatized nation as the guarantor of stability and honor. Tellingly, even certain Resistance leaders like the archconservative Henri Frenay, founder of Combat, remained Pétainist long after they went underground, while leftwing intellectuals like Jean Paulhan insisted that Pétain “could be useful.”
Now, these dramatically different contexts do not undermine Burns’ parallel. When he introduced the phrase Vichy Republican, many terrifying traits he saw in Trumpism seemed like a reprise of Vichy. Consider the incipient proto-fascism, tribalism, and anti-immigrant nativism that Trump has channeled and cheered, as well as “the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies and African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line.” Events have since confirmed Burns’ take on the near future.
But along with those differences already cited, there remains one last crucial distinction between the two regimes and their respective enablers. The political scientist Stanley Hoffmann famously described Vichy as the “revenge of minorities” -- a motley collection of monarchists and traditionalists, anti-Semites and Catholics who had been sidelined by the 20th century. Of course, many of those who made the pilgrimage to Vichy, like Pétain’s second-in-command Pierre Laval, were mere opportunists in search of a second act. Many others, however, were true believers who were committed to making their reactionary and repellent idea of France great again.
In this respect, the French bag of mixed nuts differs from the nuts now in charge of our country. The argument can be made, of course, that many of those who have rallied to Trump -- from coal miners to Christian evangelicals -- were marginalized during the Obama years. But the argument, while valid, goes only so far. Unlike those who rallied to Vichy, the most important minority represented by Trump’s administration is our country’s one percent. In their way, they too want revenge, but in their lust to raze existing environmental and financial regulations what they mostly want is to become even richer.
This is where the Burns and Will comparison ultimately misleads. When I asked Robert Paxton, the world’s leading authority on Vichy France, what he thought about the phrase, he replied not much. At best, he said, it “can be applied to the GOP only at the highest level of abstraction.” Checking off the many historical elements that distinguish Vichy in 1940 from the District of Columbia in 2017, Paxton suggested a different historical parallel. Referring to the Nazi-installed puppet regime in Norway, he drily noted: “Quisling Republicans is a term that works somewhat better.”
Still, in practical terms, these historical comparisons do not get us very far. It is probably as pointless to appeal to the better angels of those driven by unspeakable ideologies as it is to those driven by unbound avarice. Rather than either Quisling Republicans or Vichy Republicans, future historians will just have to settle for Trump Republicans.