Vichy France

The French State established under Marshal Philippe Pétain after France's armistice with Germany in June 1940, with its capital at Vichy in the unoccupied zone. Formally autonomous but in practice subordinate to German demands, Vichy France collaborated in the persecution and deportation of Jews (over 77,000 French Jews were deported to Auschwitz, of whom 2,500 survived), operated its own concentration camps, and used the French police to carry out arrests. It simultaneously maintained the fiction of French sovereignty and empire. The regime was ended by the Allied liberation of France in 1944; Pétain was tried for treason and sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. The extent and nature of French collaboration, obscured for decades by the Gaullist myth of a predominantly resistant France, became a subject of serious historical reckoning from the 1970s onward.

• Existed: 1940 CE – 1944 CE
• Type: Entity
• Government: Authoritarian state (collaborationist)
• Capital: Vichy