There was a case for Vichy, though de Gaulle never admitted it. The Battle of France had been lost. The generals had failed, but so had the politicians. The Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned, and in his place the President of the Republic invited Marshal Pétain to form a government. Pétain, believing, like the commander-in-chief, General Wey­gand, that the defeat was irreversible, had already called for an armistice. This was granted and France was divided into a zone occupied by the German army and an unoccupied zone in which the French government would retain full authority.

The National Assembly removed to Vichy in the unoccupied zone and, prompted by Pierre Laval, voted by a huge majority (569 to 80) to accord “all powers to the Government of the Republic under the authority and the signature of Marshal Pétain, for the purpose of promulgating, by one or several decrees, a new Constitution of the French State”.

This was very similar to the authority granted de Gaulle in 1958, although in his case the majority in favour was smaller.

In 1940 Pétain was what President Coty of the Fourth Republic called de Gaulle: “the most illustrious of Frenchmen”. He was the “Hero of Verdun”, the commander who cared for the ordinary soldiers and was reluctant to engage in bloody offensives. Both Left and Right admired him and, although he despised politicians and “the regime of the parties”, he served in several of the fleeting governments of the 1930s. Always inclined to pessimism, distrustful of the British, he had been very quick to decide that the war was lost and an armistice necessary, in order to maintain the French Army in being and to prevent the German occupation of the whole of France. Urged to leave France and continue the war from north Africa, he said: “I consider it my duty to remain with the French people. Whatever happens, I won’t leave.” He was to keep this promise, disastrously for himself.