Philippe Henriot

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Philippe Henriot (1934)

Philippe Henriot (born January 7, 1889 in Reims , † June 28, 1944 in Paris ) was a right-wing extremist French politician .

Life

Henriot came from a conservative Catholic milieu. His father had together with Philippe Petain , the Military School of Saint-Cyr visited. Henriot worked as a teacher at a Catholic school in the Gironde department before he emigrated to the nationalist Fédération républicaine , for which he was elected to the French National Assembly from 1932 to 1936 during the Third Republic in the Bordeaux constituency . His speeches identified him as anti-Semitic , anti-communist , anti-parliamentary and anti-Masonic . At first this was associated with a deep anti-German sentiment . The main targets of his attacks were communism , the Spanish Republic and André Marty .

In 1938 Henriot stood up as an ardent supporter of the Munich Agreement and in 1940 supported the politics of the aged Marshal Pétain, his Révolution nationale and the Vichy regimes through contributions to the collaborationist organs Gringoire and Je suis partout (= I am everywhere). With the attack of the Third Reich on the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ) in 1941, he radicalized himself and also supported Nazi Germany. He later joined the Milice française .

His daily radio broadcasts on Radio Vichy and Radio Paris earned him the nickname "French Goebbels " because he fought an intense propaganda war with French broadcasts on the BBC and Radio Londres , which was designed by the Forces françaises libres and broadcasts from England , in particular Pierre Dac and Maurice Schumann . One of his most loyal listeners is said to have been Madame Pétain. Henriot continued his propaganda war even after the complete occupation of France by the Wehrmacht in November 1942.

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Henriot was able to present complex topics clearly and directly, had a present, melodious, never theatrical voice and, with his broadcasts, appealed primarily to anxious and apathetic people, giving the impression of correcting misinformation from outside France as the voice of reason within France . In this way, Henriot justified the collaboration more extensively than the highly intellectual, traditionalist Pétain or the Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who was involved in cow trades, tried. Henriot succeeded in presenting the prehistory of the Vichy regime not as a story of the nationalist-right-wing extremist Action française , which propagated hatred of Germans, and of Laval's incarnate opportunism , but rather he formed a political line from the hero of Verdun Pétain to an assumed “Soviet Plan “the domination of all of Europe starting with the International Brigades in Spain up to the fight of German and French soldiers on the Eastern Front and the continued collaboration of the Vichy regime after the break of the Armistice of Compiègne and the occupation of the French southern zone by the Third Reich. Emphasizing his Catholicism, he consistently demonized the communist maquis in the mountains as Moscow's fifth column , interpreted the Allied landing in Normandy as an advance of the USSR into France and described the liberators as the "assassins of the heavens and the forests". Henriot traveled to the Haute-Savoie department to interview Maquisards captured there and portray them as stupid, evil and distorted by hatred. In the opinion of the Prefect of the Vaucluse department , this propaganda had an impact: two months before, en masse people had been ready to support the Resistance , Henriot managed to change the mood.

Under pressure from the German occupation authorities, Henriot was promoted to Minister for Information and Propaganda of the Vichy regime on January 6, 1944, together with Joseph Darnand as Minister for Order and Public Security with the consent of Laval. At the same time, Laval is said to have thwarted Henriot and Darnand's effectiveness as ministers by delaying or only partially executing instructions from the two newly appointed ministers. Pétain is said to have hated Henriot so much that he refused to sign his letter of appointment.

Henriot's propaganda created irreconcilable hatred between the Resistance and France libre on the one hand and Vichy on the other. Thanks to Henriot's fanatical propaganda, the Vichy regime was no longer associated with the song Maréchal, nous voilà , but with milice, torture, murder and collaboration, which partly explains the hatred of all collaborators and the violence of the épuration after the liberation.

This widening gap ultimately led to Henriot being murdered in his Paris ministry at 10 rue de Solférino by a 15-strong Résistance commando, whose members disguised themselves as members of the milice, on June 28, 1944 . The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Suhard , celebrated a funeral service for Henriot in Notre Dame Cathedral . In revenge, the milice committed murders in Mâcon and elsewhere. The culmination of these crimes was the murder of the imprisoned Georges Mandel , a proven opponent of the collaboration.

Publications

  • Les Méfaits de la Franc-Maçonnerie . Ligue national anti-maçonnique, Paris 1934.
  • Le 6 février , Flammarion, Paris 1934.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pierre Giolitto: Histoire de la Milice . Editions Perrin, Paris 1997, pp. 304-305.
  2. ^ Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) : State funeral for Philippe Henriot (last accessed on November 27, 2011).

bibliography

Web links

Commons : Philippe Henriot  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Henriot, Philippe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, member of the National Assembly
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Reims
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1944
Place of death Paris