In Europe

policeman with hollow cheeks. All afternoon he stands preaching in word and gesture to the trucks and the perspiring car drivers: drive carefully, not too fast, keep your distance. Then comes thirteen kilometres of darkness, after which I drive into another world. The fields are not brownish-yellow but green, the houses, roads and rules are clear and well defined, all randomness has been abolished. But here, behind the Alps, the overwhelming Italian light has also gone out too. Within Europe, I realise, there is yet another essential dividing line: the light line.
    After the tunnel the weather changes, it is raining and the evenings are already growing longer. In the villages the doors and shutters are closed, the only light comes from a clubhouse close to a church where a meeting is being held, or the aerobics night for the local women's club. I spend the night at a camping ground in a pine forest, a village of tents and caravans that seems drab even when the sun breaks through the next morning. The camping ground is inhabited primarily by single men. The roofs of their caravans are weathered, the canvas of their tents has turned grey, they appear to be gradually becoming one with this forest. ‘Most of us live here all year round,’ the man across the way tells me. He crosses the camping ground slowly, leaning on his cane, his head held stiffly at an angle, his swollen feet in a pair of slippers. A few couples live here as well, and a few illegal immigrants, but most of the campers are men like him. ‘I'm from Caen, that's right, a divorce. And life here is cheap, right?’ But what about the cold? ‘It only freezes here a few days each winter, most years, and I get along fine with my kerosene heater.’
    The tent attached to the front of his caravan has curtains and a television with a satellite dish, and he has gladioli in his little garden. Everyone makes the best of his own poverty, here amid these silent trees.
    I am on my way to the remarkable land of Marshal Philippe Pétain, that unoccupied territory ruled for four years from the casino and the Hôtel du Parc in the remote spa town of Vichy, that roped-off France which became a ‘hopeless observer of the war’ after the surrender was signed.
    After June 1940, France was broken into six pieces. Marshal Pétain ruled over approximately two fifths of the country. (After November 1942 that part, too, was occupied by the Germans, leaving him little room to manoeuvre.) The south-eastern part of the country, around Nice, was in Italian hands. A few northern coastal
départements
, which had been more or less annexed to Belgium, were run by the German military authorities in Brussels. North-eastern France was reserved for future German colonisation – for the French it was the
Zone interdite
, the forbidden zone. Lorraine and Alsace had been incorporated into Germany without further ado. The rest fell under the authority of the
Militärbefehlshaber
in Paris. The French themselves had to pay the costs of the German occupation: twenty million marks a day.
    Driving through the country now, one is struck by the peculiar way those boundaries were laid out: straight through provinces, sometimes even straight through cities and villages. It seems as though in 1940 someone simply drew a few lines on the map, with the same lack of concern the French had once shown in dividing up Africa. That, in fact, characterises the Vichy regime: this ‘free’ bit of France existed only as long as the German had no need for it.
    The choice of the bathing resort of Vichy was also made more or less at random. With its 300 hotels, it was the only place where the ministries that been driven out of Paris could settle down without a problem. Pétain was immediately enthusiastic: the city had a fast train to Paris, the climate was mild, the citizenry consisted mainly of the prosperous and the conservative, and its remoteness made it a pleasant place of work for every bureaucrat who did not want to be bothered by the rest of the world.
    Vichy was a town at loose ends, it was neither French nor truly cosmopolitan, it awakened in the spring and hibernated all winter. It was with Vichy that the word ‘collaboration’ assumed its modern connotation – but there it simply meant ‘cooperation’. What we now call defeatism, it called realism. Pétain was held in adulation. Vichy was at war with Great Britain: that, at least, was how people saw it. General de Gaulle, who had fled to London