Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (review)

The verdict is in—Vichy France, though short-lived, willingly collaborated in the heinous crimes of the Third Reich. It defined Jews in line with Nazi racial thinking (three grandparents of the "Jewish race" or two if a spouse practiced the religion). It enacted some 168 laws excluding Jews from social, political, cultural, and intellectual life. It "Aryanized" Jewish property and participated directly and often exclusively in rounding up and deporting Jews (Curtis and others have shown there can be no doubt that Vichy officials knew exactly where the trains were headed). The power-drunk Vichy deputy prime minister Pierre Laval himself persuaded German authorities to arrest and deport Jewish children under sixteen in the Unoccupied Zone. Indeed it was Adolf Eichmann (at his trial in Jerusalem) who pointed out the crucial nature of Vichy's cooperation.

While Verdict on Vichy focuses on the state's antisemitic policies, Curtis also outlines the extent to which "collaboration," a term introduced in the armistice between the new Vichy government and Nazi Germany, was taken to heart by leaders in business, banking, law, academia, departmental administration, and other sectors of French public life. Even those who merely sought to "accommodate" the Germans, a term introduced by Philippe Burrin in his masterful work France under the Germans, largely failed to speak out against Vichy's cruelest policies. Some, like the prefect of Vienne, Louis Bourgain, "went even further than the Germans suggested" in monitoring and interning Jews (p. 163). As Curtis asserts more than once, no senior official or member of the Conseil d'État quit his post or raised serious objections to the antisemitic policies. Collaboration, in fact, extended to supplying German military forces in North Africa and allowing the Japanese to use bases in Indochina. Curtis is certainly justified in calling the collaborationist policy "a French invention, not a German demand" (p. 255). "The verdict on Vichy," he convincingly concludes, "must be guilty" (p. 354).

If that's the argument of Curtis's book, it's certainly one that represents an historiographic consensus that has been solidifying at least since Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton published Vichy France and the Jews in 1981. And since much of what appears in Curtis's volume is well known, it seems fair to ask what motivated him to write it. Based overwhelmingly on secondary works and published memoirs, Verdict on Vichy reads as if it were prompted by France's long overdue public avowal of complicity in the Holocaust. Only with the death of François Mitterand, who worked for the regime prior to his opportunistic switch to the resistance and, during his fourteen-year presidency, maintained a close friendship with one of its most disreputable figures—the police chief René Bousquet—did French leaders begin to confront the "Vichy syndrome," the collective postwar amnesia sanctioned by the Gaullist myth that Vichy never represented the true France. Now that the French Catholic Church, police union, doctors' association, and other groups have voluntarily issued statements of extraordinary remorse and contrition concerning their roles, Curtis seems to be offering a historian's definitive judgment.

The verdict on Vichy has thus already been rendered by the guilty themselves. Be that as it may, there is certainly value in looking at the French case in a comprehensive manner—the main strength of this book. Moreover, France fascinates in large part because of the vast swing in its political culture from the early establishment of a democratic republican state to the implementation of Nazi racial policy. How did the nation intrinsically associated with "liberty, equality, and fraternity" metamorphose into "the only regime claiming autonomy and sovereignty which freely surrendered its Jewish population in areas that were not occupied, as well as those that were, to the Germans" (p. 186; though the point is debatable in light of the ready willingness to deport Jews manifested by such semi-independent states or Nazi allies as Slovakia, Croatia, and...