Liberation of France
The liberation of France in the Second World War was accomplished through the combined military efforts of the Allied Powers including Free French forces in London and Africa, and the French Resistance.
Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940. Their rapid advance through the almost undefended Ardennes caused a crisis in the French government; the French Third Republic dissolved itself in July, and handed over absolute power to Marshal Philippe Pétain, an elderly hero of World War I. Pétain signed an armistice with Germany with the north and west of France under German military occupation. Pétain, charged with calling a Constitutional Authority, instead established an authoritarian government in the spa town of Vichy, in the southern zone libre. Though nominally independent, Vichy France became a collaborationist regime and was little more than a Nazi client state that actively participated in Jewish deportations and aided German forces in anti-partisan actions in Occupied France as well as in combat actions in Africa.
Even before France surrendered on 22 June 1940, General Charles de Gaulle moved to London, from where he called on his fellow citizens to resist the Germans. The British recognized and funded Free French government in exile based in London. Efforts to liberate France began in the autumn of 1940 in France's colonial empire in Africa, still in the hands of the Vichy regime. General persuaded French Chad to support Free France, and by 1943 most other French colonies in Equatorial and North Africa had followed suit. announced formation of the Empire Defense Council in Brazzaville, which became the capital of Free France.
Allied military efforts in north western Europe began in summer 1944 with two seaborne invasions of France. Operation Overlord in June 1944 landed two million men, including a French armoured division, through the beaches of Normandy, opening a Western front against Germany. Operation Dragoon in August launched a second offensive force, including French Army B, from the département of Algeria into southern France. City after city in France was liberated, and even Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944. As the liberation progressed, resistance groups were incorporated into the Allied strength. In September, under threat of the Allied advance Pétain and the remains of the Vichy regime fled into exile in Germany. The Allied armies continued to push the Germans back through eastern France and in February and March 1945, back across the Rhine into Germany. A few pockets of German resistance remained in control of the main Atlantic ports until the end of the war on 8 May 1945.
Immediately after liberation, France was swept by a wave of executions, assaults, and degradation of suspected collaborators, including shaming of women suspected of relationships with Germans. Courts set up in June 1944 carried out an épuration légale of officials tainted by association with Vichy or the military occupation. Some defendants received death sentences, and faced a firing squad. The first elections since 1940 were organized in May 1945 by the Provisional Government; these municipal elections were the first in which women could vote. In referendums in October 1946, the voters approved a new constitution and the Fourth Republic was born 27 October 1946.
Background
Fall of France
Nazi Germany invaded France and the Low Countries beginning on 10 May 1940. German forces split the French from their British allies by striking through the lightly defended Ardennes, whose topography French strategists had considered prohibitively difficult for tanks.The invaders forced the British Expeditionary Force to evacuate, and defeated several French divisions before they advanced to Paris, and down the strategic Atlantic coast. By June, the dire French military situation had French politics revolving around whether the Third Republic should negotiate an armistice, fight on from North Africa, or just surrender. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud wanted to keep fighting, but was outvoted and resigned. The government relocated several times ahead of advancing German troops, ending up in Bordeaux. President Albert Lebrun appointed 84-year-old war hero Philippe Pétain as his replacement on 16 June 1940.
Within six weeks of the initial German assault, an overwhelmed French military faced imminent defeat. The cabinet agreed to seek peace terms and sent the Germans a delegation under General Charles Huntziger, with instructions to break off negotiations if the Germans demanded excessively harsh conditions such as the occupation of all of metropolitan France, the French fleet, or any of the French overseas territories. The Germans did not, however.
Pierre Laval, a strong proponent of collaboration, arranged a meeting between Hitler and Pétain. It took place on 24 October 1940 at Montoire on Hitler's private train. Pétain and Hitler shook hands and agreed to co-operate. The meeting was exploited in Nazi propaganda for the civilian population. On 30 October 1940, Pétain made a policy of French collaboration official, declaring in a radio statement: "I enter today on the path of collaboration."
General, sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy régime, escaped and created a government in exile for Free France in London. Of the sentence, he said:
Armistice
Pétain signed the Armistice of 22 June. Its terms left the French Army under Vichy France a rump Armistice Army. The naval fleet, although disabled, remained under Vichy control. In the colonial empire, the armistice terms permitted defensive use of the naval fleet. In metropolitan France, forces were severely reduced, armored vehicles and tanks prohibited, and motorized transport severely limited.In July, the National Assembly of the French Third Republic dissolved itself and gave absolute power to Pétain, who was to set up a constituent assembly and constitutional referendum. The "French State" created by this transfer of power was commonly known after the war as the "Vichy régime". Pétain did nothing about a constitution however, and established a totalitarian government at Vichy in the southern zone.
The Vichy régime nominally governed all of France, but in practice the zone occupée was a Nazi dictatorship and the Vichy government's power was limited and uncertain even in the zone libre. Vichy France became a collaborationist regime, little more than a Nazi client state.
France was still nominally independent, with control of the French Navy, the French colonial empire, and the southern half of its metropolitan territory. France could tell itself that it still retained some shreds of dignity. Despite heavy pressure, Vichy never joined the Axis alliance and remained formally at war with Germany. The Allies took the position that France should refrain from actively helping the Germans, but distrusted its assurances. The British attacked the French Navy at anchor in Mers-el-Kébir, to keep it out of German hands.
De Gaulle and Free France
Charles had been since 5 June the Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War and responsible for coordination with Britain. Refusing to accept his government's position on Germany, he escaped back to England on 17 June. In London he established a government in exile and in a series of radio appeals exhorted the French to fight back. Some historians have called the first, his appeal of 18 June on the BBC, the beginning of the French Resistance. In fact the audience for that appeal was quite small, but more and more listened as de Gaulle obtained Britain's recognition as the legitimate government of Free France and obtained their agreement to finance a military efforts against Nazi Germany.also tried, in vain initially, to gain the support of French forces in the French colonial empire. General Charles Noguès, Resident-General in Morocco and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Africa refused his overtures, and forbade the press in French North Africa to publish the text of 's appeal. The day after the armistice was signed on 21 June 1940, denounced it. The French government in Bordeaux declared compulsorily retired from the Army with the rank of colonel, on 23 June 1940. Also on 23 June, the British Government denounced the armistice and announced that they no longer regarded the Bordeaux government as a fully independent state. They also noted a plan to establish a French National Committee in exile, but did not mention by name.
The armistice took effect starting at 00:35 on 25 June. On 26 June wrote to Churchill about recognition for his French Committee. The Foreign Office had reservations about de Gaulle as a leader, but Churchill's envoys had tried and failed to establish contact with French leaders in North Africa, so on 28 June, the British government recognized as the leader of the Free French, despite the FO's reservations.
also initially had little success in attracting the support of major powers. While Pétain's government was recognized by the US, the USSR, and the Vatican, and controlled the French fleet and military in all the colonies, 's retinue consisted of a secretary, three colonels, a dozen captains, a law professor, and three battalions of legionnaires who had agreed to stay in Britain and fight for him. For a time the New Hebrides were the only French colony to back.
and Churchill reached agreement on 7 August 1940 that Britain would also fund the Free French, with the costs to be settled after the war. A separate letter guaranteed the territorial integrity of the French colonial empire.
French Resistance
The French Resistance was a decentralized network of small cells of fighters with the tacit or overt support of many French civilians. The various resistance groups by 1944 had an estimated 100,000 members in France. Some were former Republican fighters from the Spanish Civil War; others were workers who went into hiding rather than report for the mandatory Service du travail obligatoire to work for German arms factories. In the south of France especially, Resistance fighters took to the mountainous brush that gave them their name, and conducted guerilla warfare on the German occupation forces, cutting telephone lines and destroying bridges.The Armée Secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone: Combat, Libération-sud and the Franc-Tireurs.
Some organizations grew up around one of the many clandestine presses of the time, such as Combat, founded by Albert Camus, to which Jean-Paul Sartre also contributed. Stalin supported the effort once Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
French prisoners of war were held hostage against the French government meeting their quota of workers. When the mass impressment of able-bodied civilians began, French railway workers went on strike rather than allow the Germans to use the trains to transport them. The cheminots eventually formed their own organization, Résistance-Fer.
The French Forces of the Interior, as came to call Resistance forces inside France, were an uneasy alliance of several maquis and other organizations, including the Communist-organized Francs-Tireurs et Partisans and the Armée secrète in southern France. In addition, escape networks helped Allied airmen who had been shot down get to safety. The Unione Corse and the milieu, the criminal underground of Marseilles, gleefully provided logistical escape assistance for a price, although some such as Paul Carbone instead worked with the Carlingue, French auxiliaries to the Gestapo SD and German military police.