Philippe Pétain was head of state of the French État Français at Vichy from 10 July 1940 to 20 August 1944. He was 84 when he took office and 88 when he was removed. Under his authority, France passed antisemitic legislation that went beyond what the Germans had asked for, organised the round-ups of Jewish residents that delivered around 76,000 men, women and children to the deportation trains, and surrendered around a quarter of those to be killed. Around three quarters of the deported never came back. France was the only country in Western Europe that volunteered an antisemitic legal framework before being asked.
The 3 October 1940 Statut des Juifs
The first Statut des Juifs was promulgated by the Vichy regime on 3 October 1940. The text excluded Jews from the civil service, the officer corps, the teaching profession, the press, the judiciary, and the management of cultural institutions. The German occupation authorities had not requested it. The drafting was carried out by the Vichy Justice Ministry under Raphaël Alibert, signed by Pétain personally, and circulated to ministries on 4 October. The pre-publication draft, recovered from the French archives in 2010 by historian Serge Klarsfeld, contains Pétain’s own handwritten amendments tightening the definition of who counted as Jewish. The document is in his hand. The published version went further than what his own ministry had drafted.
The second Statut des Juifs of 2 June 1941 widened the exclusions and ordered the registration of all Jews in the unoccupied southern zone, producing the lists later used for the deportations. The Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, the dedicated Jewish-affairs ministry under Xavier Vallat and from 1942 Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, ran the implementation.
The Vél d’Hiv round-up
On 16 and 17 July 1942 the French police conducted the Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris, arresting 13,152 Jews including 4,115 children. The arrests were carried out by 4,500 French police, not Germans. The detainees were held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver cycling stadium for several days in summer heat without water or sanitation, transferred to the Drancy and Pithiviers transit camps, and from there deported to Auschwitz. Almost none survived. The operation had been agreed in advance by the Vichy government. René Bousquet, secretary general of the Vichy police, had personally negotiated with the Germans for French police rather than German troops to make the arrests, on the grounds that this preserved French sovereignty. Pétain knew the operation was happening. He raised no objection.
The Vichy government also offered, of its own initiative, to deport children under sixteen who the Germans had not initially requested. The offer was made by Laval through Bousquet. The children went to Auschwitz with their parents, and were killed on arrival.
What he knew
Pétain received regular reports on the deportations through his cabinet office. He met with Laval, his prime minister, on a near-daily basis. He met with Bousquet. He met with the German ambassador Otto Abetz. He attended cabinet meetings at which the deportations were discussed. He signed the laws under which they were conducted. He was photographed with German officials throughout the period. The defence later mounted on his behalf, that he had been a senile figurehead unaware of what was being done in his name, is contradicted by the documentary record of his cabinet papers, recovered after the war.
The most damaging single piece of evidence is the file of his correspondence with Laval and his Justice Ministry, which shows him personally amending antisemitic legislation, intervening to demand exemptions for individual Jewish friends while the laws applied to everyone else, and signing each successive measure with full understanding of what it provided. The 2010 release of his personally annotated draft of the first Statut des Juifs settled the historical question of whether he had been a passive figure. He had not.
The unoccupied zone
Until November 1942 the Vichy regime ran the unoccupied southern zone of France with substantial autonomy. The deportations from the southern zone, conducted in August and September 1942, were carried out by French police on French initiative, in territory the Germans had not yet occupied. Around 11,000 Jews from the southern zone, including the foreign Jewish refugees who had been interned at Gurs and elsewhere, were delivered to the Germans for deportation. The southern operation is the clearest case where the Vichy regime acted on its own authority, not under German pressure.
The trial
Pétain was tried by the High Court of Justice in July and August 1945. He sat through the trial, mostly silent, while a procession of witnesses described the operations of his government. He was found guilty of treason and intelligence with the enemy on 15 August 1945 and sentenced to death. De Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in recognition of his First World War service. Pétain was held first at the Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees and then at the Île d’Yeu off the Atlantic coast. He died there on 23 July 1951, aged 95.
The 1995 Chirac speech
The official French position throughout the post-war period was that the Vichy regime had been an illegitimate government and the deportations were the responsibility of the German occupier, not of France as a state. The position was maintained by every French president from de Gaulle through Mitterrand. It collapsed on 16 July 1995, the fifty-third anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv round-up, when President Jacques Chirac stated in a speech at the site of the cycling stadium that la France, ce jour-là, accomplissait l’irréparable
. France, on that day, had committed the irreparable. It was the first formal acknowledgment by a French head of state that France itself, as a state, had been responsible. The speech is now considered a turning point in French national memory.
What he was
Pétain was the case of the respected national hero who used his prestige to legitimise collaboration. He had won the Battle of Verdun in 1916. He had ended the army mutinies of 1917. He carried, in 1940, the moral authority of the only French general who had clearly won. He used that authority to give France a regime that volunteered antisemitic legislation, ran the round-ups, delivered children to the gas chambers, and presented all of it as the act of a sovereign French state. The Vichy operation was not coerced collaboration. It was offered.
See also
Sources
- Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Knopf, 1972
- Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, 1981
- Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, Fayard, 1983 and 1985
- The Pétain-annotated draft of the Statut des Juifs, French National Archives, released 2010
- Jacques Chirac, speech at the Vél d’Hiv site, 16 July 1995
- USHMM: Vichy France