The Seeds of Ideology Land on Fertile Ground.

The last post showed the construct of the colonial pyramid of Diego-Suarez. Built by successive French administrations, the grands colons were firmly at the top. Clinging beneath them were the petits blancs, whilst the indigénat kept the majority of Malagasy people under a separate and much harsher legal yoke. The Vichy puppet government in France, installed after the German conquest, didn't need to invent any structure. The collaborationist government of Maréchal Pétain already spoke the same language.

Travail, Famille, Patrie

When Maréchal Pétain's National Revolution took power, they had a to-do list. One of its first acts was to replace the Republic's motto of Liberté, Fraternité et Egalité with a new one: Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, Family, Country). The church was placed at the centre of the administration. It elevated tradition over citizenship and built a cult of personality around Pétain himself. He was the father who had saved France at Verdun during the Great War. And this time, over twenty year later, he was the man who spared France from much worse when the Blitzkrieg shattered the French army and placed the German heel firmly on Marianne’s neck. None of this was subtle. None of it needed adaption to a colonial audience already comfortable with rank, deference and a regime run by an unelected hierarchy.

When Vichy dictated, the Big Island’s governor changed very little. The directives of the so-called National Revolution policy were applied to the letter. And usually without any local consideration. Madagascar experienced the full rigours of Pétainist, read Nazi, repression. The thing is, and it’s something that is often overlooked, is that it wasn’t German Nazism directing things. No, this was Vichy politicians promoting their own ideas of pure, undiluted, ultra-conservative ideology.

Manufactured Loyalty

Governor-General Annet, who took over from Cayla in 1941, ensured that Vichy ideology stopped being rhetoric and became administration. Between July 1940 and November 1942, emphasis was placed on youth and Empire. Human and geographical ramparts, behind which the National Revolution attempted to conceal its own weakness, were constructed. As with all Nazi ideologies, strength, youth, perfection and fear of the other, became the norm. And, as with all authoritarian ideologies, the free press didn't survive. After the imposition of the Vichy regimes norms, by 1941, the only newspapers still available on the island were those which praised the administration, or which simply printed official information.

Loyalty to the regime became buzzwords. Associations of veterans, whose ideas coincided with those of the regime were formed and those who did not agree with the ideology or complained about the restriction of liberties were demonised and harassed. In other words, loyalty was not only assumed, it started being organised.

Tilting Toward the Axis

Where the story becomes difficult to divorce from neutrality, is when the puppet Vichy government made it clear that the future was aligned with the ideals of the Axis. The Vichy leadership offered Germany and, through parallel channels, Japan a closer liaison. By early 1942, German officials were pressing Tokyo to become more actively involved in the Indian Ocean and Japan was urged to extend their operations through Ceylon, the Seychelles and Madagascar with the objective of dividing supply routes to the Far East and Australia.

Intelligence received led London to understand where this might lead. In late 1941, their led British Chiefs of Staff to consider the real possibility that the Vichy government migh permit Japan to occupy Madagascar as a pivot for combined Axis operations against the Allies.

Churchill was clear on the issue and an invasion force to preclude an Axis occupation of Madagascar was quickly assembled. By now, it was known that the Governor of Madagascar had effectively provided permission to the Japanese to use the island as a base for long-range submarines. Once the French knew of the British intention to invade, Vichy went further and asked the Japanese to occupy the island outright; this to exclude the British. This was not a colony passively swept up in a European quarrel. This was a colonial government actively angling to bring an Axis power into the Indian Ocean, and only Britain's own invasion pre-empted whatever might have followed.

Fiction vs Reality

None of this required the SS to be present in Madagascar, and there is no historical record that any such units were there. I gave Fire Tree a ruthless SS officer and a troop of fifty battle-hardened soldiers anyway, alongside a delegation of Japanese diplomats, because the documented reality made the possibility of a small, forward-postured Axis presence entirely plausible. It’s the kind of thing that easily could have existed in the space between what Laval offered and what Tokyo might have accepted, had events moved even a little differently.

My Lieutenant Governor is also invented in the same spirit. Annet, the real Governor-General, was the man who managed the island's loyalty to Pétain and its opening to the Axis, and history judged him for it. In 1947 he was convicted of indignité nationale. But Annet is a historical figure, and I didn’t want to put words or crimes that can't be supported into his mouth. So, I built a Lieutenant Governor beneath him. He was a man who could carry the ideology's cruelty into a house Aurelia's daughters lived in. His devotion to the Vichy cause, his ruthlessness, and his obsession with Martine are invented. All of it is built from the same material as everything else in this series: an ideology that had already organised an entire colony around loyalty and hierarchy, and gave a certain kind of man licence to treat other people's lives as instruments for his own benefit.