ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
The corporatist dynamic and principles are present from the first moment in Vichy: ‘The
National Assembly concedes all powers to the government of the Republic, under the
signature and authority of Marshall Pétain, president of the council, in order to promulgate
one or more acts of the new constitution of the French state. This constitution must
guarantee the right to work, of families and of the country. It will be ratified by the nation and
applied by the assemblies that are to be created...’. Pétain and his inner circle expressed a
public discourse based on an organic view of society, the basis of which were the family, the
region and the profession Independently of the institutional tensions in the construction
of authoritarian political institutions, the dominant cultural model in Vichy, which was
expressed in its propaganda and ideological legitimation bodies, was ‘a conscious and
organized traditionalism... that favoured images of a rural, corporatist and religious
society’
Marshall Pétain, like other dictators of the time, used several ‘constitutional acts’ to
concentrate legislative power to his person, and ensured ministers answered to him alone.
Both parliament and the senate were suspended before being closed entirely in 1942. Later,
in the context of a difficult regime ‘coalition’ and Nazi demands, Pétain created the office of
vice-president of the council for Pierre Laval and increased the powers of a ‘head of
government’, giving it a more bicephalous model. In Vichy, the single party that had often
been discussed was never institutionalized. Against the background of a tense ‘limited
pluralism’, which included Catholics and liberal conservatives as well as the fascist parties, the
internal tensions and Nazi power hindered its effective institutionalization, determining the
centrality of a controlled administration
One of the first corporatist structures to be created by the Vichy regime, even before the
approval of the labour charter, was the National Corporation of Farmers (Corporation
Nationale Paysanne). Created at the end of 1940, designed to assist with the economic and
social reorganization of the rural world and coinciding with the legacy of rural associations
defending corporatism – such as Jacques le Roy Ladurie’s Central Union of Agricultural
Syndicates (UNSA – Union Centrale des Syndicats Agricoles) – the ruralist ideology of parts of
the Vichy elite and the urgent need for the administration to reorganize and regulate
production, distribution and agricultural price policies
The labour charter – the law on the ‘social organization of professions’ – was introduced in
October 1941. While it was inspired by Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal,
because of the powerful presence of corporatist economists, law professors, technical
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