World War II Infamy : Vichy: Town Tries to Shed Its Dark Past

For more than 100 years, the little town of Vichy, renowned for the curative powers of its waters and the ease of its life, ranked as one of the premier resorts of France. Many Vichysoisse, as the townspeople are known, like to bask in this romantic history. But the rest of the world now associates the town with a darker history.

During World War II, the town, which had no say in the matter, served as the capital for the collaborationist and fascist government of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and the name Vichy, for many, still conjures images of traitors and Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites.

A visitor would have to look very hard to find even the barest trace of this past in Vichy today. Yet the reputation of history is hard to shake off.

‘Wrong Impression’

“No one ever calls the government of those days the Petain government or even the government in Vichy,” said Mayor Jacques Lacarin in his offices in the city hall recently. “They simply call it Vichy. We spend millions of dollars to advertise the city as a wonderful place to come and stay, and people have this wrong impression of it from history. And do you know there was not a single Vichysoisse in the government of Vichy?”

The dark history, however, does not keep French visitors from the city. Almost 20,000 still come to Vichy every year to take a cure by sipping varieties of mineral water and submitting to massages in the mineral baths. Another 100,000, seeking a vacation more than a health cure, join them to play tennis or golf, walk in its lovely, 19th-Century parks and gamble in the baroque casino.

‘An Idealized France’

“Look around you,” said Jacques Chambriard, a reporter for the local newspaper La Montagne, as he chatted in a cafe in the Parc des Sources where people sit and drink mineral water or stroll under fancy, curving wrought iron arbors. “This city is beautiful. It is like a movie. You not only feel that you see all France here, but it is an idealized France that you see.”

Vichy is a city of deep greenery and bandstands and terraces and fountains and antique hotels and magnificent, Oriental-domed baths. It still has much of the splendor spawned in the 19th Century by the decision of the imperial doctors to send an anemic and sickly Emperor Napoleon III here.

The waters of Vichy failed to strengthen him. If they had succeeded, according to one 19th-Century historian, the emperor might have been strong enough to stave off France’s defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870.

Yet the inefficacy of the imperial cure has never seemed as important as the glamour of the imperial court. Though the waters failed and the emperor abdicated, his choice of the resort as his favorite health spa ensured its popularity until well into the next century.

This popularity, in fact, led to its selection as the capital of the Petain government in unoccupied France after the Nazi Germans occupied Paris and northern France in 1940. Vichy, then a town about two-thirds the size of its current population of 35,000, had 15,000 hotel rooms then. No other town in this part of France had so much available space.

The Petain government, with all its civil servants and politicians, moved in, swelling the population of the town to more than 100,000.

“They all came from Paris,” said 74-year-old Mayor Lacarin, who was a young medical student then. “We just looked at them.”

Vichy tries to ignore this history. “The world may think of the Petain state when they hear of Vichy,” said Chambriard, the local reporter, “but you cannot see anything about it here. There is not a sign anywhere.”

The traces are covered up. The Vichy public library keeps archives of the Petain government, but they lie in a basement under lock and key. Upon request, however, a librarian will unlock the safe-like doors and show a visitor stacks of fascistic posters, almost all sporting a portrait of Petain. The posters brim with homilies to motherhood and youth set against the stark propaganda decorations of those years.

The Hotel du Parc that Petain used as his residence and headquarters is now an office and apartment building housing a variety of clients, including the studios of local radio station Vichy Infos and the Joana Jopez occult bookstore. A right-wing Paris organization, the Assn. for the Defense of the Memory of Marshal Petain, bought Petain’s old rooms in hopes of transforming them into a Petain museum. But objections from other owners in the building have prevented that.

The Pavillon Sevigne, a 17th-Century mansion that is now the most comfortable hotel in Vichy, was used as the site of Petain’s Cabinet meetings during World War II, but no one has put up a plaque in any of its ornate public rooms to commemorate that.

Vichy is no longer the great spa that it was. Yet, although the bureaucracy of the Petain government damaged many hotel rooms, few Vichysoisse, no matter how bitter about Petain, blame the decline of the city on its role in World War II.

The fortunes of Vichy have always depended on the mystique of mineral water. And the French, though still more persuaded of the curative powers of water than many other peoples, are simply not as prone to drink mineral water and bathe in it as they once were.

Spas were once so popular in France that the bathhouses and casinos of towns like Vichy and Aix-les-Bains and Evian and Vittel are among the architectural wonders of the country, many of them monuments to the exuberance and optimism of the era around the turn of the century.

Vichy, after it was favored by Napoleon III, was long regarded as the most important French spa. Many visitors were seriously concerned about their health.

“In this place,” the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt wrote in their 1867 journal, “one loses the illusion that sickness is a distinction.”

In 1931, Vichy’s record year, almost 130,000 people signed up for medical treatment in the baths.

Many vacationers, however, probably showed up in Vichy simply to be seen.

“There was a time when Vichy was in fashion,” said Chambriard, “and, in fact, to be in fashion was to be in Vichy.”

In the heyday of the French empire before World War II, Vichy was packed with visitors from all over the world.

“In those days,” Mayor Lacarin, a medical doctor, explained in a long and excited account of the city’s history, “perhaps 80% of the curistes (as those seeking a cure from waters are known in French) came from the old French colonies. Many were French civil servants who had intestinal parasites or malarial fever and decided to spend some time taking a cure at Vichy. And they would meet many of their colleagues from other colonies and many other important people. Vichy was a crossroads of the world.

“Belgians would come from the Congo. The English would come from the British Indian army. Maharajahs would come from India. The king of Morocco would come. So would the Bey of Tunisia, the Shah of Iran. I mean the previous one, of course. So would South Americans, North Americans. But all this ended after World War II.”

Then France lost its colonies. Fewer French worked in Africa. Antibiotics were discovered and proved more effective against tropical diseases than the waters of Vichy. Taking a cure at Vichy or some of the other historic spas began to strike many French as old hat.

In the last few decades, however, the French government has helped to reverse the decline by paying for many of the cures. If a doctor signs a prescription calling for mineral waters to help alleviate a pain or improve the condition of a sick person, the government usually subsidizes the treatment out of social security funds.

In 1984, for example, 600,000 people took a water cure somewhere in France, and social security paid for all or part of 85% of these cures.

To attract social security patients, a national society of spas recommends different waters for different diseases. Vichy is recommended for both rheumatism and illnesses of the digestive tract.

Despite social security, mineral waters have not regained their prewar popularity, and Vichy now has only a third of the hotel rooms that it did when Petain arrived in 1940. The town now ranks 9th among French spas in the number of people who come every year to take a cure.

Since the days of Napoleon III, a private company, the Compagnie Fermiere de Vichy, has owned the baths, fountains, casino, bottling plant and pastille factory of Vichy, as well as some of544499813now expanding a large sports complex across the city on the opposite bank of the Allier River.

The Perrier mineral water company, which now controls the Compagnie Fermiere de Vichy, is convinced that it must attract a younger, sportier, healthier crowd to Vichy. The motto of its new publicity campaign is “Vichy Peps Me Up.” Curistes have always come to Vichy for a little pep. Yet the tone of the new slogan, especially now that it is emblazoned in bright green letters on white sweat shirts, would probably sound a little slangy and out of place to the courtly clients of Vichy’s bygone age.