THE COUP D’ETAT IN FRANCE AND PETAIN’S RISE TO POWER

Abstract

The defeat of France in 1940 led to the fall of the Third Republic and the creation of the Petain (or Vichy) regime. It is generally believed that the coup took place on July 10, but in fact it happened on June 16, when Petain replaced Reynaud as head of the French government. Moreover, the first steps towards the coup were taken a month earlier, in the second half of May, after the appointment of Petain as deputy head of government, and several of his supporters to other key posts. This article is written in order to prove this on the basis of factual material. The content of the article also shows that, in addition to the generally recognized reasons (the country's unreadiness for a «new type of war», the strong positions of defeatists of different political orientations, etc.), the position of Britain and the United States towards France also played a role in the coup: the former, after Dunkirk, actually left France to its fate, the public opinion of the latter has not yet matured before joining the war. At the same time, the results of the work allow us to reconsider some of the existing points of view on the Vichy government: despite a number of analogies with the Nazi coup of 1933. In Germany, the Petain regime was not completely totalitarian, although it was a kind of «conservative revolution».