Vichy France
Vichy France, also known as the Pétainist regime and Pétainist France, officially the French State, was a French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II, established as a result of German victory in the Battle of France. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy.
Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone". The occupation of France by Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country. In November 1942, the Allies occupied French North Africa, and in response the Germans and Italians occupied the entirety of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
On 10 May 1940, France was invaded by Nazi Germany. Paul Reynaud resigned as prime minister rather than sign an armistice, and was replaced by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Shortly thereafter, Pétain signed the Armistice of 22 June 1940. At Vichy, Pétain established an authoritarian dictatorship that reversed many liberal policies, began tight supervision of the economy and launched an ideological campaign called Révolution nationale. Vichy France exhibited characteristics of fascism, such as political and social engineering institutions and attempts at mass mobilization, totalitarian aspirations in control over the populace and currents within the ideological underpinnings of the regime, although various historians have rejected its definition as fascist and called it authoritarian conservative instead. The state and tightly controlled media promoted antisemitism and racism, Anglophobia, and, after Operation Barbarossa started in June 1941, anti-Sovietism. The terms of the armistice allowed some degree of independence; France was officially declared a neutral country, and the Vichy government kept the French Navy and French colonial empire under French control, avoiding full occupation of the country by Germany. Despite heavy pressure, the Vichy government never joined the Axis powers.
In October 1940, during a meeting with Adolf Hitler in Montoire-sur-le-Loir, Pétain officially announced the policy of collaboration with Germany whilst maintaining overall neutrality in the war. The Vichy government believed that with its policy of collaboration, it could have extracted significant concessions from Germany and avoided harsh terms in the peace treaty. Germany kept two million French prisoners-of-war and imposed forced labour on young Frenchmen. French soldiers were kept hostage to ensure that Vichy would reduce its military forces and pay a heavy tribute in gold, food, and supplies to Germany. French police were ordered to round up Jews and other "undesirables", and at least 72,500 Jews deported from Vichy France were killed in Nazi concentration camps. Most of these Jews were foreigners; the Jews of French origin numbered about 24,000.
Most of the French public initially supported the regime, but opinion turned against the Vichy government and the occupying German forces as the war dragged on and living conditions in France worsened. The French Resistance, working largely in concert with the London-based Free France movement, increased in strength over the course of the occupation. After the liberation of France began in 1944, the Free French Provisional Government of the French Republic was installed as the new national government, led by Charles de Gaulle. The last of the Vichy exiles were captured in the Sigmaringen enclave in April 1945. Pétain was tried for treason by the new Provisional Government and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment by. Only four senior Vichy officials were tried for crimes against humanity, although many had participated in the deportation of Jews, abuses of prisoners, and severe acts against members of the Resistance.
Terminology
After the National Assembly under the Third Republic voted to give full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940, the name République française disappeared from all official documents. From then on, the regime was referred to officially as the État Français. Because of its unique situation in the history of France, its contested legitimacy and the generic nature of its official name, the "French State" is most often represented in English by the synonyms "Vichy France"; "Vichy regime"; "government of Vichy"; or, in context, simply "Vichy".The territory under the control of the French State was based in the city of Vichy, in the unoccupied southern portion of Metropolitan France. This was south of the Line of Demarcation as established by the Armistice of 22 June 1940. It also included the overseas French territories, such as French North Africa, which was "an integral part of Vichy", with antisemitic policies implemented in Vichy France also being implemented here. This was called the Unbesetztes Gebiet by the Germans, and known as the Zone libre in France, or less formally as the "Southern Zone" especially after Operation Anton, the invasion of the Zone libre by German forces in November 1942. Other contemporary colloquial terms for the Zone libre were based on abbreviation and wordplay, such as the "zone nono", for the non-occupied zone.
Jurisdiction
In theory, the civil jurisdiction of the Vichy government extended over most of Metropolitan France, French Algeria, the French protectorate in Morocco, the French protectorate of Tunisia and the rest of the French colonial empire that accepted the authority of Vichy; only the disputed border territory of Alsace-Lorraine was placed under direct German administration. Alsace-Lorraine was officially still part of France, as the Reich never annexed the region. The Reich government at the time was not interested in attempting to enforce piecemeal annexations in the West although it later annexed Luxembourg; it operated under the assumption that Germany's new western border would be determined in peace negotiations, which would be attended by all of the Western Allies and thus producing a frontier that would be recognized by all of the major powers. Since Hitler's overall territorial ambitions were not limited to recovering Alsace-Lorraine, and Britain was never brought to terms, those peace negotiations never took place.The Nazis had some intention of annexing a large swath of northeastern France, replacing that region's inhabitants with German settlers, and initially forbade French refugees from returning to the region, but the restrictions were never thoroughly enforced and were basically abandoned following the invasion of the Soviet Union, which had the effect of turning German territorial ambitions almost exclusively to the East. German troops guarding the boundary line of the northeastern Zone interdite were withdrawn on the night of 17–18 December 1941, but the line remained in place on paper for the remainder of the occupation.
Nevertheless, effectively Alsace-Lorraine was annexed: German law applied to the region, its inhabitants were conscripted into the Wehrmacht and the customs posts separating France from Germany were placed back where they had been between 1871 and 1918. Similarly, a sliver of French territory in the Alps was under direct Italian administration from June 1940 to September 1943. René Bousquet, the head of French police nominated by Vichy, exercised his power in Paris through his second-in-command, Jean Leguay, who coordinated raids with the Nazis. German laws took precedence over French laws in the occupied territories, and the Germans often rode roughshod over the sensibilities of Vichy administrators.
On 11 November 1942, following the landing of the Allies in North Africa, the Axis launched Operation Anton, occupying southern France and disbanding the strictly limited "Armistice Army" that Vichy had been allowed by the armistice.
Legitimacy
Vichy's claim to be the legitimate French government was denied by Free France and by all subsequent French governments after the war. They maintain that Vichy was an illegal government run by traitors, having come to power through an unconstitutional coup d'état. Pétain was constitutionally appointed prime minister by President Lebrun on 16 June 1940 and he was legally within his rights to sign the armistice with Germany; however, his decision to ask the National Assembly to dissolve itself while granting him dictatorial powers has been more controversial. Historians have particularly debated the circumstances of the vote by the National Assembly of the Third Republic granting full powers to Pétain on 10 July 1940. The main arguments advanced against Vichy's right to incarnate the continuity of the French state were based on the pressure exerted by Pierre Laval, a former prime minister in the Third Republic, on the deputies in Vichy and on the absence of 27 deputies and senators who had fled on the ship Massilia and so could not take part in the vote. However, during the war, the Vichy government was internationally recognized, notably by the United States and several other major Allied powers. Diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom had been severed since 8 July 1940 after the attack on Mers-el-Kébir.Julian T. Jackson wrote, "There seems little doubt... that at the beginning Vichy was both legal and legitimate". He stated that if legitimacy comes from popular support, Pétain's massive popularity in France until 1942 made his government legitimate, and if legitimacy comes from diplomatic recognition, over 40 countries, including the United States, Canada, and China, recognized the Vichy government. According to Jackson, 's Free French acknowledged the weakness of its case against Vichy's legality by citing multiple dates for the start of Vichy's illegitimate rule, implying that at least for some time, Vichy was still legitimate. Countries recognized the Vichy government despite 's attempts in London to dissuade them; only the German occupation of all of France in November 1942 ended diplomatic recognition. Supporters of Vichy point out that the grant of governmental powers was voted by a joint session of both chambers of the Third Republic Parliament in keeping with the constitutional law.
When the Provisional Government enacted the Ordinance of 9 August 1944 during the liberation declaring the return of republican government to France, it also expunged all trappings of legality from the Vichy regime, declaring all constitutional documents enacted by the regime to be void ab initio, beginning with the Constitutional Law of 10 July 1940. As a consequence, the GPRF did not have to explicitly proclaim the return of, as the latter had never legally been dissolved.
At the Hôtel de Ville, Paris on 25 August 1944 explicitly refused to declare a new republic. When Georges Bidault of the French Resistance invited to declare the restoration of the republic, the general replied that he could not, because the republic had never ceased to exist.