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Epilogue
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Epilogue We can no longer view France as a nation of collaborators, any more than we can say it was a nation of resisters. On the contrary, the historical narrative on the ‘‘dark years’’ has revealed a nation that opposed collaboration virtually from the beginning and gradually accepted Resistance as the only solution to Nazi domination, much like other Western European nations under the Nazi yoke. Although opposition to anti-Semitic measures came somewhat late in the day, the French people ’s response to the Holocaust was largely exemplary: despite the existence of widespread anti-Semitic attitudes in France, a culture of universal humanitarianism, inspired by either the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution or Christian compassion for the persecuted, helped save thousands of Jews from the Nazi camps and contributed to Vichy’s less cooperative response to German roundups of Jews after 1942. French gentiles did not necessarily like the Jews in the abstract, but they came to their aid as much as if not more than any other European nation. The France that failed in World War II was the official, institutional France. The debacle of 1940 was not due to low morale or a lack of patriotism among the rank and file French soldiers. France could have defeated the Nazis in 1940 or earlier, but the military and political elite refused to take the initiative by attacking Germany when it was vulnerable in the fall of 1939 and then failed to interpret their own intelligence information properly in the spring of 1940. The French military elite was sclerotic, tied to antiquated policies of defense in an age of German blitzkrieg. Rather than accept their responsibility, most of these same military and political elites, led by Pétain and Laval, 198 | Epilogue accepted an armistice that subjected France to Nazi Germany and then imposed upon the nation, with Catholic Church support, the so-called National Revolution, justified by a series of lies about French decadence and the need to atone for the sins of the nation that had led to the defeat of 1940. The National Revolution was quickly rejected by the bulk of the population; neither it nor Vichy’s collaborationist policies had much legitimacy with the French people by the time Germany occupied the ‘‘Free Zone’’ in November 1942. Out of this came, in time, the Resistance. Not the heroic movement depicted in postwar hagiography, it had many flaws. The Resistance was comprised of French men and women, some of whom, made compromises with Vichy, believed in some of the ideals of the National Revolution, expressed anti-Semitic attitudes, adhered to a narrow nationalist agenda, or joined the cause for unworthy reasons to engage in despicable, criminal activities and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. But not everyone in the Resistance was a Lucien Lacombe, the antihero of Louis Malle’s film about Resistance and collaboration. The Maquis was not the mirror image of the fascist Milice. For all of its faults, the Resistance adhered to a set of ideals that made it different from Vichy or the National Revolution. Those ideals, embodied in the Resistance Charter, aimed to create in France a democratic, egalitarian political , economic, and social order in place of the authoritarian police state that the Nazis and Vichy had created. In the spirit of that charter, the Resistance fought the dual enemy of Vichy and Germany, succeeding remarkably in liberating Paris, Brittany, the South of France, and a good part of Alsace. The republican and revolutionary values that formed the core of the Resistance, both internal and external, corresponded with the goals and aspirations of the vast majority of the French people. Out of it and de Gaulle’s extraordinary leadership abilities came one of Europe’s smoothest transitions to postwar government . Vichy faded away and the French Resistance filled the gap, without serious disruption of governmental activities, civil war, or the need for an Allied government on French soil. Whatever its faults, the French Resistance enabled the French to play a major role in recovering their freedom. [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:32 GMT) Epilogue | 199 France suffered severely from World War II. The total loss of lives directly related to the war was roughly 600,000, most of whom were civilians. Only 210,000, including 40,000 conscripted from Alsace and Lorraine into the German military, lost their lives in combat operations . As many as 5 million or 12...