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.

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.

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

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.

I think the French have come to grips with their past, and that was true up until about - until the '70s. And then there were things like the film "The Sorrow And The Pity."

I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.

Well, I think they're going to learn that an awful lot of French people changed their minds. In 1940, the Third Republic had made a miserable mess of it.