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DOI: 10.1177/0957155807073317 2007; 18; 83 French Cultural Studies

J. G. Shields Charlemagne's Crusaders: French Collaboration in Arms, 1941-1945

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Charlemagne’s CrusadersFrench Collaboration in Arms, 1941–1945

J. G. SHIELDSUniversity of Warwick

Military collaboration is one of the least acknowledged aspects ofFrance under the Occupation. Yet from summer 1941 France raised anumber of fighting units for Hitler’s armies, each with its distinctivemission and each drawing the Vichy regime deeper into collaborationwith Nazi Germany. This article discusses that process and its diverseimplications. It shows how the Paris collaborationists used militaryengagement to pressure the Vichy government into more activistcollaboration and explores the divergent perspectives in which thiswas viewed from Berlin, Paris and Vichy; it considers the mobilisingmyths, motivations and misapprehensions behind military collabora-tion; and it identifies some of the anomalies of that collaboration, withits reconceptualising of France and Other, friend and foe, belongingand alienation. Those French ‘patriots’ who fought in German uniformwould become effective exiles from a homeland they departed to‘defend’ only to see it ‘liberated’ by their ‘enemies’. Exposing thedivisions and the delusions underlying military collaboration, thearticle sheds light on conflicting political calculations and shiftingallegiances in occupied France.

Keywords: Bolshevism, collaboration/collaborationism, France,Germany, military, Occupation, Vichy government, Waffen-SS,Wehrmacht

At 3.15 a.m. on Sunday 22 June 1941, the first artillery barrages announcedthe invasion by German armed forces of the Soviet Union. The ‘Europeancrusade against Bolshevism’ code-named Operation Barbarossa wasunderway. A week later, having cleared its intentions with Berlin, theFrench government at Vichy severed diplomatic relations with Moscow.

French Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies, 18(1): 83–105 Copyright © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)http://frc.sagepub.com [200702] 10.1177/0957155807073317

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84 FRENCH CULTURAL STUDIES 18(1)

At the same time, approval was sought from the German authorities byleading collaborationists in occupied Paris to form a French volunteerlegion to participate in the military effort on the new Eastern Front. Withapproval secured, the creation in July 1941 of the Légion des VolontairesFrançais contre le Bolchevisme (LVF) marked the start of a Franco-German military collaboration that would evolve over the next four yearsand culminate by stages – Légion Tricolore, Phalange Africaine,Sturmbrigade Frankreich – in the formation and deployment of theFrench Waffen-SS Charlemagne Division.

Though they enlisted relatively few recruits, the LVF and subsequentformations drew France deeper into the spiral of collaboration initiated inOctober 1940 by the agreement between Hitler and Marshal PhilippePétain as French head of state. In their propaganda, their statutes and thepersonal testimony of some who fought in them, these units yieldedtelling insights into the motivations of those in France most committed tocollaboration with Nazi Germany. They also brought into focus thetensions between the ‘collaboration’ born of political expedience at Vichyand the ‘collaborationism’ promoted from ideological conviction by moreradical elements mainly in Paris. Taking France well beyond the terms ofthe armistice agreement of June 1940, military collaboration exacerbatedthe fundamental problem with which the Vichy government grappledthroughout the Occupation: that of retaining sovereign authority over aFrance which it controlled only insofar as the Germans permitted.Though it warrants barely a mention in most studies of the Vichy regime,the French provision of fighting units for Germany tells us much aboutthe intensification of collaboration, the dynamics of power in occupiedFrance, and the gulf of perception underlying relations between Berlin,Paris and Vichy.

At another, more global level, military collaboration offers an intrigu-ing subject of analysis. It rested on particular conceptions of national,racial and cultural identity, mediated through the historically resonantnotion of an East/West clash of ‘civilisation’; it radicalised the reshapingunder Vichy of transnational alliances and enmities; and it raised press-ing questions about the place of a defeated, yet potentially rehabilitated,France within the context of a totalising war. Those Frenchmen departingin Wehrmacht uniform for the Russian front, however, were déracinés intime and in space. Likened to the knights of the First Crusade, they wereembarked on a historic anomaly, fighting for an occupying enemy ofFrance against an objective ally. They had the geographically incongruousconviction of mounting a last-ditch defence of a homeland over 2000kilometres away; yet, in so doing, they were to become effective exilesfrom that homeland, both physically and ideologically displaced asOccupation gave way to Liberation in France and as the ‘New Europe’ in

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which they had sublimated their national identity fell to ruins. This arti-cle draws in part on the memoirs by which a number of these ‘exiles’would later seek to justify their collaborationist engagement or simply todefy a post-war Republican consensus from which they continued to bealienated.

Military collaboration: from LVF to Charlemagne Division

A ‘Foreign Legion in German uniform’

Launched a year to the day after the signing of the Franco-Germanarmistice, the invasion of the Soviet Union redefined not only themilitary but also the political contours of the war. In rupturing theNazi–Soviet pact, it provided a powerful new rationale at Vichy forcollaboration with Hitler’s Reich and galvanised the Paris collabora-tionists for a war on communism. It pushed the French Communist Party(PCF) into resistance and designated its members ‘agents of Moscow’against whom ‘a fight to the death’ now had to be waged. Collaborationistpublications like Je suis partout deemed the threat of communism asufficient argument for embracing National Socialism. They colluded inthe Nazi propagandist claim that the war in the East was not a war ofaggression but a defensive measure to prevent ‘a savage horde fromsweeping towards Lisbon and perhaps all the way to London’ (Mermetand Danan, 1966: 41, 53–5, 58).1

A motley group of political activists, journalists and intellectuals, theParis collaborationists saw themselves – and were seen from Berlin – as alever with which pressure could be brought to bear on the government atVichy. They led or were associated with a range of radical movementswhich attracted a combined membership of perhaps a quarter of a millionover the period of the Occupation. Critical of Pétain’s cautioustraditionalism, they called for France to assume its place in a newEuropean order, conceiving of Hitler as a modern Charlemagne mobilis-ing Europe against Bolshevism and its ‘allies’, international Jewry andAnglo-Saxon capitalist imperialism. Thus on 23 June, the day after thelaunch of Operation Barbarossa, the German ambassador in Paris, OttoAbetz, was prevailed upon to seek permission from the German ForeignMinistry for the creation of a French legion. Two weeks later, a number ofcollaborationist leaders – among them Jacques Doriot of the PartiPopulaire Français (PPF) and Marcel Déat of the Rassemblement NationalPopulaire (RNP) – signed a proclamation committing France, with ‘theconsent of Marshal Pétain and the acquiescence of the Führer’, to ‘the cru-sade against Bolshevism’ and ‘the struggle to defend European civiliza-tion’. Published in the PPF’s organ Le Cri du Peuple on 8 July 1941, this

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was accompanied by an editorial from Doriot which identified in the‘crusade against communism’ ‘the real meaning of the present war’:

In helping to crush Bolshevism, the Legion of French Volunteers givesFrance the opportunity to resume her place as a major Europeanpower. The soldiers who are about to depart are on the threshold of astruggle for the rebirth of our country. (Davey, 1971: 32–3, 35)

The disparity is striking between this rousing call to arms and the lackof enthusiasm evinced both by Berlin, which took almost two weeks togrant its grudging permission, and by Vichy, which could scarcely havebeen less enthusiastic in having ‘no objection’ to the initiative (Paxton,1966: 275). Doriot’s editorial betrayed a misconception characteristic ofFrench collaborationists at large. As the whole course of the Occupationwould show, the ‘rebirth’ of France as ‘a major European power’ wasnever part of Hitler’s project. Quite the contrary. The defeat of 1940 hadseen almost two million French soldiers captured, most of whom werestill held in German camps. The armistice agreement had obliged Franceto demobilise what remained of its armed forces, except for an armisticearmy of up to 100,000 men retained for internal security (until theoccupation of the southern zone in November 1942, when that too wasdisbanded). While Pétain hoped for an eventual ‘peace of collaboration’,Hitler envisaged only a ‘peace of oppression’ (Pétain, 1989: 89). The treatyintended to seal this pax germanica would have provided for a smallFrench army of 25,000 men; but France was above all to be kept in a stateof ‘permanent weakness’ and never again allowed the means to embark onwar (Paxton, 1966: 393; Jackson, 2001: 171).

Though promoted in Francocentric terms by Doriot and others,moreover, there was nothing uniquely French about the proposed militarycollaboration. The fact that it was sanctioned at all arose from Hitler’sdecision to recruit an anti-Bolshevik legion in each of the occupiedcountries of western Europe (Stein, 1966: 152). The Paris collaborationistsnonetheless saw here an opportunity to court favour with Germany andposition themselves as the future leaders of a post-war France withinHitler’s Europe. The pro-Nazi weekly Au Pilori announced proudly that‘the German troops’ would now be reported as ‘our troops’ (Cotta, 1964:271). This perception took no account of the cynicism underlying‘Kollaboration’ from the perspective of Berlin, or of the contempt in whichthe French were held as warriors by the German high command. In Hitler’sjudgement, French soldiers were now ‘considerably worse’ than they hadbeen in the First World War; for the commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht,Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, they were fit at best for ‘unloading sacks ofpotatoes behind the lines’ (Bourget, 1970: 296; Saint-Paulien, 1964: 242–3).The request that French prisoners of war be allowed to enlist was refusedby the Germans, who also refused permission for French workers in


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Germany to join the LVF. Nor did Berlin honour Hitler’s reported agreementthat each LVF recruit would secure the release of an imprisoned relative.Though some from both groups would take up arms, especially in the laterstages of the war, French prisoners remained valuable bargaining countersbetween Berlin and Vichy, while French workers were seen as more usefulin the factories than in the field. France was already contributing massivelyto the German war effort through the provision of foodstuffs, raw materials,manufactured goods and armaments, with French aircraft eventually sup-plying front-line German troops from North Africa to Stalingrad.

Given Hitler’s reservations, a limit was imposed on the LVF of 15,000men, though actual membership would never approach even half thatfigure. Despite extravagant promises by the collaborationist parties, theinitial recruitment drive of summer 1941 yielded fewer than 3000 volun-teers only, with a high proportion of volunteers rejected as unfit to serve inthe Wehrmacht. Of a recorded 1679 would-be legionnaires examined byGerman doctors on 28 August 1941, almost half were rejected on medicalgrounds – some 70 per cent of them for dental problems (Saint-Loup, 1963:19–20). This rigorous selection procedure served to enforce Hitler’s instruc-tion that the LVF be kept small and to remind the French of their station asa defeated, inferior people. By spring 1942, the LVF nonetheless boastedaround 170 recruitment offices throughout France (Lefèvre and Mabire,1995: 256). Though estimates of recruitment vary, a German report fromJuly 1942 recorded 3641 recruits to the LVF during the first six months ofits active deployment; over the longer span of its first two years, the Legionreportedly attracted some 10,700 volunteers of whom 6429 were enlisted(Davey, 1971: 37).

As a private rather than a French state initiative, the early LVF wasfinanced from donations, fund-raising campaigns and the German treasury.Recruits were to be aged between 18 and 40 (50 for officers), and pay andbenefits were set in line with those of the regular French army. Volunteersvacating employment were assured of returning to their jobs, while unem-ployed recruits were to be prioritised for employment on completion of theirservice. The prevailing mood among the first volunteers seems to have beenone of impatience to join up in time for the victory parade in Moscow. Theywould be part of an army of some four million German and pro-Axis troops,‘the largest invasion force ever seen’ (Beevor, 1999: 12–13). After the easycampaigns in Poland, France and the Balkans, it was predicted by some thatthe war in Russia would be over in a matter of weeks. Others with a morelong-term geo-strategic vision reasoned that France should claim a stake inthe future ‘colony’ that the Soviet Union was destined to become for westernEurope (Gordon, 1980: 245, 248–9; Mermet and Danan, 1966: 42–3, 49).

The LVF attracted a mix of young men with no military experience, warveterans and some former soldiers of the French Foreign Legion. Itstruggled to attract able officers notably. Attempts to recruit from the


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armistice army brought scant results as regular soldiers balked at servingin the Wehrmacht, especially with ‘officers’ such as Lieutenant Doriot.Above all, the widespread antipathy in France towards the LVF explainsits poor recruitment, with legionnaires often attracting verbal abuse andLVF premises being vandalised. Those who signed up did so for a varietyof reasons: ideological conviction; adventurism or opportunism (to escapejustice, unemployment or – after February 1943 – forced labour inGermany); the desire among some demobilised soldiers to return tomilitary life; and puerile vanity (to be able to ‘walk down a street in Berlinand be saluted by uniformed Germans’) (Gordon, 1980: 253–60).2

The Legion was entrusted to the command first of Colonel Roger-HenriLabonne, a former military attaché with no meaningful combat experience,then of Colonel Edgar Puaud, a hard-boiled Foreign Legion officer returnedfrom Indo-China who, ‘like a true legionnaire’, ‘loved war’ (Paxton, 1966:95). The first contingent of some 800 rank-and-file and 25 officers, includ-ing Doriot, was dispatched in September 1941 to a training camp south ofWarsaw. They would be joined by a further 1400 recruits over the nextmonth before being incorporated into the Wehrmacht as the 638th InfantryRegiment within the 7th Bavarian Infantry Division (Lambert and Le Marec,2002: 16–20; Corvisier et al., 1994: 70). The regiment would see actionbriefly at the front near Moscow in December 1941 (sustaining the loss ofsome 250 dead, wounded or evacuated with frostbite) before being reas-signed to anti-partisan operations behind the German lines (Ory, 1976: 244).

The first legionnaires had been led to believe that they would fight inFrench uniform; but since France was not officially at war with the SovietUnion, this would have breached the Hague Convention and led to thosecaptured being treated as partisans rather than regular soldiers. The LVFwas therefore deployed as ‘a sort of Foreign Legion in German uniform’(Ory, 1976: 236). The only concessions to the legionnaires’ nationalitywere the French flag which they were allowed to carry and the smalltricolour badge and lettering ‘FRANCE’ often worn on the sleeve of theirfeldgrau uniform. Otherwise, they were to be considered as members ofthe German army and subject to German military jurisdiction. This did notprevent the anomaly of Croix de Guerre being conferred on certain legion-naires for distinguished service in German uniform against a power thatwas not a declared enemy of France (Delarue, 1968: 204, 213).

In its organisation, the LVF was run by a Comité central of prominentcollaborationists who recruited on its behalf (Déat, Bucard, Costantini) orjoined its ranks (Doriot, Clémenti). Its first president was Eugène Deloncle,head of the Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR), co-founder withDéat of the RNP and former leader of the extreme-right terrorist Cagoulemovement. In Doriot, Bucard, Costantini and others, the LVF was led bymen who, little more than a year before, had fought against the sameGerman army for which they were now recruiting agents. In a bizarre quirk


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of fate, the German embassy official appointed as liaison officer to the LVFwas the former pilot Julius von Westrick, whose aircraft had been shotdown by Costantini in the First World War, with the two subsequentlybecoming friends (Gordon, 1980: 136). Nor did irony end there. Doriot hadbeen decorated in both wars and would go on, in 1943, to add an IronCross to his Croix de Guerre. The PPF leader had been one of the brightestyoung firebrands in the PCF until the rift that prompted his expulsion in1934 and his espousal thereafter of visceral anti-communism – atransformation which he held in common with a number of other notablecollaborationists.

In addition to these political agitators, the LVF boasted a Comité d’hon-neur with influential religious, intellectual and political patrons. Amongthese were the scientist Georges Claude, the cinematographer AugusteLumière, the novelist Alphonse de Chateaubriant, the rector of the CatholicInstitute of Paris, Cardinal Alfred Baudrillart, the head of the PressCorporation, Jean Luchaire, and the Academician and future EducationMinister, Abel Bonnard. Though the Comité d’honneur was presided overby Vichy’s Delegate-General to the Occupied Zone, Fernand de Brinon, the


Figure 1. Jacques Doriot with other LVF officers on the Eastern Front. The tri-colour badge can be seen on the sleeve of his uniform.3

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Figure 2. Jacques Doriot wearing his Iron Cross (2nd class) and two otherGerman medals alongside French decorations from both wars.

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attitude of the government was one of ambivalence and suspicion. In bothits organisation and recruitment, the LVF was much less present in theunoccupied south than in the occupied northern zone. German controlofficers in the southern zone reported only a trickle of recruits and theGerman Armistice Commission noted in May 1942 that the Frenchauthorities were hindering the LVF campaign (Paxton, 1966: 275).

From Wehrmacht to Waffen-SS

This was soon to change. Fearing that the Legion might serve as a militiafor the political ambitions of the Paris collaborationists, Pierre Lavaltransformed it in June 1942 from a private organisation into an officialFrench force. Laval’s return to power as chef du gouvernement at Vichyin April 1942, and the promotion of Bonnard and de Brinon notably,marked an intensification of the regime’s readiness to collaborate. On thefirst anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the LVF was converted into theLégion Tricolore, with the Secretary of State for Franco-German Relations,Jacques Benoist-Méchin, appointed president of its Comité central. Thefuture head of the Milice and Secretary-General for the Maintenance ofOrder at Vichy, Joseph Darnand, was brought in as a counterweight toDoriot and recruitment was expanded in the unoccupied zone. TheComité d’honneur now included four Vichy ministers (de Brinon,Benoist-Méchin, Bonnard and Marion), with Laval himself as présidentd’honneur.

It was hoped by Benoist-Méchin and others that the state-sponsoredLégion Tricolore would serve as the embryo of the single party whichVichy had refused to set up in 1940. It failed, however, to win approvalfrom the German authorities, who were opposed politically to any suchdevelopment and militarily to a force presuming to represent France (asArticle 3 of the new Legion’s statutes declared) ‘on all fronts wherenational interest is at stake’ (Lefèvre and Mabire, 1995: 260). By January1943, the Légion Tricolore had been obliged to revert to the LVF and wouldremain restricted to anti-partisan duties behind the Russian front. Theimportant point was that Vichy now retained its much closer association,decreeing the LVF to be an official organisation of the French state andappointing de Brinon president of its Comité central. The costs ofdeployment would continue to be met from the German treasury while theVichy government would cover expenses in France, including disabilitypensions and support for the families of legionnaires.

While Vichy’s attempt to relaunch the LVF as the Légion Tricolore wasfaltering, another significant development took place in the form of thePhalange Africaine. This was conceived as an ‘Imperial Legion’ to help theGermans repel the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942 andto uphold French sovereignty in a crumbling empire. Unlike the LVF, the


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Phalange Africaine was essentially a Vichy initiative. Despite predictionsby Laval of fully 18,000 recruits and with enrolment underway, however,the Germans failed to provide the aircraft required to transport volunteersfrom the mainland, thereby restricting the recruitment pool to the Frenchcommunity in Tunisia (Lambert and Le Marec, 2002: 60–5; Gordon, 1980:159–60). Attracting no more than a few hundred volunteers who would beincorporated into Rommel’s 334th Infantry Division, the PhalangeAfricaine was militarily meaningless; by spring 1943 it had been almostentirely wiped out. This minuscule force nonetheless marked a furtherstage in military collaboration and in Vichy’s gradual accommodation to it.Just as Doriot and Deloncle had been prime movers in launching the LVF,so Darnand would promote a Phalange Africaine for which recruitment,while it lasted, was managed from Vichy itself.

Clearly, it was not concern over the principle of fighting with theWehrmacht that had given rise to Vichy’s reservations about the LVF inJuly 1941, but rather concern over what a military force under the controlof the Paris collaborationists might mean for the power balance inoccupied France. Already in August 1940, within weeks of France’scapitulation, Laval had offered Germany a volunteer force of some 200French pilots ready to fight with the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain – anoffer loftily spurned by Germany. Undeterred, Laval had continued torequest that France be allowed to ‘make her modest contribution to thefinal overthrow of Britain’, while the position articulated by Vichy wasthat, in return for favourable peace terms, France was ‘ready to enter thecontinental front’ (Paxton, 2001: 66–73). The resistance by French forcesto British-Gaullist incursions at Dakar, in French Equatorial Africa and inSyria could already be interpreted as de facto military collaboration evenbefore the opening of the Russian front. The abortive ‘Paris Protocols’ ofMay–June 1941, which would have ceded the use of French colonialairfields and ports to Germany, also indicated Vichy’s readiness to engagein a degree of military collaboration for political ends. The same wasevident in August 1942 when, following the Allied raid on Dieppe, Pétainappealed to Hitler that France be allowed to ‘make a contribution to thesafeguard of Europe’ (Paxton, 2001: 304–5). Though this overture appearsto have gone unanswered, the formal neutrality of Pétain’s regime wasproving, in the words of one historian, ‘increasingly asymmetrical’(Jackson, 2001: 180).

Some months after the failure of the Légion Tricolore and the fiasco ofthe Phalange Africaine, Vichy would implicate itself further in the Naziwar effort. With the German offensive critically stalled in Russia, theFrench government took the step in July 1943 of authorising the formationof a French unit in the Waffen-SS, the Sturmbrigade-SS no. 7 or‘Sturmbrigade Frankreich’. Until then, French volunteers had signed upfor the German armed forces as individuals or through the LVF. Close to


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10,000 Frenchmen, including conscripts from the annexed departments ofAlsace-Lorraine, are estimated to have joined the German navy(Kriegsmarine), motorised corps (NSKK), anti-aircraft defence units (Flak),and most notably the Todt Organisation (OT), the construction andengineering group responsible for building the Atlantic Wall (Corvisieret al., 1994: 71).4 Now Frenchmen in their numbers would be invited tosee the Waffen-SS as a legitimate calling in the name of France, and adecree signed by Laval made the amendment to French statute required toformalise this. An Association of the Friends of the Waffen-SS was createdunder the propaganda ministry of Paul Marion, and posters projected SSsoldiers fighting ‘to keep the West in existence and preserve the spiritualculture of France and Europe’ (Mabire, 1973: 30–1). Wary – again – of theuse to which a French SS brigade might be put, and ever clinging to itsmock national sovereignty, Vichy insisted only that the force should not bedeployed against dissidents in France. That was now the prerogative ofDarnand’s Milice.

The launch of the Sturmbrigade Frankreich confirmed the failure of anLVF which had seen barely two weeks of undistinguished front-lineservice in two years. The first recruitment drive reported some 800volunteers enlisted by September 1943 and 2480 by January 1944, though


Figure 3. A French recruitment poster for the Waffen-SS.

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again many were found unfit and rejected (Ory, 1976: 244–5, 266). Just asfor the LVF, recruits were drawn largely from the collaborationist parties,with a significant number coming also from Darnand’s Milice. Again likethe LVF, they carried their squabbling into the service of the Reich. Somecame from youth movements such as the Jeunes du Maréchal and Jeunesde l’Europe Nouvelle; others were volunteers with no political past, manyaged under 20.5 Engaging the Red Army in its westward push of August1944 through Galicia, the brigade sustained heavy losses and was pulledback with the rest of the German forces. Pascal Ory (1976: 267) describesa first battalion decimated in a fortnight from 1000 to 140 fighting men.

Following the Normandy landings of June 1944, some (includingAmbassador Abetz) proposed the use of the LVF against Allied forces inFrance, and Doriot declared his readiness to lead it into battle there. Lavaland the German military authorities vetoed this, ensuring thereby that theLegion would see through to its grim conclusion its mission on the EasternFront. With France liberated and the Vichy ‘government’ evacuated toSigmaringen in Germany, the final episode of military collaboration wouldbe played out in autumn 1944 and spring 1945. Survivors of the LVF,Milice, Sturmbrigade Frankreich, Kriegsmarine, OT, NSKK and others(some 7500 Frenchmen in all) were formed into an under-strength SSWaffen-Grenadier-Division no. 33, or Charlemagne Division. These werenot all the ‘dreamers in helmets’ later romanticised by one of their number(de la Mazière, 1972); they were self-made exiles who had nowhere else togo, trapped between the Red Army and the Liberation purges in France. Asthe last word in collaboration, they swore the SS oath to Hitler before beingdeployed in February 1945 against the Soviet offensive in Pomerania. Tothe end, the gulf of perception between the collaborationists and theGerman high command remained, with Hitler dismissing these Frenchsoldiers as ‘good for nothing’ (Azéma, 1993: 209). The few who were notkilled, wounded, captured or lost to desertion in that brief campaign madetheir last stand, as irony would have it, defending the Führer’s bunker amidthe ruins of Berlin (Stein, 1966: 164; Gordon, 1980: 276–8).6

Cultural collaboration: a ‘true France in a united Europe’

The rare achievement of the LVF was to ‘unite’ the disparate and oftenbitterly opposed factions of collaborationism behind the single cause ofanti-communism. There were a cluster of other causes, too, underlyingthis alliance of convenience: xenophobic nationalism, Europeansupremacism, anti-Semitism, an Anglophobia for which the British attackon the French fleet at Mers El-Kébir was but the latest reference. Drawingits ideological animus from the collaborationist parties, the LVF wasconceived not only as a fighting unit but as a political movement, a‘formation de combat politique’ in the words of one prominent recruit


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(Saint-Loup, 1963: 15). The ‘true France in a united Europe’ for whichRadio-Paris called from its studios on the Champs-Élysées was shorthandfor a commitment to Hitler’s European project either as a desired end initself or, more commonly, as the least of the evils open to France in themid-twentieth century (Lévy, 1966: 13–14). Few were those, even amongthe most committed collaborationists, who proclaimed unequivocaladherence to Nazism within its own terms rather than through theirshared opposition to the enemies of Nazism. The stark choice wasbetween a Europe dominated by National Socialism and a Europe underthe Soviet yoke. ‘I wish the victory of Germany because her war is my war,our war’, stressed the pro-Nazi intellectual Lucien Rebatet. Laval placedhimself beyond the mercy of the post-war tribunals by proclaiming his desire that Hitler should triumph to ‘prevent our civilisationcollapsing into communism’. The journalist Marc Augier (alias Saint-Loup) would rationalise his engagement in the LVF in similarlyManichaean terms: if National Socialism were the means to bring about aproperly socialist Europe, he declared, ‘then I am ready to conclude analliance with the devil himself’ (Verdès-Leroux, 1996: 170; Jackson, 2001:227; Ory, 1976: 238).

First-hand accounts of service in the LVF suggested that few recruitswere keen to be instructed in National Socialism, and there was evenevidence of anti-German sentiment. The Legion was also thought toharbour communist and Gaullist infiltrators. In its own propaganda,however, the LVF left no room for nuance, with its mission to protect the‘threatened peoples’ and ‘ancient civilization’ of Europe against the‘savage hordes of the base Caucasian’ (Gordon, 1980: 255, 260–1). ThoseFrenchmen who enlisted were praised by Pétain for participating in a‘crusade’ against the ‘Bolshevik peril’ and fighting for the cause of‘European reconciliation’ (Randa, 1997: 359). It was in this spirit, too, thatthe LVF attracted support from elements in the French Catholic Churchonly too ready to invoke France’s crusading tradition against a godless RedArmy. Thus the rector of the Catholic Institute of Paris, Cardinal AlfredBaudrillart, who extolled the LVF as ‘a new chivalric order. Theselegionnaires are the crusaders of the twentieth century. May their arms beblessed! The Tomb of Christ shall be delivered.’ Thus, too, Monsignor JeanMayol de Lupé, chaplain to the LVF and later Charlemagne Division, whowould terminate Sunday mass with the cry ‘Heil Hitler!’ and who, at theage of almost 70, added an Iron Cross to his chaplain’s crucifix and Légiond’honneur (Randa, 1997: 368–77; Halls, 1995: 350).

For those collaborationist intellectuals like Robert Brasillach andLucien Rebatet who savoured the ‘virile charm’ of the LVF from thecomfort of their Paris apartments, this fine flower of France was joiningnot a German but a European army that would destroy ‘Marxist illusions’and ‘refashion the world of tomorrow without democracies and without


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trusts’ (Cotta, 1964: 274; Randa, 1997: 342–3). Brasillach and Rebatetbelonged to a coterie of young radical right-wing intellectuals who, in thelate 1930s, had used their pens to incite violence against their politicaladversaries, most notably the leaders of the left-wing Popular Front of1936–38. Through the columns of Je suis partout and other extreme-rightpublications, they had called for the Socialist (and Jewish) premier LéonBlum to be shot, for communist leaders to be assassinated, and for a purgeof Jews in France (Verdès-Leroux, 1996: 97–9, 155–60). For them, theprospect of armed engagement posed, if not a dilemma, at least adevelopment with which their conscience had to be squared. Rebatet, whohad dreamed of pointing his ‘oft caressed machine gun’ and of ‘firing likea god’ into the ranks of his political enemies, felt less inclined to violencewhen the opportunity to enact his fantasy presented itself. If he went toRussia, he determined, it would be not with a ‘rifle’ but with a ‘pen-holder’. Brasillach had ‘too much respect for human blood and especiallythe blood of the young’ to take part in military action – which did notprevent him from commending such action in others or from visiting thefront to fawn over the uniformed Doriot. In other cases, age would renderthe question otiose. ‘If I had not been too old to leave my books’, declaredthe 50-year-old Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in summer 1943, ‘I should havejoined the SS’ (Ory, 1976: 239; Grover, 1962: 55).

For these stormtroopers by proxy, the ‘European battalions of theWaffen-SS’ embodied the ‘elite of that Aryan international’ to whichFrance no less than Germany had rightful claim (Randa, 1997: 343). AsArticle 6 of the LVF’s statutes made clear, the Legion was open to ‘[a]llFrenchmen of Aryan stock having completed their national service’ andable to furnish evidence of their ‘Aryan quality’, good health and cleanpolice record; it was also open – as an ‘exceptional provision’ – to‘foreigners having served in the Foreign Legion or having fought in unitsof the French army’ (Article 12). Foreigners, then, could join the LVF, butnot French Jews. When Vichy launched the Légion Tricolore, a ministerialcircular of 7 July 1942 stipulated: ‘Those persons declared Jewish by thelaw of 2 June 1941, together with those who, although not consideredJewish, have two Jewish grandparents cannot be members of the LégionTricolore’ (Randa, 1997: 353, 688–9).

If the cult of Aryanism in the French context was largely rhetorical, theexclusion of Jews was real and enforceable. The Jewish Statutes ofOctober 1940 and June 1941 effectively barred Jews from participation inpublic life, placing severe restrictions on their employment andeducation. Alongside French communists, freemasons and liberalteachers, Jews were designated by Vichy as a group which had conspiredin France’s downfall and with which the regime had its score to settle. Atthe first rally held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris on 18 July 1941 todrum up recruits for the LVF, the leader of the Ligue Française, Pierre


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Costantini, roused applause among the 8000-strong audience by attackingthe Jews and calling for executions (Bourget, 1970: 301–2). Echoing Nazipropaganda, the collaborationists represented the Jew as the controllingforce behind both Moscow and London, and as a dangerous, statelessenemy within the Etat Français. ‘There is only one column’, declaredCostantini on radio the day after the Vel d’Hiv rally, ‘the Jewish column,the real fifth column. It is the Jews who created the Soviets’ (Mermet andDanan, 1966: 62). The LVF thus quickly became an expression of anti-Semitic as well as anti-communist sentiment, a response to the ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik’ threat that was central to Nazi demonology. The names ofMarx and Trotsky sufficed to confirm the Jewish origins of Bolshevism,and the Jewish power behind Anglo-Saxon capitalism was no lessaxiomatic. While the LVF’s Paris headquarters were installed in theformer offices of the Soviet travel agency Intourist, commercial premisesbelonging to Jews were requisitioned for use as recruiting stations.

The national community from which Jews and communists wereexcluded found idealised expression in the propaganda that accompaniedmilitary collaboration. The theme of the crusade against ‘the Infidel’ indefence of ‘the West’ was much invoked by the LVF, with Moscow figuredas a new Jerusalem and Charles Martel’s victory over the Muslim army atPoitiers in 732 as ‘the only battle in two thousand years comparable tothat now being waged’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 48). Swords, shields,helmets and lances were part of the medievalised iconography of theLegion. Napoleonic mythology, too, was amply exploited. Commem-orative stamps featured medieval knights, imperial grenadiers and LVFsoldiers in battle, while Joan of Arc was inevitably pressed into the serv-ice of a heroic military imagery conveyed through posters, press and films(Rossignol, 1991: 195–201).

Vichy propaganda played on a primarily French register with a strongreligious tenor, denouncing the Soviet Union as ‘the very antithesis of thespiritual values and political principles on which the Marshal is seekingto rebuild the country’ (Mermet and Danan, 1966: 54). Pétain’s message ofNovember 1941 to the first LVF contingents was couched in a language ofnational and spiritual redemption: the Legion was restoring not only ‘partof our military honour’ but also ‘faith in our own virtue’ (Randa, 1997:359). Emblems of past regimes (Rude’s Départ des volontaires, imperialeagles, Marianne) combined with Vichy’s Francisque to convey an unin-terrupted history of French grandeur. The Paris collaborationists workedon a broader canvas, incorporating images redolent of Nazism (Germanuniform, swastika, the Wehrmacht soldier as the new Teutonic Knight)and foregrounding the European dimension of a conflict waged by anAryan brotherhood in arms. For them, the Waffen-SS represented a newchivalric elite to match ‘King Arthur, Lancelot of the Lake, Perceval andGalahad’, and recruits to the Sturmbrigade Frankreich were, like the


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Figure 4. A poster for the Légion Tricolore evoking Napoleon and the GrandeArmée.

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Figure 5. An LVF recruitment poster blending the imagery of the crusader knightwith that of the Wehrmacht soldier.

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knights of ‘the First Crusade’, assured their place ‘in legend and inhistory’ (Randa, 1997: 345; Cotta, 1964: 274).

Such was the collaborationists’ dream; the reality was quite different.Those French volunteers who thought of themselves as Germanic war-riors were profoundly misguided. Foreign recruits to the Waffen-SS wereexpected, in Himmler’s words, to ‘subordinate [their] national ideal to agreater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich’ (Stein, 1966:148); but the rank reserved for the French in that Germanic order wasclear from the place accorded them in its armed forces. At the outset, theLVF was not permitted to join the Waffen-SS: it was absorbed along withits Croatian, Spanish and Wallonian counterparts into the Wehrmacht,while legions from Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands attainedWaffen-SS status. Only when the exigencies of war prevailed over theracial imperatives of SS ideology did anti-Bolshevism become the deter-mining factor in admission, allowing the Waffen-SS in summer 1943 tosanction a recruitment drive in France and, in late 1944, finally to inte-grate the LVF. By that time, the Waffen-SS had also opened its ranks toEastern Slavic recruits from Ukraine and Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Stein, 1966: 152–3, 179–86).

Failed collaboration: a union of irreconcilables

By late autumn 1944, all remaining vestiges of active French collabora-tionism were concentrated in the Charlemagne Division. By then, theVichy apparatus had been consigned to exile. By then, too, some of themost ardent ideologues like Brasillach and Drieu had relinquished theirfaith in National Socialism, while collaborationism had lost all meaning asa way of securing the future of France in a post-war Europe. France hadstill not made peace with Germany, nor declared war on the Soviet Union,as the last surviving Frenchmen in Nazi uniform were pushed back toBerlin by the advancing Red Army in spring 1945.

In the four years since the formation of the LVF, France had been drawninto an increasingly state-sponsored contribution to German militaryoperations. The failed attempt by Vichy to convert the LVF into the LégionTricolore showed the limits to the regime’s putative sovereignty, while thesubsequent endorsement of the LVF as an official state organisationdemonstrated the prevalence at Vichy of political pragmatism overprinciple. As a note from Pétain to Admiral Darlan shortly after theLegion’s formation revealed, its deployment in German uniform was acause of embarrassment at Vichy (Bourget, 1970: 298–9). Not so for theParis collaborationists. At the LVF’s inaugural meeting in the Vélodromed’Hiver in July 1941 – as reported (significantly) by a police informer –Déat intoned that if the government did not show sufficient mettle, he andhis supporters were ready to depose it, while prospective legionnaires

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were ‘assured of being the future leaders’ of the new France (Bourget,1970: 302, 304). Relations between Paris and Vichy would remain asfraught throughout, with the Waffen-SS serving as the ultimate theatre inwhich the ‘Marshal’s man’ Darnand would seek to outdo the would-be‘Führer’s man’ Doriot in courting German favour. Acceding to the rank ofSturmbannführer and taking with him many of his Miliciens into theWaffen-SS, Darnand provided the measure of Vichy’s ultimate implicationin the doomed adventure of military collaboration.

If the Paris collaborationists were defined by their opposition to Vichy,they were further defined by their opposition amongst themselves. Saint-Loup (1965: 18) recounts how, as the first volunteers were inductedat the Borgnis-Desbordes barracks at Versailles on 27 August 1941, fightingbroke out in the line between Doriot’s PPF supporters and Deloncle’s MSRsupporters. Then, at the formal induction ceremony on the same day,Laval and Déat were wounded by pistol shots from a recruit. The would-be assassin, Paul Collette, who would later claim to be a Gaullist, hadenlisted through the MSR and was thought to be in league with Deloncle(Delarue, 1968: 166–75). The first blood had been spilt under the bannerof the LVF – and it was French.

Even when dispatched to the front, the LVF would remain as politicallyriven, notably between supporters of Doriot and those of Deloncle. It waslargely in order to upstage his political rivals that the PPF leader himselfenlisted. The remark to Doriot’s mother by his wife, on learning that hehad been awarded the Iron Cross, spoke volumes: ‘He must be pleased.That will give him clout against the little politickers around here whothought they could do him down in his absence’ (Bourget, 1970: 313).Meanwhile Deloncle made known his fear that, if he joined the LVF, hewould be assassinated by Doriot’s henchmen (Delarue, 1968: 185).Volunteers were recruited mainly through the collaborationist parties andretained their party affiliation over and above their common calling to theLegion. It was even envisaged for a time that companies might be formedexclusively on the basis of party membership. The intensity of politicalinfighting was noted by Monsignor Mayol de Lupé as a factor harmful tothe Legion’s cohesion; it was noted also by the Germans, who issued astern instruction in April 1942 that LVF recruits should either sink theirpolitical differences or return home. Some MSR members took the lattercourse and returned to serve their party in Paris rather than their ‘country’in Russia (Lambert and Le Marec, 2002: 21). The arrival in late 1944 ofsome 1800 Miliciens to swell the ranks of the Charlemagne Divisionmerely added more crabs to the basket, as Doriotist veterans clashed withDarnand’s newly arrived contingent. Other splits too ran through thecollaborationists’ ranks as French Waffen-SS lorded it over career soldierswho had come through the LVF but remained tarred with the defeat of1940 (Gordon, 1980: 244, 277; Ory, 1976: 267).


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Besides the personal and party rivalries which the LVF andCharlemagne Division served to exacerbate, there persisted to the end aprofound ideological incoherence – between Christian ‘crusaders’ andneo-pagan ‘Nazis’, narrow nationalists and Europeanists, reactionariesand revolutionaries, between those owing their paramount allegiance tothe Pope and those happy to swear it to the Führer. Ideologicalincoherence was embedded, too, in the discourse which supportedmilitary collaboration. In honouring the few survivors of the PhalangeAfricaine in May 1943, the president of the LVF’s Comité central, deBrinon, declared: ‘To fight against Anglo-American plutocracy is to fightagainst Bolshevism’ (Ory, 1976: 246–7). Such an incongruous remark waspossible only in the service of a ‘crusade’ that had lost its definingrationale and clarity of purpose.

Nor were the political perspectives more easily reconciled than theideological. The failure of military collaboration was foreshadowed fromthe outset by the lack of agreement between Berlin, Paris and Vichy overits value. For the Paris collaborationists, it was ‘the reconciliation of twogreat European peoples’ and the means of sharing in a German victory; forVichy, it was an unwelcome initiative which threatened to undermine thegovernment and shift the balance of power within France; for Berlin, itwas a military irrelevance but a further means of dividing and rulingFrance, of encouraging (in the words of a German embassy directive)‘those forces likely to create discord’ and ‘internal disunity and weakness’(Saint-Paulien, 1964: 147, 242, 248). By spring 1944, there was not evenagreement about the rank of the LVF’s commanding officer – ‘GeneralPuaud’ for Vichy and Paris, ‘Colonel Puaud’ for Berlin (Delarue, 1968:219). While Hitler sanctioned the LVF primarily as a useful politicaldevice, the German military authorities and the Vichy government didmore to hinder than to promote it. That its most ardent proponent, Doriot,was bitterly opposed within collaborationist circles and kept undersurveillance by Berlin and Vichy alike summed up the disunity andmistrust on which military collaboration was founded. More telling stillwas the appointment of the Nazi sympathiser Jean Fontenoy at the head ofa propaganda section within the LVF. Fontenoy’s real purpose was to spyon the Legion and compile reports for the German authorities; but he inturn was to be kept under close surveillance by a German liaison officerattached to the propaganda section (Davey, 1971: 43–4).

To the end, French military collaboration was played out in the serviceof three quite distinct political projects. To the end, too, the Vichygovernment sought to contain and gain some hold over an armed forcewhich it viewed as a threat in the hands of the Paris collaborationists.Nothing of this had been anticipated in the armistice agreement, and itcompleted the renversement des alliances effected by Vichy in relation tothe Allied and Axis powers. No public pronouncement would return to


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haunt Pétain more than his declaration of support for the ‘noble duty’undertaken by the first transports of legionnaires embarked for the frontin November 1941. In the charges laid against him at his trial on 23 July1945, and in the summing-up prior to his sentence on 14 August, the HighCourt of Justice would invoke this support for an undertaking describednow – out of all proportion – as a ‘Franco-German campaign against theRussians’. Through this and other means (military cooperation in Syriaand North Africa, ‘Paris Protocols’, civilian labour programmes), Pétainwas guilty of ‘intelligence with Germany, a power at war with France,with a view to advancing the undertakings of the enemy’ (Le Procès duMaréchal Pétain, 1945: I, 29; II, 1119–23).

With the 89-year-old Pétain’s death sentence commuted to lifeimprisonment, the ultimate judgement on military collaboration would beserved some weeks later on his former chef du gouvernement, Laval. As thereal architect of collaboration, concluded the High Court, Laval had, interalia, repeatedly expressed his wish for a German victory and ‘notablyencouraged and supported the formation of a French troop to fight inGerman uniform alongside Germany against Russia’ (Le Procès Laval, 1946:307). The man from whom blood had first been drawn at the LVF inductionin August 1941 had remarked with prescience then that those were but thefirst of the bullets destined for him, ‘since the French will not understandwhat I will attempt to do when I return to power’ (Bourget, 1970: 312). Lavalwould be executed by firing squad at Fresnes prison on 15 October 1945.

Notes1. Since this article draws on a range of French, English and German sources, some of

which are already in translation, all quotations are, for consistency, given in English.2. In July 1942, the weekly L’Illustration reported 90 per cent of a 200-strong sample of

legionnaires to be manual working-class, and only 10 per cent middle-class (Cotta,1964: 273).

3. The author is grateful to Grancher publishers for permission to reproduce Figures 1 and2 from Lambert and Le Marec (2002).

4. French membership of the German armed forces is impossible to establish withprecision. Kedward (1985: 44) estimates at under 6000 the Frenchmen enlisting in theLVF or Waffen-SS; Gordon (1980: 244) puts the figure at around 10,000 and Saint-Paulien (Randa, 1997: 337) at 15,000. British intelligence files opened in 2000 recordedan estimated 14,000 French Waffen-SS (Norton-Taylor, 2000), while Stein (1966: 139)proposes the yet higher estimate of 20,000.

5. A report on recruitment for November 1943 showed 54 per cent aged 17–20 and 25 per cent listed as students; 38 per cent were artisans and 20 per cent low-gradeemployees, while the 7 per cent for agricultural workers reflected the urban characterof the collaborationist parties and the 4 per cent for career soldiers confirmed thebrigade’s lack of appeal in French military circles (Gordon, 1980: 270–1).

6. The debacle is recounted at length in Jean Mabire’s La Division Charlemagne (1974)and Christian de la Mazière’s personal memoir, Le Rêveur casqué (1972).


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James Shields is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the Universityof Warwick. Address for correspondence: Department of FrenchStudies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK [email:[email protected]]


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