Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a jacobin podcast where we look in

depth at political topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn and I'll be presenting the show.

You're listening to the anthem of the French Resistance, Le Chant des Partisans.

French political life is still marked by a dramatic rupture that opened up in the summer

of 1940. After the French army suffered heavy losses on the battlefield against Germany,

the country's parliament handed power to Philippe Petan, a highly decorated war hero.

Petan signed a deal with Hitler that left northern France under direct German rule, including Paris.

He set up his own regime at the town of Vichy, which became a byword for collaboration in occupied Europe.

Vichy officials organized the deportation of Jews to the Nazi dead camps.

Meanwhile, a renegade French officer, Charles de Gaulle, went to London and pledged to fight on.

Inside France, resistance groups began organizing to fight against Nazi Germany and its French collaborators.

Ever since the liberation of France by the Allies in 1944, a first debate has raged in French politics,

but the experience of occupation and resistance during the war.

It remains a matter of political contestation today.

I guess today is Jim Mulfries, Jim teaches French politics at King's College in London.

He's the author of Republic of Islamophobia, the rise of respectable racism in France.

How would you account for the rapid French capitulation to Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940?

Was it primarily dictated by military factors or was there a defeatist spirit among the French ruling class

for other reasons?

Okay, so the defeat of France took six weeks and this was an army that was supposed to be the best in Europe.

So the fall of France was a major shock.

Paytown's line after the defeat was that it was a product of the popular front.

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