French weren't cowards.

First at war, the french fought fiercely while the situation quickly began to become desperate ( 92,000 killed and 250,000 wounded for the french, 45000 killed and 110,000 wounded for the germans in six weeks of fighting, a superior death toll that in Verdun).

Then during the occupation we must understand the shock that was the defeat for the french, 8 millions of them on the roads, 1,8 million men send in Germany, the defeat of Gamelin and Weygand, two veterans of world war I (Gamelin served directly under Joffre and Weygand under Foch who once said: "If the things going wrong for France, call Weygand).

And with the war, the priority (and we must understand this) for most families was to survive, find food, clothes, protect the children ( especially when the men was POW).
Still, on 6 June 1944, they were 175,000 FFI, and 300,000 in August. If you want to fight, you must need courage but not only, you must have weapons, and you must make sure that your family is in security. That's why many FFI were young (and because of the STO).

And the "collabos" ? They were very few. For exemple, while they were 175,000 men in the FFI, 450,000 in the liberation army in june 1944, they were only 15000 men in the LVF and 35000 in the infamous milice. The problem is that this very few persons controlled metropolitan France (when it wasn't the germans). The people hated Laval or Darnand but for Petain, they simply didn't understand. Petain became a soldier to avenge 1870, he was the victor of Verdun, the man that wanted to refuse the armistice in 1918 to launch an offensive from the Lorraine to Berlin, the man that said before the war that french army hadn't a good stategy to fight against Germany.

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