Marquet — Bordeaux overwhelmed, 12 June
, a former socialist turned "neo-socialist," has been mayor of Bordeaux since 1925. From 12 June 1940 his city becomes, against its will, the capital of France: the government, which has fled Paris for Tours, falls back here, followed by parliamentarians, embassies, and successive waves of refugees from the North.
Bordeaux normally has about 260,000 inhabitants. In one week the population climbs toward 600,000, perhaps 800,000. The Pellegrin hospital overflows, bakeries are empty, petrol is rationed, the grand hotels (Splendid, Normandie) are full. Marquet must, in forty-eight hours, house ministries, lodge a crowd, and feed a city that has tripled in size.
The ministries demand premises, refugees pour in by the thousand, and resources are short everywhere. Marquet, at the crossroads of municipal administration and a national power in flight, must choose a method: requisition everything, divert the flow further south, or let the market sort itself out.
How should Marquet manage the influx swamping Bordeaux?
Marquet combines A and B: from 13 to 16 June he requisitions some two hundred hotels, dozens of schools and public buildings. On 15 June the Ministry of War installs itself at the prefecture, Foreign Affairs at the Splendid, Reynaud at the Palais Rohan; in parallel he organizes regular trains toward Toulouse, Pau, and Bayonne for refugees with no assignment. On 16 June he himself joins the government as Pétain's Minister of the Interior. His trajectory then tips toward collaboration: at the Liberation he will be sentenced in 1948 to ten years of national degradation. The Bordeaux episode of June 1940 illustrates how military collapse disorganizes the rear, and how local notables find themselves, in a few days, arbitrating the fate of hundreds of thousands of people.
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