You mean that resistance is collapsed after the Germans broke through the Weygand-line?
Again, I'm making a point about political history rather than military history. Armed resistance to Nazi Germany had not completely collapsed after breaking through the Weygand-line, but if we are to speculate it would probably not have lead to a victory to continue the fighting. Yet to sign an armistice was to give a blank check to Pétain and his allies as well as Nazi Germany, to implement their horrendous policies. That is what we can know without hindsight, at the time it sent that political message, abandoning the population largely to its own faith. Furthermore, we simply don't know what would had happened in the French colonial empire, so there we can only theorise alt-history.
Continued resistance means that instead of the Germans occupying the country and committing whatever crimes they want, the French army loses hundreds of thousands of troops in a futile gesture, and THEN the Germans occupy the country and commit whatever crimes they want. Big improvement, and a noble gesture of defiance, which is really great, at least if you're somewhere else than in France.
Politically it sends the signal of the Republic of France continuing to resist, maybe underground if needed in the metropole, but it shows it is committed to continue fighting until the national territory is liberated. That is the nature of the partial defeat, it was not total since resistance could continue.
I don't admire Petain in the least, because I think his post-surrender behavior and cooperation with the Germans was contemptible, but the surrender was basically just admitting what was obvious, and ending the senseless slaughter on the battlefields. By that point, his decision very likely had little impact either way on the horrible aftermath. What he did afterward and what happened as a result of that was a different matter, and if you wish to judge him negatively for THAT, then I can't argue with it. I feel that the decision to surrender was a reasonable one at the time it was made, given the knowledge of the situation available at the time.
I analyse his decision of it being a means to reach his aims, aims that had already been stated and were rather clear, so you can not strictly say those intentions belong to the aftermath. To me the two are inherently tied given his previous record, which was not ambiguous, provided you stop venerating "the hero of Verdun" and judge the actual man by his political opinions.
Sadly, people such as loup99 seem to read a lot more into the "class struggle" aspects of the story than I believe the situation merits, seeing rampant anti-Semitism and racism in the efforts to avoid being looted or killed by the occupiers. In some cases, it existed; in other cases, it only existed in the minds of those who seek to find it, decades after the events, but innocence or guilt seems to be irrelevant when the searchers are using wealth or status of an entire social class, rather than actions of the individuals, as the determining factors.
I did not attack any entire class, but it is true that the face of collaboration was largely that of the upper bourgeoisie and industrials, to put names on them, since it largely benefited their interests. There is a reason for why the right-wing and the employers in France came out completely discredited of WW2, because while some of them joined the resistance and fought heroically, including a few marginal currents of the far-right, it was largely the Communist Party which was the backbone of the fight, and it was the left in the broader sense that dominated it. Hence the left-wing manifesto called the "Happy days" (
Les jours heureux) from the National Council of the Resistance (CNR), implemented after the liberation.
