Debates over whether or not violent conflicts in occupied societies should be considered civil wars tend to be politically loaded and are very hard to settle based on any objective standard. So is the related problem of assessing historical continuities and ruptures in countries that fell under enemy control in wartime. There certainly are some striking ways in which the struggles of the war years appear to be variations upon and exacerbations of long-standing divisions in these societies. France constitutes one of the best-known examples of this phenomenon, insofar as the Vichy regime and its supporters drew upon various strands of a home-grown illiberal tradition that could be traced not only to the country’s polarized politics of the 1930s, but to the anti-Dreyfusard movement of the 1890s and perhaps even as far back as the counter-revolutionary reaction of the early nineteenth-century Bourbon Restoration.1 For their part, some of the main currents of the French resistance could be linked directly to the Popular Front of the 1930s, and could also be seen as incarnating certain elements of the French republican/revolutionary tradition writ large.