France during World War II: From Defeat to Liberation

Chapter 4: Exclusion

4 Exclusion From its first acts until its ignominious end in 1944, the Vichy regime excluded groups of people from social, cultural, economic, and political life in France. The essence of the new order resided in the dichotomy of inclusion/exclusion as True France attempted to expel the other from its utopian dream of ‘‘Work, Family, Fatherland.’’ Jews, communists , Freemasons, and Gypsies were among those who suffered most from these policies. We are much more aware of this today than people were during the war. French men and women struggling to survive from day to day had little time to be concerned over the plight of others. Even such an astute observer of daily life as François Mitterrand failed to comprehend the significance of Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation .1 In 1994 he claimed that he was so absorbed in his work at the time that he did not notice the fate of the Jews, even though several of his close friends were Jewish. Great newspapers such as the New York Times also paid scant attention to these matters. In July and August 1942, when thousands of Jews were rounded up in France, the Times published only two relatively minor dispatches on the fate of the Jews in France. It focused overwhelmingly on military matters, reporting on the failed August raid on the French port of Dieppe in scores of prominently displayed articles over several weeks. Human rights, genocide, and crimes against humanity were not prominent concepts in 1940. Prejudice dominated the world to a degree foreign to us today. The United States not only excluded nonEuropean immigrants, it prohibited them from becoming citizens until the 1950s. When American statesmen were asked during the war to allow more Jews to enter the country, they refused to consider the Exclusion | 103 proposal, arguing that the American public opposed it. As is evident from Studs Terkels’s interviews with Americans who experienced the war years, prejudices against blacks, Jews, and other so-called undesirables were widespread in the United States. Few Americans shrank from calling blacks ‘‘niggers’’ or Jews ‘‘Yids.’’ Such openly and vehemently expressed sentiments were commonplace both in the military and on the home front, creating an atmosphere of fear among those subjected to them, since almost no one was willing to stand up for the rights of minorities. One consequence of prejudice was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.2 The French were neither better nor worse than the Americans, only different. As we have already seen, during the 1930s French laws gradually restricted foreigners from engaging in certain professions and placed limits on immigration. When war broke out in 1939, the Republic incarcerated refugees and others who seemed to threaten national security. Foreigners in general, whether they were Germans, Jews, or Spaniards, came under suspicion of forming fifth columns and were often put in special camps for the duration of hostilities. Communists, Gypsies, and other questionable French citizens were also restricted or confined. But the Republic did not exclude these groups totally, as Vichy would later do. Democracy in republican France always held out the possibility that onerous laws might be modified or even reversed.3 With France’s defeat in June 1940, the new Vichy regime proceeded to institutionalize a policy of exclusion, with little prodding from the Germans. Marshal Pétain led the way with speeches on the need to return to the earth, to adopt spiritual values in place of the materialist, hedonistic pursuits of the interwar period. These were code words for the exclusion of Jews and others from the national family: in March 1941 the Marshal told Grand Rabbi Schwartz that Jews were not French because they played no role in the nation’s rural life.4 But Pétain never came out openly against the Jews, although his advisers considered having him do so in October 1940; they concluded that the French would turn against him if he publicly supported the newly enacted anti-Semitic laws. As a result, in listing his government’s accomplishments in his October 9, 1940, speech, the Marshal made only 104 | france during world war ii vague references to these laws that few would understand. ‘‘The revision of naturalizations, the law on access to certain professions, the dissolution of secret societies, the search for those responsible for our disaster . . .’’ were some of the allusions to policies directed against...