Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth & the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942 by Daniel Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth & the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942 by Daniel Lee Sarah Fishman Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth & the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942. By Daniel Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiv + 274 pp. Cloth $110. Pétain’s Jewish Children, Daniel Lee’s meticulously researched and original book, argues for a reconsideration of the traditional narrative of the Jewish experience in World War II France that divides it into one of three categories: persecution, resistance, and rescue. Lee maintains that there was space for coexistence, even cooperation, between Vichy and Jews, if only until 1942 for French Jewish male youth in the unoccupied zone. Because Vichy did not play a direct role encouraging anti-Semitic propaganda in the unoccupied zone, Lee contends that its anti-Semitic laws represented less of a warning signal than it might seem for Jews living there. Lee acknowledges Vichy’s abrupt and deadly about-face in the summer of 1942, a time of escalating round-ups, arrests, and deportations of Jews across France. However, focusing exclusively on persecution, resistance, and rescue, Lee argues, assumes that Jews in the unoccupied zone knew what was coming, collapsing the four years of occupation to the last two years. Based on an impressive array of sources, including seventy interviews he conducted with Jewish and non-Jewish witnesses, Lee compares Jewish youth movements to other national youth movements, both prior to and during the war. After analyzing the prewar status of French Jews, Vichy leaders’ ideas about youth, and Jewish youth leaders’ responses to Vichy, Lee turns to specific examples. He explores the relations between Jews and other participants at the newly established youth leadership school at Uriage. His chapter on scouting, organized along religious lines in France, reveals that, in the unoccupied zone until 1942, Jewish scouts continued to operate and interacted openly with the broader scouting movement. Lee discovered Jewish leaders who mobilized Jewish youth in support of Vichy’s “return to the land” goal, describing one rural Jewish youth commune in Lautrec that Vichy initially provided with money and equipment. Finally, Lee investigates the Jewish experience in Vichy’s largest initiative for French youth, the Chantiers de la Jeunesse (“Youth Works”). All French men who had turned twenty were mobilized in June 1940, just as France stopped fighting and signed an Armistice with Germany that limited the French Army to one hundred thousand men. Rather than sending the recruits home, Vichy [End Page 341] created a new form of national service. Starting in July 1940, French men at age twenty were obligated to spend eight months in the Chantiers, a series of camps across rural unoccupied France where the young men worked on community projects like road repairs or forestry. The Chantiers also aimed at instilling Vichy’s conservative values: order, discipline, respect for authority, hard work. In April 1941, six months after Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, Vichy’s Ministry of Youth, rather than excluding Jews from the Chantiers, insisted, “Each French citizen, without distinction of religion or race, is compelled to undertake this obligation” (195). Clearly Lee’s research complicates our understanding of anti-Semitism in France, at least amongst some traditionalist leaders at Vichy, prior to 1942. Furthermore, Lee’s book highlights the central importance of youth, in this case gendered masculine, to national leaders. In examining the continuities between prewar youth movements—Jewish, Christian, and secular—and Vichy’s youth programs, Lee highlights unexpected parallels between several Jewish interwar youth movements and Vichy ideals: reinvigorating young men, removing them from the city, toughening their bodies, providing them with new agricultural and manual skills, creating a strong and virile “New (Jewish) Man.” This helps explain why some Jewish youth leaders even considered working with the Vichy government, and vice versa. Some Vichy rhetoric appealed to some Jewish youth leaders, and some Vichy leaders believed that young French Jewish men willing to transform themselves along those lines had a place in Vichy’s National Revolution. Given its originality, Lee’s book naturally leaves some questions. Clearly the importance of youth in certain Vichy circles created a space for this unexpected collaboration. Were Jewish youth...