Executive summary: France lost World War II, but De Gaulle eventually won it.
When I was a child, here in France, I learnt that the Allies won
World War II, and that France was one of them. Later, I thought a
little more about it, and concluded that France had actually lost the
war, since the country surrendered very quickly in 1940, and collaborated
with the Nazis afterwards. What was the truth? The truth was that
there was not one France then, but two:
- On the one hand, the French leader was Pétain. Pétain, during World War I, was a national hero because he
killed more people than anybody else at the battle of Verdun (see
Verdun for details). In June 1940, he surrendered to the
Germans, thus saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and for that
reason was later considered as a traitor. More seriously, I don't
think surrendering in June 1940 was a bad thing, since the superiority
of the German army was so large. What is bad is that France, which was
still partly independent, collaborated with the Nazis much more than
what was needed. Jews were sent to the death camps even when the
Nazis didn't ask for anything. And only a few individuals actively
resisted.
- The other France was de Gaulle's
France. De Gaulle's France, in June 1940, was a fiction: a few people
who had flown to London, a famous talk on the BBC on June 18 that you can read now on the walls at several places in
Paris, later a network of resistants in France,
and a headstrong man: Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle's main fight,
during the war, was not to defeat the Germans, because he had very few
soldiers with him, but to prepare post-war France. For that purpose,
he worked very hard to appear as the 'real' French leader in the eyes
of the allies.
At the beginning, Roosevelt decided to recognize Pétain as the
legitimate French leader, and even to work with Vichy in order to
keep it from collaborating even more with the Germans. A few days
before the landing in Normandy (June 6, 1944), Roosevelt still
wanted to establish in France the same kind of military government as
the one which was to be installed in Germany. But, during these years,
owing to his action in the French colonies and his speeches at the
BBC, de Gaulle had managed to be accepted as the leader of free
France by most French refugees abroad as well as by the French
resistance and all the people who simply waited for the Allies to
liberate the country.
Even Churchill supported de Gaulle because he thought a strong
France was necessary for the European geopolitical
equilibrium. Nevertheless, Roosevelt never really admitted de Gaulle's
leadership on French issues. For him, the most important thing was to
win the war, at any price. Massive American bombings in 1944
destroyed a lot of cities in Northern France and probably killed more
civilians than the German invasion in 1940. This is another fact
that the schoolbooks barely mention (the French have always considered these bombings as necessary).
Because of Roosevelt's opposition, de Gaulle was not present at the
Yalta Conference (February 1945), but Churchill stipulated that an
occupation zone in Germany be allocated to France. In April,
Roosevelt died, and France eventually received a seat at the UNO
Security Council.
So, at the end of the war, because of his charisma and
vision, and with Churchill's help, de Gaulle's France appeared to be
the real France, at least in the eyes of the Frenchmen, and de
Gaulle was recognized as the natural leader although he had not been
elected yet. And the same country that had been defeated five years
before was now considered as one of the winners.
My teachers at school were technically true. They only exaggerated a
few events like the liberation of Paris (which was done by Frenchmen because Paris
was not strategically important for the Americans), and they did not
insist very much about the extent of the collaboration.
My main source of information:
http://www.microtec.net/bourgot/degaulle.html, and my own
memory
Also:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/wwii/yalta.htm
Thanks admiralh for a correction about Yalta! | 
