Uncompromising, often startling, meticulously documented

—this book is an account of the government, and the governed, of collaborationist France.

Basing his work on captured German archives and contemporary materials rather than on self-serving postwar memoirs or war-trial testimony, Professor Paxton maps out the complex nature of the ill-famed Vichy government, showing that it in fact enjoyed mass participation. The majority of the Frenchmen in 1940 feared social disorder as the worst imaginable evil and rallied to support the State, thereby bringing about the betrayal of the Nation as a whole.