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Chapter 6 Lawyers during the Vichy Regime Exclusion in the Law After the Nazi invasion of Poland,France declared war on the Third Reich in September 1939,but months of what became known as the “phony war” followed. In May 1940 Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. Over 4 million women, men, and children fled their homes in France and pushed southward in a great exodus. Paris and half the territory of France were occupied in less than a month,leaving French society and the political leadership in panic and disarray. The government collapsed, a new government was formed and relocated to the town of Vichy, and full powers were voted to Marshal Philippe Pétain, who signed an armistice with Germany. French territory was divided in two main zones, one occupied by the Germans in the north and a southern zone controlled by the French, though in two years the Nazis would occupy most of France. In a complicated arrangement, French law would govern both zones but German law would take precedence. The Third Republic was effectively abolished. The national government was now called the French State. Its motto changed from “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to “Work, Family, Fatherland,” symbolizing the reactionary orientation of the new regime. As war continued to be fought on other European fronts, French society accommodated itself to a new reality. Independently of Nazi influence, the Vichy regime imposed its ideological program of National Revolution, which placed blame for the defeat on communists, foreigners, Freemasons, and Jews, 134 CHAPTER 6 and rejected them from the national community. If the Third Republic can be described as a duel between two Frances—a republican, Dreyfusard, universalist France on the one hand and a conservative, nationalist, and exclusionary France on the other—it was the latter that,in the vacuum of war,defeat,and occupation, prevailed and was incarnated in the Vichy regime. “Exclusion was consubstantial with the regime,” the historian Denis Peschanski has maintained.1 This exclusionary France denounced the supposed ills of republican France: denatalism, secularism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, urbanism, industrialism, communism, individualism,and democratization. The new values of the National Revolution would encompass a return to ruralism, corporatism, and Catholicism. The new Vichy regime quickly imposed its view of French nationality as a status that could be granted and taken away—a throwback to the arbitrariness of the Old Regime,when withdrawing and conferring nationality was a system of punishment and reward.2 As a means of repressing resistance movements, the laws of 23 July and 10 September 1940 stripped French persons of their nationality for having left the country without permission.3 Some of the most notoriously xenophobic manifestations of Vichy’s National Revolution began in 1940:the 16 July law easing procedures to strip people of French nationality; the 17 July law barring French persons born of a foreign father from the civil service; and the 22 July law undoing naturalizations effectuated since 1927. More than 15,000 persons lost their French nationality as a result of this last law, out of 900,000 who had acquired it between 1927 and 1940.4 Forty percent of these denaturalized persons were Jewish (more than 6,000),whereas it has been estimated that Jews represented only 5 percent of those who were naturalized between 1927 and 1940.5 As Catherine Kessedjian has pointed out, the legal term for loss of nationality, déchéance de la nationalité, exudes a “deep sense of degradation,of disgrace,thus of sanction.”6 Denaturalization was,for many Jews, a prelude to deportation. Lawyers’ and doctors’ interwar mobilization against foreigners and naturalized citizens continued apace throughout the debacle and into the new regime. With discourse and strategy at the ready,their plans for eliminating outsiders fell on sympathetic ears within the Vichy regime, which had quickly implemented its own exclusionary agenda.7 The Vichy regime sought to safeguard various occupational fields from the influence of suspect populations. The civil service was the first economic sector to be purged of persons of foreign origin, Jews, Freemasons, and women.8 French persons “born of a foreign father” became a new target as Vichy legislation narrowed its exclusionary focus on ever smaller sets of outsiders. They were eliminated from the medical profession and from the law bars by the laws of 16 August and 10 September 1940, respectively. In total, about 1,400 doctors and between 200 and 300 lawyers were ousted from their professions for being born of a foreign father...

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