In Europe

very start he concentrated more power in his person than any French head of state since Napoleon. In old age he had his moments of weakness and confusion, but mostly he was clear-witted and full of vitality.
    Pétain's ideal France was rural, personal, familial. It was the old, pre-revolutionary France that he hoped to resurrect in modern form, a France without individualism, liberalism, democracy and cosmopolitanism. Before me lies his credo,
La France Nouvelle
, a little booklet with a red, blue and white border that was read to tatters all over France during the war. The first lines of his manifesto: ‘Man has, by nature, certain fundamental rights. These can only be guaranteed him by the communities that surround him: the Family that raises him, the Profession that nurtures him, the Nation that protects him.’ I go on turning the pages, but nowhere do I find the language of Hitler or Mussolini. The book consists almost entirely of speeches and exhortations, and it is above all extremely Catholic: ‘The Social Politics of Education’, ‘On Individualism and the Nation’, ‘Message concerning the Pensioning of the Elderly’, ‘Message to the Mothers of France’, and so on.
    The Vichy regime was not a National Socialist regime, it was not imposed by the Germans, it was home-grown. There were not very many French Nazis. There were, however, militant right-wing thinkers who hoped for a new, authoritarian order – a tradition present in France today. One of them, the author Robert Brasillach, wrote just before he was executed for collaboration in winter 1945: ‘We were bedfellows with the Germans and we must admit that we were fond of some of them.’ But above all, the regime was legitimised by respectable intellectuals and members of the upper middle class, upstanding French patriots who were none too willing to bow to their defeat, who desired no more war and were prepared to mould themselves to the Nazis’ new Europe.
    In practice, their ‘collaboration’ meant that Vichy took a great deal of work off the Germans’ hands. The regime organised the country's owncolonisation: the plundering of industry, agriculture and national reserves, the forced labour in Germany and, not least, the deportation of the Jews. The Vichy regime took the first anti-Jewish measures on its own initiative, without instructions from Germany, and with remarkable vigour. On 17 July, 1940, only one week after the regime came to power, it decided that public functions were to be reserved for those of French parentage: a measure with immediate repercussions for the some 200,000 Jewish refugees who had sought asylum in France. On 22 July, a committee was set up to review all acts of naturalisation. On 3 October, the Jewish Statute was implemented, the start of an avalanche of measures – professional bans, mandatory registrations, greater and lesser forms of discrimination – directed against the Jews. By late 1940, some 60,000 people, mostly non-French Jews, were already interned in around 30 concentration camps.
    France's long tradition of anti-Semitism returned to full bloom after July 1940. Who else was to bear the blame but the internationalists, the decadent intellectuals, those who had ‘sullied’ the republic with ‘modern’ views, who else but the Jews? In December 1940, the Parisian anti-Semitic weekly
Au Pilori
(In the Pillory) started a contest among its 60,000 (!) readers for the best answer to how one could be rid of the Jews. First prize: a pair of silk stockings. Best entries: drop them in the jungle among the wild animals, or burn them in crematoria.
    Vichy built upon this mentality, but in a different way from the Nazis. The anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime was more nationalistic than racist; for Vichy, it was about the creation of second-class citizenship for French Jews and the removal of non-French Jews, but not about the destruction of the Jewish race. Second only to Denmark, France remains the country with the highest proportion of Jewish survivors: less than a quarter of the Jewish population was deported, as opposed to more than three quarters in, for example, the Netherlands.
    In that part of France occupied by the Germans, however, the mass murders continued apace. The first trains loaded with deportees left Paris for Auschwitz in early 1942. On 16–17 July, 1942, more than 12,000 Parisian Jews were arrested during
La Grande Rafle
. Thousands of French policemen were involved in that razzia. Some