â¨The period after the german defeat of French forces in 1940, from the signing of the armistice on June 22, 1940, to the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, was a bleak time for the press. The Third Republic was terminated, and the country was divided in two. In the north and west, two-thirds of France was occupied by the German army, which held newspapers under its control with the help of collaborationist journalists. In the south, in Vichy, the government of Marshal Pétain also kept close watch on the press with its own censors: its editorial instructions left journalists little freedom of expression. After the Allies landed in North Africa, on November 11, 1942, the Germans invaded the so-called Unoccupied Zone governed by Vichy. From then on, newspapers were under the double dominion of Vichy and of the propaganda machine of the occupying forces. â¨â¨By June 10, 1940, a majority of the 50 national dailies had stopped publishing.
The others had followed the southward retreat of the French government and settled in cities such as Lyon, Clermont-Ferrand and Limoges. By the end of 1942, many of those that had moved south, like Le Temps or Le Figaro, decided to close shop so as not to function under the invaders' supervision. All the papers that continued to publish in France from 1940 to 1944 became, voluntarily or not, instruments of German or Vichy propaganda, serving "collaboration." The only pluralist source of information the French then had was radio. Although the occupation forces and Pétain's authoritarian regime controlled their own stations, French people could, in spite of jamming, listen to "voices of freedom" from London, from French-speaking Switzerland, later from Algiers and also, from the United States, the Voice of America. â¨â¨In this disastrous situation, journalists faced terrible dilemmas:...