Vichy France and the Jews: Second Edition

By Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton

When Vichy France and the Jews was first published in France in 1981, the reaction was explosive. Before the appearance of this groundbreaking book, the question of the Vichy regime's cooperation with the Third Reich had been suppressed. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton were the first to access closed archives that revealed the extent of Vichy's complicity in the Nazi effort to eliminate the Jews.

Since the book's original publication, additional archives have been opened, and the role of the French state in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi death factories is now openly acknowledged. This new edition integrates over thirty years of subsequent scholarship, and incorporates research on French public opinion and the diversity of responses by French civilians to the campaign of persecution they witnessed around them. This classic account remains central to the historiography of France and the Holocaust, and in its revised edition, is more important than ever for understanding the Vichy government's role in the darkest atrocity of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503609822

Book preview

Vichy France and the Jews

SECOND EDITION

Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

English translation of the second edition © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Vichy France and the Jews was originally published in French under the title Vichy et les juifs, © 1981, 2015 by Calmann-Lévy.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Marrus, Michael Robert, author. | Paxton, Robert O., author.

Title: Vichy France and the Jews / Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton.

Other titles: Vichy et les juifs. English

Description: Second edition. | Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Translation of: Vichy et les juifs. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018052881 (print) | LCCN 2018055642 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609808 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609815 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609822 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Persecutions—France—History—20th century. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—France. | World War, 1939–1945—Deportations from France. | Antisemitism—France—History—20th century. | France—Politics and government—1940–1945. | France—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC DS135.F83 (ebook) | LCC DS135.F83 M3813 2019 (print) | DDC 940.53/180944—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052881

Cover photo: Fanny Fogel poses in the Brens internment camp in southern France, 1940. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ronald Hollander.

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 9.5/13 ITC Galliard

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 December 11, 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 à tous les gouvernements représentatifs et particulièrement à la constitution actuelle de la France (1815)

Contents

Preface

1. First Steps

2. The Origins of Vichy Antisemitism

3. Darlan’s Strategy, Vallat’s Strategy, 1941–1942

4. The System at Work, 1940–1942

5. Public Opinion, 1940–1942

6. The Turning Point: Summer 1942

7. The Darquier Period, 1942–1944

8. Conclusions: The Shoah in France

Epilogue: What Became of Them?

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Works Cited

Preface to the Second Edition

France’s relationship with its important Jewish population has been a complicated one. France led the way in Jewish emancipation in the 1790s. It was a major haven for Jewish refugees fleeing the eastern European pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1930s France received more Jewish refugees in proportion to its population than any other country. It had a Jewish prime minister in 1936. Jews played formative roles in French intellectual, cultural, and economic life. These achievements did not fail to arouse resentments, especially in periods of massive immigration and economic depression, such as the 1880s and the 1930s. The Third Republic mostly kept these animosities in check—after all, Captain Dreyfus, the subject of a notorious false charge of treason in 1894, was vindicated in 1906. But after the German armies inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Republic in June 1940, those safeguards vanished.

The French government, which withdrew in July 1940 to the central highlands city of Vichy while the Germans occupied Paris, channeled the bitterness of defeat into creating a new authoritarian and nationalist regime committed to punishing those it blamed for France’s decline. Above all, these included the Jews, closely identified with the discredited Third Republic. Without prompting from the German occupation authorities (who wanted at first only to expel German Jews into the unoccupied parts of France), Vichy France launched its own anti-Jewish program. Unprecedented new laws excluded all Jews—citizens as well as foreigners—from government service, including teaching. They established quotas that limited Jewish access to the professions and education and began confiscating Jewish business assets. Vichy worked to curtail the Jewish role in French cultural life. It forced Jews to register their names and addresses with the authorities, exposing them to danger. All this was accompanied by streams of demeaning commentary by both officials and private citizens.

In the summer of 1942 the Jews of France faced an even graver threat when the Nazis extended the Final Solution to Western Europe. Still eager to get rid of the 1930s refugees, the Vichy government helped round up and hand over 75,000 Jews to the Nazis. This task was facilitated by Vichy’s earlier measures of exclusion and discrimination. These had made the Jews of France, whether citizen or foreigner, far more vulnerable by impoverishing and uprooting them, by recording their names and addresses in public files available to the Gestapo, by interning the poorer foreign Jews in camps and labor battalions, and by making them all easier to detect by stamping their ID cards and ration books with the word Juif.

In the end, France lost 25% of its Jewish population. Among the countries under Nazi influence, only Denmark (1.3%), Finland (2.8%), Bulgaria (14%), and Italy (16%) lost less. But this seemingly moderate result brings no credit to Vichy France. The German occupation authorities, confident of French help, never felt the need to bring the kind of massive investment to bear on the task of eliminating French Jewry that they thought necessary in, say, Hungary. It is misleading to ask why three-quarters of the Jews of France survived the German occupation. Given the many opportunities for protection and escape, we must ask rather why so many perished.

It is also misleading to claim, as some Vichy apologists have done, that Vichy saved most French Jewish citizens by filling the deportation trains with foreign refugees. Aside from the ignominy of this alleged bargain, it has no basis in fact. All of Vichy’s exclusionary legislation affected French citizens as well as foreigners, and in some cases more so (e.g., exclusion from civil service jobs). French Jewish citizens were made nearly as vulnerable as foreign Jews by Vichy’s discriminatory measures and by the systematic hostility that accompanied them. In the end, although Vichy tried to avoid the humiliation of having its own citizens deported (as did every country under Nazi pressure), it was unable to provide them with real protection. The deported included 15% of the Jewish citizens of France and many children born to foreigners on French soil.

We undertook the first edition of this book, published in 1981, at the invitation of the late Roger Errera, a French magistrate who was also editor of a French Jewish history series with the Paris publisher Calmann-Lévy. The subject of Vichy France and the Jews was then just beginning to emerge from a resolute silence. Although the French archives were still mostly closed, Errera obtained special permission for us to consult some crucial Vichy government files. We had full access to German, Italian, and United States archives.

Today the study of Vichy France has been profoundly transformed. The French archives concerning the period of German occupation from 1940 to 1944 were freed of their last restrictions by a law of July 15, 2008. A host of younger scholars, mostly French but also German, British, and American, have scrutinized every aspect of the Vichy regime. The best work brings French and German records to bear simultaneously on particular issues. Documentary films, television programs, and exhibitions about Vichy have proliferated. Hardly a corner of French life between the defeat of 1940 and the liberation of 1944 has not been explored in detail in the official record.

In the face of these changes it was time to see how the 1981 edition stood up. Our basic conclusions about Vichy French initiatives remain unchanged. But we are able to be far more precise about the exclusion of Jews from the French civil service and from cultural activities; the application of quotas in the liberal professions; the reactions of the churches; and the way Vichy set up its own anti-Jewish program as a rival and competitor to that of the Nazis. We can be clearer about the energetic participation of the French administration in applying these measures. New research also permits clearer comparison with other countries.

Although much of the French population acquiesced in the Vichy government’s initial internments and discriminations in 1940–1942, the massive arrests for deportation to the death camps in the east in 1942–1944 profoundly shocked many. Rescue efforts by individuals and nongovernmental organizations, along with the many opportunities for hiding in France, saved many Jews from death.

Even so, the outcome in France was worse than it would have been without the active participation of the Vichy French administration, abetted by certain French individuals.

1

First Steps

During the summer and fall of 1940 the new government of defeated France, relocated to the central highlands spa town of Vichy, began a legislative assault on Jews. The most conspicuous of these measures was the Statut des juifs (Jewish Statute) of October 3, 1940. It assigned an inferior position in French civil law and society to all Jews living on French soil, citizens as well as foreigners. First, it defined who was Jewish in the eyes of the French state. Next, it excluded them from top public service positions, the military officer corps, and from professions that influence public opinion: teaching, the press, radio, film, and theater. Jews could hold menial public employment, provided that they had served in World War I or had been decorated in World War II. Finally, the statute raised the possibility of quotas restricting Jews’ practice in the liberal professions. In application of the Statut des juifs, 2,900 civil servants, teachers, officers, and the like were dismissed.¹

The Statut des juifs was not, however, the first Vichy law against Jews. On August 28, 1940, Vichy had repealed the Marchandeau Law. That executive order of April 21, 1939—an amendment to the 1881 press law sponsored by Justice Minister Paul Marchandeau—had prohibited any press attack against . . . a particular race or religion when it is intended to arouse hatred among citizens or residents.² Repealing this measure allowed antisemitism, so conspicuous in the 1930s, to return to French newspapers with a virulence bordering on delirium.³

Still earlier legislation restricted opportunities that had previously been enjoyed by naturalized French citizens. Because these acts do not mention Jews explicitly, they are sometimes considered more xenophobic than antisemitic, but the two were inextricably linked in 1940. Moreover, these laws tended to be applied to Jews with particular severity. On July 22, 1940—only twelve days after Marshal Philippe Pétain, a World War I hero, had been invested with full powers as head of state in Vichy—a commission was established by law to review the 348,402 naturalizations accorded to foreigners since 1927 and to retract French citizenship from those judged unworthy. Working assiduously until the eve of the liberation of Paris in August 1944, this commission withdrew French citizenship from 15,000 people, among them numerous Jews.⁴ The Paris daily newspaper Le Temps promised that this commission would permit the rapid removal of dubious and even harmful elements that had slipped into the French community thanks to certain political and administrative complacencies that the new government intends to eliminate.⁵

An additional law of July 17, 1940, limited employment in public agencies to citizens born of a French father. Another law of the same day authorized the government, on the basis of a simple report by a minister, to dismiss without explanation any public official whose attitude was incompatible with the new order. Thousands of civil servants were Julied (juilletisés) in this way, including not only idlers and drunkards but also supporters of the left-leaning Popular Front government of 1936.⁶ A law of August 16, 1940, limited the practice of medicine to citizens born of a French father or those naturalized before 1927. A law of September 10 limited law practice in the same terms. Although these laws did not mention Jews explicitly, their meaning was abundantly clear from loud protestations during the 1930s against the invasion of these professions by Jews.⁷

More explicit legislation followed the Statut des juifs. On the day after the statute was enacted, October 4, 1940, a particularly fateful law authorized prefects, on their own initiative, to intern foreign Jews in special camps or assign them to résidence, a kind of interior exile under police surveillance. To complete this first wave of anti-Jewish legislation, a law of October 7, 1940, abrogated the Crémieux decree of October 24, 1870, which had accorded French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria.

Where did these laws that seem so alien to French political practices and values come from? Since the abrogation in 1846 of the more judaico, the special oath sworn by Jews in French courts, French law had become so blind to religious and ethnic distinctions that today it is almost impossible to know exactly how many Jews lived in the France of the Third Republic (1875–1940) or to study such issues as intermarriage, because of the lack of any identification in civil documents.

Many observers, then and since, have attributed Vichy’s anti-Jewish measures to German pressure. In a typical example, Maurice Druon, welcoming Maurice Rheims to the Académie française in February 1977, deplored that sad period when the laws of the occupier were relayed by a captive state.⁸ Many Vichy leaders’ memoirs make a similar claim. The prestigious historian of ancient Rome Jérôme Carcopino, director of the École normale supérieure in 1940 and state secretary for national education in 1941–1942, wrote that the Statut des juifs dishonored only the Germans.⁹

To be sure, without the defeat, France would not have adopted such measures. But the Germans did not order the French to take them. When Raphaël Alibert, minister of justice (Garde des sceaux) in 1940 and one of the principal authors of the Statut des juifs, was tried in 1947, the prosecutor discovered, to his great surprise, that the accused’s records contained no trace of any contact, either official or private, with Germans. He was obliged to abandon the charge of treason (intelligence avec l’ennemi). Close study of German and French archives reveals no German demand in 1940 that Vichy adopt an anti-Jewish policy. On the contrary, what the Germans wanted in 1940—as we will see more fully—was to expel their own Jews into the Unoccupied Zone of Vichy France.

Indeed the German occupation authorities were just beginning to settle in when Vichy began to enact anti-Jewish measures. In those early days the principal point of contact between German and French officials was the Armistice Commission, which sat in Wiesbaden, Germany. There, German and French generals dealt with the technical problems of applying the armistice, demobilizing the French army, and, increasingly, setting the French economy to work for the German war effort. The minutes of these meetings, which began on June 30, 1940, make little reference to Jews.¹⁰

Paris gradually replaced Wiesbaden as the main locus of French-German contacts as the war dragged on, armistice issues were settled, and major political issues arose. The German army was in charge in Paris too, at first. When the armistice went into effect on June 25, 1940, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, supreme commander of the German army, assumed authority over the German occupation forces in France with the title of Militärbefehehlshaber in Frankreich (Supreme Military Authority in France; MBF). Parallel authority over the civil administration of occupied French territory was assigned to General Alfred Streccius. Werner Best, an ardent Nazi and theorist of organization, oversaw civil administration as a kind of super-Minister of the Interior. Best took up his duties in Paris only at the beginning of August.¹¹ The MBF became a unified command on October 25, when General Otto von Stülpnagel received both civil and military authority.¹²

The German Foreign Ministry attached a diplomatic adviser, Otto Abetz, to advise the MBF in his relations with French authorities. Abetz was not a professional diplomat but a Nazi Party activist. He received the rank of ambassador in France on August 3, 1940, during consultations in Berlin with Hitler. His office became the fully independent German embassy in Paris only on November 20, 1940.¹³

German police forces in occupied France were also subordinated to the MBF at first, unlike their notoriously freehanded colleagues in the German-occupied East. SS Sturmbannführer (major) Helmut Knochen established a branch office of the Security Service (Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst; SIPO-SD) in Paris at the end of June with a mere twenty men. Knochen’s powers were regulated by an agreement negotiated in Berlin on October 4 between the senior army command and German security chief Heinrich Himmler. Himmler’s specialist on Jewish matters, Adolf Eichmann, sent the 27-year-old SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Theodor Dannecker, to open a special office for Jewish affairs, the Judenreferat, within Knochen’s domain. Dannecker acquired a secretary only on August 12.¹⁴

As they settled into their offices in Paris in the late summer of 1940, the German occupation authorities tended to see the Jews of France primarily in military terms: as a security threat to their troops in France. Further, they intended for France to provide a solid base for Operation Sealion, their anticipated invasion of Britain, and for the French economy to be reoriented toward supporting that effort. This required calm and order.

The new ambassador, Otto Abetz, took a more aggressive position with respect to Jews in France. Abetz was a self-indulgent bon vivant who began his career as a high school art teacher in Karlsruhe. Pacifist in his youth, he was then attracted to the National Socialist Party, where he became the party’s French expert. He married a French woman, the secretary to the newspaper publisher Jean Luchaire. Abetz spent long periods in France in the 1930s organizing encounters between French and German youths and war veterans and promoting French understanding of Nazi Germany. From 1935 on, he used the Comité France-Allemagne and its German sister organization, the Deutsch-Fransösische Gesellschaft, to cultivate French journalists such as Luchaire and similar-minded politicians and intellectuals who feared war and Communism and believed that getting along with Hitler was the best way to avoid both. On June 30, 1939, amid growing tensions between France and Germany, the French government accused Abetz of spreading defeatist propaganda and excluded him from the country. Abetz’s triumphant return a year later offered a living example of the Nazi Party’s preference for ideological zealots rather than professional diplomats to represent German interests abroad.¹⁵

While visiting Berlin in early August 1940 for consultations with Hitler, Abetz heard the Führer vow that after the war he would expel all the Jews from Europe.¹⁶ Back in France, he met on August 17 with Werner Best, the recently installed head of German civil administration in occupied France. Abetz proposed a series of anti-Jewish measures for the Occupied Zone: forbidding Jews who had fled to return, preparing to expel all Jews in that zone, and planning the expropriation of Jewish property there. In Abetz’s opinion the French administration should be responsible for applying these measures.¹⁷ Best agreed that the Jews were a security threat, but his staff advised him that the MBF should limit itself to measures necessary to attain the military goals of the occupation. It is not the MBF’s business to try to improve internal conditions in France. As for the expropriation of Jewish property, they warned Best that this would be contrary to the Hague Convention. Agreeing that the extent of Jewish property might undermine the French economic contribution to the German war effort, Best’s staff advised him to reduce his proposal to longer-term measures, such as labeling and surveillance.¹⁸

So Abetz and Best drafted more practical proposals on August 20 and sent them urgently (sehr dringend) to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop for review. The revised proposals called for interdicting Jewish return to the Occupied Zone, requiring Jews to register at the subprefecture closest to their place of residence, identifying Jewish enterprises by a sign (the famous yellow poster, or affiche jaune), and designating trustees for Jewish enterprises whose owners had fled. Abetz thought that these measures might serve to prepare for the expulsion of Jews from the Occupied Zone.¹⁹ He told Best on August 29 that Hitler had approved these measures for immediate application.²⁰

Some of Abetz’s proposals were already in effect. German border guards were already preventing Jews from returning to the Occupied Zone.²¹ On May 20, 1940, even before the armistice, the German occupation authorities had been authorized to appoint trustees to administer the properties in France of owners who had fled, Jews and others. This measure, aimed at stabilizing the economy, contained the germ of a more radical confiscation of Jewish property: aryanization, about which we will learn much more in Chapter 4.

The Nazis were also already expelling Jews from German-controlled territory into the Unoccupied Zone of France. In July more than 3,000 Alsatian Jews were brutally expelled from that former French territory toward the Unoccupied Zone. On August 8 the German police commander in Bordeaux, Walter Krüger, acting apparently on his own initiative, sent 1,400 German Jews into the Unoccupied Zone, assuring them they would be free there. The French authorities interned them in a camp outside Saint-Cyprien (Pyrénées-Orientales Department), where some World War I veterans among them appealed to Berlin to save them from their humiliating French captivity.²² At dawn on October 22, the Gauleiters of the Saar-Palatinate and Baden regions, Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner, had 7,700 Jews arrested, with advance notice ranging from two hours to fifteen minutes, and shipped them to Lyon in sealed railroad cars, with one piece of baggage apiece, without notifying the French authorities. The arrestees ranged in age from infancy to 104 years (or 97, according to German sources); 2,000 were older than 60. In November 1940 the Jews of Luxembourg were sent into Unoccupied France. These expulsions seemed to prefigure a project of sending into France up to 270,000 Jews from Germany and its recently annexed Austrian and Czech lands.²³

The Vichy government saw the unexpected arrival of these German Jews as a gross violation of the armistice, all the graver because at the moment of the Bürckel-Wagner expulsion, Pétain was meeting with Hitler in person at Montoire-sur-le-Loir. These refugees touched a sensitive nerve; in the late 1930s many people in France already felt overrun by refugees, first Jewish and then Spanish. Vichy’s protests to the Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden on this subject were exceeded in number and in fervor only by those against the expulsion of French speakers from Alsace-Lorraine.²⁴ Complaining of the lack of German response, General Paul Doyen, French representative on the Wiesbaden Armistice Commission, declared on November 19, 1940, that France could not give asylum to these foreigners. He asked the German government to take them back and pay the cost of their stay in France.²⁵ As for the miserable victims of the Bürckel-Wagner action themselves, they were shunted about in their sealed railroad cars while the French and German authorities wrangled. In the end they wound up in the French internment camp of Gurs, at the foot of the Pyrenees, some already dead. Another 1,200 died at Gurs of cold, hunger, or disease during the next two winters. The survivors left Gurs only for Auschwitz in August 1942.

Some of these expulsions may have been local initiatives; Hitler himself ordered the Wagner-Bürckel action. These acts reflected Nazi policy toward Jews as it had evolved by that time. The initial segregation policy had given way to expulsion at the time of Kristallnacht in November 1938. The further step from expulsion to extermination was to come only later, in late 1941, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union bogged down.

Until then expulsion was still the order of the day. Although the term Final Solution (Endlösung) had already appeared in some German working documents, even the most fanatical Nazis envisioned well into 1941 an eventual global solution of the Jewish problem . . . transferring them to a place still to be determined, as Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command and chief of German police, wrote in a memorandum dated February 5, 1941. Heydrich further explained on February 14, 1941, to Martin Luther, the Foreign Ministry official charged with Jewish affairs, that when peace came, the Jews would leave the continent in a general evacuation of Europe.²⁶ As we have seen, the German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, envisioned in August 1940 the expulsion of all Jews from the Occupied Zone.

In short, in 1940 the Nazis wanted the opposite of what Vichy wanted as far as Jews were concerned. The Nazis wanted to expel German Jews into the Unoccupied Zone, whereas Vichy wanted to send back those already there. In the Nazi imagination, which was scornful of traditional French racial tolerance, unoccupied France was an ideal dumping ground for Germany’s Jews. They did not yet see it as an area where Jews should be regulated or excluded. As of 1940, therefore, Vichy’s Jewish policy was not a carbon copy of the German one but an autonomous rival to it.

The MBF issued the first German ordinance explicitly directed toward the Jews of the Occupied Zone of France on September 27, 1940, the first of its kind in German-occupied Western Europe.²⁷ The ordinance fell short of Abetz’s proposals of August 20. After identifying who was Jewish in the eyes of the occupation authorities, it forbade the return of all Jews who had fled and obliged those who remained to register at the nearest subprefecture. All their businesses had to be identified with a sign indicating Jewish Enterprise. A further extension of this ordinance in December 1941 required that the label Jew be applied to the identity papers of all Jews living in the Occupied Zone.

In the absence of evidence of direct German pressure on Vichy to adopt antisemitic legislation, we may well wonder about indirect pressure. Hitler’s antisemitic frenzy was no secret, and we will see that Vichy leaders tried to ingratiate themselves with Nazi officials by stressing their own anti-Jewish endeavors. Along these lines, some scholars have claimed that Vichy first considered the Jewish problem only after receiving a note, dated September 8, from General Benoît-Léon Fornel de La Laurencie, Vichy’s contact man with the German authorities in Paris; in the note de La Laurencie warned his colleagues in Vichy of the forthcoming German ordinance.²⁸ In fact Vichy had been dealing with the Jewish problem since its first days, notably by repealing the Marchandeau Law on August 28.

Indeed the French government in Vichy needed no German prompting. It is even possible that influence ran the other way. Werner Best affirmed in October 1940 that Hitler had ordered the publication of the September 27 German ordinance before the French had published their law, so as to show that the settlement of the Jewish question came from the Germans.²⁹ Berlin knew already at the end of August from its police services in France that Vichy was preparing an anti-Jewish law whose aim is to exclude Jewish public officials from their jobs.³⁰

The starting date of Vichy’s preparations for the Statut des juifs was probably indicated correctly in the official communiqué that accompanied its publication: From its first days the government, in its work of national reconstruction, has had to study the problem of Jews and other foreigners who, having abused our hospitality, contributed no little to our defeat.³¹ Justice Minister Raphaël Alibert is often considered the principal author of the Statut des juifs. Charles Pomaret, Vichy minister of labor at the time, recalled Alibert telling him in July 1940 that he and his chief of staff, Pierre de Font-Réaulx, were preparing a fine little text (un texte aux petits oignons) to settle the Jewish issue.³² At that time Alibert was secretary-general of the presidency of the Council of Ministers (i.e., Marshal Pétain’s chief of staff), and he continued to work on this text when he became minister of justice on July 12, 1940. The Ministry of the Interior was also involved, under Adrien Marquet and under his successor, Marcel Peyrouton, who replaced Marquet on September 6, though both men denied it after the war.³³ General de La Laurencie’s letter of September 8—and another on September 24 that urged the Vichy government to start purging the state administration—served to energize a process that had already been well launched.

In September Peyrouton sent a draft of the Statut des juifs to Charles-Albert de Boissieu, the secretary-general of Vichy’s Paris office, the Délégation générale du gouvernement français dans les territoires occupés, for examination by those government services that remained in the capital. Boissieu’s suggestions (e.g., opening more purely technical functions to Jews, closing local positions such as mayor and municipal councillor to them) arrived too late to be considered.³⁴ The final draft was sent for review to the German occupation authorities on October 2 for a tactical reason: Vichy wanted its statute to apply in the Occupied Zone as well as in the Unoccupied Zone. The MBF approved it but indicated that, despite a few discordances between the two texts, both versions—the German and the Vichy French—could coexist.³⁵

As additional evidence of its independence, Vichy’s Statut des juifs went further than the German ordinance of September 27. Whereas the German ordinance spoke only of religion, the Vichy law spoke openly of race. The German ordinance defined as Jewish someone with at least three observant grandparents, whereas two were enough for the Vichy statute if the spouse was also Jewish. Thus some individuals considered Jewish in the Vichy zone went free in the Occupied Zone. The mixed-race category (Mischlinge) that spilled so much legal ink in Germany was absent from both texts. The German ordinance went further in marking Jewish enterprises, but the Vichy law of October 4 went much further in authorizing the arbitrary internment of foreign Jews.

If Vichy’s measures of exclusion and discrimination against Jews did not result from German pressures, direct or indirect, perhaps they welled up from below in a wave of popular antisemitism. Indeed, it would have been surprising if the tsunami of May–June 1940 had not awakened the worst impulses. The humiliating military defeat was compounded by administrative collapse, as millions of Belgian and French citizens left their homes and jobs and went blindly south, the so-called exode. A search for those responsible for the defeat was irresistible. It fixed all too often on the leaders of the prewar French republic, and especially on the Popular Front government of June 1936–June 1937, when Léon Blum served as France’s first socialist and first Jewish prime minister. It surfaced in the acrimonious atmosphere of Bordeaux, where the French government arrived after June 14 in flight from Paris. There, on June 21, two of Blum’s former associates, Jean Zay and Georges Mandel, were mocked with antisemitic catcalls by the crew of the Massilia as they boarded the passenger liner, along with other members of the government, in order to continue the war from French North Africa, according to a plan that had in fact already been abandoned.³⁶ Otto Abetz telegraphed Berlin on July 30, two weeks after meeting Pierre Laval, saying that antisemitic tendencies are so strong in the French population that we don’t have to make any demands.³⁷ Robert Billecard, prefect of the Seine-et-Oise Department, reported on August 5, as did several others, that antisemitism has undoubtedly grown among ordinary people.³⁸

Yet only one-third of the prefects made any reference at all to the Statut des juifs in their monthly reports on public opinion during the rest of 1940. Nine prefects in the Unoccupied Zone reported approval, but only three in the Occupied Zone, where Vichy actions could seem remote. The four prefects who reported disapproval were all in charge of departments in the Occupied Zone: Calvados, Seine-et-Marne, Deux Sèvres, and Vosges. There, Vichy propaganda was distant, and antisemitism seemed mostly German. Three prefects in each zone said that their populations had nothing to say on the subject. Two-thirds ignored the subject completely.

Indifference seems to have been the dominant public response toward Vichy’s anti-Jewish measures. After all, most French people had other things on their mind as they tried to piece their lives back together. Our people are prostrated, they don’t talk about anything, reported the prefect of the Aube Department on July 28. The prefect of the Ain Department wrote in October of a general intellectual and moral anesthesia. In the Seine-et-Oise Department people seemed skeptical, edgy, disillusioned and mainly concerned about personal cares.³⁹

General indifference to the sufferings of others could emerge easily if the others in question were seen as responsible to some degree for the disaster. Public opinion depended greatly on the tone adopted by the new Vichy leaders and especially by the new head of state, Marshal Pétain, who enjoyed a stronger personal mandate in the summer of 1940 than any French leader since Napoleon. Were these leaders going to lend coherence and respectability to popular antisemitism, or were they going to deny it official approval? Were they going to propose national unity, as in 1914, or were they going to promote the identification and exclusion of the guilty?

Pétain, a man of legendary discretion in public, had never spoken openly about Jews before 1940. The young Pétain may have been one of the few French officers who did not believe that Captain Dreyfus was guilty in 1894.⁴⁰ What marked Pétain far more profoundly was the soldiers’ protests during World War I in 1917, which he attributed to left-wing agitation. He spoke in 1934 about the need to make French education more patriotic, prefiguring one of Vichy’s major themes.⁴¹ Even after 1940 his frequent speeches never mentioned the Jews explicitly. An overt reference to Jews was struck from his speech of October 9, 1940, in which he outlined his policy of exclusion in much more general terms.

The revision of naturalization, laws on access to certain professions, the dissolution of secret societies [Freemasonry], the repression of alcoholism, all bear witness to [our] desire to apply in all domains a policy of purification [assainissement] and reconstruction.⁴²

The authors of official brochures explaining Vichy policies used euphemisms and indirect allusions to avoid direct reference to Jews. Restrictions for defense of the race, the family, of youth, of the professions were not a matter of facile vengeance but of indispensable security. Exemptions for those who had rendered exceptional services to France proved that Marshal Pétain did not want to penalize anyone because of their origins.⁴³ In an essay in which Pétain sought to open [French] eyes to the abuses of the old regime’s big words and illusions, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, he affirmed that "there could be no real fraternity outside the family, the community [cité], the Nation."⁴⁴

In private, however, Pétain was less circumspect. On June 17, 1941, he told Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire central israélite de France (Central Jewish Consistory of France) and an old friend, that the Jews have amassed fortunes in parasitic enterprises. In reply, Helbronner furnished Pétain with a list of Jewish engineers and industrialists who had enriched France.⁴⁵ Pétain associated readily with open antisemites, such as Raphaël Alibert, who had been his close adviser in the 1930s. Pétain’s personal physician and private secretary, Dr. Bernard Ménétrel, told the German police official Herbert Hagen in June 1943 that, although the marshal insisted on a humane solution, he, Ménétrel, admired the resolution with which the Germans worked at ‘the final extirpation’ of the Jews.⁴⁶ Pétain’s office was evidently a place where interventions in favor of particular Jews, a frequent practice in Vichy, had to be preceded by excuses: You know . . . of my feelings about Jews, wrote André Lavagne, head of Pétain’s civilian staff, in October 1941 to M. Guionin, deputy chief of staff to the minister of colonies, [so] the very fact that I am intervening in favor of a Jew should constitute a quite exceptional recommendation.⁴⁷

An American couple who lived near Pétain’s country house at Cannes, Mr. and Mrs. Albert D. Pardee, wrote the marshal in March 1941 that the Jews were doing a lot of damage on the other side of the Atlantic too. They wanted Pétain to know that Mr. Pardee was going to bring financial pressure on Yale, his alma mater, for having hired as a professor Pierre Cot, one of the gravediggers of the French republic. Isn’t he Jewish?⁴⁸ In a personal order of October 5, 1940, Pétain instructed General Maxime Weygand, his new senior representative in French North Africa, to settle the Jewish problem in North Africa. It is essential to stop [their] harmful political activity.⁴⁹ Vichy foreign minister Paul Baudouin recalled after the war that Pétain had been the most severe participant at the cabinet meeting on October 1, 1940, when the Statut des juifs was discussed. He insisted that the Justice and Education Departments contain no Jews.⁵⁰ Baudouin’s recollection seems confirmed by the sensational revelation in 2010 of a draft of the Statut des juifs apparently annotated in Marshal Pétain’s own hand. The marshal appears to have struck out a clause exempting descendants of Jews born in France or naturalized before 1860, making the statute applicable to every Jew in France. He also extended the statute’s exclusions to all elected officials (including local ones) and all teachers.⁵¹

The Vichy regime’s second personage in 1940, Pierre Laval, vice-president of the Council of Ministers (Pétain was officially president of the Council), had shown no interest in Jews in his earlier career as an adept and ambitious centrist politician in the Third Republic. He played no role in drafting the first Vichy antisemitic legislation in 1940. But he seized quickly on the Jewish issue as a means of ingratiating himself with the new German authorities in Paris. Trying in July 1940 to arrange his first meeting with Ambassador Abetz, Laval suggested that Vichy was going to outlaw Freemasonry and evict Jews from French public services.⁵² In Paris again on August 28, Laval tried to convince the German historian and propagandist Dr. Friedrich Grimm that Vichy France’s turn toward Germany and against England, its adversary in Africa, was sincere. France had recognized the Jews as warmongers, Laval said, and had decided to settle the Jewish problem your way.⁵³ Laval evidently adjusted quickly to the new climate, for he told the U.S. diplomat Robert Murphy in early August that Jews were gathering in Vichy in alarming proportions. [Laval] thought they were fomenting disorder and would give the town a bad reputation. He said he would like to get rid of them.⁵⁴ One of Laval’s biographers concludes that he felt neither hatred nor pity for those that were persecuted. He adapted to a tolerant France, now he adapted to intolerance because it was in style.⁵⁵

When Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the French Protestant Federation, visited Vichy at the end of July 1940, he was struck by the passionate antisemitism of several cabinet ministers, who give free expression [to it] outside of any German pressure.⁵⁶ The most ardent of these was Raphaël Alibert, former judge in the Conseil d’état and a hotheaded disciple of Action française; his Ministry of Justice was playing a major role in drafting the Statut des juifs. Despite his difficult temperament, Alibert enjoyed the personal confidence of Pétain.

Another active antisemite in the Vichy regime in the summer and fall of 1940 was Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, who presided over radio and cinema in the Unoccupied Zone. Maurice Martin du Gard depicted him in 1940 delighting in Jew-baiting and attacking the unfortunate [Popular Front prime minister] Léon Blum.⁵⁷ Alain Laubreax and Lucien Rebatet, of the venomous weekly Je suis partout, furnished anti-Jewish radio programs for Vichy radio for a time. Xavier Vallat, another pillar of the right wing who in 1940 was secretary-general for veterans’ affairs before becoming in April 1941 Vichy’s first commissioner-general for Jewish affairs, praised Vichy’s antisemitic legislation even after the war as the fulfillment of a long national tradition.⁵⁸

In sum, Vichy’s measures against Jews were of French origin. Their immediate occasion was the defeat of June 1940, but they were rooted in the particular French crises of the 1930s: the Depression, the polarizing election of the Popular Front in 1936, and the arrival of waves of refugees. But there was nothing automatic or inevitable about this response to them. Pétain and his government chose to adopt them in order to attain objectives of their own, before the barely established German occupation services could gain a solid footing.

The first Vichy objective was to prevent the arrival of more refugees, especially Jewish refugees, at a moment when the French were beginning to experience shortages. The second objective was to encourage foreigners, especially Jews, to leave. A kind of refugee tennis developed along the demarcation line between the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones. On November 30, 1940, a trainload of 347 Jews from Luxembourg sent by German authorities from Bordeaux to Pau on November 30, 1940, was sent back to Orthez by the French.⁵⁹ When French officials expelled Jews into the Occupied Zone, the Germans sent them back, decreeing that no Jew could be obliged to return to the Occupied Zone.⁶⁰

Beginning in August 1940, the Vichy government tried to arrange the transport of 100,000–150,000 anti-Franco Spanish refugees to Mexico, a project the Germans feared would aid Britain.⁶¹ In November 1940 Interior Minister Peyrouton proposed to send foreigners who were overrepresented in the French economy, consuming more than they produced, to the French West Indies. Five thousand refugees, largely Jewish, were sent to Martinique under this program until American, German, and local objections ended the program in May 1941.⁶² In August 1941 Admiral François Darlan, Laval’s successor as vice-president of the Council of Ministers—in effect, prime minister—envisaged sending Jews to Madagascar.⁶³ In 1943 André Lavagne, Pétain’s chief of civilian staff, considered sending Jews to Palestine under the aegis of an anti-Allied Zionist group called Massada, about which we will learn more in Chapter 7. The best solution for Vichy, of course, would have been for the Germans to take back their own refugees, and Vichy never stopped hoping for that.

The third Vichy objective was the reduction of the foreign element in French life. On the morrow of its defeat, France was permeated with a mood of withdrawal, a wish to fall back on strictly national values. Its early measures for denaturalization and the exclusion of foreigners from law and medicine testify to this inward turn. An official note that accompanied the Statut des juifs, published widely in the press, expressed it clearly. However real were the honorable exceptions, this text declared, Jews have exerted an influence that became "insinuating and finally disintegrating [décomposante]. They have assumed a preponderant part in French public life in recent years, and the current national disaster obliges the government to regroup French forces whose characteristics have been shaped by a long heredity."⁶⁴

We must return to indirect German pressure, for in one matter it was in fact compelling: the designation of trustees or provisional administrators for enterprises left vacant when their owners fled from the Occupied Zone. The first such German measure, on May 20, 1940, had made no distinction between Jews and others. At first, Vichy was reluctant to take action against Jewish property in the Occupied Zone. It told the MBF in August that it was not ready to take steps against Jews in the French economy and that it would take eleven months to prepare public opinion and make the necessary plans.⁶⁵ The Germans went ahead with a new ordinance on October 18, 1940, that required all Jewish businesses in the Occupied Zone, not just the property of those who had fled, to be identified and placed under trusteeship. The Germans intended, according to the instructions sent by the MBF on November 12, 1940, to the newly appointed trustees of Jewish businesses, to eliminate entirely Jewish influence in the French economy.⁶⁶ The Vichy leaders might well have wished to reduce Jewish economic influence in the French economy, but they did not want to see important French firms such as the Galéries Lafayette, defense industries such as Bloch Aviation, or major banking and investment houses such as the Rothschild Bank and Lazard Frères pass into the hands of German trustees.

The Vichy ministers of finance and industrial production took immediate action to prevent this from happening. These early measures were technical, without overt antisemitic content. At the beginning of October the assets of the Rothschild family, most of whom had left France, were placed under the authority of the Ministry of Industrial Production to avoid German appropriation of these goods whose importance for the French economy is great.⁶⁷ These French authorities then proceeded in November to propose trustees of French nationality belonging to the business world and presenting indisputable guarantees of morality and competence⁶⁸ for other important Jewish companies, such as Lazard Frères and the Galéries Lafayette. The MBF accepted these French nominations and made the appointments.

On December 9, 1940, the Vichy Ministry of Industrial Production set up an agency to appoint and supervise trustees for Jewish property in the Occupied Zone: the Service de contrôle des administrateurs provisoires