Vichy builds a new image
Vichy has built a new life since June 1940 and its role as the wartime capital of France
DEPENDING on your age and nationality, Vichy means different things: Americans think of Vichy water, most Europeans will think of Oréal and Vichy perfume and older French and Britons will think of Marshal Pétain and France’s war time collaboration with the Nazis.
But in the minds of the people of Vichy itself, they feel no personal involvement in the past and see their town as it is now: a moderately successful town of 75,000 residents in the middle of France but with no direct access to the motorways to help it expand and be successful.
Before the war Vichy was a successful spa town, famous for decades for its mudbaths and sulphur-loaded waters bubbling up from the volcanoes of the Auvergne.
When the Nazis invaded France, the French government quit Paris and signed an armistice with the Germans on June 22, 1940.
Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, a national hero from the First World War became leader of France and chose Vichy as the new capital, partly because of its many hotels for ministers, MPs and civil servants but also as it had the only international telephone exchange outside Paris.
Pétain’s subsequent ‘Vichy government’ sought a level of home rule in France by implementing many of the fascist policies of the Nazis - most notably the rounding up and extermination of Jews - on the parts of the country left in its control. The result left a stain on the town’s name.
After the war medical advances stopped its life as a spa and since then Vichy has tried to find a new identity - investing heavily in sports facilities, renovation and modernisation to boost the economy and improve its architectural heritage.
Mayor Claude Malhuret has spoken only to the Jerusalem Post about the war years and said: "The people of Vichy did not invite Pétain and his government, it was imposed upon them. They did not choose it, they had to submit.
"They have submitted twice: once when they were thrown out of their houses, apartments and hotels to make way for the government and again when they saw their town’s name stained by the collaboration.
"The people of Vichy had no more responsibility for events than any other person in France."
Every year the town honours the 80 MPs who defied Pétain by voting against his leadership and war-time constitution. Each July it also marks the anniversary of the rafle du Vel d'Hiv, where Paris Jews were rounded up to be shipped to prison camps.
Vichy applied to host a G8 summit of industrial nations but its first international conference - a meeting of European nations in November 2008 on immigration - was marred by rioters trying to link the expulsion of illegal immigrants under review with the deportation of Jews to death camps.
It is not a subject Vichy shies away from. In April France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, visited it to mark the Journée des déportés - a day to remember those sent to the camps.
The way Vichy treads a line between commemoration and moving on is linked to a greater understanding of the Second World War.
As one resident said, when she was at school there were only three pages in the textbooks about the war - now her son is studying the subject in much more depth.
