Defeat, Vichy and the Resistance
France falls in six weeks, Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime collaborates with Nazi Germany and helps deport Jews, and a minority resists until the Liberation.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
The collapse
The German offensive of May 1940 broke through the Ardennes and routed the French army in about six weeks. Millions of civilians fled south in the chaos of “l’exode”. On 17 June Marshal Philippe Pétain, the 84-year-old hero of Verdun, now head of government, announced that France must stop fighting. The armistice signed on 22 June left Germany occupying the north and the Atlantic coast, while a French government based in the spa town of Vichy ruled the rest. On 10 July 1940 parliament voted Pétain full powers, ending the Third Republic.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
On 18 June a little-known general, Charles de Gaulle, spoke on BBC radio from London, calling on the French to continue the fight: “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” Few heard it at the time, but it became the founding text of Free France.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Vichy
Pétain’s “National Revolution” replaced “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” with “Work, Family, Fatherland”. It blamed defeat on the Republic, teachers, freemasons, communists and Jews. In October 1940, without German demand, Vichy passed a Statute on the Jews excluding them from public service and the professions. After meeting Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, Pétain publicly embraced “collaboration”.
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
The deportations
On 16–17 July 1942 French police arrested about 13,000 Jews in Paris, including some 4,000 children, and held many of them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycle stadium before sending them via Drancy to Auschwitz. In all, around 76,000 Jews were deported from France, most of them foreign-born or refugees; only about 2,500 came back. The Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that some 77,000 Jews living in France perished. Yet about three-quarters of France’s Jews survived, many sheltered by neighbours, priests, and villages such as Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
Resistance
Resistance grew slowly, then quickly after Germany occupied all of France in November 1942 and forced young men into labour service in Germany, which drove many into the maquis in the hills. Communists, Gaullists, Christian democrats and others were brought together under Jean Moulin, who was captured and died in 1943. Reprisals were savage: at Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944 an SS unit massacred 642 villagers.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
After the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, Paris was liberated on 25 August, with French troops of General Leclerc leading the way. A wave of reprisals, the épuration, followed: perhaps 9,000 to 10,000 people were killed without trial, women accused of sleeping with Germans had their heads shaved in public, and Pétain was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment.
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
The long memory
Henry Rousso called France’s troubled relationship with this period the “Vichy syndrome”: first mourning, then repression behind the myth of a nation of resisters, then, from the 1970s, the “return of the repressed” through films such as The Sorrow and the Pity and Paxton’s research. Jacques Chirac’s speech at the site of the Vel d’Hiv on 16 July 1995 was a turning point.
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
De Gaulle declared in liberated Paris in August 1944 that the city had been "liberated by its own people". Vichy was an illegitimate parenthesis, not France; the real France was in London and in the maquis. This story helped a divided country rebuild, and for decades presidents refused to apologise on behalf of the Republic.
- The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 — Henry Rousso, Harvard University Press (1991)
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
From the 1970s, Robert Paxton and others showed from German and French archives that Vichy sought collaboration on its own initiative and passed its own antisemitic laws. In 1995 Jacques Chirac recognised that "the criminal folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French State". Historians now stress a spectrum, from collaboration through accommodation to resistance, and the many French people who hid Jews.
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
- France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 — Julian Jackson, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Discours du Président de la République lors des cérémonies commémorant la grande rafle des 16 et 17 juillet 1942 — Jacques Chirac, Présidence de la République (1995)
About three-quarters of the Jews in France survived, many helped by ordinary people, but some 77,000 died, deported with the active help of French police. Recognition of the French state's role, and the trials of officials such as Maurice Papon in 1997–98, came late and mattered deeply.
- France — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust Encyclopedia
- Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton, Alfred A. Knopf (1972)
Why it matters today
The "dark years" are the most painful and most argued-over chapter of modern French memory. The heroic story of a nation of resisters held for a generation; since the 1970s, French people have had to face the reality of state collaboration and complicity in the Holocaust. Comparing anyone to Pétain or to collaborators, or invoking the Resistance, remains a powerful move in French politics.