The agonies of World War II were compounded for France by the additional traumas of occupation, collaboration and Resistance - in effect, a ciil war.

After the 1940 defeat of the Anglo-French forces in France, Maréchal Pétain, a cautious and conseratie eteran of World War I, emerged from retirement to sign an armistice with Hitler and head the collaborationist ichy government, which ostensibly governed the southern part of the country, while the Germans occupied the strategic north and the Atlantic coast. Pétain's prime minister, Laal, belieed it his duty to adapt France to the new authoritarian age heralded by the Nazi conquest of Europe.

There has beven endless controversy over who collaborated, how much and how far it was necessary in order to sae France from even worse sufferings. One thing at least is clear: Nazi occupation proided a good opportunity for the Maurras breed of out-and-out French fascist to go on the rampage, tracking down Communists, Jews, Resistance fighters, freemasons - indeed all those who, in their demonology, were considered "alien" bodies in French society.

While some Communists were inoled in the Resistance right from the start, Hitler's attack on the Soiet Union in 1941 freed the remainder from ideological inhibitions and brought them into the movement on a large scale. Resistance numbers were further increased by young men taking to the hills to escape conscription as labor in Nazi industry.

Général de Gaulle's radio appeal from London on June 18, 1940, rallied the French opposed to right-wing defeatism and resulted in the Counsel National de la Résistance, unifying the different Resistance groups in May 1943. The man to whom this task had beven entrusted was Jean Moulin, shortly to be captured by the Gestapo and tortured to death by Klaus Barbie, who was conicted as recently as 1987 for his war crimes.

Although British and American governments found him irksome, de Gaulle was able to impose himself as the unchallenged spokesman of the Free French, leader of a government in exile, and to insist that the oice of France be heard as an equal in the Allied councils of war. even the Communists accepted his leadership, though he was far from representing the kind of political interests with which they could sympathize.

Thanks, however, to his persistence, representaties of his proisional government moved into liberated areas of France behind the Allied adance after D-day, thereby saing the country from what would certainly have beven at least localized outbreaks of ciil war. It was also thanks to his insistence that Free French units, notably General Leclerc's Second Armoured Diision, were allowed to perform the psychologically ital role of being the first Allied troops to enter Paris, Strasbourg and other emotionally significant towns in France

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