The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham

Author:Lucy Wadham [Lucy Wadham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571252251
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Knowing this, it was all the more intriguing to discover the strange inconsistencies within Vichy’s reign of terror. Laval and Pétain, for a long time, stubbornly refused to give up French Jews to the Germans. Instead they made it their business to deliver any foreign Jews they could find, even if it meant dipping into the ‘Free Zone’. After the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, which gave birth to the Final Solution, Eichmann began to put pressure on Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo in Paris, to deliver at least one hundred thousand Jews from France to the gas chambers. Dannecker, in turn, put pressure on Laval, who set about organising the biggest police raid on a religious community that Paris had ever seen. On 16 and 17 July 1942, nine thousand French policemen rounded up 13,152 men, women and children – Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – and sent them to Drancy for deportation.

The Vel d’Hiv raid, as it came to be known (after the stadium where most of the families were held), was a turning point both for public opinion and for the French authorities. In its wake, the Germans tried to put pressure on Laval to denaturalise the seven thousand or so French Jews who had been given their nationality through a law passed in 1927. The Germans were increasingly infuriated by Laval’s insolence and ingenuity in stalling the law’s repeal¶ and were, from 1943 onwards, forced to carry out the arrest of French Jews without the help of the French police.

After Vel d’Hiv, protestations came from the heads of France’s Christian community. The moving appeals, written by Cardinal Saliège in Toulouse and Cardinal Gerlier in Lyon, demanding an end to the inhuman treatment of the Jews, as well as the outcry of the head of the Protestant Church, Pastor Boegner, helped to turn public opinion against Vichy. This shift, combined, no doubt, with the change in the fortunes of the Allied armies, made Laval give up doing the Gestapo’s dirty work.

France has taken decades to face up to the truth about the Vichy regime. The French administration was filled after the war with technocrats who had served under Vichy. Many of them made fine careers. Some of them, including René Bousquet and Maurice Papon, were eventually indicted for crimes against humanity. Bousquet was shot by a lunatic before he could come to trial, and Papon was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment and released, due to ill health, after three – a decision that was widely criticised as pusillanimous.

François Mitterrand himself, who swore allegiance to Pétain, was honoured as late as 1943 with the francisque (Vichy’s equivalent of the Légion d’honneur). He obstinately refused to apologise for Vichy’s crimes and stuck to the casuistic argument that Vichy was an aberration in French history: an illegal regime, which had usurped the Republic. As he put it in 1992, ‘The French nation was not involved in that, nor was the Republic.’ In the end

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