When Democracy Voted Itself to Death - July 10, 1940

On July 10, 1940, the elected representatives of the French Third Republic gathered at a casino in the spa town of Vichy and voted 569 to 80 to hand dictatorial powers to an 84-year-old war hero named Philippe Pétain. No tanks. No coup. A democracy dismantled itself using democratic procedures in an afternoon. This episode explores the four truths that coexist inside that single vote: the terror and shock that made capitulation feel rational to hundreds of elected men; the 80 who said no and changed nothing; the war hero who believed he was saving France while helping destroy it, and the mechanism that political scientists now study as the original case of democratic suicide, a playbook that has been used again and again, in country after country, in the decades since.