Remembering the 1940 armistice
Some memories are destined to be short-lived. Such is the case of the armistice of 1940, which confirmed the French defeat and put an end to the fighting. Although Germany was delighted at the time, the episode would not lead on to regular commemorations. In France, if it was timidly celebrated by the Vichy regime, it was soon replaced by remembrance of the refusal. The call to arms of 18 June is today an important marker in the commemorative calendar.
On 17 June 1940, Marshal Pétain, the new prime minister to replace Paul Reynaud, who had resigned the day before, announced that “fighting was to cease”. A key date in the Battle of France, this announcement is significant in many respects.
Firstly, it showed to the world that the French Government, unlike the other invaded countries, would not carry on the war in exile. It also announced – as Germany had been forced to by its military situation in autumn 1918 – that France was choosing to get out of the war by means of a political act, negotiated between two states, that would clear the military high command of any responsibility. Pétain’s speech of 17 June was also contrary to the very definition of an armistice – a negotiated agreement for the conditional cessation of hostilities – since it was made public even before the enemy had said whether or not it agreed to enter into negotiations.
The fighting therefore went on alongside the “negotiations” imposed by the victor, who chose the Rethondes clearing, the site of the armistice of 11 November 1918, for France to sign, on the 22nd, then imposed a further agreement with Italy, on the 24th, bringing the fighting to an end on the 25th. So it was not one date, but a series of dates (17, 22, 24 and 25 June) that paved the way for the vote of 10 July 1940 establishing the new regime in Vichy.
After the signatures
For Nazi Germany, the signature of 22 June was far more than a provisional legal document which – subject to relatively moderate conditions, like keeping an unoccupied territory and preserving a semblance of national sovereignty – left the British Empire to carry on the war alone. The armistice of 22 June was devised as a veritable atonement ceremony for 11 November 1918: the humiliation of France being made to sign on the very same spot, Hitler’s “little jig” before the news cameras, Foch’s carriage being taken back to Germany like a trophy, the destruction of French commemorative monuments. Soldiers on leave in Paris bought miniature replicas of the carriage, dating from when it was on display at Les Invalides, as souvenirs of their victory. A peace treaty, a natural sequel to an armistice and a Nazi victory, might have led to regular commemorations. But the war went on. On 22 June 1941, rather than celebrating the armistice signed with France, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa.
The only “commemoration” of the event was held in Vichy. On 17 June 1941, a speech was broadcast on the radio, and widely shown on the newsreels, which began with the rebroadcast speech of 17 June 1940. After having the French people listen to this recording of his voice cracking with emotion, Marshal Pétain went on in a “firm” voice intended to demonstrate the country’s “recovery”, before ending with the following words: “People of France, you really do have short memories.”
If this first anniversary was commemorated, then, the same was not true of the following years, with a more modest speech on 17 June 1942 and no specific references at all in 1943 and 1944. After the war and Pétain’s death, the nostalgics chose to commemorate his birthday, in the house of his birth – of which they had become the owners – the anniversary of his death on the Île d’Yeu, as well as 11 November and 1 May, Pétain’s version of Labour Day. In their eyes, then, the defeat of 1940 did not have the status of a “founding defeat”, as France tends to think of it.
But the decision taken in June 1940 to cease fighting and negotiate an armistice was not only the founding act of the Vichy regime. The refusal to accept that defeat and the will to go on fighting paved the way for Charles de Gaulle’s departure to London and his speech of the 18th, in response to Pétain’s of the 17th. Infinitely less listened to than Pétain’s, this first “call to arms” began a series of speeches that marked the birth of Free France.
“A null and void armistice”
The semantics of General de Gaulle’s wartime speeches and messages reveal much about how he viewed the events of June 1940. If the word “armistice” is absent from the call to arms of the 18 June, it is used alongside the word “capitulation” in the speech of the 22nd, the first for which we still have the recording: “It may therefore be said that this armistice would not only be a capitulation, but that it would also reduce the country to slavery.” The word “capitulation” appears again on 24 June and 2 July, before being replaced by the legally more precise term “armistice”, first with the qualifier “degrading” (on 26 June), then, from 30 July onwards, “abominable”, an expression used five times between 30 July and 27 August.
The signing of the Churchill-de Gaulle agreements, which laid the foundations of the relationship between Free France and the British Government, followed by the rallying of the French colonial territories to the Allies, enabled the Gaullist movement to present itself as the holder of national sovereignty and call into question the legitimacy of the governments that emerged from the armistice.
On 29 August, after the territories of Equatorial Africa had come out in support of Free France, de Gaulle said the following: “The crime of the Armistice was surrendering as if France were not an empire.” He then proclaimed: “Free France wants nothing to do with this so-called armistice. To us, this so-called armistice is null and void.”
General de Gaulle’s refusal to recognise the armistice of June 1940 led to the term disappearing almost entirely from his wartime writings; the last instance dates from 18 June 1942. The great speeches and declarations that mark the various stages in the fight for the legitimacy of his action never make any allusion to it. The term is absent from the Brazzaville Declaration of 27 October 1940, in which he denounced the Vichy Government as “unconstitutional and submissive to the invader”, the programmatic speech of 15 November 1941 at the Albert Hall and the Order of 9 August 1944 on restoring republican legality.
The “memory” of the armistice, then, disappeared with the outbreak of war, being replaced by the commemoration of its refusal, celebrated for the first time on 18 June 1941. 18 June went on to become one of France’s key commemorative dates, a claim made by de Gaulle in his speech in Algiers on 18 June 1944: “If the call to arms of 18 June 1940 has taken on its significance, it is simply because the French nation saw fit to hear it and respond to it.”