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Vichy stays recognised diplomatically

@Mumby has done some interesting reading on how Britain giving up on Vichy altogether and moving to recognising De Gaulle et al as the legitimate authorities a much closer thing than postwar history suggests. He came up with a scenario where the right (or indeed wrong) occurrences could lead to Vichy 'joining the Allies' late in the war and Free France being a historical footnote.
 
@Mumby has done some interesting reading on how Britain giving up on Vichy altogether and moving to recognising De Gaulle et al as the legitimate authorities was a much closer thing than postwar history suggests. He came up with a scenario where the right (or indeed wrong) occurrences could lead to Vichy 'joining the Allies' late in the war and Free France being a historical footnote.
Indeed - which creates all sorts of, ahem, awkwardness when Vichy's crimes come out later.
 
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Indeed - which creates all sorts of, ahem, awkwardness when Vichy's crimes come out later.

There was a big undercurrent in Vichy that saw those crimes as necessary in order for France to turn around and sock Hitler in the jaw. There were some pretty hyperbolic comparisons of Vichy's defeat to Prussia being defeated by Napoleon only for them to turn it around and become a military powerhouse by the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Lots of people in Vichy felt the reasons that France had lost Round 1 was because of corruption, and that the Vichy regime was necessary to purge that corruption. The source of the corruption was determined to be Jews, Communists, and Freemasons and only by eliminating these elements through the 'National Revolution' could they hope to prevail in Round 2 against Germany.

The Americans were spookily up with accommodating these elements, and really didn't like de Gaulle, whuch is why they persistently went behind his and our backs to back up various 'continuity Vichy' types - first Darlan and then Giraud in Algiers. But this attitude persisted freakishly late into the war, right up to very nearly the Liberation of Paris when the Americans had some incredibly stupid idea to have Pierre Laval and de Gaulle jointly lead a unity government.

I think the simplest solution is if Darlan had not been assassinated by Gaullists. Darlan was disagreeable to lots of people in North Africa but he had until recently been one of the big men in the Vichy government. The Secret Army that Vichy had set aside, keeping lots of materiel they were supposed to have handed over to the Germans, could have activated upon his command, and while the Germans are tied up dealing with that, the Americans launch their own invasion of Southern France to back up the embattled and now Allied Vichy regime. De Gaulle basically fiddles from the sidelines but is increasingly irrelevant as the Resistance is overshadowed by the Secret Army and the Free French Army of Africa is 'bleached' to ensure France is liberated by white Frenchmen.
 
One plan I will never fully recover from is the idea some had when Giraud and de Gaulle were butting heads was to have a figurehead reign over Fighting France, while de Gaulle took on the political responsibilities of reconstructing the French government in exile and Giraud took command of Free France's military. This neutral figurehead was, of course, RESTORING THE FUCKING BOURBONS BECAUSE THAT WOULD GO DOWN SO WELL WITH THE RESISTANCE IN METROPOLITAN FRANCE WHICH WAS INCREASINGLY SKEWING TOWARDS THE COMMUNISTS AND THE IDEA OF 'NATIONAL INSURRECTION'.
 
An alternative de Gaulle makes a brief appearance in volume nine of "The House of Stuart Sequence"
 
as with lots of grim shit in the cold war, i can imagine britain and america helping Continuity Vichy sweep their crimes under the rug and if anything does come out - remember we had to wait a weirdly long time for the horror of the holocaust to sink in in the west, and it would be all too easy for France to go 'oh well we had to comply with the nazis until we began the liberation, its all their fault'
 
as with lots of grim shit in the cold war, i can imagine britain and america helping Continuity Vichy sweep their crimes under the rug and if anything does come out - remember we had to wait a weirdly long time for the horror of the holocaust to sink in in the west, and it would be all too easy for France to go 'oh well we had to comply with the nazis until we began the liberation, its all their fault'

You don't have to imagine. Until Robert Paxton's seminal book using German archives about the talks between governments was published, that was more or less France's official stance. In a world where Vichy had been swept away and shown to be wrong, the myth of the sword and the shield still endured. And while he published in 1970, it took until 1995 for a French President to officially say that, unfortunately, Vichy had been France, whether we liked it or not. Jacques Chirac acknowledged the responsibility of Vichy in the "rafle du Vél' d'Hiv'" and the role played by French police and gendarmerie. So in a timeline where Vichy manages to change sides, not only people like Maurice Papon will stay in power (as he did OTL), but they will brush their crimes away or be seen as heroes for having done what was necessary.
 
It would be interesting to see what would happen if Vichy had still been in existence as of spring 1944 and had not been incorporated in the 'Reich' earlier - presenting Hitler with the dilemma of what to do with a supposed ally/ puppet government who could defect as a 'rescuing' Allied army approached, as with Rumania and Bulgaria on the Eastern front in 1944. Should the Germans strike first and occupy the country fully, as they did with Hungary in real life to depose Admiral Horthy, or leave the country alone and risk it defecting and having to be reconquered, as occurred with Rumania when King Michael deposed the Antonescu regime and switched sides and the Germans then bombed Bucharest before the Red Army could get there?

Might the military and financial strain of occupying Vichy as well as northern France cause the Germans to hold off attacking it until it was too late and the Allies had landed in June 1944, then face an anti-German coup in Vichy itself and have to combat this in an equivalent of what actually happened in Rumania? The senior politicians and generals in Vichy could insist on the Allies giving a private written pledge of no war crimes trials etc in return for their action, and hold them to it in 1944-5. Or would the Germans occupy Vichy in a pre-emptive move against defection after the Allies had overrun southern Italy in 1943? In either case, we would probably have a civil war in Vichy and a diversion of German troops there to prop loyalists there up. If this was in the run-up to or after the Allied landings in June 1944 it could cause a quicker German collapse in Normandy. If it is in the months after the Allied landings in Italy, do we have the Germans moving troops from the Balkans to defeat the 'rebels' as this is a less vital front than the N French coast, Italy or Russia - rescuing the Allied campaign in the Aegean from defeat?

If the 'pro-Allied' side won a civil war in Vichy in June-July 1944 (by means of reinforcements landing on the Southern French coast from Italy, earlier than the OTL landings on the Riviera ?) or fled South to hold out successfully in the Rhone delta/ inland Provence until Allied landings, we have the prospect of this part of the Vichy government structure salvaging some of its reputation for collaboration. After the Allied victory there would be even less appetite in Paris for a large-scale purge of 'collaborators', even those who had been deporting Jews in eager not reluctant alliance with the SS. The new government would be keen to acquire more support against the French Communists and their Resistance guerillas, and the US would be keen on this too. They could present and insist on a public 'narrative' of the majority of Vichy only assisting Germany out of self-preservation and a 'heroic' group of senior figures fooling the Germans in 1940-4 and really helping the Allies, though logically Petain himself and any other senior figures who failed to defect quickly to the pro-Allied revolt could be sacrificed as scapegoats. So logically we would have an even more contentious question of who to punish and drive out of politics post-1944, and the Left raising cries of a regime 'fix' to let pro-Germans off. And the presence of 'moderate' Vichy figures who had defected in 1943 or 1944 still in French governments in the late 1940s, while the Vichy archives containing papers on their help to Germany
that could embarrass them were quietly destroyed.
 
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