L'État contre les Juifs

About this book

On Vichy and the Shoah, we thought we knew everything. This book shows that there is still much to discover. Responding to a series of key questions, Laurent Joly deeply renews the story of the persecution of Jews under the Occupation and sweeps away many misconceptions. Why, since the summer of 1940, did Marshal Petain's regime trigger an anti-Semitic policy? Why did he accept to contribute to the massive deportations decided by the Nazis in 1942 and to assume these operations fully, in Paris as in the free zone? To what extent has the administration collaborated in genocidal politics? Based on numerous new sources, restoring the leeway of the agents (from the state leader to the simple guardian of peace) and the concrete effects of their decisions, Laurent Joly writes an incarnated story, close to the executors, victims and witnesses. The reader will learn that the status of October 1940 is not a simple transposition of the French antisemitic tradition: Vichy seeks above all to follow the Nazi model. On the Vel d'Hiv, he will discover a story that has never been told to him: the operation from the police point of view. Finally, he will realize that the idea that the persecution of Jews has been overshadowed by the purge justice deserves to be heavily nuanced. In the end, Laurent Joly shows that if all the power of the state was mobilized to persecute and then raid the Jews, the logic of the state apparatus, its contradictory objectives, its weight and finally the resistance contributed to this. that the majority of the Jews of France, hit hard by the persecution, still escape death.--Grasset.