Vichy collaborators exiled in Canada? After the war, French criminals found refuge on the banks of the Saint Lawrence, where a singular royalist and anti-republican nursery flourished.
Vichy and Quebec: the subject has already caused much ink to flow and sparked several controversies, one might say. The strength and originality of Marc Bergère’s excellent work lies in a dual focus on both the exile of French collaborators in Canada and the memory of this phenomenon. Resulting from a work of accreditation to direct research, this book is the fruit of impressive research conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. Its methodological range is no less remarkable: the book deals with diplomatic, cultural, intellectual, political and social dimensions.
Criminals in exile
From the outset, the introduction scans the horizons of a Vichy and a French exit from the war “outside the walls”. The colonies, the Americas, Ireland, Eastern Europe, these are all fields that Mr. Bergère approaches through comparisons. He challenges the idea that Quebec would have been particularly receptive to Pétainist ideology or reluctant towards Free France, by recalling that the United States was no less so. He observes in fact that a sort of ” soft power ” Vichy was working on public opinion.
According to Mr. Bergère, the reception of militiamen in Quebec after the war is mainly attributable to a Catholic and ultra-reactionary network mainly from Montreal (even if it benefited from support in Kamouraska, in particular). That being said, the greater part of the work is devoted to this milieu in which Vichy appeared as a salutary return to pre-revolutionary values, and the provisional government as an avatar of the Terror of 1793-1794.
The impact of the Cold War and, above all, its recovery by collaborators and their Quebec protectors also hold interest. The book is also full of comparisons, examples of war criminals who have escaped the meshes of various nets, because of these instrumentalizations.
Among the “protectors” relying on anti-communism, let us note the example of Robert Rumilly. This Maurrassian “corset merchant”, born in France and emigrated to Canada in 1928, converted into a historian of Quebec, became after the war the main supporter of Jacques Dugé de Bernonville. A militiaman and ultra-collaborator, the latter had led the repression against the Vercors maquis, before finding refuge in the Belle Province, where some, starting with Rumilly, received him as a hero. A singular royalist and anti-republican nursery, a sulphurous synergy that prospered on the banks of the Saint-Laurent.
Another salient point: the number of war criminals, all nationalities combined, who have found refuge in Canada. For example, on the list of the ten most wanted war criminals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2012, three of them had stayed in Canada or were still living there. Incidentally, Mr. Bergère fails to mention one of the very first, and not the least: the Nazi Otto Strasser, who emigrated to Canada in 1941.
Transatlantic echoes, transformations and distortions are at the heart of the work. The media coverage of the Pétain trial in Quebec is a good example: some Quebecers perceived the vengeance of Freemasonry, others imagined the intransigence of Robespierre or the Moscow trials. Still others, more subtle in their criticism, did not fail to ironize on the lack of constitutional legitimacy of General de Gaulle in 1940 as in 1944.
Among the short but rich sections, I will mention the development that the author devotes to the prosperous years of Quebec publishing during the war. While German and Vichy censorship was rife in France, Quebec became nothing less than “the epicenter of French publishing.” This phenomenon was to be short-lived, however: once the networks and suppliers were reestablished after the war, the French and Canadian authorities agreed on the principle of one Quebec book sent to France for every three French books delivered to Quebec…
Bernonville, a big fish
This brings us to the delicate question of French-Canadian emotional relations and a fortiori Franco-Quebec relations. The so-called “neocolonial” relationship between Paris and Quebec constitutes a recurring leitmotif with unexpected consequences. Take the incredible affair of the censorship of the film Children of Paradise in Quebec in 1945 (a ban that lasted almost two decades!). While the French ambassador to Canada tried to support the film, he was castigated for his interference by the Quebec press; the film was associated with an “immoral and decadent” France, even communist.
This permanent tension, including the censorship of Children of Paradise is only a symptom, is evident in the case of the protection enjoyed by a small circle of French collaborators. Partly because of such accusations of interference, French representatives kept a relatively low profile in dealing with the issue of the militiamen who came to settle in Canada.
These collaborators truly occupy the heart of the book. It is clear that most of them were fairly small fry, many of them doctors. This leads the author to undertake an interesting reflection on the influence that Pétainism could have had within this profession. The big fish was none other than Bernonville. Among the smugglers and promoters of this curious wave of clandestine immigration, we can cite the fascist mayor of Montreal Camillien Houde and, in the case of Bernonville, the entourage of the Count of Paris.
Bernonville must be recognized as a singular character, marked by conspiracy. A former hooded soldier, a convinced royalist, he was twice suspected of wanting to participate in a “march on Vichy”, a regime that he considered too soft and too timid (despite his great admiration for the person of the Marshal). What followed was a drift intended to prove to the head of the Militia that Bernonville was reliable and loyal. The man organized an African Phalange intended to fight against the Allies in North Africa. Then, in cooperation with the SShe formed auxiliary corps to support the Germans in their repression of the maquis. He led the counter-insurrection in the Vercors, where he sowed terror.
Then he crossed the Rubicon by personally enlisting in the Waffen SS. However, according to Rumilly, his post-war French-Canadian host, Bernonville was “a brave man, a proud Christian, a resolute opponent of communism” (p. 104). Finally, it is appropriate to mention Bernonville’s tracker, Maurice Duclos. Also from the Cagoularde movement, he distinguished himself in Free France in the summer of 1940, before taking up a post at the French embassy in Ottawa after the war. There, he devoted his time to pursuing the former militiaman.
Bernonville and his comrades benefited from undeniable complicity on the part of the clergy on both sides of the Atlantic; various religious establishments, including abbeys, sheltered for a time these people from the Legionary Order Service, the Militia, etc., accused of treason or intelligence with the enemy. Some had in fact hunted down resistance fighters, others had arrested Jews, and almost all had enthusiastically led the Franco-French civil war of 1944. One of them, Michel-Lucien Seigneur, had denounced the Anglophiles and the Gaullists to all and sundry, before linking up with the Germans in the Oradour-sur-Glane sector in May-June 1944.
The book offers a fine analysis of memorial phenomena, starting with the twists and turns of the Bernonville affair, who ended up assassinated in Brazil in 1972. Mr. Bergère rightly points out that the emphasis placed by historians and the media, since the 1990s, on anti-Semitism and reactionary and Christian authoritarianism in Quebec has provoked a reactionary effect. Thus, Yves Tremblay insisted on the role of Quebecers in the Canadian army that helped liberate France and the Netherlands in 1944-1945. Clearly, the author refutes the “globalizing vision” of a Quebec at war too often depicted in black, especially in the 1990s and 2000s.
Critical reflections
At this point, I will allow myself a few minor criticisms. The structure of the book is problematic in my opinion. Chapter 2 analyzes the case of the French collaborators who “refugeed” in Quebec, while their portrait has not yet been drawn. They are only presented to the reader in chapters 3 and 5 – the latter constituting a remarkable work of prosopography. This gives the curious impression of ending with the beginning.
In addition to this non-linear aspect, it seems to me that readers who are not specialists in Canada and Quebec risk getting lost in various twists and turns. The Quiet Revolution is mentioned on several occasions, without being defined. More generally, the memory echoes consist of a leapfrog narrative that bypasses the second – and best-known – of the Gaullist “moments” in Quebec, that of 1967 (and the phrase “Long live free Quebec!”, accompanied by a rather clumsy assimilation between Canadian federalism and German occupation: “This evening here, and all along my route, I found myself in an atmosphere of the same kind as that of the Liberation”).
Furthermore, the French-speaking fact in Canada as presented by Mr. Bergère seems to concern only Quebec, while the view of Acadians, Franco-Manitobans or Franco-Ontarians would perhaps have provided counter-examples. Just like the papers of the French consulates outside Quebec. Some regrets also: the archives of Pierre Dupuy, the Canadian representative in Vichy, reveal the same hope for a monarchical restoration in France, which perhaps invites a parallel with the royalism of Bernonville.
Finally, since the author comments on the rare Canadian films on the Second World War, The Statement (2003), by Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison (Crime against humanity in the French version) could have provided clues, because it is about a pseudo-Canadian plot to assassinate former French militiamen. The main character, a former militiamen, even thinks he will find asylum in Quebec.
Let us salute overall a remarkable book for its capacity to capture memory rebounds. Methodologically, the work is enriched by the line which consists, at the invitation of Romain Bertrand, in “taking a step to the side”, rather than creating a crossed history strictly speaking.