Vichy France and the Jews

...Steven Englund IT HAS BECOME something of a commonplace to note how "heavily history hangs over the French," as if it did not hang just as determinantly over Eskimos...

...Our authors are quite right, therefore, to linger on this issue for a short section, to criticize their sources with a narrow gimlet eye, and then to pass on...

...In view of the fact that he has already absolved Messrs...

...To be obsessed by the question of public opinion is to fish for red herrings...

...I shall not forget my surprise at being told one day by a major luminary in the French historical firmament that the topic I had selected for a dissertation (the history of the ideology of la Nation in France since the Revolution) was "probably unwritable" by anyone raised within French nationalism's embrace...

...Drumont, Laur, Guerin, Mores, and all the other fin de siecle anti-Semites either failed to make a go of this or that anti-"Youpi" league or electoral campaign or newspaper, or succeeded because their particular anti-Semitic effort hid behind (and often got lost in) a larger nationalist (and/or Catholic) enterprise...

...I would urge any dissenter from this opinion to read Jean-Claude Grumberg's recent play "The Workshop" which, while not really being about anti-Semitic feeling in the French lower classes, offers as telling a portrait of same as I've ever seen...

...We could call it, perhaps, Drumont's revenge on the parlemen-taires of the Third Republic...

...Vichy might be the exception to this, yet even here (as Marrus and Paxton reiterate) anti-Semitism was always a secondary or tertiary enterprise, not at all central to the National Revolution which Vichy ushered in and tried to actualize...

...What is possible to say with certainty is that the governors at Vichy undertook policies of native anti-Semitism, that they presently went a very long way to accommodating French anti-Semitic policy to the German Final Solution, and that therefore close to a quarter of France's Jewish population was dutifully shipped off to die in the ovens...

...This said, my second observation is that organized political anti-Semitism has not enjoyed a particularly brilliant career in French history...

...Non-French Jews, along with other emigres, lost their welcome (and were forced to leave...

...An addendum such as this from a scholar such as this makes for impatience less because it insults the intelligence than because it plainly amounts to special pleading...

...Is casting stones what the Allies were about at Nuremberg...

...Only rarely, and under conditions of extreme and vulgar persecution, did important segments of the French elites and some of the populace speak out (and then for a very short time, and against specific policies, not against anti-Semitism in general...

...Anti-Semitism's attraction to the traditional non-racist French nationalists of Vichy (from Petain and Maurras to Xavier Val-lat, Vichy's first Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs) was partly as a means of dealing with the recent problems of heavy foreign emigration during a depression and partly as a way of combating longterm social, economic, and political disruptive elements historically sym-bolizable by the term "Jew...

...Is speaking the truth or according justice "casting stones...

...Blum and Rothschild were the two sides of this coin...

...Antis'emitisme d'etat thus figures as a subordinate policy of a nationalist regime intent on achieving social stasis and unity and political homogeneity...

...What they fail to provide, as I have indicated above, is a larger analysis of French "national" political discourse and symbolism that would place anti-Semitic policies in perspective and explicate their origins, nature, and limits...

...In sum, Marrus and Paxton have given us a very fine book...

...the Prefects recorded a certain amount of public (largely middle and upper class) discontent...

...Anti-Semitism is possibly another such subject...

...Ugly street scenes resulted in a show of official distaste from the French episcopacy and some few elite voices...

...in that sense no French regime has been pluralist or even tolerant...

...Nevertheless the Statut des Juifs of 1940 (which, typically, exempted war veterans and long-established, assimilated families) had nothing to do with the Germans...

...They are even more correct to imply that the conjuncture of social and economic vicissitudes with particular ideological traditions and governing political agendas, and not popular eruptions, is the really decisive factor in explaining French anti-Semitism...

...The fact is that in certain very sensitive areas, the reputedly history-conscious Gauls are quite unwilling to inspect their past - or even unqualified to do so well...

...For explanatory purposes, popular sentiment is here of the same pertinence as considerations of patriotic feeling to a study of (political) nationalism: distinct, but slight...

...Unlike the German case, where the anti-Semitic tail eventually wagged the nationalist dog, Vichy's an-tis'emitisme d'etat, politically speaking, never amounted to more than a kind of sub-set under xenophobia, itself only one element of the nation ideology and itself burdened with the assimilationist need to do battle with all "meteques" (foreigners, Free Masons, even French-born revolutionaries, and, nominally anyway, Protestants, as well as Jews...

...Turning directly to the book under review, and the larger topic of French anti-Semitism, the first thing to say is that the question of the extent of anti-Semitic opinion - its historically fluctuating popularity - is neither particularly important nor satisfactorily answerable with the kinds of evidence we have...

...Vichy was obliged to appoint fascists-racists who in turn enforced anti-Semitic policies that diverged sharply from French tradition, but by then, Vichy hardly existed as an autonomous, recognizably French regime...

...This point becomes apparent when one reads Paxton's excellent earlier study of the whole period (Vichy French: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-44 Knopf, 1972), wherein anti-Semitism is well limned in 20 (out of 375) pages...

...In the measure that antis'emitisme d'etat could do so without endangering Vichy's precious authority, indeed as an illusory means of increasing its authority, Petain and Laval enlisted the French police and administration in the effort of rounding up and shipping off Jews...

...For that matter, do prosecutors and judges (or historians) have to have suffered the privations of the defendant (or subject) before they can pass judgment...

...Eventually, of course, both the church's and Laval's resistance was overwhelmed when the Germans invaded even the Unoccupied Zone and ran it more or less to suit themselves...

...More than in any other tradition of political anti-Semitism, the French have thrown in much that is non-Jewish under the catch-all category, "juif...

...One gets a better sense of this when one notes that even the best of the foreigners no less a scholar than the Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France at Harvard - finds it necessary to conclude a highly laudatory review of Marrus and Paxton's opus with the irrelevant caution: "But those who have never suffered a national catastrophe, including partial occupation, hunger, cold, the enforced absence of more than a million countrymen as prisoners of war, the collapse of a regime and of national pride all of which followed the miserable era of the 30's and the terribly costly and debilitating victory of 1918 - are in no position to cast stones...

...Aside from one superb, but narrowly specialized, monograph by Pierre Sorlin in 1967, the French have largely left it to foreigners to chart this terrain...

...Vichy, of course, presupposed, as well as enforced, cultural homogeneity...

...recently naturalized foreigners (including Jews) lost their citizenship...

...Political anti-Semitism in France, as its students slowly and frustratingly discover, has always led a kind of shadowy half-life, tied for its vitality to the larger nation ideology of which it was usually a not-very-successful extremist manifestation...

...As Vichy's interests were primarily etatiste, its anti-Semitic policies were principally political and juridical...

...Laval, who hoped to win points to fight other German encroachments on Vichy authority, originally agreed to do pretty much all the Nazis asked in the matter of anti-Semitism, but finally elite pressures obliged him to dig in his heels on certain demands - notably the one obliging French Jews to wear the yellow star...

...However, in the very dense and dark forest that Marrus and Paxton explore, one can easily lose sight of the larger truth that the place we are in is finally the backwoods...

...On balance it is not possible to say with certainty (as various Vichyites on trial, or latter day historians, would do) that Vichy, with its resistance to later German demands, saved the lives of many thousands of French Jews...

...French Jews were declared ineligible to political bodies and unemployable in the civil service, judiciary, and military, as well as excluded from certain cultural and educational careers...

...while Austria-Hungary provides an intermediate instance somewhere between Germany and France...

...After the Wannsee Conference of 1941-42, however, the French were required to play their part in the Endlbsung (Final Solution...

...Left to itself, the Marshal's government would have gone no further, though some form of "aryanization" of Jewish property might perhaps have been undertaken even without Vallat's desire to show the Germans he could conduct as effective an economic purge as theirs...

...Italy, incidentally, offers the tradition of a strong nation ideology with almost no political anti-Semitism...

...For the laudable purposes of exploding self-exculpating national myths, exposing criminals and guilty parties, and simply recounting in full for the first time a fascinating and horrifying story, Vichy France and the Jews is an important book...

...In short, I shall make a forthright, summary statement of the sort that Professor Hoffmann undoubtedly wants readers not to make: one may conclude, and not merely on the basis of Marrus and Paxton's fine book, that as anti-Semites go, the French as a nation usually run in the pack about equidistant from the Germans in the lead and the Scandinavians at the rear...

...Marrus and Paxton of any such intention or performance, which "stones" is Stanley Hoffmann concerned about...

...Insofar as it can be demonstrated with scholarly means to scholarly satisfaction, Marrus and Paxton show that the French population under Vichy was at best indifferent to the fate of the Jews (even French ones) and, far more often than not, was enthusiastic about the anti-Semitic policies handed down from on high...

...This is undoubtedly so because the impulse to apologize, or to pose unanswerable (or useless) questions, or to indict polemically is quite irresistible...

...indeed it surpassed their initial demands and expectations...