The Vichy regime in France was established on July 10, 1940, following the French surrender to Germany. The terms of the armistice divided France into an occupied zone covering the north and west of the country, and the so-called free zone in the south. Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of the First World War for his role in the defence of Verdun, became the leader of the new regime, having been granted full powers by both chambers of parliament, writes Jim Wolfreys in this feature article for Jacobin.
Pétain and his entourage saw the defeat of France and the collapse of the Third Republic as a chance to wipe out the legacy of permissiveness and decadence represented by the left-wing Popular Front government of the 1930s and the French Revolution. The Vichy ruler dispensed with parliamentary democracy and engaged in a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany, hailing it as a new beginning for France — a “National Revolution.” Charles Maurras, the ideologue of the antisemitic Action Française movement, welcomed these developments as a “divine surprise.”
National Myth
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, a carefully constructed national myth obscured the reality of the Vichy regime. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, propagated that myth, and historians echoed it for many years. School textbooks depicted wartime France as a nation of resisters who had refused to collaborate with the occupier. Influential historical accounts, like Robert Aron’s Histoire de Vichy, depicted Pétain as a “shield” and De Gaulle as a “sword,” each of whom had been necessary in their different ways for the defense of French interests.
At the time of the liberation, De Gaulle claimed that “only a handful of scoundrels” had behaved badly during the occupation: the rest of the country could look themselves in the eye as patriots. This “sublime half-lie,” as Henry Rousso dubbed it, formed the basis for postwar attempts at national reconciliation, symbolized in 1964 by the transfer of the remains of resistance hero Jean Moulin to the Pantheon in an elaborate two-day ceremony.
Although critical accounts of the regime did appear in French during this period, such as Henri Michel’s Vichy: Année 40, it was research by foreign historians that overturned these postwar conceptions of the regime. After the publication of studies by Stanley Hoffmann, Alan Milward, and Eberhard Jäckel (whose Frankreich in Hitlers Europa has yet to be translated into French), it was Robert O. Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 that blew away the established consensus about Vichy as a structure that protected French interests and resisted Nazi demands.
Coming in the wake of the May 1968 revolt and the death of De Gaulle, Paxton’s book turned the study of Vichy on its head, with an impact matched by very few historical works, inspiring talk of a “Paxtonian revolution.” As Paxton himself has been careful to stress, it was May ’68 that had proved the decisive element here, as “students began challenging their elders’ reticence,” and the French started to confront “the dark side of their response to Nazi occupation.”
Collaboration, Paxton argued, was not merely a catastrophe forced upon France by military defeat, but part of an internal French conflict with a much longer history. It was something actively sought by the Vichy leaders, not a demand placed upon France by Germany. Conservative, authoritarian, and counterrevolutionary traditions incubated in France itself underpinned the politics of the regime. Vichy was not a “lesser evil.”
Vichy and the Holocaust
This applied with particular force to Vichy’s treatment of the Jewish population in France. The regime enacted antisemitic laws of its own volition. From July 1940, it reviewed the cases of people naturalized as French by legislation passed in 1927: more than 15,000 people lost French citizenship in this way, 6,000 of whom were Jews. In August 1940, the Vichy rulers repealed the 1939 Marchandeau Law that had made it illegal to stigmatize any group of people in the press on the basis of their race or religion.
In October 1940, the first Jewish statute defined someone as being “of Jewish race” if they had three Jewish grandparents, or two Jewish grandparents and a Jewish spouse. The authorities restricted Jewish employment in the army, the public sector and liberal professions, and granted prefects permission to put foreign Jews under police surveillance or intern them in camps.
A second Jewish statute in 1941 reinforced and extended these measures. Jewish businesses were taken over or closed down. In July 1942, French police officers rounded up 13,000 “stateless” Jews in Paris and brought them to the Winter Velodrome. Other raids took place the following year across the south of France, and in eastern France in 1944.
In total, 76,000 Jews were deported from France to the concentration camps, most of them passing through the Drancy detention center outside Paris. Very few survived. Nearly 2,000 of those deported were under six years old; over 6,000 were under thirteen. As Paxton and Michael Marrus noted in their book Vichy France and the Jews, first published in 1981:
When the Germans began systematic deportation and extermination of Jews in 1942, Vichy’s rival antisemitism offered them more substantial help than they found anywhere else in western Europe, and more even than they received from such allies as Hungary and Romania.
Apologists of the regime initially greeted Paxton’s Vichy France with hostility, but it has had a lasting influence on our understanding of collaboration. In its wake came a wealth of studies of the occupation, including those by Philippe Burrin, Rod Kedward, John F. Sweets, Pascal Ory, Jean-Pierre Azéma, and Bertram Gordon. Henry Rousso examined the fixation with the period and the traumas associated with it in his book The Vichy Syndrome.
Specters of Fascism
These debates, and related controversies about the existence and extent of fascist organization in France between the wars, took on new relevance in the 1980s with the rise of the far-right Front National (FN), led by an antisemitic Holocaust revisionist, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The FN’s leadership team and influential satellite publications included a number of former Vichy militiamen, Waffen-SS officers, and collaborators of various sorts.
Collaborators like Roland Gaucher, former editor of the FN newspaper National-Hebdo, saw “no contradiction” between working with Marcel Déat’s collaborationist Rassemblement National Populaire in the 1940s and Le Pen’s FN half a century later. Le Pen’s notorious remarks describing the Holocaust as a “detail” of the Second World War, his use of the word “sidaïques” in reference to AIDS sufferers — which echoed Vichy’s contemptuous term for Jews, “judaïques” — and his 2005 claim that the Vichy regime was not “especially inhumane” help explain why men like Gaucher rallied to his side.
The reinvention of a fascist heritage in contemporary France sharpened and dramatized debates over the occupation. Attempts to prosecute those who participated in the crimes of the Vichy regime, and parallel efforts to stifle such efforts, demonstrated that whatever advances historical enquiry was making, there were still forces determined to block a full reckoning with the period.
Paul Touvier had been a leading figure in the Vichy militia in eastern France from 1943. He served under the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Klaus Barbie, who was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1987. At the end of the war, Touvier went into hiding and received a death sentence in absentia for his part in the deportation and execution of Jewish prisoners. These sentences expired under the statute of limitations in the mid-1960s; in 1971, President Georges Pompidou granted him a pardon.
In 1973, Touvier faced new charges of crimes against humanity. Police delays and the indulgence of some Catholic clergy, who provided him with safe houses, meant that he was not arrested until 1989, having been eventually found in the Priory of St Francis in Nice. In 1992, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Touvier could not be charged with crimes against humanity, since atrocities committed by individuals under Vichy rule did not fit the legal definition of such crimes.
Why was this the case? In an extraordinary turn, the Court released a detailed assessment of the Vichy regime that concluded it could not be considered totalitarian, since it was not characterized by the politics of “ideological hegemony,” and only contained some elements that were akin to fascism.
The Touvier episode shone a light in uncomfortable places. The safe havens offered to a war criminal by the Catholic Church were a reminder, not merely of the Church’s role in the Dreyfus affair — when the political antisemitism later mobilized by twentieth-century fascism had first erupted — but also of the persistence of antisemitism in contemporary France.
There was also the question of other complicities underpinning the failure of state institutions, from the police to the presidency, to bring Touvier to justice in the fifty years since he had first ordered the execution of seven Jewish prisoners. He was eventually convicted in 1994, becoming the first French person to be found guilty of crimes against humanity.