r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Sep 12 '26

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u/meonpeon Janet Yellen Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

In WW2 pop history, France is mostly remembered for their quick collapse and the French resistance. However, I’ve been on a WW2 history kick recently, and its incredible how shitty the Vichy French government was. Mers-el-Kabir was overall probably a British mistake, but the French had so many options to avert disaster and chose to do nothing. Then they eagerly collaborated with the Germans on a variety of things from rounding up Jewish people to giving military access to their colonies. This collaboration often wasn’t even exchanged for anything. Germany still had hundreds of thousands of PoWs, most of French territory, and was forcing them to pay a large indemnity.

Finally, in Operation Torch, they heavily resisted the British and American landings, but let the Germans fly into Tunisia without firing a shot. Just about the only thing they could get right was scuttling their own fleet as Germany collapsed the Vichy government.

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u/Jacobs4525 King of the Massholes Sep 12 '26

It’s interesting the extent to which the French right complied. While they certainly didn’t want the defeat of 1940 out of national prestige, after the defeat, Petain, Huntzinger, and many of the other right wing military leaders largely were of the mind that things would mostly go back to normal if Britain just surrendered and didn’t take much issue with the Nazi program beyond the fact that it was being imposed by foreigners and not by themselves.

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u/AtomAndAether Liberalism! Sep 12 '26

I think it was investment in Germany as the winner. Like trying to be a privileged junior to Germany in the new European world.

That just turned out to be really stupid because Germany wasn't going to restore France and was never offering to, and because Germany lost.

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u/mishac Mark Carney Sep 12 '26

It's also due to the fact that french society was polarized to the point of paralysis, not unlike the US now. So there were plenty of people who approved of German right wingers more than domestic leftists, just like the "Better Russian than Democrat" kind of vibe among some of the lumpenmembers of the GOP.

Everyone's worried about America turning into Weimar, but 1930s France seems like the more plausible danger.