Anesthesia in France

Pierre Laval had promised Adolf Hitler 350,000 skilled workers. Last week only some 50,000 French workers had arrived in Germany. Of these, a mere 15,000 were skilled. Germany needed men. Pierre Laval needed time--time to anesthetize France for Hitler's surgery.

He tried a super-duper advertising campaign to sell 85-year-old Marshal Henri Philippe Petain to every Frenchman. Two hundred experts set up shop in the government hotel in Vichy. Men of art and literature went to work. The Marshal's profile, slogans and symbols appeared on stamps, china, ash trays, badges, hatbands, blotters, coins, bijoux and shaving mugs. A francisc, the Marshal's Frankish emblem, adorned all official documents. The Marshal's colors and cheerful slogans about healthy children appeared on milk bottles. Frenchmen wryly remembered World War I, when the Kaiser's picture had adorned the bottoms of chamber pots.

But Hitler was mad as hell. The six million foreign workers already in Germany were not enough. He needed more, and he wanted those Frenchmen who were not willing slaves: they could be exchanged for Naziphile prisoners, and France's best blood thus diluted by its worst. Laval did his best to oblige. He yelled for more workers. He sent foreign and French Jews by the thousands to Nazi labor camps in Poland and Silesia. He ordered 1,600 factories in Unoccupied France shut down. He warned France that lack of raw materials would soon increase the number. He told tens of thousands of unemployed Frenchmen to "volunteer" for work at "high" wages in German factories to produce "for victory over Bolshevism."

France seethed with indignation. The Laval-Petain duet was conking out. Its collaborationists' burbling was drowned by the rattle of machine guns outside hostage camps. Laval fired arch-collaborationist Jacques Benoist-Mechin from his job as Secretary of State, on the ground that Naziphile Benoist-Mechin had conspired against him. In the next breath Laval told newspapermen that his "Government was based on "solid foundations," remarked that rumors of its fall were "laughable."

But Pierre Laval did not laugh. He knew that ballyhooing Petain would not win over the French people as long as their country was ground under the Nazi boot. He knew that all France's workers could not sate Hitler's rapacious appetite. If Hitler won, Laval would probably disappear, like Austria's Schuschnigg, in favor of a German Gauleiter. If the Allies won, Laval could expect to be hanged at least, possibly drawn & quartered by Frenchmen.

Greasy, thick-lipped Pierre Laval went home and sought solace in music. He turned on his radio and heard in idiomatic French: "Frenchmen! Take up arms against the invaders and light the fuse of revolt. Ici Moscou. Ici Moscou." He spun the dial nervously and heard London's Fighting French station saying: "Frenchmen, Wait!" He felt better, but not much.

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