ABSTRACT

Of all the countries conquered by Hider, France alone signed an armistice with Germany and kept a government of its own. The provisions of the armistice,2 the existence of a legal government and the policy of ‘collaboration’ set in place by the ‘French State’ — as much to curry favor with the victor and to gain a place in a German-dominated Europe as to implement its own ideological program — account for the uncomfortable and ambiguous situation of the French police, which was at once a symbol of the legitimacy and prerogatives of a would-be state and at the same time the instrument of an anti-democratic policy rooted in repression. Trapped by the legitimacy of the Vichy government, but also by its own corporate interests and a professional culture that shared some of the aversions of the new masters, the police came to play a role that explains the profound discredit attached to it at the time of the Liberation.