Collaborationism, as a pejorative term, can describe the treason of cooperating with enemy forces occupying one's country. As such it implies criminal deeds in the service of the occupying power, including complicity with the occupying power in murder, persecutions, pillage, and economic exploitation as well as participation in a puppet government.
The use of "collaboration" to mean "traitorous cooperation with the enemy," dates from 1940, originally in reference to the Vichy Regime in France, and other French people who helped Nazi Germany. Since then, the words collaboration and collaborateur possibly have this very pejorative meaning in French (the apocoped form collabo only has this pejorative meaning).
In France, a distinction emerged between 'collaborators' and 'collaborationists'. The latter expression is mainly used to describe individuals enrolled in pseudo-Nazi parties, often based in Paris, who had an overwhelming belief in fascist ideology. 'Collaborators', on the other hand, could engage in collaboration for a number of more pragmatic reasons, such as damage limitation or personal ambition, and were not necessarily believers in fascism per se. Arch-collaborators like Pierre Laval or René Bousquet are thus distinct from collaborationists.
Recent research by the British historian, Simon Kitson, has shown that France did not wait until the Liberation to begin pursuing collaborationists. The Vichy government, itself heavily engaged in collaboration, arrested around 2000 individuals on charges of passing information to the Germans. Their reasons for doing so was to centralise collaboration to ensure that the state maintained a monopoly in Franco-German relations and to defend sovereignty so that France may negotiate from a position of strength. As Kitson has shown, the government engaged in many compromises along the way.[1]
The term in this negative meaning is also used for German individuals and institutions cooperating with the Nazi regime, though in their case it was not a foreign occupation, and later to people cooperating with or helping other dictatorial regimes in their own countries, even when foreign occupation was not involved.
Alleged collaborators
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References
- ^ Simon Kitson, The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Fighting espionage in Vichy France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008; Simon Kitson, Vichy et la chasse aux espions nazis, Paris, Autrement, 2005.
Bibliography
- Simon Kitson, The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Fighting espionage in Vichy France, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
- Simon Kitson, Vichy et la chasse aux espions nazis, Paris, Autrement, 2005.
See also
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