Vichy Government

Vichy Government, French government during World War II, established after the Franco-German armistice in 1940. One of the decisive battles between Germany and the Franco-British forces during World War II was fought in May and June 1940. On June 16 the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and his successor, Marshal Philippe Pétain, immediately began negotiations for an armistice with Germany. This was signed on June 22, and established that the Germans would occupy France to the north of the River Loire and along the Atlantic coast to the Spanish frontier. This meant that 55 per cent of French national territory (including Paris) was occupied, but that a French state existed which still ruled over its colonial empire. On July 1 the government of this state established its headquarters in Vichy. On July 10 some 700 senators and deputies, out of an existing 932, considered a law which would abolish the existing republican constitution and would confer full powers on Marshal Pétain: some 569 voted in its favour. Pétain assumed the position of Chief of State, the term “republic” was dropped, and the meetings of both Senate and Assembly were adjourned. This was the government that was to preside over its zone of French territory (although on November 11, 1942 the Germans had occupied the whole of France) until the Germans forced Pétain to go to Germany in August 1944.

Vichy was therefore a personal government, which revolved around Philippe Pétain. He was the subject of a popular cult. This meant that his ideas about the causes for the French defeat and humiliation were of primary importance for the national revolution which he intended to lead. They emphasized traditional values, such as religion, patriotism, the importance of the family, the acceptance of one's duty to work. Thus divorce was made more difficult, abortion severely repressed, and the parents of large families decorated with state honours.

The “national revolution” necessarily included nationalism. Legislation ensured that French Jews were excluded from the civil service, education, the press, and the cinema, and Jews of foreign origin who had taken refuge in France were put into camps. Collaboration between Vichy and Germany, which was blessed by a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Pétain in October 1940, intensified, particularly in 1942, when French police assisted the Germans to round up the Jews, especially those of foreign extraction, and send them to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where they were killed. In all, between 1942 and 1944 some 76,000 were deported from France, of whom only 3 per cent survived. Two-thirds of the deportees were foreign Jews.

The Vichy Government failed, partly because of its own weaknesses. Pétain was 84 when he took power, and his secretive nature did not make for strong government. But it was the actions of the Germans that counted. In March 1942 they demanded that 250,000 Frenchmen should go to work in Germany. They took food away from France and they were responsible for shortages. The persecution of the Jews offended much Catholic and Protestant feeling. The argument that the Germans were protecting France from Bolshevism became less attractive. Armed resistance against the Germans began to grow, and in 1942 became organized as a unified movement led by Free France, the organization founded by General de Gaulle in London in 1940 (see European Resistance Movements of World War II).

The real downfall of Vichy took place after the Americans invaded North Africa in November 1942. A French Committee of Liberation was established in Algiers in June 1943. The majority of French people had neither collaborated with the Germans nor been associated with the Resistance and they welcomed the liberation of France from June 1944.