On June 14, 1940 Paris fell to the Germans. The French government were divided on whether or not to keep fighting or to surrender and call for peace. Premier Paul Reynaud wanted to keep fighting, however General Maxim Weygand and vice premier Marshal Phillipe Petain insisted on calling an armistice. Petain succeeded Reynaud as premier and quickly asked the Germans for a cease-fire.
A jubilant Hitler travelled to Paris and announced that his terms of an armistice included German occupation of two-thirds of France including Paris and all of the Atlantic Coast. The French got to keep the rest of the country, except for those few places where the Italians (under the direction of Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s ally) had captured during their invasion. The French re-established a government in the resort town of Vichy, the new capital of un-occupied France. This leads to the term Vichy French.
However, luckily for the French, there was one more who refused to give up. His name was Charles de Gaulle. And from the safety of London he was able to organise a “Free France” military force, with himself as leader. The Vichy French government were now German allies and the collaboration of De Gaulle's liberation force and the resistance fighters who remained in Paris led to the liberation of France from German occupation on 19 August 1944. The Vichy French government were exiled to Sigmaringen in Germany.
Source: World War II: An Expanded History, prepared by Theodore A. Wilson, with excerpts from World War II: A Short History, by Michael. J. Lyons, Pearson Custom Publishing, 2000
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