Marcel Déat

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Marcel Déat (1932)

Marcel Déat (born March 7, 1894 Guérigny , Nièvre department , Burgundy ; † January 4, 1955 in San Vito, an eastern suburb of Turin , Italy ) was a French politician before and during the Second World War .

Early life and politics

From 1914 Déat attended the École normal supérieure to take an exam in philosophy , where he met Émile Chartier , a philosophy teacher who was politically at home with the radicals and whose pacifism influenced him. At the age of 20, in 1914, he joined the socialist party SFIO more out of philosophical idealism than out of a materialist worldview. During the First World War he received five awards for bravery as a private and was accepted into the Legion of Honor . At the end of the war, Déat had reached the rank of captain and returned in 1918 to the École Normale Supérieure, where he took his exam. He turned to the sociology of Célestin Bouglé , a radical friend of Chartier, and worked in his secretariat at the documentation center on rue d'Ulm. He later started teaching philosophy in Reims .

Under the pseudonym Taëd he published the work Cadavres et maximes, philosophie d'un revenant (English: corpses and maxims, philosophy of a ghost ), in which he expressed his horror of the war, the trenches, his inveterate pacifism and his admiration for the Camaraderie and collective discipline, values ​​that have influenced his decisions since then.

When the SFIO split in Tours in 1920 , Déat joined the Groupe de la vie socialiste (= group of socialist life) around Pierre Renaudel . In 1925 he was elected to the city council in Reims, and just a year later, in 1926, he received a SFIO member's mandate for the French National Assembly in a by-election in the constituency of Marne , which he lost again in 1928. At the time, advancement within the SFIO was difficult for young members, but Déat enjoyed the encouragement of Léon Blum . In 1931 Déat published a theoretical paper entitled Perspectives socialistes (= socialist perspectives), in which the socialist party was recommended to adapt to capitalism , since, contrary to the Marxist doctrine, capitalism does not destroy itself. Déat gave the state a privileged role in terms of property, which in his view should, however, remain private. He spoke out against collectivism and revolution because he believed that chaos was the fascists' creed. He violently contradicted the Marxists and joined the Planists. He did not want to wait for socialism, but called for a transitional regime. Déat's understanding of “socialism” means above all anti-Marxism ; it resembled that of the long-defeated Strasser wing in the empire.

In 1932, Déat was elected to the National Assembly in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. He fell out with his party over a dispute with Léon Blum's policy in relation to Prime Minister Édouard Herriot and was officially expelled in 1933. Déat lost his seat in the National Assembly and then, together with other neo-socialists such as Adrien Marquet and Pierre Renaudel, founded a new splinter party called Parti Socialiste de France (PSDF), whose slogan was: "ordre, autorité et nation" (= Order, authority and nation). She propagated an opening to the middle class and participation in a non-socialist government. On their list, he returned to the National Assembly in 1936 as a deputy from Angoulême and in the same year became Minister of Aviation in the Albert Sarraut cabinet . However, he quickly lost this post due to a disagreement with the Prime Minister. He later also lost his parliamentary seat to a communist. By all means he opposed France's entry into the war. As a strict anti-communist, however, he did not join the Front Populaire .

Fascism and collaboration

Thoroughly frustrated with his understanding of socialism, Déat turned to fascism and became an avid advocate of far-right politics. At first Déat raved about an authoritarian republican regime, where he wanted to promote a strong, autonomous executive at the expense of the legislature in order to weaken the parliamentarism he has since despised . He asked his government to rebuild France on the fascist model. When it seemed in 1939 that France would go to war against Nazi Germany , he published a highly controversial article under the title “Faut-il mourir pour Dantzig?” (= “Do you have to die for Danzig ?”) In the newspaper L 'Oeuvre , whose direction he took over in 1940. In this article he argued that France should avoid war with Germany for Poland that would later be overrun . In doing so, he triggered a far-reaching controversy and promoted himself to national sideline. Together with the later collaborators Pierre Laval and Jacques Doriot , he formed the group of "pacifists" who, in order to avoid the confrontation with Germany, supported Prime Minister Édouard Daladier 's policy of appeasement , which resulted in the Munich Agreement . They saw the social fractures and conflicts in democratic France as the cause of an allegedly backward political development in their country compared to National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.

Déat, who became a strong supporter of the German occupation of northern France in 1940, moved to the southern zone ruled by the Vichy regime and initially became a supporter of Marshal Philippe Pétain . But when he realized that the conservative Vichy would not become a fascist state based on the German model, he returned to Paris in the occupied northern zone, where he found support from the German occupation authorities. In February 1941 he founded the Rassemblement national populaire (RNP, National People's Assembly), a collaborationist party that supported anti-Semitism and totalitarianism . With the RNP, he intended to integrate former socialists and trade unionists, but also the right wing Union nationale des combattants (national war veterans association) and the Mouvement social révolutionnaire (MSR, social revolutionary movement) Eugène Deloncles .

Laval, a former socialist who had been appointed first prime minister of the Vichy regime by the arch-conservative Pétain, saw the RNP as a welcome opportunity to weaken the Vichy regime politically and to take revenge after his release in December 1940. The RNP strongly promoted Laval's return, and Deloncle even planned for a time a march on Vichy , based on the model of Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 , which the German occupation authorities rejected out of concern for Pétain's reaction.

Together with other fascist collaborators, such as Doriot and Marcel Bucard , Déat founded the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme (LVF; Legion of French volunteers against Bolshevism) or Légion anti-bolchévique or Légion tricolore , in which French volunteers in uniforms Wehrmacht involved in the fight against the Soviet Union . Later, the remnants of this legion, as well as Dutch , Walloon , Flemish, Norwegian , Spanish , Romanian , Hungarian , Latvian and Croatian volunteer associations, were integrated into the Waffen-SS .

When Laval paid a troop visit to the LVF on August 27, 1941 in Versailles , Déat was wounded in an attempted attack by Resistance member Paul Collette . Upon recovery, he became a supporter of Laval, who had been subsidizing him with government funds since his return to power in 1942 to 1943.

About the dissolution of the MSR demanded by Déat, a conflict arose in May 1941 between Déat and Deloncle, who carelessly declared that he wanted to become the sole leader of the RNP. Deloncle feverishly hatched a plan to eradicate déats from the top of the RNP in a bogus “car accident”. From the hospital bed, Déat then ordered Deloncles to be removed from all party offices and expelled from the RNP. With the exclusion of Deloncles from the RNP, this collaboration party lost its top political position and represented almost only the middle class.

With his RNP, however, Déat exerted great influence, particularly through an organization called the Union de l'enseignement (= educational association) to which teachers and members of the educational system belonged. She advocated higher salaries for teachers, the elimination of Catholic influence on the educational system and a stronger National Socialist education for French young people. Déat also campaigned against the obsessive persecution of Freemasons operated by Bernard Faÿ and reduced it. Although Déat was against women's suffrage (which Charles de Gaulle first introduced), he protested against Vichy's attempts to restrict women's educational rights and limit them to the role of housewife and mother.

In addition, the German occupation authorities were by no means unanimous in their occupation policy, as they had three interfaces with the French collaborators: There was the military commander for occupied France (MBF), who with his almost 1,000-strong staff of armed forces and civilians, hurried in Uniformed experts resided in the Hôtel Majestic , subordinate to the Army Commander in Chief. In addition to military issues, he was also responsible for economic issues and, for a long time, for security issues.

Mainly political issues were dealt with by Ambassador Otto Abetz , who was subordinate to the German Foreign Office and thus to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop . In addition to bureaucrats and lawyers of all levels, the embassy also increasingly included scientists, especially Romanists, who worked out careers in the West in the fascist Europe they had hoped for, SS Europe .

The third sphere of influence on the German side consisted of the security police ( Gestapo , as the primary Jewish and Resistance hunters) and the security service ( SD ), who, together with the SS, were subordinate to Heinrich Himmler . There was a certain rivalry between all three German spheres of power, in particular between the embassy and the SS, which was encouraged by a lack of delimitation of precise responsibilities. Abetz and the embassy favored Laval and Déat, while the SS sponsored Jacques Doriot . So it was no wonder that the RNP achieved an “authorized status” in the northern zone as early as February 1941, which the PPF only received from October 1941.

What all the German occupation authorities had in common was that they did not even think of promoting Pétain's goal of a monolithic “unifying France”, but did everything in their power to prevent him from building a one-party state based on the German or Italian model. The National Socialists did their best to stimulate party-political, religious, regional and other internal French contradictions in order to be able to monitor and exploit France more easily. The promotion of the rival groups RNP and PPF also aimed to split French forces.

When Déat's comparatively small RNP with around 20,000 followers received financial support after Laval's return, but the government participation he had hoped for did not materialize and Déat realized that Laval, as a man of the Germans, had absolutely no intention of forming France into a one-party state , with the founding of the Front révolutionnaire nationale (FRN, Revolutionary National Front), in misunderstanding the actual balance of power, he sought to again form a federative unity party with the involvement of Doriot's much larger Parti populaire français (PPF, French People's Party) in order to jointly create pressure to exercise on the Vichy regime. While Déat promoted the formation of a unity party from above, Doriot tried to use the common hopes and fears of the collaborators on site to thwart Déat.

After the failure of Déat's attempt to form a unity party, he tried in the summer of 1943, together with other disappointed collaborators, such as Joseph Darnand and Jean Luchaire , to present a plan de redressement nationale français (= "national French restructuring plan"). At the same time, the German occupation authorities were warned that Laval could indirectly advocate France on the side of the Allies if Laval's government did not come to "power" through a one-party system led by Darnand and high milice officials. Pétain then wanted to convene the National Assembly, which had not been in session for three years, to legitimize his rule, which was prevented by the German side. Instead, the Germans insisted on the appointment of Déats, Doriots and Philippe Henriots as ministers, whereupon Laval Déat made “Minister for Labor and National Solidarity” in his puppet government in March 1944. This was not without meaning, because the Relève was anything but a success, more and more young French preferred the underground with the Resistance instead, and the German demands for French workers became more and more relentless. During Déat's tenure, only a comparatively small number of French workers entered the Third Reich . At the same time, Déat endeavored to improve the advantages that Vichy unilaterally granted employers in the works councils , which are supposed to have equal representation, in favor of employees . After the successful landing of the Allies in Normandy , Doriot and Déat held another large demonstration in Paris in July 1944, during which they reaffirmed their plan de redressement .

exile

In 1944 Déat fled to Sigmaringen in southern Germany together with the government commission . On 1 September 1944, Hitler mentioned his intention to make Doriot the leader of the French "government in exile" while Darnand and DEAT in Sigmaringen continually against each intrigued .

Shortly before the German surrender in 1945, Déat fled to Italy , where he temporarily taught in Milan and Turin under a new name . He was later received by a religious order, the Congrégation des sœurs de la providence, which hid him undiscovered in his Carmelite monastery "Institut Jeanne d'Arc" near Turin until his death in 1955 . The mother house of the congregation is in France, in La Pommeraye . Déat wrote his memoirs in Turin. In France, he was tried in absentia for treason and sentenced to death .

plant

Web links

Commons : Marcel Déat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

notes

  1. See the title of his 1936 work “Le plan français”, excerpts of which were published in German in 1938.
  2. Marcel Déat: Mourir pour Dantzig . In: L'Œuvre . May 4, 1939.
  3. Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration. Columbia University Press, New York 2011, p. 175 ff.
  4. Übers. PD Contains the complete table of contents of the November 1935 edition, Verlag Fasquelle, in German, as well as full text excerpts from two chapters, named by PD “On sale with benefit - the only source of purchasing power” and “The question of agriculture”.