The grave of Philippe Pétain on Île d'Yeu, France. Wikimedia. CC.On Sunday Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National denied on TV that France or the French state were responsible for the infamous Vel d’Hiv round-up of Jews in Paris on 16-17 July 1942. Corralled by French police into the eponymous cycling stadium, most of these 13,000 Jews ended up in Nazi death camps. But for Le Pen, widely expected to top the first round of the Presidential elections on 23 April, “if there are people responsible, it’s those who were in power at the time. It’s not France.”
In a follow-up statement, she invoked the authority of former presidents de Gaulle and Mitterrand to insist that France and the Republic were in London during the German occupation, and that the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime “was not France”. Drawing on their respective inferences that Vichy was merely an aberration of the French Republic and imposter as representative of France, she holds that while individuals shared responsibility for the atrocities of the period on a personal basis; none could be imputed to France as such. What are the implications and historical stakes of her intervention? And how is this likely to play out in the run-in to the elections?
A useful starting point to make sense of the stakes of this issue is an editorial in the leading French daily Le Monde in 1992 - a period of particularly prolific and vexed public discourse about France’s Vichy past - that invoked Italian Auschwitz survivor and writer Primo Levi. This drew on his concept of the “grey zone” to understand French complicity and collaboration during the German Occupation.
