Suppose for a moment that a “piece of America” had been occupied by an authori… no, a totalitarian regime. Would Americans, on average, have behaved better than the French?
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis comes to mind.
And, by the way, did the levels of French collaboration/resistance match those of other vanquished European democracies? France was the largest of them, and the only “great” country (although Holland has every claim to greatness, too) — but Norway, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands were all respectable, well-established democracies, too. Yet Quisling and Petain came to power only in Norway and France; perhaps Hitler didn’t need a Quisling for every occupied country?