Vichy government formed
The German offensive in May-June 1940 breached the Maginot Line and prompted the French army to collapse. The armistice accord�actually a surrender agreement�was signed on June 22. This brought the Third Republic to an end, and on July 10, 1940, the French parliament in joint session dissolved the Republican regime and installed Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain as head of the French state with full governing powers. The government established its seat at Vichy, in the southern part of the country. The results of the armistice were already evident by the end of June. France was partitioned into two sectors: a German-occupied zone (including the Atlantic coast, the English Channel front, and Paris); and an unoccupied zone in the southeast, administered by the Vichy government. The Vichy regime replaced the principles of the French Revolution�Liberté, égalité, fraternité�with new principles: Travail (work), Famille (family), and Patrie (fatherland). The Vichy regime, bolstered by nationalists who demanded a policy of “returning France to the French,” began systematically to circumscribe “aliens” influence and erode the rights of refugees and Jews. Vichy adopted a policy of courting Nazi Germany in order to extract more tolerable arrangements from the German authorities. The Vichy regime did much to help the Germans persecute the Jews and took anti-Jewish actions at its own initiative�such as the Statut des Juifs – the Jewish Statutes (October 1940) and the establishment of institutions such as the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (March 1941).