The Ostracism and Internment of Jews in Vichy France
Installment 6 of: ‘The making of the Modern Internment Regime.’
For France, World War 2 is considered a particularly dark time. The Nazi occupation of northern France and the establishment of the fascist and anti-Semitic Vichy regime in the south put France’s Enlightenment values to the test. While the Vichy regime remains a shameful part of France’s past, questions persist about France’s responsibility for the thousands of Jews in France who lost their lives during the Holocaust. Were Vichy’s laws truly unprecedented? What effect did the preceding government’s practices have on Vichy’s methods of ostracism? To what extent did the Nazis force the Vichy regime to act?
From Surrender to the Establishment of Vichy
When the French army surrendered to the invading German forces on June 14, 1940, France was divided into the northern “Occupied Zone” and the southern “Unoccupied Zone” (also called the “Free” Zone). The government of the south operated out of the city of Vichy and was headed by Maréchal Philippe Pétain. Vichy had a degree of autonomy, but was required to collaborate with the Germans occupying the north.
Vichy was allowed to create its own laws as long as they coincided with the Germans’ goals. However, in an effort to prove its autonomy and legitimacy, Vichy created many anti-Semitic and xenophobic laws that were even more harsh than those advanced by the Germans.
1940 (May): Review of naturalizations since 1927
1940 (10 September): Seizure of denaturalized people’s property
1940 (3 October): First Statut des Juifs
1940 (4 October): Internment of foreign Jews
1940 (27 October): Mandatory French identification cards
1941 (30 May): Jews required to report change of address
1941 (2 June): Second Statut des Juifs
1941 (22 July): Aryanization of Jewish property
1942 (10 February): Jews forbidden to change their names
1942 (9 November): Jews required to obtain police-issued documents to leave home commune
1942 (11 December): “Juif” required to be stamped on identification cards for all Jews
The timeline above shows some important examples of the anti-Semitic and xenophobic laws that Vichy passed. Vichy’s general path towards the ostracism of Jews involved the following steps: definiton, aryanization, denaturalization, and internment, and deportation. Additionally, foreign Jews were often subject to discriminatory laws before they were applied to French citizens of Jewish ancestry.
Defining a Jew
The First Statut des Juifs
The first step in ostracizing the Jews was to define them legally. Vichy first defined a Jew in the law of 3 October 1940 known as the “Statut des Juifs”. The first article of the law reads:
“For the purposes of the present law, a Jew is one who has three grandparents of the Jewish race; or has two grandparents of that race, if his or her spouse is Jewish.”*
The law then went on to list several occupations from which Jews were banned including government and military positions. This law followed the similar Occupied Zone law of 27 September 1940. However, this German law did not include the marriage qualification clause included in the Vichy law (Weisberg, 1996, pp. 39–40). This meant that in “Free France,” more people became targets for discrimination than in Nazi-occupied France.
The Second Statut des Juifs
Less than a year later, Vichy published an amended “Statut des Juifs” in the law of 2 June 1941. This second Statut des Juifs clarified that people with three Jewish grandparents were considered Jews regardless of religious affiliation. However, people with two Jewish grandparents were considered Jews if they practiced the faith or were married to a Jew. It clarified that a grandparent belonged to the “Jewish race” if they practiced Judaism. The law also imposed more quotas on the number of Jews allowed in certain professions and even on the number of Jews allowed in universities (Weisberg, 1996, p. 59).
The fact that the Vichy law had a broader definition of a Jew than the German law indicates that a fight for legitimacy and sovereignty played a role in its policies. By creating a law that ostracized more people than their occupiers, Vichy asserted that its laws were its own and not merely acts of compliance with German orders.
Aryanization
Having defined the status of the Jew in French law, Vichy could begin ‘aryanizing’ Jewish property. In the law of 22 July 1941, Vichy gave appointed administrateurs provisoires the power to either liquidate or place in Aryan hands any property seized by the state (Weisberg, 1996, pp. 250-254). Vichy was particularly zealous about this, requiring very little German assistance.
While the law of 22 July 1941 is typically considered the start of the aryanization policy, foreigners had already faced the consequence of the aryanization initiative for nearly a year by that time. The law of 10 September 1940 allowed for property seizure of recently denaturalized people (Weisberg, 1996, p. 251). It was only after Jews had been formally defined as aliens, that Vichy could subject Jewish citizens of France to the same form of ostracism it had applied to foreigners.
Denaturalization
The law of 22 July 1940 charged the Minister of Justice to review all naturalizations which occurred between 1927 and 1940. The purpose of this review was to begin the process of denaturalization, which is when a country takes away citizenship from a person who had previously immigrated there and successfully completed the naturalization process to become a legal citizen. The Commission de révision des naturalisations rescinded French citizenship of those vaguely deemed “unworthy to be one of us” (Laguerre, 1988). This law did not explicitly target Jews, but once the Germans pressured Vichy to denaturalize Jews in 1942, it had this data and two years of practice in the art of denaturalization to put the policy into effect.
Vichy also relied on its census to denaturalize Jews. In the law of 27 October 1940, Vichy mandated that anyone over the age of 18 be required to carry French identification cards that documented their citizenship status and, if applicable, their status as a Jew (Piazza, 2017). On 11 December 1940, Vichy mandated that the word “Juif” be marked on the IDs of all Jews using an embossed stamp so it could not be erased (Marrus and Paxton, 1981, p. 148).
Vichy’s practices laid the groundwork for denaturalization, making it easy to carry out German requests. More than 15,000 people lost their French nationality because of Vichy’s laws (Laguerre, 1988). These laws point to the nativist, religious, and ethnic nationalism that was integral to the Vichy regime.
“This regime is also deeply national: it is mounting a very clear reaction against the cosmopolitanism inspired by the philosophy of the eighteenth century” (Maurice Duverger)**
Denaturalization paved the way for internment, because in order to detain its Jewish population, Vichy had to establish a legal framework for transforming Jews into foreigners in their own country.
Internment
At the end of the Third Republic, France received many refugees, including those fleeing Franco’s rule in Spain. Turning against its previous open-door policy, the government introduced many laws legalizing the internment of “undesirable foreigners” in camps. Subsequently, several laws were passed that allowed the state to intern more and more groups as part of war-time emergency security measures.
1938 (May): undesirable foreigners sent to assigned residences
1938 (12 November): people presumed to pose a natural security threat and undesirable foreigners sent to assigned residences or camps
1939 (12 April): refugees required to perform military service or obligatory work
1939 (20 September): German male refugees under 50 years old interned
1939 (18 November): all suspects, French or foreign allowed to be interned
Vichy continued the Third Republic’s tradition of internment, but it specifically targeted Jewish foreigners. Vichy passed the law of 4 October 1940- just one day after defining Jews- allowing its officers to intern any foreign Jews in “special camps” or to assign them to “forced residences” (Weisberg, 1996, p. 56).
This is another example of how Vichy legislation often affected foreign Jews before it was applied to the Jews of France. These xenophobic laws, however, set a precedent for how Vichy would accomplish its goal of interning its Jewish citizens.
After the 4 October law, Vichy then legalized internment of Jews caught violating rules outlined in the Statut des Juifs, such as practicing professions newly forbidden to Jews. This law was included in the second Statut des Juifs, which extended Vichy’s internment policies to its own citizens (Marrus and Paxton, 1981, p. 167).
At this point, Vichy had granted itself the legal power to intern foreign Jews and “criminal” Jews, but it could not legally intern law-abiding Jewish citizens of France. Vichy could not simply intern French citizens without risking the perception that its actions were illegitimate. As a result, it had to denaturalize Jewish citizens. Because Vichy already had the legal framework for interning foreigners, it simply had to make French Jews foreigners and it could then intern them without creating new laws.
It is important to note that Vichy did not revoke the citizenship of all Jews, but only those naturalized within a certain period. It seems that Vichy may have been willing to sacrifice immigrant Jews to save “its own Jews” from internment camps. Despite the government’s eagerness to rid the economy of all Jews, and otherwise discriminate against them, Vichy considered its native Jewish population undeserving of internment.
This sacrifice of foreign Jews and of legal Jewish immigrants backfired, however, and ended up causing, rather than preventing, the eventual internment of French Jews. Because Vichy was so fervent in the ‘definition’ and ‘aryanization’ stages of exclusion, Germans learned to expect Vichy to carry out the internments that naturally followed. This, coupled with Vichy’s already existing internment policy towards foreign Jews, equipped the Germans to press the legal rationale needed to intern French Jews (Weisberg, 1996, p. 357).
Deportations
The Jews interned in French camps were later deported to extermination camps- mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Germany. In the southern zone, Jews who were scattered across several camps were consolidated at the Rivesaltes camp in the summer and early fall of 1942. The camp served as the southern zone’s “assembly center” for Jews and it deported 2,289 Jews to Drancy in the northern zone in nine convoys (Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes).
From Drancy, Jews were deported to Auschwitz where most were exterminated. Only 84 of the 2,289 Jews deported from Rivesaltes returned after the war. In all of France, 75,000 Jews were deported between March 1942 and August 1944. Less than 4,000 returned (Mémorial du camp de Rivesaltes).
France’s Legacy
Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation was unethical, but its policies were not entirely unprecedented. Many of its internment policies were inherited from the Third Republic. This shows that ostracism is not merely a function of authoritarian government, but has deep-rooted sentiments in a society.
France’s xenophobia proved fatal to its Jewish population. In its eagerness to intern foreign Jews, the state laid the groundwork for interning its own Jewish citizens. Even more toxic than France’s xenophobia was its insecurity concerning sovereignty under German occupation. Vichy subjected a greater number of Jews to ostracism than the Nazis and eagerly aryanized their property in an effort to assert its rule. To appear legitimate and autonomous, it could not merely apply the German ordinances or let the German officials conduct the aryanization and internment practices. Instead, Vichy had to distinguish its laws from those of Germany and carry them out with enough zeal to make ostracism seem to be its policy.
Vichy’s prioritization of politics over people shows its inhumanity. But this inhumanity did not come from Germany. These laws were French, and France deserves to bear a part of the responsibility for Vichy’s atrocities. Vichy’s policies grievously harmed the Jewish community in France, and set troubling precedents for the future global refugee order. Vichy made internment the norm for dealing with outsiders and it rendered the refugee question a question of national interests instead of humanitarianism.
Block quotation sources
*(Weisberg, 1996, p. 39); **Maurice Duverger, as cited in (Marrus and Paxton, 1981, p. 145)
Bibliography
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