Vichy: Two Years of Deception

A VETERAN French diplomat, shrewd in his appraisals of politics and human nature, tells the melancholy story of the Vichy regime, filling in from personal knowledge some of the chinks in the censored correspondence from France. M. Marchal was Counselor of the French Embassy in Washington until Pierre Laval came into power in the spring of 1942, when he passed over to the movement of General de Gaulle. One of the most interesting of several unpublished bits of history in the book is the story of the abortive scheme cooked up by Laval and Hitler’s emissary to France, Otto Abetz, to coax Pétain to Paris late in 1940.