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heavily on right-wing, reactionary and (some-
times extreme) nationalist and counter-revo-
lutionary traditions (e.g. the Action Française),
but by no means exclusively; in the words of
Stanley Hoffmann (1974), Vichy was a ‘plu-
ralist dictatorship’ which also attracted per-
sonalities and influences from other groupings
such as veterans’ organizations, political ‘non-
conformists’ of the 1930s, and even former
radicals and renegade left-wingers.
From the very beginning it was made ex-
plicit that under Pétain’s paternalistic author-
ity the regime intended to effect a ‘National
Revolution’ which would strive to expunge
from France the allegedly corrupt Republican
heritage. Using the slogan ‘Travail, Famille,
Patrie’ (used by the veterans’ leader Colonel
de La Rocque in his book Service public in
1934) to replace the Republican motto of
‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’, the government
introduced measures to transform the struc-
tures of French society which extended beyond
institutional domains into everyday socioeco-
nomic activities, religion and culture. In addi-
tion to its wish to promote a ‘return to the
earth’ (symbolic of the regime’s preference for
traditional values and rejection of all that was
cosmopolitan and therefore decadent), efforts
were made to eradicate elements of what was
considered to be ‘anti-France’: in constructing
this new French identity, not only were ties to
be cut with the immediate past regarding both
domestic and international politics, but those
influences deemed to be most damaging to the
‘real’ France were to be expunged. Thus the
enemies of the regime were clearly identified
by Vichyite propaganda: Anglo-Saxons, Com-
munists, freemasons and Jews.
In October 1940, after Pétain met Hitler at
Montoire, the strategy of ‘Collaboration’ was
formally adopted by the Vichy government. As
official texts show, this policy was followed
because during the first year of the Occupation
the regime was convinced that eventually the
Germans would defeat Britain and dominate the
continent. The policy of Collaboration was de-
signed to ensure a leading place for France in
the ‘new Europe’. As the war went on, how-
ever, German victory against the Allies became
less certain. Particularly after the return to power
of Pierre Laval, Pétain’s prime minister, in April
1942, and after the occupation of the southern
zone by the Germans in November 1942, Vi-
chy was increasingly and irreversibly drawn into
the machinery of the Nazi war effort. This ex-
tended well beyond the economic domain. In
particular, the two sets of anti-Jewish statutes
put into place by Vichy in October 1940 and
June 1941, laws which drew on a specifically
French anti-semitic tradition dating back to the
Dreyfus affair of 1894–9 and beyond, and
which predated the measures introduced by the
Germans, eventually eased the implementation
of the Nazis’ Final Solution in France. It was
French authorities which carried out censuses
of the Jewish population, and French police (co-
ordinated with the Nazis by police chief René
Bousquet) who co-operated in many of the
round-ups of Jews, the most infamous of which
was the rafle du Vélodrome d’hiver (a Paris
sports stadium) on 16–17 July 1942. In total,
some 76,000 Jews (of whom 24,000 were
French) were deported from French railheads
to the Nazi death camps in eastern Europe: only
3 per cent survived.
For a long time after the war, this complicity
in Nazi genocide was masked by what Henry
Rousso (1991) has called ‘the Vichy syndrome’,
according to which painful memories of the dif-
ficult choices arising from the Occupation, and
especially the memory of the fate inflicted on
the Jews, were pushed to the back of the collec-
tive conscious. However, the path-breaking
work of historians such as Robert Paxton (1972)
opened the way towards a reappraisal of
France’s role in the Occupation, and work un-
dertaken by researchers at the CNRS Institut
d’Histoire du Temps Présent began to present
the realities of the war in France in a clearer
light. Public and press reaction to revelations
that President Mitterrand began his political
career under Vichy, and that he had connec-
tions with René Bousquet after the war (Péan
1994), suggests that the ‘dark years’ of the Vi-
chy period in France continue to trouble no-
tions of contemporary French identity.
MARTYN CORNICK
Vichy