What happened to architecture while France was living through the "sinister, icy nightmare" that was, in the words of Roland Barthes, the Vichy regime? The architectural policies pursued by the French state cannot be measured solely by the infinitesimal number of buildings erected during the four long years of the Occupation. On the other hand, the abundance of textual production, the scale of administrative reorganization and the complexity of sectoral policies merit cross-analysis. Moreover, the fate of architects has not been the subject of any study comparable to those carried out on senior civil servants, lawyers or doctors, or on artists and writers. In particular, the application of racial laws to the profession, as framed by the Order created on December 31, 1940, and to education, remains unexplored.
Regionalist nostalgia, which the 1425 construction site of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions) cleverly hijacks, was at the same time as policies to modernize building design and production. Organizing committees were pressing for standardization, while prefabrication was being considered in the context of reconstruction. The architectural languages advocated for the destroyed towns varied widely, from the modernized traditionalism of Gien to the classicizing modernism of Auguste Perret in Amiens.
Purged of its Jewish professors, the École des Beaux-Arts continued to operate in Paris and, under the leadership of Eugène Beaudouin, in Marseille, while the project for a section des hautes études architecturales was discussed at length. On the other hand, a new mechanism was put in place in the field of the press, with the creation of L'Architecture française and Techniques et architecture, which brought together teams whose positions opposed each other. The role of bodies such as the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, and the many commissions set up to oversee town planning policy, should also be mentioned.
Many of the measures adopted under Vichy had their origins in the unsuccessful reform strategies of the inter-war years, and most of them remained in force after the Liberation, often implemented by the very people who had introduced them, for there was no "France Year Zero", to paraphrase Roberto Rossellini. Without claiming to uncover all the continuities and discrepancies between the programs before and after the summer of 1944, this discussion will highlight some of the most striking.