Volume 40, Number 14 · August 12, 1993
Betrayal in France
By Tony Judt
The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews
by Susan Zuccotti
Basic Books, 383 pp., $30.00
For a generation following the Liberation, the French slept uneasily upon their wartime experiences. Its victorious opponents dismissed the regime of Vichy as the work of a small coterie of fascists and collaborators, marginal to the national community and unrepresentative of it. For its defenders, Marshal Pétain's government was the maligned shield behind which France had regrouped its forces, protected from the worst ravages of occupation. Few had the desire or reason to reopen old wounds. Then, beginning in the early Seventies and building to a crescendo a decade later, there came upon the country a revival of memory, both popular and scholarly. The initial product of this reawakening was a series of scholarly accounts of the true character of the Vichy experience, which made clear the extent of its contemporary support as well as its roots in earlier French history. These, in turn, led to more searching investigations into the most neglected subject of all: the experience of Jews in occupied France and their treatment at the hands of the collaborationist regime of Vichy.
Review, 4591 words
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