François Darlan

François Darlan (1940)

Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan (born August 7, 1881 in Nérac , Lot-et-Garonne department , † December 24, 1942 in Algiers , French North Africa ) was a French admiral and politician . During the time of the Vichy regime he held important political and military offices.

Career in the French Navy

François Darlan came from a respected Nérac family with a long history in the French Navy . His father Jean-Baptiste Darlan was a member of the National Assembly for the Lot-et-Garonne department and was Minister of Justice in 1896/97 .

Between 1899 and 1902 Darlan was trained at the Naval School ( École Navale ) in Lanvéoc and served temporarily in the Far East . During the First World War he commanded a land-based naval battery and fought in the Battle of Verdun in 1916 . After the end of the war, Darlan commanded the training ship Jeanne d'Arc and from 1926 the armored cruiser Edgar Quinet with the rank of sea ​​captain .

Thanks to his godfather, Georges Leygues , longtime Minister of the Navy, Darlan's career experienced a rapid rise. In 1929 he was appointed head of cabinet Leygues and promoted to rear admiral and represented France in 1930 under the London Naval Treaty . In 1932 Darlan was appointed Vice Admiral and two years later he was in command of the French Atlantic Squadron in Brest . On January 1, 1937, Darlan was promoted to chief of staff in the Navy and admiral . He used his political contacts to successfully promote the armament of the navy and to counter the growing threat posed by the German navy and the Italian Marina Militare .

To emphasize his equality with the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy , Darlan received on June 6, 1939 the appointment to the fleet admiral ( Amiral de la Flotte ), which had been created especially for him.

Role in World War II and within the Vichy regime

In June 1940 Darlan was one of the officers who did not want to continue France's struggle in North Africa against Nazi Germany . He supported the call for a truce. He commanded most of the French Mediterranean fleet to North Africa. Part of this fleet, with about 1,300 navy men on board, was sunk by the Royal Navy in Operation Catapult on July 3 in Mers-el-Kébir . The Royal Navy wanted to prevent the French fleet from falling into the hands of the Germans. After the Allies landed in North Africa ( Operation Torch , November 8-16, 1942), Hitler had plans for the Anton company updated; On November 11, 1942, two armies of the Wehrmacht occupied large parts of the "Free Zone" of Vichy France; the Italian 4th Army occupied the Côte d'Azur and an Italian division landed on the island of Corsica .

On November 27, 1942, the admiralty of the Vichy regime ordered the self- sinking of Darlan's remaining fleet in the port of Toulon to prevent the Germans from taking over.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (right) with Marshal Philippe Pétain (center) and François Darlan (left) during talks in St. Florentin-Vergigny (1941)

Darlan negotiated the Compiègne armistice of June 22, 1940 with the German military . As a result, France had to hand over three military bases to Hitler's Germany : one in Syria , which was carried out immediately, the rest in Bizerta (in present-day Tunisia ) and in Dakar in French West Africa . According to this armistice agreement, the French army was largely taken into German captivity ; the Vichy regime's remaining “armistice army ” of 100,000 men had to fight alongside Hitler's Germany to occupy the free French colonies . In addition, the naval intelligence service "Service de Renseignement Marine" , which was under Darlan's personal command, had to provide the German Navy with information about allied ship movements.

Darlan became Minister of the Merchant and Navy in the first government of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain ( Vichy regime ). He immediately became Vice President of the State Council with the budget for the Ministry of the Interior and Foreign Ministry. In December 1940 he replaced Pierre Laval as head of government. At the same time he took over the foreign , interior and war ministries . Darlan created the general commissioner for the "Jewish question" and announced the second "Jewish statute" in June 1941. He headed the government until April 1942 and then had to resign under pressure from Adolf Hitler . However, he remained the designated successor to the head of state Pétain and commander in chief of all French armed forces of the Vichy regime.

Captured in Algiers, continued influence

On November 7, 1942, Darlan was unexpectedly called to Algiers to help his son, who was in mortal danger, who was in the Iron Lung in Maillot Hospital . There he was surprised by the Allied landing in North Africa ( Operation Torch ). He was arrested along with General Alphonse Juin , the Vichy French commanding officer for French North Africa by students from the Lycée Ben Aknoun. However, Darlan managed - freed by the Guard Mobile - to return to the Admiralty, which he ordered to resist the Allies. The following morning he sent a telegram to Vichy in which he demanded that the Allied troop transports in the Algiers area be bombarded by the German air force. In the evening, however, Darlan surrendered for Algiers. On November 10, 1942, Darlan and Juin ordered the ceasefire in Oran and on November 11th in Morocco, under pressure from US Generals Mark W. Clark and Dwight D. Eisenhower . Thereupon he was declared deposed by Pétain. The until then "unoccupied" southern zone of France was occupied by the German Wehrmacht ( Anton company ). Darlan signed the terms of the "Clark-Darlan Agreement" on November 13th.

After a debate with General Charles Noguès , François Darlan proclaimed himself “High Commissioner” in French Africa on November 14, in the name of the “prevented marshal” and citing the fourth part of the constitutional act that made him the designated successor to Marshal Pétain declared (see also: Vichy regime in liberated Africa 1942 to 1943 ). Darlan, in agreement with General Eisenhower, continued the Vichy regime, which was de facto disempowered in the motherland, under the designation "High Commissioner of France in Africa", supported by a Conseil Impérial (= Reichsrat), to which he took over the French territories and armed forces in North Africa and in France Subordinated to West Africa. This upset General Charles de Gaulle , who had commanded the forces of France libre , “Free France” on the side of the Allies from London since 1940 , and confirmed his aversion to the USA.

After another meeting of his high commissioner with the Allied Command, Darlan decided on November 14th to join the armed forces under his command in the war against Hitler's Germany. The majority of French troops in Africa followed Darlan's orders, but some units joined German troops in what is now Tunisia. At the same time, Darlan upheld Pétain's discrimination laws against the Jews and continued to imprison the victims of the Vichy regime in concentration camps in southern Algeria. He rejected calls for the democratization or emancipation of the Muslim population of Algeria.

assassination

On December 24, 1942, Darlan was assassinated by the student Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle at his headquarters in Algiers. He was hit by two bullets. Darlan died a few hours later. The assassin belonged to monarchist circles and worked with Gaullist resistance groups. In addition, the background to the attack is unclear.

La Chapelle was executed on December 26, 1942. Eisenhower chose not to stop the execution as he viewed the murder as a criminal rather than a politically motivated act.

On December 21, 1945, the appeal chamber of the Court of Appeal in Algiers posthumously rehabilitated La Chapelle and received the death sentence. According to the reasoning, the act was done in the interests of the liberation of France ("dans l'intérêt de la liberation de la France").

literature

• Elmar Krautkrämer : Admiral Darlan, de Gaulle and the royalist plot in Algiers in 1942 . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 32, issue 4, 1984, pp. 529-581. [1]
  • dsb .: The turn of the war in France in 1942. The repercussions of the Allied landing in North Africa. Darlan, de Gaulle, Henri Giraud and the royalist utopia. Peter Lang, Bern 1989
• René Pierre Gosset: Expédients provisoires (report), Fasquelle, Paris 1945
• Henri Michel : Vichy, année 1940 , Robert Laffont, Paris 1967
• Henri Michel: Darlan , Paris, Hachette, 1993
• Yves Maxime Danan: La vie politique à Alger de 1940 à 1944 , Paris, LGDJ, 1963
• Christine Levisse-Touzet: L'Afrique du Nord dans la guerre, 1939–1945 , Paris, Albin Michel, 1998
• José Aboulker and Christine Levisse-Touzet: November 8, 1942: Les armées américaine et anglaise prennent Alger en quinze heures , Paris, «Espoir», n ° 133, Paris 2002
• George F. Howe: North West Africa: Seizing the initiative in the West , Center of Military history, US Army, Library of Congress, 1991
• Arthur L. Funck: The politics of Torch , University Press of Kansas, 1974
• Les Cahiers Français, La part de la Résistance Française dans les évènements d'Afrique du Nord (Reports of the chefs des groupes de volontaires qui se sont emparés d'Alger le November 8, 1942), Commissariat à l'Information du Comité National Français, London 1943 (official reports on the coup of November 8, 1942 in Algiers)

Web links

Commons : François Darlan  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• English homepage about François Darlan
• Newspaper article about François Darlan in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Horne, Alistair (1993). The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. New York: Penguin. p. 248. ISBN 978-0-14-017041-2 .
2. ↑ Auphan, Paul; Mordai, Jacques (1959). The French Navy in World War II. Naval Institute Press. p. 10. ISBN 9781682470602 . Retrieved February 3, 2018.
3. ↑ Korda, Michael (2007). Ike: To American Hero. New York: HarperCollins. p. 325. ISBN 978-0-06-075665-9 . Retrieved May 10, 2013.
4. ↑ For the attack and the background cf. Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac : La France Libre , vol. 1: De l'appel du 18 juin à la libération , Paris, Gallimard, new edition 2001, p. 589ff.
5. ↑ Rick Atkinson : An army at dawn. The was in North Africa, 1942–1943 . Henry Holt, New York 2002, ISBN 0-8050-6288-2 , pp. 251-252.

predecessor	Office	successor
Pierre Étienne Flandin	Foreign Minister of France February 10, 1941 - April 18, 1942	Pierre Laval
Marcel Peyrouton	Minister of the Interior of France February 14, 1941 - July 18, 1941	Pierre Pucheu