Meeting at the Grand Casino in Vichy, the French National Assembly voted 569 to 80 to grant Marshal Philippe Pétain sweeping constitutional authority, effectively ending the Third Republic. The new government pursued open collaboration with Nazi Germany, implementing antisemitic laws and administering unoccupied France until the Allied liberation in 1944.
The vote took place in a casino theater, an incongruous setting for the death of a republic that had survived since 1870. Delegates gathered under chandeliers to formally dissolve the constitutional order that had governed France, handing near-total power to the 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun in the First World War and now the face of France's capitulation in the second.
Only 80 legislators voted against the measure, a group later honored as having preserved republican honor in France's darkest constitutional hour. Pierre Laval orchestrated the maneuvering behind the scenes, and within months the Vichy regime had begun issuing antisemitic statutes independent of German pressure, revealing collaboration as much homegrown as imposed.
Vichy would administer the unoccupied southern zone until Germany occupied all of France in November 1942, and its police and bureaucracy would participate directly in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to death camps. The July 10 vote remains one of modern France's most fraught historical memories, a case study in how democratic institutions can vote themselves out of existence.