It seems kind of strange to me that after France capitulated officially in 1940 and spent the next four years under German occupation that the Allies would grant them high status when the war ended.
But France was given a swath of Germany and Berlin to occupy, had a team of prosecutors at Nuremburg, and generally in photo-ops that I see, there's often a French general standing next to Ike, Montgomery, Zhukov, et al.
What led the Allies to grant France this distinguished status after they had spent most of the war under the Nazi jackboot, and aside from the resistance and Charles De Gaulle's Free French, didn't really do a lot of hard fighting? Was there any resentment on the part of the other Allies that France was being given more credit than it was due, in a sense?
The French contributed huge numbers of regular and irregular forces between 1943-45 and earned their spot in victory celebrations, even if their great power status was lost by the end of the war.
French armies fought alongside the British and American troops from Tunisia (Early 1943) onward. The French Army of Africa actually took as many casualties in the Tunisian campaign as the Americans or British did. In 1944 a French corps made a crucial breakthru in the Monte Cassino offensive in Italy. Later that year a French Army level (i.e. above corps) unit participated in Operation Dragoon, an invasion of southern France, and of course the French had an armored division in Normandy during the breakout. By the time of the invasion, France was contributing 400,000 troops to the cause. French troops were among the first troops to reach the Rhine in the southern sector of the front.
At the same time, French resistance fighters in 1943-44 also made huge contributions to the cause and suffered harsh casualties and reprisals against civilians as a result.
By April 1945, France had 1.2 million men under arms, making it the 4th largest armed forces in Europe. Because the French industrial base was devastated by occupation, bombing, and war, they were not a true great power by the end of the war and their large army relied on American Lend-Lease material.
Doubtless political factors were also at play, but the main reason the French were victors was that a huge number of French people fought very hard against Nazi Germany for the last two and a half years of the war.
So, where did all the soldiers come from? Were they colonial regiments or was half the army not around when paris fell or what?