Chris Millington - France in the Second World War

France in the Second World War

France in the Second World War

Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire

Chris Millington

For Madeleine

CONTENTS

Figures

Map

Table

On 9 May 1940, Adolf Hitler boasted to the leaders of the German army: Gentlemen, you are about to witness the most famous victory in history. The Nazi invasion of Western Europe had begun. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands fell quickly. Hitlers armies needed just six weeks to conquer France. The German invasion through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes region took Allied military leaders by surprise. Unable to adapt to the unexpected situation and with no plan B, the Western powers were routed within days. As the defeated British fled back across the Channel, the French Prime Minister, First World War hero Marshal Philippe Ptain, requested an Armistice; thus began the Dark Years of the Occupation.

Hitler inflicted a humiliating peace upon France. A punitive financial settlement saw the French saddled with the costs of their own occupation. The army was reduced to a rump and the navy confined to port. Over a million prisoners of war resided in German camps as hostages. France itself was dismembered and carved into a number of zones, the largest of which were the Occupied Northern Zone and the Southern Free Zone. An internal border the Demarcation Line separated the North from the South. In the northeast of France, the Third Reich annexed and rapidly Germanized the region of Alsace and the department of the Moselle. In the southeast, 800 square kilometres of territory fell under Italian control. Rome seized and Italianized the town of Menton where shops now displayed the sign, Here we speak Italian and give the fascist salute.

A despairing French nation turned to Ptain for comfort. Few people protested when, in July 1940, the Marshal liquidated the Third Republic, the regime that had governed France since 1870. Many French blamed the democratic Republic for the catastrophe of the defeat. Ptain subsequently founded the Etat Franais (French State), otherwise known as the Vichy regime (after the southern spa town where it was based). Vichy promised to revive the country through a root-and-branch reform of political, social, economic and cultural life the National Revolution and the vigorous persecution of Frances alleged enemies, namely Jews, communists and Freemasons. At the same time, Ptain sought to win a place in Hitlers New Order through the policy of collaboration. In the space of barely two months in 1940, France had swapped democracy for authoritarianism.

The French Empire largely remained under Vichys control, a fact that ensured that the National Revolution was a global experiment. Ptains laws applied as much to the 25 million people in Indochina and the 16 million people in French West Africa as they did to the tiniest hamlet in rural France. Still, experiences necessarily diverged and differed. Colonial governors and their subordinates adapted directives from the mainland to local contexts while preserving their broadly exclusionary and repressive nature. Meanwhile, for many subjects of the Empire, the war was not marked by foreign invasion and occupation; in imperial territories, the French were the invaders and occupiers. Consequently, in the colonial memory of the war the terms to describe the period differ. For the Caribbean peoples of Guadeloupe, for example, it means little to call the Second World War the Dark Years or the Occupation; the period is remembered instead as Life in the Time of Sorin ( la vie an tan Sorin ), named after the brutally repressive wartime governor of the island Constant Sorin.

For the French who refused to accept Ptains leadership, General Charles de Gaulle urged resistance. De Gaulle and his France Libre (Free France) movement waged a propaganda and military campaign against the Vichy regime from London and Brazzaville (in the French Congo). The Generals campaign to liberate France and its territories was of global dimensions: in 1940, colonial peoples joined the nascent Free French and de Gaulles early power base was not located in the UK but in French Equatorial Africa. A plethora of resistance movements and networks, large and small, operated in French territory. These groups worked to turn public opinion against Vichy and obstruct the Occupier. Only during 1942 did de Gaulle make contact with resisters within France itself. The unification of the Free French and the internal resistance during 19421943 allowed the French to make an important contribution to the liberation of their country in summer 1944.

The painful experience of the war years has marked the decades since 1944, evoked in novels and films, history books (it is perhaps the most intensively studied period in French history) and educational curricula, commemorations and monuments. By the end of the 1980s, according to Henry Rousso, Frances preoccupation with its Vichy past had become pathological; the so-called Vichy Syndrome ensured that this was a past that does not pass.

This book is an introduction to the Dark Years. I do not pretend that it offers an exhaustive history of the subject; it is a survey rather than an encyclopaedia . The literature on France and its Empire during 19401944 is huge. It is the goal of France in the Second Wold War to pay suitable heed to this vast historiography while presenting it in a succinct and logical form. Aimed at an Anglophone audience, it comprises the aspects of the war and Occupation most important to an understanding of the subject while accounting for the French experience in all its diversity. To distil the topic of each chapter into a clear and manageable essay was tricky. I wrote each chapter with my students in mind and I therefore offer the reader a comprehensive and readable study aid suitable for university classes of all levels.

I dedicate this book to Madeleine who, despite her young age, is already aware of her dads intermittent disappearances to a place called France. I hope that she will develop the love and appreciation of foreign cultures, histories, attitudes and languages that are so lacking in todays world.