We will draw our lesson from lost battles. Since the victory, the spirit of pleasure has won out over the spirit of sacrifice. People claimed more than they served. We wanted to spare the effort; today we ate facing misfortune.
"In this period of profound crisis, Marshal Pétain might appear to be a prophet as defined by Max Weber: opposed to the sacerdotal body like the extraordinary to the ordinary and deriving his authority from the correspondence between the offer of religious service and the public’s religious demand, the prophet derives his charismatic legitimacy from the fact that “he brings to the level of discourse representations, feelings and aspirations that existed before him but in a implicit, semiconscious, or unconscious state.” Such prophetic discourse encourages “reinterpretive perceptions that import all the expectations of the receivers into the message.” Women’s return to motherhood and to the home as home-makers belong to these semiconscious aspirations that would find in the Marshal’s words a continuous return to the sources tailor-made to fit their expectations. The relationship between the Marshal and his predestined public is a relationship of believing expectation, an effective force that, according to Freud, is at work in miraculous cures. The opposition between the spirit of pleasure and the spirit of sacrifice is one of these prophetic enunciations in which each believer can recognize his or her rancor and invest his or her ethical-political hopes.
The Marshal’s prophecies inscribe the analysis of the defeat in the contrition/redemption scheme and deliver the country over to a veritable “hypnosis of punishment,” to use Marc Bloch’s expression. The founding period of the National Revolution is thus placed under the sign of expiation and redemption. For Yves Durand, “This abusive extension of the Christian notion of individual conversion to the profane fate of a collectivity stems from an apocalyptic millennialism that gives the catastrophe redemptive value.”’ Indeed, in this representation of disorder and the return to order, of social decadence and regeneration, it was the return to the “real,” to “natural” communities and to “millennial” balances that organized the social philosophy of the regime. Women occupied a strategic place in this representation: the declining birthrate was seen as the symptom and the cause of the national “decadence,” the family as the basic “social cell,” the division of masculine and feminine “duties” as the guarantor of “organic” solidarity, the recognition of “natural” male and female aptitudes as the basis of “legitimate” social hierarchies, women’s return to the home as a return to cyclical time, the time of seasons, of nature, of what is biological in opposition to the chaos engendered by “egotistic” individualism, the artificial, and the democratic “lie.” The “eternal feminine” is made to serve contrition and redemption.
Perceived through its attempts to reconstruct femininity, the National Revolution seems to possess numerous characteristics that make it similar to a millenary movement. A collective quest for salvation against the backdrop of catastrophe under the guidance of an inspired prophet, millenarianism combines a representation of time that is both historical (impending denouement) and mythic: cyclical and eternally repetitive time. The return to a golden age is accompanied by a process of inclusion and exclusion that designates the elect and the damned. In these types of movements, the world’s return to order may be based on a return to a rigid sexual division of aptitudes, of “natural” duties and places specific to each sex.” The hypnotic power of punishment, the anchoring in collective guilt, the messianic hope for a new order built on trial, remorse and sacrifice are all elements of this historical situation that encouraged the return of archaic mythic conceptions.
These millenary traits did not spring forth from nothing in the French society of 1940; they were embodied and borne by social agents that had a common interest in the production of the goods of salvation. Men of letters, men of the Church, and men of science found in the eschatology of the National Revolution a fertile terrain for developing and systematizing a radicalized expression of their vision of the return to order and of the foundations of this order that included the sexual division of the social world on the basis of “natural” inequalities that are eternally established and biologically founded and not culturally or historically constructed. One of the major political impacts of the ideology of the “eternal feminine” was its rallying effect. By proposing that the country return to a sexual division of the social world founded on the idea of an eternal “natural” difference between the sexes, the National Revolution launched a request for proposals answered without delay by all those who, for ideological or strategic reasons, had long produced the “eternal feminine.”
The conflagration of the National Revolution, its character as successful prophetism, was due to the preexistence of multiple dispersed centers that, with the help of the crisis, joined forces. Silencing the adversaries of the past through the establishment of the authoritarian state that immediately broke with democracy permitted the harsh and unanimous expression of a vision of the social world in which feminine destiny was placed under the sign of submission and resignation. The unanimity of the National Revolution in this regard itself needs to be examined, as it is the sign of a political phenomenon of immediate, prereflective adherence, a consequence of a monopolistic situation in which the safeguards have given way and which, as a result, is ripe for any raised stakes and induration. But this unanimity must not make us forget that the processes of adherence are the product of a long history."
- Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender. Translated by Kathleen A. Johnson. Durham: Duke University Press, 3-5.
