FOR THE FIFTIETH anniversary of the Jewish decree adopted by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940—which excluded Jews from various occupations—I organized a symposium at the French Senate. For the sixtieth anniversary, I made public a document that proved the decisive role played by Philippe Pétain in the writing of that decree and laid bare the marshal’s deep-rooted anti-Semitism. The historian Robert Paxton wrote that it was “a very important discovery, a discovery that changes the way we look at that period.”
There was now no doubt about the part played by Pétain in that infamous decree:
1. To the list of courts and jurisdictions from which Jews were excluded, Pétain added: “justices of the peace.” To the positions forbidden to Jews, he handwrote: “all elected assemblies.”
2. The original decree prohibited Jews from being superintendents, inspectors, principals, or directors of primary and secondary schools; Pétain widened this to “all members of the teaching staff.”
3. Pétain removed an important exception made for Jews who were “descended from Jews born French or naturalized before 1860.” Anyone who still believes Pétain wanted to protect French Jews has to take this removal into consideration and bear in mind that the Germans did not pressure the French into coming up with a decree on the Jews.
4. Pétain concluded this anti-Jewish decree with the demand—again in his own hand—that “the reasons to justify” it be published in the government’s official journal. In other words, he was in complete agreement with the extremely anti-Semitic government note made public on October 17 and 18, 1940, making the Jews the scapegoats of the French defeat: “In its work to reconstruct the nation, the government has had to study the problem of the Jews and certain other foreigners who, abusing our hospitality, made a significant contribution to the defeat. Everywhere, but particularly in public service—however real the honorable exceptions that each of us will be aware of—the influence of the Jews has been felt in an insinuating and ultimately destructive way.”
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AFTER REVEALING PÉTAIN’S anti-Semitism in 2010, I had to react the following year to the intention of the high committee for the national celebrations to include the name of the French author and anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Céline in its celebrations on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
I appealed to the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and within forty-eight hours the 2011 edition of the book published for the celebrations was pulped. Immediately, there was talk of the “Jewish lobby.”
But Céline’s literary genius does not alter the fact that his politics were despicable, just as Pétain’s military glory does not change the reality that he led France into collaboration with the Nazis. If we are going to celebrate genius, shouldn’t we also acknowledge Adolf Hitler’s oratorical genius? Or Albert Speer’s organizational genius? Acknowledge, yes, perhaps. But celebrate? No, never.
The French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann got it right when he wrote: “Celebrating Céline would be like killing the victims of the Holocaust for a second time. As Sartre wrote: ‘Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It is a crime.’”
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IN THE FALL of 2014, a controversy was stirred up in France by the publication of a book by Eric Zemmour, The French Suicide, in which he claimed that Pétain was responsible for saving French Jews. With the aid of numerous documents, many of them previously unseen, I was able to explore this idea more deeply than it had ever been explored before.
The Vichy government was in charge of the survival of 190,000 French Jews and 130,000 foreign Jews living in French territory. On June 11, 1942, the Germans decided to implement the Final Solution in Western Europe.
On June 26, at a cabinet meeting, Laval brought up the Jewish question, emphasizing that it had been dealt with in an extremely severe way in Germany and that “French public opinion would have difficulty accepting identical measures being carried out in France, where this question has never had the same importance.” He announced that he would take a census in order to discriminate between French and foreign Jews. On July 2, at a meeting between Oberg, Knochen, Lischka, Hagen, and Bousquet, the Frenchman explained that Laval, following a request from Pétain, wanted the Germans, not the French police, to conduct roundups in the occupied zone, and that the French police would only arrest foreign Jews in the free zone. But by the end of the discussion, Bousquet had agreed that the French police would conduct roundups all over France and deliver the contingent of Jews demanded by the Germans. This decision was ratified by Pétain and Laval at the next cabinet meeting.
In eleven weeks, between July 17 and September 30, thirty-three thousand Jews were arrested by French police and deported, and by the end of the year, more than forty-two thousand Jews had been deported, sixty-five hundred of them of French nationality.
What eventually slowed down the cooperation between the French and German authorities on the Jewish question was the pressure put on Vichy by the Church and the French people, particularly following the deportation of families from the free zone.
Altogether, about twenty-five thousand French Jews were victims of the Holocaust: one-third of them French children with foreign parents; one-third naturalized French; and one-third French-born.
The French state committed a crime by collaborating with the Third Reich in the implementation of the Final Solution. The fact that, among the victims, the proportion of French Jews was smaller than that of foreign Jews is neither an excuse nor a justification.