Dictionary of Collaboration - collaborations, compromises, contradictions

The Collaboration, between 1940 and 1944, was not an invention of the German victor; the latter occupied, administered, persecuted and plundered, without concern for the approval of the vanquished. It was the vanquished who first resorted to this word and gave it substance in the hope — quickly turned illusion — of profiting from it.

The Collaboration implies acceptance of the defeat and the armistice that followed from it. A shifting and evolving concept, it presupposed permanent adaptation to circumstances, to the demands of the occupier, to the needs of the French, and to the course of the world war. It is characterised by an extraordinary diversity of attitudes and behaviours, and takes on very variable forms and degrees of involvement depending on the individuals, milieux, regions and moments concerned.

Cataloguing the concepts, events, places, organisations, publications and actors of the Collaboration on French territory, and also accounting for the memory of the phenomenon (the evolution of the ideology, historiography, filmography...), this dictionary opens new perspectives by revealing the complex reality of the Collaboration in France between 1940 and 1944.

François Broche is a journalist and historian, a recognised specialist in the Occupation, Free France and the Second World War, author of L'Armée française sous l'Occupation (3 vols.) and the synthesis Histoire de la collaboration (with J.-F. Muraciolle, new ed. Texto/Tallandier, 2021).