The French Resistance: Fantasy and Failure
The French Resistance sought liberation above all else. But what should the postwar nation look like? The question was as old as the Fall of France itself.
In the summer of 1940 millions of French men and women were beginning to grasp the reality of the Armistice signed by Marshal Pétain on 22 June that year. The elderly First World War veteran – known as the ‘Lion of Verdun’ and now in his mid-80s – had become the head of the French government following the collapse of the Third Republic during the Battle of France, which had begun, after much preamble, on 10 May. By June the battle was over, Paris occupied, France fallen. The Armistice – signed, at Adolf Hitler’s request, in the same train carriage and at the same location in the Compiègne Forest as France had accepted Germany’s surrender in November 1918 – divided France into zones placed under the control of different political authorities: a northern zone controlled from Paris by Nazi Germany; a small region of southeast France to be run by Fascist Italy; and a southern so-called ‘free zone’, to be administered by Pétain.
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