When Marshal Pétain set up his government at Bordeaux on June 16, the British Government certainly entertained many misgivings. But it did not challenge the right of the new régime to represent the ...

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain; By Julian Jackson; Belknap Press; 480 pp., $35.00 In October 1940, following a sharp and painful defeat to the Nazi Wehrmacht over the summer, Pétain shook ...

Unless the whole world was deceived, the Vichy Government last week squarely and publicly placed its bet on Germany to win World War II. Not only did it yield to Germany, which men in France today ...

Almost 50 years ago, Robert Paxton published his influential “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944.” The book awakened readers to the shock of how close France came to becoming an ...

The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. —Marc Bloch, 1940 The fall of France to Hitler’s army in the summer of 1940, besides marking a fateful turn in the military history of the Second ...

Arcade Publishing, 440 pages, $28.95. In the predawn black of July 16, 1942, 9,000 French policemen, gendarmes and paramilitary thugs fanned out across Paris. They acted on orders from Vichy, the ...

In biting verbal assaults viewed by millions, Claude Malhuret has issued a scathing critique of the American president, bringing a lifetime of experience to bear. By Roger Cohen Reporting from Vichy, ...