De Gaulle refused to restore the French Republic, insisting it had never ended
At the Paris city hall on 25 August 1944, a Resistance leader invited Charles de Gaulle to proclaim the republic's return. He declined: in his view the republic had never stopped existing, so the four years of Pétain's French State had been void all along. Historians still argue over whether Vichy was quite so illegitimate.
Germany invaded France on 10 May 1940. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned rather than seek terms, President Albert Lebrun appointed Marshal Philippe Pétain on 16 June, and the armistice followed on 22 June. On 10 July both chambers of parliament voted Pétain full powers, and the words French Republic vanished from official papers in favour of the État français. Its government sat in the spa town of Vichy, in the unoccupied south, while Germany held the north and west.
Pétain built an authoritarian regime, launched a so-called National Revolution, and in October 1940, after meeting Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loir, declared a policy of collaboration while formally staying neutral. Vichy never joined the Axis and kept its navy and empire, but the price was heavy. France paid the costs of the occupying army, Germany kept about 1,800,000 French soldiers as prisoners, and young men were sent to forced labour. French police were ordered to round up Jews; at least 72,500 deported from Vichy France died in Nazi camps, most of them foreign-born.
The fiction of independence collapsed in November 1942. When the Allies landed in North Africa, German and Italian forces occupied the whole country in Operation Anton and disbanded Vichy's small armistice army. Alsace-Lorraine had meanwhile been treated as German in all but name, with its men conscripted into the Wehrmacht.
Legality is the contested part. Free France and every later French government called Vichy an unconstitutional coup, pointing to pressure from Pierre Laval and to 27 parliamentarians absent aboard the ship Massilia during the vote. Historian Julian Jackson counters that Vichy began both legal and legitimate: Pétain was hugely popular until 1942, and more than 40 countries, including the United States, Canada and China, recognised it. The Ordinance of 9 August 1944 nonetheless declared all its constitutional acts void from the start.
Source: Vichy France
