Like de Gaulle, Pétain was a man of the north, in his case Picardy. “To understand the Marshal,” his Interior Minister, Marcel Peyrouton, said, “it was necessary to know the French peasant”. Pétain had the peasant’s strength, his sense of the concrete and his intensely conservative instinct. In 1940 he felt himself to be France – just as de Gaulle believed that he embodied the nation.

The two men had long been associated. Pétain advanced de Gaulle’s career against conservative army opposition, even though their views on the conduct of war were diametrically opposed. He employed de Gaulle to write books and articles for him. The intimacy faded, ending in disagreement, well before 1940. More than once de Gaulle later said that the Marshal “was an exceptional man. He was an exceptional leader. I have not changed my mind. Unfortunately for France and for himself he died in 1925 and he did not know it.”

There was no single Vichy. It was not a Fascist regime. There were indeed French Fascists who were ready to work for a German conquest of Europe, but they were mostly based in Paris and regarded Vichy with impatience and contempt. The Marshal’s government was rightwing and authoritarian – pre-Fascist. The veteran royalist ideologue Charles Maurras hailed Pétain’s coming to power as “a divine surprise”, but Maurras was as anti-German as he was anti-­British. Those around the Marshal planned a “National Revolution”. The Republican slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, was replaced by a new triad: “Work, Family, Fatherland”.

At one level the National Revolution was backward-looking: a revulsion from modernity, stressing the virtues of rural life. Church leaders were mostly pro-Vichy, though Pétain himself was scarcely a model Catholic. It was hostile to capitalism, in favour of artisan workshops and small businesses; anti-communist and ready to equate Socialism with Bolshevism; anti-semitic – there was no need for the Nazis to prompt Vichy to enact anti-Jewish laws. On another level some officials at Vichy were modernising technocrats. Much of their work would be carried on after the war by governments of the Fourth Republic.