REVOLT IN FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 July 1942, Page 3

REVOLT IN FRANCE

WOULD FOLLOW ALLIED LANDING ACCORDING TO ESCAPED DEPUTY. VICHY HELD IN CONTEMPT. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 11.20 a.m.) RUGBY, July 27. If there is a successful landing by Allied troops in France, these will have behind them immediately a widespread revolt of the French population. This was the opinion expressed at the headquarters of the Fighting French in London by M. Andre Philip, the 41-year-old ex-Socialist Deputy for Lyons, who recently came to England at the invitation of General de Gaulle. M. Philip said the first feelings of despair after the fall of France had been changed today to a feeling of bitter resentment against Vichy. This feeling had been growing very strongly during the last eight or nine months and resistance had been spreading in Paris, in the north, in Alsace and in Brittany. The feeling in Paris was that the Vichy Government did not exist. M. Philip said the French people had been angered because the Germans had plundered all their fruit and wine and a great deal of their meat. At the same time there was a growing spirit of revolt against Vichy, because freedom of speech and eVen of thought was being repressed. Vichy boasted of having authority, he said, but the real state of affairs was complete anarchy in everything at present. The whole atmosphere was very good for the resistance movement. Members of the movement regarded themselves as doing the same thing inside France as elements of the Fighting French who were fighting in battle were doing.