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Vichy France (French: Régime de Vichy, lit. 'Vichy regime'; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State (État français), was a French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II, established after the French capitulation after the defeat against Germany.
Vichy aircraft had already bombed Gibraltar on 18 July in retaliation for the attack at Mers-el-Kébir. The failure at Dakar hurt de Gaulle's standing with the British. Adolf Hitler was pleasantly surprised with the Vichy French defence and allowed the Vichy Armistice Army's limit to be increased.
The Government of Vichy France was the collaborationist ruling regime or government in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War.Of contested legitimacy, it was headquartered in the town of Vichy in occupied France, but it initially took shape in Paris under Marshal Philippe Pétain as the successor to the French Third Republic in June 1940.
Officially called the French State, Vichy France was established after the German victory over France with the armistice of 22 June 1940 in the non-occupied zone libre. Hitler had a number of reasons for capturing France, the most prevalent among them its future use as a stepping stone to Great Britain, and France's rich natural resources.
The Vichy regime continued to administer them under Japanese military occupation. French Indochina was the base for the Japanese invasions of Thailand, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. On 26 September 1940, de Gaulle led an attack by Allied forces on the Vichy port of Dakar in French West Africa. Forces loyal to Pétain fired on de Gaulle and ...
France's communist party had strong influence domestically, and the decolonization of the French colonial empire provided Moscow with opportunities to support anti-colonial movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, France tried to act as a broker between Moscow and Washington, but relations were strained by events such as the Soviet invasion of ...
[6] [7] That and the reluctance of the British and the French governments to sign a full-scale anti-German political and military alliance with the Soviets [8] led to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Germany in late August 1939, [9] which indicated the Soviet Union's decisive break with France by becoming an economic ...
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [t] (USSR), [u] commonly known as the Soviet Union, [v] was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. During its existence, it was the largest country by area , extending across eleven time zones and sharing borders with twelve countries , and the third-most populous country .