vichy france

This question is a bit broad, but maybe a question about "life" should start with food. Food was a serious issue, b/c there were serious shortages. The Vichy gov't instituted a rationing system to keep the prices down. People who lived through this time say that food was an overriding concern for them. It was very difficult to get meat, for instance, especially if you lived in the city. Country people were luckier, being closer to the source of food; there was a thriving black market, and some farmers made a lot of money. Other people went for barter systems, sending, for instance, clothing to their relatives in the country, in exchange for food which was more abundant there.

The Vichy gov't, under Marshal Petain, was under the thumb of the Germans but tried not to make this too obvious. They instituted a program called the National Revolution, the idea being that France had turned morally degenerate (through the influence of, among others, Jews and Communists) and that was why it had lost the war; and the National Revolution was meant to bring back moral purity and strength and traditional values. I don't know what all the features of this "revolution" were, but one major one was youth camps; I think they were a sort of toned-down reflection of the Hitler Youth, with French national pride (and no doubt some racism and chauvinism) in place of Nazi ideology.

Vichy was essentially a fascist government; Petain as "Head of State" had the powers of a dictator, though I don't think he used them for any flagrant abuses; he was given the right to write a new constitution, but never got around to it! The ideology of his government was very much a fascist, hyper-nationalist one; a little strange for a defeated nation, but it seems to have been something that Vichy France clung to as a way of restoring pride.

The police situation under Vichy is probably the one I'm the least qualified to address, but I'll give a stab at it... I know this: Vichy collaborated in the arrest and deportation of Jews. The S.S. were around, doing their work, but there was also the Milice, the French "special police", who were feared and hated by their fellow Frenchmen (and many of whom got lynched after the liberation); they pursued and arrested both Jews and resistance fighters.

Also, in the latter part of the war, able-bodied men of certain ages (mostly young men I think) were drafted by the Germans into "Service Travail Obligatoire"--basically means forced labor--and sent to Germany to work in armaments factories.

I hope putting all this together gives you some picture of what life must have been like. For many people it was a time of "every man for himself"; for everyone, I think, it was when your true character came out. You could get rich on the black market or by collaborating with the Germans and the Milice, informing on your neighbors, you could focus on strategies for getting more food than the next guy, you could be a good citizen and revere Petain and be safe, you could risk your life for what you believed in, either joining the Maquis or an underground resistance network, or one of the rescue networks that hid and protected Jews. People probably didn't talk as much as they used to; you didn't know what your neighbor was involved in!