Free France (La France Libre) (jun 18, 1940 – jun 2, 1944)

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Free France and its Free French Forces (French: France Libre et les Forces françaises libres) was the government-in-exile led by Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War, and its military forces, that continued to fight against the Axis powers as an Allied nation, following the Fall of France. Set up in London in June 1940, it organised and supported the Resistance in Occupied France, and established a foothold within several French colonies in Africa.

Charles de Gaulle, a French general and government minister, rejected the armistice being negotiated by Marshal Philippe Pétain and fled to Britain. There he exhorted the French to resist in his BBC broadcast "Appeal of 18 June" (Appel du 18 juin).

Initially, with the exception of the French possessions in the Pacific and French India, and French Equatorial Africa in August–September 1940, all the territories of the French colonial empire rejected de Gaulle's appeal and reaffirmed their loyalty to Marshall Pétain and the Vichy government. It was only progressively, often with the decisive military intervention of the Allies, that Free France took over more and more Vichy possessions, until after the Allied landings in North Africa (Operation Torch) in November 1942 Vichy only ruled over the zone libre in southern France and a few possessions in the West Indies (and nominally over Japanese-occupied French Indochina). The French Army of Africa switched allegiance to Free France, and this caused the Axis to occupy Vichy in reaction.

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