ABSTRACT
Historians of Vichy France have not yet provided an adequate explanation of the ways in which the regime acquired legitimacy, that is to say, how it secured consent from French people. This article is a contribution to that debate by providing an analysis of how the Vichy state developed a surveillance and information gathering network based on a massive interception of private correspondence. The system was vital to Vichy’s legitimacy in two ways: first, by sensitive ‘listening’ to the mood of the public it was able to gauge how best to present those policies which were essential for its very survival and secondly through its pervasive intrusion of individual privacy it helped to create the conditions of fear and mistrust that made concerted opposition to the regime extremely difficult. The organisation and purpose of this system, the Service du Controle Technique (SCT), has a three-fold importance: first, in revealing the central role played by the military authorities in intelligence gathering within France, it indicates how far some senior officers had gone in redefining the enemy; second, in the way it pursued those individuals whose private communications were regarded as ‘suspect’, it shows both how insecure the regime was and how essential the SCT was to effective policing; and thirdly, it shows how policy decisions of the highest importance were influenced by the regime’s knowledge of public opinion.
