MARIANNE IN A NEGLIGE:

Nazi occupation not inhumane - Le Pen (Amelia Gentleman, January 13, 2005, The Guardian)

The French government last night threatened to prosecute the outspoken far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen after he declared in an interview that the Nazi occupation of France during the second world war had not been "particularly inhumane".

In an interview given to an extremist rightwing paper, Rivarol, on the eve of Europe-wide ceremonies to mark the liberation of Auschwitz, Mr Le Pen made light of the tragic consequences of the German invasion of France.

"In France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders," he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

He made no mention of the 76,000 Jews who were deported from France to concentration camps during the occupation, of whom only 2,500 survived.

Interview with Robert Gildea (Jennie Rothenberg interviews Robert Gildea, December 2003, Atlantic Monthly):

In the immense canon of books about Europe during World War II, numerous works center on France, immortalizing the glory of la Résistance or revealing dark scandals of Nazi collaboration. Marianne in Chains is a different kind of story. In its pages, author Robert Gildea tells the tales of ordinary French people who were less concerned with abetting or resisting the Nazis than with maintaining their everyday lives. [...]

Compared with other parts of Europe—most notably the Eastern Front and the Balkans—the Nazi occupation of France was relatively gentle. The French, whose Latin heritage ranked them high in Hitler's racial hierarchy, were given more freedom than those of other nations to maintain their local governments, churches, and ways of life. Food was scarce, but rather than focusing on hunger and poverty, Gildea looks at the resourcefulness of the French people as they satisfied their daily needs through clandestine networks and "gray markets." In one chapter entitled "Circuses," he spends two full pages listing youth clubs and leisure organizations that existed in occupied France, demonstrating that the French people did not spend the war years "cowering at home."

Gildea's demystifying approach to history has not always made him popular with French academics.

The Nazis may not have respected their collaborators, but didn't need to treat them all that harshly since resistance was minimal. They'd established what the French were, all that was left was haggling over the price.

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French Anti-Semitism Is Not New: From Dreyfus to failing to acknowledge Holocaust role, it’s been significant for more than a century. (Robert B. Goldmann, 1/07/05, The Jewish Week )

Over the past 150 years, French Jews were freer and their emancipation came earlier than the rest of Europe. Integration of Jews was part of implementing the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” that also inspired the founders of the United States.

Alongside this impressive history, however, France has been plagued by persistent anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism that rarely gained outright power but are significant in French politics and society.

Looking at the past 125 years, the Dreyfus trial stands out as a major landmark of this trend. The Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was tried and convicted for alleged espionage. The charge had been concocted by top elements of the French army, aided and abetted by some of the country’s leading publicists. Only independent investigation by a small group of journalists, notably Emile Zola, and their unmasking of the “plot” as a fabrication led to a new trial and exoneration of the Jewish officer.

Anti-Semitism, or its tolerance by the social and political elite, manifested itself again in the 1930s in the persons of pro-appeasement, fascist-leaning Edouard Daladier and Pierre Laval, the prime minister and foreign minister during Hitler’s rise to power. They represented a morally decayed society whose army could not withstand Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

The German victory led to the creation of a Nazi-style government headed by World War I hero Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain in part of occupied France. Under this regime, 75,000 of the then 250,000 Jews were sent to the death camps. (Many thousands of others either fled or were hidden by a remarkable number of courageous citizens in small communities, mostly in the south of the country.)

In the wake of liberation, there was no Nuremberg-type trial. Free French leader Gen. Charles deGaulle showed no interest in dealing with the mass murder of the Jews. Thus, men like Maurice Papon, who had organized the deportation of 2,000 Jews from Bordeaux, could glide smoothly into postwar administrations. Papon rose as high as to police chief of Paris.

In 1997, a half-century after the war, Papon was tried on war crimes charges after decades of work by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. Witnesses for Papon’s defense included an adjutant of deGaulle, who was asked about the impact on Free French headquarters in London of the disclosure in late 1942 by then British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden of what was happening in Auschwitz. The retired French officer testified that the report was seen as journalistic exaggeration.

The unbroken line of postwar right-wing movements continued with a party led by Pierre Poujade, and today with the National Front of Jean-Marie LePen, who called the Holocaust a detail of the war. LePen’s party only two years ago received 27 percent of the vote in the first round of a national election.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2005 8:33 AM