Question

What impact did WW@ have on france?

Answer 1

well it had to draw back from the colonies, lost its status as a major country, it also needed $$ and lost lives.

Answer 2

Presumably you mean the second, since @ is 2 with the SHIFT key pressed. The French were rapidly conquered in the Second World War, so they did not suffer nearly the same carnage among their young men as in the First (when something like 10% of all military-age men were killed). However, the civilian population suffered significant under the Nazi occupation, which became increasingly oppressive. If you travel in northern France (the south was unoccupied for most of the war), you will in each village see a little memorial labeled "fusillee par les allemands" ("shot by the Germans") with a short list labeled 1914-1918 and a much longer list labeled 1940-1944. The number of Normans in whom those names are a living memory is of course rapidly diminishing to zero, but for long decades it was a powerful influence on French culture.

For one thing, de Gaulle, the leader of the French government in exile, became deeply distrustful of the Western (particularly American) guarantee of security. After all, he had waited in vain in 1940 for any help from the Americans. It is hardly surprising that after the war he insisted on, for example, France maintaining its own nuclear arsenal, an independent deterrent. I'm not sure we know even today where those nukes were targeted.

A large number of French Jews were of course shipped to Poland and murdered.

Finally, having lost or drawn three major wars in a row, the French public pretty much lost confidence in its traditional aristocratic leadership forever. After the war it turned solidly socialist (after toying it with it off and on throughout the 19th century), and has stayed there pretty much ever since (albeit with a unique Gallic flair to it -- this is not your dreary Stalinesque or East German socialism, but something much more dramatic and colorful).