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Originally Posted by eccieuser9500
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if yous say so
Was Vichy France a Puppet Government or a Willing Nazi Collaborator?
The authoritarian government led by Marshal Pétain participated in Jewish expulsions and turned France into a quasi-police state
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...zis-180967160/
How France’s Vichy Regime Became Hitler’s Willing Collaborators
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/vichy...r-world-war-ii
Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler in 1940. Photo: German Federal Archive
It’s eighty years today since the notorious Vichy regime took power in France under Nazi domination. Vichy-style fascism wasn’t simply a German plant on French soil — it drew on powerful reactionary currents in French politics and society.
The Vichy regime in France was established on July 10, 1940, following the French surrender to Germany. The terms of the armistice divided France into an occupied zone covering the north and west of the country, and the so-called free zone in the south. Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of the First World War for his role in the defence of Verdun, became the leader of the new regime, having been granted full powers by both chambers of parliament.
Pétain and his entourage saw the defeat of France and the collapse of the Third Republic as a chance to wipe out the legacy of permissiveness and decadence represented by the left-wing
Popular Front government of the 1930s and the French Revolution. The Vichy ruler dispensed with parliamentary democracy and engaged in a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany, hailing it as a new beginning for France — a “National Revolution.” Charles Maurras, the ideologue of the antisemitic Action Française movement, welcomed these developments as a “divine surprise.”
National Myth
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a carefully constructed national myth obscured the reality of the Vichy regime. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, propagated that myth, and historians echoed it for many years. School textbooks depicted wartime France as a nation of resisters who had refused to collaborate with the occupier. Influential historical accounts, like Robert Aron’s
Histoire de Vichy, depicted Pétain as a “shield” and De Gaulle as a “sword,” each of whom had been necessary in their different ways for the defense of French interests.
At the time of the liberation, De Gaulle claimed that “only a handful of scoundrels” had behaved badly during the occupation: the rest of the country could look themselves in the eye as patriots. This “sublime half-lie,” as Henry Rousso dubbed it, formed the basis for postwar attempts at national reconciliation, symbolized in 1964 by the transfer of the remains of resistance hero Jean Moulin to the Pantheon in an elaborate two-day ceremony.
Although critical accounts of the regime did appear in French during this period, such as Henri Michel’s
Vichy: Année 40, it was research by foreign historians that overturned these postwar conceptions of the regime. After the publication of studies by Stanley Hoffmann, Alan Milward, and Eberhard Jäckel (whose
Frankreich in Hitlers Europa has yet to be translated into French), it was Robert O. Paxton’s
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 that blew away the established consensus about Vichy as a structure that protected French interests and resisted Nazi demands.
Coming in the wake of the May 1968 revolt and the death of De Gaulle, Paxton’s book turned the study of Vichy on its head, with an impact matched by very few historical works, inspiring talk of a “Paxtonian revolution.” As
Paxton himself has been careful to stress, it was May ’68 that had proved the decisive element here, as “students began challenging their elders’ reticence,” and the French started to confront “the dark side of their response to Nazi occupation.”
Collaboration, Paxton argued, was not merely a catastrophe forced upon France by military defeat, but part of an internal French conflict with a much longer history. I
t was something actively sought by the Vichy leaders, not a demand placed upon France by Germany. Conservative, authoritarian, and counterrevolutionary traditions incubated in France itself underpinned the politics of the regime. Vichy was not a “lesser evil.”
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I Won't Be Watching the Debates If This Keeps Up . . . .
This is actually funny!