France in 1940 had the largest Jewish population in Western Europe outside Britain, around 330,000 people. About a quarter of them were murdered in the Holocaust: around 76,000 deported to Auschwitz and other camps, of whom only a few thousand survived. The French mortality rate of around 25 per cent was lower than the rates in the Netherlands or Belgium, partly because of geography (a large rural country, neutral Switzerland and Spain across the borders) and partly because the French regime under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, while collaborationist and antisemitic, never embraced deportation with the enthusiasm that the Hungarian or Croatian regimes did. The story of Vichy France is, however, the story of a French government that voluntarily designed its own anti-Jewish legislation, that authorised deportations of Jews from its own territory, and that handed Jews to the Germans for murder. Vichy was not the German occupation. It was the French choice within it.
The fall of France
Germany invaded France on 10 May 1940. The French armies were defeated in six weeks. The French government signed an armistice on 22 June 1940. The country was divided into a German-occupied zone in the north and west, and a nominally independent French state in the south, run from the spa town of Vichy under Marshal Philippe Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old hero of the First World War. The Vichy regime was authorised to administer the unoccupied zone and to retain notional sovereignty across all of France, subject to German oversight in the occupied zone.
The Vichy laws
The Vichy regime began passing antisemitic legislation within weeks of its establishment. The first Statut des Juifs, of 3 October 1940, defined who counted as a Jew (similar terms to the Nuremberg Laws), excluded Jews from the civil service, the army, the press, and most professions, and subjected Jewish enterprises to administrative oversight. A second Statut des Juifs of 2 June 1941 tightened the definitions and extended the exclusions. The legislation was drafted by the Vichy government and applied in the unoccupied zone before any German pressure had been brought to bear; the Vichy regime was an antisemitic regime by its own choice as well as by German request.
The Vichy government also operated internment camps for Jewish refugees who had fled to France in the late 1930s from Germany, Austria and Spain. Camps at Gurs, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet, Drancy and others held tens of thousands of people in conditions that were deliberately neglectful and in some cases lethal. Some camp inmates died there before any deportation began.
The deportations
The deportations from France began in March 1942 and continued, in pulses, until August 1944. The transit camp was Drancy, in a Paris suburb, run by the French police. Deportation trains went from Drancy to Auschwitz at intervals of a few weeks. The total number of Jews deported from France was around 76,000. About 25 per cent of them were French citizens; the remaining 75 per cent were foreign Jews, mostly refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany who had reached France in the 1930s. The French government, particularly under the second Vichy administration of Pierre Laval after April 1942, was willing to deliver foreign Jews more readily than it was willing to deliver French Jewish citizens. This distinction is sometimes presented in French apologetic accounts as an act of partial resistance. It is more accurately read as a calculation: the Vichy regime concluded that French public opinion would tolerate the deportation of foreign Jews and would object to the deportation of French citizens. It made its decisions accordingly.
The Vel d’Hiv round-up
The largest single round-up of Jews in occupied France was conducted on 16 and 17 July 1942 in Paris by the French Police Prefecture under instructions from the German authorities. Around 13,000 Jews, including around 4,000 children, were arrested in their homes and held in the Velodrome d’Hiver, a covered cycle racing stadium near the Eiffel Tower. They were held there in summer heat, with no food and minimal water, for several days, before being transported to Drancy and then to Auschwitz. The round-up was carried out entirely by French police; no German uniforms were involved. The Vel d’Hiv has its own dedicated page in this site’s Specific Atrocities section.
The Resistance and rescue
The French Resistance, in its various movements, included substantial Jewish participation. The Armée Juive operated as a Jewish armed resistance organisation. The FTP-MOI, the immigrant arm of the communist resistance, included a Jewish company in Paris under the Manouchian Group, which carried out high-profile attacks on German targets and whose members were captured and shot in February 1944. The OSE, a Jewish children’s welfare organisation, ran one of the largest rescue operations in occupied Europe, hiding around 7,000 Jewish children in convents, schools and farmhouses across France. The Protestant village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the Cévennes mountains sheltered around 5,000 Jews, mostly children, over the course of the war.
The Italian zone
From November 1942 to September 1943, southern France east of the Rhone was occupied by Italy rather than Germany. The Italian military authorities consistently refused to deport Jews from their zone, and several thousand Jews from across France escaped to the Italian zone where they were not at immediate risk. When Italy switched sides in September 1943, the German army occupied the area and the deportations resumed. Some of the Jewish refugees in the former Italian zone were caught; some escaped over the Alps into Switzerland.
The post-war record
Vichy France was abolished in 1944 and the post-war French state, under General de Gaulle, took the position that Vichy had been an illegitimate regime and that France as a nation was not responsible for what had been done in its name. This was politically convenient and historically inaccurate. President Jacques Chirac, in 1995, formally acknowledged French state responsibility for the Vichy deportations in a speech at the site of the Vel d’Hiv. The acknowledgement was a long time coming.
Around 200,000 French Jews survived the war, the great majority of them, partly through hiding, partly through the protections that French citizenship continued to provide, and partly through the mountainous geography that made escape into Switzerland or Spain feasible. The community recovered after the war and is now the largest Jewish community in Europe, around 450,000 strong, having been augmented by post-war immigration from North Africa.
See also
Sources
- Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, 1981
- Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews, Basic Books, 1993
- Renee Poznanski, Jews in France During World War II, Brandeis University Press, 2001
- USHMM: France