The Vichy regime (named after the town in central France where it was set up in 1940) was the collaborationist civilian French government of unoccupied France, set up with German support after their invasion of northern and western France. The assembly of the Third Republic gave full power to the emergency prime minister, Henri Pétain, who had been perhaps France’s greatest military leader in the First World War. However, he rapidly declared himself head of the French state, and organized, or acquiesced in the organization of, a semi-fascist state along authoritarian lines. The Vichy regime was by no means as unpopular as post-war French propaganda has suggested. There had always been a strong element of distaste on the right for the Third Republic, and indeed, among many sectors, a refusal quite to accept the principles of the French Revolution and its democratic republican spirit. Pétain himself, and he was old and feeble before the war even started, came under the influence of deliberately pro-Nazi leaders, especially Laval, a third republican politician, and Admiral Darlan.
These men and their followers co-operated actively with the Germans, even when, in 1944, the German army occupied the area of France officially under Vichy control. Their police force, the Milice, was hardly less enthusiastic than the Gestapo in carrying out anti-resistance, and at times anti-Semitic measures. To many industrialists Vichy, unhampered by free trade unions and supported by a strong and resourceful administration and civil service, was a positive improvement on the semi-anarchy of industry under the Third Republic. The essence of the Vichy regime, with its authoritarian and reactionary ideology, is well represented by the symbolic replacement of the traditional revolutionary slogan of the Republic (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity) with one of Pétain’s devising, ‘Work, Family and Country’. The Vichy regime was entirely discredited once France had been liberated, and its leading members tried for treason. However, their counter-argument, that they were trying to preserve at least some vestige of French autonomy and were essentially patriots forced to accept and moderate the consequences of a military defeat for which they were not responsible, cannot entirely be dismissed.
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