Ebook: Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944

UNCOMPROMISING, often startling, meticulously documented—this book is an account of the government, and the governed, of collaborationist France.

Basing his work on captured German archives and contemporary materials rather than on self-serving postwar memoirs or war-trial testimony, Professor Paxton maps out the complex nature of the ill-famed Vichy government, showing that it in face enjoyed mass participation. The majority of Frenchmen in 1940 feared social disorder as the worst imaginable evil and rallied to support the State, thereby bringing about the betrayal of the Nation as a whole.

The book lays bare the power struggle between Pétain, Laval, and Darlan, their relationships with the Germans, and Laval's attempts to nudge a suspicious Hitler toward a Franco-German alliance against Britain; it looks at their social reforms, some good, some farcical, and reveals that their program, including the persecution of the Jews, emanated less from any compulsion on the German side than from long-festering internal conflicts; it examines the (belated) rise of the Resistance and the deadly enmity of General de Gaulle to the regime.

Professor Paxton's conclusions are devastating—he proves that collaborationist Vichy France, contrary to comforting myth, obtained for Frenchmen no better treatment than that accorded to the fully occupied nations, and that its very sovereignty turned out to be a negotiating liability rather than a trump. As a result, his book also sheds considerable light on French politics and the fate of the country since the war.