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France’s entry into the Second World War in the summer of 1939 was accompanied by the restriction of civil liberties and the banning of the Communist Party, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. At the trade union level, this policy led to the exclusion of union members suspected to be Communists and to the dissolution of more than six hundred unions. Until the fall of the Republic, union activity was thus split between legal, but ineffective, unions and clandestine unions organisations. The rise of Pétain’s “État français” completed the transformation of the social landscape. After the Vichy government dissolved all union organisations, a final schism developed among legal unionists, dividing those who agreed to cooperate with the new regime from those who refused, joining the activists who had gone underground a year earlier.