Pétain’s Jewish children: French Jewish youth and the Vichy Regime

Thesis

Focusing on the period 1940–1942, this thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between the Vichy regime and Jews of French citizenship who found themselves under its control. Despite Vichy’s implication in the Holocaust, this study examines the possibility for convergence, however partial and temporary, between Vichy’s plans for regeneration and Jewish ambitions to participate in the New Order. This investigation aims to explain the seemingly contradictory circumstances in which a French Jew could be at once persecuted under Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, and rewarded for the promotion of certain French values by the government’s programme of National Revolution. This unstudied dilemma is explored in this thesis through an examination of French Jewish youth. An analysis of this social category provides a point of entry into the ambivalences of Vichy’s policies. While Vichy enacted legislation in order to marginalise Jewish participation in the national community, the regime was also emphatically in favour of French Jewish youth contributing to the National Revolution.

Methodologically this study moves away from the long-established categories of resistance, rescue and persecution. Rather than merely examining Jewish youth’s activities during the establishment of the Vichy regime as a period of formation and preparation for later resistance or rescue activity, this study seeks to investigate the ways in which, from 1940–1942, the Vichy regime and French Jewish youth sought to coexist. This aspect of the war years has almost entirely disappeared from France’s collective memory and from the historiographical debates over Vichy and the Jews.

Authors: Lee, D

• Publication date: 2011
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: anti-Semitism; Vichy; France
• Subjects: History of Britain and Europe; Modern Britain and Europe