Hello,
I’ve been browsing the forums and found this discussion about Vichy France rather interesting so I decided to make a few research on my own. The easiest way to settle this is to look at the Constitution of the Vichy regime (the legal document that defines and codes the state) and see the name that they called itself.
Here’s the link I used: http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/france/france.htm
It’s a database from a french university and contains all french constitutions (in french, of course). According to it,
the regime established after the 1940 defeat didn’t call itself ‘Vichy France’, it was called ‘L’Etat Français’ (The French State) in the ‘Loi constitutionnelle du 10 juillet 1940’ (constitutional law of July 10th, 1940), in substitution of the previous ‘3e République’ (‘3rd Republic’ - which was the one crushed by Germany).
It would make no sense (on a political or constitutional level) for the ‘French State’ to call itself Vichy France because that would simply remind the french citizens under its control that its actual power only represented the portion of France not occupied by Germany. In the constitution there’s no reference to its power being limited to that area, it presents itself as a continuation of the 3rd Republic, since nearly all new political regimes present themselves as continuations of the previous ones, in order to claim legitimacy.
Thus, Vichy France is merely a label applied to it because the seat of the government was on Vichy France and the name stuck because that’s how Germans called it (Ribbentrop calls it ‘l’État français à Vichy’ on a letter to Pétain, the president of the French State, available on that site) and the Allies as well.
And the name stuck so well, in fact, that in 2003 a law proposal was presented at the French Assemblée Nationalle (National Parliament): http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/propositions/pion0729.asp
It’s propose is: “visant à substituer, dans les communications publiques invoquant la période de l’État français, aux références à la ville de Vichy, l’appellation « dictature de Pétain »”. Or, to replace in all public communications that refer to the period of the french State any reference to the village of Vichy by the designation ‘Pétain’s dictatorship’.
According to the text of the proposal the honor and reputation of the citizens of Vichy is tainted by the association of their village with ‘treason, capitulation or outrage at the republican regime’.
