Meanwhile Prime Minister Reynaud, having refused the opportunity to go to England with Spears, was now, six days after the armistice, desperately trying to reach his holiday home on the Riviera, en route to Washington. The relationship between Reynaud and his mistress, the Comtesse des Portes, with whom he had been living more or less openly for years, was not just a personal scandal but had serious political consequences. According to the US diplomat Robert Murphy: ‘When M and Mme Paul Reynaud were invited to dine at the American Embassy, there always was a question which lady would attend? At one dinner both arrived, providing a neat protocol problem. Hélène des Portes was an exceptionally determined Frenchwoman, and her frenzied political activity and doubts about the war were the gossip of Paris. Even after war broke out, she persistently urged Reynaud and his ministers to negotiate peace with Germany.’
Hélène, a fascist sympathizer, ‘so violently anti-British that Hitler had once sent an emissary to woo her favours’, had long been urging Reynaud to surrender, even going to the lengths of intriguing with a key US diplomat. The disgusted Murphy later recalled: ‘I don’t think her role in encouraging the defeatist elements during Reynaud’s critical last days should be underestimated. She spent an hour weeping in my office to get us to urge Reynaud to ask for an armistice.’
Now that Pétain had taken over, Comtesse des Portes hoped that she and Reynaud could escape to a new life in Washington. But on the way south, with Reynaud at the wheel of a car dangerously overloaded with trunks, suitcases and other pieces of luggage, the car swerved violently when a hatbox was dislodged and fell into the front, obscuring the driver’s view. They hit a tree, killing Hélène des Portes instantly. Reynaud, who suffered a minor head injury, apparently told Bullitt: ‘I have lost my country, my honour and my love.’*
In the subsequent parliamentary debate in the Vichy Opera House on 10 July, Pétain exploited the absence of the opposition députés and was granted full powers as head of the new French state. The term l’état Fran?ais was chosen in deliberate opposition to the French Republic, which it was replacing. Pétain had long insisted that the morals of politicians of the Third Republic were rotten, as the death of Comtesse des Portes surely illustrated. Just a year earlier, when Pétain, then Ambassador to Madrid, was invited to return to Paris and assume political power he remarked, according to Murphy, the American diplomat, ‘What would I do in Paris? I have no mistress!’ – a somewhat hypocritical remark as he had been a bachelor into his sixties famous for his womanizing. Yet on 12 July he appointed two men to senior positions, neither of whom conformed to the ideal he was promoting of the perfect family. Pierre Laval, the swarthy self-made newspaper-owner who became Vice-President and his designated successor, had but one child, a daughter, Josée, while Fernand de Brinon, the Catholic aristocrat appointed as representative to the German High Command in Paris, had a Jewish wife, born Jeanne Louise Rachel Franck, a Parisienne socialite and divorcee who was to cause her husband some embarrassment in the months to follow.
At the other extreme from women who were preparing to give their lives to the nation were the young female actresses, the mythical and glamorous Parisiennes or ‘ambassadors of the new European order’, as the tragic, self-deluding actress Corinne Luchaire described them. In April 1940, two months before Italy declared war against France, the teenage film star was introduced to Count Ciano, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Mussolini’s son-in-law. In her own faux-na?f account she maintained later that, although flattered by his amorous attentions and aware that he was married, she did not realize then that he harboured such dangerous ideas against her own country, merely that, in gallantly paying court to her, he was playing a sort of game. For a while they met daily, but she claimed later that she found herself involved in ‘things I did not understand’.
Corinne Luchaire spoke for many when she explained that of course at first she felt uncertain and apprehensive on hearing about the armistice. But within days the German soldiers she met calmed her by their noticeable demonstration of respect as they stood up and saluted. She learned from a hotel chambermaid that ‘the Germans in the hotel were not doing any harm, paid for their own drinks and dined at small tables without paying attention to the other clients of the hotel’. Corinne, because of a childhood spent with her mother among Nazis in Germany, was well placed to reassure French women that the Germans were not at all ‘the big bad wolves’ they had been portrayed as before the war, but were in fact civilized creatures who would bring a sense of order.