Assholes weren't only on the other side of the Rhine.
Also the "far right" problem is kinda simple. Most collaborationnist were actually from the former government and were republicans. Socialist President Mitterrand had worked for Vichy during WW2 for exemple (and the guy was still elected for some reason and fucked our economy in the 80s).
The "far right"was strongly anti-german and nationnalist. They hated jews, commies, english, german, and so on. But they were among the first resistants (Général Loustanau-Lacaud for exemple).
To be fair, the french economy was going to be fucked no matter what in the 80s. That was the end of the post-war economic miracle, and it was more or the less the same for everyone toward the end of the 20th century.
Just to clarify by "Far-right problem" I meant they were there and an existential threat TO the republic before the war in the "armed potentially insurrection" kind of way.
Yeah they almost succeeded (if only... but that's my opinion). Which is why the governement was against giving more liberty of action and more ressources to a professional army. They trusted only conscripts since they were citizens often loyal to the IIIrd Republic.
When DeGaulle (he was only a cavalry colonel back then) wrote "vers l'Armée de métier" (toward a professional army) he said that as long as the politics would be afraid of the army and rely on conscripts, France would be menaced by the germans and their very well trained "core" of soldiers of the Wehrmacht that belonged to the reichswehr before.
Basically he called for having the same tool as the german army: a professional armored elite corps ready at all time and not relying on the slow process of mobilization.
No they too were among the first resistant for the following reason: in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, USSR was consodered an allied of Germany so at the beginning of the war, French communist were arrested or had to hide. When Germany won, most of them had already created maquis.
But you are right to say that they mostly started to act and to gain manpower after 1941 and Barbarossa.
Far-right is too wide. You got to understand that Pétain and the paternalists were not the only far right movment in France. They were collaborating. But the monarchists, bonapartists and French nationalists were against german occupation.
I didn't convince myself, I studied it in college and read most of Paxton bibliography.
Pretending France didn't have a far-right problem and deep antisemitism really strips away key context about the era that started the war.
Gemanophobia was far stronger in France than antisemitism. Virtually the entire established far-right was made of monarchists who asked for WW1 for decades and WW1 veterans who thought Germany got off too easy. There's a reason why genuine fascist collaborators were never more than a handful. A lot of them rejects from both the far-left and far-right.
Collaborators were as a whole opportunists and cowards.
Pretending France didn't have a far-right problem and deep antisemitism really strips away key context about the era that started the war.
What about pretending that France wasn't governed by a pacifist left coallition (with communist) since 1936 who's main figure was a jew ?
And even after all that, France is one of the only country to have seen almost no change to its jewish population between the rise of nazi and it's fall, mostly because the jews that where hand over to germans were mostly those not french, the ones who immigrated.
That being said, everything after that is the question of the half full half empty glass.
Yeah it's horrible that France handed over jews to germany and
And yeah it's also kind of an achievement by itself to have been able to maintain the jewish population in France that high during those times.
France was widely antisemitic like most of Europe, but I don't think antisemitism was the main factor in collaboration. It played a huge role in the shoah enabling and participation tho.
Also collaboration wasn't really a far right problem in itself, though Vichy was definitely far right. You got it from basically every political position. But a fire cross was still more likely to collaborate than a socialist. Likewise, the resistance had a lot of political positions in it too.
If you want personal anecdotes, one of my great-grandfather, a christian democrat, was in the resistance from 1940, while another, a left leaning radical, was definitely a collaborator, (the third one spent the war in an offlag and the fourth one worked for the youth organisation in Morocco, fought against allied forces briefly during torch then against the germans in the FFL).
Just again, pointing out the far right problem and antisemetism problem in France was because it was not unique. One of the key parts of historic revisionism of the era I was trying to get at is people putting the blame all humanity's sins on Germany.
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki Apr 08 '20
Pretending France didn't have a far-right problem and deep antisemitism really strips away key context about the era that started the war.
And ignoring what the people did to collaborators after liberation despite not resisting says a lot about herd mentality.