The Marshal Gets the News

German officers appeared in Vichy one day last week and fear swept through the town. But the people of Vichy soon learned that the officers were not part of an occupying army. They were members of the Armistice Commission which sits at Limoges, come to attend the funeral of a French colleague, Captain Rousseau, who had been killed in a motor accident. Nevertheless, fear was the dominant emotion in the capital of unoccupied France last week.

The terms of Adolf Hitler's new demands had come at last. They were not made public but their general tenor was known. Marshal Henri Philippe Petain learned of them by telephone from his Ambassador to Paris, Count Fernand de Brinon. They were harsher than the old Marshal had expected. Not only did Hitler want the restitution of Pierre Laval to power to insure the "collaboration" he demands, not only did he want passage for German troops across Tunisia for an attack on the British in Libya (TIME, Feb. 3), but he also now wanted to occupy Mediterranean ports in France as well as in North Africa. These demands went far beyond the Armistice terms General Charles Huntziger signed in the Compiegne Forest last June.

People who saw 84-year-old Marshal Petain after he had heard this news reported that he was calm and serene. But France's Chief of State was going through the same mental and emotional experience that had broken such men as Austria's Kurt von Schuschnigg and Czecho-Slovakia's Eduard Benes. Like them he tried to make little concessions, apparently unwilling to believe that the only concession that ever satisfies Adolf Hitler is capitulation. The old Marshal forced the resignation from his Cabinet of Minister of Justice Raphael Alibert, one of his closest advisers and the man who brought about the downfall of Pierre Laval. He appointed 40 "men of thought and action" to correlate French political activity into a single party. That was not nearly enough.

The German authorities fined the occupied city of Bordeaux 2,000,000 francs for an attack on a soldier by a civilian. From Paris, capital of the collaborators, the radio broadcast bitter attacks on Marshal Petain's entourage. In Paris Marcel Deat, the totalitarian-minded history professor and editor of L'Oeuvre, announced the formation of the collaborators' own single party. Called the Rassemblement National Populaire (National Popular Assembly), it is the newest incarnation of the Parti Unique which Deat and Fascist Gaston Bergery plugged in Vichy last summer. It aims to promote France's alignment in the German scheme of things, including the joint exploitation of Africa.

Though Pierre Laval's name was not mentioned, two of his henchmen, Pierre Cathala and M. de Fontenoy, were sponsors of the new party. Evident object of Laval, Deat & Co. was to force the Marshal to replace the coterie which now surrounds him with Laval, Deat & Co.

What happened next depended on the stiffness of the Marshal's spine. He sent his new No. 2 man, Admiral Jean Darlan, to Paris to try to soften Hitler's demands. The Admiral had no sooner arrived than he stated flatly: "I affirm that the French Fleet is absolutely and will remain under complete French jurisdiction and that it will defend the Empire against any challenge whatsoever." But Admiral Darlan had authority to agree to Laval's reinstatement provided Marshal Petain retained supreme power.

If the Marshal's spine became too pliant, Hitler would eventually treat France as he had treated the other countries he has conquered. If it became too stiff, anything might happen, including the breakup of France. With De Gaulle on one side and Deat on the other and the Marshal in the middle, France was already not one country, but three.

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