The Salonnards

When the full story of U.S. foreign policy toward Vichy--and the extension of that policy into the "expediency" of French North Africa--is unraveled after the war, the men who made the decisions will come in for close scrutiny. Were they, as charged by some, dominated by Fascist sympathizers? What were their associations? What were their motives?

Last week onetime Chicago Daily News Paris Correspondent Edgar Ansel Mowrer, who had just resigned as Deputy Director of OWI after a row with the State Department over North African policy, offered his explanation. Said he:

"What occasionally--to uninformed outsiders--looks like sympathy for Fascism can better be described as conservative or 'upper class' feeling . . . adherence to what the French call the Internationale des Salonnards, or the solidarity existing between members of what is called society with a capital S all over the world. It happens that a large number of American diplomats and State Department officials, by birth, wealth, or election, do 'belong.' It is as natural for them to trust their own kind abroad as it is for me to rely upon the opinion of the newspaper correspondents, which in the last 10 years nearly always has been opposed to that of our diplomats. . . .

"I do not think . . . we should have refused the aid of North African Vichy-men . . . at the cost of thousands of American lives. . . . I have nothing against using the men of Vichy. What was wrong was leaving them and putting them in political control as the price of their aid--in considering them not as our instruments, but as our allies. . .

"We absolutely had in North Africa either to restore the legality and social norms of the Third French Republic--or our own. We did neither. . . .

"So long as there are American officials who toy with the idea of beating the Axis by utilizing one Quisling after another, 'right up to the German frontiers' . . . we cannot be sure that there will be no more 'temporary expediency. . . .' "

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