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Vichy implemented anti-Jewish measures before it was even requested to do so by Berlin, partly in order ‘to keep the advantages of property confiscation and refugee control for itself’.72 Although it refused the German demand that Jews be forced to wear yellow stars, Vichy participated enthusiastically in sending non-French Jews to the death camps – principally Auschwitz – in a way that the Germans simply did not have the manpower or local knowledge to achieve.73 It did not deport French Jews, at least at first, especially if they had fought in the Great War. In the Occupied Zone, the story was worse, with the gendarmerie rounding up French and non-French Jews alike, taking them via Bordeaux to the notorious transit camp of Drancy outside Paris, and to the Vélodrome d’Hiver inside the city, then to almost certain death in the east, with the trains driven by Frenchmen and the logistics managed by French policemen and fonctionnaires such as René Bosquet and Maurice Papon. (When there were too few Jews to justify hiring a coach, Papon signed for the taxi fares.) The deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 of 4,000 Jewish children aged twelve and younger, after being forcibly separated from their parents at the Vélodrome and starved for a week, was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes acting under orders from French officials.

Although around 77,000 French Jews died in the Holocaust, this represented 20 per cent of the total number of French Jews, a lower percentage than for other countries such as Belgium’s 24,000 (40 per cent), quite apart from the Netherlands’ 102,000 (75 per cent).74 This had less to do with the authorities than with the ability of Jews to hide in a largely rural country; newcomers to inaccessible villages were often not denounced to the authorities. Many individual acts of heroism took place, such as teachers forging papers for Jews, or Gentile students of Paris wearing the yellow star in protest, or Catholic priests who protected Jews despite the intimate connections between the Church and the Vichy state.

There were also those French who collaborated willingly with the Germans – dining with them at restaurants such as Maxim’s and La Tour d’Argent – just as there were others who joined the Resistance. Some 30,000 people were shot as hostages and résistants, and 60,000 non-Jewish French were deported to concentration camps. Yet the vast majority of Frenchmen simply tried to get on with their lives. Between 300,000 and 400,000 French enrolled in various German military organizations and Fascist movements, a significant number but still only 1 per cent of the overall French population of forty million in 1945. ‘Long live the shameful peace,’ was Jean Cocteau’s pithy summation of the views of many. It was due to this that France could initially be held down by as few as 30,000 German troops in 1941.75 During the first eighteen months of the Occupation, no Germans were deliberately killed by any French in Paris, and only one French patriotic demonstration was held, during which all of the one hundred people involved were arrested. Everything reopened, except of course the Assemblée Nationale, whose building had been converted into German administrative offices with a huge banner hanging from it proclaiming Germany’s victories ‘on all fronts’.

‘I have been receiving politicians, town councillors, préfets, magistrates,’ reported Abetz back to Berlin in June 1940. ‘Out of fifty of these dignitaries, forty-nine have asked for special permissions of one sort or another, or for petrol coupons – and the fiftieth spoke of France.’76 When French intellectuals discussed the Occupation, they were all too often merely flip. ‘How do you respond to a young German soldier who politely asks you for directions?’ asked Jean-Paul Sartre, for example. There were tiny acts of resistance, it was true, such as painting a dog’s tail the colour of the tricolour, and in December 1940 a bookseller was arrested for placing portraits of Pétain and Laval in his shop window, between copies