Law and Human Suffering: A Slice of Life in Vichy France

Abstract

This essay discusses three diaries of the French Nazi occupation era. One offers moral reflection concerning the collaborationist state and the Nazi occupier. The second is by a student from an old French Jewish family who writes of, among other things, what it meant to have to wear the yellow star. The final diary spans just one month, starting from the arrest of the author's husband. He was about to be deported on the last train to leave Paris. These diaries show us a slice of life of the times, as they spur us to reflection on law and humanity.

Keywords:

• Vichy
• diaries
• France
• Second World War
• Nazi occupation
• Resistance

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a great pleasure to participate in honoring the work of Richard Weisberg, whose work has inspired me for some 25 years. This article is intended as tribute to his abiding interest in law and literature, from which he helped to create a new field. I am grateful to Kevin Clermont for his review of an earlier draft of this article. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Dominique Remy, Lois de Vichy (Paris: Romillat, 2004).

2. Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires (1940–1944) (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

3. He was elected to the Académie française in 1961. See Jean-Kély Paulhan, “Avant-propos,” in Remy, Lois de Vichy, 8.

4. For more on what is known in France to this day as “the call of 18 June” (“l'appel du 18 juin”), see Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, L'appel du 18 juin: et les appels du general de Gaulle des mois de juin et juillet 1940 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).

5. “C'est une difficile entreprise de ne pouvoir garder l'honneur que contre la loi.”

6. Vivian Grosswald Curran, The Legalization of Racism in a Constitutional State: Democracy's Suicide in Vichy France, Hastings Law Journal 50 (1998): 1, 2. For a reference to “la vraie France” in Guéhenno's diary, see Guéhenno, Journal des années noires, 109.

7. Curran, The Legalization of Racism.

8. Les Éditions de Minuit published some of the most renowned works of the times, including Vercors’ Le silence de la mer. The publishing house is still in existence, and in 2016 was the publisher of Elie Wiesel's Night in French, the book's original language. It was also the original publisher of the third diary discussed in this article.

9. One of the earliest of his descriptions is of a visit to an old Jew, the uncle of a friend, to give him news of his relatives in the unoccupied, southern zone. The man's son has committed suicide, and the old man is afraid to leave his apartment. The vast apartment was once a rich apartment, whose present condition Guéhenno describes as that of a “carcass,” emptied of much that had once been in it, a scene, as he put it, from Dostoyevski, of death and displacement (41).

10. “STO” stands for “Service de travail obligatoire,” literally, “Forced Work Service.”

11. See Olivier Wievorka, Histoire de la Résistance 1940–1945 (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2013), 208–25.

12. Jean Guéhenno, Jean-Jacques: 1712–1750. En marges des Confessions (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1948).

13. This perception of Rousseau reflected Rousseau's self-perception and ideals, but not necessarily the reality of his life, inasmuch as he may have fallen prey to the gap between sincerity and authenticity. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

14. See, e.g., Lectures de René Char, eds. Tineke Kingma-Ejgendaal and Paul J. Smith (Amsterdam: Crin 22, 1990), 131.

15. Helene Berr, Journal 1942–1944 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008).

16. The French term used is “de vieille souche française,” “of old French [-Jewish] stock.” Mariette Job, “Une vie confisquée,” in Berr, Journal 1942–1944, 283.

17. There is one exception, a reference to an avis de spoliation, a notice of expropriation, which Mme Berr is holding in a rare moment of discouragement (24), but no subsequent evidence in the diary of anything changing in the family's lavish lifestyle.

18. Job, “Une vie confisquée,” 285–6.

19. Ibid., 287.

20. Guéhenno may have been externalizing his own feelings to some extent, as his observations reflect no anti-Semitism in the scenes he describes between Jews and others in the streets. On the other hand, he does describe the cowardice of many French collaborators, especially of fellow writers, and once of a French officer who refuses to be seated near him in a restaurant because one of his group includes a man of distinctively Jewish appearance.

21. Pierre Masse had been a senator. See, e.g., Masse, Pierre, at French Senate website (Sénat, un site au service des citoyens), at https://www.senat.fr/senateur-3eme-republique/masse_pierre0241r3.html.

22. Crémieux was a prominent lawyer. See Richard H. Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 87. The family, French since the early eighteenth century, was extremely illustrious, with a hero of the 1870 Marseille Commune being another Gaston Crémieux; see Roger Vignaud, Gaston Cremieux: La commune de Marseille: un reve inacheve (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 2003); and an 1870 law liberalizing naturalization, abrogated by the Vichy government in 1940, also bearing the family name. See Andre Combes, Adolphe Cremieux 1796–1880 (Paris: Maçonniques de France, 2002).

23. A number of the family's progeny are law professors in France today.

24. UGIF stands for l'Union générale des israélites de France. See Guéhenno, Jean-Jacques, 100, n1.

25. See La petite fille du Vel-d'Hiv for the story of how one such child, herself arrested, ends up with l'UGIF and, exceptionally, is not deported.

26. The diary does not make an explicit reference to her engagement, but rather to other events that make clear it has occurred, most notably perhaps the efforts of Jean's mother to persuade her to raise their children in the Catholic religion (187).

27. Job, “Une vie confisquée,” 287.

28. Ibid., 288.

29. Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, Ceux qui ne domaient pas: Journal 1944–1946 [1957] (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2009, 2nd edn).

30. Mesnil-Amar lived from 1909 to 1987. See Frida Wattenberg, André Amar, on AJPN (Anonymes, Justes et Persécutés Durant la période Nazie dans les communes de France), at http://www.ajpn.org/personne-Andre-Amar-2099.html.

31. Ibid.

32. The author's father is hidden by his loyal cook, until presumably he needs to move again out of precaution (58), and later by a former maid (95) in what by then is his fifth or sixth place (95).

33. Mr. Amar's father was a banker and her husband a principal in it. See Wattenberg, André Amar.

34. The Germans agreed to deport foreign Jews first, as a way to create less opposition among the French population. It was only a first step, however, as the diary and fate of Hélène Berr make clear. By the time Mr. Berr was in Drancy, French Jews were being deported (142).

35. Sylvie Jessua-Amar, André Amar, on AJPN, at http://www.ajpn.org/personne-Andre-Amar-2099.html.at http://www.ajpn.org/personne-Andre-Amar-2099.html.

36. Marcel Reich Ranicki, Mein Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), 53.

37. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).

38. For a book about this transport, see Jean-François Chaigneau, Le dernier wagon (Paris: France loisirs, 1982).

39. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 15.

40. Guéhenno is among them. See Guéhenno, Journal des années noires, 28.

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Notes on contributors

Vivian Grosswald Curran

Vivian Grosswald Curran is Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, PA, where she specializes in comparative and transnational law. She is a Chevalier des palmes académiques of France and also received the großes goldenes Ehrenzeichen from the Republic of Austria for her work as the US member of the Austrian General Property Fund to compensate victims of Nazi persecution on the territory of Austria from 1938 to 1945. She has written and lectured extensively on intertwined issues of history, law, and memory.