Vichy France

After France’s defeat in June 1940, the government led by Philippe Pétain established its seat at Vichy and replaced the Third Republic with an authoritarian French State. The regime promoted a conservative National Revolution while governing the unoccupied zone and administering French institutions under the armistice.

Vichy authorities collaborated with Nazi Germany, enacted their own antisemitic laws and assisted the arrest and deportation of Jews. Officials, intellectuals and ordinary citizens faced choices ranging from active collaboration and accommodation to evasion, rescue and resistance.

This context is appropriate for fiction and nonfiction about the Vichy administration, collaboration, intellectual compromise, antisemitic persecution and the moral pressures of occupied France between 1940 and liberation in 1944.