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The German
offensive in May-June 1940 breached the Maginot Line and prompted
the French army to collapse. The armistice accord—actually a
surrender agreement—was signed on June 22. This brought the Third
Republic to an end, and on July 10, 1940, the French parliament in
joint session dissolved the Republican regime and installed Marshal
Henri Philippe Pétain as head of the French state with full
governing powers. The government established its seat at Vichy, in
the southern part of the country. The results of the armistice were
already evident by the end of June. France was partitioned into two
sectors: a German-occupied zone (including the Atlantic coast, the
English Channel front, and Paris); and an unoccupied zone in the
southeast, administered by the Vichy government. The Vichy regime
replaced the principles of the French Revolution—Liberté,
égalité, fraternité—with new principles: Travail
(work), Famille (family), and Patrie (fatherland).
The Vichy regime, bolstered by nationalists who demanded a policy of
“returning France to the French,” began systematically to
circumscribe “aliens” influence and erode the rights of refugees
and Jews. Vichy adopted a policy of courting Nazi Germany in order
to extract more tolerable arrangements from the German authorities.
The Vichy regime did much to help the Germans persecute the Jews and
took anti-Jewish actions at its own initiative—such as the Statut
des Juifs – the Jewish Statutes (October 1940) and the
establishment of institutions such as the Commissariat for Jewish
Affairs (March 1941).
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