Vichy Quotes & Sayings

It is overlooked, perhaps forgotten, by almost everyone today that we were there to defend Europe against the multiple threats represented by the Allies. We saw the British as an outdated Imperial force, organised by freemasons, who sought to turn the clock back one hundred years to the days when their word was the law around the world. Why should they be entitled to install their freemason puppet, De Gaulle, in France, to rule as a proxy? The Vichy government had three consistent points in its propaganda regarding the threats to the French people: these were De Gaulle, freemasonry and communism. As for the American state, we perceived that as controlled by the forces of international finance and banking, who wished to abolish national governments and have the world run by banks and corporations. — Holger Eckhertz

Rules of society are nothing; one's conscience is the umpire. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Everything seems insupportable to me. This may very well be because I am insupportable myself. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place. — Iain Pears

Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I'm afraid of them. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

The distance doesn't matter; it is only the first step that is difficult. — Mari De Vichy-Chamrond Marquise Du Deffand

I hear nothings, I speak nothings, I take interest in nothing and from nothing to nothing I travel gently down the dull way which leads to becoming nothing. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Do I look like the mastermind of this? I just do what I'm told. They tel me to arrest the foreign-born Jews in Paris, so I do it. They want the crowd separated - single men to Drancy, families to the Vet d'hie Viola! It's done. Point rifles at them and be prepared to shoot. The government wants all of France's foreign Jews sent east to work camps, and we're starting here.'
All of France? Isabelle felt the air rush out of her lungs. Operation Spring Wind. 'You mean this isn't just happening in Paris?'
'No. This is just the start. — Kristin Hannah

I love nothing and that is the true cause of my ennui. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Impromptu thoughts are mental wild-flowers. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Faith is a devout belief in what one does not understand. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

God is not more incomprehensible than you; but if he is not more just, it is hardly worth while beIieving in him. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fist, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in ... some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demand for total attention ... — Thomas Pynchon

The first step is the hardest. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or ... you know ... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Well, almost everything is open - the political documents, the (unintelligible) of cabinet meetings. What has been opened now and what had been closed are things that many governments still close, and that is police files and trial records, trial records of the special courts set up by Vichy. And especially interesting are the trial records of the Purge Trials after the war. — Robert O. Paxton

Well, he worked for a fairly harmless agency. He worked for the agency that looked after French prisoners of war. Though he was capable of some horrendous blunders when he was president. He once said that the Vichy legislation against Jews affected only foreign Jews, which was, of course, absolutely wrong. So he obviously wasn't too well-informed about what is going on in the Vichy government. — Robert O. Paxton

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct. — David Bezmozgis

Vichy officials and collaborationists imprisoned 135,000 people (many for little more than their political beliefs), sent 650,000 more to Germany as "guest workers" under an obligatory labor scheme, and, most notoriously, sent 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Less than 3 percent of those Jews survived. — Michael S. Neiberg

There is a scene in Arthur Miller's play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before the Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, "Is that everything you have?" The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him: "Good, now you have nothing." The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond. — Viktor E. Frankl

There were the events of 1968 when young people began to ask their parents, what did you do in the war? And since the middle- or late-'70s, the French have been absolutely obsessed with the Vichy regime. They have an institute of contemporary history that turns out first-rate scholarly work. Their textbooks are accurate. Whether the students actually read them is another matter. — Robert O. Paxton

Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common — Julian T. Jackson

Heed the still small voice that so seldom leads us wrong, and never into folly. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

There's something Vichy about the French. — Ivor Novello

Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides. — Robert O. Paxton

Ah! I shall repeat it endlessly, the only misfortune is to be born! — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Let us strive to improve ourselves, for we cannot remain stationary; one either progresses or retrogrades. — Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war. — Frederic Raphael