The meeting at Montoire

Towards evening on 24 October 1940, at the small railway station of Montoire-sur-le-Loir in the Loir-et-Cher department, Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the French State, met Adolf Hitler. The two men shook hands on the platform in front of the saloon car of the Führer’s special train and then talked for about an hour and a half in his carriage. Two days earlier, in the same place, Hitler had spoken with the deputy prime minister, Pierre Laval, who had arranged the whole meeting. No concrete agreements were concluded. Six days later, however, Pétain said on the radio that he was “entering upon the path of collaboration”, and the photograph of the handshake went round the world.

The meeting at Montoire is widely regarded as the beginning of France’s organised collaboration with the Nazi regime. That is the view accepted in historiography and in French memory, but it calls for two qualifications. First, Montoire was in fact two meetings – Laval’s with Hitler on 22 October and Pétain’s with Hitler on 24 October – and the word “collaboration” as a political programme was uttered only in the speech of 30 October. Second, the conversation itself produced no agreement and no plan of action. Montoire thus inaugurated state collaboration as a policy that the Vichy government itself proclaimed and itself pursued, not as a set of agreed obligations.

France after the armistice

Since the Armistice of Compiègne of 22 June 1940 France had been divided. The Germans occupied the north of the country and the whole Atlantic coast, while Pétain’s government, which had settled at Vichy and in July had received full powers from parliament, governed the unoccupied southern zone, the so-called free zone. It had kept the fleet and the colonial empire, but the terms of the armistice weighed heavily upon it. More than one and a half million French prisoners of war remained in German camps. France was paying occupation costs of 400 million francs a day. The demarcation line cut the country in two, hampering trade, supplies and administration. Alsace and Moselle had, in breach of the armistice, been effectively annexed to the Reich, and the Germans were expelling people they deemed “undesirable” from them.

The armistice was not a peace, and no one in Vichy knew what fate awaited France after the war. Pétain and his ministers expected Britain soon to give way and Germany to build a new order in Europe. They wanted to secure France the best possible place in it in good time: to recover the prisoners, to ease the occupation and its costs, and above all to save the colonial empire. In domestic policy the regime was pursuing the so-called National Revolution. It did not wait for the occupier’s demands: on 3 October 1940 the government adopted the first Statute on Jews, excluding them from the administration, the army, education and the press, and the next day a law allowing foreign Jews to be interned in camps.

Meanwhile Vichy was becoming entangled in a conflict with its former ally. After the British attack on the fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July it broke off diplomatic relations with London. In August Chad, Cameroon and the French Congo went over to General Charles de Gaulle, and in September the Vichy garrison repulsed the British–Gaullist expedition to Dakar. The Vichy air force bombed Gibraltar in retaliation. In Vichy the idea took shape of exploiting these quarrels: of convincing the Germans that France would itself defend its colonies against the British and de Gaulle, and of obtaining concessions in return.

The most ardent advocate of an understanding with Germany was Laval, deputy prime minister and the Marshal’s designated successor. He believed that Germany had won the war and that France must come to terms with the victor before others did. Since the summer he had maintained close contacts with the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, who presented himself as a friend of France and confirmed Laval in the conviction that Hitler was ready to extend a hand to the defeated.

Hitler’s calculations

Hitler had his own reasons for talking to the French in the autumn of 1940. In September he had postponed the invasion of Britain, and the British had no intention of suing for peace. He was therefore looking for other ways to weaken them: a strike at Gibraltar with Spanish help, support for the Italians in North Africa, and the creation of a broad “continental bloc” against England, which besides the signatories of the Tripartite Pact was to include Spain, Vichy France and perhaps even the USSR. At the same time the first studies for a war against the Soviet Union were already being drawn up in his staffs. He needed France above all to keep a firm grip on its colonies in North and West Africa by itself, without German troops, and to keep the British and de Gaulle out of them.

The interests of the bloc’s prospective members, however, were mutually exclusive. Benito Mussolini demanded Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti from France, and General Francisco Franco French Morocco and Oran. Had Hitler promised these lands, the French empire might have gone over to de Gaulle. Had he refused, he would have disappointed his allies. In the second half of October, therefore, he set off on a journey by special train, during which he wanted to sound out the French and the Spaniards in person.

Montoire, a small town on the river Loir in the occupied zone, not far from the main Paris–Bordeaux–Hendaye line, was chosen as the venue. According to French accounts, the deciding factor was that the station stood on its own, away from the built-up area, and was therefore easy to guard, while a few kilometres away, at Saint-Rimay, there was a railway tunnel in which the train could shelter from an air raid.

Laval at Montoire, 22 October

On 22 October Abetz brought Laval from Paris to Montoire. According to Laval’s own account and many historians, the French politician expected to talk to the Reich Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and only on arrival learned that Hitler himself would receive him. In the evening he talked with him and Ribbentrop in the train. Hitler began by reproaching France for declaring war on Germany, and then set out her choice: either she would pay for the war herself, or England would bear its costs, if France helped to defeat her. Laval assured him that he sincerely and unreservedly desired co-operation with Germany and Britain’s defeat. He also proposed that Hitler should meet the Marshal on his way back. Hitler agreed and travelled on to the Spanish border.

The next day, 23 October, at the station in Hendaye, he talked with Franco. The meeting was unpleasant for him and almost fruitless: the Spanish dictator would not agree to enter the war on a fixed date, and in return for a mere promise demanded so much that Hitler preferred not to risk losing the French. He therefore returned to Montoire convinced that he could not make promises to Spain at the expense of the French empire, but without a ready proposal for Pétain.

Laval, meanwhile, went to Vichy. Pétain, although he did not much care for his deputy prime minister, accepted the invitation. According to the memoirs of the head of the Marshal’s civil cabinet, Henri du Moulin de Labarthète, before the journey Pétain invoked the example of the Peace of Tilsit of 1807, when Tsar Alexander I pretended to accept Napoleon’s proposals.

The handshake, 24 October

On Thursday 24 October Pétain drove from Vichy to Montoire. On the platform, beside a line of soldiers of the guard of honour, he was awaited by Ribbentrop and the chief of the OKW, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Hitler came forward to meet the Marshal and shook his hand. The scene was recorded by the Führer’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and by German newsreel cameramen. The old man in the kepi and greatcoat of a Marshal of France, shaking Hitler’s hand amid German officers, became one of the best-known images of the occupation.

The conversation took place in the saloon car of the train. Hitler, Ribbentrop, Pétain and Laval took part, and Paul Schmidt interpreted; his record, published after the war in a collection of German diplomatic documents, is the main source for its course. Hitler spoke of the war as won. He claimed that England was beaten and had only to admit it, and that he was organising a European, and partly extra-European, community against her. He wanted to know to what extent France was prepared to take part in it. He repeated the argument from his conversation with Laval: someone had to pay for the war, and the more France helped to defeat England, the more of her losses she would be able to recoup at the expense of British possessions.

Pétain replied in generalities. He accepted the principle of co-operation, but declared that he could not commit France to a new war without consulting the government, and that a country that had just been defeated was not prepared for one. He spoke of the fate of the prisoners, of the burden of the occupation, and of France’s wish to know what the future peace would be like. Some historians, above all François Delpla, draw attention to a passage in the record in which the Marshal speaks of readiness to defend the African possessions by force of arms against the British and de Gaulle’s men and to recover the colonies that had gone over to Free France. Others see this rather as an attempt to obtain consent for strengthening the colonial forces than as the announcement of a joint war. Laval, as two days earlier, gave assurances of his readiness for far-reaching co-operation.

Hitler made no concrete offer. He promised neither the release of prisoners, nor a shift of the demarcation line, nor a reduction in occupation costs, nor the government’s return to Paris. He referred matters of detail to the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden and to later talks. All that was agreed was that the two states would “collaborate”, and that the forms this would take would be settled later. In the evening Hitler’s train departed, and Pétain returned to Vichy.

“I enter today upon the path of collaboration”

News of the meeting and the photograph of the handshake made the front pages, and the French received them with a mixture of hope and unease. On 30 October 1940 Pétain explained them in a radio address. “Frenchmen, last Thursday I met the Chancellor of the Reich,” he began. He assured his listeners that he had accepted the Führer’s invitation of his own free will and had yielded to no “diktat” and no pressure. “A collaboration between our two countries has been considered. I have accepted its principle. Its forms will be discussed later,” he said. Then came the sentence that passed into history: “It is with honour, and to maintain French unity – a unity ten centuries old – within the framework of a constructive activity of the new European order, that I enter today upon the path of collaboration.”

The Marshal promised that thanks to this policy the country’s sufferings would ease in the near future, the lot of the prisoners would improve, the burden of occupation costs would lighten, the demarcation line would be relaxed, and administration and supplies would become easier. He stipulated that the collaboration must be sincere and free of any thought of aggression, and that the armistice was not a peace, but that France remained sovereign. That sovereignty, he said, obliged her to defend her soil, to extinguish differences of opinion and “to put down dissidence in the colonies” – in other words, to take French Equatorial Africa back from de Gaulle. He ended with the words: “This policy is mine. The ministers are responsible only to me. It is I alone whom history will judge. Until now I have spoken to you as a father. Today I speak to you as a leader. Follow me.”

The speech changed the meaning of the meeting. Hitler had not demanded a public declaration from France, and German reports on Montoire were restrained. It was Pétain who, of his own accord, called his policy collaboration and took personal responsibility for it. The word, previously neutral, from then on meant co-operation with the occupier in France.

Repercussions

Most of the French, still stunned by the defeat, were waiting to see how events would unfold and did not share Laval’s enthusiasm. According to historians who have studied the public mood of the period, among them Pierre Laborie, who drew on prefects’ reports and postal censorship, Montoire caused consternation rather than enthusiasm, and the handshake with Hitler dented confidence in the Marshal for the first time. For de Gaulle’s followers in London it was proof that Vichy had gone over to the enemy.

The British feared above all that France would hand over her fleet and her African bases to Germany. A few days earlier, on 21 October, Winston Churchill, in a radio broadcast delivered in French, had assured the French that Britain would fight on until victory, which would restore freedom to France as well. After Montoire King George VI sent Pétain a personal message, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a note delivered at the end of October, warned the Marshal that handing the fleet over to Germany would be a flagrant breach of France’s obligations and would destroy the traditional friendship between the two nations. Vichy replied that it had no intention of surrendering the fleet or attacking the British without provocation. At the same time an informal envoy of the Marshal, Professor Louis Rougier, was in London, where a modus vivendi was discussed with him. Montoire nevertheless deepened London’s distrust of Vichy.

Montoire also alarmed Mussolini, who feared an understanding between Germany and France at his expense. Hitler decided to meet him to reassure his ally and restrain him from an adventure in the Balkans. He was too late. Italy was already determined to attack Greece, and the meeting took place only in Florence on 28 October, a few hours after the Italian attack.

Nor did the occupiers intend to change their policy towards France. On 22 and 23 October, while collaboration was being discussed at Montoire, the Gauleiters Robert Wagner and Josef Bürckel deported some 6,500 German Jews from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate to the free zone, without warning the French authorities. The Vichy authorities protested but placed the deportees in the camp at Gurs at the foot of the Pyrenees. Owing to hunger, cold and disease, more than a thousand internees died there by March 1941, according to German studies. In November Bürckel expelled tens of thousands of inhabitants of Moselle regarded as pro-French to the free zone.

Place in the war

A few days after Montoire Laval took over the Foreign Ministry from Paul Baudouin and became the chief executor of the new policy. In November and early December 1940 he met Hermann Göring and Abetz, and French and German officers held talks in Wiesbaden and Paris on joint action against the Gaullists in Africa, including the recovery of Chad. Without the knowledge of part of the government, Laval also handed over to the Germans the Belgian gold that had been entrusted to France in 1940. In return France obtained little: the release of small groups of prisoners. In November Gabon passed into the hands of the Free French after brief fighting.

Laval’s independence and lack of results alienated the Marshal’s entourage. On 13 December 1940 Pétain abruptly dismissed him and had him briefly arrested. He was freed by Abetz, who came to Vichy with an escort. Two days later the Germans handed over to France the remains of Napoleon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt, which were solemnly laid to rest at Les Invalides in Paris, but Pétain did not attend the ceremony. It was Hitler’s only gesture towards France that autumn, and it was purely symbolic. Laval’s dismissal did not mean a break with the policy of Montoire. Admiral François Darlan, who then took over the government, went even further in 1941 and agreed to make bases in Syria and Africa available to the Germans, and from 1942, when Laval returned as head of government, the French administration and police took part in the deportation of Jews to the extermination camps.

For Hitler Montoire was a secondary event. He obtained an assurance that Vichy would itself defend its empire against the British, and he did not have to pay anything. He got neither French participation in the war nor an agreement with Spain, and his “continental bloc” never came into being. His attention soon turned to the Balkans and then to the east. The German diplomat Cecil von Renthe-Fink, the Reich’s delegate to Pétain in 1943–1944, said after the war that Montoire had been the greatest failure of German policy towards France, because Germany had gained nothing there, had neither won France over nor occupied the whole of it, which later made the Allied landings in North Africa easier. That is the opinion of an interested party, but it captures well the modest balance of the meeting.

For France Montoire became a symbol. In collective memory the photograph of Pétain shaking hands with Hitler stands opposite the image of de Gaulle at the BBC microphone delivering the appeal of 18 June: the one stands for collaboration, the other for continued resistance. After the war the Marshal’s defenders claimed that he had given nothing away at Montoire, and that his policy was a double game, a shield protecting the French from the worst, while Laval was its evil genius. The research of historians, above all the German Eberhard Jäckel and the American Robert Paxton, has shown that it was otherwise: it was Vichy that sought co-operation with Germany, while the Germans treated these overtures with reserve and had no intention of giving France anything. Pétain and Laval differed in style, but not in aim. The words with which the Marshal concluded his speech of 30 October, “it is I alone whom history will judge”, proved prophetic. In 1945 a court sentenced him to death for treason, and de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The station at Montoire today houses a small museum devoted to those two meetings.