The Town of Vichy and the Politics of Identity

“In a cautionary tale of the challenges facing a company town trying to control its ‘brand,’ Kirrily Freeman explores the complicated roots of the town of Vichy's sense of identity. While ‘Vichy’ is now synonymous with the collaborationist regime of Marshal Pétain, the roots of this town's sense of identity, and of aggrievement, victimhood and stigmatization lie farther in its past, and shape it today.”
- Lynne Taylor, University of Waterloo, Canada

“Kirrily Freeman’s highly readable and richly informative history of Vichy France combines excellent scholarship with an eye for the telling detail or anecdote to provide a sensitive account of a haunted city. One understands in reading Freeman’s book why the name ‘Vichy’ has come to represent much more than the spas and mineral water for which it became famous. Highly recommended.”

- Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University, USA

This book explores the contoursof civic identity in the town of Vichy, France. Over the course of its history, Vichy has been known for three things: its thermal spa resort; its products (especially Vichy water and Vichy cosmetics); and its role in hosting the État Français, France’s collaborationist government in the Second World War. This last association has become an obsession for the residents of Vichy, who feel stigmatized and victimized by the widespread habit of referring to France’s wartime government as the 'Vichy regime'. This book argues that the stigma, victimhood, and decline suffered by Vichyssois are best understood by placing Vichy’s politics of identity in a broader historical context that considers corporate, as well as social and cultural, history. 
Kirrily Freeman is Professor of History at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. Her publications include Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary (2009) and Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 (2019), edited with John Munro.