"Hour of Truth"

The officials of conquered France worked like beavers last week. Their apologists swore they were not Fascists, but every effort they launched was calculated to fit their battered rump of a nation into the familiar authoritarian pattern of government by suppression, censorship, alibis, purges. Echoes of "Heads will roll" Hitlerism were heard from Paris to Marseille as the Petain Government announced that onetime Premier Edouard Daladier, onetime Interior Minister Georges Mandel, onetime Navy Minister Cesar Campinchi, onetime Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos and numerous other pre-Petain Government leaders were under arrest and would be tried and punished because "they threw our country into war although they knew we were not ready to fight."

MM. Daladier, Mandel, Campinchi and Delbos had fled from Bordeaux on June 20 on the steamer Massilia, a few days before armistice agreements were concluded with Germany and Italy. Reaching Casablanca, they were held on their ship by Moroccan authorities acting on orders from Bordeaux, to await the Petain Government's decision. In Marseille last week to stand trial, sagging-jawed Daladier and his fellow scapegoats learned that they were the principal victims of a new Government decree withdrawing citizenship and confiscating the property of all citizens who left French territory between May 10 and June 30 without a valid reason.

"You have been living on lies," declared Interior Minister Adrien Marquet to his countrymen in announcing the forthcoming trials as part of an extensive domestic moral purge. "The hour of truth has sounded. . . . The rapidity of our catastrophe upset you and then you sought those responsible. It was useless to hunt widely. . . . The day they come to trial, our dead will sit on the prosecutor's bench. In the name of justice, those guilty of such political errors and military ignorance will be punished."

Sweet revenge to onetime Dentist Marquet, described as a combination of Huey Long, Don Juan and Hitler, was the purging of Daladier. In 1934 the ex-Premier suggested the possibility of a Cabinet post to Marquet. "I'll take the Interior or nothing," the latter declared and confided to a colleague, "Now that there are a couple of two-fisted men at the helm like Daladier and myself, there is nothing to fear." He did not get the post, and became anti-Daladier.

Feeling his oats last week, Minister Marquet also had advice for America. "Tell America her time is coming unless she wakes up," he advised foreign pressmen. "In 1932 when I was there, a young man with average intelligence, average brawn and average will to work could have hoped and did hope to amass enough to live comfortably. When I returned in 1939 I was astonished to find American youth no longer wished to work . . . women filling the jobs of men in industry and commerce, wearing too much make-up and refusing to bear children. I warn you . . . it is time for that nation to look to its future and wake up."

The Fat & The Lewd. The day of "fat, puffing State employes" was also past, according to Le Petit Parisien, which announced the introduction of compulsory physical training. To Vichy, after escaping the Germans three times as an artillery captain, went France's famed "Bounding Basque," tennis star Jean Borotra, to become Secretary General of Physical Education. Insisting that he is no politician, only a sportsman, Borotra announced that physical education would henceforth be as important as intellectual education, surmised that his job would be difficult because of the nation's "softness and previous indifference."

Moral purging also got under way on the Riviera, where strictly enforced bathing-suit regulations bedecked the bosoms of French society's semi-nude sun cult. In Paris the German military authorities forbade Frenchwomen to use red lacquer on their fingernails on the grounds that it was a demoralizing Jewish-Oriental habit. The Folies-Bergere was scheduled to reopen under German supervision with less exposed anatomy and a German-speaking master of ceremonies.

"Loyal Attitude." Hoping the Nazis would release food for the hungry millions of rump France, the controlled press urged a "loyal attitude" toward the conquerors, and Spokesman Marquet shouted loudly in the direction of Berlin that it was not in Germany's interest for undernourishment to breed pestilence.

More painful to Frenchmen almost than the loss of their freedom was the abolition of a time-honored prerogative to landowners of distilling their own hard liquor without paying excise to the Government. By decree the Petain Government achieved what other Governments had un successfully attempted since 1789. It outlawed home distilling, thereby in theory checking the scourge of alcoholism, reducing the contraband liquor trade and bringing a tidy excise sum into the national treasury.

A back-to-the-farm movement began with a campaign of Nazi slogans to make the peasants "France's favorite sons." Minister of Agriculture Pierre Caziot announced that agricultural reconstruction would be accomplished by showing the peasantry their "social importance" and abolishing their "past impression of inferiority in the social scale." For industrial and office workers who will be unable to find re-employment, the Government studied a plan for the allotment of land, and a group of white-collared Banque de France employes were last week tilling a tract of land under the direction of the bank's gardener, hoping somehow to supply enough fruit and vegetables for their common table.

For women there was the old German formula of Kinder, Kirche, Kuche (Children, Church, Kitchen). "What is ruining France," wrote Le Figaro, in warning women to retire from professions and to have bigger families, "is the number of childless couples who live a selfish life appropriating two incomes from salaried positions."

"France for the French" was the slogan behind an entire series of decrees issued last week, the most significant of which provided for a review of all naturalizations granted since Aug. 10, 1927, the date of the existing naturalization law. A committee appointed by Minister of Justice Raphael Alibert will examine the case of each person naturalized since that date and will have the power to revoke citizenship if it deems the individual unworthy "of being a Frenchman. "Attracted by the ease of our life and by the prospect of quick profits," wrote Le Jour in sentences reminiscent of Germany's Alfred Rosenberg, "a crowd of half-breeds and ex-patriots have rushed to our country. Thanks to the imprudent generosity of certain politicians and the political calculations of others, French citizenship has been handed out at the rate of a battalion a month. This most precious right has been usurped by these people--they must now restore it."

Other decrees provided for the removal of any civil servant deemed unworthy of his post, and stipulated that Government jobs or commissions in the Army and Navy could be held henceforth only by persons whose fathers were French citizens. The word "Jew" was not mentioned in a single decree, but "Jews not wanted" signs began to appear in shop windows.

Phantom Arsenals. Anxious to break down the general reluctance of the people to accept dictation and to prevent growing criticism of the Government for not restoring pre-war conditions, the regimented press urged Frenchmen to realize that they cannot expect to recover "the easy life of yore." More than mere anxiety lay behind a Government decree providing the death penalty for civilians found with firearms after July 30. In the chaotic days of the armistice, control was lax and a large percentage of military equipment was not surrendered. Thoughts of this "phantom arsenal" in the hands of a desperate citizenry caused sleepless nights to the quasi-Fuehrers at Vichy.

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