Chrétiens et juifs sous Vichy (1940–1944): Sauvetage et désobéissance civile (review)

Since the end of the Second World War the turbulent historiography of the Vichy regime has been abundant and diverse. Ranging from the shaping of the past through the immediate postwar lens (when some saw Pétain's Vichy as the "shield" that had protected France against total occupation), to the post-Paxton revolutionary rewriting that uncovered and showcased widespread French collaboration, and on to the nuanced current studies of local socio-cultural history, the pendulum has swung in both directions.¹ Marcel Ophüls' 1971 film Le chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), which portrayed French attentisme (wait-and-see-ism), further undercut postwar visions of the "nation of resisters." Michael Marrus's analytical contribution to Paxton's line reexamined French responsibility for the persecution and deportation of the Jews of France. After such historiographical milestones scholars continued to examine various levels and means of collaboration, elaborating on Vichy's political processes and the ways in which "ordinary" French women and men coped. For example, Philippe Burrin's 1995 La France à l'heure allemande tinted the "nation of collaborators" in shades of gray. Within this broad examination of the culpability of regime and people for the crimes of World War II, scholars have focused on public opinion, French antisemitism, the role of women, the French colonies during the war, and of course resistance and rescue—this latter sometimes marginalized by the focus on collaboration.

Following recent methodological trends, Limore Yagil's study of civil disobedience, resistance, and rescue complicates and deepens our understanding of various social groups within French society and how they reacted to German occupation and the Vichy regime.² Yagil shows that, similarly to collaboration, resistance and rescue were heterogeneous. The author offers a timely addition to the literature in its entirety and a reconsideration of certain responses of the population in the face of persecution of their Jewish neighbors. She also has achieved an important analysis of France in minutiae. Rather than considering solely the top governmental levels of French collaboration, Yagil has shifted the focus to the regional and departmental. In so doing, Yagil aims at answering an exceedingly important and elusive question: whereas in other parts of Europe the Jews were nearly wiped out (Poland, for instance, or even the Netherlands), why in France were approximately 75 percent of the Jews able to survive? What or who can account for this relatively high survival rate?

Yagil finds the answer in the French population itself. She focuses on three major groups. One is the thousands of civil servants who essentially kept the country running. Many of them were in a position to suppress or to support local efforts to resist, to help Jews, and to rescue. She also reconsiders Christian resistance and rescue as personified by both Catholics and Protestants, clergy and laity. Finally Yagil looks at armed and other resistance networks. Particularly striking is Yagil's demonstration that aid to Jews began in 1940, not only after summer 1942 as has previously been the usual contention. She finds continuity between those individuals and organizations who helped Jews and others before the war and those who helped during the occupation.

The first part of Yagil's book consists of a general study that situates resistance and rescue within the context of French defeat and the birth of Vichy. The author examines the political antisemitism of Vichy and its role vis-à-vis collaboration with the Germans in the disenfranchisement, arrest, and deportation of Jews. Here too Yagil examines both the Catholic and the Protestant churches as institutions, situating the war years against the background of the philosophical introspection both churches underwent in the 1920s and 1930s. The author points out that many prominent religious thinkers had warned of the rise of the far right, fascism, and, subsequently, Nazism and its inherent anti-Christian core. Her examination of the Catholic Church in...