By EUGEN WEBER [The Atlantic] – Hindsight suggests that the best characterization of Germany’s approach to occupied France was “Give me your watch and I’ll tell you the time.” But if the Germans looted with all the enthusiasm once shown by Napoleon’s armies, they also struck deals that could serve both sides. The new order was European. With French and German bankers, industrialists, and other businessmen meeting regularly, the idea of a United States of Europe was making its way, along with visions of a single customs zone and a single European currency. The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration. Bureaucratic controls proliferated, administrative and business elites interpenetrated, postwar economic planning took shape—as did that greater Europe in which France’s Hitler-allotted role would be one of a bigger Switzerland, “a country of tourism … and fashion.” For the present France offered an economy to be milked at will, and a reservoir of labor.

In February of 1943 German demands for manpower forced Laval to introduce the Compulsory Labor Service (STO). Already 185,000 volunteers (including the future leader of the French Communist Party, Georges Marchais) had found work in Germany. But far more numerous than those who, however unwillingly, obeyed the draft were those who would not go—who hid, who ran away, who took to the hills, the forests, the maquis (a term for Corsican scrubland which came into general use by April of 1943). The STO turned law-abiding folk into outlaws and made law-enforcement agencies reluctant to enforce the law. Church dignitaries, most of them silent about the fate of the Jews, criticized the labor draft. In September of 1943 the prefect of Marseille estimated that 90 percent of his police force sympathized with the underground. That was what turned an insignificant trickle of resistance into a torrent.

Continued in The Atlantic | More Chronicle & Notices.