No, Rick arranged for Sam to stay on when Ferrari bought the Cafe Americain. Not that there was any doubt Sam would agree to say, knowing his place and all that.
Even though for special friends of Rick’s there was a special discount.
The government in Vichy was nominally neutral in World War II, and while dependant on German forbearance, wished to present itself to the French people and to the world as something more than Nazi puppets. For Renault to allow a visiting German army officer, who has no legal authority in French Morocco, to arbitrarily arrest or even shoot a legal refugee (Laszlo) would look like shit. The government might even fire Renault as an easy way to “stand up to the Nazis” without doing anything substantive.
Given that Petain had full powers, without any kind of check or elected representation, it was definitely a dictatorship.
It is only an inconsistency if you assume that Strasser was actually a major in the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). There is, of course, an alternate explanation that resolves all of the apparent inconsistencies and errors in the film.
Stranger
What modern dictatorship has ever called itself a dictatorship?
Sounds like what happened with one of the Jewish families in Matthew Brzezinski’s book, Isaac’s Army. The Osnos family managed to get transit visas to assist in their flight from Germany to India. These papers were often good for just 24 hours; sometimes they were legally obtained, sometimes purchased on the black market, sometimes forged; sometimes a stamp in a passport, sometimes a separate document.
Weird, that there was so much red tape in a time of chaos. Bureaucrats will be the last survivors of the apocalypse.
Who said anything about what they called themselves? You can do better than that.
The what exactly did you mean by saying Vichy France “was not a Dictatorship (in name anyway)”?
Most modern dictatorships continue to maintain at least the forms and institutions of democracy, even if all power is concentrated in one or a few people. Virtually no dictatorships are dictatorships “in name.”
For the purpose of the thread, I clarified that the Government of the time was the Vichy Govt which was not a Dictatorship in name, but anything that Germany would want, would have happened. That is pretty clear from post #31.
Today, Hitler is known as a Dictator. As is Stalin. Petain or Lavelle are not.
I trust this assists you.
If you want to start a separate thread about colloborationist govts versus dictatorships I would be happy to participate.
How would you define Petain then?