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This policy included the Bousquet-Oberg accords of July 1942 that formalized the collaboration of the French police with the German police. This collaboration was manifested in particular by anti-Semitic measures taken by the Vichy government, and by its active participation in the genocide.
The armistice after Germany defeated France in June 1940 included numerous provisions, all of which largely guaranteed by the German policy of keeping 2 million French prisoners-of-war in Germany effectively as hostages.
Pétain established an authoritarian government at Vichy, [8] [9] with central planning a key feature, as well as tight government control. French conventional wisdom, particularly in the administration of François Mitterrand , long held that the French government under Petain had merely sought to make the best of a bad situation.
Vichy France (French: Régime de Vichy, lit. 'Vichy regime'; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State (État français), was a French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II, established after the French capitulation after the defeat against Germany.
The Vichy government, itself heavily engaged in collaboration, arrested around 2,000 individuals on charges of passing information to the Germans. They did so to centralise collaboration, ensure that the state maintained a monopoly in Franco-German relations and defend sovereignty so that they could negotiate from a position of strength.
These elections were the first test for the validity of the provisional institutions that had emerged from the Resistance. The electoral system in force was the two-round majority system, except in Paris, where elections were held under the proportional system. This election was also marked by the participation of women for the first time in ...
On 14 August 1941, a decree signed by Philippe Pétain required all civil servants to take an oath of loyalty to him. An official ceremony took place for the police on 20 January 1942, during which 3,000 delegates from the Paris Guard, the National Police and the Police Prefecture met in the great hall of the Palais de Chaillot, under the presidency of Pierre Pucheu, Minister of the Interior.
The nationalism of Pétain, who saw himself as maintaining the tradition of the victorious nationalism of 1918, did not stop his collaborating with the Nazi regime. Until he died, he kept a certain degree of Germanophobia of the sort expressed by Charles Maurras. He had no pro-German or anti-British record from before the war.