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to resist the Germans only after Hitler had invaded Russia in June 1941, but its members proved effective résistants due to their commitment and the already existing cell structure of their organization. They always had their own political agenda, of which expelling the Nazis was only the first part. After the fall of Paris they concentrated their efforts on plans to seize power, and even assassinated other, anti-Communist résistants whose local popularity they believed might threaten their success. When in 1945 the French Army pursued the Wehrmacht through Alsace all the way to Bavaria, the French Communist Party awaited Stalin’s call to rise up, which, for various strategic reasons to do with Soviet penetration of eastern Europe, never came.

A large number of French betrayed their country for what appear to be simply financial reasons. When 600 boxes of files captured from the Abwehr were finally released by the French authorities in 1999, it became clear that several thousand French had been willing to spy not only on foreigners but also on their countrymen, for relatively small amounts of money (although some could earn up to 10,000 francs per month).83 Among their number were a hairdresser, actor, brothel manager, Air France pilot and magician; even more minor figures included a woman who for a small monthly stipend simply allowed the Abwehr to use her mailbox. Furthermore, tens of thousands of anonymous denunciations were sent to the Gestapo, often to settle old scores or in the hope of wiping out financial debts, or very often out of sheer, inexplicable malice, alleging Resistance connections with little or no evidence. This period has been referred to as the Franco-French War, and found no parallel in other countries, except perhaps politically riven Yugoslavia. ‘While others united to fight against Hitler,’ Vichy’s foremost historian has written of the Dutch, Poles and Norwegians, ‘the French fought each other.’84

In Vichy, Anglophobia also reached its highest levels since the Napoleonic Wars. The Vichy Air Force actually bombed Gibraltar in July and September 1940, and its Navy Minister, Admiral Jean François Darlan, regularly expressed his personal desire to go to war with Britain. There were no fewer than fourteen military engagements that saw Frenchmen and Britons fighting against each other during the Second World War, as far apart as Dakar and Madagascar, Syria and of course Oran. There was some justification for this hatred; at 150,000, almost as many French civilians died in the Second World War as soldiers, two-thirds of them as a result of Allied military action. The air raids ‘softening up’ Normandy for invasion in 1944 alone killed tens of thousands of civilians.

‘Less sugar in their coffee and less coffee in their cup,’ opined André Gide of his countrymen, ‘that’s what they’ll notice.’ It was true that food and the threat of starvation played a central role during France’s ‘dark years’ of occupation. Germany requisitioned half of all the food produced by France between 1940 and 1944, and in some areas of production – especially meat and wine – even more. Around 80 per cent of the meat that came into Paris was effectively confiscated, and incidents are recorded of 2,000 people queuing up from 3 a.m. onwards in order to buy only 300 portions of rabbit. Parisian criminal gangs would pose as the Gestapo to extort food and fuel from their compatriots, and a judge’s daughter even married a peasant from the Loire, ‘lured by his pork chops and rillettes’.85 La France éternelle.

With 1.5 million French POWs working for years abroad (mostly in German factories), Wehrmacht soldiers, who seemed likely to be in situ for ever, charmed the impressionable shopgirls, waitresses and chambermaids they met, and there was a good deal of collaboration horizontale between 1940 and 1944, with as many as 200,000 babies being born as a result. (Considering the shame endured by the mothers in many communities, this must represent a tiny fraction of the sex that took place without such visible issue.) In the post-Liberation