In Europe

with his Free French Forces, was the great turncoat. That was the attitude during the first years of the war. After 1944, half of France made a complete about-turn.
    These days the French are reasonably aware of what happened in their country between 1940–4. But at first, certainly for the first two or three decades afterwards, the country lived in deep silence when it came to the war. In 1971, cineaste Marcel Ophüls was the first to produce a clear-eyed and remarkable documentary about Vichy,
Le chagrin et la pitié
. One year later the young American historian Robert Paxton got the debate rolling among his colleagues. In his study
Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order
, Paxton was the first to make use of German documents which had never been consulted by French historians. Inevitably, those documents showed that the story the French had been telling their children and themselves for years was wide of the mark. Vichy was in no way the product of an elderly president and a few hundred powerless French officials working under severe pressure from the German occupiers. On the contrary: it was a fresh new regime with great aspirations, supported and lauded by millions of French citizens. It was not merely the transitional stage, the provisional government that the official annals of French history tried to make of it. It was a regime with pronounced anti-Semitic traits, and with far-reaching plans to reorganise French society along authoritarian, corporative lines, more or less the same lines applied earlier in Portugal by the dictator Salazar.
    Modern-day Vichy is not a city of lies, but definitely one of ‘lacunae and blank spots’. As if by a miracle, life there has halted in summer 1939. The shaded streets behind the hotels are full of the art deco villas and pseudo-oriental castles of the once-worshipped miracle doctors and masseurs. People still converse beneath the old plane trees and chestnutsin front of the casino, the town has a long covered walkway to protect strollers from rain and sun, and every day one still runs into Chekhov's ‘lady with the little dog’.
    In Vichy itself, only one historical ‘fact’ remains visible: a high, pock-marked wall in the park along the Allier River, topped with shreds of barbed wire once put there by the Gestapo to shield its headquarters from prying eyes. That wall, along with a few coins and letters in the little municipal museum, is the only concrete reminder of ‘the period’, as the citizens of Vichy prefer to call the war years.
    Otherwise it is only the names that continue to haunt. The Hôtel du Portugal, once the Gestapo headquarters, is still called Le Portugal, and the same applies to the Hôtel Moderne of the
Milice Française
, the paramilitary organisation of Vichy whose job it was to stamp out the Resistance.
    The chic Hôtel du Parc, the seat of the Vichy government and Pétain's private residence, has been christened ‘Le Parc’, but otherwise everything remains the same: the balcony from which the marshal received the cheers of hundreds of Frenchmen during the Sunday parades, the pavements along which his supporters, standing five deep, raised their voices almost every day in the Vichy anthem:
    Maréchal, nous voilà
Devant toi, le sauveur de la France.
Nous jurons, nous, les gars,
De servir et de suivre tes pas.
    Marshal, here we are! Saviour of France, we, your men, swear to serve and follow in your footsteps.
    In those days, in the streets off the boulevards, there were scores of smaller hotels where some 100,000 civil servants found shelter. Provisional ministries were set up in the Grand Casino, with dividing walls made of archive boxes. ‘In the streets of our city, the crowds of passers-by, hands in their pockets and collars turned up, scatter in every direction like nervous ants,’ a journalist wrote in the
Progrès de l'Allier
on 27 January, 1942. To combat the worst of the cold, the officials installed simple wood stoves. ‘Everywhere were the long black necks of pipes, sweating drops of sooty liquid.’
    Most of the officials were young, and the atmosphere was one of excitement, often steamy and sensual. Marches were held regularly, and a concert was given each week by the
Garde Républicaine
. In 1940 Pétain was as popular with the average Frenchman as de Gaulle was at the time of the country's liberation in 1944. He signed his first laws in truly royal fashion, ‘We, Philippe Pétain …’, and the people loved it. From the