Vichy Regime

Vichy Regime (France, 1940–4) On 17 June 1940, Pétain became the last Prime Minister of the Third Republic. He obtained an armistice five days later, which left him in control of two-fifths of French territory in southern France, which he governed from the spa resort of Vichy. Trusting in Pétain as the saviour of France at its darkest hour, and encouraged by the threats of Laval, the Chamber of Deputies effectively voted itself out of existence. On 10 July 1940, it transferred all powers to Pétain and his new ‘État Français’. Pétain made full use of his dictatorial powers, as he considered the previous republican system, rather than the army, to have been the root cause of France's defeat. With his full support, and under the effective guidance of Laval, the old republican motto ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity’ was replaced by ‘family, country, and work’. Unlike the Republic's anticlericalism, the Roman Catholic Church was given a special role to guide moral regeneration. In common with other Fascist regimes, the emphasis on a new national community included hostility to those who were deemed to be outside, in this case Jews, Protestants, Freemasons, and Republicans. Vichy's anti-Semitism was the culmination of the anti-Semitism which had been holding together various factions of the French right since the Dreyfus Affair and beyond, and prepared the ground for active collaboration in rounding up a quarter of the country's Jewish population (around 76,000) for the Nazi concentration camps, in order to win favours from the Germans. Under Pétain's Chief Ministers, Laval (1940, 1942–4) and Darlan (1940–2), the state became more and more accommodating to the Germans, creating a niche for itself in the new German world order, but it received few concessions in return. In November 1942, after the US landing in Morocco to participate in the North African campaigns, German troops entered the state to secure it against possible invasions from the Mediterranean, which restricted Pétain's and Laval's freedom of action even further. In 1944 the state effectively ceased to exist as the retreating Germans forced Pétain to set up a government-in-exile of the Vichy state in the south German town of Sigmaringen.