ABSTRACT
Along with the aspiration to transcend defeat Ьу perpetuating а French state went the rather different, опе might almost say contradictory, impulse to acknowledge defeat and base France's future squarely ироп it. The fiction here (paralleling the fictions of sovereignty and autonomy) was that defeat had brought about а collective awakening, exposing the nation's fundamental problems and clarifying the right way to tackle them. The reality was that the "lessons of defeat" were anything but self-evident; they were weapons in the hands of contending political forces. Each of the main elements in Occupation-era politics had distinct opinions about what had gone wrong in 1940 and deployed these views to advance their political interests and claims.
