The French World War II sites failed to recognize the widespread collaboration efforts of Vichy as part of their history and acknowledge their shortcomings in the war. At the Caen Memorial, the museum contained little information about Vichy France and French life under the occupation of Nazi Germany. It seemed like the memorial was trying to push all the blame for a collaborationist government that emerged in Vichy as Philippe Pétain’s fault. The way the French appeared to be using Pétain as an escape goat was very similar to the German belief of Dolchstoss in World War I. In both circumstances, the German and French public blamed a new emerging government, Weimar and Vichy respectively, and failed to accept the reality that they were bested on the battlefield. Pétain understood that France had lost the war and choose to surrender to save French lives and act in a way that would position France in the best situation possible under a German controlled Europe. A significant number French soldiers who were rescued at Dunkirk willingly surrendered themselves in order to return to France proves that there was public support for Vichy France.
Les Invalides in Paris along with the Caen Memorial also generated a distorted account that the French should see themselves as an Allied Power throughout the entirety of the war. After the fall of France, both of these museums made it seem as if France was a part of Allied victories leading up to the liberation of Paris. For instance, Les Invalides made it seem like France had a significant impact in the African theater, but this past spring semester we learned that French soldiers initially opened fired on American troops landing in Morocco. Furthermore, the sites suggested that World War II ended with the liberation of Paris in August 1944. I did not see anything in the museums that discussed the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Berlin. They followed a pattern that stressed the liberation of Paris and then ignored the major events leading up to Germany’s surrender in May 1945.
The majority of the French sites also glorified Charles de Gaulle and exaggerated the accomplishments of la Résistance. Les Invalides dedicated an entire wing to de Gaulle and tried to emphasis that he was on similar status as Roosevelt and Churchill. In reality, de Gaulle was the head of a government in exile with resources that came nowhere near to the extent of Roosevelt or Churchill. There were also several claims regarding the accomplishments of the French Resistance throughout the different sites in France. Although the French Resistance provided information to the Allied forces and hindered German troops, especially in the Normandy campaign, they were not successful in liberating the majority of France by 1944. After learning about the actual history of the war and visiting these memorials, France appeared to approach World War II with a selective memory that relied heavily on exaggeration and drifted from the reality of their war experience.