France Introduces its Own “Nuremberg Laws”

By Paul R. Bartrop, PhD

An old joke is told about two Jews, Shlomo and Yakov, in Warsaw, sitting on a park bench in 1900. Shlomo said to Yakov, “You look awful; are you alright?” Yakov Dr. Paul Bartrop answered that he’d had a horrible nightmare, “I dreamed that in 40 years the city will be destroyed. There will be war, and all the Jews will be murdered.” “Don’t worry,” said Shlomo. “It will never happen. The French aren’t that bad.”

For many pundits at the turn of the century, it was more likely that a major explosion of anti-Semitic persecution would have come from France rather than its eventual focus, Germany. This month, it will be 80 years since some of the currents leading to Yakov’s nightmare came to the fore, when France introduced legislation that was at least on par with the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

Following the defeat of France by Germany on June 22, 1940, the country was divided into two zones: a northern zone occupied by the German army, and an unoccupied “free zone” in the south. The unoccupied zone retained its nominal independence (although in many respects it was a puppet of Germany), with its capital in the resort town of Vichy, southeast of Paris. Its president was the World War I hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was granted extraordinary powers by the National Assembly to enact a new constitution, giving him full authority in the new French government. Pétain, then aged 84, turned the Vichy regime into a nondemocratic collaborationist government, operating enthusiastically with Nazi Germany while remaining officially neutral.

On October 3, 1940, the government passed its first widespread anti-Jewish legislation, the Statut des Juifs (Jewish Law). This included a definition of who was a Jew that was even stricter than what the Nazis had instituted in Germany. Under Vichy, someone was Jewish if he or she had three Jewish grandparents, or two Jewish grandparents if his or her spouse was also Jewish.

The Statut des Juifs also entrenched a drastic cutback of Jewish involvement in French society. Jews were, from this point onward, excluded from the army officer corps and noncommissioned officer posts, top government administration positions, and any other job that influenced public opinion. They were only allowed to hold low-level public service jobs if they had fought in World War I or distinguished themselves in battle in 1939-1940.

Further, Jews were denied French citizenship and were ultimately banned from professions such as show business, teaching, the civil service and journalism. In occupied France (though not in Vichy), Jews were forced to wear yellow badges. Police confiscated their telephones and radios, and a curfew was enforced, beginning in January 1942. Jews were also required to travel in the last car of the Parisian metro and were limited to certain public areas.

The Statut des Juifs was followed by a second Statut, issued on June 2, 1941. It made the definition of a Jew even more rigid and called for the complete removal of Jews from industry, business and the liberal professions. Only a few Jews were exempted from these cutbacks.

The impact of the anti-Jewish laws was profound. They enabled the French police in the northern zone to conduct raids, roundups and deportation of Jews. In doing so, they went further than the orders demanded by the German occupiers. The laws were created purely on the initiative of the French government and not by the Germans themselves. They were not mandated by Germany and were to apply throughout metropolitan France as well as its overseas territories.

The speed with which the new measures took hold was head-spinning. Denaturalization of Jews in France took one month; in Germany, it took six. Whereas in Germany, it took over three years for Jews to be excluded from the military, in France the process took only three months. And so on.

As a result, the Vichy regime managed to maintain public order for the first two years after the armistice, with Germany providing little in the way of interference—other than demanding that the French police round up immigrant Jews, communists, political refugees and any individual labeled as “undesirable.”

The Vichy government was ahead of the curve, however; it voluntarily enacted its own measures against these “undesirable” individuals. A special commission was set up in July 1940 to review naturalizations granted since the 1927 reform of the nationality law. As a result, Vichy denaturalized approximately 15,000 individuals, mostly Jews, between June 1940 and August 1944.

Vichy tightened its anti-Semitic legislation, applicable in both zones, during 1941. The first mass arrests of Jews took place in May 1941, with most of them held in the winter sports stadium known as the Vel’d’Hiv. They were held in horrifying conditions for days, prior to being sent to the transit camp at Drancy before being moved on to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Overall, by the time deportations ended, the Vichy government had aided directly in the deportation of approximately 76,000 Jews to German extermination camps.

The course of anti-Jewish legislation in France provided fertile ground for the collaborationist Vichy government to exercise its racist agenda during the war. It is worth bearing this in mind when we contemplate the horrible darkness that was the Holocaust, and to reflect on the fact that one did not have to be a German Nazi in order to adopt murderous anti-Semitic policies.