From the Author:
Michael Curtis is a distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. He is highly regarded as an expert in several fields—political theory, comparative government, European politics, and the Middle East. He is the author of more than thirty books, and for many years he was the president of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East and editor of the Middle East Review. Born in London and educated at the London School of Economics, Professor Curtis has taught at Yale University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and University of Bologna, in addition to his years at Rutgers. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, is married, and has two sons and six grandchildren.
From Publishers Weekly:
Was the wartime Vichy regime a helpless victim or an enthusiastic collaborator in Nazi crimes? That question has been the cause of much controversy in France, and according to this comprehensive indictment, "the verdict on Vichy must be guilty." Rutgers political science professor Curtis argues that Vichy's anti-Semitic policies were "a deliberate, autonomous French government policy rather than...a response to German pressure." Vichy passed laws to strip Jews of their civil rights, seize their assets and exclude them from most professions. Worse, the French police apparatus organized and carried out the rounding up of Jews for deportation to the death camps, a task that the small German police contingent in France would have been hard-pressed to accomplish. With more freedom of action than most of occupied Europe, Curtis argues, Vichy was far more complicit in the Final Solution, especially in comparison with occupied Denmark and even the Axis governments in Bulgaria and Fascist Italy, which took concerted action-or at the very least, were less inclined to enforce discriminatory laws-to protect Jews under their jurisdiction. Curtis sets Vichy policy in the context of pre-war right wing and anti-Semitic political tendencies, and explores the post-war consensus that sought to downplay Vichy collaboration in favor of a mythology of heroic national Resistance to the Germans. He goes beyond the Vichy officials themselves to explore the acquiescence or silence of French society-the legal establishment, Church leaders, even left intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir-in the face of anti-Semitic persecution. Drawing on the latest research, Curtis provides a comprehensive, nuanced but morally uncompromising look at France's darkest hour. 8 pages of b&w photos.
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