Veni, Vidi, Vichy

“Everything doesn’t all collapse at once. Within the overturned anthill a few corners remain almost peaceful; and there the ants may imagine their universe going on as usual.”

– The opening lines of Victor Serge’s novel, Last Times.

Anyone who swims in fetid and perfervid waters of social media will recognize the hashtags #VichyDems or #VichyDemocrats.

They are catchphrases that have become a term of contempt for Democratic public officials. Insults meant to rebuke of a formal acquiescence to authoritarianism through the maintenance of the now-bankrupt norms of American political institutions. “Vichy Democrats” continue to observe the rules amidst a smoking rubble wrought by the Trump Administration’s first two months of office.

The perception is that #Vichy Dems are happily surrendering their constituents to fascism to ensure comity. Yet the widespread use of these epithets offers an opportunity moment to reflect: What was Vichy? How was it installed? How did it take hold in France in 1940?

Technically, Vichy France was an “independent” state. Yet its independence was in name only.

Vichy France was created and controlled by the victorious Nazi state that had blitzkrieged France – divided clearly into an occupied zone in the north of that country (including Paris) and a “free” zone in the south that encompassed Marseilles and other French protectorates abroad.

Think Casablanca for how this latter political entity was run.

The scholarly literature on the extent to which Vichy was a puppet or client state of Nazi Germany in its early years is contentious. Yet for all practical purposes, Vichy was a part of the Third Reich from the beginning – and only given its fig leaf of autonomy between 1940 and 1942 as Adolf Hitler sought to take France out of the Second World War and isolate Great Britain for a planned invasion.

Vichy France’s leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, held authoritarian power within the state in the service of fascism. He was squeezed hard by Hitler’s government from the start, gradually adopting key elements of the Nazi program (antisemitism, totalitarianism, convergence with the Nazi war program) in steady dribs and drabs.

By 1942, the so-called “free” zone in the south was no more. Vichy was a Nazi vassal state.

1940: Nazi troops march on the Champs-Elysee after the fall of the Third Republic. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-036-09A / CC-BY-SA)

One of the best accounts of the fall of France and how Vichy flowed into the vacuum left by its Third Republic can be found in Victor Serge’s novel, Last Times.

It is a book that stands slightly apart from Serge’s other literary output. He wrote Last Times in 1943 and 1944 during his exile from Europe. Serge’s central role in the consolidation of the Bolshevik regime and broader Soviet politics from 1919 through 1937 prevented any chance of finding asylum in the United States. So he and his family found refuge in Mexico. (It was Serge’s final port of call; He died in Mexico City in November 1947.)

Last Times is a vivid dash through the France’s fall. It begins as Paris waits anxiously for the arrival of the Nazi blitzkrieg to arrive in the city and ends with the scattering of those who fled that onslaught from the port of Marseilles to points across the globe – or their disappearances and deaths at the hands of fascist forces.

Many of those who have written about Victor Serge’s art and life tend to downgrade Last Times in any assessment of his achievements. Even the writer himself harbored some doubts about his aims in writing it.

Yet as a broadly-pitched distillation of his ideas, Last Times serves as an invaluable introduction to Serge’s work.

Serge wrote it as a page-turner for the North American market. His singular politics dominate his other novels, poetry, private musings and his classic autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Yet his success in finding a home for Last Times – as his other works of genius languished in his desk drawer – demonstrates that his efforts to satisfy a perceived audience and remain true to his essential vision did pay off.

Aside from a short book (“From Lenin to Stalin”) published in the US in 1937, Last Times also was the only work published in English by Victor Serge during his lifetime.

And, in our moment of renewed interest in Vichy, it merits closer examination.

1942: Victor Serge in the studio of Austrian Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico. (Public Domain)

The brilliance of Victor Serge’s Last Times is rooted in proximity. He experienced the calamity of 1940 in France – and his prose captures all of the desperation, tumult, resignation and moral compromise of that moment.

Serge was living in Paris as the Germans approached the capital. His own story was steeped in the bitterest of historical ironies. He was one of the very few opponents of Joseph Stalin to escape the vicious purges of the late 1930s. Now the forces of Nazi totalitarianism closed in on him.

Yet Serge lingered for as long as he could in the city before fleeing south to the “free” zone with his girlfriend, Laurette Séjourné, her daughter, Jeannine, and others. His decision to leave at the last moment turns out to be a boon for readers, who are treated to lyrical passages of a capital emptied of much of its life and haunted by absences and shadows as the Germans advance:

The white midnight reigned over the enchanted city, intensified by its empty spaces, its silence, the blindness of its shopwindows and closed cafés, the boredom of the newspaper stands deserted at high noon like urinals at night. The streets were nothing but useless plane surfaces. A half-open bar was surprising like a reminiscence; a housewife going out shopping, God knows where, passed quickly by this absorbed walker, and cast a vague, questioning look at him.

Last Times follows its characters as the new order imposed by the Nazis takes hold in the north – and the uneasy bargain of autonomy struck in the south yields both opportunities and dangers. The book ends with an assortment of fates: unhappy deaths, the submergence of decency and human dignity beneath oppression, and the tenuous yet exuberant liberties that Serge and lucky others found in escape.

“There’s not much chance of us seeing each other again,” said Charras. “I’m glad for you, Doctor. Try to make them understand over there.” Ah, what can they understand of the tragedies of the Old World? thought Ardatov. And what can a shipwrecked man out of the last lifeboat explain to anyone about his experience, his despair, the certainty of his expectations – as certain as the storm in the gathering clouds?

June 1940: German troops and French women outside the Moulin Rouge. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-129-0480-26 / Boesig, Heinz / CC-BY-SA)

As I mentioned, even Serge had doubts about whether Last Times was worth it. He also was writing searing and pioneering works that stretched genre and form such as Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Unforgiving Years in roughly the same period.

Serge jotted the following note on the novel’s composition in his Notebooks in March 1944:

I am currently writing a novel that takes place in France during and in the immediate aftermath of the defeat. I am frequently drowning in it, stopped in my tracks by darkness. I often don’t know what my people are doing, where they’re going: they’re wrapped in fog. I feel tired. I don’t feel like going on – I doubt it’s worth the trouble. Then the impulse – aided by the will to work – arises on its own.

And, in December 1944, an increasingly ailing Serge further observed:

I’m at the end of Last Days and I’m feeling an extraordinary difficulty in finishing this book. It’s not just the physical breathlessness and the lack of a favorable environment. It’s more for me that the novel must have an inner justification, internal to its characters and its atmosphere, and that in reality all the people I have attempted to bring to life seem to me condemned men walking through a fog. They need a solution, I need a solution for them – and there isn’t one. History can only impose solutions by walking over their dead bodies.

Serge sold himself very short. Last Days weaves his essential politics of human dignity so tightly into the book that it sparkles from start to finish. I could quote dozens of passages. I will offer two of them in hopes that you will pick up the book and read it.

As his characters flee south toward Marseilles, steeping in the atmosphere of poisonous betrayal of their own weak government, Serge offers a dazzling passage to Hilda - a brave young woman involved in the struggles for social and political justice:

We breathe treason and I think there are no traitors. Real treason is much more difficult and rare than we think. A few wretches don’t really count. There are old words, old ideas, old institutions that have lost their meaning. People without a compass who have no means of expressing themselves or disobeying. Much more weakness, stupidity, and natural cowardice than bad faith, Working classes that no longer believe in themselves and are in any case bound hand and foot, ruling classes that have no future. When they fight all they do is discover new modes of suicide. The machines run all by themselves, great economic machines directed by small minds that go on thinking in terms of profits.

Near the end of the book, a prominent poet who finds it hard to let go of old modes and old meanings complains that his nation and the world have entered a “reign of fear.” A level-headed admirer retorts:

“... the reign of fear – you mean, of cowardice ... That may be so, but we will not consent to it, do you understand? We are Europeans and there is no more Europe, unless you mean a charnel house. We are French and there is no more France. We are civilized people and civilization is reduced to scientific murder. We are clean and we wallow in filth. Is that not true?”“Yes, that is true.”“Well we will not accept it. Let the great intellectuals acquiesce if they like, and beg little favors that will smother them alive. We shall resist without them.”

Which brings us back tidily to #VichyDemocrats. Last Times reminds us that while the collapse of the France in 1940 and the installation of a puppet state was accompanied by panic and confusion and complexities, there is a simple clarity at the center of the tale.

Fascism and its imposition via government is an immense evil.

The 1946 English translation of The Long Dusk; the original publication of Last Times.

A brief coda: In 2022, New York Review Books published Richard Greeman’s revision of the original English translation of Serge’s novel as Last Times.

In his introduction to the new edition, Greeman tells the story of the original publication of the novel in 1946 as The Long Dusk. It was translated by Ralph Manheim, whose correspondence with Serge relates a roller coaster tale of editorial interference, unapproved cuts, and lost corrections to the published version.

Manheim was unsatisfied. Greeman quotes his bitter observation to Serge that “this is the first time in my career as a translator I have encountered such editing and I am very sorry that it has to be in connection with your book.

After reading Greeman’s account, I felt that I needed to have a copy of Manheim’s translation as well. I wanted to hold the book that Serge might have held in my own hands.

As an act of solidarity and imaginative sympathy.

So I found it online. It is part of my own collection now. I treasure it because of its imperfections. And because it is a part of the journey that Serge’s work has taken from obscurity to a growing recognition that he ranks among the most powerful writers of the 20th Century – whose works offer deep wisdom and continuing relevance from which any reader can profit today.

(All quotations from Last Times above are from the translation by Richard Greeman, published by New York Review Books in 2022.)

(This essay first appeared on the Stage Write Substack on March 24, 2025.)