Armistice of 22 June 1940
The remainder of the country was to be left unoccupied, although the new regime that replaced the Third Republic was mutually recognised as the legitimate government of all of Metropolitan France except Alsace–Lorraine.
The French government was forced to relocate to Bordeaux on 10 June to avoid capture and declared Paris to be an open city the same day.
In Article 3, Clause 2, the drafters said that Germany did not intend to heavily occupy north-west France after the cessation of hostilities with Britain.
After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler—in a calculated gesture of disdain for the French delegates—exited the carriage, as Foch had done in 1918, leaving the negotiations to the chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the Armed Forces), General Wilhelm Keitel.
Finally, as Germany lacked a navy sufficient to occupy France's overseas territories, Hitler's only practical recourse to deny the British use of them was to maintain a formally independent and neutral French rump state.
They provided for German occupation of three-fifths of metropolitan France north and west of a line through Geneva and Tours and extending to the Spanish border, so as to give Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine access to all French Channel and Atlantic ports.
An unoccupied region in the south, the Zone libre, was left relatively free to be governed by a rump French administration based in Vichy.
About a third of the initial 1,500,000 prisoners taken were released or exchanged as part of the Germans' Service du Travail Obligatoire forced labour programme by the time the war ended.
The cease-fire went into effect at 00:35 on 25 June 1940, more than two days later, only after another armistice was signed between France and Italy, the main German ally in Europe.
The armistice did have some relative advantages for the French, compared to worse possible outcomes, such as keeping the colonial empire and the fleet, and, by avoiding full occupation and disarmament, the remaining French rump state in the unoccupied zone could enforce a certain de facto independence and neutrality vis-à-vis the Axis.
The Alsace-Lorraine Monument (depicting a German Eagle impaled by a sword) was also destroyed and all evidence of the site was obliterated, except notably the statue of Ferdinand Foch; Hitler ordered it to be left intact, so that it would be honoring only a wasteland.
