3 - The Shifting Parameters of the Patriotically Plausible

Summary

On August 12, 1941, Philippe Pétain took to the airwaves to speak to his compatriots of an “evil wind” he sensed rising across the land. Among the factors he blamed for what he described as a growing public mood of disquiet and a questioning of his government’s authority were the forces of the “ancien régime” (i.e. the Third Republic) – the Freemasons chief among them! But, after first claiming that the partisans of the defunct system and of the corporate “trusts” were somehow interposing themselves between “the people” and him – between whom, otherwise, a mutual understanding existed – he went on to imply that it was precisely the French people who were at fault. Insisting that authority no longer flowed from the bottom up but rather from his own person, he described the solution to the problem as lying in a more energetic and forceful use of that authority to implement the principles of the National Revolution. The marshal cited his past record of restoring order out of chaos during the military mutinies of 1917 as well as the rout of 1940, concluding that “today, it is from yourselves that I wish to save you.” The alternative, he warned, was a civil war on the Spanish model.¹