Vichy syndrome

Vichy syndrome^[a] is a word describing the guilt and denial of the French people over the war crimes of Vichy France during the Holocaust.

The word was made by Jewish historian Henry Rousso in his 1987 book The Vichy Syndrome. He said that the war crimes of Vichy France remained a "past that doesn't pass away".^[1] The nature of Vichy French collaboration with Nazi Germany is a subject of debate.^[2][3]

The French government's position towards French responsibility for the Holocaust changed over the decades, with different presidents holding different views on the matter.

Before Jacques Chirac became the president, the French government insisted that Vichy France was an illegal regime separate from France, denying that the French participated in the Holocaust.^[4]

Jacques Chirac was the first president to say that the French participated in the Holocaust.^[5]

Emmanuel Macron said on July 16, 2017 that Vichy France was the France during World War II, accepting responsibility for the Holocaust.^[6] When discussing the Vel' d'Hiver roundup, Macron said:^[7]

From the end of the war to the 1970s, it was a common illusion that almost every Frenchman was in the Resistance, or at least supported it, and that the collaborators were a minority. Another two popular beliefs went along with this, that of the "sword and shield", and the idea that to whatever extent there were harsh measures under the Vichy regime, it was because it was under the boot of the Germans and not by choice.^[8]

Particularly, anti-Zionists played a huge role in promoting Holocaust denial in France. For instance, Pierre Guillaume, an ultra-left anarcho-Marxist activist, published books denying the Holocaust, calling it a "distraction from class struggle" that "played into the hands of Zionism and Stalinism".^[9]

Despite being left-wing, Guillaume's views were adopted by the French far right,^[9] who have trivialized the Holocaust by comparing the Holocaust to the Judean massacres of the Canaanites^[9] or the Native American genocide,^[10] and accused Jews of exploiting the Holocaust to extort compensations from European countries.^[11]

A number of influential French Holocaust deniers emerged, such as Claude Autant-Lara,^[10] Maurice Bardèche,^[11] Louis-Ferdinand Céline,^[12] Paul Rassinier,^[13] François Duprat,^[14] Serge Thion,^[15] Robert Faurisson,^[16] and Dieudonné M'bala M'bala.^[17]

Today, the few remaining defenders of Vichy France maintain the claim made by its Catholic fascist leaders Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval: state collaboration was supposed to protect the French civilian population from the Occupation's hardships. At his trial, Pétain said that Charles de Gaulle had represented the "sword" of France, and Pétain had been the "shield" protecting France.^[18]

Kim Munholland (1934‒2020) reported in 1994 a widespread consensus among historians on Vichy French authoritarianism and its

broadly stated desire to regenerate a "decadent" state and society that had become corrupted by an ambient lassitude, secularism, and hedonism under the Third Republic by returning to earlier and purer values and imposing a greater discipline and dynamism upon the industrial order.^[19]

American historian Robert Paxton (1932 ‒ ) said:^[20]

The Nazis needed the French administration [...] They always complained about the lack of staff [...] The French state, itself, participated in the policy of extermination of the Jews [...] How can one claim the reverse when such technical and administrative resources were made available to them? [...] Contrary to preconceived ideas, Vichy did not sacrifice foreign Jews in the hope of protecting French Jews. At the hierarchy summit, it knew, from the start, that the deportation of French Jews was unavoidable.

American historian Susan Zuccotti (1940 ‒ ) said that the Vichy regime facilitated the deportation of foreign Jews, rather than French Jews, until at least 1943:^[21]

Vichy officials [had] hoped to deport foreign Jews throughout France in order to ease pressure on native Jews. Pierre Laval himself expressed the official Vichy position [...] In the early months of 1943, the terror [Adam] Munz and [Alfred] Feldman described in German-occupied France was still experienced by foreign Jews like themselves. It is difficult to know exactly how many French Jews were arrested, usually for specific or alleged offences, but on 21 January 1943, Helmut Knochen informed Eichmann in Berlin that there were 2,159 French citizens among the 3,811 prisoners at Drancy. Many had been at Drancy for several months. They had not been deported because, until January 1943, there had usually been enough foreigners and their children to fill the forty-three trains that had carried about 41,591 people to the east [...] By January 1943, foreign Jews were increasingly aware of the danger and difficult to find. Nazi pressure for the arrest of French Jews and the deportation of those already at Drancy increased accordingly. Thus, when Knochen reported that there were 2,159 French citizens among the 3,811 prisoners at Drancy on 21 January 1943, he also asked Eichmann for permission to deport them. There had been no convoy from Drancy in December and January, and [SS Lieutenant Heinz] Heinz Röthke was pressuring Knochen to resume them. Röthke also wanted to empty Drancy in order to refill it. Despite Vichy officials' past disapproval and Eichmann's own prior discouragement of such a step, permission for the deportation of the French Jews at Drancy, except for those in mixed marriages, was granted from Berlin on 25 January.

Deportations from France started in summer 1942, several months after mass deportation from other countries had started. Whatever the Vichy government's initial or subsequent intent, the death rate was 15% for French Jews, slightly over half of that of non-citizen Jews residing in France.^[22]

• Polish Memory Law
• Historical revisionism
• Secondary antisemitism