The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity: Stigma, Victimhood and Decline 303093196X, 9783030931964

Table of contents :
Note on Terminology
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Introduction: Vichy Regime
Stigma, Victimhood, Decline
Stigma
Victimhood
Decline
Conclusion: Nostalgia, History
Bibliography
Chapter 2: Stigma
Introduction: Vichy’s Name
Vichy: Queen of Spas
Vichy and the Second Empire
Vichy in the Third Republic
Conclusion: Decadence and Ambiguity
Bibliography
Chapter 3: Victimhood
Introduction: Vichy’s Occupation
War Damages
Vichy and Vichy-État
Conclusion: Civic Identity
Bibliography
Chapter 4: Decline
Introduction: Vichy’s Postwar Prosperity
Decolonization, Socialization, and Medicalization
Perrier, “the Predators”
Conclusion: Catastrophe and Decline
Bibliography
Chapter 5: Renewal and Defiance
Introduction: Vichy’s Revival
Recovery and Nostalgia
The Past and the Present
Conclusion: Enduring Stigma
Bibliography
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Introduction: What “Vichy” Means
“Vichy Will Always Be Vichy”
Conclusion: Beyond Collective Memory
Bibliography
Glossary
Index

Citation preview

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity Stigma, Victimhood and Decline

Kirrily Freeman

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity

Kirrily Freeman

The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity Stigma, Victimhood and Decline

Kirrily Freeman Saint Mary’s University Halifax, NS, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-93196-4    ISBN 978-3-030-93197-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Colin

Note on Terminology

In this book, the name “Vichy” denotes the town of Vichy and its resort and associated products. The term “État Français” is used for the French collaborationist wartime government.

vii

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the writing, and I’ve accumulated a great many debts in the process. I am especially grateful to the archivists at Vichy’s Municipal Archives, Aurélie Duchézeau and Valérie Goutaudier, as well as Fabienne Gelin at the Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, for their invaluable assistance. The suggestion that Vichy’s archives are somehow inhospitable to researchers could not be further from the truth. I would also like to thank Claude Malhuret, former mayor of Vichy, for permission to reproduce images from municipal collections, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a grant that enabled the bulk of this research. Katherine Crooks, Jennifer MacDougall, and Elise Blacker were model research assistants. Katherine has since become a colleague, her research and our co-authored paper in French History inspired much in this present project. Lynne Taylor and Joe Golsan are encouraging and generous mentors, I’m so thankful for their time and wisdom. The reviewers and my editor at Palgrave Pivot, Emily Russell, made this book a reality in more ways than they know. Karly Kehoe and Madine VanderPlaat, colleagues first but now cherished friends, gave me the gifts of space and time. Maggie Bowman, Debra Gilin, Lauren Arens, Danielle LeBrun, and Molly MacInnes are the village that raised my kids— I’m very lucky to have them in my life. But my biggest debt is to my family. My parents, Dawn and Donald Freeman, my children Theo and Clara, and my husband Colin provided much needed distraction and perspective. This book is dedicated to Colin, who will be glad to see the end of it.

ix

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Stigma 21 3 Victimhood 47 4 Decline 75 5 Renewal and Defiance103 6 Conclusion123 Glossary131 Index133

xi

About the Author

Kirrily  Freeman  is Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. Her publications include Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary (2009) and Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 (2019), edited with John Munro.

xiii

Abbreviations

ADMP Association for the Defence of the Memory of Marshal Pétain BGI Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine CfV Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy, Compagnie fermière de Vichy FFI Forces françaises de l’intérieur LIDV Laboratoires industriels de Vichy MSR Mouvement social révolutionnaire MUR Mouvements unis de la Résistance ORA Organisation de résistance de l’Armée PLM Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée SGHV Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy SHDV Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy SIHAN Société immobilière et hôtelière de l’Afrique du Nord

xv

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Vichy n’est pas le Siège d’un Gouvernement Traitre à la Patrie mais la “Reine des Villes d’Eaux” (Vichy is not the seat of a treasonous government, but is the “Queen of Spas”) Municipal Council deliberations, 20 November 1944. Archives municipales de Vichy 3 Map of Vichy, 1925. Guide de l’Étranger à Vichy Saison 1925, Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC 5 Guide de l’Étranger à Vichy, Saison 1900. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC 28 PLM publicity poster, Grand Casino de Vichy. Tauzin, 1910. Bibliothèque nationale de France, gallica.bnf.fr 32 Vichy-Purgatif, postcard. US National Library of Medicine, 10145926733 Vichy, Comité des fêtes. Broders, 1926. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, 10 Aff 4341 41 Advertisement for Vichy Célestins. Guide de Vichy Édition Illustrée, 1954. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC 59 Nouvel Hôtel Guilliermen, 1894. Bibliothèque nationale de France, gallica.bnf.fr 65 Soyez élégants! (Be elegant!) Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, EF Aff 91 77 France, Vichy, mai-octobre. Lefor-Openo, circa 1960. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, OTT 10 Aff 1 80

xvii

xviii 

List of Figures

Fig. 4.3 Fig. 6.1

Vichy, Capitale Thermale, 1947. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC J. Sennep, “En l’an 2000 … Vichy sera toujours Vichy!” Dessins de J. Sennep présentés par la Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, 1942. Pamphlet, collection of the author

86 126

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Introduction: Vichy Regime At the end of the Second World War, civic identity—an alchemy of image, self-perception, and collective memory—preoccupied the residents of Vichy, the spa town that, between 1940 and 1944, served as France’s provisional capital and the seat of the État Français, the collaborationist government established by Marshal Philippe Pétain following France’s defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. Vichy’s mayor and municipal council were deeply concerned about the “dishonor imparted to the name of their town.”1 The municipality published a statement: “Vichy is not the seat of a treasonous government, but is the Queen of Spas.” The mayor wrote to his colleagues across France and to the national and international press to “protest against this label that is injurious to the town of Vichy, which refuses to be held responsible for the presence of the government … [and] is trying to erase the link.”2 An article published at the time of Vichy’s liberation was more sanguine, however: “I don’t share the concern of others,” the author proclaimed, “that the presence of the government in Vichy has made the city and its inhabitants infamous. They appear, instead, as victims. The indignation that reigns every time we hear the word 1   Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Municipal Council deliberations, 20 November 1944. 2  AmV, Dossier “Nom de Vichy,” Letter, Mayor of Vichy to the Mayor of Nice, 15 December 1945.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_1

1

2 

K. FREEMAN

‘Vichyssois’ substituted for ‘Vichyste’ is that of a proprietor protecting his appellation contrôlée, fearful that this extravagant vitriol will taint his bottles” (Fig. 1.1).3 Despite Vichyssois’ concerns, and far worse than conflating “Vichyssois” and “Vichystes,” the habit of referring to the wartime regime by the name of the town that hosted it became entrenched and persists to this day. The name “Vichy” has come to stand for France’s Dark Years as a whole: in public discourse and academic scholarship, in France and abroad. It is an “infamy” Vichy’s residents resent deeply. Our author was astute, however, in highlighting Vichyssois’ “proprietary” reaction to the misuse of their town’s name, and in remarking on their status as victims. These two things—victimhood and indignation—have defined responses to the Second World War in Vichy and have become, according to Audrey Mallet in her study Vichy contre Vichy, the “cement” of local identity.4 Vichyssois’ apprehensions about the negative perceptions of others, their sense of victimhood, and their staunch defense of Vichy’s name and reputation were not born of the town’s experiences in the Second World War, however. These tendencies have a longer history and have been central features of Vichy’s civic identity since the creation of the modern thermal resort in the mid-nineteenth century. Negative perceptions of Vichy, and the town’s related defensiveness, are connected to the Queen of Spas’ reputation for decadence—pleasure, excess, and luxurious self-­ indulgence—which was a source of pride and prosperity, but also of criticism. When, for example, in 1915, Vichy was accused of contributing to France’s moral, physical, and demographic weakness, resort publications responded to this “defamation” with a vehement defense of Vichy’s honor and contributions to national vitality through the purity and efficacy of its waters.5 Vichy’s decadence remained problematic even as historical contexts shifted: in the early Third Republic it was associated with Bonapartist excess, in the First World War it was a violation of republican values, and in the 1930s it was a manifestation of everything that was wrong with 3  AmV, Dossier “Nom de Vichy,” “Tempête autour d’un verre d’eau” n.p., n.d. (September 1944?). The “Nom de Vichy” dossier in Vichy’s municipal archives includes newspaper clippings and articles collected since the Second World War related the use of the town’s name to signify the wartime regime. Some clippings are missing title, author, date, or publication information. 4  Audrey Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire (Paris: Belin, 2019), 162. 5  Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) Gallica, Ollivié, “Chronique locale,” Bulletin de Vichy, 13 June 1915.

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

Fig. 1.1  Vichy n’est pas le Siège d’un Gouvernement Traitre à la Patrie mais la “Reine des Villes d’Eaux” (Vichy is not the seat of a treasonous government, but is the “Queen of Spas”) Municipal Council deliberations, 20 November 1944. Archives municipales de Vichy

4 

K. FREEMAN

republican France. Throughout, Vichy’s corporate and municipal leaders energetically defended Vichy’s name and image. Despite this mobilization and projection of unity, for much of its modern history Vichy was two distinct entities—town and resort—that coexisted uneasily. The power and money resided in the resort, which had its own interests, and whose leaders were “seasonal” rather than “native” Vichyssois. Resident Vichyssois were progressively marginalized from— though still reliant on—the resort, a toxic interdependence that led to deep resentments over the town’s impotence, and a conviction that the fate of Vichy was decided by outsiders, often at the expense of the local population and counter to its interests and values. This book explores these broader contexts of Vichy’s civic identity. It also contextualizes Vichy’s postwar history. The town saw a significant change of fortune from the 1950s onward, but war-related infamy was not the culprit of the Queen of Spas’ decline, rather decolonization and the medicalization and socialization of the resort were largely to blame. Also responsible, however, were the corporations that controlled the thermal resort and its associated products. Vichy was a company town. As the postwar reference to “appellation contrôlée” suggests, Vichy’s status as a brand and the resort’s corporate history played a vital role in the construction, definition, and defense of Vichy’s identity, as well as in the resort’s decline from the 1950s to the 1980s, and its revival in the 1990s. Integrating this corporate dimension into the history of Vichy involves focusing on the main powerbrokers of the resort’s thermal, tourism, bottled water, and cosmetics industries: the Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (later Compagnie fermière de Vichy, or CfV), the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV) and, in the second half of the twentieth century, Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI), Perrier, L’Oréal, and their parent company, Nestlé. The CfV, founded in 1853, purchased the rights to bottle and sell Vichy mineral water. This company had a strong relationship with the French state (which owned Vichy’s thermal springs) and sold its products under the label “Vichy-État.” The CfV had a fraught relationship with the municipality, however, which resented the company’s “invasive” tendencies.6 The leasing agreement between the CfV and the state involved commodifying more than Vichy’s water, however: the CfV was largely 6  Archives nationales (AN), “Mémoire explicatif à l’appui des pétitions adressées au gouvernement par des habitants de Vichy contre les concurrences illégales qu’oppose à leurs

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

responsible for transforming the resort into “The Queen of Spas,” developing thermal baths, para-thermal attractions, and other products such as pastilles and mineral salts which, along with Vichy water, were sold the world over. For close to a century, the CfV invested heavily in the resort and its products. But the company’s acquisition by BGI in 1954 and then by Perrier in 1967, both of which focused on bottled water at the expense of the thermal spa, had significant repercussions for the resort and for the town (Fig. 1.2). At the turn of the twentieth century, the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy joined the CfV as a motor of Vichy’s development. Under the directorship of Joseph Aletti, the SGHV built and operated a plethora of luxury

Fig. 1.2  Map of Vichy, 1925. Guide de l’Étranger à Vichy Saison 1925, Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC commerces et à leur industrie principale la Cie fermière de l’Établissement Thermal de cette ville. Vichy, le 25 novembre 1869,” F 14 8274.

6 

K. FREEMAN

hotels in Vichy. These hotels, and their modern amenities, attracted French and international elites in large numbers, and Vichy prided itself on being the summer capital of Europe. Vichy’s hotels also provided significant service to the state. In the Franco-Prussian War, more than 1000 beds in six Vichy hotels were made available for the sick and wounded of the siege of Paris.7 Between 1914 and 1919, close to 80 hotels were requisitioned as hospitals by the French and American militaries.8 Vichy’s hotels received government ministries, national treasury, and the gamut of diplomats, dignitaries, and occupation forces (including the Gestapo) during the Second World War.9 After the liberation, the SGHV and other hotel owners submitted extensive war damages claims, casting Vichy as a victim of disaster and feeding its discourses of victimhood. And then, just as the SGHV had been a motor of Vichy’s development, it also contributed to the resort’s decline. The company’s spectacular disintegration in the 1950s—linked to wartime corruption and decolonization—had significant implications for tourism to the resort. Vichy’s products expanded in the 1920s and 1930s to include cosmetics. The Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV) and its product line “Vichy: Source of Beauty” were acquired by L’Oréal in 1951 and became Laboratories Vichy. This brand remained relatively neglected by L’Oréal until Vichy’s revival as a luxury spa. In the 1990s, however, Laboratoires Vichy became an internationally recognized brand. Vichy’s association with L’Oréal reinforced the scientific and indulgent connotations of the resort’s thermal identity but also its État Français connections. Revelations about the wartime politics of L’Oréal’s founder and his successors, alongside a series of scandals involving the CfV, L’Oréal, and Nestlé in the 1990s, fed the “afterlife” of the État Français during a time of national obsession, and brought Vichy’s past into the present, deepening Vichyssois’ feelings of victimhood and resentment.10 7  Charles Bonnard, Vichy-Ambulance, son rôle pendant la prochaine guerre (Vichy: Imprimerie Bougarel, 1890), preface. 8  Kirrily Freeman and Katherine Crooks, “‘Amusez-vous, Vichyssois:’ Wartime Morality and Home Front Tensions in WWI Vichy,” French History 31, no. 2 (June 2017): 194–218. 9  Pierre Broustine, et  al., Vichy réquisitionnée: Utilisation de ses capacités d’hébergement, 1870–1871, 1914–1918, 1939–1945 (Vichy: Centre Culturel Valery Larbaud, 1993). 10  On the legacy of the État Français, see Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Richard J. Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

For over a century, then, the resort and its various products and industries promoted a “Vichy cure” which would revitalize and rejuvenate through luxurious pleasure and self-indulgence. Ironically, the branding and marketing process by which the name Vichy became associated with a “cure,” or “regime,” is in part responsible for the attachment of the town’s name to the État Français. In 1940, the term “Vichy regime” was already widely used to suggest an intensive treatment which cleansed, purified, and renewed: it was supported and reinforced by a range of commodities that were advertised and sold all over the world. That the new government was also bent on purification and renewal was widely satirized. A 1940 cartoon, for example, depicts a frail and sick Marianne, allegory of the French Republic, attended by her doctor, Pétain, who prescribes a Vichy cure. In offering her a bottle of Vichy-État, Pétain exclaims: “Come, come, my dear! Nothing better than a Vichy cure to return you to health and beauty.”11 By 1945, the metaphor had shifted: “In the City of Cures, a radical cure-by-strangulation of the Republic and of French democracy.”12 Other satirists probed the difficult co-existence of government and resort. Henri Sjoberg focused on bureaucratic frustrations in Hors Saison à Vichy (Vichy in the Off-Season): his unfortunate protagonist tries in vain to attend a meeting but is confounded at every turn by a maze of ministries and their inept personnel. The cartoonist Sennep caricatured tourist frustrations in a pamphlet published in 1942: two hapless visitors arrive in Vichy to find, rather than rest and relaxation, unending restrictions, regulations, and red tape. Both works suggest that government and resort had commingled, and something of the one now characterized the other. In his journeys, Sjoberg’s protagonist stumbles upon a bureaucrat and his paramour lounging amid empty champagne bottles. For much of Vichy’s history, the resort’s reputation for leisure and pleasure was anchored in vice, fueling accusations of decadence. From Gustave Flaubert (who wrote to the Goncourt brothers describing Vichy’s brothels) to the wartime notoriety of the Cintra bar, sex and prostitution were key features of the Vichy experience. They also represent a significant aspect of Vichy’s “corporate” history. Far from isolated or marginalized, prostitution was central to the resort economy, and was staunchly defended by business 11  Pascal Chambriard, Aux Sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999), 155. 12  José de Berys, Le Patriote de Provence, 6 July 1945 quoted in Maurice ConstantinWeyer, Vichy et son histoire (Vichy: Szabo, 1947), 138.

8 

K. FREEMAN

elites and municipal officials alike. When Vichy’s sex trade was curtailed in the 1930s amid national fears of degeneration and calls for social hygiene, Vichy’s economic and political elites lamented the impact of such “costly morality” on tourism to the resort, and decried Vichy’s “departure from [its] tradition of hospitality.”13 Indeed, Vichy’s status as a tourist destination is perhaps the most defining facet of its history and identity. Tourism made Vichy the Queen of Spas: tourist infrastructure was the precondition of Vichy’s wartime experiences, as a hospital town in the First World War and provisional capital in the Second. Vichy’s relationship with tourism is the dominant theme in the historical literature on the town, including scholars investigating Vichy’s war years. Michèle Cointet, for example, emphasizes that the French state was already “at home” in Vichy,14 alluding to the Vichy-État brand, the fact that much of the tourist infrastructure that housed the government was owned by an agent of the state (the CfV), and that many dignitaries felt comfortable in a resort that had long been promoted as “the ultimate destination” for French and foreign elites.15 Bertram Gordon examines tourist interest in the capital of the État Français in the contexts of wartime travel and war-related memory tourism.16 Valérie Hass, on the other hand, highlights the role of tourism in Vichyssois’ identity and self-­ perception.17 She stresses that the town’s history was shaped to a remarkable degree by a culture of simultaneous reception and difference: a fundamental rift between locals and outsiders structured by reliance and resentment in equal measure. Audrey Mallet argues that Vichyssois’ tradition of hospitality meant keeping a discreet distance from Vichy’s guests and from whatever activities took place in the resort, a form of attentisme that continued during the war and defined collective memory afterward. The economic dimension of Vichy’s wartime tourism history has been less studied, however. Local authors generally skirt the issue. Jean 13  AmV, “Rapport concernant la réadmission à Vichy des femmes dites de mœurs légères,” 23 April 1937. Prostitution divers, 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 14  Michèle Cointet, Vichy capitale, 1940–1944: Vérités et légendes (Paris: Perrin, 1993), 19–20. 15  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” L’Égalité, 20 May 1932. 16  Bertram M. Gordon, War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 17  Valérie Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999).

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

Débordes, for example, writes that although the question of wartime profits was the subject of much speculation, “we will likely never know the truth of the situation.”18 The archives reveal, however, that although Vichyssois’ wartime experiences were mixed, there was certainly money to be made in the hospitality sector. The average hotel revenue in Vichy in 1938 (the most profitable season of the decade before the war) was 447,996 francs, compared to 853,554 in 1941 and 883,207 in 1942.19 Nevertheless, the wartime requisition of Vichy’s tourist infrastructure and the “lamentable state” in which it was left at the end of the war became the foundation of the town’s assertions of victimhood.20 For all that tourism has played a central role in Vichy’s history, the town has not become a significant site of “dark tourism” since the Second World War. Gordon describes a curiosity about and interest in the État Français among visitors to Vichy, not least such groups as the Association for the Defense of the Memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP), but Mallet argues that there is little evidence that tourists were or are inordinately drawn to Vichy by its wartime past.21 This is perhaps because there is little to see. Few traces of the État Français or the war years exist in Vichy. Instead, tourism patterns were shaped by other forces. In the decade after the war, Vichy regained its Queen of Spas status, and tourists and Vichyssois alike largely ignored the recent past. When tourism to Vichy decreased precipitously after the late 1950s, visitors came for a very specific purpose: state-­ subsidized thermal treatments for liver disease. Since the 1990s, the resort’s revival as a luxury spa and tourism destination has brought more visitors back to Vichy. Some seek information on the Dark Years, but they generally come for other reasons, principally leisure, health, vocational training, or business. The city has made modest accommodations to tourist curiosity in the form of an État Français walking tour. A museum of the war years remains merely the subject of discussion, however. Indeed, since 1945 the only tourism to Vichy driven specifically by the town’s association with the État Français and the Second World War took the form of conferences and meetings of resistance, survivor, and deportee 18  Jean Débordes, Pierre Coulon: La trop courte chance de Vichy (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1991), 93. 19  491,599.36 francs and 470,395.16 francs, respectively, in 1938 currency. Archives départementales de l’Allier (AdA), 1441 W 85. 20  Constantin-Weyer, Vichy et son histoire, 178. The phrase “lamentable state” appears repeatedly in the press and in local studies. 21  Gordon, War Tourism, 184. Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 219.

10 

K. FREEMAN

associations. These developed partly in response to a failed initiative by the ADMP to turn Pétain’s rooms in the Hôtel du Parc into a museum of his life.22

Stigma, Victimhood, Decline This book, then, explores the politics of identity in Vichy by examining the town’s stigmatization, victimhood, and decline through the lens of its corporate and tourism history. These themes all require some elaboration, however. They also raise other issues that have shaped Vichy’s civic identity: the town’s uniqueness (or exceptionalism), its nostalgia, and the necessity and risks of historicizing the Dark Years. Stigma According to Erving Goffman, the ancient Greeks originated the term “stigma” to refer to bodily signs designed to expose an individual’s negative moral status.23 In contemporary usage, stigma refers to “an attribute that is deeply discrediting.”24 The link between attribute and identity is central for Goffman: “we impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one,” he argues, which together tarnish the reputation of the stigmatized.25 Likewise, the perceptions of others—their scorn and prejudice, which lead to ostracism—are fundamental to the process of stigmatization. Although Goffman’s theory of stigma treats individuals, it offers some insights into Vichy’s situation. There is no question that the presence of the État Français in Vichy and the enduring association between town and regime is felt by Vichyssois to be deeply discrediting and tarnishing to the town’s image. The discredit of hosting the État Français imputed collaboration, compromise, cowardice, and immorality. Playing on metaphors connected to Vichy’s thermal vocation, postwar discourse obsessed over the “stain” and “blemish” that the État Français represented, the need to “cleanse” and “wash away” was commonly expressed.26 In Vichy, however, the fear and anticipation of ostracism has  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 210.  Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Hoboken, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 1. 24  Goffman, Stigma, 3. 25  Goffman, Stigma, 5. 26  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Le Centre Républicain, 17 May 1946. 22 23

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

led to feelings of stigmatization, whether or not those fears correspond to reality. Social psychologist Valérie Haas investigated Vichyssois’ self-perception in the 1990s. When asked how they believed the rest of the country perceived them, a third of Haas’ respondents replied, “as collaborators.” Another 25 percent responded that Vichy is “generally badly perceived.” Only 2.5 percent believed that Vichy was associated with a positive image.27 Haas concludes that these perceptions are so deeply and uniformly negative as to represent a case of collective, internalized stigma: “Vichy’s inhabitants” she argues “are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the image the town projects.”28 Mallet emphasizes, however, that there is no evidence of widespread ill-feeling or discrimination toward the town on the part of the broader French public.29 While there have been “occasional instances of ostracism,” she maintains that these should not be taken as evidence of stigma.30 Some of these instances of ostracism carry more weight than others, however. When, a few years after the war, Vichy’s football club played a national championship series, the “whistles, jeers, and shouts of ‘Collabos!’ ‘Pétainistes!’” could be shrugged off.31 Charles de Gaulle’s ostracism of Vichy, however, was less easily discounted. In December 1944, Vichy’s mayor and municipal council wrote to de Gaulle, then President of the Republic, to plead for the honor of a state visit.32 Many Vichyssois hoped that the General’s grace would bring absolution for their town.33 But de Gaulle refused to visit Vichy in 1944 or at any point until May 1956 when he briefly attended a meeting of survivors of Dachau concentration camp, held in Vichy’s Hôtel Majestic.34 When he finally spoke to the people of Vichy on 17 April 1959, de Gaulle stressed the historic significance of his own presence in the former capital of the État Français. As Henry Rousso notes, despite the quality of “exorcism”  Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 288.  Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 299. 29  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 161. 30  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 161. 31  Georges Frélastre, Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales (Paris: Éditions FranceEmpire, 1975), 95. 32  AmV, Dossier “Nom de Vichy,” Letter, Vichy Municipal Council to the President of the Republic, 4 December 1944. 33  Frélastre, Les Complexes de Vichy, 250. 34  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), Maurice Sarazin, “Il y a 50 ans, le vendredi 17 avril 1959: Voyage officiel en Bourbonnais du Président de la République Charles de Gaulle” Les Cahiers bourbonnais, 208 (2009): 53–59. 27 28

12 

K. FREEMAN

to the speech, de Gaulle nevertheless understood “full well the negative significance still implicit in the word ‘Vichy’ which he repeated emphatically, as if uttering a magic incantation.”35 Audrey Mallet describes how this moment amplified Vichyssois’ existing resentment of de Gaulle and their feelings of betrayal, linked to his support of decolonization which had a significant negative effect on tourism to Vichy.36 This resentment toward de Gaulle fed a resurgent sympathy for Pétain: many Vichyssois held on to cherished wartime memories of the Marshal.37 Ultimately, whether or not Vichyssois are, in fact, the victims of wartime stigma is immaterial: they see themselves as such and their resentments have had significant political consequences. Victimhood That Vichy’s residents responded to their wartime experiences by asserting their victimhood is both a product of the town’s distinctive circumstances and of general, even global, cultural and commemorative trends. Audrey Mallet describes how, although the provisional capital had resisters and collaborators like anywhere else in France, the predominant response of Vichyssois was a passive attentisme. As a result, postwar narratives of resistance, especially Gaullist resistance, did not resonate with local realities. A policy of silence and avoidance was cultivated by every mayor from 1949 onward, to the extent that initiatives related to resistance were generally received with indifference by Vichyssois as was the fate of Vichy’s Jews, the majority of whom had been deported by 1942. A plaque honoring victims of the Gestapo, for example, was inaugurated at the Hôtel du Portugal (which housed the Gestapo prison) in June 1965 as part of an annual meeting of former Resistance members. When that plaque along with several others dedicated to resisters or deportees disappeared, there seemed little inclination to replace them.38 These plaques—as well as one honoring Jewish victims of the 1942 roundups and deportations, and one dedicated to the republican parliamentarians who voted against the creation of the État Français—were private, rather than municipal, 35  Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 73. 36  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 143–146. 37  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 64, 86. 38  AmV, Dossier “Plaques et noms de rues.”

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

initiatives.39 The end of the Algerian war fueled victimhood and Pétainism in equal measure in Vichy. The loss of the French colonies which Pétain had endeavored to maintain, the disappearance of Vichy’s colonial clientele, and the influx of a substantial pied-noir community (with its own victim narratives), all combined to reinforce the town’s sense of victimhood and its increasingly partisan and public Pétainism, despite a municipal policy of “non-intervention” which Mallet links to wartime attentisme. By the 1960s and 1970s there was, according to Mallet, an official policy of silence reinforced by mayors who normalized Vichyste narratives and emphasized Vichy’s victimhood. The town’s “precipitous decline” from the 1960s to the 1980s reinforced feelings of victimhood and resentment, as did renewed attention to the war years in the 1990s. Even the town’s acquisition of the thermal domain from the state in 2011 has not altered Vichy’s identity. Indeed, Vichyssois’ self-perception as victims of history has remained remarkably consistent. This is a long-standing reflex, which has its roots in the uneasy relationship between the town and the resort. In certain contexts, such as wartime, resentments toward the resort and its powerbrokers shifted to the state and other outsiders, a trend which intensified after 1944 and again after 1990. But resentment and indignation remain the dominant motif of civic identity. There was nothing unusual, however, in focusing on one’s own victimhood in the wake of the Second World War.40 Silence in the face of collaboration with Nazi Germany, or choosing to focus on reconstruction and a “return to normal,” was the characteristic response of many French, and indeed European, communities in the postwar period. Haas describes the temptation of treating the “Vichy Syndrome” in Vichy as a microcosm of the national experience, which involved stages of identification with Resistance, exposure of collaboration, and recurring periods of judgment and introspection, as France attempted to come to terms with defeat, occupation, and the policies and legacies of the État Français. But Vichyssois’ identification with Resistance was short-lived and was replaced by assertions of victimhood. There has been little confrontation of the ambiguities of the war period. But this is not to say that Vichy is untouched 39  John Campbell, “Vichy, Vichy and a Plaque to Remember.” French Studies Bulletin 27, no. 98 (Spring 2006), 4; Audrey Mallet discusses the deportation monument in Vichy contre Vichy, 232–233. 40  See, for example, Robert G. Moeller, “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

14 

K. FREEMAN

by the “Vichy Syndrome”: French “obsession” with the Dark Years had an important impact on Vichy. The town came under renewed scrutiny, and this was often accompanied by expectations for Vichyssois’ behavior. Journalists turned their attention to Vichy in the 1990s and early 2000s, around the time René Bousquet and Maurice Papon’s indictments for crimes against humanity reinvigorated media and public attention to the État Français.41 Many were looking for traces of something that wasn’t there. Julia Pascal wrote in The Guardian, “I am in search of France’s hidden past. Can I find ‘Vichy’—the centre and symbol of wartime collaboration—in Vichy?”42 Adam Nossiter moved to Vichy to “find out what it means to coexist with the past.” “I had come to Vichy,” he confessed, “expecting certain cards to be frankly on the table.”43 François Dufay, writing in Le Point in 2003, was disappointed at the futility of looking to Vichy for information on the war years.44 Others came forward with recommendations for how Vichy should “face up to its past,” whether through cooperation with journalists and historians, public workshops and debates, a museum of the war years, or “even a few plaques.”45 The town’s response—championed by Vichy’s mayor since 1989, Claude Malhuret— has been indignantly defiant. Alon Confino has argued that “ours is an era of memory and repentance, an age of apology.”46 Elazar Barkan, in The Guilt of Nations, describes how an ethos of restitution and reparations has come to dominate contemporary politics.47 Vichyssois, however, feel that they have nothing to apologize for. This makes Vichy’s encounter with its wartime past distinctive, at least in the context of late twentieth-century commemorative culture.48 Mallet describes Vichy as an anomaly in the  Eric Conan, “Vichy malade de Vichy,” L’Express, June 1992, 37–38.  Julia Pascal, “Vichy’s Shame,” The Guardian, 11 May 2002. 43  Adam Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory, and the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 3, 103. 44  François Dufay, “Vichy: cette ville qui veut oublier Pétain,” Le Point, 31 January 2003. 45  Campbell, “Vichy, Vichy,” 5. 46  Alon Confino, “Remembering the Second World War, 1945–1965: Narratives of Victimhood and Genocide,” Cultural Analysis 4 (2005), 47. 47  Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000). 48  Kirrily Freeman, “A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity,” in The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016, ed. Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 131–151. 41 42

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

French memorial landscape.49 And yet we see discourses of victimhood functioning in Vichy in much the same way that they do in other communities. Pieter Lagrou describes victimhood as increasingly ritualized, serving to strengthen communal bonds and identity. In the current cultural landscape, he argues, victimhood offers “a universal source of legitimacy, a new language with which to formulate collective claims.”50 Lagrou suggests a series of general traits that characterize discourses of victimhood, all of which apply to its mobilization in Vichy: victimhood does not tolerate contradiction; it cements a sense of community, belonging, and identity; it is static, retrospective, passive, and nostalgic; and it is essentialist, preventing us from seeing historical processes at work.51 For Lagrou, discourses of victimhood, in turn, fuel discourses of identity which are likewise binary, static, exclusive, intolerant, and ahistorical.52 Decline After the Second World War, Vichy experienced a drastic change in fortune. From the late 1950s until the late 1980s, Vichy suffered economic depression, a marked decrease in tourism, and the degradation of the resort’s thermal infrastructure. For Vichyssois, this change was catastrophic and, over time, came to be associated with the stigma of Vichy’s wartime past, though locals also recognized the role of decolonization in the town’s fate.53 But Vichy’s first postwar decade brought prosperity, and a much touted “return to elegance.” Hotels reopened, tourists returned, and the resort experienced an “incontestable recovery.”54 With decolonization, however, “Vichy was killed a second time.”55 The effects of decolonization included the loss of Vichy’s colonial clientele, but also structural economic effects related to repatriation from and nationalization in the  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 252.  Pieter Lagrou, “Europe as a place for common memories? Some thoughts on victimhood, identity and emancipation from the past,” 283–285, https://dipot.ulb.ac.be. 51  Lagrou, “Europe as a place for common memories,” 285–86. 52  Lagrou, “Europe as a place for common memories,” 287. 53  Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993), 10. 54  Pascal Chambriard, “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960),” in Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 234. 55  MVL, Science et vie, économie, April 1991, 10 dj 15. 49 50

16 

K. FREEMAN

former empire. Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI), which acquired the CfV in 1954 and focused solely on Vichy’s bottled water, was a repatriating colonial company looking to invest in a profitable metropolitan industry. The Algiers-based subsidiary of the SGHV, the Société immobilière et hôtelière de l’Afrique du Nord (SIHAN), had kept its sister company afloat in the 1950s but was absorbed by an Algerian company at the height of that country’s war of independence. Vichy’s transformation also had roots in the state’s domestic policy. In 1947, the Fourth Republic’s national healthcare system began reimbursing thermal treatments at spas across France, but at a fixed rate and with the stipulation that each spa develop an area of specialty. The Queen of Spas consequently became the land of liver, and the resort, its clients, products, and infrastructure were progressively medicalized and socialized. This reorientation toward budget, state-subsidized, medical “cure-ism” justified the resort’s neglect in the eyes of its corporate owners. Perrier, in particular, sought to protect its brand image by dissociating mineral water from its thermal and medical connotations. For Vichy’s residents these changes simultaneously represented immediate catastrophe and unrelenting decline. Partly, this “catastrophism” is an outgrowth of Vichyssois’ feelings of victimhood, and of a contemporary preoccupation with “the explosive event” and its aftereffects.56 Partly, it is a form of inverted civic boosterism: a belief in Vichy’s exceptionalism so unwavering that change is understood as a fall from grace. But it is also tied to a broader fixation with decline that gripped France and many other countries in the same period. Robert Frank has charted French fears of decline over the course of the twentieth century.57 Though such fears were long a core feature of French political and cultural life, the Second World War boosted and redefined declinist narratives: the defeat of 1940 became the key moment of rupture, followed by the loss of France’s colonies. It is unsurprising that, in Vichy, a similar explanation for the town’s postwar trajectory took hold.58

56  Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 10. 57  Robert Frank, La hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014 (Paris: Belin, 2014). 58  MVL, Science et vie, économie, April 1991, 10 dj 15; Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 10.

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

Conclusion: Nostalgia, History A key feature of declinism is the tendency to emphasize former grandeur and lament its loss. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Vichyssois were obsessed with efforts to recapture the resort’s past glory and return Vichy to its status as Queen of Spas. Vichy, however, had been largely abandoned by its “parent” companies, and the municipality was forced to assume the cost of upkeep in the resort while its concessionaires retained the profits, deepening the downward spiral. Despite protest and mobilization from municipal and regional government, this situation remained unchanged until the late 1980s, when Perrier and the state reinvested substantially in Vichy. This reinvestment brought about a striking renaissance, the return of an emphasis on elite and luxurious pleasure and well-being, as well as the revitalization of the Vichy brand and its products. This new future for Vichy involved cultivating a very narrow vision of the past, one dominated by nostalgia for the Second Empire and Belle Époque. Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as “a sentiment of loss and displacement, but […] also a romance with one’s own fantasy.”59 In Vichy, the romance of the town’s golden years was deployed to ease such feelings of victimhood and stigmatization. The renovations and developments that took place in Vichy in the 1990s focused entirely on resurrecting the resort’s “kaleidoscopic mingling” of Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Orientalist, and Second Empire features.60 This was accompanied by a rehabilitation of Napoleon III, whose name and likeness cropped up on products and in public spaces all over Vichy. This strategy, deliberately taken to return Vichy to its “true” character, served to overwrite the resort’s wartime experience. But the Dark Years are an “ever-present past”61 that, as Richard J.  Golsan writes, still resonates powerfully in France in increasingly

59   Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Summer 2007), https://hedgehogreview.com/ issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents. 60  Dominique Kalifa, “Le Second Empire, une ‘Belle Époque’?” Histoire, économie & société 36, no. 3 (2017), 71. For Kalifa, Vichy is a particularly salient example of the “shared structural traits” that unite the Second Empire and Belle Époque in French historical identity. These traits include décor, peace and prosperity, the glamor of society life, the primacy of entertainment and leisure, and a festive atmosphere of pleasure and permissive sexuality. Kalifa, “Le Second Empire, une ‘Belle Époque’?,” 61. 61  Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy: An Ever-present Past (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).

18 

K. FREEMAN

partisan ways.62 It is also a past that, Rousso and Golsan both maintain, is continually recalled and rescued, acted upon and judged, in an anachronistic impulse that simplifies and distorts.63 Memories of the war years, always politicized and now increasingly revisionist, obscure the specificity of historical events. These tendencies highlight the vital importance of anchoring Vichy’s Dark Years and their legacy in history. In this book, “historicization” does not mean the normalization of the État Français or its crimes. Rather the memory, understanding, and interpretation of the wartime regime in the town of Vichy—a civic identity which has mostly been considered unique, exceptional, or outside history—must be resituated in a longer historical continuum of habits, reflexes, and reactions.

Bibliography Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: Norton, 2000. Bonnard, Charles. Vichy-Ambulance, son rôle pendant la prochaine guerre. Vichy: Imprimerie Bougarel, 1890. Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Summer 2007) Broustine, Pierre, et  al. Vichy réquisitionnée: Utilisation de ses capacités d’hébergement, 1870–1871, 1914–1918, 1939–1945. Vichy: Centre Culturel Valery Larbaud, 1993. Campbell, John. “Vichy, Vichy and a Plaque to Remember.” French Studies Bulletin 27, no. 98 (Spring 2006): 2–5. Chambriard, Pascal. Aux Sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles. Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999. Chambriard, Pascal. “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960).” In Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Cointet, Michèle. Vichy capitale, 1940–1944: Vérités et légendes. Paris: Perrin, 1993. Conan, Eric. “Vichy malade de Vichy.” L’Express, June 26, 1992, 37–38. Confino, Alon. “Remembering the Second World War, 1945–1965: Narratives of Victimhood and Genocide.” Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 47. Constantin-Weyer, Maurice. Vichy et son histoire. Vichy: Szabo, 1947. Débordes, Jean. Pierre Coulon: La trop courte chance de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1991. Débordes, Jean. Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993.  Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today.  Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today, xxii.

62 63

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

Dufay, François. “Vichy: cette ville qui veut oublier Pétain.” Le Point, January 31, 2003. Frank, Robert. La hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014. Paris: Belin, 2014. Freeman, Kirrily. “A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity.” In The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016, edited by Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame, 131–151. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Freeman, Kirrily, and Katherine Crooks. “‘Amusez-vous, Vichyssois:’ Wartime Morality and Home Front Tensions in WWI Vichy.” French History, 31, no. 2 (June 2017): 194–218. Frélastre, Georges. Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales. Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1975. Golsan, Richard J. Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Golsan, Richard J. The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Hoboken, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Gordon, Bertram M. War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. Haas, Valérie. “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants.” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999. Kalifa, Dominique. “Le Second Empire, une ‘Belle Époque’?” Histoire, économie & société 36, no. 3 (2017): 61–71. Lagrou, Pieter. “Europe as a place for common memories? Some thoughts on victimhood, identity and emancipation from the past”, 283–285, https:// dipot.ulb.ac.be. Mallet, Audrey. Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire. Paris: Belin, 2019. Moeller, Robert G. “Remembering the War in a Nation of Victims: West German Pasts in the 1950s.” In The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, edited by Hanna Schissler, 83–109. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nossiter, Adam. The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory and the Second World War. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Pascal, Julia. “Vichy’s Shame.” The Guardian, 11 May 2002. Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991. Rousso, Henry. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

20 

K. FREEMAN

Rousso, Henry and Eric Conan. Vichy: An Ever-present Past. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. Sarazin, Maurice. “Il y a 50 ans, le vendredi 17 avril 1959: Voyage officiel en bourbonnais du Président de la République Charles de Gaulle.” Les Cahiers bourbonnais, 208 (2009): 53–59.

CHAPTER 2

Stigma

Introduction: Vichy’s Name In April 2012, a French court of appeal fined a group of social justice activists several thousand euros for comparing the Sarkozy government’s treatment of migrant workers to “Vichy’s methods.”1 The court found this comparison to be defamation. For Vichy’s residents, the court’s decision confirmed their enduring stigmatization: “from the moment the justice system considers the use of our city’s name to be defamatory, the prejudice towards Vichy and its inhabitants is made clear.”2 As Richard J. Golsan writes in The Vichy Past in France Today, “‘Vichy’ as word and memory has increasingly become a metaphor for generalized social and cultural evil, for political, moral, and ethical decline, and even decadence in the present.”3 The town of Vichy has long resented the association of its name with the État Français. From fall 1944, when the municipality protested “the denigration of the name Vichy [and] … the unwarranted disgrace inflicted on our town and its inhabitants,”4 to initiatives such as the website “Vichy, c’est une ville!” (“Vichy is a town!”) which catalogs  See www.atlantico/dossier/mur-cons-syndicat-magistrature-706991.html.  Christophe Pommeray quoted in “Vichy sur le ‘mur des cons’” http://vichyensemble. files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ar-4-mai-page-1-vichy-sur-le-mur-des-cons. 3  Richard J. Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), xxiii. 4  Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Municipal Council deliberations, 20 November 1944. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_2

21

22 

K. FREEMAN

every “misuse of the name Vichy,”5 the town has consistently rejected such “disparagement hurtful to the inhabitants of Vichy,” and demanded “honor and respect to Vichy and its population.”6 Vichyssois’ sensitivity to negative perceptions of their town, and Vichy’s strident efforts to defend its name and reputation, pre-date the État Français, however, and are tied to the resort’s reputation for decadence. Vichy’s “Queen of Spas” image and brand—through products ranging from bottled water and cosmetics to the resort itself and the experiences it offered—rested on twin pillars of purity (authenticity, exclusivity, cleanliness, detoxification, revitalization) and decadence (pleasure, luxury, self-­ indulgence, extravagance). From the mid-nineteenth century, the Vichy brand was characterized by an imbrication of “curism,” or hydrotherapy, and elite tourism, both anchored in unbridled consumption.7 This gambit was wildly successful—Vichy became the most popular and prosperous spa town in France. But Vichy’s decadence was problematic, and led to enduring negative associations for the town, though these shifted with historical contexts. In the early years of the Third Republic, Vichy’s decadence evoked the Second Empire reviled by French republicans; during the First World War, it violated wartime commitments to modesty, austerity, and self-sacrifice; during the 1930s, “decadence” stood for the gamut of ills that afflicted the French nation. The État Français deployed accusations of decadence as an ideological weapon, yet the regime’s ambiguous relationship with the concept mirrored many of the resort’s ambiguities. Throughout, municipal and corporate leaders vigorously defended Vichy from competitors, imitators, and detractors by asserting the purity and authenticity of the Vichy product, an appellation contrôlée rendered problematic by the État Français’ promotion of the same ideals.

Vichy: Queen of Spas Perhaps the most famous account of a Vichy “cure” comes from Madame de Sévigné, one of the resort’s most celebrated guests. On a Wednesday evening in May 1676 the marquise wrote to her daughter, “I took the  https://vichycestuneville.wordpress.com.  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” “Impressions de Vichy,” April 18, 1946. 7  Kirrily Freeman, “Performing Leisure as Labour in the Queen of Spas: Tourism, ‘Cureism’, and Masquerade in Third Republic Vichy,” Journal of Tourism History, March 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2021.1903097. 5 6

2 STIGMA 

23

waters this morning my darling and oh, were they dreadful!” De Sévigné describes the drinking cure as unpleasant: “We go at six [am] to the fountain: everyone is there and we all drink and pull faces because the water is scorching and sulphurous.” The shower treatment, she contends, was both physically and emotionally painful: [The showers] are a fairly good rendition of purgatory. One is completely nude in a small underground space, and there’s a hose of hot water that a woman applies where you will. It is all very humiliating. There’s a jet of the most boiling water imaginable. At first it is a shock to the whole system, but when it comes to the nape of the neck, there’s a kind of fire and surprise you can scarcely imagine. One must suffer, and we do.8

Although Madame de Sévigné’s description of her cure hinges on discomfort, she nevertheless occupies a privileged position in the history of Vichy. She is credited with launching the spa as a fashionable destination for aristocrats and elites, thanks to her frequent letters to family and friends describing the rhythms of life in the resort. Her observation that in Vichy one keeps good health and better company was reiterated in Le Mercure galant in June 1678: “the waters in Vichy have an admirable effect. All the nobility assembled here has certainly contributed to the cure by bringing endless pleasures to bear.”9 While the Marquise may have established Vichy as an aristocratic destination, Napoleon III entrenched it as France’s “thermal capital,” a cosmopolitan center of elegance and luxury, by building both the infrastructure and the image of the Queen of Spas. The Second Empire (the period of Napoleon III’s rule, from 1852 to 1870) saw massive urban redevelopment throughout France. A parallel phenomenon was the vogue for luxury thermal tourism. The coincidence of these two forces led to an explosion of capital ventures in thermal resort development, and Vichy became the jewel in the French thermal crown. The company responsible for Vichy’s development, La Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (later, Compagnie fermière de Vichy, or CfV), was established in 1853 and incorporated in 1862. Its founders, Auguste Stanislas 8  Albéric Second, Vichy Sévigné, Vichy Napoléon: Ses eaux, ses embellissements, ses environs, son histoire (Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Lafitte, 1862), x. De Sévigné’s letters are reproduced in many Vichy guidebooks. 9  Armand Wallon, La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914 (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 12.

24 

K. FREEMAN

Lebobe (1790–1858) and Georges-Antoine Callou (1794–1875), were prominent Parisian businessmen and intimates of the emperor. The CfV’s board of directors comprised many influential capitalists and leading figures of the Second Empire, including the regent of the Bank of France and the Emperor’s physician. Through a series of concessions, or leasing agreements with the state which owned the mineral springs within Vichy’s boundaries, the CfV embarked on the transformation of the resort. In 1858, Arthur Callou, Georges-Antoine’s son, joined his father at the helm of the company and by 1862 had become its director. An architect by training, the younger Callou proved both astute and ambitious: he was described as Vichy’s Haussmann, locals called him Napoleon IV.10 An 1853 concession between the French state and the CfV provided the resort with the necessary thermal infrastructure to serve an increased clientele, including investment in a new mineral water collection system, 200 treatment rooms, and other spa facilities.11 Callou was driven to expand Vichy beyond this, however, and looked toward a whole range of tourist services to complement the thermal cure. This approach coincided with Napoleon III’s intention to develop the French thermal industry so that it could compete with German rivals, known as much for their social calendars as for the therapeutic properties of their waters. In 1861, the emperor arrived in Vichy for the first of five annual cures determined not only to regain his health, but also to work with Callou to direct the resort’s development.12 The Allier River was diked, transforming swamps and flood plains into lush parkland. Streets were widened, creating gracious thermal boulevards lined with plane trees. Vichy’s train station, post office, and a whole assortment of villas and chalets were constructed to accommodate an influx of affluent guests. When the CfV’s lease was renewed early in 1864, resort development shifted further toward the “para-thermal,” with the Grand Casino, a racetrack, an outdoor café-­restaurant, and an array of pavilions and kiosks in Vichy’s central park and gardens, the Parc des sources, built in a matter of two years. Together, Napoleon III and the CfV had made Vichy—in the words of one newspaper—“the Versailles of the Bonapartes.”13  Wallon, La vie quotidienne, 44.  Pascal Chambriard, Aux sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999), 48. 12  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), “Projets arrêtés par S.M.  L’Empereur pour les embellissements de Vichy,” 10 Aff 422. 13  MVL, La Semaine de Cusset et de Vichy, August 11, 1866. 10 11

2 STIGMA 

25

This development had the desired result: Vichy became a premiere destination for the world’s monarchs and aristocrats. In the early 1860s, Ismail Pacha of Egypt, Grand Duke Alexis and Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, Maria-Christina (ex-regent of Spain), and the kings of Belgium and Sweden all spent seasons in Vichy.14 The resort’s luxurious and aristocratic Queen of Spas image was solidified, entrenching Vichy’s position as the summer hub of society life. As Vichy developed, its architecture and urban planning privileged elite guests and followed the logic of aristocratic leisure, revolving around promenades, gardens, and spaces of display. The Orientalist baths were lavish and “exotic,” the riverside chalets, quaint and romantic. The Hall des sources, an elaborate glass and wrought metal structure filled with palm trees, framed the “drinking cure” as an act of sociability, inviting visitors to see and be seen amid lush tropical greenery because, “it’s not the physical treatment that the [curiste] seeks at all costs, but rather distraction, fantasy and the repeated opportunity to be admired.”15 Wrought iron covered walkways wound around the Parc des sources, enhancing the resort’s “air of luxury, gaiety, and taste for festivity and exhibition.”16 Also prominent in the Parc des sources was La Restauration—an outdoor café which boasted “the most bustling terrace in the world.”17 Vichy’s gastronomy was famously indulgent. The resort’s hotels were described in Le Figaro as “sumptuous.”18 In 1924, the most expensive hotel room in France (300 francs per night) was at Vichy’s Hôtel Majestic.19 When Sarah Bernhardt played Phaedra at Vichy’s Grand Casino in August 1896, the theater’s already splendid foyer was transformed into a dream world of Persian carpets, embroidered cushions, colorful lamps, and lush tropical greenery, with silk draperies billowing from the ceiling and walls.20 Such elegant distractions were a central feature of resort life in Vichy. 14  MVL, La Semaine de Cusset et de Vichy, August 11, 1866; MVL, “Son Altesse Impériale le Grand-Duc Alexis arrive dans nos murs,” 10 Aff 4384; MVL, “La municipalité remercie la population vichyssoise de son accueil envers le Grand-Duc,” 10 Aff 4387. 15  Chambriard, Aux sources de Vichy, 71, 74; Fréderic Dutheil, “Promenade dans les parcs de Vichy et saisons thermales,” Ethnologie Française, 36 (2006): 549. 16  Cécile Morillon, “Lumière et déambulation dans le Grand Établissement Thermal de Vichy,” in Villes d’eaux: Histoire du thermalisme (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 458. 17  Charles Bonnard, Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? (Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894), 14. 18  MVL, “Supplément Illustré: La Saison de Vichy” Le Figaro, May 31, 1910, 10 DJ 11. 19  MVL, “La saga de la vente des thermes” Le Point, September 9, 2010, 10 DJ 11. 20  Wallon, La vie quotidienne, 240.

26 

K. FREEMAN

Vichy’s privileging of elite leisure and pleasure shaped the resort’s approach to its clients and products. “Serious patients” were encouraged in the shoulder seasons of April-May and September-October, the rainy spring in particular being a time when “the alkaline waters, heavily mineralized, produce a noticeable effect.”21 “The heat of the summer months,” on the other hand, “might harm patients suffering from those … ailments treated in Vichy.” The clientele of July and August were “more robust, what they require is pleasure.”22 That a 21-day Vichy thermal cure was a pretext for leisure and pleasure in many guises was fodder for picture postcards, for example, which mocked the “love cure” and the “wallet cure.”23 Nevertheless, the pretext was upheld with remarkable insistence by the resort and its promoters. As Dr. Jean Berger reassured his British clients, the “extra-medical condition of comfort” fulfilled a therapeutic role: “the physical relaxation imparted by an intelligent balneological treatment, by balanced and graduated sport, by the moral effect of a tranquil mind, and even by wise and artistic distractions,” he claimed, could “ameliorate the biliary and nervous systems and the mental condition.”24 The casino, meanwhile, offered an “intellectual treatment,” a “cure for the disease of ill temper.”25 In 1872, Vichy’s municipal council had argued for the curative properties of gambling, “a powerful enhancement to therapeutic activity.”26 That same year, a Hachette guide to Vichy described games as “hygienic.”27 Indeed, the resort’s promoters consistently made clear that all the pleasures of a Vichy holiday were in some way therapeutic: Increased appetite, the first consequence of ingesting mineral waters, must be satisfied by abundant and varied cuisine, which in turn calls for increased activity to bring physiological balance. Many of the afflictions treated in Vichy (those of the stomach and the liver in particular) leave their victims in  Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy, Guide de l’Étranger 1896, 19.  Dr. Salignat (1902) quoted in Isabelle Pouzadoux, “Contribution à l’histoire culturelle d’une station thermale: Le Grand Casino de Vichy de 1870 à 1939” (MA thesis, Université Clermont-Ferrand II, 1989), 75. 23  Freeman, “Performing Leisure as Labour,” 7; Thierry Wirth, Vichy 1890–1914 (Le Havre: Imprimerie Philaprint, 1978), front matter. 24  MVL, “Vichy: Capitale Thermale” Journal de Vichy: Journal des Baigneurs, 10 April 1939, 10 DJ 11. 25  BnF Gallica, Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy, Guide de L’Étranger 1896, 98. 26  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 27 December 1872. 27  Louis Piesse, Vichy et ses environs (Paris: Hachette, 1872), 155. 21 22

2 STIGMA 

27

a state of melancholy. Providing entertainment to these patients, then, is the only way to ensure the success of their treatment. Every hour must bring rest and relaxation so that they leave Vichy with a new constitution and a transformed spirit.28

“Yes,” Vichy’s guests were reassured, “even bonbons are part of the cure”29 (Fig. 2.1).

Vichy and the Second Empire Napoleon III wrote of Vichy: “I am happier here than anywhere else, for this is my creation.”30 And indeed Vichy’s physical and cultural landscape was shaped by the emperor to a great extent. The Second Empire character of the resort is evident in its design, planning, and architecture but also, for critics, in its reputation for vice. Émile Zola, one of Napoleon III’s fiercest opponents, declared “one area in which the authority of the Emperor is without limits: the world of debauchery, of pleasure, the empire of womanizing and of the brothel.”31 Vichy acquired the reputation for carnality associated with the Second Empire: Napoleon III installed his mistress in one of the imperial chalets, courtesans reigned in the casino and gossip pages, and “from time to time, Fleury [the Emperor’s aide] ventures into town and brings the Emperor back a friendly Vichyssoise.”32 Brothels, likewise, became integral to the resort experience.33 Indeed, Vichy promoted the full-scale development of prostitution as an industry up until the eve of the Second World War. The extant police files on prostitution in Vichy cover the period from 1897 to 1913: in that time, 675 women registered as prostitutes, and worked in a staggering assortment of brothels.34 In addition to Vichy’s many registered 28  BnF Gallica, Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy, Guide de l’Étranger 1896, 98. 29  MVL, Advertisement, v.10 910.2. 30  Maurice Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension 1800–1870 (Saint-Étienne: Impressions Dumas, 1998), 174. 31  Émile Zola quoted in David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 329. 32  Baron d’Ambès quoted in Wallon, La Vie quotidienne, 74. 33  Marie-Eve Férérol, “Luxure, calme et volupté dans les villes d’eaux françaises à l’âge d’or du thermalisme,” Via: Tourism Review 11–12 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/ viatourism.1759. 34  AmV, Police Register, Police des moeurs, Série J 123.

28 

K. FREEMAN

Fig. 2.1  Guide de l’Étranger à Vichy, Saison 1900. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC

2 STIGMA 

29

prostitutes were unregulated demi-mondaines and unregistered insoumises who worked in the parks, cafés, and brasseries of the resort. Vichy’s sex trade was a significant attraction, defended by the resort’s elites because it was lucrative and it underscored the Queen of Spas’ reputation for pleasure and indulgence. When, in 1912, a spate of protests from residents demanded greater regulation and confinement of prostitution in Vichy, the resorts’ prostitutes petitioned the mayor and municipal council to put an end to their “harassment.” In demanding the right to work freely, Vichy’s prostitutes underscored that they were “offering hospitality to our visitors.”35 Their petition was signed by many of the resort’s merchants and hoteliers. Vichy’s residents protested the “scandal of prostitution” because it intruded on and disrupted their daily lives, and because it was contrary to the values of a health resort.36 In 1911, a group of tourists, “honest men and women who visit the thermal resort,” likewise petitioned the CfV “in the name of public morality,” to remove the “intolerable scandal” of prostitution from the Parc des sources.37 Another group, a month earlier, complained that “prostitution is unfettered in Vichy, in the most shameless way.”38 Such protest was consistently unsuccessful, however. Vichy’s police commissioner explained in 1887, “the interests of the resort do not permit prostitutes’ isolation or expulsion. … The resort would suffer greatly if we agreed to such demands.”39 Twenty-five years later, his successors took the same stance: “in Vichy … the administration must tolerate prostitution.”40 The Second Empire character of the resort was further amplified by its fusion of ancien régime sensibilities and modern capitalism. The culture of a Vichy cure—lavish hotels, decadent gastronomy, and abundant entertainment—followed the aristocratic tradition but relied on distinctly modern tourist infrastructures, business practices, and technologies and 35  AmV, Petition, 14 April 1912. Plaintes et Réclamations: pétitions, correspondance, rapports de police 1859–1934, J 123 no. 1–2. 36  AmV, Petition, 1887. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2; AmV, Pétition des Habitants de Vichy contre la licence des rues et particulièrement contre les scandales et inconvénients de la prostitution, 15 June 1912. Plaintes et réclamations, J 123 no. 1–2. 37  AmV, Petition, 12 September 1911, Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 38  AmV, Petition, 1 August 1911, Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 39  AmV, Commissioner of Police, 15 July 1887. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2; AmV, Commissioner of Police, 4 July 1889. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 40  AmV, Mayor to Prefect of Allier, 26 February 1914. Réglementation, J 123 no. 1–2.

30 

K. FREEMAN

appealed to an increasingly diverse clientele. The CfV spent copiously on advertising. It spared no expense in courting celebrities and the media. It invested in a state-of-the-art bottling plant (located in an annex of the new railway station) and subsidiary glass, cork, and printing industries to capitalize on the popularity of bottled mineral water and to further commodify the resort. The success of these initiatives depended on two others: diverting thermal springs from outside Vichy into the resort in order to assure sufficient mineral water supply, and the development of a vast, ultimately global, distribution network for Vichy products which, in addition to bottled water, included lozenges and pastilles made from extracted mineral salts, as well as bath salts and toiletries such as soap, perfume, toothpaste, and shaving cream.41 The 1920s and 1930s saw the proliferation of Vichy beauty products: the Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV), which would eventually become Laboratoires Vichy, was founded in 1931. These products, all advertised as capturing the essence of Vichy, pitched luxury and self-indulgence to a mass market. Although all Vichy’s products had hygienic pretexts (to treat liver, kidney, or gastrointestinal ailments, to aid digestion, eliminate bad breath, cleanse, purify, detoxify), they were also all symbols of fashionable extravagance, emphasizing the stylish and unrestrained lives of their consumers. This is illustrated in the promotion and consumption of Vichy products. Promotional imagery of Vichy is palpably decadent. Whether produced by the municipality, the CfV, or travel companies such as Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM), these images focus overwhelmingly on the lavish pleasures of a spa vacation, particularly in casinos, gardens, restaurants, and sporting or theatrical events. Although every bottle of Vichy water carried a label detailing its mineral composition and recommended uses, Vichy water was most often consumed as an aperitif, on its own or as Vichy-Vermouth, Vichy-Quina, or Whisky-Vichy. The consumption of Vichy products was a conspicuous indicator that the consumer had the means to lead a life of excess. While Vichy products were occasionally advertised as effective antidotes for “work intoxication,” they were far more widely promoted as treatments for intoxication of other kinds: opium addiction, alcoholism, obesity,

41  Vichy perfume was made from “concentrated” mineral water. Vichy soaps were made from mineral salts, as was Vichy toothpaste. Chambriard, Aux sources de Vichy, 324.

2 STIGMA 

31

indigestion, and other symptoms of a self-indulgent lifestyle.42 The ill effects of the kinds of unrestrained consumption for which Vichy was famous could be treated with more consumption of Vichy products, all ultimately underscoring the resort’s decadence. As one American ad proclaimed, “if you’re sick, drink Vichy and get well. If you’re well, drink Vichy and get better”43 (Figs. 2.2 and 2.3). Vichy’s successful commodification hinged on the vigilance with which the CfV trademarked the “Vichy product” and defended Vichy’s brand and image. The company’s abundant publicity exhorted consumers to “demand the genuine article,”44 and assured clients that the Vichy-État label was “a perfect guarantee. The purity of the springs is controlled.”45 The CfV’s lawyers were constantly engaged in legal battles to defend Vichy from imitators and competitors.46 As Vichy’s renown grew, so did threats to the brand.47 Authenticity became a key element of the CfV’s publicity in France, the colonies, and throughout the world, assertions made necessary by local competitors and a profusion of international imitators including Vichy Catalan (established in 1881 near Barcelona), several “Nordic Vichy” spring water companies in Scandinavia, and multiple American “Vichies,” notably Saratoga Vichy in New  York and Vichy Springs in California. The CfV combatted Vichy Catalan and Saratoga Vichy in the courts, citing the misuse of the name “Vichy.”48 The company’s international agents and distributors intensified their advertising 42  MVL, “Les Cures thermales: le meilleur correctif du surmenage,” Chronique d’actualité médicale, April 6, 1932, 10 dj 15; MVL, “After painting the town … drink Vichy,” 10 DJ 14. 43  MVL, Advertisement, v.10 910.2. 44  Chambriard, “Entre Thermalisme et Cosmétique: le projet thermal de Paul Baudecroux à Cusset (1930-1961),” Société d’émulation du Bourbonnais 72 (2005): 317–347. 45  Gustave Monod, The Waters of Vichy (Paris: Herbert Clarke, 1935), 8. 46  Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Mémoire en défense de M. Bertrand, propriétaire à Cusset contre la Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy et le jugement du tribunal de Cusset en date du 29 juillet 1875 présenté à messieurs les conseillers de la Cour de Riom [qui l’accusent de contrefaçon en ce qui concerne les bouteilles, les étiquettes] (Vichy: Imprimerie Bougarel, 1875), 8 FM 236; Avis sur la contestation qui s’est élevée entre M.  Bécourt et la Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement de Vichy [dont les fermiers actuels, Lebobe, Callou et Cie, refusent de livrer à Bécourt le modèle de leurs cachet et marque pour être apposes sur les boîtes de pastilles que fabrique Bécourt. Le motif invoqué est que les pastilles, dites de Vichy, contiennent du bicarbonate ne provenant pas de l’eau de Vichy (Paris: Imprimerie V. Janson, 1854), FOL FM 1100. 47  Chambriard, “Entre Thermalisme et Cosmétique.” 48  US Supreme Court, La République Française et al., Petitioners, v. Saratoga Vichy Spring Company. Argued 4 November 1903. Decided 7 December 1903. https://www.law.cor-

32 

K. FREEMAN

Fig. 2.2  PLM publicity poster, Grand Casino de Vichy. Tauzin, 1910. Bibliothèque nationale de France, gallica.bnf.fr

2 STIGMA 

33

Fig. 2.3  Vichy-Purgatif, postcard. US National Library of Medicine, 101459267

34 

K. FREEMAN

campaigns against “false Vichies.”49 By far the most threatening of these, however, was a group of proprietors from nearby Saint-Yorre, who used their location in the “Vichy Basin” to promote their products as “Vichy water.” Over several decades of court cases, the CfV struggled to define the parameters, and establish exclusive use, of Vichy’s name.50 A 1933 decree finally prevented the “abusive use of Vichy’s name” for generic mineral or soda water.51 In 1938, Vichyssois merchants lobbied for appellation contrôlée status to “protect the name Vichy and the advantages of its reputation.”52

Vichy in the Third Republic One of the Compagnie fermière’s greatest achievements was to ensure that the Vichy brand survived the collapse of the Second Empire with which it was so closely associated, and the proclamation of a republic which espoused wholly different values. In 1870, Napoleon III was captured by the Prussian army following France’s defeat in the Franco-­ Prussian War: French republicans removed him from power and established the Third Republic. The Second Empire was thoroughly demonized in the decades that followed.53 Visceral hostility toward anything associated with the Bonapartist regime was a recurring theme of French republican identity, despite affinities and continuities between the two governments.54 Symbolically, the Third Republic stood in resistance and opposition to the Second Empire, an approach that permeated republican politics, culture, ideology, and outlook.55 In an 1870 plebiscite, Vichyssois had voted overwhelmingly for empire. The resort was indebted to, and fond of, Napoleon III. When the new nell.edu/supremecourt/text/191/427; Natalia Piernas, Vichy Catalan: 125 years of History (Barcelona: Viena Ediciones, 2009). 49  MVL, “Vichy Célestins French Republic Property,” v.10 910.2. 50  Antonin Mallat, De l’Appellation commerciale ‘eau minérale de Vichy’ ou ‘eau minérale du Bassin de Vichy’ en jurisprudence (Vichy: Imprimerie C. Bougarel, 1899). 51  Decree of 17 July 1933 published in the Journal Officiel, 23 July 1933 reproduced in La Presse Thermale et climatique, 1 May 1934. 52  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 27 June 1938. 53  Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 54  Sudhir Hazareesingh, “The Republicans of the Second Empire” in The French Republic, ed. Berenson, Duclert and Prochasson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 41–42. 55  Hazareesingh, “The Republicans of the Second Empire,” 42.

2 STIGMA 

35

republican government was proclaimed, the municipality pragmatically pledged allegiance.56 But there remained sympathy for the emperor in the Queen of Spas, alongside a vague but enduring sense that “the Third Republic didn’t like Vichy,”57 perhaps because Vichy’s image as a decadent, elitist, self-indulgent place of leisure sat uneasily with republican political culture. Moral citizenship in the universal republic required espousing the ideals of austerity, self-sacrifice, egalitarianism, and, above all, work and productivity.58 Republican leaders stressed discipline and castigated idleness.59 If the essence of the republic lay in its exaltation of these values, Vichy offered an experience that was manifestly un-republican. Yet despite this clash of values, and fears that the European aristocracy might boycott republican France entirely, Vichy flourished during the early Third Republic, its clientele continuing the pursuit of luxurious self-­ indulgence in ever greater numbers. The Shah of Persia’s visit to Vichy in 1905 was a high point of excess and allegedly “debauched” revelry.60 The former Sultan of Morocco tossed gold coins to the crowds that lined the streets to greet him in 1912. The guest book of the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs revealed “a whole suite of prestigious names marking the passage of great people,” an “ultra-elegant clientele … seduced by the most modern comforts, the tradition of fine cuisine … as well as a vast garage.”61 Sales of bottled water also increased exponentially during the Third Republic. Fourteen million bottles of Vichy water were sold in 1905; by 1937 yearly sales had reached 100 million.62 Visitors consumed the resort’s other offerings with equal abandon. In 1890, for example, Vichy’s seasonal wine consumption was 4 million liters, or about 40 liters per guest.63 Shopping in Vichy—where “luxurious boutiques are one of the most brilliant ornaments” of the resort—“offered a prodigious arrangement of the rarest and  See also Gontard, Vichy: l’irrésistible ascension, 206.  Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993), 40. 58  Paul Lafargue, Le Droit à la paresse (Paris: 1883); Berenson, Duclert and Prochasson, eds., The French Republic. 59  Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-theCentury France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 27. 60  Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 35. 61  MVL, “Supplément Illustré: La Saison de Vichy” Le Figaro, May 31, 1910, 10 DJ 11. 62  MVL, Le Massif Central à L’Exposition Internationale Paris 1937, 102. 63  Charles Bonnard, Vichy-Ambulance, son rôle pendant la prochaine guerre (Vichy: Imprimerie Bougarel, 1890), 92. 56 57

36 

K. FREEMAN

most exquisite luxury.”64 In the decade before the Great War, Vichy was a perpetual worksite with much of the construction devoted to palatial hotels. The demand from elite vacationers was such that a luxury train, the Vichy Express, ran daily from Paris during the summer months, and Pullman offered a first-class service from London.65 Throughout, Vichy’s reputation for pleasure and excess persisted, and the resort’s decadent image deepened. The early Third Republic—the period mythologized as the Belle Époque—saw a tremendous growth in production, consumerism, tourism, and luxury industries across France. It was an era characterized by festivity and joie de vivre, by the careless frivolity of high society, by pleasure, prosperity, promiscuity, progress, and the incontestable reign of French culture.66 It was also a period of profound anxiety and crisis, in which “decadence was a favorite theme.”67 Decadence had become a mainstay of French political and cultural discourse by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. French morals had been degraded, first by Bonapartist license and then by republican liberty.68 For its critics, the republic fostered hedonism, materialism, artifice, and corruption. Under the umbrella of decadence, these were all taken as symptoms of national weakness. Contemporaries read the statistics on alcoholism, venereal disease, and demographic decline with alarm, and places of pleasure were increasingly targeted by purity campaigners concerned with the defense of social hygiene. Vichy was particularly identified with the Belle Époque, its festive exuberance, and also its threats.69 Vichy’s high rates of alcohol consumption and syphilis, for example, were well known and widely debated.70 The resort responded to these criticisms by asserting the therapeutic and hygienic dimensions of its brand and image: its connotations of purity,  MVL, “Supplément Illustré: La Saison de Vichy” Le Figaro, May 31, 1910, 10 DJ 11.  MVL, “Vichy—six heures de Paris,” 1895, OTT 10 Aff 3; “London-Vichy Pullman Express,” 1927, 10 Aff 4161. 66  Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la “Belle Époque” (Paris: Fayard, 2017); Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque. 67  Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Robert A.  Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Chap. 5. 68  Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque, 32. 69  Kalifa, “Belle Époque,” 12. 70  BnF, Rapport à Monsieur le Ministre de l’Intérieur: prophylaxie des maladies vénériennes, Vichy, F1a 4516, 8 April 1919. 64 65

2 STIGMA 

37

cleanliness, and revitalization. In summer 1913, for example, the Bulletin de Vichy published national statistics which contrasted French birth and death rates with those of England and Germany.71 “It is easier to prevent death than stimulate birth,” the newspaper proclaimed.72 Vichy’s “miraculous waters,” with their restorative, regenerative properties, thus had a critical role to play in buttressing national health and vitality. “Defamation” of the resort (allegations that a visit to Vichy fostered weakness rather than strength) was blamed on foreign propaganda meant to discredit French thermalism and tarnish Vichy’s reputation.73 Such defamation persisted during and after the First World War, the advent of which deepened Vichy’s association with moral and social ills, despite the resort’s increased medicalization in wartime and undeniable contributions to the war effort.74 With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Vichy became a hospital town. The resort’s hotels and baths were requisitioned to treat the war’s wounded, and resources of all kinds were diverted to the war effort. But Vichy nevertheless struggled to maintain its position as the Queen of Spas and persisted in cultivating the extravagance and indulgence for which the resort was famous.75 The Grand Casino stayed open when other casinos in the country had closed their doors, since closing would be “contrary to Vichy’s traditions.”76 Le Sporting, Vichy’s country club, offered golf, tennis, swimming, and water sports on the river. The 1915 thermal season began early, and the resort recorded a steady flow of clients. In the summer of 1916, Vichy welcomed 100,000 guests.77 This patronage by wealthy visitors and the pursuit of elite indulgence continued for the duration of hostilities, and catering to tourists remained the  BnF Gallica, “Nouvelles Diverses,” Le Bulletin de Vichy, June 21, 1913.  BnF Gallica, “Nouvelles Diverses,” Le Bulletin de Vichy, June 21, 1913. 73  BnF Gallica, Ollivié, “Chronique locale,” Bulletin de Vichy, June 13, 1915. 74  “France Missing Wealthy Tourists, Germany Gaining. Keen Propaganda Wins Results” Straits Times, December 13, 1929. The article describes circulars “recently discovered by French police … [that] advise tourists especially not to go to Vichy. They state that the town of Vichy is very unwholesome.” 75  Kirrily Freeman and Katherine Crooks, “‘Amusez-vous, Vichyssois’: Wartime Morality and Home Front Tensions in WWI Vichy,” French History 31, no. 2 (June 2017): 194–218. 76  AmV, Société du Grand Casino, Assemblée Générale des Actionnaires, February 1915. Although gambling was prohibited, the casino still offered card games, billiards, opera, theater, ballet, and a restaurant. 77  Musée de l’Opéra de Vichy, Vichy, les théâtres et la guerre 1914–1918 (Vichy: Musée de l’Opéra de Vichy, 2014). 71 72

38 

K. FREEMAN

resort’s priority despite the state of war. John M. Swan, an American army official posted in Vichy, described the resort as “a cosmopolitan European watering place, … comfortably filled with all kinds of men and women. The orchestra played twice a day …, an opera company gave performances two or three times a week, … there was a golf course and other amusements and entertainments.”78 Anne Tjomsland, an American physician, remarked that there was “no more army life” in Vichy, “there was a fashionable world passing, there were flowers, no prohibition, and the Mademoiselles.”79 This privileging of leisure and pleasure in wartime fed existing negative perceptions of Vichy. The large numbers of non-combatants in the resort, and the continued unrestrained consumption of food, alcohol, and luxury products were especially problematic. While the rest of France suffered acute shortages and heavy rationing, food and drink remained abundant in Vichy, a situation which eroded the sense of solidarity and national unity the war effort demanded. The presence of a significant population of foreigners and a large number of civilian men was seen as a threat to national security and national unity alike. Vichy’s reputation for prostitution tarred most civilian women, as fears of venereal disease and moral decay intensified. A letter to the mayor of Vichy in July 1916 encapsulates such perceptions: Mr. Mayor, let a soldier tell you frankly how much he and all his comrades are disgusted by your town and its inhabitants who forget that there’s a war. We wish to convey to you our utmost contempt, and we pity the wounded who must suffer amidst your revelry. […] Mr. Mayor, I’m a patriot, and I’m revolted by what’s going on behind the lines, especially in your town.80

The letter’s author was Félix Termonde, a soldier in the 339th Infantry Regiment of the French Army stationed at Verdun. A wounded comrade of Termonde’s convalescing in Vichy had described life in the resort as “shameless and scandalous”: he was offended and enraged by a petition circulating in Vichy which called for wounded soldiers (whose injuries might repulse or unsettle paying guests) to be banned from the resort’s 78  John M. Swan, A History of United States Army Base Hospital No. 19 (Rochester, NY: Wegman-Walsh, 1922), 26. 79  Anne Tjomsland, Bellevue in France: An Anecdotal History of Base Hospital No. 1 (New York: Froben Press, 1941), 151. 80   AmV, Plaintes et réclamations: pétitions, correspondances, rapports de police 1859–1934. Série J 123, no. 2.

2 STIGMA 

39

public spaces. Termonde decried “wanton and disgraceful Vichy,” and “those Vichy women that some might call ladies, though calling them whores is still better than they deserve.” “Amusez-vous, Vichyssois,” he declared, “because here soldiers die every day. We don’t sleep, we hardly eat, we wait for death every second. But at least the Vichyssois are in good spirits! With their sickeningly lush life.”81 The mayor’s response to Termonde’s letter was a prototype of what would become a standard reply to criticisms of Vichy’s comportment in wartime: [Y]ou make clear your profound disdain for the population of Vichy who, you claim, lead a shameless and sickening existence. … You may well be a hero, but nothing gives you the right to … attack the reputation of a town that has fulfilled its patriotic duty. Vichy has absolutely nothing to apologize for.82

Vichy’s contributions to the war effort were significant and undeniable: some 20 percent of all French wounded received medical care in Vichy between 1914 and 1918.83 It is equally true that resident Vichyssois were not the ones who led “lush” or “shameless” lives. But the determination to pursue a livelihood that privileged the consumption, leisure, and pleasure of elite guests shaped perceptions of the town as immoral. These perceptions, in turn, made Vichyssois defensive. Vichy, like every French community, suffered losses during the First World War: 498 Vichyssois died in the conflict.84 But when the resort framed its wartime experiences as “a heavy sacrifice and cruel tragedy,” it was with the hospitality sector in mind.85 Vichy’s press decried the resort’s unjust treatment by the state in the requisition of hotels as hospitals, and the condition in which they were left at the end of the conflict.86 The reinstatement of gambling—made illegal during the war for moral 81   AmV, Plaintes et réclamations: pétitions, correspondances, rapports de police 1859–1934. Série J 123, no. 2. 82   AmV, Plaintes et réclamations: pétitions, correspondances, rapports de police 1859–1934. Série J 123, no. 2. 83  Musée de l’Opéra de Vichy, Vichy, les théâtres et la guerre. 84  Archives nationales (AN), Fonds du ministère des Pensions, livre d’or des Morts pour la France, Département de l’Allier, Vichy, F 9 3922. 85  BnF Gallica, G. Ollivier, “La Saison 1919,” Bulletin de Vichy, January 5, 1919. 86  BnF Gallica, G.  Ollivier, “La Saison 1919,” Bulletin de Vichy, January 5, 1919; G. Ollivier, “La Paix,” Bulletin de Vichy, June 29, 1919.

40 

K. FREEMAN

reasons—was also a key concern for a municipality thirsty for revenue. Resort leaders even argued that the resumption of gambling would be a “philanthropic” measure, so long as it took place in elite locales.87 Despite these concerns and others—an official responsible for municipal provisioning during the war embezzled 20,000 francs and disappeared—Vichy quickly regained its pre-war stature.88 In 1919, Vichy earned the highest revenue of any French resort.89 The interwar period saw Vichy’s development continue apace. The town’s pre-war construction boom was reignited, with new and renovated hotels attracting an ever-increasing clientele. The municipality committed itself to public works—paving streets and sidewalks, whitewashing buildings, planting gardens, providing more and better street lighting—but also to regulations meant to banish the ugly, unsightly, unhealthy, and unpleasant (vandalism, garbage, public defecation and urination, stray dogs).90 Municipal authorities were entreated to clean and modernize the resort in order to buttress its festive and hygienic atmospheres, and even to profit from the vogue for battlefield tourism: after visiting “places of anguish and ruin” tourists could come to Vichy for relief, recovery, uplift, and regeneration.91 This was Vichy’s “duty to France.”92 Although the traditional entertainments for which the Queen of Spas was famous continued unabated (opera, theater, casino, galas, golf, horse races), the 1920s and 1930s saw a diversification of the festivities the resort offered and of the clientele Vichy attracted. In entertainment, there was a marked focus on the open-air, capturing the “modern spirit” with regattas, car and bicycle races, floral competitions, parades, and outdoor films and concerts. There were fewer European aristocrats, and more rich colonials and Americans, but also more middle- and (as the 1930s wore on) even working-class clients. Vichy began to incorporate “affordability” into its image, though this did not displace luxurious self-indulgence as the essence of the Vichy brand (Fig. 2.4).  BnF Gallica, Ch.-G. Romeuf, “Aurons-nous les jeux?” Bulletin de Vichy, May 4, 1919.  AN, Rapport à M. le Ministre, Ravitaillement municipal de Vichy, 15 February 1921, F1a 4516. 89  Pascal Chambriard, “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960),” in Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 228. 90  BnF Gallica, “On Réclame,” Bulletin de Vichy, January 19, 1919. 91  BnF Gallica, Marcel Périn, “Un Esprit Nouveau,” Bulletin de Vichy, March 23, 1919; G.O. “Tourisme et Syndicats d’Initiative” Bulletin de Vichy, April 20, 1919. 92  BnF Gallica, Dr. F.  Fau, “Modernisons nos Stations Thermales,” Bulletin de Vichy, March 9, 1919. 87 88

2 STIGMA 

41

Fig. 2.4  Vichy, Comité des fêtes. Broders, 1926. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, 10 Aff 4341

42 

K. FREEMAN

The resort was relatively unscathed by the Great Depression. In 1931 it still boasted 48 jewelers, 37 haute couture boutiques, and 18 furriers.93 Vichy’s worst year, 1932, saw only a seven percent decrease in revenue.94 But as the 1930s wore on, change was in the air. In the second half of the decade, Vichy experimented with “popular thermalism.” The advent of paid vacations in 1937 inspired Vichy’s newly created Office of Thermalism and Popular Tourism to launch “package cures.”95 Of greater impact, however, was a 1932 decree curtailing prostitution, following which all but one of Vichy’s brothels closed. Prostitution in Vichy had long had its critics, as we have seen. Despite increased restrictions in 1913,96 and periodic calls to “purge” prostitutes from the resort,97 Vichy’s sex trade remained protected until the 1930s. By that point, however, fears of moral decline and physical degeneration were ubiquitous, and calls for social hygiene increasingly strident. In an atmosphere of national crisis inflamed by accusations of decadence, prostitution in Vichy was finally restricted, but not without resistance. A group of local merchants and politicians “representing the resort’s commercial interests” compiled a detailed report in defense of prostitution.98 The report approached the ban from the perspectives of commerce, hygiene, morality, and law. In each case, it found prohibition to be unjustifiably damaging: Vichy could not afford “the luxury of such costly morality.”99 For this group, defending Vichy’s economic interests meant definitively repudiating its “new reputation for morality and modesty” and rejecting its newfound “prudishness.”100

Conclusion: Decadence and Ambiguity In a radio broadcast of 25 June 1940, the day the armistice with Nazi Germany came into effect, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the new head of the French state, blamed the “spirit of pleasure-seeking” for France’s  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 46–47.  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 46–47. 95  AmV, Dossier “Thermalisme et Tourisme populaire.” 96  BnF Gallica, Georges Spada, “Chronique Locale,” Bulletin de Vichy, June 21, 1913. 97  BnF Gallica, “On Réclame,” Bulletin de Vichy, January 19, 1919. 98  AmV, Rapport concernant la réadmission à Vichy des femmes dites de mœurs légères, 23 April 1937. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 99  AmV, Rapport concernant la réadmission à Vichy des femmes dites de mœurs légères, 23 April 1937. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 100  AmV, Rapport concernant la réadmission à Vichy des femmes dites de mœurs légères, 23 April 1937. Prostitution Divers 1861–1945, J 123 no. 1–2. 93 94

2 STIGMA 

43

catastrophic situation.101 That same summer, however, Pétain described Vichy as “the kind of town I like best.”102 Other members of the new government felt differently. General Weygand, for example, decried the atmosphere of leisure and self-indulgence in the resort.103 A great irony of the new regime’s installation in Vichy was that this government of moral order had set itself up in a temple to decadence. By 1940, decadence had become the leitmotif of a Third Republic in disarray, and the clarion call of the right in France—it was the cause of all the nation’s ills, and the ultimate justification for the new regime’s National Revolution, with its aims of purification and regeneration.104 Vichy, Queen of Spas, had built its image and reputation on luxury, self-indulgence, excess, and pleasure, as we have seen. But Vichy’s image also rested on a second pillar of authenticity, purity, and revitalization. Whenever Vichy was accused of corruption, immorality, or impropriety—when it was labeled as decadent—it appealed to its vocation as a health resort and therefore to its contributions to the strength and regeneration of France. Cultivating such ambiguity was the resort’s modus operandi.105 A similar ambiguity characterized the État Français. Pétain’s regime also championed authenticity, purity, and revitalization, the core characteristics of a National Revolution that promoted exclusionary Frenchness rooted in the soil, the peasantry, and traditional values of family, work, and nation; the isolation and expulsion of foreigners and Jews; and the rebirth of “true France.” But the National Revolution masked the regime’s impotence, corruption, excess, and lack of direction.106 The regime itself—like the Third Republic it replaced and the spa town it occupied—was decadent despite its assertions of regeneration. As the vitriolic, arch-collaborationist Lucien Rebatet, who initially held high hopes for the État Français, lamented: “I wanted to believe that all this ridiculousness … that one encounters at every step was incidental, … but I had to disabuse myself of this.” Rebatet’s accusation that “one Vichy” (the regime) was “the faithful 101  Richard Carswell, The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 123. 102  Michèle Cointet, Vichy capitale, 1940–1944: Vérités et légendes (Paris: Perrin, 1993), 19. 103  Ivan Loiseau, Souvenirs et témoignages: Un témoin naturel et quotidien du gouvernement de Vichy 1940–1945 (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1974), 132. 104  Debbie Lackerstein, National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies, 1930–1944 (New York: Routledge, 2012). 105  Freeman, “Performing Leisure as Labour.” 106  Lackerstein, National Regeneration, 10.

44 

K. FREEMAN

reflection, the extension of the other” (the town, resort, and brand) is but one wartime instance of the “town-regime amalgam” so resented by Vichyssois.107 But fears and perceptions of stigma had a long history in Vichy, as we have seen, as did Vichyssois’ efforts to defend their town’s name and reputation. Local responses to the État Français took up and carried forward themes and discourses, habits and reflexes, that were already entrenched facets of Vichyssois civic identity.

Bibliography Baguley, David. Napoleon III and his Regime: An Extravaganza. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Berenson, Edward, Vincent Duclert and Christophe Prochasson, eds. The French Republic: history, values, debates. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Bonnard, Charles. Vichy-Ambulance, son rôle pendant la prochaine guerre. Vichy: Imprimerie Bougarel, 1890. Bonnard, Charles. Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894. Chambriard, Pascal. Aux Sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles. Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999. Chambriard, Pascal. “Entre Thermalisme et cosmétique: le projet thermal de Paul Baudecroux à Cusset (1930–1961).” Société d’émulation du Bourbonnais 72 (2005): 317–347. Chambriard, Pascal. “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960).” In Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Cointet, Michèle. Vichy capitale, 1940–1944: Vérités et légendes. Paris: Perrin, 1993. Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Villes d’eaux: Histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy, Guide de l’Étranger 1896. Vichy: A. Wallon, 1896. Débordes, Jean. Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993. Dutheil, Fréderic. “Promenade dans les parcs de Vichy et saisons thermales (1850–1870).” Ethnologie Française 36, no. 3 (2006): 543–552. Férérol, Marie-Ève. “Luxure, calme et volupté dans les villes d’eaux françaises à l’âge d’or du thermalisme (Belle Époque et Années Folles).” Via: Tourism Review 11–12 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.1759

 Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942), 508.

107

2 STIGMA 

45

Freeman, Kirrily. “Performing Leisure as Labour in the Queen of Spas: Tourism, ‘Cure-ism,’ and Masquerade in Third Republic Vichy.” Journal of Tourism History (March 2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2021.1903097 Freeman, Kirrily, and Katherine Crooks. “‘Amusez-vous, Vichyssois:’ Wartime Morality and Home Front Tensions in WWI Vichy.” French History, 31, no. 2 (June 2017): 194–218. Golsan, Richard J. The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Gontard, Maurice. Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension 1800–1870. Saint-Étienne: Impressions Dumas, 1998. Kalifa, Dominique. La Véritable Histoire de la “Belle Époque.” Paris: Fayard, 2017. Lackerstein, Debbie. National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies, 1930–1944. New York: Routledge, 2012. Lafargue, Paul. Le Droit à la paresse. Paris, 1883. Loiseau, Ivan. Souvenirs et témoignages: Un témoin naturel et quotidien du gouvernement de Vichy 1940–1945. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1974. Mallat, Antonin. De l’Appellation commerciale ‘eau minérale de Vichy’ ou ‘eau minérale du Bassin de Vichy’ en jurisprudence. Vichy: Imprimerie C. Bougarel, 1899. Monod, Gustave. The Waters of Vichy. Paris: Herbert Clarke, 1935. Morillon Cécile. “Lumière et déambulation dans le Grand Établissement Thermal de Vichy.” In Villes d’eaux: Histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Musée de l’Opéra de Vichy, Vichy, les théâtres et la guerre 1914–1918. Vichy: Musée de l’Opéra de Vichy, 2014. Nye, Robert A. Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Piernas, Natalia. Vichy Catalan: 125 years of History. Barcelona: Viena Ediciones, 2009. Piesse, Louis. Vichy et ses environs. Paris: Hachette, 1872. Pouzadoux, Isabelle. “Contribution à l’histoire culturelle d’une station thermale: Le Grand Casino de Vichy de 1870 à 1939.” MA thesis, Université Clermont-­ Ferrand II, 1989. Price, Roger. The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Rearick, Charles. Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Rebatet, Lucien. Les Décombres. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942. Second, Albéric. Vichy Sévigné, Vichy Napoléon: Ses eaux, ses embellissements, ses environs, son histoire. Marseille: Éditions Jeanne Lafitte, 1862. Swan, John M. A History of United States Army Base Hospital No. 19. Rochester, NY: Wegman-Walsh, 1922.

46 

K. FREEMAN

Tjomsland, Anne. Bellevue in France: An Anecdotal History of Base Hospital No. 1. New York: Froben press, 1941. Wallon, Armand. La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914. Paris: Hachette, 1981. Weber, Eugen. France: Fin de Siècle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Wirth, Thierry. Vichy 1890–1914. Le Havre: Imprimerie Philaprint, 1978.

CHAPTER 3

Victimhood

Introduction: Vichy’s Occupation Vichy’s wartime experiences were distinct in important ways which have shaped perceptions of the war years and the town’s role in this period. The major “foreign” presence in Vichy was the French government, rather than German forces. Vichy escaped the air raids and combat suffered elsewhere in France in the spring of 1940. But the arrival of the national government in the resort in July 1940 was nonetheless perceived as an invasion, the requisition of hotels and places of leisure framed as “occupation.” Residents’ experiences between 1940 and 1944 were mixed, and the effects of the town’s sudden elevation to provisional capital of France were uneven. Leisure and luxury industries mostly prospered, although small businesses saw less benefit than larger companies. Vichy’s population was healthier than most in wartime France, but the bulk of the town’s food was reserved for government canteens.1 Vichy’s liberation was negotiated by the Swiss ambassador, saving the town from retaliation by the Germans or by the Resistance.2 But between May 1943 and August 1944,

1  Kirrily Freeman, “A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity” in The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016, ed. Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), 139, 143. 2  Walter Stucki, La Fin du régime de Vichy (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1947).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_3

47

48 

K. FREEMAN

Vichyssois were tortured by the Milice in the cellars of the Petit Casino.3 The Gestapo interrogation rooms were in the Hôtel du Portugal. The majority of Vichy’s Jews had been deported by 1942.4 In local collective memory, a division has long been drawn between Vichyssois and outsiders.5 In memories of the war years, Pétain’s government and its functionaries were unwanted guests. This distinction is perpetuated in Vichy through an insistence on referring to inhabitants of the town as “Vichyssois” and representatives of the regime as “Vichystes.” The local population and the municipality have long proclaimed their distance from the État Français, their impotence and innocence in the face of the government’s collaboration, complicity, and corruption, and ultimately their status as victims of the regime. But victimhood was difficult to assert in the absence of widespread physical destruction, especially when Vichyssois were suspected of profiting from the war. During the conflict, and in the immediate postwar period, Vichy focused on enumerating and seeking compensation for damages—lost tax and tourism revenue and damage to infrastructure such as hotels, restaurants, baths, casinos, parks, gardens—all framed in terms of harm to Vichy’s future income, livelihood, and reputation. Vichy’s image was not helped, however, by the fact that many claims for reparations, subventions, and indemnities were motivated by a desire to upgrade the amenities of a tourist resort seeking to recapture an elite clientele. The fact that the actual cost of the war for Vichy was ambiguous, and even deliberately manipulated, exacerbated the problem.

War Damages During the war, Vichy’s municipal government estimated 250 million francs for the renovation of the resort’s hotels, and 10 million francs in lost tax revenue.6 Wartime and postwar claims to cover these losses met with mixed success. Vichy’s hotels received compensation for their requisition from the État Français itself. After the war, some received reparations 3  See Denyse Dorville, “4 juillet 1944: La Grande Nuit du Petit Casino” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy ed. Maurice-J. Champel (Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues, 1946). 4  Audrey Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire (Paris: Belin, 2019), 93. 5  Haas, Valérie. “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999), appendices. 6  Maurice Constantin-Weyer, Vichy et son histoire (Vichy: Szabo, 1947), 178.

3 VICTIMHOOD 

49

for damages, but appeals for subventions for lost tax revenue were less successful, as was a postwar request from the municipal council for additional allocations of food in anticipation of the tourist season.7 Vichy faced difficulty receiving compensation because the town was perceived as having prospered, rather than suffered, between 1940 and 1944. Just how much Vichy profited from its wartime experiences has been the subject of great speculation, yet the cost of the war for Vichy is difficult to quantify not least because, in their quest for compensation, Vichy’s leisure industries presented contradictory accounts of what had and had not been damaged, when, and by whom. The Allier regional archives contain a wartime survey of Vichy’s hospitality sector that sheds some light on the resort’s finances, however: in 1943, the Moulins-Vichy Chamber of Commerce and Industry asked all Vichy hotels, restaurants, and bars to disclose the number of staff they employed, and their revenue for 1938, 1941, and 1942; 137 establishments responded.8 Of 92 hotels that supplied data for all three years, 65 percent reported a higher income in 1941 or 1942 than in 1938, the most profitable year of the decade before the war. Twenty-six respondents opened their hotels after 1940.9 Some hotels saw their revenue increase dramatically: Les Ambassadeurs, home to the foreign press and diplomatic corps during the war, declared revenue of 3,329,825 francs for 1938 and 12,144,272 francs in 1941. Adjusting for wartime currency devaluation, this still represents an increase of 143 percent.10 Hôtel Gallia reported earnings of 794,721 francs in 1938, and 3,755,453 francs in 1942.11 The Gallia’s staff also increased dramatically, however, from 2 people in 1938 to 33  in 1942. On the other hand, the Hôtel du Grand Condé, which grossed 268,355 francs in 1938 and 1,040,767 francs in 1941, went from 7  Archives départementales de l’Allier (AdA), Préfecture de l’Allier à M. le Sous-préfet à Vichy, 25 July 1942. Ville de Vichy, Demande de subvention exceptionnelle 1941–1942, 999  W 623; Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Municipal Council deliberations, 20 June 1945. 8  AdA, 1441 W 85. 9  AdA, 1441 W 85. Many businesses were attracted to wartime Vichy. Jacques Pottier, La Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998 (Moulins: MV-CCI, 1998), 32. 10  8,096,181 in 1938 francs. The hotel went from employing 145 people in 1938 to 129 in 1942. AdA, 1441 W 85. 11  3,755,453 francs in 1942 represent 2,086,362 1938 francs. For inflation rates see Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE).

50 

K. FREEMAN

employing seven people to four.12 The modest Hôtel d’Oran saw its revenue increase from 32,715 francs to 288,971 francs in 1941.13 Restaurants and bars also appear to have fared well. The Brasserie du Casino earned 428,885 francs in 1938 and 1,479,312 francs in 1942.14 A hotel, café, and restaurant on rue du Commerce earned 296,877  in 1938 compared to 1,434,441 francs in 1941.15 The Hôtel et Restaurant Lafayette declared revenue of 197,650 in 1938 and 1,292,068 in 1942.16 A hotel, café, and restaurant owned by Louis Memeraud saw an increase in revenue of 195 percent, while the income of an establishment owned by Adrien Nardy grew by 188 percent. On the other hand, Hôtel de la Paix saw its income drop from 1,130,992 in 1938 to 420,444 in 1942, though it continued to employ 15 people.17 The Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV), under the directorship of Jacques Aletti, also declared wartime losses. The SGHV owned most of Vichy’s luxury hotels including the Carlton, Majestic, Thermal Palace, and Parc, hotels requisitioned by a series of government and military agencies from 1940 to 1945. The Parc and the Majestic housed the offices of the Head of State between 1940 and 1944. The SGHV declared higher revenue in 1938 than during the war (6,836,340 compared to 5,346,590 in 1941 and 4,524,976 in 1942).18 The company’s wartime papers complicate this picture, however.19 The SGHV declared profits of 1,774,096 francs in 1938, and 1,390,575 francs in 1939.20 In 1940, with all but 80 of its rooms requisitioned, the SGHV reported a profit of 1,513,701 francs.21 Its profit for 1941 was 1,074,329  693,845 in 1938 francs. AdA, 1441 W 85.  160,539 in 1938 francs. The hotel continued to employ five people. AdA, 1441 W 85. 14  879,022 in 1938 francs. The brasserie lost two employees. AdA, 1441 W 85. 15  956,294  in 1938 francs. The owner hired seven additional employees in 1942. AdA, 1441 W 85. 16  717,815 in 1938 francs. The Lafayette continued to employ 15 people. AdA, 1441 W 85. 17  233,580 in 1938 francs. AdA, 1441 W 85. 18  8,019,885  in 1941 francs and 8,144,956  in 1942 francs, respectively. The SGHV employed 614 in 1938 compared to 369 people in 1942. AdA, 1441 W 85. 19  These papers were discovered in the basement of an abandoned building during research for this book. I’m grateful to Aurélie Duchézeau, Director of the Municipal Archives in Vichy, for giving me access to these uncataloged documents. 20  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblée Générale Ordinaire Annuelle, 8 June 1940. 21  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblée Générale Ordinaire Annuelle, 27 September 1941. 12 13

3 VICTIMHOOD 

51

francs,22 but declined to 660,108 francs in 1942 and 699,979 francs in 1943.23 The profit for 1944 was 429,842 francs, at which point Aletti advocated a policy of austerity.24 In a series of court cases from 1947 to 1957, however, Jacques Aletti and the SGHV’s administrators were accused of embezzlement and were found to have falsified their 1942–1945 budgets, neglecting to report a large portion of their profits.25 The Compagnie fermière de Vichy (CfV), which operated the thermal baths and other tourist infrastructure in the resort, also weathered the war years well. Its leadership assured shareholders in 1945 that “the disaster of the current war, despite its regrettable consequences, hasn’t really disrupted our business.”26 Luxury industries such as Louis Vuitton, which opened a flagship boutique in the Hôtel du Parc, “came out of the war richer than they went in.”27 There were clearly gains to be made in wartime Vichy, particularly in the hospitality and luxury sectors. In January 1945, France’s new provisional government stipulated that all wartime profits be turned over to the national treasury because “it is inadmissible that some have enriched themselves, while the nation became impoverished.”28 In the midst of continued suffering throughout the country, attention turned to Vichy’s “illicit profits.” The regional Chamber of Commerce, however, pledged to limit the scope of its investigations to the black market and direct transactions with Germany since Vichy had “already been tarred with suspicions of indignity and dishonor.”29 Postwar investigations in Vichy largely avoided the hospitality sector (the “illicit profits” dossier for the CfV is curiously empty), but rather focused on the government functionaries stationed in the city between 1940 and 1944, 22  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblée Générale Ordinaire Annuelle, 22 August 1942. 23  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblées Générales Ordinaires, 5 June 1943, 30 June 1944. 24   AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblée Générale Ordinaire, 28 February 1945. 25  AmV, Jugement du Tribunal correctionnel de Cusset, 17 May 1957; procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire réunie extraordinairement, 25 May 1957; Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire, 10 October 1958. 26  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement Thermal de Vichy, Assemblée générale annuelle, 4 September 1945. 27  Bonvicini, Stéphanie. Louis Vuitton: une saga française (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 259. 28  AdA, Comité de confiscation des profits illicites du département de l’Allier, 774 W 6. 29  AdA, Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Moulins-Vichy, Confiscation des profits illicites, 30 April 1945. Extrait du registre des délibérations, 1441 W 19.

52 

K. FREEMAN

and in particular the provisioning of government canteens. These investigations revealed corruption of scandalous proportions.30 Equally problematic was the fact that the resort’s peacetime priorities appeared to prevail between 1940 and 1944, despite the state of war and occupation and the moral rectitude of the État Français’ National Revolution: “the sad honor bestowed on Vichy demanded that its first duty be austerity. This austerity became nothing more than a talking point.”31 Champagne was a recurring theme in recollections of wartime Vichy. Coco Chanel, dining in the Hôtel du Parc in 1940, was “shocked by the behavior of a woman nearby, laughing and drinking champagne under a huge hat.”32 Balls, galas, theater, opera, fine restaurants, and high fashion flourished. For some, wartime Vichy was “brilliant and prolific … celebrities paraded at the Grand Casino, and every show was sold out.”33 A smiling Maurice Chevalier photographed playing golf at Le Sporting in 1943 suggests that Vichy had remained a center of leisure and pleasure.34 Furthermore, certain of the resort’s most influential figures colluded with the État Français: Jacques Aletti was on close terms with key members of Pétain’s entourage, and the CfV’s resort director, Ivan Loiseau, was a staunch Pétainist and supporter of the National Revolution. In response to suspicions of war profiteering, perceptions of excess, revelations of corruption, and accusations of collaboration, Vichy asserted its victimhood. Vichyssois initially stressed their resistance to the regime, made difficult by the heavy presence of the Milice and Gestapo in their midst. But support for Pétain (whose physical presence in Vichy personalized the regime), the fact that the majority of resisters in Vichy were of the Vichyste variety (pro-National Revolution but opposed to the German occupation), and the relative absence of communist or Gaullist resisters in 30  AdA, Comité de confiscation des profits illicites du département de l’Allier, Rapports établis par le Comité de libération de Vichy relatif à la gestion de l’Économat Central des Popotes de Vichy, 1944–1945. Commission d’épuration du Ministre du Ravitaillement, 18 December 1944, 774  W 6; AdA, Le Commissaire de Police de Vichy Sud à Monsieur le Commissaire Divisionnaire Chef de la circonscription de Police de Vichy, 16 August 1943, 774 W 6. 31  Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942), 481. 32  Hal Vaughan, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (New York: Vintage books, 2011), 140. 33  MVL, Georges Coustal, “La Saison Lyrique de L’été 1942,” Vichy Médical: 1942, 751–6. 34  Press photo, uncredited, reproduced in Alain Carteret, Vichy Charme (Olliergues: Éditions de la Montmarie, 2006).

3 VICTIMHOOD 

53

Vichy complicated the town’s efforts to define itself as resistant after the war.35 In general, Vichyssois’ comportment between 1940 and 1944 was more appropriately characterized as “attentiste,” a “wait and see” mentality later framed as stoic endurance. Vichy’s May 1945 municipal election is a revealing illustration of Vichyssois’ identification with endurance. The wartime mayor, Pierre-Victor Léger, was removed from office with the liberation. A member of Vichy’s municipal council since 1919 and mayor since 1929, Léger was a popular, respected, and experienced leader. Between 1940 and 1944, Léger and his municipal council kept to the purely pragmatic.36 Some in the national government and the legion accused him of decadence—drunkenness, “debauchery,” and socialist leanings—but regional officials stressed his support of and loyalty to Pétain and the state. Léger’s granddaughter and others have recently pointed to his contributions to resistance.37 During the war, however, Pétain insisted on maintaining Léger in office, hence Léger’s dismissal on 30 August 1944. Vichy’s postwar election to replace Léger came down to two candidates: Louis Moinard, Léger’s deputy mayor appointed in 1941 by Pétain, was an early member of the Organisation de résistance de l’Armée (ORA), supplied weapons to the Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI) and transported money, arms and intelligence to resistance groups in North Africa.38 The other candidate, Dr. Jacques Guillaumin, was a First World War veteran, trade unionist, and an active member of the communist resistance in Allier. Guillaumin had been arrested and interned in October 1940 and deported in 1941, only to return to Vichy in 1944.39 In May 1945, Vichyssois had a choice between two decorated resisters. Guillaumin, the communist deportee, represented a rupture with the wartime municipality and a new vision for Vichy. Moinard, former deputy mayor, represented continuity and solidarity with Léger. Moinard swept the polls. Four years later, Léger handily took the first elections in which he was eligible to run. In Pierre-Victor Léger, Vichyssois saw a reflection of themselves: he had lived all the ambiguities of life in the provisional capital and was a symbol

 Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 76–77.  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 79. 37  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 81. 38  AN Léonore database, Dossier 19800035/421/56309 (Louis Moinard). 39  AmV, Dossier “Jacques Guillaumin.” 35 36

54 

K. FREEMAN

of the town’s stoicism and unjust treatment, themes that were cornerstones of Vichy’s civic identity. Vichy asserted its victimhood primarily, however, by appealing to the destruction of the resort’s hotels. In 1946, the municipality published declarations in national and international newspapers that put Vichy’s wartime damages at 500 million francs.40 On 27 July 1945, the daily La Montagne calculated that 155,000 kilograms of linens, 8000 sets of cutlery, 34,000 meters of carpeting, 80,000 square meters of area rugs, 85,000 plates, 85,000 glasses, 137,000 square meters of wallpaper, and 74,000 kilograms of paint would be necessary to get Vichy’s hotels back in working order.41 Hotel owners submitted copious reparations claims in the decade following the war, as did the CfV.42 That the situation of Vichy’s hotels was framed as “war damages” was problematic, however, especially when government funding was sought for the refurbishment of leisure industries. The SGHV’s files are, once again, an enlightening illustration. The company employed various tactics throughout the war and in the postwar period to mitigate the wartime requisition of its hotels. During the war, it earmarked a portion of its budget to “refitting buildings upon derequisition, to resume our luxury standing.”43 By 1944 this reserve fund had reached nearly 12.5 million francs.44 After lengthy negotiations with the État Français, the SGHV commissioned a professional valuation of its properties in January 1943. The report estimated 39,467,985 francs for repairs to return the hotels to their pre-war condition.45 Later that year, the SGHV obtained a 20 percent increase in the rent it received from the government, ostensibly to cover these costs and a legislated wage increase for all hotel staff in Vichy.46 The SGHV, like all Vichy hotel owners, was paid two indemnities toward privation of use and cessation of commercial activity. Nevertheless, in 1945, the company claimed it would  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Tribune de Genève, May 21, 1946.  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), La Montagne, July 27, 1945. 42  See Archives départementales de l’Allier, 537 W 197–209, 287–288, 294–298, 389–392; the war damages dossiers for the CfV are extensive, see Archives départementales de l’Allier 537 W 192–193 and 537 W 277–278. 43  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblées générales annuelles, 1940–1969 (SGHV AGM), 22 August 1942. 44  AmV, SGHV AGM, 28 February 1945. 45  AmV, SGHV AGM, 5 June 1943. 46  AmV, Convention collective des employées de l’hôtellerie de Vichy, 17 August 1943, SGHV AGM, 30 June 1944. AdA, Convention de réquisition, 12 January 1944, 537 W 390. 40 41

3 VICTIMHOOD 

55

require an additional 50 million francs to recover from the war.47 This recovery included replacing all furniture, linens, and décor, as well as items such as kitchen sponges and washcloths.48 In 1949 and 1950, new national legislation awarded additional war damages compensation to properties that had been occupied by French or Allied troops.49 In light of this, the SGHV recast its claims. It asserted that the État Français had in fact kept the requisitioned hotels in perfect order and that the military requisitions of the liberation and immediate postwar period were responsible for all damage done to the SGHV’s hotels. The company submitted claims to cover renovations performed between September 1944 and 1952, an amount in excess of 59 million francs.50 The government response to these claims drew attention to the “liberal measures” taken to calculate this amount and to the SGHV’s opportunism, even duplicity, in submitting multiple claims supported by contradictory evidence.51 A comparison of the SGHV’s 1939 and 1944 inventories reveals that its hotels were already in disrepair before their requisition.52 The claims made by the SGHV in the postwar period were in fact aimed at the complete renovation of its properties, a “careful and high-quality restoration work” the SGHV had deemed “indispensable” before the war.53 The SGHV was not the only group to make such war damages claims. The owner of the Hôtel Alexandra applied for war reparations in December 1949.54 His application was rejected in June 1951 because the hotel had not been requisitioned by the military or the enemy, but rather partly requisitioned by various ministries including the Ministry of the Interior.55 The hotel had already received 630,000 francs in 1946, though its original claim was much higher, seeking a “complete renovation of the hotel at the 47  In contrast, the damage to the Hôtel du Parc was estimated in December 1944 at 90,000 francs. AdA, Estimation des dommages consécutifs à une usure anormale constatée à la fin de l’occupation en réquisition par des Services d’État, 1 December 1944, 537 W 390. 48  AdA, 537 W 389. 49  AdA, Loi du 20 avril 1949, modifiée par celle du 22 aout 1950, 537 W 389. 50  Récapitulation d’une partie des factures et mémoires de remise-en-état réglés au cours des années 1944 à 1952 inclus. Archives départementales de l’Allier, 537 W 389. 51  AdA, Ministère de la construction à Monsieur le Président Directeur Général de la Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, 24 November 1962, 537 W 389. 52  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, États des lieux. 53   AdA, Letter, Jacques Aletti to ministère de la Reconstruction et du logement, Département de l’Allier, date illegible, 537 W 392. 54  Ada, Dossier “Hôtel Alexandra et des Anglais,” 537 W 287, 1441 W 85. 55  Part of the hotel also appears to have remained open for guests. AdA, 1441 W 85.

56 

K. FREEMAN

expense of the state.”56 Government officials accused the hotel’s owners of “a grave and unconscionable lack of professionalism” in presenting stains and scratches on the ceilings, woodwork, and wallpaper as war damages.57 But the president of Vichy’s tourism office lamented that the town had “once again had its hands tied” by insufficient funding from the national government. This “excessive economizing,” he claimed, damaged the interests of the resort.58 Such claims made by Vichy’s hospitality sector sparked debate at the national level over what constituted war damages. War damages legislation of 28 October 1946 proclaimed the equality and solidarity of all faced with the costs of the war, but this was not borne out by public opinion nor were all types of damage equal in the public mind.59 A debate in the National Assembly over whether damaged hotels should be entitled to war reparations was a direct result of Vichy’s situation. That these damages had largely been caused by French officials and not enemy forces, that they were the result of administrative rather than military activity, that they took the form (for the most part) of “wear and tear,” and affected places of leisure rather than homes or factories left very little sympathy for Vichy’s cause. Even reparations to sites such as the Petit Casino—a Milice prison and torture chamber from May 1943 to the end of August 1944—were controversial. After the Liberation, the Petit Casino’s freight elevator “was riddled with bullets, and the blood was still fresh.”60 Three million francs were awarded to the owners of the property in compensation for the partial destruction of the building and the near-total destruction of its interior and contents.61 A protracted conflict ensued, however, between the municipality and the Petit Casino’s owners over this income.62 The municipality planned to purchase the property and convert it to a library, but required the reparations money to complete this work. The casino’s owners, however, intended to keep the war damages payments plus the 56  AdA, L’Intendant militaire, Chef de Service des réquisitions à M. le Chef de l’annexe des réquisitions à Vichy, 10 April 1946, 537 W 287. 57  AdA, Dossier “Hôtel Alexandra et des Anglais,” 537 W 287. 58  AmV, Dossier “Syndicat d’Initiative,” Raport Mathieu, 1952. 59  Loi no. 46-2389 sur les dommages de guerre, 28 October 1946. 60  Constantin-Weyer, Vichy et son histoire, 160. 61  AdA, 537 W 373; AdA, Dossier “Petit Casino,” 537 W 366. 62  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 1949–1951; AdA, Rapport de Contre-expertise: Petit Casino de Vichy, 537 W 366; AdA, Dossier “Petit Casino,” Société du Petit Casino à M. Le Directeur des Dommages de guerre, 13 June 1956, 537 W 366.

3 VICTIMHOOD 

57

revenue from the property’s sale. The horrors that took place in the Petit Casino became fodder in a bitter dispute over money. Vichy’s simultaneous assertion of victimhood and investment in the resurrection and refurbishment of its leisure industries is evident in a remarkable document published in 1946, the Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy.63 The collection contains essays and poems by over a dozen contributors: the majority are concerned with delineating and defending Vichy’s resistance credentials and testifying to Vichyssois’ suffering. Some give sober and moving accounts of life in Vichy for those who resisted, and the horrifying consequences of that resistance.64 We read the citation presented with the Croix de Guerre to Louis Moinard in July 1945 and the testimony of Roger Brunet, a railway mechanic who ferried resisters across the demarcation line. In “Retour à Vichy,” Jean-Gabriel Grand describes his return from German captivity and his stay at the Centre thermal des prisonniers et déportés where camp survivors could follow a free 21-day spa treatment to speed their recovery. The Nouveau Mémorial also extolls, however, “The Charm of Vichy” and the “delights a spa offers. … There’s nothing more fun than listening to Beethoven, Mozart, and Ravel in the open air.”65 A chapter on “The Future of Vichy” lamented that “the champagne bubbles of the past have dissipated,” but predicted that Vichy’s future would nevertheless be splendid.66 The Nouveau Mémorial also includes an overview of the upcoming highlights of the 1946 season. Most jarring, however, are the advertisements featured on almost every page: ads for porcelain and perfume, cosmetics and cars, jewelry, golf courses, horse races, and sporting equipment. Many hotels placed ads as well, stressing their renovation and refurbishment. The character of these ads and the dissonance of themes in Nouveau Mémorial must have struck readers—a review in a Cannes newspaper stressed: “Don’t believe the notice that appeared in the Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy advertising regular deliveries of ‘delicious meat and garnishings’ … [Vichy] is experiencing food supply issues that are, if not as serious as our own, nevertheless very real.”67 63  Maurice-J.Champel, ed., Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy (Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues, 1946). 64  J. de Saint Armand, “Vichy-Resistance”; Denyse Dorville, “4 Juillet 1944. La Grande Nuit du Petit Casino” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy. 65  Hélène Vacaresco, “The Charm of Vichy” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy, 74. 66  Jean-Paul Dumas, “Avenir de Vichy” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy, 95. 67  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Gaston Thierry, “Un tour en France,” May 30, 1946.

58 

K. FREEMAN

Publicizing the resort’s first postwar season, the daily La Montagne asked: “who would have believed that so soon after the departure of the administration, the recovery of Thermal Vichy would astonish France?” But wartime profits played no part in this recovery, the paper stressed. “Like a thrifty housewife,” Vichy had “made do as best she could.”68 Despite Vichy’s assertions of victimhood, efforts to seek recognition for its losses mostly backfired and the town’s name remained attached to the “Government of Treason.” Vichyssois declared that they did not want their town to be provisional capital, and they had not asked to host the État Français. They proclaimed that Vichy’s “occupation” by the regime had damaged the town materially and symbolically and they felt abandoned and unjustly criticized by their compatriots. These resentments built upon existing hostility and animosity in Vichy between the municipality and the resort.

Vichy and Vichy-État Vichy’s wartime and postwar sense of victimhood was anchored in a century of resentments: a long-standing feeling of division between the resort and the town; a sense of powerlessness on the part of the municipality over what happened in the resort; and a conviction that the fate of Vichy was decided by outsiders, often at the expense of the local population and counter to its interests and values. The relationship between the municipality and the resort was deeply ambiguous: on the one hand Vichyssois were proud of Vichy’s status as “Queen of Spas” and “Thermal Capital,” an image owed largely to the resort and its corporate promoters. But there was also a deep, festering resentment at the town’s reliance on and subordination to a resort whose powerbrokers, as often as not, held the municipality and its population in contempt. This toxic interdependence created a legacy of victimhood and resentment that became the essence of Vichy’s civic identity. For close to a century, the label on every bottle of Vichy mineral water read “Vichy-Property of the State.” The name given to all Vichy products, Vichy-État, was intended to guarantee quality. But the name also reveals the concrete political and economic realities of a town shaped by state and corporate interests. In every respect Vichy, the town, was subordinate to Vichy, the resort, giving local politics and civic identity a distinctive  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” La Montagne July 27, 1945.

68

3 VICTIMHOOD 

59

Fig. 3.1  Advertisement for Vichy Célestins. Guide de Vichy Édition Illustrée, 1954. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC

character. Stories of resistance and opposition—of native Vichyssois who challenged the state and its agent (the “foreign” Compagnie fermière de Vichy) at every opportunity, of heated municipal politics and deadlocked administrations—reveal a population which, though relatively powerless, was never passive. But these confrontations also illustrate the extent to which Vichy’s “thermal interests” trumped all else, sowing the seeds of Vichyssois’ resentment (Fig. 3.1). Vichy was, for much of its history, two entities: a thermal resort and a “sedentary” village. The Vichy brand revolved entirely around the resort to the deliberate exclusion of the village. This division was evident physically, in the urban geography of the town(s); administratively, in the fact that the municipality was not the master of its own domain; and emotionally, in the pervasive feeling among Vichyssois that their town was built “by and for others.”69  Claude Malhuret cited in Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 30.

69

60 

K. FREEMAN

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Vichy’s two agglomerations—Vichy-la-Ville and Vichy-les-Bains—had distinct characters and populations. Vichy-la-Ville, the “sedentary village,” housed the majority of the population: about 130 families. The residents of Vichy-la-Ville were farmers, artisans, and merchants. Vichy-les-Bains, on the other hand, was home to at most a dozen families who worked in the baths and rented rooms to spa clients.70 Throughout the nineteenth century, as the thermal quarter prospered and expanded, Vichy’s two halves remained separate. Vichy’s development was “disciplined” and “guided” in order to orient and subordinate the village to the thermal resort.71 An 1828 development plan laid out a thermal quarter more than double the area of the village.72 Thirty years later, a town plan by the leading thermal architect of his day, Charles-E. Isabelle, organized Vichy’s urban space to highlight the resort and its separation from the village.73 The final step was Napoleon III’s investment in Vichy’s thermal and para-thermal infrastructure.74 These measures made the resort a discrete geographical and architectural entity divorced from the year-round municipality, which became known as “Old Vichy.” The landmarks of the thermal resort—the baths, opera, casino, kiosks, hotels—were clustered around the springs in the Parc des sources, flanked on one side by arcades of luxury boutiques, and on the other by riverside parkland. The village encircled the resort but remained apart. Thermal architecture underscored the resort’s distinctiveness. In styling itself as a “cité,” the resort claimed connotations of modernity, wealth, and luxury in contrast to the working-class character of the village. Resort buildings were “exotic” in style and disproportionate in scale, in deliberate juxtaposition with the modest, provincial, medieval character of the village. This tendency was not unique to Vichy—spa developers across Europe privileged urbanity, grandeur, and extravagance in the architecture

70   See Maurice Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension 1800–1870 (Saint-Étienne: Impressions Dumas, 1998), Chap. 1. 71  Pascal Chambriard, Aux Sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles (Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999), 70. 72  Lise Grenier, ed., Villes d’eaux en France (Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture, 1985), Chap. 2. 73  Bernard Toulier, Villes d’eaux: Architecture publique des stations thermales et balnéaires (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2002), 27. 74  Armand Wallon, La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914 (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 79.

3 VICTIMHOOD 

61

and planning of their resorts to establish a distinct identity and aesthetic.75 But the distinction between Vichy’s two halves became central to cultivating the resort’s image. Tourist guidebooks consistently elevated one Vichy over the other: While [Vichy-les-Bains] is filled with movement, luxury and joy, the old town wrapped in her feudal blanket merely casts a jealous eye on her lovely neighbor. … The stunted old town, wrinkled, reduced to fossil form, can’t muster the strength to be anything. The curiste will certainly feel like an exile, a pariah, if he is obliged to lodge there. There is nothing to attract visitors to Old Vichy.76

The two Vichies were consistently juxtaposed—as old and young, ugly and pretty, dirty and clean, dark and light, “wrinkled, blackened, shriveled” and “fresh, white, vast, full of air, sunshine, and shade.”77 “There are two contiguous Vichies,” Félix Mornand wrote in 1856, “one old, winding and poorly built, formerly fortified [and] exclusively for locals, the other young, chic, … busy and animated.”78 Even the most positive depictions of the village still privilege the resort: “Vichy is a charming little town on the Allier, the view of which suggests a distinctly dual character: on the right are large buildings and an old tower from the feudal age, their long dark roofs spread hemispherically. One’s gaze rests happily to the left, on more modern buildings crowned with the verdant dome of trees.”79 Even the water had a dual character in descriptions of Vichy: “Old Vichy was supplied with more or less potable water from the Jonchère springs … and by bad public and private wells … all polluted to some extent.”80 The resort’s thermal springs, however, are invariably described in the most superlative terms.

75  Penez cited in Annick Cossick and Patrick Galliou, eds., Spas in Britain and in France in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2006), 97. 76  Archives nationales (AN), Deuxième Liste des Étrangers arrivés à Vichy pendant la saison des eaux de 1845, F 7 9307. 77  Louis Nadeau, Vichy historique (Vichy: A. Wallon, 1869), 6. 78  Félix Mornand, La vie des eaux (Paris: Hachette, 1856). 79  Hyacinthe Audiffred, Guide pittoresque et médical (1849) quoted in Cécile Morillon, “L’Image de Vichy” in Spas in Britain and France, 352. 80  Antonin  Mallat, Vichy à travers les âges (Vichy: Imprimerie centrale bourbonnaise, 1934), 192.

62 

K. FREEMAN

Local chroniclers also distinguished between native and seasonal Vichyssois, entrenching negative perceptions of Vichy’s “sedentary” residents. For some, the distinction was one of character: The indigenous people of this country, those old Vichyssois from old Vichy … found themselves drowned out by the powerful flood of exotic annual arrivals, and overcome by a polymer race, more practical and audacious in outlook, more cordial and polite in manner, more open and courteous in business, more rollicking and free in leisure. These new Vichyssois replaced the old ones and made them easy to forget.81

Others located the difference in action rather than outlook. “The Vichyssois from Vichy appear to have had a negligible role, even a negative role, in the prosperity of their own town.”82 They “languish rather than live.”83 Seasonal Vichyssois, on the other hand, those resort doctors and administrators who saw themselves as responsible for the resort’s prosperity, praised their own action and ingenuity in investing in the resort and its promotion. The division between Vichy-la-Ville and Vichy-les-Bains—so rife with resentment and mutual distrust—was a result of the towns’ history and development but was also fixed in divergent understandings of the needs, priorities, and best interest of the larger community. This divergence led to friction over resources and responsibilities and fed Vichyssois’ feelings of victimhood. The relationship between the municipality and the resort was long one of simmering hostility and occasional violence. Despite the resistance of Vichy’s sedentary population, the municipality was progressively marginalized throughout the nineteenth century, a practice institutionalized through appointments to the town’s two most important offices, mayor and superintendent of waters/director of the thermal domain. In 1822, Doctor-Inspector Lucas who, as superintendent of waters, was the state’s representative in Vichy, was also appointed mayor— making him, in his own words, “Lord of Vichy.”84 One of Lucas’ first initiatives was to expropriate municipal land and demolish houses in order  Mallat, Vichy, 137.  Dr. Walter in Société des sciences médicales de Vichy, Vichy après la guerre (Vichy: Centre Médical, 1943), 14–15. 83  Jacques Corrocher and Paul Raymond, Vichy historique et médical (Moulins: M. Dole, 1982), 99. 84  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 49. 81 82

3 VICTIMHOOD 

63

to expand the grounds around the thermal baths. This trend continued under Doctor-Inspector Prunelle, who served as mayor of Vichy until 1853, and under Dr. Leroy who served simultaneously as director of baths for the CfV and mayor of Vichy until 1860. Leroy’s dual appointment elicited particularly vehement protest from Vichy’s municipal council because, unlike Prunelle and Lucas, Leroy was not a representative of the state but of a private company.85 The practice of appointing a mayor who represented the resort’s corporate interests, while the municipal council defended local priorities, left Vichy’s administration in perpetual stalemate and institutionalized the subordination of the town to the resort. Such appointments fed the growth of thermal Vichy—which “in rapid ascension, became a brilliant centre of tourism and thermalism”—and the stagnation of the village which, “saw little profit from this prosperity but shouldered its increasing burden.”86 Compounding this was the fact that the thermal resort largely excluded native Vichyssois, a tendency that worsened as the resort developed. Assumptions that the local people “enriched themselves” from the yearly influx of wealthy tourists were resented in “Old Vichy” and led the municipal council to declare that,87 the exceptional situation of the town of Vichy [is] misunderstood. All prosperity resides in the resort, while the communal coffers see no advantage and reap no benefits from the influx of foreigners. Instead, its expenses rise with the rapid increase in population … and only add to the obligations of the municipal administration.88

What labor the village provided the resort was increasingly marginalized as Vichy grew.89 This is particularly evident in the example of Vichy’s hotels. In the early nineteenth century, lodging in Vichy consisted largely of furnished rooms, apartments or villas for rent, and a small number of hotels, all of which were owned by locals.90 People commonly rented out their homes and moved their families into attics or cellars for the summer. By  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 145.  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 106. 87  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 146. 88  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 158. 89  Jeanne Sasmayoux, “Vichy, ville thermale” Revue d’Auvergne 86 no. 1 (1972): 1–51. 90  Catherine Labbaye, Joseph Aletti, le temps des palaces à Vichy (Paris: Éditions des Écrivains, 2003). 85 86

64 

K. FREEMAN

the 1840s, these maisons garnies had become hotels: the Hôtel Guilliermen, Hôtel Cornil, Hôtel Montaret, Hôtel Sornin, and the Hôtel Chaloin. The Guilliermen could accommodate over 300 guests, the rest between 115 and 160.91 By 1865, Vichy had 143 hotels, all located adjacent to the Parc des sources and the baths. As the resort expanded, hotels replaced rented lodgings, and foreign capital took over from local ownership (Fig. 3.2).92 The Hôtel du Parc and its sister hotels illustrate this phenomenon. The Parc was built in 1862 by Maurice Bousquet, a Paris lawyer who served as mayor of Vichy from 1865 to 1870. The hotel passed from Bousquet’s heirs to Madame Veuve Larbaud, mother of local luminary Valery Larbaud. In 1901, Joseph Aletti arrived in Vichy from Cannes to take over management of the Parc: [Aletti] quickly turned the Parc into a centre of the season in Vichy. He modernized it and transformed it into a palace, incorporating the Hôtel Victoria next door, which had attracted an excellent clientele and was run by Madame Tixier. … No detail, no comfort, was overlooked for his new wealthy guests. … Everything was done to satisfy a cosmopolitan clientele that required luxury and discretion.93

Aletti’s approach transformed the hotel landscape in Vichy. In 1907, Félix Riçois (president of the Parisian department stores Bon Marché) bought Pavillon Germot, a hotel owned by Madame Veuve Germot and her children. He demolished the building and began construction of a “palace” to be managed by Aletti. It opened in 1908 as the Hôtel Majestic. Similarly, the Hôtel Guilliermen—one of the oldest in Vichy—was enlarged, renovated, renamed The Carlton, and subsequently sold to Aletti’s Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV). The Hôtel des Thermes—built before the 1860s—was expanded and renovated in 1912 and then purchased by the SGHV. The Ruhl, built in 1910, was bought in 1920 by Puerto Rican investors, renamed The Radio, put under Aletti’s management, then acquired by the SGHV.  By the mid-1920s, Vichy had over 250 hotels, third only to Paris and Nice. Joseph Aletti, alongside the CFV, is credited with transforming Vichy, and solidifying the resort’s position as Queen of Spas. He turned 91  Jacques Cousseau, Palaces et Grands Hôtels de Vichy: Trois siècles de vie hôtelière dans la reine des villes d’eaux (Champétières: Éditions de la Montmarie, 2007), 9. 92  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 100. 93  Labbaye, Joseph Aletti, 74.

3 VICTIMHOOD 

65

Fig. 3.2  Nouvel Hôtel Guilliermen, 1894. Bibliothèque nationale de France, gallica.bnf.fr

66 

K. FREEMAN

provincial establishments into fashionable destinations and set the standard for luxury accommodation in Vichy. He also started the trend of “palaces” to the extent that the decade before the First World War was one of perpetual construction of luxury hotels.94 This trend deepened the divide between the resort and the town, however, and saw Aletti and the SGHV resented almost as much as the CfV.95 The more Vichy developed, the more foreign capital displaced local businesses, the more marginalized became the resident population, and the more entrenched became their sense of victimhood. The CfV, for example, used local labor primarily in two realms: in its bottling plant and factories, and as donneuses d’eau, attendants at the springs who distributed water to clients. Donneuses d’eau were the only locals deliberately recruited and placed at the heart of the resort, and they functioned as a sign of authenticity.96 These young women spent the season in the role of hostesses, dressed in traditional Auvergnat peasant garb. They were also, most often, recruited from the countryside, rather than from Vichy itself. Resident Vichyssois(es) worked in the bottling plant and the factories that produced pastilles, mineral salts, toiletries, and cosmetics. This industrial labor—so antithetical to the image of the thermal resort—was sequestered on the outskirts of town. Vichy’s industrial workforce was strident; its unions were active, and strikes were frequent. But these were fundamentally at odds with Vichy’s image, and there was great concern that Vichy hide its militant working-class character.97 Vichyssois’ labor activism was a significant component of the animosity that existed between Vichy’s two halves: it was also consistently shut down by the state and corporations that owned the resort and its industries.98 Aside from the donneuses d’eau, Vichy’s resort workforce was foreign and seasonal. At the height of the Belle Époque, Vichy’s hotels employed close to 2500 people, but this personnel was migratory, and predominantly Parisian, Swiss, or Italian.99 When the casinos, theaters, restaurants, and hotels closed for the winter, their employees relocated to ski resorts in  BnF Gallica, “Un nouveau Vichy,” Bulletin de Vichy, July 31, 1913.  BnF Gallica, “Un nouveau Vichy,” Bulletin de Vichy, July 31, 1913. 96  Eric Jennings, “Donneuses d’eau. Une profession au cœur du thermalisme français (1840–1914)” Sociétés & Représentations, 38 (2014): 143–70. 97  BnF Gallica, “Vichy, Ville de Luxe,” Bulletin de Vichy, June 8, 1919. 98  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Le Renouvellement du bail de la CFV, est-il favorable à l’État?” April 20, 1924. 99  Labbaye, Joseph Aletti, 47. 94 95

3 VICTIMHOOD 

67

the Alps or to the beaches of the Côte d’Azur. Vichy in the off-­season was a “necropolis.”100 The powerbrokers in Vichy were also largely foreign and migratory. The Alettis—owners of most of Vichy’s luxury hotels—split their time between Paris, Vichy, Nice, and Algiers. The CfV’s administrators, and the vast majority of its shareholders, were Parisian.101 The resort was known to locals as the “Paris Quarter” because the CfV was considered to be “Parisian”; because the thermal quarter was a luxurious, cosmopolitan “slice of Paris”; but also because it was a foreign body in the heart of the town, designed for and populated with outsiders. The adversarial relationship between Vichy’s resident population and the resort predates the arrival of the CfV in Vichy.102 But when the CfV was awarded the concession for Vichy’s mineral waters in 1853, this antagonism became more heated. The state had owned Vichy’s thermal springs since the Revolution (before that they were property of the Crown). Until 1853, the government looked after Vichy’s thermal infrastructure and its modest bottled water industry directly. The 1853 concession maintained state ownership of the springs, but awarded the management of the resort and the production and distribution of bottled water to a private company, the CfV. The municipality denounced the CfV and the terms of its concession even before the ink had dried on the agreement. Municipality and corporation attacked each other in the press, unleashing vitriolic letters, petitions, and pamphlets. This conflict spread to the courtroom and the street.103 An 1869 petition is a good illustration of the municipality’s early criticisms of the CfV. The signatories were “afraid, with good reason, … of the invasive influence of such a powerful company,” and characterized the CfV as the “enemy, the destroyer” of Vichy, operating “to the detriment of the entire town.” As “victims of the disguised absolutism” of the CfV’s monopoly, the townspeople feared “inevitable ruin.”104 A subsequent petition in 1870 organized by the municipal council opposed the CfV’s  Wallon, La Vie quotidienne, 177.  Jérôme Penez, “Les Réseaux d’investissement dans le thermalisme au XIX siècle en France” In Situ, 4 (2004): 2–21. 102  See E. Mauve, Vichy avant la Compagnie fermière: Le Médecin-Inspecteur Prunelle, les fermières Brosson et la régie où une période critique du développement de Vichy. 1833–1853 (Moulins: Crepin-Leblond, 1935). 103  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 176. 104  AN, Mémoire explicatif à l’appui des pétitions adressées au gouvernement par des habitants de Vichy contre les concurrences illégales qu’oppose à leurs commerces et à leur indus100 101

68 

K. FREEMAN

new kiosks (which sold clothing, books, lace, jewelry, tobacco, and sweets) in the Parc des sources.105 Vichyssois feared that these amenities would dissuade visitors from venturing into town to shop. The municipal council characterized the shops, restaurants, and lodgings in the thermal quarter as  harmful to Vichy’s commercial interests. The CfV, it argued, was no ordinary competitor: its privileged position and myriad advantages made it a threat to, rather than a guarantor of, prosperity in Vichy. The CfV was obliged to contribute to municipal finances in several ways: by a “patente,” or trading tax, by a percentage of product sales, and by a portion of casino revenue. This subsidy was mandated by the concession between the state and the CfV, but the municipality was at the mercy of the CfV’s willingness to comply with, and the state’s willingness to enforce, that agreement. Several key issues emerge in the long history of conflict between the town and the resort: the heavy tax load carried by the population, the lack of representation of local interests, and the CfV’s abuse of power.106 Concerns voiced by Vichy’s residents went largely unaddressed by the state, however, which oversaw the CfV’s operations and enforced the terms of its lease. In fact, the state was widely suspected of colluding with the CfV to the town’s detriment.107 Occasional support for Vichy came from regional deputies to the national legislature, one of whom outlined the impunity with which the CfV appeared to operate: The convention was violated not once, not twice, but twenty times … and neither the municipality nor its residents has ever had any kind of redress. … The government must stop the invasive tendencies of [the CfV], make it respect its concession, and protect the interests of the town of Vichy.108

On the other hand, the CfV’s supporters argued that, in its obstructionism, Vichy’s population was blind to its own interests. In the 1850s, trie principale la Cie fermière de l’Établissement Thermal de cette ville. 25 November 1869, F 14 8274. 105  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Pétition de la ville de Vichy au corps législatif, 9 July 1870. 106  MVL, 10 Aff 18; MVL, Lettres Vichyssoises, pamphlets anonymes contre M. Callou. 107   AN, Nicholas Larbaud, “La Source Prunelle à Vichy et les complaisances de l’administration en faveur de la Compagnie de Vichy. Tentative de confiscation des droits inhérents à la propriété tels qu’ils sont définies par la loi” (1873), F14 8273; AN, Letter, 26 June 1873, Nicolas Larbaud à M. le Ministre de l’agriculture et du commerce, F14 8273. 108  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 205.

3 VICTIMHOOD 

69

regional officials dissolved the municipal council because it was “animated by a spirit of systematic opposition … that compromises the interests of the town and impedes its proper functioning.”109 Charles Bonnard, a resort doctor and local booster, addressed concerns by Vichy’s café and bar owners (who protested La Restauration, a large café with terrace in the park) in a pamphlet published in 1894: La Restauration is one of Vichy’s great attractions. … I ask our bartenders quite sincerely: do you really think that if La Restauration didn’t exist, more tourists would come to your counters during intermission at the opera? There is a whole population of visitors to Vichy who know only the park and absolutely refuse to venture beyond it. It is only wise to conform to their desires and provide them with the amenities for which they are more than happy to pay.110

The Bulletin de Vichy regularly entreated its readers to “lower [their] arms” and support the CfV—Vichy’s “alma parens”—which represented the town’s “true interests” and ensured its survival.111 In 1947, Maurice Constantin-Weyer characterized Vichyssois’ opposition to the CfV as stemming from ignorance: “Unhappy, ill-informed people protest periodically against the renewal of the Compagnie fermière’s lease. … I have so often heard this organization attacked by people who have no idea what it has done.”112 As Antonin Mallat explained in the newspaper Progrès Social: There are still a [few] of us old Vichyssois … who instinctively, and in spite of ourselves, will always suffer a … little bit of that blind and inexplicable hatred of the new arrival, the invader, this feeling has meant that we will always be opponents. … Our fathers fought against the Brosson brothers who, from 1833 to 1842, exploited our waters. Us, we were born adversaries of the Compagnie fermière.113

The division between the two “Vichies,” the CfV’s power, the state’s collusion, and the subordination of local interests is illustrated in the handling of a series of deaths from typhoid in the interwar period. At least  Gontard, Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension, 138.  Charles Bonnard, Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? (Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894), 14. 111  BnF Gallica, Bulletin de Vichy, October 23, 1913, March 15, 1915, March 23, 1919. 112  Constantin-Weyer, Vichy et son histoire, 93–94. 113  Société des sciences médicales de Vichy, Vichy après la guerre, 14. 109 110

70 

K. FREEMAN

three children, and potentially many more people, died from drinking contaminated water in the summer of 1929, though Vichy’s waters were known to have been polluted since the turn of the twentieth century and even earlier. Ironically, the availability of clean drinking water was a persistent problem for Vichy for most of its history. After the 1929 typhoid outbreak, the town treated the municipal water supply with chlorine, and was careful to emphasize that it was public drinking water—the water the locals drank in the village, rather than the mineral springs in the resort— that was contaminated, but also that the contamination had been short-­ lived. Public notices posted the results of laboratory tests throughout Vichy.114 News of the deaths was suppressed. Later investigations revealed, however, that state officials and the CfV were “perfectly aware of the [contaminated] water, … [but] felt it best not to proceed, for fear of creating a scandal” and tarnishing the resort’s image.115 The contaminated water had in fact come from the Célestins spring, where mineral water was diluted with surface water. The municipality and local press decried the CfV’s “revolting impunity and … shameful maneuvers”: We Old Vichyssois remember the old Célestins. That trickle of fresh sparkling water has nothing in common with what they’re serving these days at the springs. We ask ourselves how those wily merchants, in one fell swoop as if by enchantment, transformed a trickle of water into such an abundant source that it fills more that 100,000 bottles per day for export. The pollution of the source in 1929 is no longer in question, … the CfV committed these crimes in all conscience, and got away with it.116

Despite local outrage, there is little trace of Vichy’s typhoid outbreak in the national or international press, which treated the episode as malicious propaganda from competing resorts.117 For much of Vichy’s past, the rift between the thermal resort and the “sedentary” village—a rift encoded in emotion, memory, identity, and  MVL, “Ville de Vichy. Tableau des analyses des eaux d’alimentation,” 10 Aff 388.  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Comment en 1929 la CfV entretenait ses sources!” L’Éclaireur du Centre, September 17, 1932. 116  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Comment en 1929 la CfV entretenait ses sources!” L’Éclaireur du Centre, September 17, 1932. 117  “Vichy Lays Rumors to Jealous Rivals: Famous Watering place cites figures in Denying Reports of Typhoid Epidemic” New York Times, September 8, 1929; “Soyons armés contre les campagnes calomnieuses,” Le Littoral, August 25, 1929. 114 115

3 VICTIMHOOD 

71

perception—has been a crucial element of civic identity. Money, power, and influence gave Vichy’s thermal interests an impunity that, while continually challenged, was never displaced. The subordination and marginalization of the resident population, meanwhile, entrenched feelings of resentment and victimhood that persist to this day.

Conclusion: Civic Identity Vichyssois’ experiences of “occupation” and victimhood in the wake of 1940 fit an established and long-standing tradition in which the resort’s guests and interests were seen as “invasive” and the town as occupied and even colonized.118 Residents emphasized that “not one member of the government was Vichyssois,” despite the collusion of certain of the resort’s elites and powerbrokers with the regime.119 “Regardless of what people say, Vichy did not dishonor France. … Those who did were from everywhere else, but not from here.”120 In a study of the social psychology of Vichy’s resident population, Valérie Haas argues that Vichy’s entire history is perceived in terms of such difference.121 Her findings emphasize the extent to which Vichy residents saw themselves as apart, embattled, powerless, separate from (and at the mercy of) the resort and its guests. These feelings were still manifest in the 1990s when Haas conducted her research.122 The requisition of Vichy’s hotels—focal point of assertions of victimhood during and following the Second World War—was also situated in a longer history and infused with well-cultivated discursive habits. Pierre Broustine, in Vichy Réquisitionné, enumerates the hotels that were requisitioned by the État Français between 1940 and 1944 alongside the requisitions of the Great War and the Franco-Prussian War, highlighting the broad arc of the resort’s service to the state in wartime over the specific role Vichy played in each conflict.123 The feeling that the requisition of

 AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 28 February 1948.  Constantin-Weyer, “Vichy-vérité” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy, 11. 120  Fournier, “Convalescence de Vichy” in Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy, 57. 121  Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 217. 122  Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” appendices. 123  Pierre Broustine, et al., Vichy réquisitionnée: Utilisation de ses capacités d’hébergement, 1870–1871, 1914–1918, 1939–1945 (Vichy: Centre Culturel Valery Larbaud, 1993). 118 119

72 

K. FREEMAN

hotels in the First World War was a “disaster” and an “injustice” was echoed and amplified in the Second.124 Given the history of animosity between the municipality and the resort, it is perhaps surprising that the requisition of and damage to Vichy’s hotels galvanized discourses of victimhood that had historically been aimed at the resort itself. This is evidence of a telescoping of resentments—a shift in what groups were accorded insider or outsider status—that changed with context but was anchored in perceptions of Vichy’s stature and best interest. If we were to represent these resentments graphically, it would be through concentric circles with resident Vichyssois at the center, and the resort (CfV, SGHV, clients), the state/État Français, and the rest of France, even the rest of the world, radiating successively outward. Prior to 1940, in peacetime, the resort’s powerbrokers—CfV, SGHV—were the resented outsiders. During the First World War resentments shifted, in defense of the resort, toward the state for mobilizing Vichy’s thermal resources to the war effort, and to outsiders (French and foreign) for their “defamation” of Vichy and its priorities. In the summer of 1940, resentments shifted similarly to the État Français for its “invasion” and “occupation” of the resort. There were certainly Vichyssois who were proud to host the État Français, either out of political conviction or because they saw Vichy’s new role as confirming or elevating its status. But the predominant response was umbrage, not necessarily because of the État Français’ politics but because of its disruptive presence.125 After 1944, resentment shifted outward to the rest of France and beyond for making Vichy its scapegoat, and for the stigmas of collaboration and profiteering Vichyssois felt were undeserved: “There were the French, busily probing the true intentions of the native Vichyssois, taking the pulse of the people to see whether or not they were friendly with the occupant! As if the entire country shouldn’t answer the same question!”126

 BnF Gallica, G. Ollivier, “La Saison 1919,” Bulletin de Vichy, January 5, 1919.  See Mathieu de Fossey in Société des sciences médicales de Vichy, Vichy après la guerre, 40. 126  Georges Frélastre, Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales (Paris: Éditions FranceEmpire, 1975), 221. 124 125

3 VICTIMHOOD 

73

Bibliography Bonnard, Charles. Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894. Bonvicini, Stéphanie. Louis Vuitton: une saga française. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Broustine, Pierre, et  al. Vichy réquisitionnée: Utilisation de ses capacités d’hébergement, 1870–1871, 1914–1918, 1939–1945. Vichy: Centre Culturel Valery Larbaud, 1993. Carteret, Alain. Vichy Charme. Olliergues: Éditions de la Montmarie, 2006. Chambriard, Pascal. Aux Sources de Vichy: Naissance et développement d’un basin thermal, XIXe et XXe siècles. Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Bleu Autour, 1999. Champel, Maurice-J., ed. Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues, 1946. Constantin-Weyer, Maurice. Vichy et son histoire. Vichy: Szabo, 1947. Corrocher, Jacques, and Paul Raymond. Vichy historique et médical. Moulins: M. Dole, 1982. Cossick, Annick and Patrick Galliou, eds. Spas in Britain and in France in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2006. Cousseau, Jacques. Palaces et Grands Hôtels de Vichy: Trois siècles de vie hôtelière dans la reine des villes d’eaux. Champétières: Éditions de la Montmarie, 2007. Freeman, Kirrily. “A Capital Problem: The Town of Vichy, the Second World War, and the Politics of Identity.” In The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe at War, 1936–2016 edited by Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame, 131–151. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016. Frélastre, Georges. Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales. Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1975. Gontard, Maurice. Vichy: L’irrésistible ascension 1800–1870. Saint-Étienne: Impressions Dumas, 1998. Grenier, Lise, ed. Villes d’eaux en France. Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture, 1985. Haas, Valérie. “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants.” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999. Jennings, Eric. “Donneuses d’eau. Une profession au cœur du thermalisme français (1840–1914).” Sociétés & Représentations 38 (2014): 143–70. Labbaye, Catherine. Joseph Aletti, le temps des palaces à Vichy. Paris: Éditions des Écrivains, 2003. Mallat, Antonin. De l’Appellation commerciale ‘eau minérale de Vichy’ ou ‘eau minérale du Bassin de Vichy’ en jurisprudence. Vichy: Imprimerie C. Bougarel, 1899. Mallet, Audrey. Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire. Paris: Belin, 2019.

74 

K. FREEMAN

Mauve, E. Vichy avant la Compagnie fermière: Le Médecin-Inspecteur Prunelle, les fermières Brosson et la régie où une période critique du développement de Vichy. 1833–1853. Moulins: Crepin-Leblond, 1935. Nadeau, Louis. Vichy historique. Vichy: A. Wallon, 1869. Penez, Jérôme. “Les Réseaux d’investissement dans le thermalisme au XIX siècle en France.” In Situ 4 (2004): 2–21. Pottier, Jacques. La Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998. Moulins: CCI de Moulins-Vichy, 1998. Rebatet, Lucien. Les Décombres. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942. Sasmayoux, Jeanne. “Vichy ville thermale.” Revue d’Auvergne 86 no. 1 (1972): 1–51. Société des sciences médicales de Vichy. Vichy après la guerre. Vichy: Centre Médical, 1943. Stucki, Walter. La Fin du régime de Vichy. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1947. Toulier, Bernard. Villes d’eaux: Architecture publique des stations thermales et balnéaires. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2002. Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War. New  York: Vintage books, 2011. Wallon, Armand. La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914. Paris: Hachette, 1981.

CHAPTER 4

Decline

Introduction: Vichy’s Postwar Prosperity In 1946, Gaston Vuitton, who headed his family’s Vichy operations, embarked on a campaign to resuscitate commerce in Vichy. At a one-day conference on the future of luxury goods, Vuitton stressed the centrality of such industries to the nation’s recovery.1 In early 1951, Jacques Aletti, president of the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV), gathered journalists for a press conference on the future of Vichy. He declared that the 1951 season must bring the return of elegance, and proposed making evening gowns and tuxedos mandatory.2 Lest he be accused of elitism, Aletti clarified the role this would play in resuscitating the resort: The return of etiquette is not an anti-democratic measure. It will certainly not prevent Vichy from being accessible to people of all means. On the contrary, the crowds who gather to admire stylish couples on their way to galas at the Carlton demonstrate the power of elegance. A season that is chic will attract a greater clientele.3

 Stéphanie Bonvicini, Louis Vuitton: une saga française (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 314.  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), “La Saison 1951 doit voir un renouveau de l’élégance à Vichy,” Revue Vichy Cannes, January 1951. 3  MVL, “La Saison 1951 doit voir un renouveau de l’élégance à Vichy,” Revue Vichy Cannes, January 1951. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_4

75

76 

K. FREEMAN

June 1951 was “the month of elegance” in Vichy, with skeet shooting, golf tournaments, horse races, ballet, and music festivals.4 There were two competing “elegance pageants” in which female contestants posed or paraded with their luxury cars.5 Every issue of Vichy revue—a monthly gazette with national circulation—contained two columns devoted to elegance.6 In 1954, Vichy hosted the Miss Europe Pageant. The local press made much of the fact that “beauty queens were returning to the Queen of Spas”: “The cult of beauty is the strongest guaranty of universal peace and human happiness. … The town of Vichy [has] long understood this.”7 Municipal rhetoric in the late 1940s and early 1950s was dominated by assertions of Vichy’s prosperity and style (Fig. 4.1): French elegance has reclaimed its position in this city. … One finds a whole international elite skimming the water’s edge, in the cool and voluptuous shade of the parks, on the magnificent terrace of the Casino, … Vichy has regained her brilliant pre-war prestige.8

A 1951 tourist guide described the city as “radiant, repaired, repainted, refreshed. The effervescent city … joyful and illuminated … lives and triumphs, more beautiful and more lively than ever.”9 Discourses of cleansing and makeovers abounded: The town has positively had a facelift. One will look in vain for ghosts that haunt the environs of the Hôtel du Parc, nor will one recognize the renovated palaces, the charming and welcoming hotels, where they paint and wash, persistently erasing the vestiges of the occupation.10

Vichy, “cleansed of its stain,”11 “has rediscovered its true face.”12 A municipal magazine boasted, “Since the war, Vichy has rapidly recovered her envied position as Queen of Spas. … [S]he continues to affirm her  Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Dossier “Syndicat d’initiative.”  MVL, Vichy revue, September 1950, March 1951; Vichy, Guide illustré édité par le Syndicat d’initiative, édition 1951. 6  MVL, Vichy revue, “Notes d’élégance à Vichy” and “L’Élégance des soirs d’été.” 7  AmV, Dossier “Miss Europe.” 8  MVL, Vichy: Capitale thermale, la reine des villes d’eaux (1948). 9  MVL, Vichy, Guide illustré édité par le Syndicat d’initiative, édition 1951. 10  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Gaston Thierry, “Un tour en France,” May 30, 1946. 11  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Le Centre Républicain, May 17, 1946. 12  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” La Tribune de Genève, May 21, 1946. 4 5

4 DECLINE 

77

Fig. 4.1  Soyez élégants! (Be elegant!) Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-­ Larbaud, EF Aff 91

prestige … she makes herself more beautiful, more seductive. She deploys her secret charms.”13 These charms included “the number and variety of  MVL, Vichy, Guide illustré édité par le Syndicat d’initiative, édition 1951.

13

78 

K. FREEMAN

our shops, the tasteful luxury of their presentation, [and] new or renovated boutiques, with constantly updated displays.”14 Vichy’s postwar mayor, Louis Moinard, proposed municipal publicity budgets of 1 million francs in 1946 and 3 million in 1947.15 The strategy paid off: in 1949, revenue from the 1.5 percent tourist tax was 150 million.16 In 1951, the town paid 5 million francs for ads on billboards and matchboxes.17 The success of these initiatives, confirmed by letters from happy clients, was touted in the press: “I hesitated to come to Vichy … but I’m so glad I did. All the hotels are open, restored, comfortable, with very satisfactory meals. … Every day we have our choice of shows, not to mention sports and, naturally, the miraculous waters.”18 Vichy experienced an “incontestable recovery” between 1945 and 1957, contradicting the tendency to ascribe the resort’s eventual decline to the war: “the argument that Vichy’s clientele abandoned it because of the bad reputation acquired by its status as capital of the État Français,” Pascal Chambriard argues, “is completely disproven by the numbers.”19 An April 1946 advertisement for Vichy enumerated 200,000 clients and 60 million bottles of water sold since the end of hostilities: “Some may have been worried that recent events have left a stain on Vichy,” but the resort had emerged “bigger and better from its struggles.”20 One striking example of such postwar recovery is the Hôtel du Portugal, formerly requisitioned by the Gestapo, which reopened for the 1946 season and saw a steady stream of guests.21 Vichy’s postwar prosperity lasted for just over a decade. Between the late 1950s and late 1980s, however, the resort’s fortunes changed dramatically. This was due to three concurrent trends: decolonization, the socialization and medicalization of French spas, and crucial changes in the corporate landscape.

 MVL, Vichy revue, September 1950.  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 21 March 1946, publicity plan for 1947. 16  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 24 March 1951, publicity plan for 1951. 17  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 24 March 1951, publicity plan for 1951. 18  MVL, L’Éclair, June 25, 1946. 19  Pascal Chambriard, “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960),” in Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 234. 20  MVL, “Le Tourisme et le thermalisme, sources de richesse nationale. Vichy, la ville d’eaux éternelle,” April 6, 1946, 10 dj 15. 21  MVL, “L’Hôtel du Portugal, une nouvelle page de l’histoire,” June 11, 2007, 10 dj 11. 14 15

4 DECLINE 

79

Decolonization, Socialization, and Medicalization Between 1946 and 1975, 65 European colonies became sovereign states. For many French colonies, notably Indochina and Algeria, independence followed brutal wars, revolution, and upheaval. Sovereignty in former colonies often meant the nationalization or seizure of foreign assets, and led to the impoverishment and exodus of European settlers and their supporters. For Vichy, decolonization was catastrophic. It resulted in the near-total disappearance of a large segment of the resort’s elite clientele. Close to 40 percent of all visitors to Vichy in the last two years of the 1940s were from the French colonies, continuing pre-war trends. In the 1950s and 1960s, such visitors disappeared as war and revolution swept the colonized world.22 “The rich colonials who made the money pour in like a waterfall” vanished for good.23 Likewise, the settlers, soldiers, administrators, and missionaries who had flocked to the resort since the late nineteenth century and sought in Vichy’s waters an antidote for colonial ills.24 The resort  had long provided the leisure, entertainment, and atmosphere visitors from the colonies desired. For over half a century, these colonial contingents had flocked to Vichy. In the interwar period there was a direct sea-rail link between Oran and Vichy, and 17 percent of Vichy’s clients were from North Africa alone.25 After the Second World War, Air Algeria offered regular direct flights to Vichy from Algiers and Oran. Ads for Vichy ran in all major North African papers, while publicity films were shown in dozens of North African cinemas (Fig. 4.2).26 There were also, however, deep financial, institutional, and political ties between Vichy and the French colonies. In 1930, Vichy’s hotel magnate, Joseph Aletti, opened the Aletti Algiers hotel, a hub “of society and financial life” in Algiers.27 The Aletti Algiers was managed by the Société immobilière et hôtelière de l’Afrique du Nord (SIHAN), a subsidiary of the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV). Aletti, founder of both societies, died in 1938 leaving two of his sons, Jacques and Louis, as directors  AmV, Rapport moral du Syndicat d’initiative, 1962.  MVL, “Thermalisme: Cures à Gogo,” 10 dj 15. 24  Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 182. 25  Jennings, Curing the Colonizers, 184. 26  AmV, Publicity scrapbook, “Célestins Voyage,” La Tribune, May 8, 1956. 27  “Hôtel Aletti,” Le Soir D’Algérie, November 9, 2008; MVL, Report, Syndicat d’initiative (1950). 22 23

80 

K. FREEMAN

Fig. 4.2  France, Vichy, mai-octobre. Lefor-Openo, circa 1960. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, OTT 10 Aff 1

4 DECLINE 

81

of his companies. Jacques took over the SGHV in Vichy and Louis, the SIHAN in Algiers. The war brought prosperity and intrigue to both companies.28 Between 1947 and 1957, however, the Aletti family and its fortune were torn apart as Jacques and Louis Aletti sued and counter-sued each other over mismanagement, conflict of interest, damages, fraud, and the misappropriation of funds. This decade-long feud stemmed, at least publicly, from the fact that the SGHV held the majority of shares in the SIHAN.29 After 1945, the SIHAN kept the SGHV afloat. Losses in Vichy (SGHV lost 80.5 million francs between 1953 and 195530) “absorbed the totality of … profits in Algiers.”31 Ultimately, the courts decided against both brothers, who paid millions in legal fees.32 In 1959, L’Exploitation hôtelière Franco-Algérienne, headquartered in Algeria, absorbed the SIHAN and therefore also the SGHV.  All the companies’ holdings in Vichy and North Africa were liquidated. The catastrophic disintegration of the SGHV had such an effect on tourism in Vichy—the SGHV owned six hotels, three restaurants, a casino, and shares in the Compagnie fermière de Vichy (CfV)—that the municipality and the CfV chose to subsidize it for a decade, at 25 million francs per year.33 Vichy’s luxury hotels were the cornerstone of elite tourism in Vichy and a major contributor to the local economy. Despite these subsidies, however, the SGHV’s decline proved irreversible, and eventually its property was sold off bit by bit. At the same time as the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy’s disintegration, the other linchpin of Vichy’s elite tourism industry was also 28  Hervé Bastien, “Alger 1944, ou la révolution dans la légalité” Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine, 37, no. 3 (1990), 429. 29  AmV, Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblées générales annuelles, 1940–1969 (SGHV AGM), Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale, 19 December 1953. Privately, Louis Aletti’s accusations against his brother led to his ostracism from the family. His sister Jacqueline wrote: “Louis, you’re a bastard. I’ve always known it. … You’ve done everything to fleece your brothers and sisters, and now you resort to defamation. … None of us will ever stand by you again. … I’ve bailed you out of all kinds of trouble, …I’ve given you money, I nursed you through typhoid, and what thanks do I get? You do your best to steal my inheritance, and slander me in the process.” AmV, SGHV Correspondence, Jacqueline Aletti to Louis Aletti, October [illegible], 1950. 30  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale, 21 December 1954; Procèsverbal de l’Assemblée générale, 1955; Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale, 1956. 31  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale, 19 December 1953. 32  AmV, SGHV AGM Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale, 19 December 1953. 33  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations; Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, Assemblées générales annuelles, 1940–1969; La Patriote, August 12, 1952.

82 

K. FREEMAN

seriously weakened. The Compagnie fermière de Vichy (CfV) was acquired by the Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI) in 1954. That July, Georges Baugnies, president and director of the CfV for 34 years (and great-grand-nephew of its founder Georges-Antoine Callou) died leaving no heirs and ending a century-long dynasty. With Baugnies’ death, BGI (which had been amassing shares in the CfV for some time) held the majority of the company’s capital.34 BGI had important financial and political reasons to invest in the CfV: war and defeat in Indochina left this colonial company looking for “a way to repatriate without losing large sums.”35 The French government offered incentives for the transfer of colonial investments to metropolitan industries.36 Vichy presented an attractive solution: BGI, a carbonated beverage company, would exploit the CfV’s newly upgraded bottling plant and extensive export capacity.37 From 1954, the CfV became the motor of BGI’s prosperity.38 Production of bottled water increased dramatically over the following decade, reaching 80 million bottles by 1969, and 100 million by 1971.39 Vichy’s thermal and tourist holdings, however, were left to stagnate. We have seen the extent to which the relationship between the town and the CfV was fraught and contentious: this hostility grew further during the 1950s and 1960s. Long-standing anger toward the CfV in Vichy was exacerbated by the BGI’s arrival for several reasons. First, the company’s concentration on maximizing production meant an increased exploitation of Vichy’s industrial labor force. This approach worsened the poor relationship between Vichy’s workers and the CfV: strikes and protests intensified throughout the 1950s and 1960s, repeatedly paralyzing the bottling plant and the thermal establishments.40 Second, the new powerbrokers were viewed as outsiders even more than the “Parisian” CfV had 34  Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993), 93. 35  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 93. 36  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 93. 37  MVL, “Un progrès technique aux ateliers d’embouteillage” Journal de Vichy, MayJune 1950. 38  MVL, Liberté April 8, 1958; Yves Stavrides, “De L’Indochine au Vietnam” L’Express, April 26, 2004. 39  Christophe Pommeray et  al., Vichy à Vendre? (Vichy: Allier République Éditions, 2010), 21. 40  Archives départementales de l’Allier (AdA), Le Syndicat interprofessionnel des thermaux de Vichy à M. le Préfet de l’Allier, 5 August 1953, 404 W 6; Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 102.

4 DECLINE 

83

been.41 Finally, and perhaps most critically, when BGI acquired the CfV there were still 15 years left in its lease. That BGI focused all its resources on bottled water and turned its back on the spa was disaster enough. That this situation would be inalterable for over a decade was devastating. Compounding the damage was the fact that BGI feigned deficit by sheltering a large portion of the CfV’s profits in order to avoid paying royalties and to compel the municipality to subsidize the spa.42 An investigation into the BGI’s conduct emphasized the company’s “hostility” to Vichy and warned of “the total dissolution of the resort, and considerable financial loss.”43 Indeed, BGI laid off much of its workforce,44 scaled down entertainment in casinos and theaters considerably, stopped sponsoring sporting and cultural events, left gardens unplanted and parks untended. The effect of this neglect on Vichy’s image and ambiance was, according to the municipality, “disastrous, permanent, and reprehensible.”45 Despite war, decolonization, revolution, and independence in the disintegrating empire, Vichy was determined to continue to cultivate its colonial ties as best as it could in an effort to counter the resort’s deterioration and to resuscitate the town. Much of this was the initiative of Pierre Coulon, who became mayor of Vichy in 1950 at the age of 38. Though young, Coulon was an experienced businessman and politician. He was also deeply committed to French colonialism and to reinforcing Vichy’s connections with North and West Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Coulon headed a delegation to Algiers and Beirut in 1957 to publicize Vichy and target wealthy visitors and investors. In 1962, he launched a publicity campaign aimed at West Africa.46 Coulon pushed the reconstruction of Vichy’s airport (destroyed by the retreating Germans in 1944), despite the expense of the project, the municipality’s lack of funds, and

 Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 99.  This tactic was later employed by Perrier. AdA, Renseignements généraux, 19 April 196, “L’activité de CfV de Vichy,” Juvénal, no. 640, April 7, 1961, 404  W 6; MVL, Rapport présenté à l’Assemblée générale de la CfV pour l’exercice 1958. 43  AdA, Renseignements généraux, 19 April 196, “L’activité de CfV de Vichy,” Juvénal, no. 640, 7 April 1961, 404 W 6 44  AdA, Renseignements généraux, Situation de la CfV à l’ouverture de la saison thermale, 13 May 1960, 404 W 6. 45  AdA, Renseignements généraux, Situation de la CfV à l’ouverture de la saison thermale, 13 May 1960, 404 W 6. 46  AmV, Dossier “Syndicat d’initiative,” “La Publicité de Vichy pour la Saison 1962.” 41 42

84 

K. FREEMAN

determined opposition from neighboring communities.47 But flights from North Africa to Vichy dwindled after 1961. By 1964, the airport only saw two flights a week to Paris and Nice.48 When colonial tourists disappeared, Coulon focused on repatriating French settlers, or pieds-noirs, from North Africa to Vichy. By the end of the 1960s, approximately 3000 repatriates had been brought to Vichy and set up there with municipal funds in a specially-built housing project.49 The pied-noir community found, in Vichy, an atmosphere of respect and sympathy.50 Audrey Mallet describes in detail Vichy’s close ties with the pied-noir community and with supporters of French Algeria including Raoul Salan, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Pierre Poujade, and Robert Faurisson who moved to Vichy in 1957.51 One consequence of these relationships was a rightward political drift that significantly reshaped memories of the Second World War, and resurrected sympathies for Pétain and the National Revolution.52 Another, Mallet argues, is that the Algerian War “marked an even greater rupture for Vichy than the Second World War.”53 Decolonization ultimately had many negative consequences for Vichy: the loss of the resort’s colonial clients and of investments in North Africa; the bankruptcy of the SGHV and the decline of the thermal resort after a repatriating colonial company, BGI, took it over; and the creation of a significant pied-noir community in Vichy, which reinforced ties with supporters of French colonialism and the extreme right. The other major facet of Vichy’s postwar transformation is illustrated by a striking publicity image featuring Venus holding a water glass. Her abdomen is shattered, and a yellow glow emanates from her liver. A measuring cup hovers over her groin, tiny tennis racket, golf clubs, and horse triangulate her torso, and a small harp hangs over her ear. This image was prophetic: the pleasures of a Vichy cure were dwindling, sensuality was 47  Jean Débordes, Pierre Coulon: La trop courte chance de Vichy (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1991), 181. 48  MVL, Vichy, la Saison 1958. After 1974, only charter flights served Vichy. See Pottier, Chambre de commerce. 49  Valérie Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants” (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999), 40. 50  Audrey Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire (Paris: Belin, 2019), 189. 51  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, Chap. 7. 52  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 192. 53  Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy, 192.

4 DECLINE 

85

replaced by science, and throbbing livers and shattered bodies were taking center stage: the Queen of Spas was becoming the land of liver (Fig. 4.3). That this Venus graced the cover of the 1947 municipal guidebook was no accident. That year, the French government’s new national healthcare system began subsidizing thermal treatments at 104 French spas, with the proviso that each focus on a particular specialty.54 Vichy’s specialty was liver. The same year, Vichy welcomed its first social security patients under the new scheme, and the resort began publicizing the benefits of Vichy’s waters for the treatment of liver disease. The municipality hosted medical conferences and receptions, the CfV founded a liver research center, and Le Journal de Vichy—the newspaper once filled with theater programs, gossip columns, and glossy fashion plates—became a journal of thermal medicine. For many other spa towns this legislation was a boon. At the national level, the number of spa clients grew exponentially, and the specialized thermal industry thrived.55 But for Vichy, the advent of socialized medical thermalism meant the death of its elite image. Stripped of its decadent luxuries, Vichy became what town promoters had long feared, “a village of merchants who traffic in health, … where nervous spasms and rheumatic aches are the insipid daily subjects of agonizing conversation;”56 “a cemetery, an old age home, a place where people are bored.”57 Social security had certainly brought visitors to Vichy before 1947. The introduction of paid vacations a decade earlier led to a noticeable increase in tourism to the resort between 1937 and 1939.58 The CfV built a “third-­ class establishment” in 1937, “testimony to a new, more popular form of thermalism.”59 In 1938, the newly created Office of Thermalism and Popular Tourism launched “package cures” that included transportation, accommodation, all meals and drinks, medical consultations and prescriptions, and treatment at the third-class baths.60 The war brought an end to  Arrêté, 15 January 1947. Journal Officiel, 25 January 1947.  National numbers increased from 100,000  in the immediate postwar period to over 600,000 in the late 1980s. Guy Ebrard and Daniel Janicot, Le Thermalisme en France: situation actuelle et perspectives d’avenir (Paris: La Documentation française, 1981), 108. 56  Armand Wallon, La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914 (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 64. 57  AmV, Rapport concernant la réadmission à Vichy des femmes dites de mœurs légères, Vichy, 23 April 1937. Prostitution Divers, J 123 no. 1–2. 58  See Chambriard, “Rythmes.” 59  Pierre-Jean Coustier, “Le Thermalisme social à Vichy, notes historiques” in Villes d’eaux: Histoire du thermalisme (Paris: CTHS, 1994), 327. 60  AmV, Dossier “Office de Thermalisme et de Tourisme Populaire.” 54 55

86 

K. FREEMAN

Fig. 4.3  Vichy, Capitale Thermale, 1947. Fonds patrimoniaux, Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, v 10 910.2 VIC

4 DECLINE 

87

this experiment, however, and Vichy’s first brief exposure to socialization was not sufficiently long or entrenched to alter its luxurious image. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, however, Vichy saw a dramatic shift in clientele.61 The Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy reached its postwar peak (25,503 clients) in 1950.62 By 1952, it could not fill even one of its luxury establishments. But when its Hôtel des Thermes was downgraded to a two-star facility, a new clientele—described as “average but abundant”—filled the hotel to capacity.63 In 1939, the SGHV welcomed 80,000 clients in over a thousand luxury rooms. By 1953, this number had dwindled to 22,000 clients and 330 rooms.64 Although the Chamber of Commerce noted a yearly average of over 100,000 visitors to Vichy in the 1950s, these visitors increasingly sought mid-range accommodations for shorter stays.65 Cosmopolitan elites who spent an entire season at the resort were replaced by local, state-subsidized patients, most of whom stayed for no more than a week. The extent to which this trend was specific to Vichy was debated at length in the resort. The SGHV felt “obliged to accept that this is a phenomenon particular to Vichy, which no longer attracts the rich and elegant guests it once did,” since “in Paris, [luxury] hotels like ours are turning clients away and making a fortune each year.”66 Others remarked that rich tourists were deserting France altogether in favor of Swiss, Austrian, Italian, and German resorts, since the growing “identification of spas in France with the health insurance system led wealthy clients to the more luxurious spas of Central Europe.”67 The SGHV feared that the luxury sector in Vichy was “on the verge of extinction.”68 61  AmV, Rapport du Conseil d’administration, Compagnie fermière de Vichy, Assemblée générale ordinaire annuelle, 30 June 1947. 62  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire, 11 October 1950. 63  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire, 18 November 1952. One night in the new two-star Thermal Palace cost 45 francs for two people, with breakfast, tax, and gratuity included. 64  Vichy’s other luxury hotel conglomerate, the Groupement des Hôtels de Grand Premier Ordre de Vichy, also had a combined total of 1000 luxury rooms before the war. 65  Jacques Pottier, La Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998 (Moulins: CCI de Moulins-Vichy, 1998), 60. 66  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire, 18 November 1952. 67  George Weisz, “Water Cures and Science: The French Academy of Medicine and Mineral Waters in the Nineteenth  Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 393. 68  AmV, SGHV AGM, Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée générale ordinaire, 15 November 1955.

88 

K. FREEMAN

Publicity for Vichy in this period is characterized by a pronounced split: the resort continued to promote elitism, but also began styling itself as “popular.” Vichy’s tourism office launched a renewed luxury publicity campaign: “We must make sure that the word on the street is ‘It’s chic to be in Vichy.’ … and our flyers must be glossy even if the expense is greater. We must defend the prestige of our resort.”69 Certain celebrities still came to Vichy: Edith Piaf every summer from 1947 to 1961, Pablo Picasso in 1953, Utrillo and Dali in 1955, and Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1954. An association called Prestige de Vichy was created in 1957 to host such famous guests, a task that had previously fallen to the CfV.70 There was, however, an equal effort to attract social security clients in a newly competitive budget spa market. Emphasis was placed on economy, and the first step was an effort at re-branding: Vichy’s slogan was changed from “Queen of Spas” to “La Ville d’eau Éternelle” (“The Eternal Spa”). Publicity promoted affordability and accessibility. La Nation, for instance, ran an ad that read, “Vichy is certainly the cheapest city in France, as anyone will see from its flyers.”71 When a Paris newspaper suggested that families could not stay in Vichy for less than 2000 francs per person per day, the municipality demanded an apology and a retraction.72 The cover of Vichy revue for September 1950, for example, features a black and white photo of a young woman in a wooden cart drawn by a donkey.73 Populist Vichy promoted loyalty over status. The municipality celebrated its most faithful clients with receptions and profiles in resort publications. Local newspapers published photos of smiling pensioners pictured knitting, playing cards, sitting in the park, or taking dance lessons. In a radical departure from its earlier priorities, the municipality also began a campaign against noise to protect its new clients’ rest. In the past, when neighborhood groups complained about noise from brothels, casinos, and nightclubs, their petitions were predictably unsuccessful. Now, the municipality demanded quiet from its citizenry.74 Noise from street cleaners,

 MVL, La Tribune, November 8, 1951.  Débordes, Pierre Coulon, 163. 71  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” La Nation, June 22, 1946. 72  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Ici Paris, May 20, 1946. The retraction was printed on 3 June 1946. 73  MVL, Vichy Revue (September 1950). 74  Ville de Vichy, Vivre à Vichy (Vichy: Éditions Havas, 1983). 69 70

4 DECLINE 

89

garbage trucks, pedestrians, and even cats and dogs was restricted. Nightlife went from attraction to detriment.75 Despite the municipality’s two-pronged approach at promoting the resort, the two sets of images and clients could not co-exist. Vichy could not be both the Queen of Spas and the “Destination of choice for Hepatics.”76 The Queen of Spas and the land of liver were fundamentally incompatible. While Vichy’s prosperity rested on the former, the latter prevailed and, once Vichy’s lot was cast with socialized medicine, its economic and cultural transformation was rapid. The resort went from first to nineteenth place in French rankings.77 Social security patients sought modest accommodation and meals, which meant modest revenue for the municipality (tourist taxes were prorated, so the municipality earned much less from two-star hotels than luxury ones). Guests chose meal plans and semi-catered accommodations over restaurants. The casino, another major source of municipal revenue, saw a tremendous decline in profits.78 Vichy’s social security clients could not afford, and were not inclined, to spend much money at all during their stay.79 In Georges Simenon’s Maigret à Vichy, set in the late 1960s, the resort’s clients all repeat the same daily circuit of drinking their prescribed dose at the springs, reading in the park, napping, strolling by the river, and listening to music by the band shell in the evening. Simenon’s protagonist, Inspector Maigret, is secretly thrilled to uncover a murder because solving the case would finally give him something interesting to do in Vichy. The deterioration of the resort’s thermal infrastructure compounded Vichy’s woes. The BGI used the resort’s socialization to justify its neglect: there was no point investing in social security patients. In 1966, the CfV closed the Bains Lardy. The building was taken over by the city and transformed into a physiotherapy clinic.80 Facilities that remained open were not kept up, and spa technicians were laid off as the CfV shifted to a self-­  Jean Chardonnet, “La Relance de Vichy,” Les Cahiers bourbonnais, 144 (Summer 1993).  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Press clipping, np, 1957. 77  MVL, Science et Vie, Économie, April 1991, 10 dj 15. 78  Casino income decreased from 4 million to 800,000 francs in this period. Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993), 189. 79  MVL, “Vichy entre deux âges,” 10 dj 15. 80  Pottier, Chambre de Commerce, 60. 75 76

90 

K. FREEMAN

service model. The last donneuse d’eau hung up her apron in 1970. Patients complained of long waits, poor facilities, and sub-standard services.81 Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Vichy’s decadent, luxury spaces were all medicalized and socialized. Some hotels became clinics, hospitals, nursing homes, or retirement residences. The Hôtel de la Place des Victoires and the Hôtel de Provence became residences, for students and unemployed youth, respectively. Several other hotels became schools (for hospitality, nursing, and languages).82 Most of Vichy’s hotels, however, were sold as apartments. The Hôtel du Parc never reopened after 1945 and was sold in 1954. The Majestic closed in 1959. That same year, sections of the Carlton and the Thermal Palace were refitted for two- and three-star guests, with the rest of their rooms sold to private buyers. In total, 106 hotels were converted to apartments in this period. Of these, thirty-two had at one time been listed in the Michelin Red Guide. A further five hotels were demolished. Vichy’s places of leisure suffered a similar fate. The Grand Casino became a conference center. The Petit Casino became the municipal library. The Casino des Fleurs was demolished, and an apartment and shopping complex were built in its place.83 Only the Elysée Palace, bought in 1954 by local resistance hero René Jeux, remained open. Vichy’s other nightclubs were shuttered. La Féria, Vichy’s last brothel, became a hospital annex: its splendid decorations removed, the lavish “palace of pleasure” was transformed into a convalescent home.84 One by one, boutiques and restaurants closed, leaving many storefronts vacant.

Perrier, “the Predators” In 1894, Charles Bonnard made a prophetic observation, which came true in the 1960s: The CfV could drastically reduce the entertainments it offers—concerts, balls, theatre—and eliminate its artistic personnel. Likewise, the Casino with its orchestra …, and the Opera. … The same could be said for all thermal treatments. In fact, there is only one part of this whole concession that is  MVL, Newspaper clipping, nd, np., 10 dj 11.  MVL, France Soir, June 24, 1966, 10 dj 15. 83  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 168. 84  AmV, Fermeture des maisons de tolérance 1946–1947, J 123 no 1–2. 81 82

4 DECLINE 

91

important to the CfV, the sale of bottled water. The CfV could easily make all its profits from that. All this to say that, if it wished, the CfV could abandon the resort and still make a good profit. Vichy would be irretrievably lost, and nothing—nothing—would bring the tourists back.85

In spring 1967, Perrier acquired the Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI), and therefore also the Compagnie fermière de Vichy (CfV).86 A few months later, Pierre Coulon—Vichy’s popular and energetic young mayor—died suddenly. Together, these events solidified Vichy’s “slow but inexorable decline.”87 Indeed, in Vichy the late 1960s are remembered in near-apocalyptic terms: when Coulon died, Vichy’s future died with him and Perrier—“the predators”—feasted on the carnage.88 Pierre Coulon’s biography, written by his friend Jean Débordes, is revealingly subtitled “Vichy’s fleeting chance.” Coulon is lionized in Vichy. He became mayor in 1950, and for 17 years the municipality embarked upon an impressive number of expensive and high-profile projects, including the total redevelopment of Vichy’s waterfront—featuring a vast artificial lake, world-class sporting complex, conference center, and housing development—at a cost of over 70 million francs.89 The artificial lake, a 100-hectare aquatic facility for sailing, rowing, water-skiing, and other nautical events, was inaugurated in September 1963. The convention center, which could accommodate over 2000 people, was inaugurated in 1966 with a national Lions Club convention. A 120-hectare athletic complex, Omnisport park, featured ten soccer fields, two rugby fields, a track and field stadium, a soccer and rugby stadium, a boulodrome, an artificial river for white-water kayaking, an Olympic pool, 35 tennis courts, archery grounds, an outdoor climbing wall, and indoor facilities for dance, gymnastics, fencing, martial arts, boxing, table tennis, badminton, basketball, and volleyball. This massive complex, completed in 1968, is adjacent to the racetrack and Sporting Club (Vichy’s 18-hole golf course), making the whole left bank of the Allier River a gigantic athletic 85  Charles Bonnard, Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? (Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894). 86  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Entreprises, 541 (22 January 1966). 87  Jacques Lacarin, Vichy 1965–1989: Un quart de siècle entre deux mondes (Vichy: Éditions Neuville, 1994). Jean Cluzel also writes of Vichy’s “slow and inexorable degradation.” MVL, La Montagne, 13 December 1974, 10 dj 15. 88  See Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, Chap. 6: L’Arrivée des Prédateurs. 89  AdA, “La relance de Vichy de 1962 à 1973,” 1080 W 373.

92 

K. FREEMAN

facility. The right bank of the new artificial lake featured a beach (which opened in 1964), the Parc Napoléon III, a yacht club, a large lakeside restaurant, and a waterfront esplanade. These ambitious construction projects initially grew out of Vichy’s postwar boom and were later intended to both complement and mitigate the resort’s medicalization and to deal with the effects of decolonization on the town. Coulon paid for these projects by borrowing heavily and increasing taxes by 30 percent. Vichy assumed “one of the heaviest debt burdens of any commune” in France.90 Coulon undertook these ambitious projects not only to revive Vichy’s economy but to rescue Vichy’s image. The city’s decision to market itself as a conference destination was taken in the early 1950s in the context of the resort’s emerging medicalization and was reinforced by Vichy’s subsequent tourism crisis. Vichy’s main meeting venue, however, was the aging Grand Casino, a facility that was owned by the state and managed by the CfV. Coulon sought to rebrand Vichy as a convention destination by building a modern, purpose-­ designed facility that would attract large international conventions and, with them, new foreign clients. Vichy’s existing sporting facilities—racetracks and Sporting Club (with golf course and swimming pool) had long been a principal attraction in Vichy but were also—like the casino—property of the CfV in decline. Coulon sought to expand sports tourism to Vichy and attract a new kind of prestigious clientele, elite athletes. By building new facilities for international business and sporting elites he brought these initiatives under the purview of the municipality, insulating Vichy from the whims of the state and the CfV. For these reasons, Pierre Coulon is remembered as a champion of Vichy’s interests. Although he died before the full cost and consequences of his projects became clear, Coulon’s popularity stemmed from the long-­ standing conflict in Vichy between the resort and the town. Unlike Vichy’s other benefactors, Coulon invested primarily in the town. His projects were aimed at capitalizing on Vichy’s traditions and bolstering its image, but not uniquely through thermalism and outside the realm of the CfV. Furthermore, Coulon’s facilities were accessible to ordinary Vichyssois. They gave local sports teams, children, and amateur enthusiasts world-class facilities for their own leisure rather than focusing municipal resources solely on the leisure of others. Coulon also built new homes 90  Lacarin, Vichy 1965–1989, 66; AdA, Le Préfet de l’Allier à M. le Secrétaire d’État aux affaires culturelles, 1080 W 373.

4 DECLINE 

93

and schools, new abattoirs, a covered market, and an industrial park, which attracted one of France’s largest and most successful companies, L’Oréal. That he did this at extraordinary cost—municipal bankruptcy for over a generation—has proven largely irrelevant in Vichyssois’ understanding of Coulon’s legacy. These investments did not yield the profits Coulon had anticipated, however. Merchants and hoteliers felt few positive results: conventions and sporting events did not have the same “trickle-down” effect as luxury tourism. Conference delegates and athletes stayed, for the most part, in residences in Omnisport park. Few ventured to shop, play, or eat in Vichy. Perhaps most importantly, Coulon’s initiatives did not address the rapidly deteriorating thermal infrastructure in the heart of the resort, or its impact on Vichy’s reputation. Instead, Coulon’s legacy of debt meant that once the city turned its attention to this thermal crisis, there was no money left to reverse its decline. The arrival of Perrier in 1967 was a further blow to Vichy. Like BGI which it acquired, Perrier was concerned exclusively with Vichy’s bottled water industry. Unlike BGI, however, this was more than a question of profit and investment; it was a strategic part of Perrier’s brand identity: Perrier’s marketing strategy hinged on divorcing mineral water from thermalism.91 The Perrier springs, in the village of Vergèze, were open to the elements and to the public until the late nineteenth century.92 In 1894, Dr. Louis-Eugène Perrier sought to profit from the vogue for thermal spas and bought the springs with the aim of developing a resort. For funding, Dr. Perrier approached St. John Harmsworth, the youngest son of a British newspaper magnate. Harmsworth envisioned a different future for Dr. Perrier’s mineral springs. He bought out the doctor’s claim and built a bottling plant. Seizing on the popularity of mixed drinks among British elites, Harmsworth imagined his mineral water as a luxury beverage rather than a medicinal product. Mineral water was already a mark of distinction, finesse, and refinement: as an alternative to soda with whiskey or tonic with gin, mineral water carried the added cachet of natural carbonation. Harmsworth felt that this luxury image would be further enhanced if his mineral water were permanently divested of its medical and therapeutic 91  Nicholas Marty, “La consommation des eaux embouteillées: entre alimentation, distinction et hygiène,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, 91 (2006), 30. 92  Nicholas Marty, Perrier C’est Nous! (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2005).

94 

K. FREEMAN

association, though this would require breaking with traditions in the mineral water industry. French waters traditionally take the name of their spring, but Perrier was removed of any geographic association by being named for its founder. To further avoid medicinal or therapeutic connotations, Perrier was freely available outside pharmacies and without a prescription. There were no stern warnings about dosage or self-medication, no promise of cures for various ailments. Perrier would not treat your liver or ease your gout. It just sparkled and went well with whiskey. Perrier, “the champagne of table waters,” was purely an upmarket beverage, a fancy alternative to still water, more sophisticated than soft drinks and more salubrious than hard ones. This brand identity remained consistent from Perrier’s earliest days to its diversification and globalization. All new products were required to adhere to this image.93 Perrier faced an ambiguous situation with Vichy. On the one hand, in acquiring its main competitor, Perrier gained a coveted international network of agents and depots, and domination of the bottled water market. The elitism and decadence of Vichy’s lingering Queen of Spas image reinforced the luxury connotations of Perrier’s brand identity. Perrier’s president, Gustave Leven, explained in 1973 that his company bought the CfV not just for its distribution network—though that was a significant factor—but because “Vichy is still a glorious brand. This was also attractive for us. It was important to add [this] prestigious name to our group.”94 On the other hand, however, in acquiring the CfV, Perrier acquired a renewed association with thermalism, one that was increasingly unprofitable and tainted by socialized medicine. To maintain the integrity of its brand, Perrier had to dissociate itself entirely from the medical aspects of the resort and its waters, and especially from Vichy’s sick, old, middle-class clientele. It sought to capitalize on the luxury image of Vichy water, but to marginalize the increasingly medicalized resort. Vichyssois speculated endlessly about why Perrier was so disinterested in their thermal resort. One reason, certainly, was that Vichy’s thermal domain was steadily losing clients every year. Indeed, the CfV declared publicly that “every client costs money. [Our] plan would be to close the 93  When Perrier acquired Roquefort cheese in the late 1960s, its challenge was to transform a “smelly, provincial” product into “the Rolls Royce of cheeses.” Le Figaro, June 2, 1986. 94  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Roger Priouret, “Face à face avec Gustave Leven” L’Expansion, January 1973.

4 DECLINE 

95

resort.”95 In 1968, the French social security administration scaled back its coverage of thermal treatments and the number of clients decreased by 20 percent nationwide.96 These restrictions translated to greater losses for the town’s thermal industries.97 Perrier had strong economic reasons, then, to ignore the thermal domain and focus on bottled water exclusively. Less persuasive was the widespread tendency in Vichy to ascribe Perrier’s antipathy to the fact that its president was Jewish. Much was made in Vichy of Gustave Leven’s Jewishness—many speculated that he was punishing Vichy for the État Français, using profits from Vichy water to support Israel, or “destroying” Vichy just as Jews had been destroyed.98 Regardless of Leven’s personal feelings toward Vichy, Perrier had an image to uphold and Vichy’s failing thermalism undermined it. In the process, Perrier revealed its remarkable power and mercenary priorities, leading local government to warn of “an acute municipal crisis, with certain regional and possible national consequences.”99 This municipal crisis solidified in 1971 surrounding a new concession agreement between the state and the CfV. The expiring agreement dated from 1923, and the 1971 concession differed from its predecessor in several important respects. The terms of the 1923 agreement, and every concession before it, had been debated and voted on by the French parliament. The 1971 agreement was concluded directly between Perrier and the Ministers of Finance and Health. There was no parliamentary deliberation, no government vote.100 Furthermore, this new agreement was negotiated behind closed doors and its contents were kept confidential, a lack of transparency troubling to many observers.101 The National Assembly voiced concern that a “secret” deal might threaten Vichy’s interests.102 But the Minister of Health justified the new convention by describing, 95  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Vichy: des bulles entre la ville et Perrier” Le Progrès, March 6, 1980. 96  MVL, “Thermalisme” France Soir, February 10, 1975, 10 dj 15. 97  The number of tourists dropped from 29,200  in 1957 to 24,246  in 1969. AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Vichy: Main basse sur les sources?” Humanité dimanche, September 13, 1970. 98  See Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière. Christophe Pommeray discusses these sentiments among people he interviewed for his study, Vichy à Vendre? 99  AdA, Préfet de l’Allier au Ministère de Culture, 15 July 1975, 1080 W 373. 100  Lacarin, Vichy 1965–1989, 106. 101  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” La Tribune, June 26, 1984; Humanité September 13, 1970; La Montagne, January 23, 1971; La Montagne, June 12, 1970. 102  Débordes, Pierre Coulon, 119.

96 

K. FREEMAN

the importance of the [construction] works it calls for, … its adaptation to the demands of modern life, and its approach to equipment and practices that will bring a healthy collaboration between state, locality, and the private sector. Vichy will be the launching pad for a new kind of thermal politics.103

The terms of the agreement, signed in February 1971, required the CfV to invest 26 million francs in a series of renovations and construction projects over a five-year period.104 Nevertheless, the new concession caused great alarm in Vichy: “We are in a colonial situation,” locals told Le Figaro in January 1971, “how is it that the CfV’s shareholders can vote on the new concession, and we Vichyssois can’t even see it?”105 The municipality was completely excluded from the negotiation of the new lease. Dr. Jacques Lacarin, Coulon’s successor as mayor, had attended three meetings with the Ministry of Health in the months leading up to the agreement, but he was barred from all decision-making.106 Rather, the town was presented with a fait accompli—one which “shaped the next thirty years of [Vichy’s] future”—shortly before the signing ceremony.107 Alarmed, Lacarin boycotted the ceremony. The mayor criticized four areas of the new concession in particular: the inadequacy of Perrier’s projected investments, the ambiguous definition of its obligations, the equally vague schedule of works, and the inequitable division of responsibilities which, Lacarin feared, would leave Perrier reaping all the profits and Vichy paying all the bills.108 He asked that the government postpone signing the document so that the municipality could ensure that its interests were adequately protected.109 His request was ignored. Lacarin took his protest to the press and to regional and national government.110 He stressed the damaging nature of the new agreement and Perrier’s existing track record in Vichy: from 1967 to 1971 the company had refused to commit to  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” La Tribune, January 20, 1971.  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” La Tribune, January 20, 1971. 105   “Polémique à propos du renouvellement du bail de la société fermière: Vichy Colonisée?” Le Figaro, January 8, 1971. See also Georges Frélastre, Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1975), 247: “Our situation is astonishingly colonial. It’s other people who decide our destiny.” 106  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Tribune, January 20, 1971. 107  Lacarin quoted in Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 122. 108  See La Montagne, September 2, 1966. 109  La Montagne, December 15, 1970. 110  See, for example, La Montagne, October 14, 1975 and January 7, 1976. Lacarin’s political rival, Georges Frélastre, also protested. See La Montagne, January 23, 1971. 103 104

4 DECLINE 

97

investments of any kind.111 In 1970, losses in thermal domain were enormous, and only the bottling plant showed a profit.112 It was unlikely, Lacarin argued, that Perrier would alter its approach when the state had made clear that municipal interests were secondary. In a special issue on the accord, Le Figaro concluded that the once prestigious Queen of Spas is growing more tarnished year by year, [with] a decrease in thermal operations …, facilities that are outdated, an alarming recession among local merchants, and rising taxes. In the city centre shops are empty. In the casino, entertainment is of debatable quality. There has been a decrease of over 100,000 nightly stays this year compared to last. But Vichy’s thermal techniques are renowned and municipal investments are considerable, especially in the realm of recreation. How can we explain such paradoxical conditions? … Two specific questions arise: why, when the town is in a recession, have the profits of the Compagnie fermière increased by more than 17 per cent? And why, if its profits are increasing, have its dues remained the same?113

Senator Jean Cluzel, in an interview with La Montagne, laid the blame for Vichy’s “deplorable position” squarely on the government: “The State, as proprietor of the thermal domain, is gravely responsible. … It has not ensured the necessary upkeep of its own property. … For over thirty years we have witnessed the slow and inexorable degradation of Vichy’s thermal capital.”114 Perrier was mercenary, but the state enabled it. The concession agreement empowered a government commissioner to ensure that the terms of the lease were abided.115 The commissioner, however, defended Perrier and the CfV’s neglect of state property by citing the “decline in popularity of thermalism in France.”116 “If Vichy, like every other resort, required its guests to pay for water,” he argued, “there would be the resources to deal with these issues.”117 A state commissioner prioritizing corporate profits testified to the true nature of Vichy’s “new thermal politics.”118  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 109.  Sarasota Journal, July 31, 1970. 113  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Polémique à propos du renouvellement du bail de la société fermière” Le Figaro, January 8, 1971. 114  La Montagne, December 13, 1974. Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud, 10 dj 15. 115  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Le Figaro, January 1971. 116  AmV, Dossier “Syndicat d’Initiative,” La Montagne, October 9, 1970. 117  AmV, Dossier “Syndicat d’Initiative,” La Montagne, October 9, 1970. 118  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Le Figaro, January 1971. 111 112

98 

K. FREEMAN

Municipal outrage spurred interest from the local and national press, particularly because the license fees paid by the CfV were minuscule compared to the company’s profits.119 In 1964, for example, the CfV made a profit of 202 million. It paid the state 1.7 million in tax and the municipality 558,614 francs in royalties.120 In 1973, Perrier reorganized its holdings so that all deficits were attached to the CfV and all assets were transferred to Perrier.121 In a reversal of previous practice, Perrier transferred the CfV’s bottling facilities to nearby Saint-Yorre and Vichy’s water was piped there for bottling and sale under the Saint-Yorre label (also owned by Perrier). Sales of Vichy-État water dropped by 8 million cases in one year: Perrier avoided paying fees for bottling water that emerged in Vichy and for the use of Vichy’s name.122 By diverting water and bottling to Saint-­Yorre, Perrier increased its profits and Vichy lost more municipal revenue.123 By 1976, the end of the initial five-year period mandated in Perrier’s lease, none of the stipulated construction projects had broken ground. The state and Perrier renegotiated the terms of the lease and signed an amendment on 16 January 1976, which lessened Perrier’s obligations in Vichy in light of the CfV’s “losses.” Despite outcry from the municipality, the confidential negotiations once again involved only Perrier and the state. The amendment extended the lease period by ten years.124 In return for a 40-year concession, Perrier was now required to build one hotel.125 Furthermore, the amendment did exactly what Lacarin had feared: it transferred the upkeep of the resort to the municipality, while retaining the income for Perrier. Vichy found itself in the untenable situation of paying for the maintenance of property it did not own or control: between  Pommeray, Vichy à Vendre?, 21.  Le Monde, September 2, 1966. 121  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Perrier simplifie ses structures,” La Montagne, May 22, 1973. Assets included real estate, the Société Commerciale des Eaux de Saint-Yorre, which produced 280 million bottles annually, a 25 percent share in Evian, and distribution rights for Coca-Cola in Bordeaux and Paris, and for Pepsi in Lyon. AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Le Progrès, July 9, 1970. 122  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Vichy: des bulles entre la ville et Perrier” Le Progrès, March 6, 1980. 123  MVL, Jacques Lacarin, “Rapport sur la situation et les conditions du développement de la station thermale de Vichy: Analyse de la politique de l’État et de la CfV,” December 4, 1986. 124  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Jean-Pierre Fourcade to Gabriel Peronnet, 6 December 1975. 125  Lacarin, Vichy 1965–1989, 112. 119 120

4 DECLINE 

99

1974 and 1979, Vichy spent over 10 million francs on state property, the profits from which went to Perrier.126 Vichyssois resented in the extreme a situation in which municipal funds subsidized corporate profits, but the town had little choice in the matter despite the colossal financial burden it assumed. Vichyssois were once again resigned to embattled victimhood. Mayor Lacarin, however, mobilized to draft a renewal plan, focusing on three main areas deemed essential to Vichy’s survival: publicity, thermal infrastructure, and accommodation.127 The plan was, above all, a desperate bid to salvage Vichy’s reputation.128 If Vichy’s image could be resuscitated, then an economic turnaround would follow, though this required a coordinated plan, multiple partners, and external funding. Lacarin created a “mixed syndicate”—including municipal council, chamber of commerce, tourism office, and the CfV—dedicated to “the study, elaboration and implementation of a development plan for Vichy, as well as the management and conservation of all resources dedicated to Vichy’s economic revival.”129 Despite the mounting urgency of Vichy’s crisis, renewal was paralyzed by the intractability and hostility of the municipality and the CfV. Major labor organizations pledged solidarity with Lacarin and Vichy’s population, “which suffers,” in the confrontation with Perrier, the “menace that threatens our future.”130 Perrier, for its part, refused to participate in any discussions or projects. Representatives of the CfV, when they attended meetings at all, made it clear that they would not endorse anything the committee proposed. The municipality was excluded from Perrier’s plans: in the early design stages of the new hotel (which both the 1971 concession and the 1976 amendment required the CfV to build), all plans and architectural models were kept in Paris. This hotel became a flashpoint in the mounting conflict. The town fixated on a new, modern, luxury facility as key to revitalizing the resort’s thermal image and kick-­ starting a cyclical process of recovery.131 The CfV, however, sought to meet its obligations with minimal expenditure. The obstinacy of all parties  MVL, Lacarin, “Rapport.”  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” La Montagne, December 13, 1974. 128  AdA, Compte rendu de la réunion du comité de Concertation de Vichy, 23 May 1975, 1080 W 373. 129  AdA, Minutes, Comité de concertation de Vichy, 1080 W 373. 130  AmV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” “Le Conseil municipal a voté le budget supplémentaire” n.d. 131  Proposition de Loi relative à la dévolution du domaine thermal de l’État à la ville de Vichy, in Lacarin, Vichy 1965–1989, appendices. 126 127

100 

K. FREEMAN

involved led to a stalemate.132 “Public opinion is intense,” one regional official wrote to the national government.133 In June 1976, the national government proposed a partial solution: the CfV would build a three-star Novotel in the south wing of the existing baths, the renovation and upkeep of which would be paid by the state, alongside the refurbishment of La Restauration (renamed Le Grand Café) and the remodeling of the Grand Casino (now a conference center) both of which, it was hoped, would draw tourists back into the heart of the resort. This compromise was not the success the government and municipality had hoped. The three-star hotel attached to the existing baths did not revitalize the resort, nor draw an elite clientele. The Grand Casino, as a conference center, was not a place of leisure, but a business destination. Vichy’s faltering image was not resuscitated. In a 1986 report, Lacarin summed up the situation after a decade of failed renewal: Over the last ten years, the city has invested close to 19 million francs in the state’s thermal domain. … With a 12 per cent unemployment rate and the loss of tax revenue from gambling, bottled water, and tourism, the city can no longer bear the costs of maintaining, let alone investing further, in the resort.134

As he explained to the municipal council, “Help from the state, region and department is, in such circumstances, indispensable for [Vichy’s] survival. Up to this point, we have faced this crisis courageously, but we can no longer survive without help.”135

Conclusion: Catastrophe and Decline A closer look at the causes and chronology of the stark changes in Vichy in the second half of the twentieth century reveals the imbrication of several concurrent developments which were tied to broader processes of 132  AdA, Compagnie fermière de Vichy to Mayor, 19 November 1974, 1080  W 373; “Durcissement des positions entre la ville de Vichy et la Compagnie fermière après l’examen du cahier des charges du Grand Casino au Conseil municipal” La Tribune, December 2, 1976. 133  AdA, Le Préfet de l’Allier à M. le Secrétaire d’état aux affaires culturelles, n.d., 1080 W 373. 134  Lacarin, “Rapport.” 135  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 19 December 1986.

4 DECLINE 

101

decolonization, shifts in tourist practices, and capitalist globalization. Vichy’s economic depression, the physical degradation of the resort, the decrease in the number and status of the resort’s clients, and the erosion of Vichy’s image were less the result of the town’s tenure as the capital of wartime France, and more the product of global trends. For Vichyssois these changes appeared both immediately catastrophic and unrelenting over the long term. Such “catastrophism”—according to which change is understood as the result of sudden, violent, exceptional events—was an extension of long-standing feelings of victimhood, and of a more contemporary fixation with fracture, discontinuity, and pessimism in the wake of the war and occupation, and of decolonization. It also testifies to the unyielding insistence on Vichy’s exceptionalism that long infused Vichyssois civic identity and ascribed a moral character to the town’s changes in fortune. Catastrophism was not unique to Vichy, however.136 It was also tied to a broader declinism—a tendency to see change as decline—that gripped France and many other countries in the same period. Robert Frank charts French fears of and obsessions with decline over the course of the twentieth century.137 Though decline was an entrenched feature of French politics and culture from the 1870s onward, the Second World War boosted and redefined declinist narratives: the defeat of 1940 became the key moment of rupture, followed by the loss of France’s colonies. It is unsurprising that in Vichy a similar explanation for the town’s postwar trajectory took hold.138 Another key feature of declinism is the roseate glow of the past: a tendency to emphasize former grandeur and lament its loss. Just as France grieved the loss of its Great Power status in the second half of the twentieth century, so Vichy mourned the death of the Queen of Spas.

Bibliography Bastien, Hervé. “Alger 1944, ou la révolution dans la légalité.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 37, no. 3 (1990): 429–451. Bonnard, Charles. Vichy-Thermal: prospérité ou décadence? Vichy: Imprimerie J.-B. Desbenoit, 1894. 136  Henry Rousso, The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). 137  Robert Frank, La hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014 (Paris: Belin, 2014). 138  MVL, Science et vie, économie, April 1991, 10 dj 15; Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 10.

102 

K. FREEMAN

Bonvicini, Stéphanie. Louis Vuitton: une saga française. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Chambriard, Pascal. “Les Rythmes de la saison vichyssoise (1853–1960).” In Villes d’eaux, histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Chardonnet, Jean. “La Relance de Vichy.” Les cahiers bourbonnais 144 (Summer 1993). Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. Villes d’eaux: Histoire du thermalisme. Paris: CTHS, 1994. Débordes, Jean. Pierre Coulon: La trop courte chance de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1991. Débordes, Jean. Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993. Ebrard, Guy, and Daniel Janicot. Le Thermalisme en France: situation actuelle et perspectives d’avenir. Paris: La Documentation française, 1981. Frank, Robert. La hantise du déclin: La France de 1914 à 2014. Paris: Belin, 2014. Frélastre, Georges. Les Complexes de Vichy, ou Vichy-les-Capitales. Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1975. Haas, Valérie. “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants.” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999. Jennings, Eric. Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Lacarin, Jacques. Vichy 1965–1989: Un quart de siècle entre deux mondes. Vichy: Éditions Neuville, 1994. Mallet, Audrey. Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire. Paris: Belin, 2019. Marty, Nicholas. “La Consommation des eaux embouteillées: entre alimentation, distinction et hygiène.” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 91 (2006): 25–41. Marty, Nicholas. Perrier, C’est Nous! Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2005. Pommeray, Christophe, et  al. Vichy à Vendre? Vichy: Allier République Éditions, 2010. Pottier, Jacques. La Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998. Moulins: CCI de Moulins-Vichy, 1998. Rousso, Henry. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Stavrides, Yves. “De L’Indochine au Vietnam.” L’Express, April 26, 2004. Ville de Vichy. Vivre à Vichy. Vichy: Éditions Havas, 1983. Wallon, Armand. La Vie quotidienne dans les villes d’eaux 1850–1914. Paris: Hachette, 1981. Weisz, George. “Water Cures and Science: The French Academy of Medicine and Mineral Waters in the Nineteenth Century.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 393–416.

CHAPTER 5

Renewal and Defiance

Introduction: Vichy’s Revival The dawn of the 1990s brought a new chapter for Vichy. In September 1987, the Compagnie fermière de Vichy (CfV) and three levels of government signed an agreement committing close to 400 million francs to Vichy’s revitalization.1 Construction began almost immediately on a long-­awaited luxury riverside hotel and spa, Les Célestins, which, when it opened in 1993, became the flagship of a rejuvenated Vichy and the cornerstone of the resort’s revival—“a symbol rich enough” to woo back corporate investment and an exclusive clientele.2 A crucial change in municipal leadership also began in 1987: a new president, Antoine de Galembert, was appointed to the CfV and a new mayor, Claude Malhuret, won Vichy’s municipal election in 1989. “For the first time since the Second Empire,” the municipality and the CfV pledged to “[find] consensus, grounds for agreement. Before, each side blamed the other and

 Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Municipal Council deliberations, 12 October 1987.  Mayoral letter no. 2, February 1992 quoted in Valérie Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants” (Ph.D. diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999), 240. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_5

103

104 

K. FREEMAN

no one moved forward. Now, [they] worked in the same direction, together.”3 Central to Vichy’s revival in the 1990s was the resurrection of its Queen of Spas image and reputation for luxury and leisure. The municipality sought to revive elite tourism and an aura of prestige, while the Compagnie fermière (owned by Perrier) and Laboratoires industriels de Vichy (owned by L’Oréal) sought likewise to revitalize their Vichy brands through an emphasis on indulgence, exclusivity, and well-being. The revival of Vichy’s elite identity involved cultivating nostalgia for the resort’s golden years: Roaring Twenties, Belle Époque, Fin-de-siècle, and especially the Second Empire. This nostalgia is evident in the architecture, design, décor, marketing, and publicity of the renovated resort and in municipal events and associational life that linked Vichy’s revival with a rehabilitation of Napoleon III. Vichy’s revitalization was complicated, however, by increased attention to the État Français in the 1990s. A surge in popular and scholarly interest in the collaborationist wartime regime and the question of French comportment during the war and occupation define an “obsessional phase” in France’s “Vichy Syndrome.”4 Globally, the 1990s saw the flourishing of a new regime of memory, an age of apology and victimhood supported by cultures of repentance and restitution.5 Against this obsession with France’s wartime past, and defying the expectation of atonement, Malhuret pledged to cultivate Vichy’s Queen of Spas image and minimize its role in the Second World War. For Malhuret and many Vichyssois, the only past worth contemplating was glittering, exclusive, elegant, and grand. Those who expected contrition or apology, or even open and frank discussion of the war years, would be disappointed. Malhuret’s suppression of Vichy’s wartime history, promotion of the resort’s golden years, and defiance of the “duty to remember” won him the devotion of his constituents and shaped the town’s revival. But Vichy was nevertheless embroiled in a series of scandals linking the resort’s renewal and the État Français. A major, national corruption scandal tied 3  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), L’Hôtellerie, 13 February 1992, 10 DJ 11. The irony in this statement is that, in the Second Empire, the state appointed the mayor. Malhuret’s critics alleged that he was, likewise, put in office by the CfV. 4  Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991). 5  Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

105

directly to Vichy’s revitalization implicated both Malhuret and de Galembert and revived the specter of decadence. A series of high-profile scandals involving L’Oréal and its parent company, Nestlé, raised troubling wartime associations, cast shadows over Vichy products, and drew attention to links between the town and the État Français.

Recovery and Nostalgia In the early 1990s, Vichy’s revival seized on the elite pursuit of well-being with the construction of Les Célestins hotel and spa, named for a fifteenth-­ century convent built by the Duke de Bourbon, and its nearby thermal springs. In a reversal of their previous resistance, Perrier and the CfV embraced Les Célestins as key to repositioning Vichy’s image, revitalizing its commercial potential through appeals to a luxurious past, and regaining the elite clientele that Vichy had lacked for decades. Perrier’s change in strategy in Vichy came about as a result of several concurrent developments. Benzene contamination at the Perrier plant in Vergèze forced the recall of all Perrier water, as well as Gustave Leven’s departure from the company.6 With its sales plummeting 60 percent, Perrier looked to its other brands to help the company recover. But the late 1980s also brought a cultural shift toward wellness and self-improvement in which luxury spas saw a global resurrection. In Vichy, associations with thermalism that had once been detrimental for Perrier became an asset and a target for development. But Vichy’s rebirth required substantial investment and unqualified cooperation from the municipality.7 Vichy’s revitalization plan—the “Juppé accord”—provided an important initial investment, which then generated subsequent corporate interest in Vichy.8 Ultimately, almost a billion francs were poured into Vichy’s development,9 with the goal of catering to an international, luxury clientele, and making Vichy “a

 “Perrier chairman quits,” Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1990.  “Le voyage d’Antoine de Galembert aux USA et au Japon,” La Tribune, November 20, 1986. 8  The agreement was not a new concession: the 1971 lease and its several amendments remained in place until 2011. Rather, it was a parallel deal between state, regional and municipal government, the CfV, and Vichy’s Chamber of Commerce. The French government finally sold the remaining parts of the thermal domain to the municipality in 2011. Les Échos, February 4, 2011, 5. 9  MVL, L’Hôtellerie, February 13, 1992, 10 dj 11. 6 7

106 

K. FREEMAN

European capital of fitness, health, beauty and leisure.”10 As “the largest health and beauty centre in the world,” and the keystone of the resort’s renewal, Les Célestins would feature “the most sophisticated techniques and products aimed at skin, hair, body, form and fitness, with close attention to personal beauty.”11 To complement Les Célestins and align with the resort’s focus on fitness, beauty, leisure, and well-being, Perrier and the CfV also renovated the totality of the resort’s existing thermal infrastructure.12 Vichy was made over from head to toe. The 1989 municipal election solved the problem of local support and collaboration between the CfV and municipality. Vichy’s defiant former mayor, Jacques Lacarin, was replaced by 39-year-old Claude Malhuret, a past president of Doctors without Borders. Malhuret was Perrier’s candidate: “if Leven was going to invest 240 million, he needed another mayor.”13 This collaboration had a near-immediate impact. In the wake of the election, the municipality refurbished Vichy’s Grand Casino and Opera, pedestrianized the city center, and launched a range of tourism initiatives to showcase the resort’s renewal.14 More than a dozen hotels were renovated and reopened between 1989 and 1992, including two of Vichy’s luxury flagships: the Pavilion Sévigné and the Aletti Palace (formerly the Thermal Palace), both grande dames of the resort’s glittering past.15 With the CfV and the municipality committed to partnering in Vichy’s revitalization, L’Oréal likewise expanded and cultivated its Vichy brand and associations. In 1989, Laboratoires Vichy and the CfV entered an exclusive partnership. L’Oréal was not new to the Vichy scene: in 1950, Vichy’s mayor, Pierre Coulon, had enticed L’Oréal to take over cosmetic production for the Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV), founded in 1931 by Dr. Prosper Haller, director of Vichy’s baths. The SHDV’s thermal beauty products—“Vichy, Source of Beauty”—promised 10  Mayoral letter no. 2, February 1992 quoted in Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 240. 11  Archives départementales de l’Allier (AdA), La Vie internationale, 13–14 December 1986. 12  MVL, L’Hôtellerie, February 13, 1992, 10 dj 11; MVL, “La remise en forme décolle,” October 2006, 10 dj 14/10 dj 15. 13  MVL, “Vichy: Malhuret en bons thermes avec la Fermière,” Libération, August 7, 1992, 10 dj 14/10 dj 15. 14  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 12 October 1987. MVL, L’Hôtellerie, February 13, 1992, Vichy 10 dj 11. 15  MVL, L’Hôtellerie, February 13, 1992, 10 dj 11.

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

107

that Vichy’s mineral water could erase “unsightly traces left by age, fatigue, and weathering.”16 Coulon and André Bettencourt, the son-in-law of L’Oréal’s founder Eugène Schueller, were friends and members of the same political party. With this deal, L’Oréal expanded its product line— changing the SHDV’s name to “Laboratoires industriels de Vichy” (LIDV) and later “Laboratoires Vichy”—and moved into a 15-hectare factory in a new industrial park, generating notable economic benefit for Vichy.17 L’Oréal was sensitive, however, to the connotations of Vichy’s image. Initially, L’Oréal kept its distance from LIDV,18 fearing that Vichy’s deteriorating reputation would undermine L’Oréal’s “brand potency.”19 From the 1960s onward, Vichy’s image, as we have seen, was associated with government-insured medical treatments in outdated and run-down facilities. LIDV production was modest, and efforts by the Compagnie fermière to place LIDV or other L’Oréal products in its hotels and spas had been unsuccessful for decades.20 But there were aspects of Vichy’s earlier brand identity—in particular the overlapping of science and indulgence— that fit well with L’Oréal’s corporate image. Once Vichy’s revitalization was underway and its luxurious Queen of Spas image resurrected, L’Oréal’s position on Vichy changed. In the 1990s, L’Oréal invested substantially in Laboratoires Vichy, which moved from being a minor to a major brand, internationally and in Vichy itself. Les Célestins became home to a Laboratoires Vichy Beauty Institute, and the hotel and spa began to carry Laboratoires Vichy products exclusively and integrate them into Vichy’s trademark treatments. L’Oréal’s investment in Vichy hinged on the resurrection of the resort’s past reputation for luxurious well-being. As a result, Vichy regained its position as an internationally recognized brand, associated with one of the world’s foremost beauty companies. Vichy’s revitalization in the 1990s would have been impossible without such corporate involvement. The “return” of Perrier and L’Oréal to Vichy, 16  Eugene Montfort, Vichy: un regard neuf sur les villes d’eaux (Paris: Les Éditions LaJeunesse, 1937), 73. 17  AmV, Fiche d’Information, Laboratoires industriels de Vichy. 18  “Le voyage d’Antoine de Galembert aux USA et au Japon,” La Tribune, November 20, 1986. 19  Jean-Noel Kapferer, The New Strategic Brand Management: Creating and Sustaining Brand Equity Long Term (Paris: Les Éditions d’Organisation, 1992), 51. 20  “Le voyage d’Antoine de Galembert aux USA et au Japon,” La Tribune, November 20, 1986.

108 

K. FREEMAN

and the collaboration and re-investment this brought, reshaped Vichy’s image (which, as we have seen has always been defined as much by its products and brand identity as by the municipality and its population). With the backing of its corporate powerbrokers, Vichy turned a new leaf. But its future focused on a very specific vision of the past. In architecture, design and décor Vichy has, since the 1850s, shown a penchant for eclecticism in cultivating an ambiance of luxury.21 This mingling of styles was characteristic of the Second Empire itself, and a consequence of Vichy’s subsequent development. The first major phase of resort development, under Napoleon III, focused on the opulent baths, but also featured imperial villas in a range of vernacular styles. During Vichy’s second major phase of development between the 1890s and the First World War, lush and extravagant Orientalist and Art Nouveau construction contributed further to Vichy’s eclecticism and grandeur. This trend continued with Art Deco-dominated resort expansions in the 1920s. The renovations and restorations of the 1990s reanimated Vichy’s architectural pastiche by emphasizing luxury and splendor through the resort’s Orientalist, Second Empire, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco features, while removing the utilitarian upgrades of the 1960s and 1970s.22 Vichy’s revival brought “luxury and exoticism [to] the forefront.”23 The Central Hotel, a boutique hotel and spa renovated in the early 1990s, cultivated an Art Deco aesthetic to “evoke an atmosphere of cocooning and well-being.”24 Likewise, Hôtel Thermalia (a newly built hotel on the site of a wing of the former baths) carefully publicized its “Art Deco ambiance.”25 The Aletti Palace (built in 1911) was renovated to its “original Art Deco style” featuring “woodwork, metalwork, Art Deco, Louis XVI and Directory furniture, heavy curtains and drapery, grand chandeliers and stained glass all dedicated to an atmosphere of prestige.”26 La Veranda, a restaurant built in 1998, features a palmarium and fluted green glass awning evoking the iconic Art Nouveau frontispiece of the Grand Casino. Renovations to 21  Lise Grenier, ed., Villes d’eaux en France (Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture, 1985), preface. 22  For Kalifa, these “telescope in a hybrid style meant to incarnate a moment of grandeur.” Dominique Kalifa, “Le Second Empire, une ‘Belle Époque’?” Histoire, économie & société 36, no. 3 (2017), 61. 23  MVL, “Les émaux de Bigot, un air d’orient,” 10 dj 11. 24  MVL, La Montagne, January 15, 1998, 10 dj 11. 25  MVL, La Montagne, January 15, 1998, 10 dj 11. 26  MVL, “La Grande Vie—Aletti Palace Hotel,” 10 dj 11.

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

109

other Vichy landmarks in the 1990s also highlighted their golden age features. In 1991, the renovated baths reopened with gilt dome completely restored, and interior design focused on “well-being, exoticism, and warmth.”27 The Art Nouveau opera was restored in 1995, as was the Art Nouveau pavilion at the springs. Here, the self-service modifications of the 1970s were reversed.28 Vichy’s restored streetscapes, which featured newly refurbished stained-glass windows and wrought metal balustrades, the renovated exteriors of the Art Deco post office and Église Saint-Blaise, a Belle Époque carrousel added to the Parc des sources, all contribute to a palpable nostalgia for the resort’s pre-1940 history and heritage. The municipality focused heavily on this restored patrimony in its publicity and marketing. Guided walking tours included excursions entitled: “Art Deco Vichy: Twilight of Luxury,” “The Second Empire and the Belle Époque: Vichy’s Golden Age,” “Beautiful Villas: Vacation Architecture, 1850–1930,” and “Vichy: Universe of Opera.”29 Vichy’s Tourism Office also created a self-guided walking tour of the resort based on over two dozen didactic panels describing Vichy’s historical and architectural landmarks prior to 1940. These self-guided tours were arranged in two circuits “dedicated to the glory years of the resort, the Second Empire and the Belle Époque.”30 Vichy’s golden age revival was accompanied by a resurrection of many of the resort’s elite pastimes, activities that largely disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s. A water taxi service linking Les Célestins and the Sporting Club golf course was inaugurated shortly after the hotel’s opening. A new racetrack was completed in 1992, and the Grand Prix de Vichy was reinstated. From 1995 onward, the city once again hosted winter and summer theater seasons in addition to an annual opera festival, and the CfV and the tourism office began offering weekend packages oriented to such pastimes: “Vichy à deux, weekend grand jeux” included accommodation, spa treatments, fine dining, and tickets to the races. For Vichy’s decadent image to be truly resurrected, however, its medicalized identity had to be erased: liver was replaced by skin, thermal medicine by cosmetic science, internal ailments by external perfection, sickness by well-being, and accessibility by exclusivity. The physical traces of  MVL, Semaine de l’Allier, May 29, 2006, 10 dj 11.  MVL, La Montagne, September 12, 1994, 10 dj 11. 29  MVL, La Montagne, October 30, 2009, 10 dj 11. 30  MVL, “Patrimoine: Vichy en quelques bornes,” 10 dj 11. 27 28

110 

K. FREEMAN

medical Vichy were also mostly eliminated. Vichy’s resurrection, which hinged so much on the construction of Les Célestins, was also predicated on the demolition of the second-class Callou baths, built in 1934, a center of medical thermalism during the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s. A new Callou spa facility, completed in 1990, continued to offer many of the same treatments (for rheumatism and metabolic disorders) though these treatments were recast as “anti-aging” and “form.”31 In 1990, Vichy’s military hospital was demolished to make way for a shopping center, theater, and casino complex completed in 2002. The destruction of these symbols of Vichy’s medical identity was essential in reviving the resort’s luxury brand. More difficult to erase, however, was Vichy’s population of retirees: at the turn of the twenty-first century, 23.3 percent of the male population and 35.3 percent of the female population were over the age of 65 compared to a national average of 17.1 percent.32 And so, that population was recast as well. “People don’t grow old today the way they did twenty years ago,” exclaimed a special issue of L’Express devoted to Vichy’s resurrection, “today’s seniors prefer the Rolling Stones to Luis Mariano, graphic novels to the Pleiades, tennis to bridge, Nepal to Club Med.” The new Vichy was “ideally suited to their vitality, their curiosity, their spirit of adventure” and their wealth.33 In a 1990 survey, an anonymous resident of Vichy summed up the town’s feelings about its past: “Napoleon III created elegant Vichy, he made the city aristocratic. We were the capital of France then.”34 For all that Vichy’s revival was characterized by a pastiche of styles evoking various eras from the 1860s to the 1930s, the Second Empire holds pride of place. Through Napoleon III’s favor, Vichy was France’s unofficial capital. As the resort relaunched in the 1990s, Vichy appealed to its Second Empire status as “summer capital” or “thermal capital” to draw attention away from the fact that Vichy was the État Français’ provisional capital between 1940 and 1944. Renewed attention to the Second Empire was central to Vichy’s revitalization efforts. The emperor’s name and likeness sprang up everywhere. Busts were unveiled in the riverside park and in Les Célestins’ restaurant: both park and restaurant were named in Napoleon III’s honor. The  MVL, L’Hôtellerie, February 13, 1992, 10 dj 11.  “Vichy: Une nouvelle vie commence à 50 ans” L’Express, no. 3164, February 2012. 33  “Vichy: Une nouvelle vie commence à 50 ans” L’Express, no. 3164, February 2012. 34  Respondent number 10. Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” appendices. 31 32

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

111

renovated casino featured a “salle Napoléon III,” while the newly refurbished Aletti Palace and the new opera honored his wife, Empress Eugenie. Portraits of the imperial couple discovered in the cellars of the city hall were restored and unveiled in the Grand Casino. At their inauguration, mayor Malhuret called for a full-scale rehabilitation of the emperor and his family. In 1995, street signs honoring the Imperial Family were added to the main thoroughfares of Vichy, effectively re-instating streets names changed in 1871. The CfV and Laboratoires Vichy, meanwhile, emphasized Vichy’s Second Empire heritage in their publicity, as did merchants such as Aux Marocains, a chocolate and sweet shop “created in 1870 in a Napoleon III setting.”35 Ads for Vichy pastilles emphasized that the lozenges were “Empress Eugenie’s favorites.”36 One of the highlights of Vichy’s yearly calendar is the annual Fête Napoléon III. Organized by the municipality and the Friends of Napoleon III (founded in 1983), the celebration is a three-day extravaganza of “creative anachronism.”37 The 2012 festival, for example, was devoted to the theme “Napoleon III: Misunderstood” and featured two balls (one outdoors with over 300 participants in period costume, and a gala at the Grand Casino), “a night with Jacques Offenbach” at the Opera, carriage rides, street performers, salon dance lessons, a period dinner, an exhibition of Second Empire fashion, a military encampment, and the re-enactment of Napoleon and Eugenie’s procession from Vichy’s train station to the imperial chalets. For Vichy, the Second Empire is: an ideal marketing strategy to make people forget about the dark years of the État Français. The Fête Imperiale, with its crinolines, its joyful music, its dances, offers a much more appealing face than some old [historian] talking about privation and moral rectitude.38

During the Fête Napoléon III, Vichy embraces the ambiance and personalities of the Second Empire. These are not easily rehabilitated, however, and a very narrow lens is required to see, in the Bonapartist dictatorship, only the dizzying grandeur embraced by the Queen of Spas 35  “Bienvenue Aux Marocains,” Ville d’Eaux Magazine (Royat: Sett Communication, 2012), 46. 36  “Pastilles de Vichy. Un bon moyen d’allier santé et plaisir gustatif!” Ville d’Eaux Magazine, 71. 37  The association was founded in 1983 and had over 200 members in 2010. 38  Alain Carteret, Vichy: Cité Napoléon III (Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal, 2009), 98.

112 

K. FREEMAN

in its annual re-enactments. As Jay Winter reminds us, such activities— “joining the stream of history at a point of our own choosing”—privilege experience that is outside both history and politics.39 The foundations of the Second Empire, however, rested in a coup d’état and ensuing repression which left 400 civilians dead and saw an unknown number of summary executions.40 Thereafter, voters were disenfranchised, opposition was forcefully suppressed, demonstrations were violently put down, newspapers were seized, and protesters were arrested.41 The violent origins of the Second Empire were difficult to ignore, even for the Emperor himself.42 For Napoleon III’s opponents, the Second Empire—born in treason and undone by defeat—was illegal, illegitimate, and a “defilement of the Republic.”43 It was also a period of unrestrained excess: its lavish public “spectacles of prosperity”—all extravagance, exoticism, ostentation, and grandeur—included the construction of thermal Vichy itself.44 After 1870, Vichy managed to transcend the stigmas associated with the Second Empire. Indeed, Vichy flourished during the Third Republic, despite such problematic associations. From the 1990s onward, however, the rehabilitation of the Second Empire in Vichy has proven more problematic, with links to revisionist and Pétainist currents in Vichy. For example, Alain Carteret is a prolific local historian, member of the Association of Friends of Napoleon III in Vichy, and author of Napoléon III: Bienfaiteur de Vichy et de la France (Napoleon III: Benefactor of Vichy and France). In his book Régime de Vichy, Ça Suffit! (Vichy Regime? Enough!), Carteret rejects the suggestion that the term “Vichy Regime” be replaced by “Pétain Dictatorship,” which he finds “more than contestable. Wasn’t it really a ‘Hitler dictatorship’? Didn’t Pétain always do his best to soften the terrible exigencies of the Reich?”45 Nostalgia for the Belle Époque is no less problematic, however. Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues, often aims for a return to a

39  Jay Winter, “Unfinished Business: Remembering the Great War Between Truth and Re-enactment” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (2020), 119–140. 40  David Baguley, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 14. 41  Baguley, Napoleon III, 11. 42  Baguley, Napoleon III, 28. 43  Baguley, Napoleon III, 35. 44  Truesdell, Spectacular Politics quoted in Baguley, Napoleon III, 193. 45  Alain Carteret, Régime de Vichy, Ça Suffit! (Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal, 2010), 89.

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

113

“prelapsarian” past.46 Dominique Kalifa stresses that invocations of the Belle Époque, in particular, have been a tried-and-true response to crisis, and the 1990s were certainly not the first time the Belle Époque imaginary was deployed as antidote or refuge.47 Rather, the term and the concept were born in the first months of the Nazi occupation of Paris, and were “put in the service of the German army.”48 Evocations of the Belle Époque satisfied the occupation forces’ voyeurism and touristic desires but, in addition to being evocative and picturesque, these also harkened back to an earlier defeat of France, and underlined German superiority and French decadence.49 The relationship between the Dark Years and nostalgia for the Belle Époque is, therefore, seminal.

The Past and the Present Throughout the 1990s, interest in the État Français, the Occupation, and the Holocaust intensified in France. At the same time, a series of scandals brought Vichy’s wartime history back into focus, despite the resort’s renewal as Queen of Spas and the town’s dedication to promoting a romanticized and sanitized vision of its past. One scandal, the Maillard Duclos affair, implicated the president of the CfV and the mayor of Vichy in a massive embezzlement scheme, tainting the resort’s revitalization with corruption and fraud, and raising the specter of decadence. Scandals at L’Oréal involved Vichy’s past and its present. These controversies ultimately highlighted the wartime history the town tried so hard to downplay and reinforced Vichyssois’ sense of stigmatization and feelings of victimhood. The Maillard Duclos affair exposed an enormous embezzlement scheme in which a construction company (Maillard et Duclos) was found to have issued fake invoices totaling over 26.6 million francs.50 A portion of that sum, over 6.7 million, was embezzled in the construction of Les Célestins. Of the fifteen people implicated in the scandal, two were associated with 46   Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Summer 2007), https://hedgehogreview.com/ issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents. 47  Dominique Kalifa, La Véritable Histoire de la “Belle Époque” (Paris: Fayard, 2017). 48  Kalifa, “Belle Époque,” 85. 49  Kalifa, “Belle Époque,” 97. 50  Karl Laske, “Ouverture du Procès des fausses factures de Maillard et Duclos” Libération, January 26, 1998.

114 

K. FREEMAN

Vichy: Robert Bourachot, former CEO of Maillard et Duclos and native Vichyssois, and Antoine de Galembert, president of the CfV. These two men pointed to even bigger fish: Alain Juppé (budget minister, later prime minister, and signatory of Vichy’s revitalization plan) and François de Grossouvre (politician, former spy, and friend and advisor to President François Mitterrand). Bourachot and de Galembert gave conflicting accounts of how much had been embezzled in Vichy and for whom. De Galembert claimed that although he had received 3.5 million in kickbacks, he had passed the whole amount on to de Grossouvre who had been tasked with wooing Arab investors to the CfV.51 On 7 April 1996, de Grossouvre committed suicide: de Galembert blamed the Maillard Duclos investigations.52 De Galembert was sentenced to two years in prison and was forced to repay the embezzled 3.5 million to the CfV.53 For his part, Bourachot claimed to have donated 6 million francs of misappropriated money to the Parti républicain (to which Juppé and Malhuret belonged), and a further 100,000 francs directly to Claude Malhuret’s 1989 mayoral campaign. Bourachot also alleged that 1.8 million francs had been paid directly to Juppé. Like de Galembert, Bourachot was sentenced to two years in prison. The Maillard Duclos affair revealed another dimension to Vichy’s resurrection: the resort’s luxurious revival was rooted in decadence, scandal, nepotism, corruption, illegality, and deceit. At the same time as the Maillard Duclos revelations, a series of scandals rocked L’Oréal.54 In 1988, L’Oréal acquired Helena Rubinstein Inc. Rubinstein herself had died in 1965. After her death the company floundered, and L’Oréal’s American subsidiary began gradually buying up portions of the company so that by 1988 it had acquired the whole enterprise. This takeover, however, placed L’Oréal on the Arab League’s anti-Israel blacklist. Helena Rubinstein, a Polish Jew whose sister died in the Holocaust, was a fervent and generous supporter of Israel and of the Zionist movement.55 The Arab League—determined to strangle Israel  MVL, La Montagne, March 19, 1998, 10 dj 14.  Karl Laske “Le procès Maillard et Duclos. Galembert lie le suicide de Grossouvre à l’argent noir” Libération, January 28, 1998. 53  MVL, La Montagne, March 19, 1998, 10 dj 14. 54  See Ruth Brandon, Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oréal and the Blemished History of Looking Good (New York: Harper Collins, 2011); Charles Poncet, Nestlé, Bettencourt et les Nazis (Paris: Vevey, 1995), Michel Bar-Zohar, Bitter Scent (London: Dutton, 1996). 55  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 141. 51 52

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

115

through a boycott of all Israeli businesses and of companies that did business with Israel—demanded that L’Oréal divest itself of its Israeli subsidiaries and their Jewish management. This posed two dilemmas for L’Oréal: treating with the Arab League was illegal in France, the United States, and many other countries where L’Oréal operated, but L’Oréal also had significant business interests in the Middle East, as did Nestlé which, as part owner of L’Oréal, was also threatened with blacklisting. Despite French law, L’Oréal agreed to sell its Israeli holdings and relocate its Tel Aviv factory to Germany. The man who oversaw those negotiations, and who had orchestrated the acquisition of Helena Rubinstein Inc., was Jacques Corrèze, director of L’Oréal’s American operations. As part of its efforts to placate the Arab League, L’Oréal also attempted to persuade Jean Frydman (a business partner of François Dalle, L’Oréal’s former CEO and VP of Nestlé) to resign from L’Oréal’s Board of Directors. Frydman was a French citizen, a Holocaust survivor, and a resister during the Second World War. He lived primarily in Israel and had no intention of assuaging the Arab League. So, at a secret meeting in April 1989, L’Oréal removed Frydman from its board. In retaliation, Frydman revealed that Jacques Corrèze, head of L’Oréal in the United States, was a Nazi collaborator and antisemite who had spent the war extorting Jews and confiscating their property. Corrèze had been the lieutenant and surrogate son of Eugène Deloncle, the ultranationalist, antisemitic, collaborationist founder of an interwar terrorist organization known as La Cagoule, and of the wartime collaborationist group Mouvement social révolutionnaire (MSR). Corrèze oversaw MSR’s expropriation activities, and in the winter of 1941–1942 volunteered to fight with German forces on the Eastern Front. After the war, Corrèze was sentenced to ten years in prison. How, Frydman asked, could such a man end up in charge of the American operations of a company like L’Oréal? The answer lay with L’Oréal’s founder, Eugène Schueller. Schueller, a chemist, founded L’Oréal in 1907 after having been hired by a Parisian hairdresser to create a safe and reliable hair dye for women. Schueller’s dye made him rich, and by the 1930s he was one of France’s leading industrialists. Schueller was also an unabashed authoritarian, a founding member of Eugène Deloncle’s MSR, and a supporter of Pétain’s National Revolution.56 The État Français was a welcome development for 56  Philippe Burrin, France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York: The New Press, 1993), 260.

116 

K. FREEMAN

Schueller politically, ideologically, and professionally: L’Oréal’s profits quadrupled between 1940 and 1944.57 After the Second World War, Schueller was tried twice: once in 1946 for industrial collaboration, and again in 1948 for his involvement in MSR. He was acquitted in the 1948 trial because his association with the MSR had only lasted until 1942.58 His trial for industrial collaboration, on the other hand, lasted two years and very nearly ended in conviction.59 Schueller was saved from ruin and disgrace, however, through the intervention of Pierre de Bénouville, founder of the Mouvements unis de la Résistance and leader of the Free French forces in Algeria. Bénouville, who hardly knew Schueller, intervened on his behalf as a favor to two close friends from his student days, two men who had become Eugène Schueller’s protégés: André Bettencourt and François Dalle.60 André Bettencourt, François Dalle, Pierre de Bénouville, and François Mitterrand were all alumni of a Catholic student residence at 104 rue de Vaugirard in Paris. The “104 network” is at the heart of the scandals that beset L’Oréal, and Vichy by association, in the 1990s. André Bettencourt was introduced to Eugène Schueller in 1938 and the two became close friends. Bettencourt later married Schueller’s daughter, Liliane. In 1940, Bettencourt secured a job for François Dalle who was groomed as Schueller’s successor. Dalle and Bettencourt brought their friend Mitterrand into L’Oréal’s orbit as well. The future president was briefly editor at Votre beauté, one of Schueller’s magazines, between the end of the war and Mitterrand’s election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1946. In 1957, Eugène Schueller died, and François Dalle became managing director of L’Oréal. Dalle hired Jacques Corrèze, proving that MSR had a long shadow: Schueller and Deloncle’s relationship lived on in that of their protégés, Dalle and Corrèze. After Corrèze was released from prison, Dalle made him vice-president of L’Oréal’s Spanish subsidiary.61 After Spain, Corrèze was dispatched to the United States to expand L’Oréal’s interests. At this point, he began acquiring Helena Rubinstein’s business. Jean Frydman’s bombshell led to Corrèze’s resignation from L’Oréal in 1991, but also to Dalle and Bettencourt’s vocal defense of their friend,  Eric Conan, “L’Oréal: L’arme de la mémoire” L’Express, February 16, 1995.  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 114. 59  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 122. 60  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 133. 61  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 162. 57 58

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

117

despite his unrepentant stance. This and the 1994 publication of an exposé on François Mitterrand’s Vichy years, Une jeunesse française, encouraged Frydman to continue his investigations into Bettencourt’s wartime activities.62 What he found sent shock waves through the French establishment. André Bettencourt had worked as a journalist during the occupation, writing for an agricultural magazine called La Terre française. His front-page articles championed the État Français’ National Revolution. Frydman republished the most explosive and vitriolic of Bettencourt’s writings, revealing the authoritarian and antisemitic past of this close friend of the president and husband of the richest woman in France.63 Bettencourt resigned in disgrace. The wartime behavior of Nestlé (owner of both Perrier and L’Oréal and therefore of the CfV and Laboratoires Vichy) also attracted attention in the 1990s. In France, this came in the wake of revelations about the company’s support of Pétain’s regime when a 1942 ad, “Présent Monsieur le Maréchal! Présent Nestlé!” came to light. In Switzerland, researchers revealed that Nestlé not only supplied chocolate to the Germany military throughout the Second World War, but also financed Swiss Nazis before and during that conflict.64 In 2000, Nestlé was required to pay a 14.6 million settlement to Holocaust survivors and victims of forced labor. The L’Oréal and Nestlé scandals reinforced connotations that Vichy and its products—Laboratoires Vichy cosmetics owned by L’Oréal, and Vichy water owned, ultimately, by Nestlé—remained tainted by the war years and the État Français. For the town of Vichy, the 1990s’ “obsessional phase” of France’s Vichy Syndrome, its “ever-present past,” manifested in a variety of ways.65 The L’Oréal and Nestlé scandals reinforced links (and the perception of links) between Vichy, its image, its products, and the État Français, and brought these into the present. Sensational revelations about Bettencourt and Mitterrand’s “Vichy years,” and the État Français links of other luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, which had a flagship store in the Hôtel du Parc and produced Pétainist propaganda, caught public attention. On the night of 10 November 1997, Corsican separatists exploded a bomb in the  Pierre Péan, Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934–1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).  Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 179. 64  “Nestlé pays 14.6 million into Swiss banks’ Holocaust settlement” The Independent, August 28, 2000. 65  Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy: An Ever-present Past (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). 62 63

118 

K. FREEMAN

Parc des sources to denounce Vichy as “the capital of the Pétainist French State, and a shameful symbol of collective amnesia.”66 Vichy’s wartime past was also mobilized in 1998 when the mayor of Montpellier, Georges Frêche, named a street in the city “rue de Vichy” to draw attention to the rise of the extreme right in his region. When Malhuret and Vichy’s municipal council descended on Montpellier in protest, Frêche declared, “in Montpellier we breathe a purer air than in Vichy!”67 Audrey Mallet explains that Vichy was also a key site of struggle for the historian, lawyer, and activist Serge Klarsfeld.68 In 1992, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup which resulted in the deportation of 6500 Jews to Nazi camps, Klarsfeld gathered in silent vigil in front of the Hôtel du Parc with the members of his organization, Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France. On this occasion, and without municipal permission, he placed a commemorative plaque in the building. Klarsfeld’s plaque was officially inaugurated the following year. Vichyssois’ responses to such initiatives combined ambivalence, defensiveness, and denial. The Klarsfeld plaque remained in a private interior courtyard of the Hôtel du Parc until 2000, when it was moved to a monument facing the building.69 On the night of its re-inauguration, the plaque was vandalized: text that addressed the complicity of the État Français in the deportations, the number of victims of the Holocaust, and the nature of the death camps was defaced. Although mayor Malhuret declared to the press that this was a “clear manifestation of antisemitism which arouses our wholehearted indignation,” he stated elsewhere, “I couldn’t say no to the Klarsfeld plaque, but I knew it would turn out badly.”70 Another initiative related to the war years in Vichy has drawn similar ambivalence. A walking tour, “Vichy, Capital of the État Français,” was created in the 1980s by a local tour guide and a history student to meet public demand for information about the war, given the absence of visible traces of the État Français in Vichy. The popularity of this “amateur” tour eventually

 Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 24.  Frêche quoted in Pascal Frasnetti, “La Mémoire de la ville de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours” (MA thesis, Université Charles de Gaulle Lille III, 1998), 79. See also AmV, Dossier “Nom de Vichy.” 68  Audrey Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire (Paris: Belin, 2019), 232–233. 69  AmV, Dossier “Plaques et noms de rues.” See also Mallet, Vichy contre Vichy. 70  François Dufay, “Vichy: cette ville qui veut oublier Pétain,” Le Point, January 31, 2003. 66 67

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

119

compelled a reluctant Tourism Office to formalize it in 1990.71 The new ads for the État Français walking tour proclaimed, “If you enjoyed this, try ‘The Second Empire: Vichy’s Golden Age’!” Although an État Français walking tour was grudgingly accepted by the municipality, proposals for a museum of the war years in Vichy have been consistently and categorically rejected. Many scholars, politicians, and activists, including Klarsfeld, have urged the municipality to create such an institution. In 1990, one of Vichy’s municipal councilors ventured that a museum of resistance and collaboration might in fact ease the town’s burden as “the symbol of the bad conscience of the French.” “If we care about the image of our town,” he proclaimed, “let us not hide this past behind some veil of shame.”72 Deputy Gérard Charasse has pressed for a historical research and documentation center.73 But Malhuret’s refusal was absolute. “As long as I am mayor,” he has stated, “there will be no discussion.”74

Conclusion: Enduring Stigma For Vichyssois, this attention to the war years is understood as further illustration of the town’s enduring stigmatization. As the town and the regime came under increasing scrutiny in the 1990s, Vichyssois’ rejection and offense at the “town-regime amalgam” intensified.75 Claude Malhuret wrote to the Académie française in 1996 to request a precision in future dictionaries over the correct usage of the word “Vichy.”76 In 1997, Gérard Charasse took Vichy’s indignation to the National Assembly: “Vichy is a town,” he proclaimed, “It didn’t invite the collaborationist government, but suffered it and suffers still.”77 In 1999 and again in 2003, he tabled a law to prohibit the use of the word Vichy to denote the État Français, and

 Haas, “Mémoires, identités et représentations,” 333.  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 2 July 1990. 73  Rosso Romain, “Vichy ne veut plus d’Histoire” L’Express, October 30, 2008. 74  Claude Malhuret quoted in François Dufay, “Vichy: cette ville qui veut oublier Pétain,” Le Point, 31 January 2003. 75  Carteret, Régime de Vichy, Ça suffit! 76  AmV, Dossier “Nom de Vichy.” 77  “Le député de l’Allier Gérard Charasse propose une loi pour ne plus associer Vichy à Pétain. Pour la troisième fois, le députe radical de gauche de l’Allier propose une loi destinée à remplacer l’expression ‘régime de Vichy’ par ‘Dictature de Pétain.’” Franceinfo, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, October 13, 2012. 71 72

120 

K. FREEMAN

renewed his efforts again in 2012.78 Vichyssois, in turn, have taken up Charasse’s slogan, “Vichy is a town!” Municipal councilor Christophe Pommeray created the website “Vichy, c’est une ville!,” which lists every “insulting public misuse” of the name Vichy so that “the inhabitants of the town can address those responsible.”79 Audrey Mallet stresses recent shifts in attitude among ordinary Vichyssois, notably an increased willingness to discuss the war years.80 Outside Vichy, there also appears to be a measure of sympathy, a recognition that whether or not Vichyssois were victims of the État Français, they have been tainted by its legacy. In discussions surrounding a European conference on the integration of immigrants held in Vichy in 2008, for example, Brice Hortefeux (Sarkozy’s minister for immigration, integration, and national identity) suggested that France had a responsibility to “break with sixty years of ostracism” and offer Vichy a “symbolic clean-­ sweep.”81 But for some observers, the choice of Vichy for an immigration conference by a president whose immigration policy—particularly the deportation of migrants—has been compared to the État Français’ was provocative: “You can’t blame the town of Vichy for its long-held rancor and desire to rehabilitate its spa. … But should that really start with a conference about the politics of hostility towards foreigners …?”82

Bibliography Baguley, David. Napoleon III and his Regime: An Extravaganza. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: Norton, 2000. Bar-Zohar, Michel. Bitter Scent: The Case of L’Oréal, Nazis, and the Arab Boycott. London: Dutton, 1996.

78  Assemblée nationale, Proposition de loi visant à substituer, dans les communications publiques invoquant la période de l’État français, aux références à la ville de Vichy, l’appellation “dictature de Pétain” (M. Gérard Charasse), N° 0729. 79  https://vichycestuneville.wordpress.com/2013/10/. 80  Mallet herself is contributing to this process through a mobile app, Vichy 1939–1945, available in English and French, in which key sites related to the wartime history of Vichy are identified and discussed, accompanied by historic images and primary documents. 81  Rosso, “Vichy ne veut plus d’Histoire,” 7. 82  Angelique Chrisafis, “Ghosts of collaboration haunt Vichy’s attempt to rehabilitate its image,” The Guardian, July 12, 2008.

5  RENEWAL AND DEFIANCE 

121

Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Summer 2007) Brandon, Ruth. Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubenstein, L’Oréal and the Blemished History of Looking Good. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. Burrin, Philippe. France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise. New York: The New Press, 1993. Carteret, Alain. Vichy: Cité Napoléon III. Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal, 2009. Carteret, Alain. Régime de Vichy, Ça Suffit! Vichy: Imprimerie Vidal, 2010. Chrisafis, Angelique. “Ghosts of collaboration haunt Vichy’s attempt to rehabilitate its image.” The Guardian, July 12, 2008. Conan, Eric. “L’Oréal: L’arme de la mémoire.” L’Express, February 16, 1995. Dufay, François. “Vichy: cette ville qui veut oublier Pétain,” Le Point, January 31, 2003. Franceinfo, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes. “Le député de l’Allier Gérard Charasse propose une loi pour ne plus associer Vichy à Pétain. Pour la troisième fois, le députe radical de gauche de l’Allier propose une loi destinée à remplacer l’expression ‘régime de Vichy’ par ‘Dictature de Pétain.’” October 13, 2012. Frasnetti, Pascal. “La Mémoire de la ville de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours.” MA thesis, Université Charles de Gaulle Lille III, 1998. Grenier, Lise, ed. Villes d’eaux en France. Paris: Institut Français d’Architecture, 1985. Haas, Valérie. “Mémoires, identités et représentations socio-spatiales d’une ville: le cas de Vichy. Étude du poids de l’histoire politique et touristique dans la construction de l’image de la ville par ses habitants.” PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1999. Kalifa, Dominique. La Véritable Histoire de la “Belle Époque.” Paris: Fayard, 2017a. Kalifa, Dominique. “Le Second Empire, une ‘Belle Époque’?” Histoire, économie & société 36, no. 3 (2017b): 61–71. Kapferer, Jean-Noel. The New Strategic Brand Management: Creating and Sustaining Brand Equity Long Term. Paris: Les Éditions d’organisation, 1992. Laske, Karl. “Ouverture du Procès des fausses factures de Maillard et Duclos.” Libération, January 26, 1998a. Laske, Karl. “Le procès Maillard et Duclos. Galembert lie le suicide de Grossouvre à l’argent noir.” Libération, January 28, 1998b. Mallet, Audrey. Vichy contre Vichy: Une capitale sans mémoire. Paris: Belin, 2019. Montfort, Eugene. Vichy: un regard neuf sur les villes d’eaux. Paris: Les Éditions LaJeunesse, 1937. Péan, Pierre. Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934–1947. Paris: Fayard, 1994. Poncet, Charles. Nestlé, Bettencourt et les Nazis. Paris: Vevey, 1995. Romain, Rosso. “Vichy ne veut plus d’Histoire.” L’Express, October 30, 2008. Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991.

122 

K. FREEMAN

Rousso, Henry, and Eric Conan. Vichy: An Ever-present Past. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998. Ville d’Eaux Magazine. Royat: Sett Communication, 2012. Winter, Jay. “Unfinished Business: Remembering the Great War Between Truth and Reenactment.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (2020): 119–140.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Introduction: What “Vichy” Means Local studies and municipal guidebooks of Vichy often begin with a discussion of the origins and etymology of Vichy’s name. These invariably stress the word’s difference. “Where did this name come from, this ‘Vichy,’ so bizarre, so barbaric, and so different from other French names?” Louis Nadeau asked in 1869.1 The word’s origins are, in fact, Latin (vicus calidus or Vippiacus depending on the theory) and Occitan (Vichèi), like many French place names. But in Vichy, invocations of the town’s name tend toward the exceptional and incomparable. “Vichy! At the mere mention of this name, the heart of every Bourbonnais beats faster. This town that we love has no equal”2; “Vichy is a unique place, there’s nowhere like it.”3 This exceptionalism has many dimensions. Vichy was imagined as exceptional for its grandeur and attractions. Even though other French resorts featured similar spa and tourist amenities, Vichy’s boosters were effective in promoting the idea that Vichy was “unique in the world and known to everyone, [with] an international reputation that places it above all

 Louis Nadeau, Vichy historique (Vichy: A. Wallon, 1869), 30.  Jean Cluzel, preface to Jean Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques (Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993), 9. 3  Médiathèque Valery-Larbaud (MVL), “Supplément Illustré: La Saison de Vichy” Le Figaro, May 31, 1910, 10 DJ 11. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1_6

123

124 

K. FREEMAN

publicity.”4 “If Vichy didn’t exist, it would have to be created,” proclaimed the editor of Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy.5 Where Vichy was distinctive, however, was in its reputation for decadence and the resort’s commitment to leisure and pleasure. Vichy was also exceptional in its cosmopolitanism—or, for critics, its “un-Frenchness.” A 1930 ad in Condé Nast shows boats, cars, planes, and trains all headed to Vichy from the four corners of the globe.6 “It seemed it was the Nile, and not the Allier,” wrote Jean Débordes, “that lapped the shores of Vichy.”7 Vichy’s thermal architecture, dominated by Orientalist and “exotic” themes, and its status as “colonial capital”—a choice destination for colonial elites—reinforced these perceptions, leading critics such as Lucien Rebatet to oppose Vichy as provisional capital in 1940 because it was too decadent but also too “un-French” to become the center of national renewal.8 Vichy was perhaps most distinctive, however, for its “thermal politics”: the degree of corporate dominance in Vichy shaped the municipality and its identity to a remarkable degree and over an extended period. What the “Vichy regime” meant depended on whether one was a supporter or opponent of the État Français. It meant renewal, revitalization, and reinvigoration of the nation by returning to traditional values, strong government, and France for the French. It continues to mean those things for a growing and increasingly mainstream segment of the French population today. For opponents, during the war and since, it means “the government of treason”: authoritarianism, repression, collaboration, antisemitism, xenophobia, and, increasingly, generalized evil and immorality that, Richard J. Golsan argues, has transcended the boundaries of the Second World War to infuse present understandings of a range of traumas and events.9 For Vichyssois, the establishment of the national government in their town meant a confirmation of Vichy’s status but also a loss of prestige. Over time, it came to mean victimhood, stigma, and ostracism from, and resentment toward, the French nation. 4  Archives municipales de Vichy (AmV), Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” La Tribune, May 15, 1956. 5  Maurice-J. Champel, ed., Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy (Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues, 1946), 7. 6  AmV, Dossier “Articles de presse,” Condé Nast Travel Service, June 24, 1930, 15. 7  Débordes, Vichy et la Compagnie fermière, 58. 8  Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942), 480–481. 9  Richard J. Golsan, The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

6 CONCLUSION 

125

Before “Vichy regime” meant État Français, however, it meant a thermal cure characterized by the imbrication of purity and decadence, science and self-indulgence, health and pleasure, authenticity and elitism. Over its history, the Vichy brand was defined, cultivated, promoted, and defended by the corporation at the heart of the resort, the Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (CfV), though different elements of the brand—tourism or consumer products—took precedence at different times. The relationship between brand and place also shifted periodically: the brand was anchored in Vichy’s geography by the resort and thermal springs, which lent authenticity to Vichy’s products. The brand divorced itself from the place in certain periods, however, when such geographic associations undermined corporate priorities or detracted from the image attached to Vichy products. The moments of greatest synergy between place and brand were when Vichy’s Queen of Spas identity—hinging on leisure, pleasure, and self-indulgence—was dominant. At other moments (from 1940 to 1945, and from the late 1950s to the late 1980s) when other meanings were attached to Vichy (wartime politics, medicalization, and socialization), Vichy’s brands and corporations distanced themselves from their place of origin. In 1942, for example, the Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy published a pamphlet by the illustrator Sennep, poking fun at the resort’s occupation by the French government. In a series of sixteen cartoons, two unfortunate tourists search in vain in wartime Vichy for lodging, food, and respite, but find only requisitions, restrictions, and regulations. The pamphlet concludes, however, with a vision of Vichy “in the year 2000”: the Parc des sources is once again an earthly paradise where visitors and their needs take center stage. The caption reads, “Vichy will always be Vichy.” This sentiment encapsulates Vichy’s exceptionalism and the tenacity with which the town clung to its identity as Queen of Spas. It also gestures at fears that Vichy-the-town might always be associated with Vichy-the-­ government. But it equally captures something of the defining relationships that have long structured the town’s history and experiences. Vichy is a company town, its social, cultural, and political history molded by corporations to a remarkable degree. The state has played an important role in this relationship, but more as an enabler of the resort’s corporate powerbrokers than as a defender of the town’s interests. As a result, Vichyssois have had difficulty imagining and constructing a civic identity not shaped by this dynamic (Fig. 6.1).

126 

K. FREEMAN

Fig. 6.1  J.  Sennep, “En l’an 2000 … Vichy sera toujours Vichy!” Dessins de J. Sennep présentés par la Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy, 1942. Pamphlet, collection of the author

“Vichy Will Always Be Vichy” The fatalism that underlies Vichy’s civic identity is due in part to the fact that there have been few other viable identity options for Vichyssois to draw from other than the intertwined discourses of stigma and victimhood. One option, which we might call the “authentically medical,” was subsumed by Vichy’s Queen of Spas identity and the culture of tourism to the resort.10 Part of the masquerade of a Vichy cure involved a performance of healthcare:

10  Kirrily Freeman, “Performing Leisure as Labour in the Queen of Spas: Tourism, ‘Cureism’, and Masquerade in Third Republic Vichy,” Journal of Tourism History, March 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755182X.2021.1903097.

6 CONCLUSION 

127

You write prescriptions, we ignore them, but we pay which is the important thing. We drink water, and wine too, we stroll, we dance, we gamble, money goes, pleasure comes, … love gains what virtue loses, … no one complains, and the survivors depart satisfied, and make plans for next season.11

Supporters of an authentically medical Vichy, those who opposed the resort’s indulgent and lavish food, drink, and entertainment and sought to focus Vichy’s energies on thermal therapies alone, were defeated by the money-making power of decadence and festivity. And the advent of socialized medicine after 1947 had a paradoxical effect on the viability of a medical identity for Vichy. Thermal doctors—who had once rivaled their elite patients in wealth and status—found their income significantly reduced once they were paid by the state healthcare system. The number of thermal doctors decreased as did the social standing of those who remained. Likewise, a narrow focus on health brought corporate neglect leading to a deterioration of thermal facilities, criticism of medical services, and the discrediting of the spa. Although science and medicine have always been a pillar of Vichy’s identity, they functioned as support and pretext for leisure, pleasure, and self-indulgence. They could not stand on their own. Another alternative identity for Vichy was socialist. This vision—of accessible thermalism and community ownership and management of the resort—was present throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It infused conflicts between the municipality and the resort, workers and the CfV, and was persistently voiced by a minority in the town and municipal council. This vision also found expression in a healthy labor movement and a trend toward socialist mayors during the Third Republic. In 1970, as the first renewal of the CfV’s lease since 1923 approached, and after more than a decade of alarming recession, an assortment of small merchants and unions called for the CfV’s expulsion from Vichy.12 The Comité de défense des intérêts de Vichy et du thermalisme resurrected an initiative—protecting “democratic thermalism” from the threat of the CfV’s “colonialism”—that had been championed by Vichy’s communist faction, led by Dr. Guillaumin, since 1946. National legislation in 1947 extending social security to cover thermal medicine was seized by Vichy’s 11  Félicien Mallefille, Le Coeur et le Dot (1851) quoted in Fréderic Dutheil, “Promenade dans les parcs de Vichy et saisons thermales,” Ethnologie Française, 36 (2006): 549. 12  AMV, Classeurs “Compagnie fermière de Vichy,” Conférence de presse, Comité de défense des intérêts de Vichy et du thermalisme (1970).

128 

K. FREEMAN

communists as the first step in the long-overdue eviction of the CfV, the essential precondition for the revolution that would transform Vichy. The insurgency against the CfV in 1970 had the support of Henri Védrines and Pierre Villon, communist deputies for Allier, who tabled a resolution demanding the nationalization of all thermal resorts in France.13 In his statement to the National Assembly, Védrines (who represented Allier from 1945 to 1958 and again from 1968 to 1973) emphasized the exploitative nature of the CfV and its parent companies. Just as Dr. Guillaumin had stated to the municipal council in 1948 that Vichy would always be exploited if its local magistrates continued to be vassals of a capitalist corporation “penalizing the small and modest, so that the rich may prosper,”14 so the Comité de défense, Villon, and Védrines imagined a future for Vichy without the CfV. But despite tentative efforts at popular thermalism in the late 1930s, Guillaumin’s candidacy for mayor in 1945, Vichy’s socialization and medicalization in the 1960s and 1970s, and the efforts of the Comité de défense, this socialist alternative was never adopted or even fully accepted. If anything, it fed negative perceptions of Vichy and the reflexes of victimhood and resentment. In 2011, ownership of Vichy’s thermal domain was finally devolved to the town, increasing municipal revenue and agency alike. This removed the state from Vichy, but not the corporations: the CfV, Perrier, and L’Oréal remain. Consequently, this major shift in governance and in the relationship between municipality and resort has still not altered Vichyssois’ self-image.

Conclusion: Beyond Collective Memory The contours of Vichy’s civic identity suggest that our efforts to understand the town’s relationship with its wartime past must move beyond the boundaries of Vichyssois’ collective memory of the Second World War. The identity formation process in Vichy has been dominated by other forces, over a longer term, that include the political, cultural, economic, and emotional, and is equally shaped by other traumas, relationships, and events. Postwar trajectories mingle with pre-war ones, nostalgia reinforces fears of decline leading to an ahistorical and sometimes revisionist view of 13  Vichy’s chamber of commerce rallied against these nationalization plans. See Jacques Pottier, La Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998 (Moulins: MV-CCI, 1998). 14  AmV, Municipal Council deliberations, 28 February 1948.

6 CONCLUSION 

129

the past. Most importantly, Vichy’s civic identity has not been shaped by Vichyssois alone. Their self-perception and understanding of the town’s past and present experiences are wrought in a continual process of negotiation with outside views. That these outsiders included corporations invested in constructing Vichy’s image as a marketable brand is of fundamental importance. Ultimately, the presence in Vichy of the Compagnie fermière de Vichy has been as significant to the construction of the town’s image, identity, and self-perception as the presence of the État Français.

Bibliography Champel, Maurice-J., ed. Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy. Vichy: Éditions des Montagnes Bleues, 1946. Débordes, Jean. Vichy et la Compagnie fermière: Un attelage à hauts risques. Vichy: Éditions des Cahiers bourbonnais, 1993. Dutheil, Fréderic. “Promenade dans les parcs de Vichy et saisons thermales (1850–1870).” Ethnologie Française 36, no. 3 (2006): 543–552. Golsan, Richard J. The Vichy Past in France Today: Corruptions of Memory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Nadeau, Louis. Vichy historique. Vichy: A. Wallon, 1869. Pottier, Jacques. La Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Moulins-Vichy, 1898–1998. Moulins: CCI de Moulins-Vichy, 1998. Rebatet, Lucien. Les Décombres. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1942.



Glossary

Milice  Paramilitary organization created by the État Français in January 1943 to combat the Resistance Pieds-noirs  French settlers in Algeria during the colonial period (1830–1962) Vichyssois  Resident of Vichy Vichyste  Supporter of the État Français

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1

131

Index1

A Académie française, 119 Alcohol, 36, 38 alcoholism, 30, 36 champagne, 7, 52, 57, 94 consumption of, 36, 38 quina, 30 whiskey, 30, 93, 94 wine, 35 Aletti, Jacques, 50–52, 75, 81 Aletti, Joseph, 5, 64, 66, 67, 79 Algeria, 79, 81, 116 Algerian War, 13, 84 American, see United States Appellation contrôlée, 2, 4, 22, 34 Arab League, 114, 115 Art Deco, 17, 108, 109 Art Nouveau, 17, 108, 109 Association for the Defence of the Memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP), 9, 10

Association of Friends of Napoleon III in Vichy, 112 “Attentisme,” 8, 12, 13 B Baths Bains Callou, 110 Bains Lardy, 89 Baugnies, Georges, 82 Belle Époque, 17, 17n60, 36, 66, 104, 109, 112, 113 Bettencourt, André, 107, 116, 117 Bonnard, Charles, 69, 90 Bourachot, Robert, 114 Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI), 4, 5, 16, 82–84, 89, 91, 93

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 K. Freeman, The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93197-1

133

134 

INDEX

C Cagoule, La, 115 Callou, Arthur, 24 Callou, Georges-Antoine, 24, 82 Carteret, Alain, 112 Casinos Casino des Fleurs, 90 Elysée Palace, 90 Grand Casino, 24, 25, 37, 52, 90, 92, 100, 106, 108, 111 Petit Casino, 48, 56, 57, 90 Célestins, Les, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 113 convent, 105 hotel and spa, 103, 105 springs, 105 CfV, see Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy Chamber of Commerce, see Vichy, chamber of commerce Charasse, Gérard, 119, 119n77, 120 Cluzel, Jean, 97 Collaboration, 10, 13, 14, 48, 52, 72, 96, 106, 108, 116, 119, 124 Colonialism, 13, 15, 16, 79, 82–84, 124, 127 Colonies, 16, 31, 79, 101 Comité de défense des intérêts de Vichy et du thermalisme, 127 Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (CfV) concession, 24, 67, 68, 90, 95–97, 99, 105n8 development of Vichy, 91 hostility towards the, 82, 99, 120 and the État Français, 72, 95, 104, 110

Compagnie fermière de Vichy, see Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (CfV) Contamination benzene, 105 typhoid, 69, 70, 81n29 Corrèze, Jacques, 115, 116 Cosmetics, 4, 6, 22, 57, 66, 106, 109, 117 See also Laboratoires industriels de Vichy (LIDV); Laboratoires Vichy; L’Oréal; Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV) Coulon, Pierre, 83, 84, 91–93, 96, 106, 107 Cure-ism, see Hydrotherapy D Dalle, François, 115, 116 Dark Years, 2, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18, 111, 113 De Bénouville, Pierre, 116 Débordes, Jean, 8–9, 91, 124 Decadence, 2, 7, 21, 22, 31, 36, 42, 43, 53, 94, 105, 109, 113, 114, 124, 125, 127 and the Belle Epoque, 36, 113 and the État Français, 21, 22 and the Second Empire, 22 and the Third Republic, 2, 22, 43 Declinism, 16, 17, 101 Decolonization, 4, 6, 12, 15, 78–90, 92, 101 De Galembert, Antoine, 103, 105, 105n7, 114 De Gaulle, General Charles, 11, 12

 INDEX 

De Grossouvre, François, 114 Deloncle, Eugène, 115, 116 Donneuses d’eau, 66, 66n96, 90 E Elegance, 15, 23, 75, 76 Empress Eugenie, 111 État Français, 1, 6–14, 18, 21, 22, 43, 44, 48, 52, 54, 55, 58, 71, 72, 78, 95, 104, 105, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117–120, 124, 125, 129 legacy of, 13, 120 Etymology, 123 Evian accords, 98n121 water, 98n121 Exceptionalism, 10, 16, 101, 123, 125 F Faurisson, Robert, 84 First World War, 2, 8, 22, 36, 37, 39, 53, 71, 72 France Franco-Prussian War, 6, 34, 71 provisional government of, 1, 12, 47, 51 (see also État Français) Frank, Robert, 16, 101 Frêche, Georges, 118 French Republic Fourth Republic, the, 16 Third Republic, the, 2, 22, 34–43, 112, 127 values of, 43 Frydman, Jean, 115–117 G Germany, 37, 51, 115, 117 Gestapo commemoration of victims of, 12 prison, 12 (see also Hotels, Hôtel du Portugal)

135

Goffman, Erving, 10 Golsan, Richard J., 17, 18, 21, 124 Great Depression, 42 Great War, see First World War Groupement des Hôtels de Grand Premier Ordre de Vichy, 87n64 Guillaumin, Jacques, 53, 127, 128 H Haas, Valérie, 11, 13, 71 Haller, Dr. Prosper, 106 Harmsworth, St John, 93 Hotels Aletti Algiers, 79 Aletti Palace, 106, 108, 111 The Carlton, 50, 64, 75, 90 Central Hotel, 108 construction of, 36, 66, 103 demolition of, 90, 110 employees of, 66 Hôtel Alexandra, 55 Hôtel Chaloin, 64 Hôtel Cornil, 64 Hôtel de la Paix, 50 Hôtel de la Place des Victoires, 90 Hôtel de Provence, 90 Hôtel des Ambassadeurs, 35 Hôtel des Thermes, 64, 87 Hôtel d’Oran, 50 Hôtel du Grand Condé, 49 Hôtel du Parc, 10, 51, 52, 55n47, 64, 76, 90, 117, 118 Hôtel du Portugal, 12, 48, 78 Hôtel et Restaurant Lafayette, 50 Hôtel Gallia, 49, 50 Hôtel Guilliermen, 64 Hôtel Majestic, 11, 25, 64 Hôtel Montaret, 64 Hôtel Sornin, 64 Hôtel Thermalia, 108 “illicit profits” of, 51 Les Célestins, 103, 105–107, 109, 110, 113

136 

INDEX

Hotels (cont.) Pavilion Sévigné, 106 requisition of, 37, 39, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 71, 72, 78, 125; First World War, 72; Second World War, 71 The Radio, 64 revenue of, 9, 49–51 The Ruhl, 64 survey of, 49, 110 Thermal Palace, 50, 87n63, 90, 106 war damages claims by, 6 Hydrotherapy, 16, 22 Hygiene, 8, 36, 42 I Israel, 95, 114, 115 J Jews, 12, 43, 48, 95, 115, 118 deportation of, 12, 48, 118 Juppé, Alain, 114 K Klarsfeld, Serge, 118, 119 L Laboratoires industriels de Vichy (LIDV), 104, 107 See also Laboratoires Vichy; L’Oréal; Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV) Laboratoires Vichy, 6, 30, 106, 107, 111, 117 See also Laboratoires industriels de Vichy (LIDV); L’Oréal; Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV) Lacarin, Jacques, 96–100, 106

Lagrou, Pieter, 15, 15n50 Lebobe, Auguste Stanislas, 23–24 Léger, Pierre-Victor, 53 Leven, Gustave, 94, 95, 105, 106 L’Exploitation hôtelière Franco-­ Algérienne, 81 Liberation, 1, 6, 47, 53, 55, 56 LIDV, see Laboratoires industriels de Vichy Liver, 9, 16, 26, 30, 84, 85, 89, 94, 109 Loiseau, Ivan, 52 L’Oréal, 4, 6, 93, 104–107, 113–117, 128 scandals, 6, 105, 113, 114, 116, 117 See also Laboratoires Vichy; Laboratoires industriels de Vichy (LIDV) Louis Vuitton, 51, 117 M Maillard Duclos affair, 113, 114 Malhuret, Claude, 14, 103–106, 104n3, 111, 114, 118, 119 election of, 103 Mallet, Audrey, 2, 8, 9, 11–14, 84, 118, 120, 120n80 Medicalization, 4, 37, 78–90, 92, 125, 128 Milice, 48, 52, 56 Mitterrand, François, 114, 116, 117 Moinard, Louis, 53, 57, 78 Mouvement social révolutionnaire (MSR), 115, 116 Mouvements unis de la Résistance (MUR), 116 N Napoleon III, 17, 23, 24, 27, 34, 60, 92, 104, 108, 110–112 busts, 110 celebration of, 111 park, 110

 INDEX 

National Assembly (France), 56, 95, 119, 128 National Revolution, 43, 52, 84, 115, 117 Nazi forces, 113 occupation, 113 Nestlé, 4, 6, 105, 115, 117 and the Second World War, 117 Noise, 88 Nostalgia, 10, 17–18, 104–113, 128 Nouveau Mémorial de Vichy, 57, 124 O Omnisport park, 91 Orientalism, 17, 25, 108, 124 P Parc des sources, 24, 25, 29, 60, 64, 68, 109, 118, 125 Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM), 30, 32 Parti républicain, 114 Perrier brand image, 16, 93–94, 105 contamination, 105 founding of, 93–94 and purchase of the CfV, 93, 94 Perrier, Dr. Louis-Eugène, 4, 5, 16, 17, 90–100, 94n93, 104–107, 117, 128 Pétain, Marshal Philippe, 1, 7, 10, 12, 13, 42, 43, 48, 52, 53, 84, 112, 115, 117 and French colonies, 13 Pétainism, 11, 13, 52, 112, 117, 118 Pieds-noirs, 13, 84 Plaques, 12, 14, 118 Pommeray, Christophe, 120 Prostitutes, see Prostitution

137

Prostitution brothels, 7, 27, 42, 88, 90; La Féria, 90 restriction of, 42 support for, 7, 27, 29, 42 Purity, 2, 22, 31, 36, 43, 125 R Rebatet, Lucien, 43, 124 Reparations, 6, 14, 48–58, 54n42 Resistance Forces françaises de l’intérieur (FFI), 53 Gaullist, 12, 52 Organisation de résistance de l’Armée (ORA), 53 Vichyste, 52 Restauration, La, 25, 69, 100 Rousso, Henry, 11, 18 Rubinstein, Helena, 114–116 S Saint-Yorre, 34, 98, 98n121 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 21, 120 government of, 21 Schueller, Eugène, 107, 115, 116 Second Empire, 17, 17n60, 22–24, 27–34, 103, 104, 108–112, 119 Second World War, 1, 2, 2n3, 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 27, 71, 84, 101, 104, 115–117, 124, 128 Sennep, J., 7, 125, 126 Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 22–23, 23n8 Simenon, Georges, 89 Sjoberg, Henri, 7 Socialism, 53, 127–128 Socialization, 4, 78–90, 125, 128 Social security, 85, 88, 89, 95, 127

138 

INDEX

Société des Grands Hôtels de Vichy (SGHV), 4–6, 16, 50, 51, 54, 55, 64, 66, 72, 75, 79, 81, 84, 87 Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV), 6, 30, 106, 107 Société immobilière et hôtelière de l’Afrique du Nord (SIHAN), 16, 79, 81 Sporting Club, 91, 92, 109 See also Sporting, Le Sporting, Le See also Sporting Club Swiss, 47, 66, 87, 117 See also Switzerland Switzerland ambassador, 47 and Nazis, 117 Syphilis, 36 T Tax, 48, 49, 68, 78, 87n63, 89, 92, 97, 98, 100 Tourism dark tourism, 9 museum, 9, 14, 119 revenue from, 78, 100 walking tour, 9, 109, 118, 119 Typhoid, 69, 70, 81n29 U United States, 6, 31, 38, 40, 114, 115 military, 6 Vichy springs in the, 31 V Venereal diseases, 38 See also Syphilis Vichy brand, 4, 6, 8, 17, 22, 31, 34, 40, 44, 59, 94, 104, 106, 107, 117, 125, 129

chamber of commerce, 49, 51, 105n8, 128n13 as colonized, 71, 96 commodification of, 31 cosmetics, 4, 6, 22, 104, 106, 109, 117 (see also Laboratoires Vichy; L’Oréal; Société d’Hygiène Dermatologique de Vichy (SHDV)) cure, 7, 22, 26, 29, 84, 125, 126 development of, 5, 6, 17, 23, 25, 27, 30, 40, 60, 91, 99, 105, 108 economic depression in, 15, 101 exceptionalism, 10, 16, 101, 123, 125 liberation of, 1, 47, 52n30 mayor of, 1, 11, 14, 38, 53, 62–64, 78, 83, 106, 113 municipal council, 1, 11, 29, 53, 63, 118–120, 127, 128 municipality, 1, 53, 54, 58, 83, 88, 106, 119, 124 name, (mis)use of, 2, 22, 31, 120 negative perceptions of, 2, 38, 62, 128 “Old Vichy”, 60–63 products, 4, 6, 7, 12, 17, 22, 26, 30, 31, 34, 58, 82, 101, 105–107, 117, 125 public works in, 14 as Queen of Spas, 1, 2, 8, 9, 17, 22–27, 29, 37, 43, 58, 64, 76, 85, 88, 89, 94, 104, 107, 125, 126 residents of, 1, 2, 12, 16, 21, 29, 56, 60, 62, 64, 66–68, 71, 110, 113 (see also Vichyssois) revival of, 6, 99, 103–105, 108–110, 114 sedentary, 59–60, 62, 70 stigmatization of, 10, 11, 17, 21 as “thermal capital”, 23, 58, 97, 110

 INDEX 

tourism to, 4, 8, 9, 12, 22, 48, 56, 63, 81, 88, 92, 104, 109, 125, 126 water; contamination of, 70; “false Vichies”, 34; sales of, 35, 98 (see also Brasseries et glacières de l’Indochine (BGI); Compagnie fermière de l’Établissement thermal de Vichy (CfV); Perrier) website Vichy is a town!, 21, 119, 120 Vichy, chamber of commerce, 49, 51, 87, 99, 105n8 Vichy-État, 4, 7, 8, 31, 58–71, 98

139

Vichy regime, 1–10, 112, 124, 125 See also État Français; Vichy, cure Vichyssois “seasonal”, 4, 62 deaths in WWI, 39 negative perceptions of, 2, 22, 62 “sedentary,” 59–60, 62, 70 self-image of, 128 stigmatization of, 113, 119 Vichyste, 2, 13, 48, 52 Vichy Syndrome, 13, 14, 104, 117 Vuitton, Gaston, 75 W War damages, see Reparations