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Chapter 2: National Revolution
- Fordham University Press
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2 National Revolution With sudden defeat in June 1940, France was left with few options. Although a small minority, led by General Charles de Gaulle, chose to go into exile to continue the war from overseas, the vast majority of the French chose to remain at home and hope that the armistice pursued by Marshal Pétain would work out for the best. The armistice terms proved to be exceedingly burdensome and collaboration with the Germans , which the armistice mandated, soon became unacceptable to most of the French. Further, the Vichy regime, which emerged in the summer of 1940 as a temporary alternative to the Third Republic, pursued a radical National Revolution that the population largely rejected. To be sure, Vichy initially had substantial support from those disgusted with the Third Republic, happy to be out of the war, expecting a quick British capitulation to the Nazis, or hopeful that collaboration might bring tangible benefits or disguise a ‘‘double game,’’ but such support was short-lived. By the late fall of 1940, most Frenchmen favored an English victory in the war, rejected the policies of the new government, and opposed collaboration with Germany. Alone among the leaders at Vichy, Marshal Pétain remained popular throughout the war, due more to the role he played at Verdun during World War I than to his political prowess in the 1940s. This chapter traces the contours of the National Revolution, its contradictions, and the reasons for its profound failure, both on its own terms and also with the French population. The armistice inaugurated this revolutionary experiment by defining the relationship that the new order would have with Nazi Germany . By its terms, Germany occupied two-thirds of the nation, including the entire Atlantic coast, Paris, and the north. Germany es- National Revolution | 35 sentially annexed Alsace and Lorraine while the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais came under German military command in Brussels, and a large part of northeastern France was designated for German colonization. In these northern ‘‘Germanic’’ areas a form of ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ of the French would take place during the Nazi occupation . The armistice effectively dismembered France—broke it into at least two parts—with a demarcation line between the German-occupied north and the so-called Free Zone in the south that could only be crossed with papers issued sparingly and sporadically by the Germans. This was a sort of Berlin Wall, before the fact and without the physical structure, policed with cruelty and brutality by the Nazi occupiers. In theory, the French state was considered sovereign over French territory on both sides of the demarcation line. In practice, the Germans all but controlled the north—especially the far north and the east—and had extensive influence over the south.1 The armistice required the French to reduce their military to 100,000 men in metropolitan France and to pay a massive indemnity to the Germans. As a result, the French army was dissolved and reconstituted as a smaller, armistice force, suitable only for domestic policing and the defense of the French empire, for which the Germans ultimately allowed a French North African army of 115,000 men. In the meantime, while France waited for a peace to be signed, well over one million French soldiers were deported to Germany as prisoners of war. Most of them would remain in German camps until 1945, despite the Vichy government’s feeble and self-defeating attempts to free them. Meanwhile, the French were required to pay reparations and occupation costs that by some estimates equaled as much as one-half of the nation’s revenue. The burden was so heavy that the French people were literally turned into slaves of the Third Reich, required to work for it, either directly or indirectly, for little or no recompense, and forced to consume less and less each year due to its claims on French resources. As a result, the French were compelled to adopt draconian rationing policies for basic commodities.2 At the time, however, very few people were aware of the armistice’s terms and many of those who were depicted it as just, given the cir- [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:21 GMT) 36 | france during world war ii cumstances. On Tuesday, June 25, 1940, Marshal Pétain spoke to the French nation about the armistice, two days after Great Britain announced that it no longer considered France to be a...