Robert O. Paxton reflects on the process behind the creation of Vichy France and the Jews.
I was invited to write Vichy France and the Jews by a French publisher. The late Roger Errera, a French magistrate who also worked for the Paris publishing house of Calmann-Lévy, asked me to write about this subject in a letter of July 2, 1971. “Good books about Vichy,” he wrote in that letter, “are nonexistent in France.” This statement might seem surprising for such a momentous period in French history, from June 1940 to August 1944, when Paris and two thirds of the country were occupied by German troops while a semi-autonomous French government administered the rest from the spa town of Vichy, in the central hills, and while resistance gathered in the shadows. In 1971, however, the German occupation and varying French responses to it still aroused bitter feelings that discouraged serious scholarship. Self-justifying memoirs abounded, but the one standard study of this period was the journalist Robert Aron’s Histoire de Vichy (1957), a work that, in the absence of access to any relevant government documents, had drawn heavily upon how Vichy officials under trial after the war for collaboration had explained their actions.
At that time I was a relatively young scholar. I had published one book about the Vichy regime: Parades and Politics at Vichy: the French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain (Princeton, 1966). But it had not been translated into French. Indeed it had hardly been noticed in France. I had had to donate a copy myself to the French National Library. I had not yet completed my second book about Vichy, which was to appear in 1972 as Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (New York: Alfred Knopf,). But Errera had heard about me from my professors at Harvard. He wanted someone who stood outside French clans and cliques, who knew the period well, and who could work with the German archives as well as French. He wanted someone who would dig deeply into the policies of both countries and apportion responsibility for what happened to Jews in France during 1940-1944. He wanted a book so firmly rooted in the official record that its findings could not be challenged.
Errera was well-connected, and as promised he secured access for me to important classified files in the French Archives Nationales. These included the correspondence of Marshal Pétain, the Vichy French head of state, and the files of the Commissariat-general for Jewish Questions
I had not expected my research on Vichy France to move in this direction. But Errera’s invitation was tempting. The subject was certainly a dramatic one. Moreover Errera promised me some access to French archives, which were still officially closed. Above all he offered me a chance to be published in France and to address the French public directly, an opportunity which had eluded me up to that time. I accepted his invitation eagerly.
Errera was well-connected, and as promised he secured access for me to important classified files in the French Archives Nationales. These included the correspondence of Marshal Pétain, the Vichy French head of state, and the files of the Commissariat-general for Jewish Questions, the French cabinet-level office that oversaw Vichy’s efforts to reduce the role of Jews in French life.
On the German side, important German military and civil papers had fallen into the hands of the American, British and French military forces that defeated Germany in May 1945. I could consult hundreds of reels of microfilmed German documents at the United States National Archives in Washington. Unlike the sensitive Vichy French government files, these captured documents were subject to no restrictions by the American government, and I was welcomed with expert advice by Robert Wolfe, the archivist in charge of these materials.
I went to work on this project with enthusiasm in my hours free from teaching. In the second year, however, I grew discouraged. I found myself deeply immersed in material that was both overwhelming in its quantity and somber in its nature. I told Roger Errera that I wanted to drop it. That wise magistrate found a solution – to bring in Michael Marrus of the University of Toronto as co-author. Marrus had recently published The Politics of Assimilation (Oxford, 1971), a study of the Jewish community in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1896-1906). Together, Marrus and I parcelled out research in Paris, London, New York, and Washington.
Marrus worked on the YIVO archives in New York, the Wiener Library archives in London, and on previously published scholarly research. I concentrated on French and German archives and on materials published during the German occupation found in the French National Library. Then we wrote and rewrote drafts of all the chapters, managing not to quarrel as we revised each other's texts. The result came out in 1981, first in the original French edition with Calmann-Lévy, and soon after in an English version with Basic Books in New York.
The current revision became indispensable in 2008 when the French government opened up to researchers the last of its archives for the Vichy period. Our provisional conclusions could now be replaced with officially-documented information about Vichy’s efforts in 1940-1942 to remove Jews from public office and the professions, and to reduce Jewish influence in French economic and cultural life, and the ways in which this autonomous French program facilitated the later Nazi project of total extermination in 1942-1944. That is the task of the revised second edition of Vichy France and the Jews published by Stanford University Press.
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