The new newspaper, La Petite Patrie, quickly began to promote a personality cult: Admiral Robert was ‘our Pétain transposed. Let us never speak of him other than with admiration and respect. For us, he is the guide, and he is pure and beyond reproach; the resolute and paternal chief; the worthy representative of the France that loves and understands us.’35 Photographs and portraits of Robert were soon on sale in the shops and markets, and in many homes they hung alongside pictures of Pétain himself. Vichy’s ideology placed enormous emphasis on the family – hence the appointment to office of ‘mothers and fathers of families’ – and Robert himself became Martinique’s symbolic father when he agreed to become the godfather of a local child. As a British historian of Martinique notes, it was certainly no accident that the child was from Schoelcher, a commune on the outskirts of Fort-de-France that is named after the ‘liberator’ who freed the slaves.36 Robert became both a symbolic father and the liberator who would dispel the dark mood of 1940. That mood was captured in a poem published in a newspaper:
Peuples noirs, c’en est fait; le malheur est sur nous;
Celle qui se penchait sur notre triste sort,
Qui guidait notre marche et nous montrait la voie,
Celle qui tendrement préparait notre essor,
La France, en butte aux trahisons, succombe et ploie
Celle qui sur nos fronts faisait luire l’espoir
La grande nation puissante et généreuse
Qui, seule dans le monde, aimait vraiment le Noir,
Doit subir du Germain l’odieuse tutelle.37
[Black peoples, it is over; misfortune has befallen us;
The France who watched over our sad fate,
Who guided our steps and showed us the way,
Who was tenderly preparing us for our rise,
Has been exposed to treason, bends her knee and succumbs.
The France who made our faces shine with hope,
The great nation, powerful and generous,
The only nation in the world to truly love the black man,
Must submit to the odious sway of the German.]
As in metropolitan France, paternalism went hand in hand with repression. Freemasonry was made illegal. The small Communist Party was proscribed. Vichy’s ‘Jewish Statute’ was introduced and enforced, even though Martinique’s Jewish population was so tiny as to be statistically insignificant. The Statute excluded Jews from senior positions in the civil service, the officer corps, the ranks of non-commissioned officers and all professions that might influence public opinion. A quota system was devised to limit the number of Jews in the liberal professions.38 By August 1942, a total of sixteen Jews in Fort-de-France had registered, as required, with the police.39 It was forbidden to listen in public or in private to BBC radio, whose broadcasts were relayed from Dominica to the north and St Lucia to the south. A law adopted in July 1940 imposed the death penalty on anyone convicted of entering the service of a foreign power, and the same penalty was later extended to those who, like Fanon, joined the Free French forces outside Martinique. The student-policemen encountered by Breton were part of an island-wide network of agents and spies who encouraged the denunciation of subversives.40 Tropiques was, like all journals and newspapers, subject to pre-publication vetting by a heavy-handed information service and when, in May 1943, Suzanne Césaire requested a paper ration to print a new issue, she was refused it on the grounds that it was ‘revolutionary, racial and sectarian’.41 Tropiques was banned. Publication began once more when Tan Robè was over.
The attempt to establish a local version of the Vichy regime was not popular with the majority black population of Martinique. The countless portraits of Pétain that André Breton saw on the walls of Fort-de-France in 1941 were regularly slashed with knives, and he quickly became convinced that the vast majority of the working population were hoping for an Allied victory. He was probably right. Many black Martinicans would have agreed with the basic argument of Coridun’s Mon Pays, Martinique! Martinique!: the best defence against the white plantocracy was the extension of republican institutions, and it was the power of those very institutions that was being eroded by Robert. The black population was not, according to Breton, taken in by the patronizing use of Creole to promote the image of ‘Li bon papa Pétain’ (‘Good father Pétain’).42 Martinique was both hungry and unhappy. The prudence dictated by the repressive atmosphere meant, however, that there were as yet few acts of defiance.
One of the reasons for the sullen discontent was the rise of overt racism. Food rationing had been introduced, and the queues in the half-empty shops were segregated, as they never had been in pre-war Martinique. In normal years, the crews of visiting naval ships had only a week’s shore leave, but now they were permanently on shore with little to do. They could now take off their masks and behave as ‘authentic racists’.43 What Lévi-Strauss described as the ‘excessive drinking of punch’,44 the increase in prostitution and the rise in sexual tensions as local girls like Mayotte Capécia’s heroine consorted with white and relatively rich officers all contributed to the increasingly ugly mood. The strong naval presence caused a housing shortage, and property prices soared. Food shortages and the rise of the black market fuelled discontent, both in the capital and the countryside. The monoculture of sugar co-existed with small-scale agriculture geared towards self-sufficiency, but the economy could not really cope with the influx of non-productive sailors. A character in Glissant’s novel Le Quatrième siècle describes a typical foraging party arriving in trucks at a small habitation and taking away all the yams, breadfruit and bananas they could carry. ‘A whip was being wielded against the blacks.’45
The dominant memory of the war years is that of hunger, and it has become part of a collective memory that can be shared even by those who are too young to have lived through the war. In his semi-autobiographical Ravines du devant-jour, Raphaël Confiant, who was born in 1951, recalls that when he refused to eat his soup as a child, his grandmother would tell him that if there was ever a return to Tan Robè, he would eat it because he would understand what hunger really meant.46 The blockade had disastrous effects, which are described by Chamoiseau in his novel Texaco: ‘We had to do without oil, salt, dried vegetables, salted meat, soap, garlic, shoes. The poor could no longer find wood, corrugated tin or nails. Coal was becoming scarce, and more and more expensive. Those who lit a fire no longer had matches and did all that was possible to keep it glowing ad aeternam.’47 In 1939, 76 per cent of all foodstuffs had been imported, and those imports had now ceased. Even if there had been no blockade, things would have been difficult. Most of Martinique’s food imports came from France, and France’s agricultural produce was now being diverted to Germany. Between 1940 and the end of the war, retail prices in Fort-de-France rose by 600 per cent, and in 1943, the kilo of cod that had cost 3.8 francs in 1939 had risen in price to 32 francs.48 By 1943, near-famine conditions were being reported in the countryside. And yet Glissant, adopting a famous phrase from Sartre, claims that the people of Martinique had never been so free as they were during the ‘Occupation’.49