After defeat before Nazi expansion, France was between 1940 and 1944 governed by an authoritarian government located in the small resort town of Vichy in the heart of the country, led by the former war hero and Maréchal Philippe Pétain. Having been granted emergency rule by a distraught Parliament and charged in theory with the securing and reconstruction of the Republic, the Maréchal Pétain engaged a series of normative institutional and ideological reforms under the banner of a National Revolution. This movement can be characterized by a cult of the leader, a return to traditional patriotic and moral values such as the family and individual sacrifice, and an active collaboration with Germany, along with a systematic attack on liberal principles and institutions, from parliament to political egalitarianism. While this phenomenon has been recorded and described with rigor in texts such as Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-44, which demonstrate the proactive nature of the actions committed by the French State (the Vichy regime's official designation), little work has been done to understand the origins of this seminal moment in the West's history. This academic incompletion has led to a rapid association of Vichy with an existing reactionary tradition that had remained in existence since 1789, particularly amongst older monarchical elites in the military, to which Pétain and his government are associated. Upon closer study of the National Revolution as an ideological vision however, one discovers under a surface of recognizable traditionalist platitudes a progressive intent, those implementing reforms believing that they were correcting the defects in the Republican model in order to give French liberalism a more scientific and lasting content. The most seemingly undemocratic measures taken by the regime, from its aggressive moral nationalism to its rejection of individual liberty, are paradoxically explained by regime officials, including the Maréchal, as the securing of a true and lasting political freedom. This study seeks to resolve the incompatibility between theoretical perception and historical reality by explaining the Vichy regime as the product of French history and its particular relationship to the Republic as a democratic ideal. Spanning the Third Republic as the most enduring attempt to establish democracy in France, we shall argue that the Republic as understood by French reformers was comparable to that of Vichy, with an abstract idealization of values such as the law and social progress that ultimately transformed liberalism and modernity into moral imperatives to be enforced by a group of political elites. This position, which equated the pursuit of stability and order by the state with democratic freedom, was accompanied by the belief that the struggle against authority had in fact been a means of discovering France's true essence against corrupting individuals, so that the Republic was in fact the embodiment of the national collective against selfish impulse.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Vichy","National revolution","Collaboration"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23862