Incident At Vichy Quotes

We have not many wills, but only one --it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.

There is a scene in Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vichy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before the Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, “Is that everything you have?” The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him: “Good, now you have nothing.” The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

Including the Free French in the invasion force proved to be a grave mistake, because it made the conflict internecine. To the Vichy French, the Gaullists were ‘the Devil incarnate, the scapegoats for all the anger, resentment and weakness which had been lurking in the dark places of their consciences for a year’, a Free French officer believed.24 Wherever they were involved, the fighting was especially vicious. In the village of Khirbe in southern Lebanon a Free French officer was shot by Vichy forces in the back as he was returning to his own front line, having failed to persuade his countrymen to surrender. When, in another incident, a Free French officer on a motorcycle drew up beside a Vichy counterpart and invited him to join him against their common German enemy, the Vichy man drew his pistol and shot him dead. In a memoir, Jumbo Wilson called the invasion a ‘most unpleasant campaign’.25