Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime
456
Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime
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Overview
This masterful book is the first comprehensive reappraisal of the Vichy France regime for over twenty years. France was occupied by Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944, and the exact nature of France’s role in the Vichy years is only now beginning to come to light. A main reason its history has been difficult to uncover is due to some of France’s most prominent politicians, including longtime president François Mitterrand, who were implicated in the regime. This means that public access to key documents has been repeatedly denied, and only now an objective analysis is possible.
The fate of France as an occupied country could easily have been shared by Britain, and it is this background element that enhances our fascination with Vichy France. How would we have acted under similar circumstances? The divisions and repercussions of the Vichy years still resonate in the country today, and whether you view the regime as a fascist dictatorship, an authoritarian offshoot of the Third Reich or an embodiment of heightened French nationalism, Michael Curtis’s rounded, incisive book will be seen as the standard work on its subject for many years.
“An outstanding . . . unavoidably controversial book.” —The Daily Telegraph
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628720631 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2003 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 456 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
THE JEWS OF FRANCE
The Jewish presence in France goes back nearly 2000 years, to the Roman province of Gaul, to the Garonne valley and to the area along the confluence of the Rhine and Rhône. In the Middle Ages a small number of Jews lived in different areas, mostly in Provence and Languedoc but also in Limousin, Burgundy and the île de France, in spite of continuing hostility and mistreatment. Though Jews were able to enter professions and to trade, their situation was precarious. French kings regarded them as people to be exploited for revenue or used as a scapegoat to explain political or economic failures. Their status varied in different regions, from toleration in an area north of the Loire and in Champagne to hostility in other places.
The First Crusade in 1096 led to considerable violence against Jews in Metz and Rouen, irrelevant to the struggle against the Muslim infidels in Jerusalem. Accusations resulted from growing Christian hostility: Jews were responsible for spreading disease, defiling the Christian Host and poisoning wells and rivers. The first accusation of ritual murder came in Blois in 1171. After the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council, convened by Pope Innocent III in 1215, calling for Jews to be identified and excluded from society, the Council of Narbonne in 1227 ordered Jews to wear a distinguishing badge. King Louis IX, regarded as Saint Louis, implemented this in 1269 by a decree that Jews must wear a rouelle, a piece of fabric, on their clothing.
Discrimination and persecution from the beginning of the Jewish presence included various forms of restrictions and extortions, banning of ownership or seizure of property, heavy taxation, brutal attacks, pressure to convert to Christianity and to listen to sermons, physical segregation and expulsion. Jews were massacred in a number of places and expelled from various provinces in the country during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1306 Philip IV, the Fair, unfairly ordered the expulsion of Jews, and in 1394 Charles IV ordered them out of his domain. After Provence became part of the Kingdom of France in 1481, Jews were within twenty years expelled from that area.
In spite of the persecution by the French kings, some Jewish cultural life continued in other parts of the country. In the eleventh century a northern French Jew, Rashi, in Troyes founded a Talmud school and wrote commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. His pupils continued these commentaries and glosses on interpretations. These northerners were rivals of the Jews in Provence, who thrived in Marseille, Narbonne and Lunel until their expulsion in 1498. The southern Jews, especially the ibn Tibbon family, played an important role in transmitting philosophical and scientific knowledge from the east to the west, and helping translate works in Arabic by Jewish and Muslim scholars. The most important of these was the work by Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed.
In early modern history Jews came into France from different places. Sephardic Jews entered the country from Spain and Portugal, settling in the south-west, especially in Bordeaux and Bayonne. By the 1648 treaty of Westphalia, Alsace became part of France, thus adding a different group of Jews, Ashkenazis, to the French population.
On the eve of the French Revolution about 40,000 Jews lived in the country. They can be categorised in four groups.
The most integrated group consisted of the Sephardim in the southwest and the Provençal communities of the south, descendants from the marranos supposedly converted in Spain. Sometimes also referred to as 'Portuguese Jews', they became a part of the local upper class and served the government, as did the Gradis family. If in legal trouble, these Sephardim resorted to the French court system rather than to the rabbinical one. In 1723, in return for a substantial payment, the marranos were officially tolerated and their privileges confirmed. The 4000 Jews in the south-west obtained citizenship on 28 January 1790, the first Jews to be emancipated. A second group, some 2500 'Papal Jews', protected by the Pope, who ruled the area, were in the Comtat Venaissinß centred in Avignon and Carpentras.
The largest number, 70 per cent of the total, lived in Alsace, about 25,000, and in Lorraine with its 5500 'German' or 'Teutonic' Jews. They were in Metz, the largest Jewish city in the country in the eighteenth century, in Nancy and Thionville, but excluded from Strasbourg. They were scattered in small towns and villages. These Ashkenazis, facing legal restrictions on residence and mobility and sometimes, as in Colmar, heavy taxation, were prevented from owning land, and worked in traditional Jewish occupations: pedlars, second-hand dealers, pawnbrokers and clothing goods makers. Living in close-knit communities, virtually autonomous corporations, they were highly organised with their own system of jurisdiction and were devoted to the Jewish tradition and the synagogue. Their villages resembled the shtetls of eastern Europe.
In 1789 deputies from Alsace to the newly recalled National Assembly, which was divided on the Jewish question and on granting civil rights to Jews, opposed emancipation of Jews. The decree of 27 September 1791, however, emancipated all Jews, and those in Alsace became citizens. At the same time, their life was changed with the establishment of state-sponsored religious organisations which reduced the significance of their autonomous organisations on the one hand, while enlarging opportunities in economic and social life, including commerce, industry and the military, on the other. Emancipation did not end hostility against them. Anti-Jewish violence erupted in Alsace in 1793 when cemeteries were sacked, sacred tablets destroyed and synagogues closed.
In spite of the hostility, the Alsatian Jews were devoted patriots. Affected by the loss of the two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, to Germany after the French defeat in 1870, that patriotism was displayed when over 15,000 Jews, about a third of the Jews in the two provinces and about half of the total number of Jews in France at that time, who wanted to remain French, left the area. They also welcomed, as did the French population as a whole, the return of the two provinces to France after the First World War. Ironically, in view of events in the 1890s, among these fervently patriotic Jews who wanted to remain French was the family of Alfred Dreyfus.
The Alsatians who left after 1870 largely went to Paris. A small number of Jews, about 1000 in 1789, lived in Paris, mostly in the Marais district. During the next century the Jewish population, though remaining at about one-quarter of 1 per cent of the population, became increasingly urbanised with Paris as the great magnet. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost the whole of the Jewish population of 85,000, out of the total French population of 39 million, was urbanised, compared with about one-third of the general population. Paris contained at least 60 per cent of Jewry in France, most working in the tertiary sector, commerce and the liberal professions, and in banking. Of the 440 individual owners of financial establishment in Paris, almost a quarter were Jews.
Emancipation
Emancipation had not come easily; even non-Jewish advocates thought it required the end of Jewish distinctiveness, the 'melting' as the Abbé Grégoire put it, of Jews into the national mass, or their conversion to Christianity. Enlightenment ideas, particularly tolerance and reason, naturally attracted Jewish leaders and thinkers. In Alsace, one of those leaders, Cerf Berr, in 1780 asked Moses Mendelssohn, the key figure in the Haskalah movement, advocating modernity for Judaism and the departure of Jews from their geographical, social, professional and linguistic ghettos, to write a memorandum arguing for emancipation.
Mendelssohn passed on the task to Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, military counsellor to the King of Prussia. The translation by Mirabeau into French of Dohm's work was published in 1782, just ahead of a royal decree of January 1784. The decree abolished the péage corporel, a corporal tax on Jews 'which ranks them alongside animals ... and seems to debase humanity'.
Before the French Revolution numerous legal and social restrictions had been imposed on Jews, and to a lesser degree on Protestants. In 1787 civil equality was granted to Protestants. In the same year an essay competition on the question, 'Are there any ways of making the Jews of France happier and more useful?' resulted in awards to winners including the Abbé Grégoire, who proposed economic emancipation of Jews and the elimination of restrictions on them. After the Declaration of the Rights of Man, adopted on 26 August 1789, which ended discrimination, it took another two years before Jews enjoyed full civil rights. It took almost another hundred years before, in October 1870, Algerian Jews numbering about 35,000 were granted citizenship by the decree of Adolphe Crémieux, the Minister of Justice.
With many barriers removed, Jews began to participate in the economic, political and cultural life of the nation, in the arts and music, in journalism and publishing, and in politics, starting at the local level and then nationally, with the first Jewish deputies to the legislature being elected in 1842. The funeral in 1858 of the Jewish actress Rachel, of the Comédie-Française, symbolised the new role of Jews in French life with the attendance not only of prominent Jews such as Adolphe Crémieux, but also of her two sons, one descended from Napoleon, and the other from General Bertrand.
Crémieux had links to both the state service and the Jewish community. Coming from a family long settled in France, and with a distinguished career as lawyer, parliamentary deputy, political liberal and Minister of Justice, he was also a defender of the rights of Jews as full and equal citizens and a leading person in the Jewish Consistoire Central in Paris and in the Alliance Israélite Universelle in 1864.
If in Alsace various factors fostered continuation of a traditional Jewish lifestyle and occupational distribution, with acculturation being measured 'in generations, not years', and with tension between tradition and modernity, increasing numbers of Jews in Paris and other large cities such as Lyon and Marseille were affluent and integrated, for the most part, into the French bourgeoisie.
The heterogeneous Jewish community responded to emancipation and to the possibility of changes in patterns of behaviour in different ways. Some adhered to the traditional communal autonomy and the Kehillah, Jewish life and culture. Others, beginning in the 1830s, sought a new Franco-Jewish identity, advocating a concept of regeneration or modernisation, which entailed socio-economic change, a more secular educational system, the end of some religious rituals, and the unification and centralisation of French Jewry. For this latter group, engaged in processes of acculturation and assimilation, the culture of France, the spiritual home, became more significant than group identity. The French Revolution was the new exodus for the Jewish people, who now had access to the universal rights of humanity. Vichy was to betray those rights and tread them under foot.
Native and Foreign Jews
In his 1893 book Israël parmi les Nations, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu took the integration of Jews for granted. However, increasing Jewish immigration, mostly from eastern Europe, seen by some French people as a foreign invasion, slowed the process. By 1914, over half of the Jewish population in Paris, the magnet, were non-citizens. The Paris population displayed a double image. One consisted of the native Jews, earlier immigrants, now affluent, well placed, influential, with a bourgeois style of life. Politically, at least until the First World War, they were generally republican moderates attached to the 'religion of the French Revolution'; few supported parties of the left until the 1920s. Contrasted to the native Jews were the new immigrants, non-citizens, poor, mostly from Poland, concentrated in the traditional artisan trades of textiles, furs, garments and shoemaking. Many speaking Yiddish, some speaking Ladino (Spanish-Jewish) or Chuadit (Portuguese-Jewish), they were more likely to hold more radical political and economic views, such as those of the Bund, anarchists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, than were the native Jews.
The two groups were separated by both a wide social and economic gap, and a geographical one. The natives mostly lived in the richer western sections of the capital, while the new eastern Europeans lived in the central and eastern sections, the so-called Pletzl, the third and fourth arrondissements.
France, before and during the Vichy years, had long seen the Jewish population as divided into two parts: the French citizens, Israelites, and the foreign 'Jews.' The first group, assimilated, acculturated, integrated into French life and loyal to France, proud of their past as veterans in the First World War, were self-defined as adherents of the Mosaic Law. The foreign-born Jews differed from the French Jewish population in their way of life, religious practice, language, use of Yiddish and attachment to Jewish tradition. The two groups also differed economically and by class. The French Jews were middle to upper class; they were professionals, commercial and business people, and intellectuals. They were assimilated into the secular educational system of the Third Republic, blending their Jewish inheritance and French patriotism. For this assimilated community, the Dreyfus affair was not so much a Jewish issue as a struggle between forces of justice and order. It saw the blatant anti-Semitism at the time as a temporary phenomenon 'due to passing circumstances' and limited to a few people. Foreign Jews were often manual workers, artisans or small tradesmen dealing in clocks and watches, jewellery, furniture and the like.
The two groups also differed on the questions of Jewish identity, the Jewish role in the Diaspora and, later, on the response to the Nazi regime. Moreover, each group had its own institutional structure. The distinction between the citizen and the 'foreign' Jew was crucial, and was literally to be a matter of life and death in the wartime years and the Vichy regime.
Linguistic differences also separated them. The newer immigrants, Ashkenazis from central Europe, spoke little French or French with an accent and also, especially in the older generation, Yiddish. Sephardim from Mediterranean countries spoke French with a different accent but spoke no Yiddish. Native Jews, the leaders, coming from families long resident in France, spoke the language with no accent.
Generally, native and foreign Jews reflected different views on the place of Jews in the general society, on the meaning of Jewishness and on self-definition. Established, assimilated, bourgeois citizens referred to themselves as 'Israelites' or French people of Jewish origin or of the Mosaic persuasion. Distinguishing themselves from poorer Jews, they rejected the idea of a specific Jewish destiny, had little interest in Zionism, were conversant with French culture, were epitomised by the half-Jewish Marcel Proust, and articulated their patriotism and devotion to the Third Republic and its institutions, and to French republican ideas in general. Non-citizens, especially from eastern Europe, were more likely to define themselves as 'Jews', to observe religious practices, to be bound by ethnic ties, to have a Yiddish culture, and were more supportive of socialist or, to a lesser degree, Zionist movements.
The self-definition of native Jews was perhaps expressed most eloquently by Marc Bloch, in his pungent book Strange Defeat. He wrote, 'By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for 1 have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian ... I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own.' In his testamentary instructions to his family, Bloch again repeated that he was born a Jew and never denied it, yet 'I have ... felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman ... I can declare that I die now, as I have lived, a good Frenchman'
He was a good Frenchman but also a tragic one with his expulsion from his university career and from his position as co-editor of the prestigious journal, the Annales, and finally his arrest, torture and execution by being shot in 1944. Equally poignant was the fate of Jacques Helbronner, prominent leader of the Jewish community before and during Vichy, who said at a meeting in June 1933, 'French Jews are French before being Jewish.' His destiny was to be arrested and deported as a Jew to his death in Auschwitz.
Some of the native Jews did minimise or dissociate themselves from their Jewish heritage. An example was the secularist Paul Grunebaum-Ballin, a former president of a section of the prestigious Conseil d'État, who refused, even after the start of Vichy anti-Semitic legislation, 'categorically to consider myself a French Israelite, a French Jew. I am a Frenchman who is not of the Jewish race because there is no Jewish race ... Nor am I a Jew by religion'19 Prominent Jews descended from rabbis - Bloch, Marcel Mauss, Robert Debré, Claude Lévi-Strauss - were assimilated intellectually into French culture. The composer Darius Milhaud defined himself as a 'Frenchman from Provence of the Israelite persuasion'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Verdict on Vichy"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Michael Curtis.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Preface,
List of Abbreviations Maps,
Introduction,
1 The Jews of France,
2 Anti-Semitism in France,
3 Vichy: the French State,
4 The new anti-Semitic legal system,
5 From definition to detention,
6 The Aryanisation process,
7 Detention by Vichy,
8 Persecution,
9 Response to persecution,
10 Between the devil and the deep blue sea,
11 The judgements of Paris,
12 Servants of the state and the law,
13 The Churches and anti-Semitism Conclusion,
Fate of some of the collaborators,
Select Bibliography,
Notes,