Description: On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the Vichy regime. Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Olivier Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans.
Brief description: Olivier Wieviorka is Professor of History at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.
Review Quotes: Olivier Wieviorka is a historian of the first rank. This excellent study provides a detailed collective biography of the men who sat in the French Senate and Chamber of Deputies when the Third Republic collapsed in June-July 1940. Most of them voted for Pétain, but many of them were centrists and leftists who had been elected as members of a Popular Front majority in 1936. This precise and thoughtful book considers how their fateful choices were made, and how these men related to one another, to their parties, and to their constituencies. Wieviorka helps us greatly understand better the place of the Vichy regime in the history of the French nation between the Third and Fourth Republics.--Patrice Higonnet, author of Paris: Capital of the World