Reflexivity of Analysis in the Events of World War II in France and their Commemoration

Paul Fischer

10/20/2017

Professor Zdatny

Word Count: 705

Rousso, Henry. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Reflexivity of Analysis in the Events of World War II in France and their Commemoration

The Occupation of France in World War II represents a chronological web because while 10,000 collaborators were summarily shot or hanged after liberation, those responsible for deportations were not tried for decades. Even functionary trials extended into the fifties and beyond. Each of these subsequent developments had their roots firmly in the final years of World War II and especially the events that passed during that cold winter. Henry Rousso navigates this web masterfully in The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944.

There is a functional chronology as the primary thesis of the book is to analyze the historical commemoration of the occupation and liberation. Rousso believes the actions of Vichy France to play a greater role in French reconciliation of the memory of the war than other factors. This is due to the “prism of Vichy” through which the people of France perceive the war even today (10). It should be noted that this is an evolving prism, an example can be seen as the liberal reversal in the view of the Israeli state to a symbol of Western colonialism and return to support (81). Such developments in political analysis match the timeline proposed by Rousso precisely.

First came the period of repression marked by pardons and clemency. Then came a short but turpitudinous “broken mirror” period followed by two overlapping periods of obsession. With the trial of Klaus Barbie and the death of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix in the 1980s, it is only during the period of obsession that the final solution returned as a primary focus of historians and in the public eye from the period. The progression in public opinion is matched and supported with evidentiary analysis of laws, films, and publications (222)

There are three structural factors of the Vichy syndrome identified by Rousso. Catholicism played a fundamental role in Pétainism and contributed to the scandals and is argued to continue to play a political role after 1940 in France (299). Left-right political differences drew on the resistance in the aftermath of the war, and it was the decision to pursue Gaullo-Pétainism by liberals that allowed the right to rehabilitate itself from being a purely fascist entity in Europe. Finally anti-semitism plays a critical role in the Vichy syndrome, returning to the public eye in the 1960s and climaxing by 1980.

He draws a hard line between functional historical analysis and that of memory. This definition aids the reader throughout the book to identify with the considerable job of narrowing down an enormous body of knowledge and to understand his decision making process in doing so. Memory is cast as a reflexive action, only a repercussion to an event (2). Historical analysis should be a reconstruction of events and deconstruction of biases and motivating factors.

This hard line creates the basis for a scientific evaluation of the stages through which decades of domestic and geopolitical politics took remembrance of the liberation. In doing so, Rousso uses moments in the war to illustrate contemporary developments in the press and film of the portrayal as well as their convergence and divergence. These developments allow the proof of three structural facets to the Vichy Syndrome. Combined with a timeline of the history of the history of the Resistance, two vectors of analysis are then created that allow for a diagnosis of the “syndrome” represented by Vichy encroachment on public consciousness.

The extent of the malady is then approached, estimated, and through work like that of Rousso’s is treated. There are multiple novel historical concepts introduced and defined in this work, including extended redefinitions of functional terms. This does not clutter the work, but instead allows a certain genius of clarity to glimmer forth. A quick summary of these three structural factors as well as a chronological sketch is provided above though it is certainly worth cracking the book to flesh out the specific examples.

The allusions to primary sources are abundant and well cited. Some of the work is popular literature and cinema in addition to historical writing and documentary work; Rousso gives the reader a hand by offering a clear division in definition between the two. To do otherwise would be hypocritical at the least.

Three Distinct Antisemitic Trends in Vichy France

Paul Fischer

9/20/2017

Professor Zdatny

Marrus, Michael R. Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1981.

Word Count: 752

Three distinct antisemitic trends in Vichy France

Vichy France and the Jews is research that has been done rereading evidence, correspondence, and documents from the persecution of the Jews in France during World War II. It is worthwhile to highlight some of the critical trends of antisemitism at the time, as well as that which separates French racism from other national discriminatory natures.

Some background is provided into the history of anti-racist measures, helping to establish the surprise with which the French encountered the success of racist movements (25-71). Foremost, loi Marchandeau prohibited antisemitism in the press and had been passed shortly before the invasion. It would be replaced with the Statut des juifs, legislation updated during the war (3). In the first statute effects were primarily felt by civil servants, but as the war drew on, its goals would be expanded in revisions to include mandatory identification, property sequestration, and ultimately death for all Jews in Occupied France. Other empirical restrictions on the activities of Jewish communities included race-exclusive leagues such as l’Ordre des Médecins established August 10, 1940 that effectively excluded Jews from medical practice (160). A similar measure was taken shortly afterwards for lawyers.

Reconciliation of trending French sympathies for the Allies that grew through the war and simultaneously increasing sanctioned persecution of the Jews can be difficult (201, 210). Three examples are useful in addressing this: that of Theodore Dannecker, SS judenreferat, of Xavier Vallat, Commissioner-General of the Jewish Question (CGJQ), and of Ambassador Otto Abetz.

Upon arrival August 12, 1940, Theodore Dannecker, a young officer of the SS, was tasked with bringing the “‘gut antisemitism’ - a visceral hatred undisciplined by reason, patriotism, or a sense of public order” of Germany to France (89). At the time, this proved complicated; even the Marshall Pétain had friends in his inner circle that he wished to ensure were exempted from early legislation (207). Dozens of property crimes and other violence had been directed against Jews in the countryside of France before German invasion, to be sure, but officially these had been hitherto rightly viewed as illegal acts (34, 182). The nature of these crimes were personal rather than organized, and did not near the level of the atrocities experienced during the war. Marrus and Paxton even point to the irony that legislation preventing refugees from getting jobs or obtaining worthwhile occupations created the very conditions of criminality that they were explicitly charged with preventing.

The invasion of France also saw antisemitism drift into the sphere of politics and diplomacy. For one powerful figure, the Ambassador Abetz, “antisemitism [was] one of the levers to replace the reactionary grip of the Church and Army in Vichy France by a popular, anticlerical, pro-European … mass-movement” (78). The use of antisemitism as a tangent factor in contingent political battles directed mass opinion in a manner uncharacteristic of the liberal or communist antisemitism extant in France before occupation.

Xavier Vallat was the Commissioner-General of Jewish Questions in France. Original enthusiasm led to his public admission that “aryanization had produced an unleashing of greed’” (156). He “proclaimed himself a champion of ‘state antisemitism,’ the regulation of Jewish existence by state agencies for the benefit of all Frenchmen” (89). The position was offensive to the Germans, though not entirely out of step with the general strategies that they employed, because the French created the position independently of Germany and without forewarning. While for some, it could be seen as a way of heading off some of the more strict German rules for Jews, it also behaved more harshly towards certain groups of Jews as well (83). Arguably, it is the deviation from German guidelines that may have led to his dismissal.

The successor of Vallat, Louis Darquier, would be a complete contradiction in terms to the first Commisioner-General. With three arrests, he took the level of antisemitism to another level (283). By the time he was appointed in 1942, Laval had taken office and persecution of the Jews already well outside the legal bounds of French sovereignty, began to escalate well out of all legal and moral bounds (251). While the Germans influenced Vichy France greatly, it is a tragedy that such a high level of complicity existed, and co-operation was present even outside of the specifically antisemitic departments, “it was not the PQJ who conducted the arrests and guarded the trains, but regular police” (294).

Technics of France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

Paul Fischer

9/18/2017

Professor Zdatny

Bloch, Marc. Strange defeat: A statement of evidence written in 1940. No. 371. WW Norton & Company, New York, 1968.

France in Crisis: Two Defeats in Strange Defeat

At the time Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat, France had lost territory and its political status was reduced to that of a puppet empire. 1940 was a dark year, and the coming years would force the French to lose hope in the goodness of their national Marseilles, motto, or constituent ideals as a competent force for good. The technics of war, from the point of view of a supply line Intelligence officer creates a distinct prism of analysis for historians that appropriately conveys the logistical predecessors of contingent and subsequent complete defeat at the hands of the Germans. That is, the two intertwining communications stressed in this book are the military losses during the rapid advance of Nazi Germany through France and the cultural capitulation spreading throughout France and the Allies like a disease under the stress of starvation, hardship, and absence of adequate leadership.

The importance of the Maginot line cannot be stressed enough in French plans. Like the Titanic, a great ship so formidably designed no one thought to include life boats except for cosmetic purposes, the French investment in concrete believed to stop a German incursion substituted for proper evacuation and withdrawal plans (52). The French hoped to avoid a war with Germany first through diplomatic means and if all else failed to repulse her by utilization of near limitless resources invested soundly in the same mechanics of warfare found in the First World War.

Germany correctly anticipated the French attachment to a static defensive structure (73). Engines had grown in size, and motorized transports, armored divisions, and even motorcycles traversed the countryside, sowing uncontrollable panic without even confronting the fortifications of the military (51). Bloch hypothesizes that if such an outcome were possible there may have been a path to victory in this early war with full and vigorous retreats to bring the French military together and to make a unified assault on German targets (40). Improper planning led to isolated units, without water or other necessary supplies, that Bloch was personally acquainted with as an officer of the fuel depots (38).

Hitler met with psychologists in the development of the Blitzkrieg in order to ensure that the war would exert the maximum effect on civilian and military populations possible. Mechanical means were used to boost the screech of dive-bombers, for example (54).  The Battle of London showed the Luftwaffe capable of a good deal more than was deployed into France. The French likely would have required more than simple modifications to withdrawals to counter German invasion forces, should such an outcome be conceivable without dramatically changing the fundamental makeup of the French Army. Only half of the battle was lost on the field, however.

By the conclusion of military operations dramatic social class differences in France were extant, and the occupiers sought to exploit these as liberators or bringers of a new form of government: the tyrant or dictator. In the process of authoritarianism, the French would lose hope in their national Marseilles (138). For the first time, the Germans began to fail. Where the military had instilled fear in the mind of France, appropriately enough, intelligence operatives from Germany were thugs. Improper targets were chased, and fifth columnists inappropriately exploited, becoming one of the targets of blame (25). As a consequence, the Resistance lived on.

At the time Marc Bloch wrote, the France that De Gaulle described in London was a fairy tale. Even among the regular French population, “the Germany of Hitler aroused certain sympathies the Germany of Ebert could never have hoped to appeal” and the war seemed lost for the French people as well as the military (150). To Bloch, the political right had sold out to fascists and vassalized France while detracting their political opponents as warmongers. These were elements of a social class conflict with the bourgeoisie as their target. They had “refused to take the masses seriously, or they trembled before their implied threat. What they did not realize was that, by so doing, they were separating themselves effectively from France” (167).