Geography, empire and National Revolution in Vichy France

This essay reveals how a section of Franceʹs geographical movement sought to influence the Vichy governments that came to power after the Nazi invasion of France in the summer of 1940. The investigation focuses on the Société de Géographie Commerciale de Paris (SGCP), an offshoot of the older Société de Géographie de Paris (SGP). During the inter-war years, the SGCP become closely associated with the right-wing values of its president, the prominent anthropologist–geographer and politician Louis Marin. After 1940, the SGCP was relaunched as a geopolitical ‘think-tank’ and sought to persuade the authorities in Vichy that an extra-European dimension should be injected into the domestic programmes for national rejuvenation. The history of the SGCP demonstrates how commercial geography could be hijacked by a right-wing, and ultimately quasi-fascist economic imperialism, while the internecine struggles between the leading personalities in the society after 1945 exemplify the moral and intellectual complexities of collaboration and resistance in occupied Europe.