Abstract
AbstractResearch on authoritarian legitimation suggests that rulers seek support through ideological, personalistic, performance-based, and procedural strategies. Typically, however, this work only considers the dynamics of legitimation between rulers and civilians. In contrast, this paper suggests that meso-level actors play a critical role in shaping legitimation from both above and below. Through an historical analysis of the French episcopate’s support for the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, I identify four practices that bolstered Vichy’s attempts to accrue legitimacy and simultaneously identify the consequences of these practices for the Church’s relationship with Jews. Public endorsements by the religious authorities for Marshal Pétain, their cooperation with the Vichy administration, the expression of shared values, and common rhetoric all contributed to the regime’s legitimation process while leading to a concomitant decline in the hierarchy’s ties to the rabbinate. These results suggest that attention to meso-level actors brings into relief important dynamics about how legitimation processes unfold in authoritarian settings while simultaneously contributing to research on the Holocaust in France.
Highlights
O N 1 0 J U L Y 1940, the Vichy regime2 came to power in France and the French Third Republic was dissolved
The historian Phillipe Burrin explains how, three days after the armistice was signed on 25 June, “Pétain addressed his compatriots to inform them of the implementation of the armistice and in the very same breath, he announced the beginning of a new order and bade them help him to set up a ‘new France’” [1996: 14]
Numerous French historians have noted the important role of various organizations in shaping public opinion through their support for the Vichy regime [e.g., Burrin 1996; Sapiro 2014] The historical record, suggests that the French Catholic Church had an especially powerful impact on French civilian’s responses to the war, defeat, and subsequent settlement around a policy of collaboration with Nazi
Summary
O N 1 0 J U L Y 1940, the Vichy regime came to power in France and the French Third Republic was dissolved. This “normative ordering power” of religion can in turn help or hinder authoritarian legitimation by tying authoritarians’ claims to legitimacy to sacred ideas about “what is” and “what ought to be” beyond partisan interests [Brubaker 2015: 5; Geertz 1983 in Williams 1996: 370; Grzymala-Busse 2016: 13] It can raise the stakes of subversion where authoritarianism is endorsed by religious authorities, or compliance where it is rejected insofar as each position entails countering the will of God. Religious organizations can support authoritarian legitimation if their leaders develop cooperative working relationships with authoritarians or take positions in their administrative apparatus. The following section motivates this article’s focus on the French Catholic Church in Vichy France and during the Vichy regime’s first two years of rule
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