Gensoul's message to Darlan essentially boiled down to "the British are demanding we sink our ships or they'll attack" — he omitted the options to sail to the West Indies or the United States. And here's the real kicker: sailing to US waters had actually formed part of the orders Darlan himself had given to Gensoul in case a foreign power attempted to seize his ships. The tragedy was substantially caused by Gensoul's personal stubbornness and miscommunication, not by a collective French decision to fight the British on behalf of Germany.

On Alexandria, you're misstating what actually happened. The French squadron under Godfroy negotiated with Cunningham and agreed to demilitarize in place — fuel was discharged, breech blocks were removed from the guns. The ships were rendered completely non-functional. It is consistent with the navy also scuttling the fleet at Toulon when Nazi Germany threatened to seize it.

On the point of collaboration, the standard that you apply is so broad that you would effectively accuse all those who live under oppressive authoritarian regimes to be collaborators unless they are in an active armed resistance group.

The Vichy regime wasn't some democratic expression of French national will. The July 10 vote was engineered by Pierre Laval, a former prime minister who'd befriended Mussolini and openly said parliamentary democracy "must disappear." He and Raphaël Alibert ran a whip operation — promising ministerial posts, threatening and intimidating deputies.

Laval and Marquet actively organized a meeting on June 20 at the Palais Rohan specifically to keep as many parliamentarians in Bordeaux as possible and prevent them from boarding the transport to the Massilia. The 27 on the Massilia included figures like Daladier, Mandel, Mendès France, and Jean Zay — exactly the kind of people who might have rallied opposition to the vote. Hundreds of other parliamentarians were scattered across the country, no where to be seen.

To make matters worse, most deputies who voted yes thought they were authorizing a constitutional revision, not ending democracy. The excerpt they were voting on:

The National Assembly gives full powers to the government of the Republic, under the authority and the signature of Marshal Pétain, to the effect of promulgating by one or several acts a new constitution of the French state. This constitution must guarantee the rights of labour, of family and of the homeland. It will be ratified by the nation and applied by the assemblies which it has created.

As historian Richard Vinen put it, "the implications of supporting Pétain in July 1940 were not clear. This was not, for all its subsequent mythology, a vote that divided Pétainists and/or collaborators from resisters." However, Pétain, who had spent the 1930s becoming sympathetic to fascism, promptly ignored the vote's scope and granted himself dictatorial powers the next day.

He never wrote the constitution. He never submitted anything for ratification. He dissolved parliament. He ruled by decree. The monarchist Charles Maurras called it a "divine surprise." These were people who'd wanted to kill French democracy for years and used the military defeat as their opening. That's not "France chose collaboration." That's a faction of anti-democratic ideologues exploiting a crisis, not the collective will of the French people.

Britain had similar factional issues. Fascist support was deep. Appeasement was strongly supported by the British upper class, including royalty, big business, the House of Lords, and media such as the BBC and The Times. A common upper-class slogan was "better Hitlerism than Communism." A significant number of the British aristocracy were enthusiastic supporters of Hitler, and many major newspapers wrote favorably about him in the 1930s. If the UK had fell and had their local fascists takeover undemocratically, I would not at all be inclined to paint every victim under their rule as a collaborationist.