Through a detailed case study of South-Eastern France, this thesis represents the first environmental history of the "dark years" and their aftermath. Contributing to Vichy historiography, environmental histories of war, and French environmental history, this study argues that nature mattered during the years of war and occupation, both materially and culturally. The natural environment was a site of combat, a means for constructing identities during a time of political and social upheaval, and a "victim" of human conflict. Following defeat in 1940, the Vichy regime launched an ultimately unsuccessful war against "wasteland," born of ideological convictions and severe material shortages. Forests represented a particularly important source of natural resources and were consequendy over-exploited, as well as being transformed into political spaces by both Vichy and the resistance. In addition, occupation armies plundered forest resources and used them for military manoeuvres, developments which French foresters struggled to restrain. Similarly, nature preservationists battled to preserve the Camargue from agricultural modernisation, military manoeuvres, and German submersion plans, aided (unwittingly) by nature. Elsewhere, Vichy and the Club Alpin Franc?ais mobilised mountains as a space in which to remake French masculinity. This mobilisation of the mountains was echoed by the resistance, especially in the Vercors, which was transformed into a "natural fortress." This intense human activity necessitated the reconstruction of the environment in the postwar era, which was planned and state-led through schemes such as the Fonds Forestier National. Just as it had between 1940 and 1944, nature continues to matter, and plays a role in preserving and obscuring memories of the war. Drawing on governmental and other archival sources (some previously unexamined), this thesis aims to demonstrate the relevancy of environmental history to wider historiography, as well as inform contemporary concerns about the complex relationship between war and nature.

Focusing on the period 1940–1942, this thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between the Vichy regime and Jews of French citizenship who found themselves under its control. Despite Vichy’s implication in the Holocaust, this study examines the possibility for convergence, however partial and temporary, between Vichy’s plans for regeneration and Jewish ambitions to participate in the New Order. This investigation aims to explain the seemingly contradictory circumstances in which a French Jew could be at once persecuted under Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, and rewarded for the promotion of certain French values by the government’s programme of National Revolution. This unstudied dilemma is explored in this thesis through an examination of French Jewish youth. An analysis of this social category provides a point of entry into the ambivalences of Vichy’s policies. While Vichy enacted legislation in order to marginalise Jewish participation in the national community, the regime was also emphatically in favour of French Jewish youth contributing to the National Revolution. Methodologically this study moves away from the long-established categories of resistance, rescue and persecution. Rather than merely examining Jewish youth’s activities during the establishment of the Vichy regime as a period of formation and preparation for later resistance or rescue activity, this study seeks to investigate the ways in which, from 1940–1942, the Vichy regime and French Jewish youth sought to coexist. This aspect of the war years has almost entirely disappeared from France’s collective memory and from the historiographical debates over Vichy and the Jews.