Collaborationism in France during World War II

Abstract

More than twenty years have passed since the liberation of France, and the flood of books about Vichy and the Resistance has not receded. However, there is no satisfactory treatment of the most delicate of all the problems raised by the fall and divisions of France: collaboration with the German occupant. This may be due in part to the nature of the subject. Vichy can be discussed, I won't say objectively, but without reopening the wounds that the events of 1940-44 inflicted on French selfconfidence and national consciousness. For there is enough evidence behind the thesis of Vichy, the shield that protected the French body politic while London and the Resistance forged a sword, to allow the French public to face without too much shame such facts as Petain's early popularity and Vichy's original appeal. The Fascist gangs and writers of can be dismissed as a noisy but tiny, repulsive but insignificant, minority, an exception that confirms the rule of French decency despite French divisions. To deal with the subject of collaboration as such would make retrospective reassurance far more difficult. For one would have to realize that the cancer which was gnawing at France's sense of national identity had spread much beyond the narrow confines of the Paris traitors. The historians and social scientists of a nation where that sense appeared to have triumphed at last over the ordeals which twenty-five years of ghastly tests had accumulated may feel less inhibited today about the scrutiny of an ugly past. However, there is a second reason for their timidity. The subject is infernally complicated. Vichy, the pluralistic dictatorship, is complex enough. However, it is easier to distinguish phases, clans, ideas, and issues within the maze of Petain's regime than in the story of French collaborationism. A careful historian would have -almost-to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration. This may help explain why, if we look for full treatments (rather than sections in books that deal with broader subjects), we find only two volumes-one,' written by a former collaborationist, who throws amazingly little light or heat on what purports to