The French Solution to the Jewish Question was not a single set of rules and decisions. Vichy government policy often fluctuated, and even then, it was not enforced uniformly across all the départements and municipalities.

Changes came under the pressure of tactical realities. Contradictions became apparent. For example, the deportation of foreign Jews to Germany in 1942 was not in the spirit of the laws that made up the Statute of the Jews* promulgated between October 1940 and June 1941. France was sacrificing these undesirables in the hope of preventing the delivery of French Jews in the short term. This “compromise” didn’t come as a demonstration of sympathy for French Jews, but was instead, a device meant to protect a remnant of sovereignty by Vichy in the face of the Nazi victor. In addition, the verbal protests by a part of the population confirm that for some people these deportations were beyond the scope of the “French solution” to the Jewish question they had come to accept. They saw it as a far reaching decision that was difficult to swallow, even if the deportations were the logical extension of the anti-Semitic decrees. Indeed, physical abuse against an already weakened group is never surprising.

How should one qualify the more or less overt collaboration by some functionaries with the German designs? For instance, the activity of the collaborationist Prefect of the Gard (from 1940 to the beginning of 1944), Angelo Chiappe, who was executed during the Liberation, is as much part of the “French Solution” as the ambiguous attitude of a Vichy functionary who would have applied measures against the Jews according to the dispositions of the Statute of the Jews while at the same time helping other Jews.

The CGQJ, another branch of the Vichy government, seemed to harbor a more radical anti-Semitism than the Prefecture and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The implementation of the measures against the Jews along the Statut des Juifs did not follow a strict pattern and resulted in a significant diversity of action across French territory and in particular in the Vaucluse. The guiding line of these measures did not include by and large the active and systematic deportation of Jews, except for the notorious roundups of the summer of 1942. All these measures converged however to a core issue: turning the Jews into outcasts in French society.

With all its specificity, the “Vaucluse solution to the Jewish question” falls within the framework of this complex body of actions that we shall call the “French solution” within these pages.

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* The Statute of the Jews falls within the context of a global European anti-Jewish hostility, but it must be noted that each country had its own legislation, modified by German decrees.