| I do not think there is any evidence that De Gaulle brushed Vichy under the table.Indeed De Gaulle continually stressed that Vichy Government was not the legitimate Government of France.Why would he want to do to ignore the role of Vichy during the war?.Vichy afterall found its principal active supporters among enemies of the Republic and right wing activists who were against the prewar left wing Blum Government.Blum, of the Jewish faith was put on trial by Vichy for the act of declaration of war against Germany.His ministers and most of the military leadership were held in captivity by Vichy and Germany for the duration of the war.Vichy sentenced De Gaulle to death in his absence.
De Gaulle's new administration had a deep unfavourable judgement on the Petain years and initiated a purge of the collaborators from the landings in Normandy.
The deportation of Jews from France was carried out by the Vichy Government whose leadership included fanatical anti-Semitics and who saw their role as one of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers.There is still a critical debate regarding the role of the French police in this matter although it is fair to say that some French police were not loyal to Vichy and aided the Resistance.
The majority of the Vichy leadership were convicted in the French High Court of Justice which opened on 15 March 1945 and had over 100.000 Frenchmen and women before them.Petain was sentenced to death but the Hero of Verdun had his sentence reduced to life imprisonment by CdG and was incarcerated on the Isle de Yeu.
Pierre Pucheu,Darlan's Interior Minister whose anti- Semitic legistlation paved the way for Jewish deportations was tried and executed in Algeria long before Vichy collapsed on mainland France.De Gaulle by this action ensured that a purge of collaborators would continue at the liberation.
Industrial collaborators such as Gilbert Renault saw their businesses seized by the French State after the liberation.
De Gaulle's first priority was to ensure that in the chaos of the liberation that the Communists did not seize power.By October 1945 there was a return to party politics and in January 1946 De Gaulle resigned from the post of President of the Provisional Government and withdrew from politics until his return in 1958.
(Admiral Darlan who had a deep hatred of the British was assassinated by a young royalist by the name of Fernand Bonner de la Chapelle who appears to have had some SOE direction.I believe he, in turn was executed.)
One of the big political problems for the Allies was the miscalcuation that FDR made was that he thought that the best leader of the Free French should be General Giraud.Consequently the US sponsored Giraud who had recently escaped from Germany to Algeria, while the British preferred De Gaulle and the US were increasingly hostile to De Gaulle.Giraud was a soldier and never a politician whose sole priority was to unify the Vichyites of the Algeria and De Gaulle's Free French.De Gaulle saw this as a priority to amalgamate both forces but also have a break with North African Vichy ideology and purge its administration.De Gaulle's political will won the day and Giraud stood down.(De Gaulle was later to be firm with the US when he would not allow the US freedom to deploy nuclear weapons from French bases without French authorisation in the 1960s causing US forces to leave French bases.
At Casablanca in early August 1943,De Gaulle spoke for the first time on the subject of punishment of Vichyites and collaborators.He stated that national unity could only be achieved if the French Republic knew how to recognise its faithful servants and punish the criminals.This pointed the way to the purge of collaborators and Vichyites at the liberation. |