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

After the 1940 defeat of the Anglo-French forces in France, Maréchal Pétain , a cautious and conservative veteran of World War I, emerged from retirement to sign an armistice with Hitler and head the collaborationist Vichy 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, Laval, believed it his duty to adapt France to the new authoritarian age heralded by the Nazi conquest of Europe.

There has been endless controversy over who collaborated, how much and how far it was necessary in order to save France from even worse sufferings. One thing at least is clear: Nazi occupation provided 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 involved in the Resistance right from the start, Hitler's attack on the Soviet 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 labour 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 Conseil National de la Résistance, unifying the different Resistance groups in May 1943. The man to whom this task had been entrusted was Jean Moulin, shortly to be captured by the Gestapo and tortured to death by Klaus Barbie, who was convicted 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 voice 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, representatives of his provisional government moved into liberated areas of France behind the Allied advance after D-day, thereby saving the country from what would certainly have been at least localized outbreaks of civil war. It was also thanks to his insistence that Free French units, notably General Leclerc's Second Armoured Division, were allowed to perform the psychologically vital role of being the first Allied troops to enter Paris, Strasbourg and other emotionally significant towns in France