Did more Frenchmen serve with the Allies or against the Allies

Hmmmm.

Surely that research has already been done and published by Jean-François Muracciole (as well as others). He doesn't appear on your 'already done' list. Perhaps you should look him up.

It's your initial reference to policemen and railway staff as complicit in the holocaust that has sent others up a blind alley.

British authorities were under the impression (May 1943) that there were 80,000 Free French (army) troops around the world and another 6,000 French naval personnel on 57 ships.

 

The trouble with trying to establish the facts is that can be illusive. I understood that history is about interpreting source data. Even simple questions such as how many people served can have complicated answers.

My old CRA once asked me to calculate to cost of the ammunition we were going to fire in a firepower demonstration. He was not impressed when I asked him what was the basis for costing the ammunition - purchase price, replacement cost, nominal cost...

 

Thank you MarkN, now I'll try to get a count of the FFAF
its appreciated !

 

On a regular basis the British military submitted a report on allied troops they were 'accommodating' to their political masters. Those reports contain precise figures for all 3 components of the French forces. Each is a snapshot in time so they represent a total head count at that moment not a total headcount up to that point in time.

I have not studied them in detail so cannot say whether they will be of any help to you or not.

Documents are held at Kew if you want to read for yourself.

 

Geography and definition of nationality is an issue clouding this too. Not only colonial citizens but the status of those who became French due to the post 1WW boundary changes. An obvious case is Guy Sayer, 'author' of the much discussed 'The Forgotten Soldier'.

 

Germany drafted 'Volksdeutsche', which included a lot of Alsatians (not the dogs) and Poles. I read somewhere that these Polish 'Germans' became good recruitment material for the Polish formations in Italy.

This is a complex story with no easy answers.

Malgré-nous - Wikipedia

All the best

Andreas

 

I just came to say you would find most French -above a certain age (lets say 40) and locality- that would be for absolutely calling a rat, a rat.
In tiny villages in France in 2021 people still remember which local families supported the Vichy traitors.

Source: a French roommate with degree in history.

 

Correct, but as Sheldrake said, the situation was not black and white, because many of those who supported the Vichy regime were against collaboration, and did not feel like traitors to their country. The spectrum between full scale collaboration and armed resistance was a more or less continuous one, with different people drawing the line at different points, these points also changing with time.

 

Absolutely agreed Michel, and seconded.

Dear Christian Wilson, if you have never seen "The Sorrow and The Pity" ("Le Chagrin et La Pitie" as your roommate may have mentioned it) please seek it out, I doubt you will be disappointed.

Some of the participants may have you throwing rocks at the screen, but others, if it should be needed, will restore your faith in human nature (French human nature at that).

Kind regards, always remember, never forget,

Jim.

 

A very misleading statement. At its height, the Milice did not have more than 35,000 members, out of which a maximum of 15,000 were considered as active, with never more than 4,000 in its armed wing, the Franc-garde.

Apart from helping in the Holocaust, harassing its political enemies and engaging in a variety of gangster-like activities, with a few exceptions (all post D Day), the Milice did not fight the Allies but the Résistance, which you continue to ignore.

As repeatedly pointed out by the other forum members, you need to clearly define all the words in your initial question:
- Frenchmen
- serve
- with the Allies
- against the Allies
as well as the time or time frame you are considering. You mentioned "pre D Day". Does that mean the cumulative numbers up to and including 5 Jun 44? Starting when? Or the numbers on 5 Jun 44?

Short of this, you will just be comparing apples with oranges.

 

"World War Two divided France, and after the liberation most people chose not to speak about the war years for fear of opening old wounds. In Val d'Isère, where Huguette sheltered with her broken leg, the silence continues today. In Vabre things were quite different, though. From the first anniversary of the liberation, the locals celebrated the story of how Protestants and Jews took on the Nazis. Michel Cals thinks Vabre's unique story deserves to be heard more widely. "It is a lesson in morality and that you must help those in need," he says."

From the story here:

In love with the Resistance: My mother-in-law's war

Kind regards, always,

Jim.

 

Looking for something else about France I came across this hitherto unknown aspect of the French surrender in June 1940, with an armistice dictated by Germany:

Link: Armistice of 22 June 1940 - Wikipedia

 

That's a very interesting distinction: They didn't feel like traitors.

Ok but not really.

From Henry V: "Every subject's duty is the king's, but every subject's soul is his own."

When you align yourself with a criminal collaborationist regime, that's on you, not on the regime. As a consequence, you are a collaborator/traitor. The argument used by modern historians to explain Vichy sounds a lot like "well I didn't know they were doing anything bad, oops" and "not my responsibility". These are both nonsensical arguments of people doing nothing.

I guess the end of the war wiped their memories clean of the government supported roundups, in the spirit of moving on. This is not atypical.

-CJ

 

It's not a distinction I make, it's how they were feeling at the time. I personally do not "feel" that I have any right to judge this large majority of people who did nothing either way. I leave that to those who actually lived those troubled times.

 

I would agree with what Christian Wilson has said in Post #27. A very good account of the era of occupation is Peter Novick's work The Resistance against Vichy which reveals "Les Deux Frances". and the ultimate purge of the collaborators starting after the fall of Vichy in North Africa. It makes good reading.

Those who supported Vichy followed Petain whose agenda was to take France's alongside Germany, the new masters of Europe. This political aim was already dovetailed into the hatred of the Third Republic by the Petainists...Leon Blum was persecuted on account of being Jewish by their ilk before the outbreak of war. What followed during the occupation was embedded collaboration and denouncements of those who resisted. It also led to industrialists such as Renault and along with a wide spectrum of business making the best of the economical circumstances of occupation by collaboration. The Atlantic Wall, despite the Todt Organisation heading the project could not have been accomplished without collaboration. To put it crudely there is no evidence that the French workforce pissed into the concrete.

Some were not willing "volunteers", the owner of Michelin at Clermont Ferrand, a Michelin himself refused to collaborate and died in a concentration camp. Others who did not collaborate or resist sat on the fence of indecision with the view that they were neutral and this era would soon be pass over if they laid low

The above submission is misleading regarding the STO. The STO was the forced labour schemed devised by Sauckel with legislation laid down by Vichy to conscript manpower for the German war economy. There never any German intention to exchange workers to Germany in exchange for French POWs. Its scheme followed the failure of the La Releve system which Vichy had committed itself to in meeting German demands for manpower. A system based on the understanding or better, enticement, that volunteers to work in Germany would result in an equal number of French POWs exchanged and released for a return to France. Germany fell short of their side of the undertaking but Sauckels demand for manpower intensified and Vichy took the initiative to fulfil the wish of their masters and seek out "volunteers" aided by Vichy police. Those defaulters were categorised by Vichy as "refractaires".

From the status of the La Releve system based on "volunteers", the next Sauckel move to satisfy his ever demand for increasing numbers of manpower was, in conjunction with Vichy legislation on 13 February 1943 to introduce the STO scheme whereby certain classes of young French males (20-23 years) and females according to their domestic circumstances had to register with the Department Prefect administration. These were then mandatory subject to reporting to the appropriate railway station for travel to Germany. their status being that of forced labour. The consequence of the STO was revolt with those registered or failing to register, fleeing to safety in the rural backwaters some provided with food and shelter by fellow citizens or in groups in mountainous regions or forests. The German reaction in some parts of Southern France was have mass roundups of the streets and load the abducted on to trains for Germany. Free "refractairies" became the recruitment pool for the Maquis groups or the FTP.

On 23 June 1944,Laval suspended the STO. By this time the Germans had too much on their plate being under the pressure of the Normandy landings and ceased to insist in the continuation of the scheme.

Traitors.......Post #33.For CDG and later his Provisional Government went on to prove that Petain's Third Republic was as illegitimate as his tailor made regime. Vichy, which followed the armistice which it negotiated was null.

Had it not been for CDG and the Free French, France would have been an occupied country under Allied powers rule.

 

As I oft quote

read
To lose a battle; France 1940:Alistair Horne

Some true colours shown

 

Citing Harry Ree (in part):

In fact Algeria, not a colony, a department of France was subject of an Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory (AMGOT) following Operation Torch in November 1942 till the declaration of a Provisional Government of France on the 29th August 1944, which the UK and USA accepted.
Based on earlier research re Setif and reliant from memory on: Charles de Gaulle - Wikipedia

 

Don't forget the Résistance, which gave de Gaulle the necessary legitimacy to represent all French people who did not accept the Armistice, and helped force her other western Allies to accept the fait accompli of a France administered by the French rather than by AMGOT.

We'd better not stray into the quagmire of French-US relationships during the war...

 

That policy was effected by the US and GB for the duration of the war from the fall of Vichy in North Africa after the Torch landings in November 1942.It had no bearing after the war since CDG was accepted eventually as the leader of France, reluctantly by the US. He was not the preferred choice of FDR's. WSC, although backing CDG from June 1940 had a lack of moral courage in not supporting CDG in the face of FDR's control of political events in North Africa and the preference of Giraud as the leader of France.

(Interesting point regarding the status of Algeria who have been described as a Protectorate and also a Colony. It had three areas of administration based on the structures of Metropolitan France apart from one significant difference. Algiers, Oran and Constantine, were represented by three Senators and nine Deputies in Paris, reflecting the large number of French settlers in Algeria. However, unlike the Metropolitan France administrative structure, it was ruled by a Governor General, usually appointed from the military classes.)

 

just for interest
What happened in Renault factories during the war remains to this day highly controversial as it was the basis of the complete expropriation of the company by the French government in 1944 on the official case of collaboration. Louis Renault prevented the Germans from physically moving his factory and equipment to Germany, thus saving its company from displacement and absorption by Daimler-Benz, and put his factories at the service of Vichy France, which in actual fact meant that he was also assisting the Nazis, in a detoured way.
France 1940-1944: Production restricted to (sabotaged) trucks