Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France - Softcover

Weisberg, Richard H.

9780814793367: Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814793363 ISBN 13: 9780814793367

Publisher: NYU Press, 1998

The involvement of Vichy France with Nazi Germany's efforts to exterminate Europe's Jews has long been a source of debate and contention. At a time when France is taking more responsibility for its role in the deportation and murder of 75,000 of its Jewish citizens, Richard Weisberg here provides a comprehensive and devastating account of the French legal system's complicity with Hitler's genocidal campaign during the dark period known as Vichy.

As in Germany, the exclusionary laws passed during the Vichy period formalized institutional anti-semitism. In Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France, Weisberg pulls back the curtain on the ways in which the legal community responded to these laws. Private lawyers quickly absorbed the discourse of religious exclusion into the conventional legal framework, expanding the laws beyond their simple intentions, their literal sense, and even their German precedents. Anti-Jewish laws slipped easily and with little resistance into the legal canon and French lawyers often enlisted the laws as a means of career advancement. Examining the work of lawyers and judges, policy makers and administrators, prosecutors and defenders, reporters and academics, Weisberg reveals how legalized persecution actually operated on a practical level.

For a discussion about this book at the Amgot web site, please go tohttp://www.amgot.org/weisberg.htm

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About the Author:

Richard Weisberg is the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University and the author, most recently, of Poethics, and Other Strategies of Law and Literature.

Review:

”Having learned much from this book, I commend it to readers as first-rate legal history, as a distinguished contribution to the understanding of the Holocaust in France, and also as a cautionary tale.”

-Michael R. Marrus,author of Vichy France and the Jews

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