When Pétain betrayed France

CLAIMS by apologists for the Vichy regime that Marshal Pétain tried to protect the Jews have been discredited by the discovery of a draft of the Statute on Jews annotated in his hand. The document, legislation passed by the regime in 1940 after the fall of France depriving Jews of rights, shows he thought the original proposals were not tough enough.

A Great War hero, Pétain became PM as France faced defeat. He favoured armistice over the union of Britain and France. He then obtained, by parliamentary vote, extraordinary powers to create a new constitution, becoming head of the French State (not Republic).

The regime oversaw anti-semitic laws, including setting up internment camps for foreign Jews. The most notorious episode was in July 16, 1942, when 13,000 Jews were arrested by police and 7,500 were held inside Paris’s Vélodrome d'Hiver in appalling conditions, before, in many cases, being deported to Nazi death camps.

A new film, She was called Sarah, stars Kristin Scott Thomas as a journalist investigating the fate of one young girl involved.

In 1993 President François Mitterrand chose the date for an annual commemoration of “racist and anti-semitic persecutions under the French State”, to which Jacques Chirac added the notion of “homage to the Just of France”, whom he also honoured in the Pantheon (some 3,000 French acknowledged by Israel as having helped Jews escape persecution, who helped to ensure fewer Jews died than in many occupied states: 30 per cent, compared to 80 per cent in Holland).

On this year’s anniversary Veterans’ Minster Hubert Falco said: “The French State betrayed France, the France of the Lumières and the Rights of Man.” It not only submitted to the demands of the Nazis, but “outstripped them and put at their service the whole machinery of state”.