ABSTRACT
On June 23-24, 1940, Raymond Aron, who had served in a meteorological unit from September 1939 until the defeat of France, left for England. Aron's first article in La France libre, "Capitulation", written in November 1940, was a painful and powerful critique of the armistice that France, with Marshal Petain as prime minister, signed with Germany on June 22, 1940. Aron, in a series of articles starting in January 1941, was the first commentator to provide a comprehensive picture of the Vichy regime, its changing personnel and prevailing, sometimes contradictory, ideas, an analysis that is still a useful starting point for historical understanding. In some brilliant articles in La France libre he rejected pacifism, which had attracted him as a young man, as politically impossible. He showed in his exchange with Jacques Maritain, in an article of La France libre but excluded from Chroniques, that toughness in approving what might be called moderate Machiavellianism.
