History: At the last rally of his failed presidential campaign last year, the extreme right-wing National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted in jest, "Hey boys, the second World War is over!" Lara Marlowe reviews Michael Curtis' Verdict on Vichy
You wouldn't think so from the regular way the war crops up. Le Pen's questioning of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews has harmed him more than all his tirades against Arab and African immigrants. His election campaign programme advocated policies similar to those of the 1940-1944 Vichy regime, and he said Marshal Philippe Pétain's motto, "Famille, Patrie, Travail", should be rehabilitated.
In recent weeks, George W. Bush and Tony Blair have equated Saddam Hussein with Hitler, and those reluctant to join their "coalition of the willing" with 1930s appeasers. When the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked about "old Europe", he meant German Nazism and French collaboration.
Young men from France's Arab-Muslim minority have repeatedly vandalised Jewish property in response to Israeli repression of the second Intifada. Israel and the US quickly brandished the accusation of French anti-Semitism, leading President Jacques Chirac to proclaim that "France is not an anti-Semitic country."
In December 2002, academics at the University of Paris VI suggested that Europeans should curtail exchanges with Israeli universities in protest at the treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Jewish intellectuals like Bernard-Henri Lévy harked back to the second World War. "French universities are the only major institution not to have repented for the wrongs of Vichy," he said in January, adding that its failure to apologise made Paris VI's proposal "even more shameful".
If for no other reason, Michael Curtis' book merits close examination because the Vichy period is so often used to attack France. A professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers, and a former fellow at the Dayan Centre in Tel Aviv, Curtis makes the connection between the present-day Middle East and the 1940s: "This objection to the centrality of anti-Semitism in discourse on Vichy can be linked . . . to French hostility towards, as well as criticism of, the policies of the state of Israel . . ." he writes on page 10.
The book begins with Chirac's speech on the 53rd anniversary of the "Vél d'Hiv" round-up by French police of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris. Their deportation to Nazi death camps, "will forever tarnish our history", Chirac said. Collective apologies for the behaviour of Vichy followed from French bishops, police, doctors and the National Assembly. The soul-searching peaked during the six-month trial of Maurice Papon, who was sentenced in April 1998 to 10 years in prison for his role in the deportation of 1,560 Jews from Bordeaux. Philippe Séguin, who then headed Chirac's RPR party, denounced "a climate of collective atonement and self-flagellation". The trend belatedly reached Ireland where, on January 26th, the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, apologised to Ireland's Jewish community.
Curtis's book gives the uncomfortable impression that he believes France as a nation is collectively guilty of "co-authorship of genocide". It is as if the enormity of the evil perpetrated by the Nazis made it impossible to hold present-day Germany responsible, while the sins of Vichy are held against subsequent generations.
"I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people," Curtis quotes Edmund Burke. Yet a few pages later, Curtis relents somewhat, saying that "the imposition of great suffering on innocent people" is "the heavy charge against Vichy". Of that he provides ample documentation, from the infamous "Statuts des Juifs" of 1940 and 1941 to the dispossession and deportation of more than 75,000 Jews.
Curtis' book is fraught with repetition and inconsistencies - even on basic facts and figures. "No senior official quit his job because of the arrests and deportation of Jews," he writes on page 89. Later he tells of army officers, police commissioners, an inspector-general of education, a regional prefect, an inspecteur des finances and others who defied orders, resigned or were fired because they saved Jews. Likewise, he repeatedly accuses the Catholic Church of remaining silent over the fate of Jews, then recounts how Cardinal Jules-Gérard Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse, wrote a letter denouncing the deportation of Jews that was read in 400 churches in August 1942. The Bishop of Montauban protested vigourously, and the Bishop of Nice saved up to 500 Jewish children.
Curtis is too honest an academic to leave out material that undermines his conclusion that "the verdict on Vichy must be guilty", but his failure to reconcile the facts he reports with his own categorical summations is as schizophrenic as France's own attitude towards Vichy. He notes that, by the end of the 19th century, almost a quarter of financial establishments in Paris were owned by Jews - who represented less than one per cent of the population of France. He describes the involvement of immigrants from eastern Europe in the Bund and other left-wing movements, and says French-born Jews - who in 1939 numbered 90,000, compared to 240,000 immigrants - were worried about the influx of Yiddish-speaking new arrivals who were "bound by ethnic ties". Yet Curtis denounces as anti-Semitic past French perceptions of Jews as rich, revolutionary or unassimilated.
Unlike Adam Nossiter's less ambitious but more powerful book on the same topic, published by Methuen in 2001, Curtis fails to convey the human drama of Nazi occupation. He devotes one sentence to Madeleine Lévy, the granddaughter of Dreyfus, who was deported and killed in Auschwitz. The stories of prominent French Jews who believed their loyalty to France would save them are poignant, but again, Curtis misses the opportunity to tell us more. Instead, he devotes pages of tedious detail to Vichy bureaucracy.
Curtis should have re-read his own manuscript more carefully, particularly his reference to the Italian Jewish poet and concentration camp survivor Primo Levi, who spoke of "infinite gradations of responsibility and moral ambivalence".
Lara Marlowe is France and Maghreb correspondent for The Irish Times. She covered the 1997-1998 trial of the former Vichy official and Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon
Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime. By Michael Curtis. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 419 pp. £20