Les services artistiques de la radio de Vichy : l'application hasardeuse de la législation antisémite

Abstract

In the defeated France, the Vichy government made use of the National Broadcasting as the readiest organ for the new political trends. Under the rule of one of the most drastic services of the new State that was the General Office for Information and Propaganda, this service immediately undertook, as soon as the first status for the Jews was promulgated, to purge widely its various offices, which conveyed in fact a particularly outrageous interpretation of the actual legislation. The utterly discretionary exclusion of Jewish artists who had been engaged to enrich the programs of Vichy radio, reflects the gap between the intentions of the lawmaker – the exclusion of the Jews from the posts where they could be influential – and the difficulty in trying to adapt a law to an intricate service, placed at the intersection between civil service and culture system.