Pétain becomes Prime Minister of France

On the evening of 16 June 1940, at Bordeaux, the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned. That same evening the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, asked the 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, until then Deputy Prime Minister, to form a government. Pétain had his list of ministers ready in his pocket. Shortly before midnight the new cabinet met for a session lasting a few minutes and decided to ask the Germans for armistice terms. Around midnight the Foreign Minister, Paul Baudouin, passed the request to the Spanish Ambassador, and at noon on 17 June the Marshal announced on the radio: “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop the fighting.” After a five-week campaign France, the Allies’ second great power alongside Britain, was leaving the war.

Formally Pétain became President of the Council of Ministers (président du Conseil), as the office of prime minister was called under the Third Republic. But the change of head of government on 16 June decided more than who held the office: it decided whether France would fight on from its colonial empire at Britain’s side, or conclude a separate armistice with Germany.

The government at Bordeaux

The French government had left Paris on 10 June and for several days had been scattered among the châteaux of the Loire around Tours. There, at conferences with Winston Churchill at Briare and Tours, the Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, and Marshal Pétain argued that the Battle of France was lost. On 13 June Reynaud asked Churchill whether Britain would release France from the pledge of 28 March that neither ally would conclude a separate armistice or peace. The British Prime Minister refused. On 14 June, the day the Germans entered Paris, the ministers reached Bordeaux. Reynaud took up residence in the headquarters of the commander of the 18th Military Region in the rue Vital-Carles, while the cabinet met in the nearby prefecture of the Gironde department.

There were already two camps in the government. Reynaud, the Interior Minister Georges Mandel, the Minister of Marine César Campinchi, Yvon Delbos, Louis Marin and a few others wanted to move the government, the fleet and as much of the army as possible to North Africa and carry on the war. Reynaud proposed that on the mainland the army should capitulate in the field, as the Dutch had done in May. That would be a military act that did not bind the government. Weygand rejected this outright. He believed that a capitulation in the field would dishonour the army and place on the soldiers a responsibility that belonged to the politicians. In his view the war was lost, and only the government could decide to end it, by asking for an armistice. Pétain said that he would not leave France and that her rebirth would come from suffering at home, not from emigration. Both expected Britain to capitulate as well within a few weeks.

Reynaud had the formal right to dismiss Weygand, but he did not do so. He feared the consequences of removing the Commander-in-Chief in the midst of defeat, and he had no one to replace him. He himself had brought Pétain in as Deputy Prime Minister in May, counting on his prestige. Now that prestige was working against him.

Chautemps’s proposal

On the afternoon of 15 June the cabinet met in the prefecture at Bordeaux. Reynaud read out President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reply to his desperate appeal for help. The Americans promised supplies of material but could not promise to enter the war, since that was a matter for Congress. Mandel remembered that the Prime Minister read it “without fire, without conviction, like a lawyer reading a document”.

Then the Deputy Prime Minister, Camille Chautemps, an experienced politician of the Radical Party, put forward a proposal that he called a compromise. The government would ask the Germans on what terms they would agree to an armistice. If the terms proved unacceptable – and Chautemps argued that they would – public opinion would understand that the fight had to go on and would more readily accept the government’s departure for Algeria. The proposal offered a way out to the undecided ministers. They did not have to come out in favour of capitulation; it was enough that they wanted “only to ask”. According to the accounts of those present, most of the ministers supported it. There was no formal vote. Reynaud threatened to resign, but Lebrun talked him out of it. In the end the Prime Minister agreed to ask London to release France from the pledge of 28 March far enough for it to ask for terms.

That same day General Charles de Gaulle, Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry since 5 June, sailed from Brest for Britain to arrange shipping to carry troops to North Africa. The British were already beginning to evacuate their last units from the western ports of France in Operation Aerial.

Sunday 16 June

On the morning of 16 June the cabinet met again. Pétain read out a letter announcing his resignation unless the government asked for an armistice at once. Lebrun persuaded him to wait for the answer from London. The presidents of the two chambers of parliament, Jules Jeanneney of the Senate and Édouard Herriot of the Chamber of Deputies, came out in a conversation with Lebrun in favour of moving the authorities to North Africa.

The British reply came in telegrams that the Ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, and Churchill’s personal representative to the French government, General Edward Spears, brought to Reynaud in the course of the day. The War Cabinet agreed that France might ask about armistice terms, but on one condition: the French fleet was to sail at once for British ports and remain there until the negotiations were over. For Reynaud this was a blow. He had been counting on the British refusing, and on their refusal allowing him to win over the undecided. He also considered the condition concerning the fleet unacceptable, since the departure of the ships from the Mediterranean would hand that sea to Italy, which had declared war on France on 10 June.

The Franco-British Union

In London, meanwhile, another idea had been circulating for several days. Jean Monnet, the French chairman of the committee co-ordinating the two countries’ war production, together with René Pleven, Sir Arthur Salter and the Foreign Office’s Chief Diplomatic Adviser, Sir Robert Vansittart, had drafted a plan for a union of the two states. On 15 June the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, put a similar idea to the cabinet. Churchill was sceptical. On the morning of 16 June de Gaulle arrived in London and Monnet presented the plan to him. According to de Gaulle’s memoirs, the general asked ironically whether Monnet wanted to marry President Lebrun to King George VI. He decided, however, that a grand gesture might give Reynaud the argument he needed, and over lunch at the Carlton Club he won Churchill over to it.

In the afternoon the War Cabinet held back the telegrams about the armistice and approved the “Declaration of Union”. Its key sentences read:

France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain; every British subject will become a citizen of France.

For the duration of the war there was to be a single War Cabinet, which would direct all the land, sea and air forces of both countries and which “will govern from wherever it best can”. The two parliaments were to be formally associated. De Gaulle dictated the text over the telephone to Reynaud, who, according to witnesses, received it with enthusiasm. Churchill arranged with him a meeting of the two governments the following day at Concarneau in Brittany.

Historians still argue over how serious the proposal was. De Gaulle later wrote that neither he nor Churchill had any illusions, and regarded the declaration as a gesture intended to put heart into those who wanted to fight on. Others point out that the British cabinet formally adopted it and that, had it arrived a few days earlier, the French ministers might have considered it more calmly. On 16 June it came a few hours before the decision.

“Fusion with a corpse”

At five in the afternoon Reynaud put the plan to the cabinet. It was met with coolness, even hostility. Many ministers saw it as a trick by which the British meant, at the last moment, to take over the French colonial empire and fleet. Pétain is said to have called it “fusion with a corpse”. One minister – Jean Ybarnégaray, according to most accounts – said he would rather France became “a Nazi province – at least we know what that means” than a British dominion. Others refused to discuss the union at all until they had returned to Chautemps’s proposal of the day before.

The discussion soon moved from union to armistice. According to a tally drawn up on the basis of Reynaud’s memoirs, those in favour of fighting on were Reynaud himself, Mandel, Campinchi, Delbos, Marin, Georges Monnet, Louis Rollin, Alphonse Rio and Albert Sérol, while those supporting Chautemps’s proposal included Pétain, Chautemps, Baudouin, Yves Bouthillier, Ludovic-Oscar Frossard, Henri Queuille, Ybarnégaray and several others. Some historians, however, question this count. No vote was taken, and several ministers counted among the supporters of an armistice later claimed that they had been in favour only of asking about terms. Reynaud concluded that he had lost his majority and at about 8 p.m. resigned. Lebrun asked him to stay, but in vain.

Many historians believe that Reynaud made a mistake in equating opposition to the union, which was indeed widespread, with support for an armistice, which the majority of the cabinet need not have given at all. Reynaud himself called the failure of the union the greatest disappointment of his political life, and in later years blamed himself for having surrendered power.

The Marshal takes power

Lebrun consulted Jeanneney and Herriot, who advised him to entrust the government to Reynaud once again. According to most accounts, however, Reynaud himself named Pétain as his successor. He was counting on the Marshal discovering at first hand that Hitler would not give France honourable terms, and that power would then return to those who wanted to fight on. Lebrun sent for Pétain. The Marshal took a ready-made list of ministers from his pocket, which even his own entourage took as proof that he had long been preparing for this moment.

In the new government Chautemps remained Deputy Prime Minister. Weygand became Minister of National Defence, Admiral François Darlan – who only a few days earlier had been insisting that he would sooner take the fleet away than hand it over – Minister of Marine, Paul Baudouin Foreign Minister, and Yves Bouthillier Finance Minister. The far-right lawyer Raphaël Alibert became Under-Secretary of State to the Prime Minister, and Robert Schuman, later one of the founders of the European Community, Under-Secretary for Refugees. The Socialists, with Léon Blum’s consent, kept two ministries, in the belief that the government would soon leave for Africa in any case. Pétain wanted to give foreign affairs to Pierre Laval, but Weygand and the ministry’s Secretary-General, François Charles-Roux, objected. Laval turned down the Ministry of Justice offered to him instead and did not join the government until 23 June, as a Minister of State.

When de Gaulle landed at Bordeaux that evening with the text of the Declaration of Union, Reynaud was no longer Prime Minister. In London, Churchill, Clement Attlee, the Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair and the Chiefs of Staff were already sitting in a special train at Waterloo station, ready to travel to Southampton and from there by cruiser to Concarneau, when word came that the journey was pointless. Churchill returned to Downing Street, as he wrote, “with a heavy heart”.

The request for an armistice

Shortly before midnight Lebrun convened a meeting of the new government. It lasted about ten minutes and was a formality: the cabinet decided to ask the Germans for their terms for ending hostilities. Around midnight Baudouin summoned the Spanish Ambassador, José Félix de Lequerica, and handed him a note asking General Francisco Franco’s government to pass on to Berlin France’s request for a cessation of hostilities and for the terms of peace. The word “peace” in the note has caught historians’ attention: for Pétain an armistice was a prelude to ending the war, not a pause in it. At the same time the Apostolic Nuncio, Valerio Valeri, was asked to pass a similar request to Benito Mussolini through the Vatican.

At 12.30 p.m. on 17 June Pétain spoke on the radio from Bordeaux:

Frenchmen! At the call of the President of the Republic, I assume from today the direction of the government of France. […] I make to France the gift of my person to alleviate her misfortune. […] It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop the fighting. I addressed myself last night to the adversary to ask him if he is ready to seek with me, as between soldiers, after the fight and in honour, the means of putting an end to hostilities.

The words about stopping the fighting were spoken before the Germans had even replied. Many units understood them as an order to lay down their arms, and German leaflets and communiqués at once repeated them. In the evening Baudouin tried to retrieve the situation, declaring on the radio that the government “had neither abandoned the struggle nor laid down its arms” and would not accept dishonourable terms. In the printed version of the speech the sentence was changed to “we must try to stop the fighting”. The damage could no longer be undone. Historians point out that a large proportion of the more than one and a half million French prisoners of this campaign were captured precisely in the days between the speech and the armistice coming into force.

That same day, at Brûly-de-Pesche (PL) in the Belgian Ardennes, where his headquarters was located, Adolf Hitler learned of the French request. A short film shot by a cameraman, showing him stamping his foot with joy, was later re-edited by Allied newsreels to make it look like a dance. On the morning of 17 June de Gaulle flew from Bordeaux to London in General Spears’s aircraft, with money from a secret fund that Reynaud had handed him before leaving office. In Bordeaux that day Mandel was arrested on Alibert’s orders. After Lebrun intervened he was released a few hours later, and Pétain had to apologise to him in writing. On the evening of 17 June Churchill said in a BBC broadcast that “the news from France is very bad”, but that Britain would fight on until the curse of Hitler was lifted from mankind.

For the Poles, Pétain’s decision meant the end of hope of continuing the fight in France. The Polish government had been staying near Bordeaux for several days, and units of the Polish Armed Forces, whose rebuilding was directed by General Władysław Sikorski, were fighting in France. In the days that followed their evacuation to Britain became the most urgent matter of all.

Place in the war

Pétain’s appointment ended France’s part in the war as an Allied great power. On 18 June Hitler and Mussolini agreed in Munich that the armistice terms must not be so harsh as to drive the fleet and the empire over to the British, and on 19 June the Germans replied to the French request. On 21 June the French delegation under General Charles Huntziger arrived in the forest of Compiègne, at the same railway carriage in which the Germans had signed the armistice in 1918, and on 22 June it signed the armistice. It came into force on the night of 24–25 June, after the armistice with Italy had been concluded. Already on 18 June de Gaulle had called from London, over the BBC, for the fight to go on. Pétain’s government moved to Vichy, and on 10 July 1940 parliament granted the Marshal full powers, which meant the end of the Third Republic and the beginning of the French State, which took the path of collaboration with Germany.

For Britain, 16 June was the day she was left alone. The fear that the French fleet, the fourth largest in the world, would fall into German hands led on 3 July to the British attack on the French warships at Mers-el-Kébir. The debate over whether Reynaud could have taken the government to North Africa, and whether a war waged from the empire would have shortened the war or, on the contrary, exposed Africa to German attack, continues in France to this day. What is known is that the choice made at Bordeaux on the evening of 16 June decided four years of occupation, the complicity of the French state in the deportation of Jews, and the fact that it was not the government of the Republic but a handful of men around de Gaulle who represented France in the camp of the victors.