Laval (although out of office from December 1940 until the spring of 1942) was a more enthusiastic collaborator than the Marshal. In old age François Mitterrand, a junior official in Vichy after he escaped from his PoW camp and before he set up his own Resistance group, would speak of Laval with dazzled admiration: “What an incredible type, this Laval, a peasant from the Auvergne who had been a prodigious success in Paris in the years of the Third Republic .?.?. He was rich and powerful because in his whole life he had believed in nothing.”

The case for Vichy crumbled in November 1942 when the Allies invaded north Africa and the Germans moved into the unoccupied zone, disbanding the French army there. From this time Pétain was a puppet. But he might have escaped this humiliating role. When the German intention became known, many around him urged that he should himself go to north Africa. He refused because he had promised the French people he would stay with them.

But what if he had yielded to this advice? De Gaulle himself gave an answer: “The Americans would have welcomed him with open arms, and eventually he would have returned to Paris on a white horse. And as for us? We’d have been fucked.” The USA, one should remember, had recognised Vichy and kept an ambassador there. There were frequent contacts between the Marshal and Roosevelt, who distrusted de Gaulle and thought he had Fascist tendencies.

There was little resistance in the first years of Vichy, none from the Communists until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and some of the first resisters, such as Henri Frenay, who founded the “Combat” group, were Marechalistes. But, as the war turned against Germany, resistance grew in France, and to counter it Vichy formed the Milice Française in January 1943. It was now engaged in a civil war with the Resistance, in which both sides committed atrocities. Meanwhile, the regime lurched towards Fascism. Eventually the Germans transported the rump of Vichy to the little town of Sigmaringen on the Danube, where it expired in quarrels, silences and ignominy.