What It Meant to Be “A Jew” in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation

I have been an anti-Semite for much longer than you. Besides, I could have been your father. 

Xavier Vallat to SS Officer Theodor Dannecker, head of the Paris Judenreferat (19 February 1942)

In order to guide his actions [Xavier Vallat] consulted uniquely the spiritual traditions coming from our national past. . . . Why would we hide our pride that this civilizing lesson was given to the contemporary world. . . by a Frenchman, by one of us?

Marie-Madeleine Martin, preface to Le Proces de Xavier Vallat (présenté par ses amis) (1947)

I. Collective Memory and Foreign Interventions

In Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours, Henry Rousso analyzes the conflicted French collective memory of Vichy France and describes both the attempts of the French to flee responsibility for the events that occurred during the Occupation as well as their struggles to come to terms with them. Rousso defines “the Vichy syndrome” as a kind of collective complex or neurosis growing out of a particularly painful trauma. It is, in his words, “the heterogeneous totality of symptoms and manifestations… which reveal the existence of a trauma engendered by the Occupation and in particular a trauma linked to internal divisions, one which has persisted and at times developed after the end of the war.”1 The trauma and the often bitter struggles over the memory of Vichy it has produced have resulted in what Rousso calls a continuing “Franco-French war” over French national identity. As Steven Ungar aptly puts it in the title of the first chapter of Scandal and Aftereffect, which deals in part with Rousso’s book, “Vichy” has become for the French nothing less than the “paradigm of contested memory.”