Vichy France and the Jews: with a new Foreword [1995] by Stanley Hoffmann 9781503618831

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VICHY FRANCE AND THE JEWS

VICHY FRANCE AND THE JEWS MICHAEL R. MARRUS AND

ROBERT 0. PAXTON Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California Copyright© 1981 by Calmann-Lcvy Originally published in French in 1981 as Vichy et les juif~ by Editions Calmann-Levy First English edition was published by Basic Books in 1981; a paperback edition was issued by Schocken in 1983 Reissued in paperback by Stanford University Press in 1995 Printed in the United States of America o-8047-2499-7 LC 94-68126 This book is printed on acid-free paper. ISBN

Cover photo: French gendarme guarding Jewish inmates at a detention camp in Pithiviers, near Orleans, sometime after 15 May 1941. In the 195o's, the French government forbade use of this picture in the film Nuit et Brouillard. Photo © Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes Historiques de Ia Seconde Guerre Mondiale; print courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

To the French men and women who assisted persecuted jews during the Second World War

In accordance with a law passed by the Vichy government on 11 December 1942, the word Juif was stamped on all identity cards and individual ration cards belonging to Jews.

In a dreadful moment in history it was argued that one only carried out unjust laws in order to weaken their severity, that the power one agreed to exercise would have done even more damage if it had been placed in hands which were less pure. What a deceitful rationalization, which opened the door to unlimited criminality! Everyone eased his conscience, and each level of injustice found a willing executor. In such circumstances, it seems to me, innocence was murdered, with the pretext that it be strangled more gently. BENJAMIN CONSTANT

Principes de politique, applicables a taus les gouvernements representatifs et particulierement a la constitution actuelle de la France (1815)

Foreword

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hen Robert Paxton's Vichy France was published in France, in 1973, it was not very well received. The tone of comments and reviews ranged from what the French call gene-let us translate it as embarrassment-to hostility. The fact that he was the first historian to have exploited German archives was not seen as a major asset. What hurt was the stark picture of the regime's eagerness for collaboration, at a time when the post- World War II representation of Vichy as a reactionary clique which the occupier and the circumstances had coerced into collaborating was still prevalent. Paxton's book and Marcel Ophuls' film The Sorrow and the Pity challenged this view, and gradually destroyed it By the time Vichy France and the Jews was published in France, in 1981, the battle was won. Once more, it was a pioneering work. There had been earlier books on aspects of Vichy's anti-Semitic policies, but this was by far the most comprehensive. It was, by contrast with Paxton's earlier masterpiece, intelligently received and bvorably reviewed. It played a major role in focusing scholarly and public attention on one part of Vichy's repressive policies and collaborationist activities that had never before been at the center of the stage. The subject never left that position since: a flood of books, French (such as the works of the indefatigable Serge Klarsfeld, of Andre Kaspi, of Adam Rayski) and non-French (such as Susan Zuccotti's and Richard I. Cohen's), has resulted in careful explorations not only of Vichy's policies and of public attitudes, which complement Marrus and Paxton, but also of the Jews' own reactions and behavior-a complex subject which shows, for instance, that even someone like Marc Bloch, a victim of Vichy's anti-Semitism, made a sharp distinction between French Jews, who were first of all French, and foreign Jews, an issue that has contributed to the recent questioning of the validity and benefits of Jewish "assimilation" by writers as diverse as Shmuel Trigano and Pierre Birnbaum. All these works, and a mass of commemorations and controversies about whether the French Republic

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does or does not owe a solemn apology to the victims and their descendants, have kept the subject at the forefront of public consciousness. At a colloquium held in 1992* in commemoration of the July 1942 roundup of Jews in Paris, Simone Veil, who survived deportation, told of the indifference with which Jewish survivors were met when they returned to France, by contrast with deported Resisters. By 1994, some observers were grumbling that the floodlights focused on the "Jewish question" in Vichy were so strong that other aspects of the regime were now lost in the dark-that we had moved, in a sense, from a sound and fair historical treatment of a profoundly painful subject, in the Marrus and Paxton book, to an ahistorical overkill. t I find the comment excessive, if only because the very fact that Vichy's anti-Semitic policies were not at the heart of opposition to Vichy at the time-civil servants who were later to become prominent in the Resistance at first did not protest against, and indeed enforced, the infamous Statut des ]uifs of October 1940-is itself a major part of the problem, of the pathology that Marrus and Paxton describe. But the grumbling is an indication of the long-term influence of their work. One can distinguish three aspects of the book. The first is the careful and thorough reconstruction of the Vichy regime's policies, in all their complexity. One of the book's greatest merits is the connection it describes between pre-1940 xenophobia and anti-Semitism in France and Vichy. Vichy France began with the fall of France in 1940. :j: Vichy France and the Jews reaches back to the 1930s, a major advance. Another merit is the analysis of the different consecutive policies of the mess that was Vichy (my translation of the word frequently used by someone who should know- Franc;ois Mitterrand-namely, une petaudiere). The early policy of discrimination, segregation, and aryanization carried out by Xavier Vallat was not, as some once asserted, adopted under Nazi pressure: it was wholly indigenous and even went beyond Nazi policy in its definition of Jews. But it was not the same as Vichy's later participation in and collaboration with the Nazis' "final solution," under Pierre Laval and the sinister Darquier de Pellepoix. This latter policy had its limits: Marrus and Paxton show *Published in Annales, May- June 1993, under the title "Presence du passe, lenteur de l'historie: Vichy, !'occupation, les Juifs." Both Marrus and Paxton are among the contributors. tcr Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: ur1 passe qui ne passe pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994), especially Chap. 1 and pp. z671f. +cr. Ralph Schor, L'opinion franqaise et les etrangers (Paris: Publications de Ia Sorbonne, 1985).

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the inconsistent attempts at protecting French Jews from deportation-and indeed the great majority of them were not rounded up; they mention Petain's refusal to force Jews in the Vichy-run part of France to wear yellow stars. But they also show that when the Nazis began to deport Jews from France, Laval and his police chief Rene Bousquet-respectively a conservative politician and a civil servant close to the Radicals of the Third Republic, with no previous record of ideological anti-Semitism-seized this moment as an opportunity to rid France of its foreign Jews, and took initiatives (such as the deportation of children) aimed at improving France's bargaining power in the new order which-or so Bousquet told the imprisoned Daladier-the victorious Germans were going to impose.* A second aspect of the book concerns the reactions of the French. Vichy, in 1942, put the apparatus of the state, above all its police, at the service of the Nazis' extermination drive. The authors make it clear that until then there had been a great deal of public support for Vichy's policies, indeed a surge of anti-Semitism in 1941 and early 1942, resulting from food shortages that were blamed on the Jews and from xenophobia. They are less informative about the subsequent evolution of public opinion. Even that rather dubious source, the pn?fets' reports to Vichy, show that a public that had at first supported Vallat's view of the incompatibility "between the French national tradition and an inassimilable Jewish tradition" (p. 95), and approved the exclusion of the Jews from a huge range of activities, was shocked and shaken by roundups and deportations, even though such natural leaders of public opinion as Catholic bishops and notables remained, with some fine exceptions, remarkably silent. Recent studies of opinion have confirmed that the atrocious events of the summer of 1942 contributed powerfully to the estrangement between the public and the regime that Laval's return to power in April 1942 had already set in motion.t The third aspect of the book is the fascinating comparison the authors make between the fate of the Jews in France and that of Jews in other countries occupied by or allied with Nazi Germany. Here too, they were pioneers: the French studies of Vichy had been remarkably francocentric, and now they no longer are. :j: Defenders of Vichy have *Cf. Edouard Daladier, Journal de captidte, 1940-1945 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1991), pp. 168-70. tcr. Pierre Laborie, L'opinion fran