Why Jacques Chirac Should Be Remembered
Our family lived in France in 1992–3 and then from 1999 to 2007, long enough to witness that the terrible 20th century was now history. France, it should be remembered, had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world and is even today the third largest home to Jews in the world. In that last decade of that century, Jacques Chirac publicly recognized the participation of the French in the German sweeps of Jewish homes and schools that led to the death of 76,000 people, many French citizens and many desperate refugees from the north and east of Europe.
I confronted the history of this dark period of France during German occupation by accident during my first year when I visited France. I was a guest at a national research center that was attached to one of the Grandes Écoles in engineering and sciences. At that time, I was collecting financial data from annual reports in the research stacks of the National Archives on French firms.
Nearby was a pile of papers. On the top, there was in handwriting the word Germania, a Roman name for northern Europe but also for Charlemagne’s territories in the Middle Ages. I was told not to look at these papers, and frequently someone came by to make sure I was not. Curiosity peaked, I opened up the first file. I realized it consisted of documents relating to the German occupation during World War II and particularly to the denunciation of Jewish households or to inquiries into the purchase of confiscated Jewish properties, often by neighbors. Some of these properties belonged to famous German Jewish families that owned multinational businesses, some located in France.
The racial language of the Nazis is a hard read especially when unprepared. While I knew already the German Nazi language from novels and histories, it was all the more destabilizing to see the same terms translated so starkly into French. So entjuden became déjuiver, to de-jew. Such brutal language for such brutal crimes, like a knife in the eye.
For whatever reason, I did not read many files. I was permitted to be in the research stacks on a special basis, I had little time to complete the research I had set out to do anyway, I felt too saddened, even more so because the Archives were close to the Marais, the then vibrant Jewish quarters in Paris. I did share my finding with a friend who was one of the leading economic historians in France, and returned to the US in 1993 with my wife and two young children.
It was not however as if I forgot.
As the recollections and histories of the French participation in the rounding up of Jews during the war began to mount in the 1990s, the deeply complicated story of a much beloved President Francois Mitterand became published. There is little doubt that he was profoundly close in the 1930s to despicable anti-Semites, some of whom were protected in France after the war. Mitterand had not accepted French responsibility for participation in the atrocities and confiscation of Jewish properties.
All of this is prelude to the understanding of the courage of President Chirac’s decision in 1995 to recognize French participation in these crimes. Two years later, came out the Mattéoli Commission Report that detailed the history of these crimes based upon archival materials, including no doubt those that I saw guarded from my view.
By the time we returned to France, there were plaques on buildings and streets in Paris that marked where Jews, and Jewish children, were swept up from their homes or schools. I wondered as I stopped to read their text, did the parents to these children run to their schools in panic and tears, fearing the worse, that their child vanished that day.
Every country has its crimes, its secrets. It was courage to address a silent history that all already knew. It’s my reason that I remember Jacques Chirac in admiration.
