Vichy France in the European Crusade against Liberalism and Bolshevism, 19401944

The political legitimation of Vichy France relied more on the country’s prospective international positioning after the war than on immediate solutions for urgent domestic problems. The regime’s rhetoric stressed the strategic significance for France to join the Nazi’s New European Order. This was more than a tactical response to the contingency of German military occupation. Vichy’s propaganda thrived on a previous French nationalist narrative, according to which laissez-faire capitalism and class struggle had equally undermined the French Third Republic and led to its defeat in 1940. The not-so-few supporters of Petain now conceived of the war as an opportunity for shaking off liberalism and Marxism that had debilitated the nation. The achievement of social peace at home was tied to the German victory, which would lead to establishing a European community opposed to Anglo-American liberalism and Russian Bolshevism. The apparent clash between different political and socio-economic models partly overlapped with more traditional geo-political rivalries. The collaborationist propaganda merged several and sometimes contradictory topics and promises, from the relaunch of social policies to European economic integration. The unifying idea was that the European crusade against Anglo-Saxon individualism and Soviet collectivism would reshape the national communities and their public policies for the better. Their alignment with the Nazi Neuordnung would pave the way for the creation of a new European identity based on social and economic integration. The chapter stresses the link between the social ideology of Vichy's "National Revolution", the tides of the war and the active striving for harmonising social policies among European nations. To lay the foundations for the ‘new Europe’ that was to be resurrected from the ashes of liberalism and Communism, Vichy France collaborated with Germany on several decision-making levels.