In an interview with Le Monde, historian Robert Paxton refutes Éric Zemmour’s contention that Vichy sacrificed “foreign” Jews to save “French” Jews. One hopes that this admirably concise statement of Paxton’s lifetime of work on Vichy France will circulate widely.
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My own mother was expelled from lycée Fenelon classe préparatoire in October 1940 due to the decree signed by Pétain forbidding a number of professions such as teacher to Jews. She went into hiding for 4 years. The section of the decree leading to her being expelled was hardened by Pétain’s own handwritten addition to what the bureaucrats had written in the decree. Interestingly, the De Gaulle government of 1958 gave her compensation by creating a special statute for persecuted people such as her which allowed her to teach in the collège (junior high school) without having passed the qualifying exams until she retired. Needless to say, my mother was born French, although her father having been born in Odessa lost his French citizenship immediately as Pétain took over. Thus, in my own family’s history, we can see concretely the difference between De Gaulle and the traitor Pétain as well as verify that Pétain persecuted all Jews, French and foreign.