Vichy France (29 page)

The next step was to roll back the naturalization process by which a number of these refugees had become French citizens. A simplification of the naturalization procedure in 1927 had allowed many “to become French too easily.” No doubt, some of them had not acquired perfect purity of tongue along with their naturalization papers. On 22 July 1940 Justice Minister Raphael Alibert, an avowed monarchist whose sourness toward republicans was heightened by his successive failures in business after resigning from the Council of State in 1923, set up a Comsion for the Revision of Naturalizations to review all new grants
of French citizenship since 10 August 1927. Of some 500,000 dossiers examined, 15,154 new Frenchmen had their citizenship revoked. Of these, 6,307 were Jews. The first step in the “purification” of the French nation had been taken.
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Inexorably, purification turned inward to single out what Maurras liked to call “internal foreigners,” un-French Frenchmen. It was perhaps the counterpart to Fifth Column thinking on the other side. But the habit of accusing certain groups of Frenchmen of being corrupting influences in the nation had been ingrained in conservatives by forty years of Maurrassian attribution of all French decline to the
métèques
—an ugly word suggesting animal breeding that Maurras applied to the three parts of “anti-France”: Protestants, Masons, and Jews. Defeat cried out for scapegoats, and scapegoats were ready to hand.

Among Maurras’
métèques
, Protestants no longer offered a target to conservatives. Indeed, the rather closed, austere Parisian world of Protestant banking and high civil servant families was well-represented among the notables who stepped forward to replace the Third Republic politicians. By 1940 the religious issue that divided Catholic and Protestant in 1900 had long since given way to an antisocialist issue that united them. One finds such Protestant notables at Vichy as Maurice Couve de Murville, the highly capable director of foreign exchange at the Finance Ministry until the spring of 1943 (and twenty-five years later, prime minister of the Fifth Republic); François Charles-Roux, secretary-general of the Foreign Office in late 1940; General Brécard, grand chancellor of the Légion d’honneur; Gaston Bruneton, commissioner for French laborers working in Germany, and so on. The leading Protestant pastor, Marc Boegner, was a member of the National Council. The only anti-Protestant remark I have found during the whole Vichy period is a suggestion to the Papal Nuncio by Yves Bouthillier that
Charles-Roux’ Protestantism made him sympathetic to England.
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The other
métèques
were less fortunate. The Vichy regime took seriously the conspiratorial view that Masonic Lodges, those small-town meeting places of politicians and businessmen from the Third Republic’s center, were a kind of clandestine shadow government. They were reputed to intervene in personnel questions, advancing the careers of radicals and moderate socialists and retarding those of good Catholics. The virulence and ubiquity among French conservatives of a Masonic devil-theory is baffling to foreigners until one remembers that the lodges and the church had been fighting each other tooth and claw since the late eighteenth century. Unlike the Scottish-rite Masons of North America, the Grand Loge de France and the Grand-Orient de France had gone beyond anticlericalism to outright anti-religion after 1877. The church, in turn, forbade any good Catholic to belong. By the late nineteenth century, the lodges were indeed more than just social clubs. They were part of the web of friendship, shared views, and organization that bound together the partisans of the militant lay Republic—village teachers, shopkeepers, and doctors—against the village curé, nobleman, and monarchist notables. Indeed it is established that the lodges did operate an unofficial intelligence system for the pro-Dreyfus majority after 1899, collecting information about which army officers in the provinces were republican and which went to mass. The revelation of these secret card files in 1905 (the “affaire des fiches”) allowed frightened conservatives to imagine what other horrors went on behind the lodges’ sealed doors. More than just an old enemy, the lodges were a surrogate of the militant anticlerical petit-bourgeois republic, a voodoo doll into which one stuck pins in order to get at the real body.

Justice Minister Raphael Alibert attacked the lodges at once. There is no evidence of the German pressures on which Laval later blamed the whole business.
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On 13 August 1940 all
secret societies were abolished. Public officials and civil servants were required to swear that they were not (or were no longer) members. Further acts were taken against Masons in the general tightening up of August 1941. The names of some 14,600 officeholders in the lodges were published, presumably to reveal those who brazenly and illegally continued to hold official functions and also to expose them to public obloquy. Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque nationale and scholar of the eighteenth-century Masonic precursors of the French Revolution, began going through seized documents to unearth the secrets of Masonry under the Third Republic. These were to be published in
Les Documents Maçonniques
, which appeared for about a year after October 1941 under the editorship of Robert Vallery-Radot. There were a few surprises: Marcel Peyrouton, Vichy interior minister in the fall of 1940 and then ambassador to Argentina, had to be given special exemption from the law of 13 August 1940.
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But by and large, the results were as disappointing as were the contents of the Yalta documents in 1955 to Senators Joseph R. McCarthy and Styles Bridges, who had forced the State Department to publish them early out of series. The main effect was to discredit a legend, to antagonize thousands more middling Frenchmen who would probably otherwise have supported the regime, and to reward a few more conservatives with vacant places.

This brings us to the blackest mark on the whole Vichy experience: anti-Semitism. It is vital to expose the French roots of early Vichy anti-Jewish measures, for nowhere else has the claim of German pressure and French passivity been more insistent. It is true that, from 1942 on, the German project of deportation was imposed upon France by fiat and despite a certain amount of Vichy foot-dragging. At the beginning, however,
the Germans cared so little for French internal matters that France was used as a dumping area for German Jews. On 23–24 October 1940, over intense French government objections, six thousand German Jews were sent into France from Western Germany.
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Just as France was not included in the “Middle European Great Economic Region” of German peace plans, so it was not considered part of the area to be “purified” of Jews.
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In 1940, therefore, an indigenous French anti-Semitism was free to express its own venom.

Long before the Germans began to apply any pressure, the Vichy government began setting up a purge and quota system. A law of 3 October 1940 excluded Jews from elected bodies, from positions of responsibility in the civil service, judiciary, and military services, and from positions influencing cultural life (teaching in public schools, newspaper reporting or editing, direction of films or radio programs). A law of 4 October authorized the prefects to intern foreign Jews in special camps or assign them to forced residence. A law of 7 October repealed the Crémieux law of 1871, which had extended French citizenship to the indigenous Jews of Algeria. A law of 27 August 1940 had already repealed a law of 21 April 1939 that penalized anti-Semitic excesses in the press. From the beginning, the government singled Jews out for special penalties and sanctioned hostile attitudes toward them. Jews were excluded altogether from the department of the Allier, where Vichy was located.
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In view of what was to come, it may seem casuistical to observe that Vichy anti-Semitism rested upon different bases from Nazi anti-Semitism. Left to itself, Vichy would probably have stopped short at job discrimination and measures calculated to hasten the further emigration of foreign Jews. Vichy xenophobia
was more cultural and national than racial, in a French assimilationist tradition. Vichy displayed no more intolerance toward blacks, for example, than had the Third Republic. Henry Lémery, the Martinique lawyer who was among Pétain’s closest cronies in the Senate, was minister of colonies in June–July 1940 and a confidant thereafter. Senegalese units were excluded from the Armistice Army only upon German order, in memory of their presence in the Rhineland in the 1920’s.
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What most Frenchmen required of outsiders was assimilation, the unreserved adoption of French culture. A black man like Lémery was altogether French, but even the republic had had running battles with gypsies, whose mobility confounded the
état civil
, and with Breton mothers who insisted upon giving their children names unpronounceable in Paris. Traditional conservative French xenophobia demanded cultural conformity (which any individual may acquire) more insistently than physical resemblence.

Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, therefore, always exempted Jewish war veterans and long-established families from some of the rigors of the law. As Darlan explained to a scornful Abetz on 5 March 1941, Marshal Pétain insisted upon treating those who had served in the French Army differently from foreign Jews. The French are not a race, argued Thierry-Maulnier in the
Revue universelle
, but a melting pot of diverse peoples welded into a nation. Pétain seems to have consulted the Vatican on the permissible limits of anti-Semitism. Ambassador Léon Bérard wrote him a long personal letter on 2 September 1941 assuring him that an “authorized person at the Vatican” had said that the church would not start any quarrel over restricting certain citizens’ access to jobs or over limiting Jews’ actions in society. The church’s quarrel with fascist and Nazi “racism” rested on their refusal to agree that a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon conversion to Catholicism and on their refusal of intermarriage even after conversion. The Vatican spokesman took issue only with the first article of the law of 3 October 1940 (which clashes in spirit with the exemptions elsewhere in the text) defining Jews racially
as anyone with three Jewish grandparents, whatever the religion of the present generation. There were racist anti-Semites in France, and with Darquier de Pellepoix in 1942 they even entered the government. But, as long as Vichy had a free hand in Jewish matters, a Catholic and national anti-Semitism rather than a racial anti-Semitism lay at the base of French policy.
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Meanwhile, the German authorities were going their own way in the Occupied Zone. From 20 May 1940 on, they assigned provisional administrators to enterprises whose owners had fled and forbade Jews who had fled to return. A census ordered on 18 September 1940 was the first German ordinance to single out Jews. Then, on 18 October 1940, provisional administrators were assigned to all Jewish property. The third ordinance of 26 April 1941 gave the provisional administrators the power to sell Jewish properties to Aryans or to liquidate them, with proceeds going to the state. Thus a number of Frenchmen in the Occupied Zone became beneficiaries of an act of spoliation no less direct than the Rosenberg office’s seizure of Jewish art treasures in Paris at the same time. By July 1943 provisional administrators were running 39,000 Jewish enterprises in the Occupied Zone (28,000 businesses and 11,000 buildings), of which 12,700 (12,000 businesses and 700 buildings) had already been “Aryanized” or liquidated, often at a fraction of their prewar worth. As in the French Revolution, a new class of purchasers of
biens nationaux
was being created, and, as was done in 1815, the Germans expected to write the legitimacy of these new property titles into the peace treaty.
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Efforts to block these German practices in the fall of 1940 having failed, the Vichy government in 1941 succumbed to the
temptation to try to restore French sovereignty over Jewish affairs in the Occupied Zone. Not that Vichy regretted German efforts to reduce Jewish influence in the economy. But “Aryanization” all too often meant Germanization. Already, in the fall of 1940, General de la Laurencie, the French government’s representative in Paris, concentrated his efforts upon obtaining assurances that almost all the provisional administrators would be French. In early December a Service du Contrôle des Administrateurs Provisoires within the Ministry of Industrial Production, under Pierre-Eugène Fourr ier, former governor of the Bank of France, attempted to “oversee in the name of the French government the organization of Jewish enterprises demanded by the German authorities.”
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As soon as his position was assured after the crisis over Laval, Darlan took further steps to recapture French initiative over policy toward Jews. In his first serious talk with Abetz on March 5, 1941, Darlan discussed the creation of a central office for Jewish affairs within the French government. The project was all the more acceptable to Abetz since German security and police officials at Paris had been urging the same thing.
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On 23 March he named Xavier Vallat commissioner-general for Jewish affairs, with rank of under-secretary in the French cabinet. Vallat, a nationalist deputy frightfully mutilated in World War I, who played a flamboyant role in right-wing veterans’ organizations and in General Curières de Castelnau’s
Fédération Nationale Catholique
between the wars, had never hidden his anti-Semitism. In June 1936, as Léon Blum assumed the office of premier in the Popular Front, Vallat had risen to note this
“historic moment” on which, for the first time, this “ancient Gallo-Roman country” was to be governed by “a subtle Talmudist.” As Pétain’s first minister for veterans’ affairs, he had realized the interwar activists’ dream of a single veterans’ organization, the Légion Nationale des Combattants, assigned a leading role in public affairs. His chauvinism in this office had made the German authorities in Paris nervous. He was no less blunt as commissioner-general for Jewish affairs. He once lectured the SS officer Theodor Dannecker with the assertion that “I am an older anti-Semite than you. I could be your father in these matters.”
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