Special Feature

Vichy France and the Holocaust Michael Curtis y now the literature on and media presentations of the Holocaust is voluminous: on the perpetrators, the victims, the motivation, the rationale, the moral issues involved, the mechanisms and organization of death, the degree of complicity of officials and nonofficials. A unique historical occurrence, a massacre of unprecedented proportion, "the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world" in Winston Churchill's characterization, has been and still is being portrayed from many different perspectives and methodological approaches: scholarly, popular, polemical, objective. Discussion of what was, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, regarded as indescribable has become infused with passion, deep emotion, anger, and, in recent years, insidious mischievousness on the part of those who for various nefarious reasons deny the existence of the Holocaust. T h e H o l o c a u s t deniers persist in France as elsewhere. Twenty-five years ago Frangois Duprat argued that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were used merely for disinfection, not for extermination. In the fall of 1978, L'Express published a blatantly antiSemitic interview entitled "Only Lice Were Gassed in Auschwitz" by Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, commissioner for Jewish Affairs of Vichy France. More important was the article in 1978 and later the book, Mdmoire en ddfense, in 1980, by Robert Faurisson, a professor of French literature, who wrote of "the problem of the gas chambers or the rumor of Auschwitz";

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for him the "non-existence of the 'gas chambers' is good news for beleaguered humanity." The book was made even more unpalatable by the bizarre preface written by Noam Chomsky, not known for his familiarity with the techniques of gas chambers; nor, as he himself stated, was he familiar with the contents of the book. Even more recently, Roger Garaudy, former Stalinist turned Islamic fundamentalist, held in his 1996 book The Founding Myths of Israeli Policy that the Holocaust was one of the myths concocted to justify the creation of Israel. Surprisingly, the work was endorsed by Abb6 Pierre, a man sometimes referred to as the Mother Theresa of France but who sees the book as "the search for truth." Appealing for wider support, the deniers have also tried to focus on the more debatable question of whether or not the public has become satiated with symbols and ceremonies of the Holocaust. In his Assassins of Memory (1992), Pierre VidalNaquet, though aware that memory is not history because history's mode of selection functions differently from that of memory and forgetting, nevertheless integrated memory into his historical analysis and his devastating criticism of the deniers. The task of the Holocaust deniers, attempting to falsify history, has been made more formidable by the recent appearance of an extraordinary work by Serge Klarsfeld, first published in French in 1994 and now ably translated into English by Howard Epstein and Glorianne Depondt under the title French Children of the Holo-

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 19

caust: A Memorial. To say this publication is a labor time atrocities in France and elsewhere, including the of love on the part of the author and the editors and operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He has translators in Paris and New York is to understate the also clarified the role of French governmental institudevotion and emotion behind this 1,900 page work, tions and police and examined the extent of their parwhich is, as the title indicates, a fitting memorial to ticipation in the atrocities. the French Jewish children who were victims of the The Klarsfelds have had some success in their purNazi genocide. suit of the war criminals, especially Klaus Barbie, who This weighty book is a collection of text and pho- was finally extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983, tos of 2,500 of the 11,400 children under the age of tried in Lyons four years later, and condemned for 18 who were deported from France between 1942 and crimes against humanity, and Paul Touvier, who es1944 to extermination camps. The photographs were caped punishment for forty-three years and was fipainstakingly gathered over a twenty-year period by nally convicted in 1994. Klarsfeld and his associates in France from a variety It is Barbie's brutal crime of April 6, 1944, that of sources: family testimonies and photographs solic- underlies Klarsfeld's new book. On that day Barbie, ited by ads in Jewish publications in Europe, Israel, head of the Gestapo in Lyons and the man reputed to and the United States. Much of the text is based on have murdered Jean Moulin, the representative of the Nazi lists of deportees discovered by Klarsfeld in Charles de Gaulle to the Resistance in France, rounded the archives of a French Jewish organization. up forty-four children---of whom twenty-three were Twenty-one percent of the total Jewish population stateless and twenty-one French--and seven adults in France in 1939 were Jewish children under 16. Of in a children's home in Izieu, fifty miles east of Lyons, the 75,000 Jews deported to and killed in the extermi- sent them to Drancy, the main deportation camp, near nation camps, 12 percent were under 16. Klarsfeld Paris, and then to their death in the extermination was determined that the children who were murdered camps in Eastern Europe. Barbie admitted his guilt in should not be forgotten or remain faceless--indeed, a cable of April 6 to his superiors, informing them of he was obsessed. Overall, his work constitutes pow- his liquidation of the home for children, who were erful documentary evidence of the nature and impact aged between three and thirteen. of the Holocaust and is a damning indictment of the This episode had a double impact on Klarsfeld. Nazi regime and the French collaborators during the He was determined to get accurate information about Vichy regime from 1940 to 1944. He has sought and the children, whose ages and even names were not provided a collective memory of those who were recorded accurately on the commemorative plaque at Izieu: In 1984, Klarsfeld would produce a photo almurdered. An earlier book edited by Klarsfeld, The Holocaust bum of the liquidation of Izieu. He was equally deterand the Neo-Nazi Mythomania (1978), had aimed at mined to track down Barbie in Bolivia for the sake of countering the Holocaust deniers and the propagan- the children whom Barbie had sent to their deaths. All this activity was not merely a search for jusdists who sought to rehabilitate Nazism. The detailed presentation of the stages that led up to the "Final tice; it was also the recording of memory, names, and Solution," of the role of the SD, the SS, Sipo, the faces. Inherent in the consciousness of the Jewish Gestapo, and Adolf Eichmann's IV B4 section, of the people is the commandment of Zakhor, remembrance. examination of the construction and operation of the For many people, memories play an important role in gas chambers, of the statistical report of March 1943 their approach to life and their assessments of who is by Richard Korherr, chief of statistics for the SS, on friend and who is foe. Yet Jewish memories of persethe murder of Jews to Heinrich Himmler, who had cution and liberation, of past events endowed with ordered it on January 18, 1943, and wanted the phrase immortality, are particularly tenacious in character. "transportation of Jews" to replace "special treatment Memory, as Maurice Halbwachs has suggested, is a of the Jews" in the execution of the Final Solution, living link between generations. Thus, the present together provide an unanswerable case of the crimi- generation of Jews mourns the missing millions; Klarsfeld himself has provided an organizational link nality of those participating in genocide. Klarsfeld, assisted by his courageous wife Beate, to the past through his group, the Sons and Daughters has been the foremost French researcher of the reality of the Jews Deported from France. Moreover, memory of the Holocaust, especially in France, and the lead- has unique potency and usefulness. The historiograing pursuer of the war criminals. In over twenty works phy of the Holocaust, as Omer Bartov has argued, has Klarsfeld has documented various aspects of the war- resulted in many different and contradictory versions

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of the event, but memories "have certain qualities that make them more stable and permanent than any scholarly representation." The elimination of Central and Eastern European Jewish communities, and thus the ending of an important part of the Jewish intellectual and cultural heritage, has given impetus to Jewish emphasis on memory. Not everyone is sanguine about this, particularly in the United States and France, as has been shown by the current debate over, and perhaps conflict between, memory and scholarly reconstruction. The phenomenon of memory, in its different formulations and practices, has become a subject of contemplation in its own fight. Nevertheless, most Jews are rightfully obsessed with not forgetting. Since the Lodz Ghetto book of 1943, the millions who did not get a burial in the Holocaust have been remembered either by individual autobiographies dedicated to parents, loved ones, or children who perished, or by yisker biher, memories of the murdered on tombstones. This collective memory has been given a new dimension by the Holocaust and is shaped by different forms of representation: the biblical historical books and narratives sanctified, as Y. H. Yerushalmi wrote, by the rabbis of Yabneh in Palestine in recalling the events of the past; in ceremonies, monuments, personal testimonies, media, and scholarly publications. The Holocaust is now a crucial part of that collective memory. Even more, as Marcel Proust claimed, "memory, through imagination, can impose a value beyond that of the actual experience." If collective memory is, to a considerable degree, the basis for the identity of people in the Diaspora, it is now vital to remind them of ancestors who existed and were murdered. Klarsfeld's works and public activity have been concerned with that collective memory. One of his earlier books was Le M~morial de la d~portation des Juifs de France, published in France in 1978 and in the United States in 1983. This book contained the 76,000 names of Jews sent from France to Auschwitz and other death camps, listed by deportation convoys, mostly from Drancy, and identified by date and place of birth and nationality. It also contains a list of the several thousand Jews who died from maltreatment in internment camps in France or who were killed by the Nazis in France. Of the 76,000 deported, some 24,000 were French and 52,000 were foreign Jews. The work was not only an act of piety and homage to the victims. It was also invaluable tool as legal evidence because of its wealth of information about the German operatives and French collaborators involved

in deportation proceexiings in France. The book was in fact consulted by the judges at the trial of three SS war criminals, Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen, and Ernst Heinrichsohn, who had lived unpunished and had prospered in postwar Germany and who were convicted in Cologne in 1979. Lischka had been the organizer of Kristallnacht in November 1938 and was the chief of the Gestapo in France and the man finally responsible for sending 80,000 Jews to their deaths. Hagen, head of the anti-Jewish section of the SD in Berlin before the war, was the fight-hand man of the Nazi police chief in France. Heinrichsohn was the aide to Theodor Dannecker and Heinz Rothke, heads of the anti-Jewish section of the Gestapo. Some of the deported children were listed only by number and so died nameless. The omission became Klarsfeld's obsession; he needed to know their names and where they had lived and, above all, to see their faces. The present work is their collective gravestone, a memorial to the children who should not be forgotten. Even the two covers of the book are meaningful, with their photos of the identity cards of a girl of seven born in Strasbourg, and a boy of eight born in Nancy. Though both were born in France, their cards are stamped "Etranger surveill6" as well as "Jew." Revealingly, the Vichy authorities had refused to recognize Jews born in France as French. From July 1942 on, children were arrested by French police in Pads and other places, on orders from or by agreement of the Vichy officials in the Unoccupied (later the Southern) zone of France; they were temporarily held in Drancy and other transit camps and turned over to German authorities for deportation and murder. The mad logic of deportation and extermination continued relentlessly until August 18, 1944, the very day that fighting began in Pads to liberate the city. Turning the pages with their 2,500 photos of the children, identified in alphabetical order and giving the dates of their arrest and deportation, is a deeply moving experience. The children appear one after another, some eager and happy, others somber as if they anticipated their fate; most are well and neatly dressed; many are handsome and beautiful. Some are photographed alone, others as part of what might be a typical French family. All the 2,500 children are identified by a brief biography, and their names also appear on the passenger lists of the convoys dispatched to the East from 1942 to August 1944. One sad detail is thus revealed: Convoy 67, of February 3, 1944, included the three boys who were the subjects of Louis Malle's memorable film, Au revoir, les enfants.

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 21

One's emotional response to the book is heightened by the awareness of the meticulous research that went into it, which even went so far as to find letters or poems written by the children. One youngster of fifteen changed his date of birth in order to be old enough to fight in the Resistance; he was still under sixteen when he was shot. One photo shows infants behind barbed wire at the Vichy camp at Gurs, where over 1,000 Jews died from subhuman conditions, while another shows a playground with the notice "reserved for children: forbidden to Jews." A letter from a seventeen-year-old boy, himself soon to be arrested and deported, to the regional prefect for Chalons-surMarne asks for the release of his mother, father, and sister, all soon to be murdered. Other photos are revealing. One shows a French policeman saluting a German officer in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Another presents a 1941 poster declaring that "Jews must be swept away to make our house clean." Klarsfeld's work inevitably evokes a complex of feelings, of sadness, anger, revulsion, toward the perpetrators of the cruel and inhumane actions and their obsessional, irrational hatred of Jews. His books also amplify what has long been familiar from works of other authors, such as Raul Hilberg: the extraordinary efficiency and perverted rationale of the killing machine, even to the four copies of the list of names of the victims made by the Nazis. Such efficiency was at the service of evil. Before analyzing the French situation, it is worth remembering the controversy over Hannah Arendt's argument on the issue. In a letter of December 17, 1946, to Karl Jaspers, Arendt, rejecting the concept of"satanic greatness" of the Nazis, wrote that "we have to combat all impulses to mythologize the horrible, and to the extent that I can't avoid such formulations, I haven't understood what actually went on .... Perhaps an organized attempt was made to eradicate the concept of the human being." Yet the horrible is there on every page of Klarsfeld's book without resort to mythology or tortuous logic. Equally, Klarsfeld may help dispose of Arendt's unfortunate and ill-defined phrase "the banality of evil," by which she presumably meant it was wrong to think of evil as springing from villainous motives. For Arendt, Adolf Eichmann's inability to think, his thoughtlessness rather than his stupidity, and his inattention meant that he could perform monstrous deeds without monstrous motives. Philosophically, this argument may be, as Fred Schick suggests in his Understanding Action, akin to the Platonic view of knowledge by acquaintance, of a vision of things as

they are. From this perspective, a person who sees the world as it is, who is attentive, cannot fantasize or act as did Eichmann. An inherent difficulty in this metaphysical discussion is that those who were responsible for the Holocaust, in France and elsewhere, convinced themselves that they saw the world clearly and that their actions were justified. In the heated exchange over "banality," Gershom Scholem wrote to Arendt that her phrase was "a catchword or slogan" and not to be taken seriously in discussion of moral philosophy or political ethics. The essential question is whether the Arendt position reduces or eliminates responsibility for action. Klarsfeld's book provides an opportunity to reflect on the question of responsibility in France from a number of perspectives: the actions of the political institutions and the police, the degree of their complicity in crimes, the nature of collaboration, the role of the Church during and after the war, the attitudes of the French citizenry, the dilemma of the Jewish population, and changes in the attitudes of French people in the time periods of the war years. In the postwar period, French intransigence in refusing to reveal or to cooperate in seeking information has sometimes amounted to collective amnesia. How else to explain the slowness of the judicial process, the reluctance of the police to search for those accused of war crimes, the help given by part of the Church in protecting war criminals, or the astonishing clemency of the pardon given by the president of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, in September 1971 to Paul Touvier, twice sentenced to death, in absentia in 1946 and 1947, by French courts for treason and "assisting the enemy"? Klarsfeld had to resort to legal action to obtain and to copy identity cards with photographs of the children, which were held or concealed in French archives. It is sobering to learn that after the liberation of Paris by the Allied forces, the prefecture of police there destroyed almost all of its voluminous files on the arrest of Jews and transferred the rest to an inconspicuous place, the Ministry of Veterans and War Victims Affairs. The reality is that Jews in France have taken most of the initiative for finding information about the Holocaust in the country. The Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation seized and guarded the archives of the Jewish Affairs Service of the Gestapo in France, which included copies of most convoy lists made out at the time of deportations. After considerable difficulty, Klarsfeld and others obtained access to records of the trials of German criminals by French military courts, the records of the Vichy del-

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egation in Occupied France, and the Pads prefecture TV documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitid. When it was shown in a cinema in 1971, it shattered the myth of a of police. These practical difficulties for one investigator courageous, defiant French citizenry with its docutypify the problem of objective and impartial analy- mentary depiction of convinced Pttainists, a few resis of the Vichy regime, its polity and police forces, sisters, and a mostly indifferent populace. In the academy, discussion of the Holocaust has and of the response of the French people and groups to the atrocities of the Occupation years. The same focused not only on the actual events but also on the questions can be posed about Vichy as have been asked variety of interpretation of it in the historiographical so often about the Germans: Who did what, who knew, literature. Many, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who who was told about the Holocaust, who suspected, expressed his concern in his book The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present, were troubled by the lack who did not know, and who resisted? In the years immediately after the end of the war, of work on the subject by French historians in the early little attention was given politically or intellectually postwar years. The explanation is complex: The lack to the role of France in facilitating the Holocaust. Some was due partly to politics, because of the need to deal who argued, during the Fourth Republic and the first with the wartime collaboration of administration, poyears of the Fifth Republic, that Vichy was "illegiti- lice, and judiciary; partly to academic timidity; partly mate" felt no responsibility or guilt. Others still held to the unavailability of relevant archives, which were that the regime, despite its deficiencies, was neces- a treasure trove only found in 1991, largely by sary for the renaissance of France after its inglorious Klarsfeld's activities, in the Office of Veterans Afdefeat in 1940. Others, as part of what Henry Rousso fairs, where they had been deliberately hidden for has called the "Vichy syndrome," swallowed the myth many years; and partly to the diversion of French of a resistance movement in which a considerable part historical interest, because of the influence of the of the French population participated. The French Annales school, from contemporary affairs to "la appeared not to have accepted the observation by longue durde.'" Explaining his surprising and controversial pardon Aristotle in The Ethics that the pre-Socratic philosoof Paul Touvier in 1971, President Georges Pompidou, pher Agathon was right: at a press conference on September 21, 1972, asked: "Has not the time come to draw a veil over the past, One power has Fate to God himself denied to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, To make undone the thing that has been done. attacked one another, and even killed one another?'" The first major critical scholarly writing on Vichy's Pompidou's timing was bad, and his plea for historipolicies and actions came from North Americans, es- cal oblivion had the opposite effect, reminding people pecially Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus. The of the crimes of Touvier and others. Since the 1970s a combination of political events, French were slow to admit that France was the only occupied country whose legal government and police judicial processes, and intellectual inquiry have led had worked and acted in support of German demands. to a more open evaluation of French behavior. The This was apparent in the judicial realm as well as in indictment of a number of people--Jean Leguay in the political and intellectual worlds. It was difficult 1979, Klaus Barbie in 1983, Paul Touvier, Rend for the French to accept responsibility for genocide, Bousquet, and Maurice Papon over the last decade-to accept the reality that the 10.000 Jews deported for crimes against humanity, as well as the bitter disfrom the Unoccupied Zone were the only Jews killed cussion by the extreme Right and Left of works of in the Holocaust who came from an area without any various kinds of Holocaust denial, especially by German military presence at the time, or to appreci- Robert Faurisson between 1978-81, have occasioned ate French complicity given that the three German a reexamination of wartime activity concerning Jews police battalions in France only numbered between in France. Ironically, Faurisson the Holocaust denier, 2,500 and 3,000 men. Charges brought in the courts sentenced in 1981 to pay a symbolic franc in damwere concerned with political activity, such as trea- ages to organizations representing former inmates of son or collaboration with the enemy, rather than with the camps, made the Holocaust an important issue for France. activities relating to the Holocaust. A pertinent illustration of French reluctance to disThis increased interest was reflected in political and cuss the Vichy years with candor and objectivity was literary writing as well as in the media and in films the ten-year delay in airing Marcel Ophul's made-for- such as Lacombe Lucien (1974), in which a young

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 23

peasant, drawn to violence, becomes an aide to the Gestapo. Claude Chabrol's L'Oeil de Hchy, with its presentation of wartime newsreels and radio broadcasts that aimed at making Marshal Pttain a national hero, implicitly condemned the men of Vichy by their own statements, in which they blame Jews and capitalists for inflicting defeat on France in 1940 and call for collaboration with Germany to fight against bolshevism in order to build a new Europe. What Pierre Nora has called "lieux de rrMrnoire"-m o n u m e n t s , testimonies, film, t e l e v i s i o n - - n o w abound. It is perhaps too strong to say that the French are obsessed with the memory of Vichy and the actions of their elders during the Occupation. Yet the postwar controversies over the past show the painful nature of memories of Vichy and the difficulty in reconciling the French people with their recent history and with what has been termed "la guerrefranco.franfaise.'" History is always being rewritten, partly because of new methods of inquiry, partly because new information becomes available, and partly because of changing political perspectives. At one end of the historical argument over Vichy is the claim that it upheld traditional Catholic and right-wing values that were supported by a considerable part of the population. Early histories by Robert Aron and FranqoisGeorges Dreyfus contrast the "good" and "bad" parts of the regime. For these writers, Marshal Philippe Pttain, the great hero of World War I, elderly, patient, a believer in wait-and-see, was concerned with the moral regeneration of the country and saw the armistice as an interlude in the war. By contrast, Pierre Laval, the evil genius, appears as the collaborationist who saw the armistice as an opportunity for France to participate in the New Order. In this view, Laval was the sinister influence on policy, and the Marshal never issued any official proclamation that Jews were enemies of the state. More recent commentaries do not support this argument. Eberhard J~ickel's France in Hitler's Europe indicates the extent of Pttain's collaboration with the Germans. Robert Frank, in an essay on poisoned memory, suggests that Pttain's charisma anesthetized public opinion to the anti-republican and anti-Semitic measures of the regime. More critical assessments of Vichy, from the pathbreaking work by Robert Paxton to books by French authors such as Jean-Pierre Aztma and Marc Ferro, hold that the Vichy regime did not resist the occupation, willingly accepted collaboration with the Germans, wanted to change society and the state, and took part in anti-Semitic activity, sometimes on its own

initiative and sometimes under pressure. Indeed, although the meaning of the term is now disputed, the word "collaborator" was used by P6tain in December 1940 after his meeting with Hitler at Montoire when he said: "It is with honor and to maintain ten-centuryold French unity in the framework of the constructive activity of the new European order that I embark today on a path of collaboration .... Follow me: Keep your faith in la France dternelle." The abundant and rapidly increasing literature and media representations of Vichy and its personnel allow us to assess the regime objectively and to make judgments on the behavior of people and institutions during the Vichy years. Yet those judgments belie easy generalizations because there were internal conflicts within the regime, differences in motivation, changes during the four years of the system, and relations with the German authorities. At a minimum, Viehy practiced a politics of exclusion and persecution of Jews, a politics in which anti-Semitism and xenophobia were prominent. This concept of politics stemmed from the intellectual strand in French thought and history of integral nationalism, the belief in the organic unity of the French nation. Foreigners, especially Jews of foreign origin, and other people regarded as undesirable would not be regarded as included in that unity. Vichy was responsible for the roundups and deportation of Jews, but it is debatable whether most of the leaders of the regime approved a policy of extermination. Vichy can be classified as an authoritarian rather than a totalitarian system, and its policy was marked by a certain ambivalence rather than clarity. As Stanley Hoffmann remarked in Vichy et les Franfais, the fact that Vichy was regarded as a legal regime, led by a charismatic hero, justified a certain number of actions that perhaps would not have been otherwise possible. Nevertheless, those actions, even though they were performed within the legality of the state, are not excusable, and the perpetrators cannot avoid punishment for them. Service to the state, as Alain Finkielkraut argued in Remembering in Vain does not exonerate any civil servant. One interesting illustration of the ambiguous or mixed nature of Vichy was the school at Uriage, recently studied by Bernard Comte in Une Utopie combattante. The school, near Grenoble, was set up in 1940 to train youth and prepare them for leadership in the Vichy regime, and it thus became symbolic of the system. Though it was pessimistic about the crisis of civilization and hostile to parliamentary democracy, it also advocated moral reform, virility, and devotion to leadership, to Pdtain in particular, and

24 1 SOCIETY 9 M A Y / J U N E 1997

to the regime. Though the school did not appear to be troubled by the anti-Semitic laws and activity, it can perhaps be properly categorized as authoritarian but not fascist. Ambivalence in French history and politics is not a new phenomenon. In this fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the baptism, supposedly in Rheims, of Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, opinions differ as to whether he should be praised as the father of France, as the man who created the first Christian monarchy in the West, or castigated as an unscrupulous opportunist. Not surprisingly, Jean-Made Le Pen, the leader of France's extreme right-wing party, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic, sees Clovis as a symbol of ultranationalism. More pertinently for this subject, the Vichy regime named its highest medal for services to France and to Pttain after"francisque," the double-headed ax Clovis used to kill a soldier. A modern example of this ambivalence is reflected in the personal history of Franqois Mitterrand, a quintessential embodiment of the complex political culture of France, with its two, sometimes contradictory, heritages stemming from the Revolution of 1789: a yearning toward liberty and equality on the one hand and toward nationalism, order, and French grandeur on the other. Mitterrand's political career was a classic case of opportunism, moving from fight to left while always maintaining his availability as ministrable. His version of his own history was selective, at best disingenuous. Not until the end of his life did he publicly acknowledge, as recorded in Pierre PLan's book Une Jeunesse Fran~aise, and in his late statements, his early years as a participant in fight-wing student demonstrations, as a writer for right-wing journals, as a sincere supporter of Pttain in 1941, and as an official for the Vichy regime for about eighteen months, during which he received the Francisque Gallique medal in the spring of 1943. More surprisingly, he continued his friendship with Rent Bousquet through the 1980s and laid wreaths on the tomb of Pttain between 1986 and 1992. Mitterrand, as a prisoner of war, had written that "France...had exhausted herself, and I thought that we, the inheritors of these 150 years of errors, were responsible." As a postwar politician and as president of the Republic, he called for "national reconciliation" between supporters of the Vichy regime and those who opposed it or were its victims to heal the wounds of the past. The comment of Jacques Attali, his former political advisor, was apt: For Mitterrand "genocide was only a fact of war, not a monstrosity of human nature."

Mitterrand's ambivalence about Vichy and his lack of candor about his own past reflect both the divisions, past and present, of the French about the war years and also their reluctance to acknowledge the degree of complicity of their officials and fellow citizens in the Holocaust. They also raise the difficult problem of relating moral values and codes of conduct to extreme cases. It has long been recognized that of the 40 million French people alive in the war, 40 million were Pttainists and 40 million were Gaullists. Clearly, wartime France was not a country of heroic resisters, risking life and liberty, gallantly defying Nazi demands or attempting, subtly or otherwise, to sabotage them. In spite of the myth to the contrary, the Resistance movement was small and was operational only in 1943-44. It is more probable that a majority of the population, undergoing a crisis of identity, accepted Mardchalisme, that is, attachment to Marshal Pttain as the necessary head of the country. The myth of a heroic Resistance movement, cultivated by the media and intellectuals in postwar years, has been dispelled in many works over the last two decades. Relatively few, such as the writers Rent Char and Paul Eluard, were courageous in defying the Occupation, and many more Frenchmen--nearly threequarters of a million--were either prisoners of war or workers obliged to labor in the Service de Travail Obligatoire in Germany. On the part of prominent writers--Andr6 Gide, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Jules Romains, Roger Martin du Gard, even Andr6 Malraux until nearly the end of the war--the rule was silence or inaction. This silence was even more deafening in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who so strongly influenced the climate of intellectual opinion after the war, because of their claim to the contrary that they not only took part in the Resistance in a significant way but that their courageous defiance inspired their conduct in peacetime. A timely book, Une si douce occupation by Gilbert Joseph, presents a scathing picture of the two existentialists, who were never involved in the Resistance, who never wrote of the murder of Jews, and who did nothing to prevent their persecution during the war years. They are shown to be wholly preoccupied with their literary careers and prepared to make compromises with the authorities to further that end. Sartre belied his own analysis in Situations H when he said: "The writer is in a position to do something in his time: each word has its reverberation, each silence also. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 25

the Commune because they did not write a line to prevent it." Yet, neither was France a land of infamous collaborators or supporters of anti-Semitic persecution. Most citizens, especially at the beginning, were passive or opportunistic, uninvolved in the crimes and atrocities in their country. Some, though disliking foreigners and anti-Nazi refugees, were troubled by the increasing extent of persecution but remained convinced of the need for the authoritarian Prtainist regime to replace the weak democratic republic with which they were disillusioned, to preserve the unity of France, to maintain order and discipline, and to make internal changes. Two problems arose from this formula. The In'st, stated by Paxton in an interview in L'Express of July 16, 1992, was that Vichy, instead of creating "une union sacrde" as in World War I, began by excluding part of its population from the unity. The other difficulty was that Vichy policy meant putting the French administration and police at the service of the Nazi cause. Four groups were committed to collaboration with the Germans or were ideological fascists or Nazis: prominent literary figures; extreme right-wing political parties; the Milice Fran~aise; and some senior bureaucrats.

Varieties of Complicity The first group embodied what Zeev Sternhell has called "a fascist mentality" with its hostility to or rejection of materialism, individualism, liberalism, and democracy. The literary figures in this group included Louis-Ferdinand Crline, with his cynical anarchism, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Robert Brasillach, who were vitriolic in their obsession for destructive energy and their myth of the collective greatness of France. An article by Brasillach of February 7, 1942, in his magazine Je suis partout, entitled "The AntiFascist Conspiracy in the Service of the Jews" is only one, particularly flagrant, example of violent polemics: "Will we ever be rid of the stench of scented putrefaction which is still begin given off by the dying old whore?" More active political movements, such as the Parti Populaire Franfais (PPF) led by former Communist leader Jacques Doriot, had engaged in violence against Jews as early as summer 1940, though in Nice it encountered some public disapproval. A variety of other extreme or fascist movements in the prewar period urged political change by indoctrination or by action: Action Frangaise, Lrgion Faisceau, Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarit6 Fran~aise (led by Jean Renaud), Croix de Feu/Parti Social Fran9ais (under Colonel Casimir de la Rocque).

Anti-Semitism did not become prominent in all of these movements until the late 1930s. It became more significant in the Vichy years, when anti-Semitic rhetoric accompanied the overt anti-Jewish policies and actions. Marcel Drat, former socialist transformed into a supporter of collaboration with Germany, not only advocated a new kind of man, one who would defend "an active and vigorous Aryanism," but also urged getting rid of Jewish "parasites" in European culture. Colonel de la Rocque accused the Jews, along with Marxists and Freemasons, of responsibility for France's military defeat in 1940 and of being a major source of corruption in France. Jean Renaud talked of Jews as poisoners of French culture and politics who ought to be deported. Jacques Doriot attacked the "Jew with his will to universal domination." The most extreme and ruthless group of collaborators was the Milice Fran9aise, which originated in a veterans' organization set up in 1940 to fight for French unity and nationalism and to oppose bolshevism. In January 1943 it became an independent group, a virtual auxiliary of the Nazis, armed by them and pursuing similar objectives, sometimes in a more extreme fashion than the Germans in "the struggle against the Jewish leper and for French purity." With their black uniforms, decorated with a symbol of force, the Milice as a paramilitary organization attacking the Resistance enforced discipline and order by coercion through police, prisons, systematic torture, and murder, as well as by intense propaganda for a New Order. A state within a state, the Milice could act on its own initiative or in cooperation with Vichy or in collaboration with the Germans. Its leader, Joseph Darnand, a World War I hero who called himself the man of the Marshal, took an oath of loyalty to Hitler and attached himself, with a number of followers, to the SS in 1943. When he became interior minister of Vichy in June 1944, the Milice became as ruthless as the Gestapo. Unrepentant to the end, Darnand on the night before he was executed wrote to General de Gaulle asking clemency for his followers because they "gave up everything to serve what they considered to be the true interests of their country." Whether for political or self-interested motives, Prtain on August 6, 1944, wrote to Laval expressing his concern about the activities of the Milice and its strong collaboration with the German police. Laval sent the letter on to Darnand, who replied to Prtain: "For four years I have received your compliments and felicitations.... now that the Americans are at the gates of Pads, you say to me that I am a blemish on the history of France."

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Despite fifty years of historiography, the question of Vichy remains open for some. Was the regime a willing participant in genocide, or was it a shield by French politicians against German excesses? The latter argument, that Vichy attempted to protect French national sovereignty, was long made but is now less acceptable. Part of the problem in coming to a simple conclusion is the case made in Robert Aron's influential History of Vichy which tried to separate the "good" Pttain from the "evil" Laval. Another aspect of the problem results from the timing of action and rhetoric and the entrance of different players in Vichy's politics.

French Participation The case for the "good" Pttain has never been more than superficial. It is true that he did not have a program of extermination of the Jewish people. Yet Pttain, together with Laval and Darlan, was the vital instrument of the first stages of the Final Solution-exclusion and deportation----even if the leaders did not at first understand the difference between the concentration camps and extermination camps, between Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Pttain was a stern believer in severe measures against the Jews, stating that obedience to the law was essential and indispensable for French revival. Unlike the situation in other Nazioccupied countries, the existence of a French state, with a popular leader, gave collaboration a legitimacy it did not have elsewhere while at the same time damping any civil resistance. The leaders issued legal definitions of "Jews" and isolated them from the main population of France. They encouraged an openly anti-Semitic, racist, and xenophobic propaganda. They participated, through the French administration and police, in the demands made by the Germans, hoping by collaboration to obtain a better place for France in the New Order. It is startling to consider that four-fifths of the Jews deported were arrested by French police. The Vichy politics of exclusion of Jews from the national community is a damning indictment of the regime. As early as July 22, 1940, the "purification" process began with the establishment of a committee to review all citizenships granted since 1927, about 500,000 cases; the committee decided that 17,000 persons, of whom 40 percent were Jews, should have their citizenships revoked. A month later, the 1939 decree banning anti-Semitic propaganda was revoked, thus allowing the dissemination of racial hatred. Soon the word "Jew" was put on identity cards in the Occupied Zone. The decisive step in exclusion was taken in three stages in October 1940: the first Statute of

Jews of October 3; the October 4 law authorizing confinement to home or internment in special camps of foreigners of "the Jewish race"; and the October 7 decree stripping Algerian Jews of French nationality. The October 3 statute separated Jews from the rest of the nation and defined them not by religion but by race, by the number of grandparents of Jewish race. The ostensible reason for the statute was the important role Jews had taken in recent years in the direction of affairs of the country. This law, and a second law of June 2, 1941, which redefined a Jew and imposed further restrictions on their public activities, excluded Jews from most public positions and private professions, including the army, teaching, and the media, preventing them from having any position of responsibility or influence. Besides the definition of Jews by race, two other factors are pertinent. The statutes were devised and promulgated without any pressure from the Germans, and they were even more discriminatory than similar German decrees. Indeed, the laws were even more severe than the Nazi Nuremberg laws. The first statute defined a Jew as someone with three grandparents of the Jewish race or with two grandparents and a spouse who was Jewish. The second narrowed the definition to a person with two Jewish grandparents, even if the spouse was not Jewish. The legislation of Vichy was spontaneous and autonomous. Pttain himself insisted that Jews should have no part in the justice system and the teaching profession. Maurice Duverger, a political scientist and constitutional lawyer, in a 1941 article in a French law review discussing the two Statutes of Jews, saw "the incapacity of access of Jews in the French administration...as a measure of public necessity." French responsibility is clear. No document has been found in the archives indicating direct pressure on Vichy by the Germans to pass the Statutes of Jews or to eliminate them from official positions. The October 1940 statute was organized by Raphael Alibert, minister of justice, a strong disciple of Charles Maurras and a notorious anti-Semite. The June 1941 one was proposed by his successor, Joseph Barth~lemy, a man of order rather than an ideological anti-Semite but nevertheless a man who believed that "Jews did not dissolve in the French community." A year later, as a result of regulations published on May 29, 1942, this became a selffulfilling statement when Jews were forced to wear the yellow star in the Occupied Zone. The severity of French actions increased over a twoyear period. Vichy created a concentration camp system out of the existing network of internment camps already in existence, which in 1939 contained German

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 27

and Austrian refugees, mostly Jewish, who had been interned as enemy aliens. These camps, which became the transit deportation centers, as Eric Conan points out in Sans oublier les enfants, a study of two of them, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, were until 1943 run by French police as a part of administrative routine. The French cannot escape the fact that their officials were involved in crimes. The great roundup of Jews at the Velodrome d'Hiver (Vel d'Hiv), July 16-17, 1942, when over 4,100 children were interned to be deported and murdered, was carded out exclusively by French police. For the next two years the Milice and a special SS group led by Alois Brunner, an SS officer, helped make the arrests for deportation. Parenthetically, Serge Klarsfeld has had a particular interest in the pursuit of Brunner, who was traced to Damascus, where he reportedly died in 1992, for at least two reasons: Brunner led the raids in July 1944 against the Jewish children's centers in the Pads area, arresting 250 children, almost all of whom were sent to Auschwitz. It was also Brunner's men who seized Klarsfeld's father, a Rumanian national, in Nice but failed to find Serge, who was hidden in a closet. About this last episode, Klarsfeld makes an interesting point: The Italian military authorities in the area protected Jews and tried to prevent their arrest by the Vichy police. The Italians even prevented French administrators from stamping the word "Jew" on identity papers. Vichy was guilty of allowing and assisting in the deportation of over 140,000 people in France, of whom 75,000 were Jews, to death camps. It imprisoned 135,000 people and interned 70,000 suspects, and sent three-quarters of a million workers to Germany as conscript labor. The Pttainist motto "Work, Family, Country" replaced "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." The figure of Pttain replaced Marianne as the symbol of France. The familiar Republican street n a m e s - Zola, Jaur~s, Anatole France--were all replaced. Many of the guilty men remained unpunished, and many never expressed remorse. Jean Leguay, the highest police official in the Occupied Zone, although indicted in 1979, died unpunished. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, high commissioner for Jewish Affairs in Vichy, escaped to Madrid, where he died in 1980 before possible extradition. Paul Touvier escaped justice for over forty years. Rent Bousquet was assassinated before he could be tried. Maurice Papon was finally indicted but in 1997 was still awaiting trial. How to assess the complex and equivocal relationship---cordial, cautious, and suspicious at different moments--between Vichy and the German occupiers, first in the Occupied Zone and then in the whole

country? On taking power in Vichy on July 11, 1940, the Pttain regime began anti-Jewish regulations in an Unoccupied Zone, which was under French control. Those regulations were valid and were applicable in the Occupied Zone as well. The Vichy regime controlled French governmental institutions and operations in both the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones, even though subject to a German veto. However, German authorities, the Military Headquarters in Pads, the German security and intelligence Headquarters (SiPo-SD), and the Gestapo exerted direct and indirect pressure on Vichy through their key personnel: Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Department in France; Helmut Knochen, SiPoSD chief in France; and Kurt Lischka, SiPo-SD chief in Pads. The Vichy--German relationship became more complicated when in July 1943 the SS took over control of Drancy, the main French deportation camp. At the end of 1943, the Gestapo and German police acted directly against French Jews without protest from senior Vichy ministers or officials. French children and adults were abandoned by France, whose officials often participated in their arrest and deportation. The regime carried out a census of Jews, first in the Occupied Zone at the end of 1940 and then in the Unoccupied Zone after June 1941. It also set up the C o m m i s s a r i a t - G e n e r a l on J e w i s h Q u e s t i o n s (CGQJ)--which was in fact a Ministry of Jewish Affairs--a special police for Jewish Affairs, and also a Jewish organization, the General Union of Israelites of France (UGIF). All Jews, French as well as foreign-born, had to register with the French police. From March 1941 until May 1942 the CGQJ was led by Xavier Vallat, head of the Ltgion, a strong anti-Semite who believed in the irreconcilable conflict between Jewish tradition and the French national tradition. The first mass arrests of Jews in Paris, in the Occupied Zone in May 1941 and August 1941, were carded out by French police, on orders from German military authorities and the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Department. Pads police assisted at a third roundup of Jews in December 1941, conducted by German military police and the SS. Deportations to the extermination camps began on March 27, 1942, with a convoy assembled from French internment camps, run by French authorities, and a German-run camp in Compi~gne. This first deportation sent 1,112 Jews to Auschwitz; the convoy was escorted to the German border by French police. From this point the story becomes even more complex. As a result of the mass arrests and the deporta-

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tions, there was some criticism of official actions. In June 1942, some French citizens in the Occupied Zone protested the German decree that Jews wear the yellow star on their clothes. Even this small expression of public protest had an impact on policy. The Vichy regime, recognizing the arousal of public opinion, refused to pass a similar ordinance on the yellow star for the Unoccupied Zone, though in December 1942 it began stamping the word "Jew" on identification and ration cards of Jews under its jurisdiction. The regime, at first, arrested only foreign Jews in its zone. The regime also appeared reluctant for a time to have French police arrest French Jews in the Occupied Zone. Yet in July 1942, the key figure, Rent Bousquet, head of the national police, at a meeting with SS and Gestapo leaders in Paris agreed to allow French police to arrest 22,000 stateless Jews in Paris and others throughout French territory. Prime Minister Pierre Laval said he would have no objections to the Nazi deportation of children of stateless Jews in both zones, although the Germans had not planned to take children, at least initially. In the roundup in Paris of July 16--17, 1942, 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children, were arrested. Bousquet's chief delegate in the Occupied Zone, Jean Leguay, insisted that the children be deported with their parents, or even alone. At the end of July 1942, before the Germans agreed to take the children, French police in the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande used rifle butts to separate Jewish mothers and children and deported the mothers. The children were to follow them to the gas chambers a few weeks later. With poetic justice, July 16 is now a day of national commemoration. The Vel d'Hiv roundup has become the symbol of Vichy participation in genocide. In spite of their pretense that they would deport only non-French Jews, the Vichy authorities in fact gave French Jews to the Germans in large numbers. By the end of the war in France, over 75,000 Jews, both French and foreign, had been deported; only 2,700 of them returned to France after the war, and several thousand others died in French camps of malnutrition and disease. Conscious of growing indignation by part of the French citizenry, including some important clergymen, even Laval later appeared reluctant to assist the German acceleration of the rate of convoys to the camps. Undeniably, Vichy was involved in the persecution of Jews. Bousquet, in an instruction to French police headquarters in Paris on October 15, 1942, asked the police to "take all useful measures" that the Germans had requested to round up Jews belonging

to various categories in the Occupied Zone. Without this French participation, the Germans would have had greater difficulty in carrying out the deportations. Vichy even exceeded German demands. Vichy and the Germans agreed that in the "Free Zone" certain categories of Jews would not be deported, particularly children under eighteen whose parents had already been taken and children under five and their parents. Yet Bousquet canceled the exemptions, and hundreds of the children were arrested. The Jews Themselves One controversial aspect of the Vichy years is the behavior of the Jews themselves, a subject to which more scholarly work is being devoted. Gershom Scholem, in his open letter to Hannah Arendt, questioned whether "our generation is in a position to pass any kind of historical judgment" on Jewish behavior during the Nazi period. Arendt in fact had made some provocative comments about the Judenrate (the Jewish Councils): "To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story." If the Jewish people had been unorganized and leaderless, it was argued, the number of victims would have been fewer. A similar, if more moderate, position is that expressed by Primo Levi in his concept of a "gray zone" in which the victims were also collaborators. Three separate but interrelated issues are pertinent in France: the double composition of the Jewish population; the official organization; and the activities of Jews in the Resistance. 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 World War I, were self-defined as adherents of the Mosaic law. The foreignborn Jews, mostly from Poland, 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 and upper middle class; they were professionals, commercial and business people, and intellectuals. Foreign Jews were often manual workers, artisans, or small tradesmen dealing in clocks and watches, jewelry, furniture, and the like; most lived in the poorer parts of Paris. In spite of anti-Semitic propaganda, French Jews continued to consider themselves French, as people

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST / 29

who acted individually and not as part of a collective faith. For the distinguished historian Marc Bloch, in his classic work Strange Defeat, all Jews domiciled or resident in France were obligated and affiliated to the country. He acknowledged, shortly before his sad death: "I was brought up in the tradition of patriotism .... France will remain, whatever happens, the one country with which my deepest emotions are inextricably bound up .... A stranger to all credal dogmas...I have through life felt that I was above all, quite simply, a Frenchman." Even Jews descended from rabbis--Bloch, Marcel Mauss, Robert Debrt, Claude Ltvi-Strauss--were assimilated intellectually; some married out of their faith or converted. The prominent social scientist, Raymond Aron, who spoke of the "uncompromising patriotism" of French Jews, mistakenly believed that the Statute of the Jews had been imposed by the Germans and thought that "Vichy was a parenthesis in the history of France, an episode of the war." Whereas French Jews rejected the idea of separate Jewish political organizations, foreign Jews were grouped into two communal bodies: the Union of Jewish Societies in France, small and linked to the Communists, and the Federation of Jewish Societies of France, about seventy to eighty bodies, with Zionist inclinations. The French origin of the anti-Semitic legislation is now clear; it is the result of the logic of the national revolution, the policy of collaboration with the Nazis, and the long heritage of French anti-Semitism. The best that can be said of Vichy policy is that it tried to draw a distinction, with some success, between French and foreign Jews; the latter could be sacrificed to save the former. Susan Zuccotti in her The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews carefully analyzes the figures. Of the Jews killed in the camps or in France, 24,500 were French and 56,500 were foreign. About 13 percent of French Jews, compared with 41 percent of foreign Jews, were deported or died in French camps. Vichy rounded up and interned foreign Jews in the Unoccupied Zone while their counterparts in the Occupied Zone were free. If some ambiguity existed about the fate of French Jews, there was none about the foreign Jews. UGIF, created by law on November 29, 1941, was charged with the task of representing Jews to the public authorities. Some Jews saw it as a useful compromise with the regime, but others denounced it as a trap. Even if it was not a tool of the regime, the UGIF did at first facilitate the actions of Vichy. It became the intermediary between the regime and the

Jews without halting persecution. Though not a Judenrat since it was appointed by Vichy rather than by the Nazis, the UGIF was implicitly helpful to the regime. Only after the second Statute of the Jews of June 1941 did Jewish organizations protest to P~tain. Yet even then the U G I F - - a n d even the religious group, the Central Consistoire, which had not participated in the UGIF--maintained relations with the regime. Jews were divided over Vichy, with some community leaders welcoming it as a contribution to spiritual reform of the country. The Rabbinat assured Pttain that he was exhorting his flock to serve country, family, and work and to be loyal to the Marshal. Jacques Helbronner, a decorated veteran and the head of the Central Consistoire, the chief representative of the Jewish community in France since 1808, met with Pttain twenty-seven times between summer 1940 and June 1941. Most French Jews respected the laws of France, even after October 1940. The composition of Jews in France, the conduct of official leaders, and the membership of some Jews in the Communist Party affected the decision about Jewish resistance: Should Jews participate in the general resistance movement, or should they join a specifically Jewish movement? The main roles in the latter were played by foreign Jews, many of whom were Communists and some of whom were Zionists. This logically followed from their being the most threatened, from their personal experience of anti-Semitism, their militancy, their communal links and social relationships, and their strong identity of Jewishness. Organizational and policy differences resulted from this. The Jewish resistance, starting largely from Communist cells in the Occupied Zone, put together a number of groups which in 1944 became the Jewish Organization of Combat (OCJ). From the beginning, the problem arose of whether Communists should be included in the Jewish group and whether they would emphasize the Communist line. This related to practical activity: Should they attack the Wehrmacht or sabotage the rail lines from the deportation camps? Should the Jewish resistance be limited only to Jewish objectives? A connected issue is that of active, armed resistance, in both military and political action, and passive, unarmed resistance concerned with the rescue of Jews and others. In previous works on Vichy, the armed resistance of urban guerrillas and the maquis has been highlighted. More recent research has begun to emphasize the importance of rescue, of the hiding of children, of the fabrication of false passports.

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A work more nuanced than most on the subject is Asher Cohen's 1994 book, Persecutions etsauvetages, whose rifle indicates that rescue as well as persecution of Jews occurred in different parts of France. The problem of ascertaining the relative complicity, hostility, or indifference of the French to the fate of Jews or their willingness to protect Jews is related to two factors: the origins of the Jews involved and the timing of the incidents. The first is the question of whether the Jews were French nationals, assimilated French citizens, or foreigners, immigrants with a different, non-French, culture. The pro-Vichy argument, partly plausible, was that the regime was willing to sacrifice the foreign Jews living in France to the Germans but tried to save its French citizens. A larger proportion of foreign-born Jews than of French-born Jews were in fact sent to the camps and murdered. Another related factor in assessing behavior of officiais and nonofficials is the timing of actions. It is useful to divide the occupation years into different periods: from the defeat of France in 1940 to the first Statute of Jews of October 3, 1940; from then to summer 1942, a period of increasing anti-Jewish discrimination and persecutions; an almost two-year period of roundups and deportations beginning in July 1942; and 1943-1944, when the Germans occupied the south as well as the north of the country and the Milice was important. The attitudes of citizens and of some church officials changed at times depending on events. In the early years, the distinction between extermination camps and the concentration camps, with which the French were more familiar, was not evident. A change in French reaction to the fate of Jews, from passivity to shock, appears to have begun after the roundups, first of foreign and then of French Jews, and the consequent start of the convoys from France to the extermination camps in mid-1942. On this issue Klarsfeld, in a 1983 work, is closer to the view of Asher Cohen than to the Paxton-Marrus position. It is true that the Gestapo depended on the French administration and police more than on their own agents and force to continue the deportation process. At the same time, beginning in 1942 secular and clerical organizations and individual citizens helped rescue perhaps 45,000 Jewish children from the authorities. The connection between collaboration and anti-Semitism is clear. At the same time, the fact that the proportion of Jews killed--80,000 out of a total Jewish population of 320--350,000---was lower in France than in surrounding countries in Western Europe suggests that the French citizenry felt some degree of sympathy for the plight of Jews and helped to prevent deportation.

The Vichy political elite was aware of some change in French public opinion on the Jewish issue. Even Laval, in his statement on the French decision to deport children, argued with apparent cynicism that it was only humane that infants not be separated from their parents. He recognized that forcing Jews in the Unoccupied Zone to wear the yellow star would offend public opinion, as would information about the arrest of Jews; the publication of such information was forbidden after August 1942. The regime was also aware of the Protestant conscience, especially as expressed by Pastor Marc Boegner, head of the Reformed Protestant Federation. He objected to the passionate anti-Semitism of several ministers, wrote and spoke to Pttain and Laval criticizing the deportation of foreign Jews, and instructed his pastors to condemn the persecution. Protestants not only protested publicly against the deportations, they also provided positive assistance, individually and organizationally. Among the organizations were the Protestant relief organization CIMADE and the Amiti6 Chrttienne, which included both Protestants and Catholics. Two actions by Protestants and Catholics stand out in particular. The first was the hiding of some 800 to 1,000 Jews by the inhabitants of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the center of a large Huguenot enclave in the high plateau, comparatively isolated and a center of Protestant resistance. The second notable exploit was the snatching of a hundred Jewish children from the train station at Vtnissieux as they were being deported in August 1942 and their secretion in seminaries and other religious institutions in the Lyons area; unfortunately, the children never saw their parents again. Many had hoped that Vichy's policies and actions would be revealed in the trials of those active during the regime. To some extent, the trials of Touvier and the two other individuals, Bousquet and Papon, at the center of recent judicial investigation illustrate the different levels of complicity and responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Touvier was a fascist, a willing collaborator, and an unscrupulous war criminal. Bousquet and Papon were respectable senior civil servants who claimed they were defending and protecting the French people from the occupying power. Touvier, born in a traditional Catholic family, was a member of various extreme fight organizations, a true believer in the anti-democratic crusade, and an ideological anti-Semite who for sixteen months belonged to the Milice. He became head of Milice intelligence in Lyons, reporting directly to Vichy rather

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST ! 31

than to the Milice chief in Lyons. In 1946 and 1947 he was twice sentenced to death in absentia by French courts for treason and "assisting the enemy." However, he was able to avoid punishment; after being captured he was allowed to escape. Hidden for twentysix years, he was pardoned by President Pompidou in 1971, despite an official report that Touvier's behavior during the war had been "nefarious, unscrupulous, and inexcusable." At this point Beate Klarsfeld, outraged by Pompidou's surprising act, led a large demonstration in protest, leading Touvier to go into hiding for another seventeen years. For all forty-three years of concealment, he was protected and aided by members of Church organizations--Jesuits of Lyons, Dominican and Benedictine monks--who defended their hospitality either as Christian charity or as based in ideological beliefs sympathetic to Touvier, who thus stayed in France when other war criminals fled to Latin America. The Klarsfelds were leaders of the pursuit for Touvier. He was finally caught and arrested in Nice, as the Church became more troubled by his presence in their institutions, in May 1989; he was charged with and convicted in April 1994 of complicity to commit crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. The Touvier case, as Leila Sadat Wexler argues in two authoritative articles, constitutes an extraordinarily important event for both France and the international c o m m u n i t y in that, unlike the Nuremberg trial by an international court, a country tried and convicted one of its own citizens for crimes against humanity committed under a prior regime. Touvier was the first Frenchman to be tried and punished for this offense. The Touvier case is useful for discussion of a number of issues concerning the Holocaust and its aftermath. The crime for which Touvier was indicted was a reprisal raid for the killing by the Resistance of Philippe Heariot, minister of information and propaganda in Vichy on June 28, 1944. Touvier had the Milice murder seven men, all Jewish, in Rillieux-laPape, a suburb of Lyons, on June 29, 1944. A number of questions arose out of the Touvier proceedings. Why did those judicial proceedings take so long, so convoluted, and so controversial a path? Why was Touvier, a convicted criminal, protected for so many years? What exactly is the definition of "crimes against humanity"? What was the real nature of the Vichy regime? Following the successful prosecution in 1987 of Klaus Barbie for crimes against humanity, Touvier was charged originally with eleven counts, on five of which

he could be indicted, according to the investigating magistrate. In an extraordinary decision, the Paris Court of Appeals reversed this and rejected the indictment, holding that evidence on ten of the eleven counts was insufficient. On the eleventh count, the massacre at Rillieux, the Court indicated that the prosecution had to prove that Touvier intended to take part by systematically committing planned inhumane acts and illegal persecutions on behalf of a state practicing a "hegemonic political ideology." The Court, examining the history of Vichy, held that the regime, unlike Nazi Germany, was not "a begemonic state"; though it exhibited some anti-Semitic tendencies, Vichy had not made the extermination of Jews official policy. Therefore, Touvier could not, as a matter of law, have committed a crime against humanity in carrying out Vichy's orders. Nor could he be seen as an accomplice of the Gestapo since RiUieux was an entirely French affair. Many people, including the French National Assembly, were shocked by the decision of the Court of Appeals, considering it a miscarriage of justice, as Vichy had in fact practiced an ideology of exclusion, hate, and collaboration with the Germans. Touvier himself stated, and it was to be part of his defense, that the Milice carried out the Rillieux massacre under German orders. On November 28, 1992, the Court of Cassation reversed the judgement of the Court of Appeals, holding that Touvier, though French, could be tried as an accomplice of the Gestapo. His trial, which opened on March 17, 1994 in the Court of Assizes, was conducted by three professional judges and a lay jury of nine, which found him guilty. The long, complicated legal process ended without full clarity about the role of Touvier and, implicitly, of the Vichy regime. Had Touvier acted under German orders or on his own initiative in committing the massacre? According to the prosecution, the plan was Nazi but the complicity was French. Yet it is plain that the Touvier trial did not in itself lead to an authoritative judgment on the actions of Vichy France. Many actions of Vichy, including those against members of the Resistance, were not raised. Valuable though trims for crimes against humanity and war crimes are to clarify the historical record, to caution against extreme and inhumane ideologies, and to uphold international principles of justice, they cannot determine the guilt or innocence of an entire regime. The Touvier trial did not result in an admission by the French government and society of responsibility for wartime atrocities. Touvier's guilt did not become symbolic of a wider social guilt. A moral victory

32 I S O C I E T Y 9 M A Y / J U N E 1997

was won by Touvier's conviction, but it did not settle the debate about Vichy. The Touvier case inevitably brought attention to the uneven role of the French Catholic Church and its prelates in both the wartime and peacetime periods. The Church appeared to give general support to the Vichy regime for its authoritarian policies, its xenophobic nationalism, its "'New Order," its motto of "Work, Family, Fatherland," and its promotion of Christian civilization. This attitude seemed to be upheld by higher authority. The French ambassador to the Vatican, Lton Berard, reported to Pttain on September 2, 1941, after a conversation in Rome: "There was nothing in the measures [the Statutes of the Jews] that can give rise to criticism by the Holy See." Nor was there much overt criticism by French Catholics against the anti-Jewish measures of 1940-41, for a variety of reasons of which indifference seemed the most important. Only one voice, that of the Jesuit priest P~re Fessard (on December 15, 1940) publicly protested against these early measures. An occasional priest issued false baptismal certificates or hid children. The Jewish artist and poet Max Jacob was sheltered by a priest until captured by the Germans; he was then sent to Drancy, where he died. Nevertheless, a number of Church officials were troubled by the increasing persecution of Jews. In July 1942, a turning point for them as for so many others, some cardinals and archbishops privately, though not publicly, protested to P&ain against the large number of arrests and the harsh treatment of Jews. Some, like the bishops of Toulouse and Montauban continued their protest; the archbishop of Lyons, Cardinal Gerlier, even protected Jewish children. The role of Cardinal Gerlier appears mixed or ambivalent. He was usually compliant with Vichy's policies, a pillar of the regime, and is regarded as very pro-P~tain; yet he also intervened to plead on behalf of Jewish veterans of World War l and protested against the harsh treatment of deportees. A favorable comment came from Klarsfeld in Le Monde of June 3, 1989: "It is to Cardinal Gerlier...that is owed, more than to any other, the abrupt slowdown of the massive police cooperation given by Vichy to the Gestapo." The Church was not and is not monolithic; religious orders, abbots, and priests exercise considerable autonomy. This is now very apparent in the inquiry into the Touvier case by a committee of respected historians chaired by Rend R~mond which was set up by Cardinal Albert Decourlray, archbishop of Lyons, in 1992. Its report made c/ear the extent of the logistical and financial support given by the Church

to Touvier. This did not result from any collective decision by the hierarchy of the Church but from the convergence of individual behavior by many people through interconnected channels of an extensive network of convents, priests, and religious institutions, particularly in the region of Chambery. The network included part of the Secretariat of the Archbishop of Lyons, especially Monseigneur Duquaire, Catholic Help (Secours Catholique), Pax Christi, the papal Secretariat of the Episcopate, and even Cardinal Villot, the secretary of state. This network called for a complete amnesty and for a pardon for Touvier. His most willing supporters and protectors were the Chevaliers de Sainte-Marie, fervent nationalists, extreme right-wing activists, counterrevolutionaries and anti-Semites, with close links to the movement of traditionalist priests, the integristes. The last were followers of Monseigneur Lefebvre, who broke with Rome because of their opposition to changes in the Church after Vatican II. Yet support of and aid for Touvier, surprising because his private, especially sexual, conduct was at such variance with Catholic morality, came from more than counterrevolutionary or fascist clerics or religious figures. Even the distinguished philosopher Gabriel Marcel, a Jew who converted to Catholicism, wrote on Touvier's behalf to President Pompidou on November 17, 1970; he soon regretted his action, calling Touvier "a scoundrel who lied all along." Others put the church above the laws of man, holding that its laws were those of God, that its justice and morality were superior to judgments of the state, which could be mistaken. For them the mission of the Church, the truths of faith, the salvation of souls, and the duty of charity were more important than politics and justified shielding a fugitive from legal punishment. Brian Moore in his The Statement, a fictional retelling of the last days of Touvier, has a Jesuit priest make an appropriate remark: "In the Church, very often, devotion replaces intelligence." A difficult legal problem and moral issue, illustrated by the cases of Barbie, Touvier, Bousquet, and Papon, is assessing the nature of the criminal offense and the degree of responsibility. In theory one can distinguish, as Irving Louis Horowitz did in Taking Lives, between genocide (the denationalization of selected groups among those out of favor) and the Holocaust (the total physical annihilation of members of a community, people or nation), a specific practice of the Nazis and their collaborators that aimed at the murder of an entire population. But a distinction was also necessary between war crimes and crimes against humanity as

VICHY FRANCE AND THE HOLOCAUST I 33

defined by international law and perhaps, as in France, incorporated into national law. That the distinction was not readily understood can be seen in Alain Resnais's moving and evocative film, Night and Fog, in which no sharp difference appears between deportations for political reasons and those for racial motives. Some attempt at legal clarification was made. The amendment of statutory limitation for punishment of criminal actions was adopted in 1964 into French law, which declared that crimes against humanity are imprescriptible by their nature. The 1964 law was at the center of the legal controversy in the Touvier case, including the decisions of the Court of Cassation of February 6, 1975, that crimes of humanity are not covered by ordinary French rules of prescription, but are instead "imprescriptible by their nature." The French Foreign Ministry in July 1979 confirmed the principle of "imprescriptibility." The way was thus open for the prosecutions not only of Touvier but of Klaus Barbie in 1982 on charges of crimes against humanity. Though Barbie challenged the validity of the 1964 law, the Court rejected his argument and ruled that crimes against humanity could be prosecuted in France "whatever the date and place of their commission." The Court of Cassation in 1985 defined "crimes against humanity" as "the inhumane acts and the persecutions which, in the name of a state practicing a hegemonic political ideology, have been committed in a systematic fashion, not only against persons because they belong to a racial or religious group, but also against the adversaries of this (state) policy, whatever the form of their opposition." The perpetrator of a crime against humanity intends to deny the humanity of his victim, and by attacking the individual is also, indirectly, injuring the group to which the victim belongs. By an ironic twist of fate, a term, "hegemony," brought into political parlance by Marxists, first Plekhanov and then Antonio Gramsci, became the test of a fascist regime. Touvier had committed a crime against persons because they were members of a religious group, with the intent of furthering the plan of a state practicing a hegemonic political ideology. He had associated himself with the Nazis' extermination and persecution based on political, racial, or religious motivations. His own group, the Milice, fought "against the Jewish leper and for French purity." The fundamental problem with the Court's introduction of the existence of a " h e g e m o n i c " state as part of the definition of crimes against humanity is that the focus is placed not only on the accused individual's

morality and actions but also on the morality, actions, and ideologies of the state. Touvier was unimportant, a low-level thug, compared with the senior officials whom Klarsfeld pursued, particularly Ren6 Bousquet, Jean Leguay, and Maurice Papon, whose trials would have helped clarify the relationship between Vichy personnel at the highest level and the Nazis and Berlin. The fast two died before coming to trial, while the third was indicted in 1983 but has not been tried. Bousquet, a brilliant civil servant and the youngest prefect in France in 1940, became head of the national police in Vichy in 1942. In that capacity, he agreed that French police would arrest foreign Jews in the numbers wanted by the Germans, though at first refusing to arrest Jews holding French citizenship. The importance of his role is well understood. Darquier de Pellepoix, head of Vichy's Commissariat for Jewish Affairs between May 1942 and February 1944, gave an infamous interview in October 1978 to L'Express from exile in Spain, where he lived after being sentenced to death in absentia in December 1947 for c o n s o r t i n g with the enemy. The interview named Bousquet as responsible for rounding up Jews in both zones of France, especially the Vel d'Hiv roundup. Francois Mitterrand, who maintained cordial relations with Bousquet in the postwar years, during which the latter had a successful business career as an executive and director of French companies and banks, called him a man of "exceptional breadth." Bousquet, remarkably, had avoided any punishment. The High Court in June 1949 sentenced him to five years' loss of civil rights, suspended for acts of resistance. He was never prosecuted for his real crime, that of ordering the French police to round up Jews to be deported and murdered. Political pressure had undoubtedly slowed down investigation of his case, but Klarsfeld's persistence in pursuit of Bousquet finally led to his indictment in 1989 for crimes against humanity. His assassination before trial prevented the revelation of his true history in open court. Bousquet's deputy and delegate in the Occupied Zone, Jean Leguay, the official who had successfully proposed that children be deported, either with their parents or by themselves, was the first Frenchman to be indicted for crimes against humanity, but he died in July 1989 while his case was still being investigated after having been delayed for ten years. Maurice Papon is the quintessential French official who served in some capacity in the Third Republic, Vichy, the Resistance, and the Fourth and Fifth

34 I S O C I E T Y 9 M A Y / J U N E 1 9 9 7

Republics. In postwar France, Papon was Pads police chief from 1958 to 1967 and budget minister from 1978 to 1981, in the government of Prime Minister Raymond Bane; for these posts he was awarded the IAgion d'Honneur. Yet under Vichy, Papon, as secretary-general of the prefecture of the Gironde in 194244, had organized nine convoys of Jews to be sent from the internment camp at Merignac, near Bordeaux, to Drancy and then on to the extermination camps. He ordered French police to escort "the convoys of Israelites" and insisted that the instructions of the SS be executed. This imperturbable official, who symbolizes the collaboration of the prefectorial administration, with no sign of remorse or empathy for his victims sent over 1,600 people, including 240 children, to their deaths. Seemingly protected by the French Justice Ministry, Papon was indicted in 1983. Others were more involved, and became more important, driven by anti-democratic extremism, anti-Semitism, hatred of Freemasonry, and sympathy for Nazism and for its racial views in particular. Strong currents of antiSemitism were present in the regime, which adopted legal and administrative measures of discrimination against Jews, even though Vichy never officially proclaimed that Jews were enemies of the state; nor did P6tain make anti-Semitic speeches. Examining the nature of the Vichy government, the court in the Touvier case held that the regime had a certain ideology, more a grouping of feelings and political animosities than a system of rigorously connected ideas. In this grouping was nostalgia for tradition and for the rural world of old, an attachment to Christianity, and ill will toward those held to be responsible for the defeat of France. Most of the senior supporters of P6tain believed in a German victory. Some were opportunists calling for concessions to the Germans either as a state of necessity or for cynical reasons.

Toward the Acceptance of Responsibility Will the wounds of Vichy ever heal? Only if we act not in an attitude of misguided charity or political cynicism but with an acceptance of responsibility. President Mitterrand, in a conversation in April 1992 with Olivier Wieviorka, took an unhelpful position. Mitterrand said that Bousquet was not a low character like Touvier and that Bousquet had been compromised or had allowed himself to be compromised: "One cannot live all the time on memories or rancor." Unfortunately, Mitterrand did not comment on the vandals who, a month after Touvier was condemned,

desecrated a Jewish cemetery at Rillieux and destroyed the plaque commemorating the seven victims Touvier murdered there. At the core of the problem is responsibility for actions. The ideological thug, the suave, indifferent bureaucrat, the highly intelligent political collaborator, none of whom expressed remorse or regret for their actions or acknowledged their guilt, all were responsible for atrocities in their different ways. Looking again at the photographs in Klarsfeld's book, can anyone doubt that they should have been punished?

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

Robert Aron. The Vichy Regime. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Omer Bartov. Murder in Our Midst. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Marc Bloch. Strange Defeat, reprinted. New York: Octagon, 1968. Bertram M. Gordon. Collaborationism in France during the Second World War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. W. D. Halls. Politics, Society, and Christianity in Vichy France. Oxford: Berg, 1995. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Frederic Schick. Understanding Action. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt. "Exchange of Letters." Encounter 22, no. 1 (1994). Reprinted in Arendt, The Jew as Pariah. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Robert Soucy. French Fascism: The Second Wave, 19331939. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. John F. Sweets. Choices in Vichy France: The French under Nazi Occupation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Assassins of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Pierre Vidal-Naquet. The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Susan Zuccotti. The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Michael Curtis is professor of political science at Rutgers University. He is author of a number of books, including Three against the Third Republic; Comparative Government and Politics (now in its fourth edition); and Western European Integration. He is also the editor of Great Political Theories. Most recently, he has produced an updated edition of Marxism: The Inner Dialogues.