| abstract | This dissertation explores America's intelligence community's experiences with and responses to Vichy France's mythical
Synarchy affair between 1941-1946. In the most garish accounts, the highly secretive Synarchy (known formerly as the Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire (M.S.E.))
emerged as a perceived threat to global security, as it muddled the actual ambitions of influential French technocrats controlling various machinations of the
Pétain regime. Despite the conspiracy being contrived by an effervescent French propaganda machine, William Donovan's intelligence services, Cordell Hull's
diplomatic agents in Vichy, and various other ad hoc American departments generally recognized it as an authentic phenomenon throughout World War II and beyond.
In turn, they believed that the sinister Synarchy threatened numerous American foreign policies and national security aims, most notably those associated with
Franco-German collaborationism, the destabilization of international democratic institutions, and the proliferation of clandestine statist cabals. An endlessly
pliable legend, Synarchy appeared concomitantly with numerous world affairs, continually stirring the Americans' interest in the topic. Pétain's controversial
cashiering of General Maxime Weygand in North Africa in late 1941, the rise of the actual Mexican Sinarquista (U.N.S.) movement in 1941 and 1942, and the ascent
of de Gaulle's C.F.L.N. in 1943 and 1944, for instance, all intersected with the tall tales of Vichy's technocratic phantasms. While the legendary faction never
prompted any catastrophic foreign policymaking decisions on the part of the Americans, it did remain a palpable theme within multiple narratives and became a referent
for shifting U.S.-French relations. Previous scholarship on the Americans' relationship with the conspiracy, though limited, attests that the intelligence community's
interest in the affair ended with the closure of the American Embassy in Vichy in November of 1942. By contrast, this paper demonstrates that determined investigations
continued until at least 1946. I thus conclude that due to these officers' persistent belief that the cabal constituted a menacing shadow organization, the Synarchy
affair ultimately thwarted a sizable portion of America's nascent intelligence networks.
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