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51




On June 22, 1940, a week after German troops entered Paris,French and German representatives signed an armistice whose termsdivided France into two zones. Germany occupied Paris in the zonenorth of the demarcation line that sliced across France..
e new French government, named Vichy after its new capital city, residedin the unoccupied zone south of the line, called the “free zone.”Technically the Vichy government had jurisdiction over both zones,but German authorities allowed them virtually no power north of the demarcation line.
e National Assembly at Vichy voted to grantMarshal Pétain full extraordinary powers over the state on July 10,1940, fully establishing the authoritarian Vichy regime and Pétain’s
Révolution nationale 
(National Revolution). Pétain and the PrimeMinister, Pierre Laval, pledged to reorganize France according tothe traditional values of “Work, Family, and Country” through theirNational Revolution program. Months later, meeting in a train sta-tion on October 24
th
, Marshal Pétain agreed with Hitler to the of-ficial “collaboration” of the Vichy state with the
ird Reich.
2
France was not merely territorially divided.
e French citizens were also ideologically and politically divided between collaboration with and resistance to the new Vichy regime. To understand the ways in which the French split in their reactions to Vichy, it is firstessential to define the labels being applied to them. Although the
 
journal of undergraduate research
52
terms “collaboration” and “resistance” can apply to actions in any  war, they are highly politicized and provocative when writing thehistory of World War II.
ey are used to describe many diverseacts. For example, “collaboration” can mean anything from actively aiding the Nazis with deportations of Jews to working in an ammu-nitions factory supporting the Nazi war e
ff 
ort. “Resistance” refers toanything from survival for a Jew in a concentration camp to violentpartisan attacks on Nazi troops.
3
Clearly the definitions of “collabo-ration” and “resistance” are neither static nor o
ffi
cial.
ese expressions can refer to occurrences in many countriesduring the Second World War, but they take on a particular mean-ing in France under German Occupation. Vichy France had high-ly concerted e
ff 
orts of both collaboration and resistance. HistorianGerhard Hirschfeld remarks that these labels must be defined spe-cifically in the French context because “just as resistance in all itsforms cannot be seen in isolation from the conditions of repres-sion in which it arises, so collaboration cannot be separated fromthe social and political conditions which enable it to develop.”
4
InVichy France, “Collaboration” and “Resistance” refer to very spe-cific movements–hence their capitalization–which grew out of theunique arrangement between Vichy and Nazi Germany. “Collabora-tion” was the Vichy government’s o
ffi
cial cooperation with the Nazisand those who fully supported Vichy’s cooperation were “Collabora-tionists.” “Resistance” meant the organized movements both insideand outside of France who opposed and fought against Nazi occu-pation.
e Resisters in France were more active and coordinatedthan in any other country Germany attacked. With the city of Lyonserving as the center of their operations, Resistance movements of all kinds performed a range of actions to thwart the Nazis and theVichy regime, from physically fighting to publishing undergroundnewspapers to hiding Jews from deportation. Although relatively small in numbers, the Resisters proved to be quite powerful andhad a significant influence on the psyche of the French people as the war intensified.
5
A final group, the
P 
é
tainistes 
(Petainists)
 
formed
 
“It was not as simple as it seems”:
1
 Collaboration, Petainism, and Resistance in Vichy France
53
another movement in France that was neither fully a part of the Col-laboration nor the Resistance movements.
ey supported MarshalPétain and his National Revolution, but distrusted the Collabora-tion with the
ird Reich.
ese terms are defined more specifically  when applied to religious movements during the Occupation.

e discord between Collaboration and Resistance infected theFrench Christian community at the beginning of the Vichy govern-ment. Catholic and Protestant leaders generally separated into thesame three sides as secular leaders: Collaborationists, Petainists, andResisters. Yet Christian groups and leaders responded in a distinctly spiritual way, di
ff 
erent from their secular counterparts.
ey fun-damentally based their decisions to collaborate or resist as they didupon their faith.
e theologies of their churches, whether radicalor traditional, established the frame for how they viewed the eventsof World War II and the Vichy regime. Everyone claimed to act inthe name of Christ.How could people who were committed to the same Chris-tian values, read the same Bible, and followed the same Christ havemade such opposite decisions? If they really all acted in the nameof Christ, should they not have responded in the same way to theVichy Regime? In dividing among Collaborationists, Petainists, andResisters, the French Christians during World War II illustrated im-portant distinctions in the Christian Church as whole at the time. A fundamental schism had begun to occur between the traditionalreligious establishments, both Catholic and Protestant, and the new theology of Christian intellectuals.
ese tensions became apparentas the di
ff 
erent sides separated over the question of how to react tothe new realities of Vichy France.
e di
ff 
erences among these groups can be clearly seen throughthe writings of an individual or group who led each. Cardinal Bau-drillart represented the Collaborationists, as a leading Catholicin France at the time and left behind a detailed daily diary of his
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