Verdict on Vichy - Softcover

Curtis, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842126695 ISBN 13: 9781842126691

Publisher: PHOENIX PRESS, 2004

Synopsis

Michael Curtis uses up-to-date research to examine the degree to which ministers and officials of the Vichy regime, the legal and administrative system, the Church, and individuals in different walks of life collaborated with Nazi Germany which occupied part of and then all of France between 1940 and 1944. Curtis reviews the careers, indictments and trials of the regime's prominent figures for crimes against humanity committed during the war, and scrutinises the ambivalent role of Francois Mitterrand as a Vichy official. This book also analyses the new official reports of the complex aryanisation process as well as the requisitioning of Jewish goods and property.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Curtis is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.

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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: PHOENIX PRESS
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1842126695
• ISBN 13: 9781842126691
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416