Vichy Leader Said to Widen Anti-Jewish Law
by Maia de la Baume
5 October, 2010
PARIS — Far from the enfeebled and senile general manipulated by his peers, as the French have long viewed
him, Marshal Philippe Pétain was an unapologetic anti-Semite, said Serge Klarsfeld, one of France’s leading
Holocaust experts.
On Sunday, Mr. Klarsfeld announced the discovery of an original draft of the law that first established
discriminatory practices aimed at Jews under the Vichy government in France. The document includes
handwritten annotations made by Marshal Pétain, France’s chief of state from July 1940 until August 1944, Mr.
Klarsfeld said.
The document, dated Oct. 3, 1940, was donated anonymously to the Paris Holocaust Memorial; the handwritten
additions considerably toughened the law as it had been proposed by legislators, expanding proposed bans on
public-sector jobs for Jews.
Mr. Klarsfeld, known for tracking down Gestapo leaders like Klaus Barbie, said the handwritten notes were
“decisive proof” that Marshal Pétain himself was behind French anti-Jewish measures, and that he hardened the
document’s original language.
“Pétain will finally enter history as an anti-Semitic old man who was in full possession of his senses and acted
willingly to align France with the racial Nazi ideology,” Mr. Klarsfeld said in an interview. The law, he said, was
signed a few weeks before Marshal Pétain’s encounter with Hitler on Oct. 24.
While the Germans occupied most of France, Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government was largely in the south and
had some autonomy over life there. But how much it was a puppet of the Nazis, and how much of the Nazi
ideology Marshal Pétain shared, have long been debated by historians.
Marshal Pétain’s penciled-in changes expanded job restrictions for Jews and eliminated some exemptions from
those restrictions. The changes were then included in the final law.
For example, Marshal Pétain eliminated a paragraph that would have allowed the “descendants of Jews born
French or naturalized before 1860” to hold lower public offices. Some of his additions also forbade Jews to seek
election or to teach.
About 76,000 Jews living in France were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Only 2,600 of them returned.
For Marc Olivier Baruch, a respected French historian, “the document shows that there were two schools in
Vichy.” One school, he told the daily newspaper Le Figaro, “was in favor of a statute for the Jews which would
protect ‘the good French Jews,’ that is, those who were assimilated and who would have had the right to hold
minor positions, and the other, which was openly racist and anti-Semitic.”
Marshal Pétain, he said, belonged to the second category.
But documents proving individual responsibility for acts against French Jews are rare, historians say. They
believe, for instance, that the justice minister at the time, Raphaël Alibert, drafted the law that Marshal Pétain
modified.
“We used to say that Pétain himself had never truly participated in the policy of state anti-Semitism, exclusion
and discrimination,” the historian Jean-Pierre Azéma told the daily newspaper Le Parisien. “We discover today
that Pétain was very much involved in the drafting of a text that destroys freedom.”
Until now, Mr. Azéma said, historians had no decisive proof that “the marshal,” cherished by the French at the
time, had participated in the writing of the law.
Previously, the only testimony about Marshal Pétain’s involvement in hardening the anti-Jewish law came from
Paul Baudouin, a former foreign minister under Vichy. In a book published in 1948, “The Private Diaries (March
1940 to January 1941),” Mr. Baudouin wrote that during a cabinet meeting on Oct. 1, 1940, the government had
examined “the status of the Israelites” at the request of Marshal Pétain, who “showed himself to be the most
severe” among those present. “He insists in particular on the fact that there shouldn’t be any Jews in justice and
education,” Mr. Baudouin wrote.
French historians say that the draft law shows Marshal Pétain’s state of mind before the 1942 creation of the
General Authority for Jewish Questions, the agency officially charged with France’s “Aryanization.” But some
doubt the historical importance of the discovery.
“Pétain’s anti-Semitism is nothing new, though it is shown explicitly in the document,” wrote Marc Ferro, the
author of a biography of Marshal Pétain.
“Mr. Pétain was for a social and political discrimination,” he wrote in Le Figaro. “The Jews had to be, according to
him, excluded from certain positions. But he didn’t approve the wearing of the yellow star or the stamp ‘Jewish
religion’ on a Jew’s identity card.”
Tal Bruttmann, another historian and author of a study on the anti-Semitic policy under Vichy, said that Mr.
Klarsfeld’s findings added detail. “We knew the definitive text already,” he said. “But we have here the last
corrections before the official publication, we can see the trials and errors, the orientations taken, and above all
we see the hardening.”
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