Moral and Historical Reckonings With the Vichy Regime in Post-War France
Installment 13 of: “The Making of the Modern Internment Regime”
After World War II, Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government of the French Republic emphasized an account of France’s history of resistance to the Nazis over the truth of the preceding Vichy regime’s extensive collaboration with Germany. For decades the French people preferred to believe the propaganda of de Gaulle’s 5th Republic. Eventually, as France’s citizens began to acknowledge the French role in the Holocaust, their calls for the truth about the collaboration occurred in tandem with demands for justice. Many in France wanted to prosecute those responsible for the crimes committed by the Vichy regime. This finally led to the so-called Vichy trials of the late 20th century, which served to punish the surviving members of the regime for its role in the destruction of French Jewry and others.
The Vichy Regime: Collaboration, Resistance, Deportation
“Work, Family, Fatherland.” It replaced the famed ‘Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality’ of France’s prior Liberal Democratic governments.
In 1940, as France was overrun by Germany, the elected government (known a the Third Republic) fell and Marechal Petain established another in the ‘unoccupied zone’ in the southern half of France. His Vichy regime became known for its anti-Semitic practices, collaboration with Nazi Germany, and participation in the Holocaust. The French Resistance emerged shortly after the start of the collaboration between France and Germany, and it opposed both the Nazi occupation and Vichy. Despite the heroic efforts of its members, the resistance was not a dominant force in French society under Vichy.
The French government limited public dialogue about the fact that it actively organized and aided the deportation of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ to Nazi death camps. In an effort to hide the extent of its collaboration, Vichy and its subsequent apologists minimized the extent of the deportations it organized, and claimed that the resulting deaths were lower than those of other occupied countries. In reality, the Vichy regime actually engaged in some of the worst race and ethnic laws in Europe, and actively advanced the deportations of ‘undesirables’ (France, Holocaust Encyclopedia).
Memory of Vichy and the Resistance After WWII
After resisters established a provisional government after the war, he also framed the history of World War II in France as a “monolith of anti-fascist resistance.” Charles de Gaulle did so by highlighting the actions of resistance movements while reducing any discussion of the Vichy regime and the French people’s collaboration with Germany(Scullion, 1999). De Gaulle pinned the faults of Vichy on a few people and focused on France as a nation of resistors. In this way, it was possible to avoid coming to terms with the atrocities committed and to act as though ideals of France had not changed since the Third Republic (Horne, 2014, 2). The provisional government formed a collective memory through the “skillful ‘organization of forgetting’” by means of which it erased all evidence of the concentration camps France established or of the deep collaboration between France and Germany in the execution of the so-called Final Solution (Le Syndrome 12 as cited in Scullion, 1999).
Destruction of Vichy Documents
In 1944, when it was clear the Allies were going to liberate France, Vichy officials tried to destroy all incriminating government documents. Consequently, historians were left with few primary sources documenting the extent of France’s collaboration. This abetted the ‘organized’ forgetting of the Vichy regime’s actions and it shifted research away from its history of collaboration.
However, hiding the truth of the regime “would not be as simple as destroying documents” (Steinlight, 2017, 313). Historians like Robert Paxton and Serge Klarsfeld used German documents and personal testimony to uncover the truths of Vichy. German records and personal testimonies then became the basis for the prosecution of the Vichy officials in the late twentieth century.
How Vichy Was Rationalized
Before the 1970’s, French citizens blamed Vichy officials for the atrocities France committed during the war. Their collective memory had been altered or they had been educated to believe that most Frenchmen were willing resistors rather than eager collaborators.
A series of interlocking myths still shroud Vichy: that France spent the interwar years preparing to refight World War I; that all Vichy’s evil policies sprang from the depraved mind of Laval; that some well-meaning intellectuals, confused initially by Petain’s comforting rhetoric, quickly came to their senses; that 40 million French people courageously resisted the German occupiers. (Sarah Fishman)*
Marcel Ophuls’ documentary The Sorrow and The Pity (1969) revealed that people had been making sense of the Vichy regime by advancing the myths of France as a nation of resistors. The documentary began to question common accounts of the Vichy regime and to break down the “myths that the people of France still need” (Jeffries, 2004).
The Response to Ophuls
Some viewers of Ophuls’ film felt that to highlight a history of collaboration was to minimize the importance of the resistance and de Gaulle’s successes after the war. People also worried that if Ophuls distributed the documentary, it would spread the wrong idea about the French Republic to the international community. French society wanted blame to stay on the fascist political climate of Europe during the war rather than on anti-democratic sentiment at home (Phillips, 2001). And yet, the official accounts of the war proved so successful that even the provocative documentary could not completely change the way citizens continued to make sense of Vichy.
“Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944”
In 1972, Robert Paxton published a groundbreaking work entitled: Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. Paxton proved that “Vichy had been the one to seek out collaboration” in an attempt to advance conservative ideologies in French politics as a protection against the perceived threats of socialism (Horne, 2014, 6).
…Vichy France, [which both] switched the focus in studies of France during World War Two from the Resistance to Vichy and also destroyed the benign interpretation of the latter. (John Horne)**
More than this, Paxton also showed that the anti-Semitism of Vichy’s anti-Semitic program was independent of Germany’s. The truth of France’s war experience was more complicated than what was expressed in the simple belief that France was a nation of resistors. Given its overt acts of discrimination, internment, and deportation of populations it deemed undesirable, France was neither passive nor an active resistor to the project of the Holocaust. Paxton therefore argued that it was necessary for France to abandon the commonplace view that the Vichy regime was “an aberration or parenthesis in French history” if it wanted to come to terms with itself (Jackson, 2001, 10).
People praised Paxton’s book because it genuinely unlocked many of the myths of Vichy. The book explicitly stated that the collaboration of the Vichy regime was for France’s own gain. Vichy officials sought collaboration in order to advance a political agenda hostile to liberalism. No less importantly, Paxton’s research showed how a tradition of rationalizing Vichy as an aberrant had been an attempt to hide this eagerness for collaboration. Paxton’s book shifted the debate from France as a nation of resistors to a discussions about a nation that intentionally collaborated (Jackson, 2001, 12).
The ‘Vichy Syndrome’ and the Resurgence of Repressed Memory
Following the lead of Paxton and Ophuls, Henry Rousso published The Vichy Syndrome in 1991. Rousso argued that the “French looked back upon the war years with a perspective of guilt and shame” (Gordon, 1995, 502). He emphasized that the guilt and moral trauma resulting from the collaboration actually present themselves in a history of successive rationalizations of the Vichy regime (Gordon, 1995).
France had witnessed a “retro-satanisation” of the Occupation, which had shifted attention from French collaboration with the Germans to a more specific focus on the fate of the Jews. (Bertram Gordon)***
With the renewed focus on the fate of the Jews, Rousso suggested that “creative arts became key vehicles for the resurgence of repressed memories and unbidden complexities” (Horne, 2014, 7). So did survivors of Vichy’s horrors. Serge Klarsfeld, a historian who was himself deported as a child, worked to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust by documenting the death of each Jew at at Vichy hands (Whitney, 2007). For Klarsfeld and other members of the Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France, documents of the deportations became “the only memorial…[the victims]..may ever have…it shows that they did exist” (Hellman, 1979). Putting faces to both the victims and the perpetrators made the crimes of Vichy factual. Recognition of the atrocities committed during the Vichy regime would “prevent killers from killing again” (Bernstein, 1987).
This restoration of individual faces and stories to the ultimate victims of Vichy anti-semitism and Nazi genocide stands at the opposite pole to the myth-histories with which we began. (Bertram Gordon)***
Like the Klarsfelds, the historian Denis Peschanski studied the collective character of individual memory and how it translates into the politics of various times and spaces. He felt that the Vichy trials of the 1990’s became a “competition of memories” in which testimonies conflicted with rationalizations of the past (Bohlen, 2015).
In curating a history exhibit about Vichy, Peschanski worked to debunk the perspective that everyone was in the resistance or that everyone was a collaborator. Peschanski allowed the accurate memory of Vichy and its victims to be highlighted by “examin[ing]the questions of legitimacy of power and ‘disobedience’” (de la Baume). The exhibit served as a method for coping with a history of portrayals of the collaboration.
The Legacy of Vichy France
It is in this context of changing rationalizations for and of Vichy, that French citizens began to desire accountability. Many wanted to try Vichy officials who had evaded punishment in the past, especially since a number of them assumed important roles in the French government after the war. The trials proved that the crimes of the regime could no longer be hidden behind the history of myths and rationalizations inaugurated by de Gaulle. To try collaborators would be to render a final account for the sake of Vichy’s victims: “a trial would adduce evidence of French complicity” (Singer, 1993).
1987 — Klaus Barbie. Trial of the German Gestapo member begins in France.
1989-Rene Bousquet. The Secretary General to the Police during the Vichy regime is accused of crimes against humanity.
1993-Rene Bousquet is assassinated shortly before start of his trial.
1998-Maurice Papon, chief of Vichy police, convicted for charges of crimes against humanity.
The evolution of thought that took place after World War II led to the prosecution of Vichy officials in the last decade of the twentieth century. These, in turn, affected public memory of France’s own role in the Holocaust.
Block Quote Sources
*Fishman, S., 1995. The Power of Myth. The Journal of Modern History, 67(3), pp.666–673.
**Horne, J., 2014. The Paxton Revolution.
***Gordon, B.M., 1995. The “Vichy Syndrome” Problem in History. French Historical Studies, 19(2), pp.495–518.
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Whitney, C.R., 1997. Vichy Figure Goes on Trial in Deportation of Jews. The New York Times.
