Quotes About Vichy

the US continued to recognise Vichy and the Free French were reduced to operating in the US out of the office of the representative of the Patou perfume firm.143

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

CASABLANCA provided Vichy with its best anchorage south of Toulon, and the French navy had chosen to defend the Moroccan port with valor worthy of a better cause.

Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. "November 8, we fight everybody," he wrote privately. "November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody." Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

When people complained, Vichy, unconvincingly, sought to justify its moves by pointing out that one of the reasons France lost the war was that it had too many bars, one bar for every 80 persons compared with one for every 270 people in Germany.

This Catholic assault on the Third Republic and Jews looked directly forward to Vichy cooperation with Nazi Germany during World War II and was a potent instance of the manner in which Catholic anti-Semitism prepared the context for abetting genocide.

Fascists have been particularly enamored of traditional gender roles. Vichy France made Mother's Day a major festival and awarded medals to good mothers. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, argued that "Man should be trained as a warrior and woman as recreation for the warrior," a precept he put into practice in his own life as far as the recreation was concerned.

For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.

I consider that France and the Republic were in London during the occupation and that the Vichy regime was not France.

Brigitte LeContre, code-named Germaine, arrived in Vichy, France, on Saturday, August 23, 1941. She was the first woman field agent the SOE had sent into France.

Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.

E' solo un mal di testa, Signor Sempere. Mi sta già passando. Sempere mi verso un bicchiere di acqua di Vichy. Tenga. Questa cura tutto, meno la stupidità, che è una epidemia sempre più diffusa.

The reason Vichy was acceptable to most French people after the defeat of 1940, for example, was not that it pleased them to live under a regime that persecuted Jews, but because Pétainist rule allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with minimum disruption. How the regime treated Jews was a matter of indifference: the Jews just hadn't mattered that much. And much the same was true in most other occupied lands.

So they became superpatriots. And to prove themselves right-minded, they were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others, even their fellow Jews. They were like the Vichy government in France, collaborators who held on to their influence and position at the expense of their fellow countrymen.

For those rooms at the Hôtel Ritz, the Germans would take a 90 percent discount—paying a mere twenty-five francs a day on average. As "guests" of the French people, they would ultimately send even that reduced bill to the new French puppet government of the occupation, the Vichy regime,

The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier.

To her, Vichy was nothing but a nest of gossip, infighting, and intrigue, filled, as she put it, with the "aristocracy of defeat"—politicians, businessmen, civil servants, military officers, and others—all seeking jobs or other personal or political gain from the new government.

Vichy officials and collaborationists imprisoned 135,000 people (many for little more than their political beliefs), sent 650,000 more to Germany as "guest workers" under an obligatory labor scheme, and, most notoriously, sent 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Less than 3 percent of those Jews survived.