Vichy France

• 1. Introduction

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  Vichy France began on the 10th of July 1940, the day the French National Assembly voted by 569 votes to 80 to hand absolute power to an 84-year-old military hero named Marshal Philippe Pétain. France had just suffered a catastrophic military defeat. German forces had swept through in weeks. And now, in a quiet spa town in central France, the Third Republic was dissolving itself. The deputies and senators gathered not in Paris, not in Lyon, but in Vichy, a small resort city known for its thermal springs and its large, easily requisitioned hotels. From that unremarkable address, a government would take shape that would officially call itself the French State, strike the old motto of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood from public life, and replace it with Work, Family, Homeland. Those four years would be among the most contested and complicated in French history. Who was truly in charge? How much did France collaborate, and how much did it resist? And what happened to the two million French soldiers held as prisoners in Germany while their government negotiated from a position of near-total weakness?

• 2. The Armistice and Its Terms

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  Paul Reynaud, who had wanted to move the government to North Africa and fight on, resigned rather than sign an armistice. President Albert Lebrun then appointed Pétain as prime minister on the 16th of June 1940, and Pétain signed the Armistice of the 22nd of June just days later. The terms were punishing. Nazi Germany effectively annexed Alsace and Lorraine, occupied northern and western France including the entire Atlantic coastline, and imposed the full costs of maintaining its occupation troops on the French government, a financial burden running to several million French francs a month. Germany also held roughly two million French soldiers as prisoners of war and refused to repatriate them. About a third had been released on various terms by 1944; the rest remained in Germany, with privates put to work in agriculture, factories, or mines. France was left nominally governing the southern two-fifths of metropolitan France plus its overseas territories, provided it kept its navy under strict conditions and did not allow that territory to become a base for Allied operations. General Charles Huntzinger, who led the French armistice delegation, had been instructed to break off talks if Germany demanded the entire French fleet, all of metropolitan France, or any French overseas territories. Germany made none of those demands, and so the armistice was signed. Adolf Hitler had practical reasons for restraint. Administering all of France would have been expensive, and maintaining Vichy's nominal independence sent a message to Britain that it now stood alone.

• 3. The Révolution Nationale

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  Pétain used his new dictatorial powers almost immediately to dismantle democratic institutions. Elective bodies were replaced by appointed ones. The crime of opinion was re-established, effectively ending freedom of expression. Critics were frequently arrested. Pétain justified all of this through an ideological programme he called the Révolution nationale, which placed the blame for France's defeat on the alleged moral decay of the Third Republic era. In his radio speeches, Pétain consistently used the first-person singular, cast himself in a Christ-like mould of self-sacrifice, and painted the entire preceding republican era in the darkest terms as a time of décadence rooted in liberalism, individualism, and hedonism. The British historian Christopher Flood summarised Pétain's diagnosis as blaming decline on "political and economic liberalism, with its divisive, individualistic and hedonistic values." Joan of Arc replaced Marianne as the national symbol of France under the regime; her image as a devout Catholic patriot suited the Vichy message, and the school textbook Miracle de Jeanne by René Jeanneret became required reading. One school textbook made explicit the regime's vision for women, warning that while Joan had been heroic, girls should "preferably exercise the virtues of patience, persistence and resignation" and not follow Joan's military example literally. The French national motto disappeared from official documents, and it was noted at the time that the new initials TFP, for Travail, Famille, Patrie, also stood for travaux forcés à perpetuité, the criminal penalty of forced labour in perpetuity.

• 4. Collaboration and Its Limits

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  On the 24th of October 1940, Pétain met Adolf Hitler aboard Hitler's train at Montoire-sur-le-Loir. They shook hands, and the photograph was widely distributed by Nazi propaganda. Six days later, Pétain made the policy official in a radio address: "I enter today on the path of collaboration." Historians have debated ever since how much of what followed was imposed and how much was chosen. Norman Davies argued that it is incorrect to call Vichy a puppet state, on the grounds that it was formed by French politicians through French choices. Robert Paxton's research concluded it was "an autonomous government, doing things partly in parallel with German actions, but which it's not required to do." The complexity is real. Vichy officials organised the arrest of German spies in the unoccupied zone even while collaborating with Germany in other ways. Pierre Laval, the dominant political figure in the regime's first months and again from 1942 onward, was an enthusiastic proponent of closer ties with Germany; on the 22nd of June 1942 he publicly declared he was hoping for a German victory. René Bousquet, the head of French police, exercised his authority in Paris through his deputy Jean Leguay, who coordinated raids with the Nazis. French police rounded up Jews and other people the regime labelled undesirables. At least 72,500 Jews deported from Vichy France were killed in Nazi concentration camps; about 24,000 of them were of French origin, with the majority being foreign-born. The Vichy government also tried to negotiate with Germany for the early release of French prisoners of war, believing it had extracted concessions through collaboration, though Germany maintained its demands for gold, food, and forced labour from young Frenchmen throughout.

• 5. Anglophobia as State Policy

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  Among the defining features of Vichy ideology was an intense, state-sponsored Anglophobia. Pétain himself had told the Italian ambassador as far back as February 1936 that "England has always been France's most implacable enemy." Pierre Laval and Admiral François Darlan shared his view. In Pétain's radio broadcasts, Britain was consistently portrayed as "Perfidious Albion," the eternal enemy whose treachery had lured France into declaring war on Germany in 1939. Vichy propaganda claimed Britain had operated through Masonic lodges to weaken France and then abandoned it. The three events cited repeatedly to illustrate British betrayal were the Dunkirk evacuation of May 1940, the Royal Navy attack on the French Mediterranean fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, which killed over 1,300 French sailors, and the failed Anglo-Free French attempt to seize Dakar in September 1940. The propagandist Henri Béraud, who described himself as a professional Anglophobe, published a widely distributed pamphlet in August 1940 titled in translation "Should England Be Reduced to Slavery?" The question was rhetorical. In an interview published in the Gringoire newspaper in 1941, Admiral Darlan was quoted warning that if Germany's New Order failed in Europe, it would mean the return to power of Jews and Freemasons subservient to Anglo-Saxon policy. Vichy mixed Anglophobia with antisemitism to portray Britain as a racially degenerate nation controlled by Jewish capitalists. The regime also promoted Joan of Arc, in part precisely because she had fought against England, making her opposition to the English inseparable from her use as a national symbol.

• 6. The Colonial Tug-of-War

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  After Charles de Gaulle's Appeal of the 18th of June 1940, the fight between Vichy and Free France played out across an enormous geography. In French Equatorial Africa, three of four colonies switched to the Free French within days of each other in late August 1940: French Chad on the 26th, French Congo on the 29th, and Ubangi-Shari on the 30th. The fourth, Gabon, required military force, and a Free French operation between the 27th of October and the 12th of November 1940 took the capital Libreville by bombing before final Vichy troops surrendered at Port-Gentil. In the Pacific, French Polynesia held a referendum on the 2nd of September 1940 in Tahiti and Moorea; the vote was 5,564 to 18 in favour of joining the Free French. American forces then built a naval refuelling base and airstrip on Bora Bora under Operation Bobcat, sending nine ships and 5,000 soldiers; that base supplied the Allied ships and planes that fought the Battle of the Coral Sea. French Somaliland, by contrast, held out under pro-Vichy leadership until late in the war. In Martinique, 286 tons of gold from the Bank of France had been transported there on the cruiser Émile Bertin in June 1940. The island was blockaded by the Royal Navy; the British used the gold as collateral for Lend-Lease arrangements, on the basis that it could be acquired at any time if needed. Free French sympathisers took control of the gold in July 1943 after Admiral Georges Robert departed under threat of a full-scale American invasion. French Indochina followed a different trajectory entirely: the isolated colonial administration negotiated with Japan to allow Japanese military bases, and the Japanese staged a coup d'état on the 9th of March 1945, ending French administration there.

• 7. Liberation and Contested Legitimacy

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  On the 11th of November 1942, following the Allied Operation Torch landings in North Africa, Germany launched Case Anton and occupied the whole of southern France, ending even the pretense of Vichy independence. The Armistice Army, which the armistice had allowed to remain at a strength of 3,768 officers, 15,072 non-commissioned officers, and 75,360 men, was disbanded. To prevent the French fleet at Toulon from falling into Axis hands, the French themselves scuttled it on the 27th of November 1942. Pétain remained nominal head of state until the 20th of August 1944. When the Provisional Government issued the Ordinance of the 9th of August 1944 restoring republican government, it simultaneously declared all Vichy constitutional documents void from their origin, as if they had never had legal force. The logic was precise: because Vichy had never lawfully replaced the republic, the republic had never ceased to exist. At the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on the 25th of August 1944, Georges Bidault of the French Resistance invited de Gaulle to declare the restoration of the republic; de Gaulle replied that he could not do so, because the republic had never ceased to exist. Debate over the regime's legitimacy had been live even during the war. Julian T. Jackson noted that over 40 countries, including the United States, Canada, and China, recognized the Vichy government, and that Pétain's popularity within France remained high until 1942. The deputies and senators who had voted full powers to Pétain on the 10th of July 1940 were later condemned individually after the Liberation; yet the vote had passed with 65% of all deputies and 70% of all senators in favour.