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March 30, 2012
France was shaped by revolution
There is no doubt that, among the mainstream French, antisemitism has little currency.
EUGENE KAELLIS
The recent targeted killings in Toulouse have focused Jewish attention on France. With its 650,000-750,000 Jews, France ranks just behind the United States and Israel among countries with significant Jewish populations. The incident has revived memories of the bombings in Paris of a synagogue and a Jewish restaurant some years ago, also apparently the work of Muslim terrorists. Non-Muslim French have not displayed any significant increase in antisemitism in recent years, but the demographic circumstances of the country are not promising.
France’s Muslim population, largely derived from the former colonies of Morocco and Algeria, and their descendants, next to native-born French Catholics, now constitutes by far the largest ethno-religious group in France, about 10 times larger than its Jewish population, and growing both proportionally and absolutely. Of course, the vast majority of French Muslims are not potentially violent enemies of the Jewish population, but they certainly form part of a base from which one can more likely expect extremists to arise. French Protestants, usually more favorable to Jews, have not been a prominent force since the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572.
During the Revolution, beginning in 1789, France was the first European nation to grant Jews all the rights of citizenship. What was expected of them, however, was that they would enter French society as individuals, no longer as part of a community with its own beliefs, forms of worship and traditions. Napoleon confirmed this arrangement. He even appointed a Jewish marshal (André Masséna) and, wherever the Grande Armée went, ghetto walls were torn down (only to be replaced after his defeat). Napoleon even promised that, once he had conquered the Middle East, he would re-create a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
However, the problem with progressive revolutions is that they never fulfil their promises. Even when they succeed, they fail. It seems that exalted promises simply cannot be matched by the appropriate deeds. Patently “bad” revolutions – fascism, Nazism, Falangism – are successful only until, in a frenzy of aggressive over-confidence, they overextend themselves or, as in the case of Francisco Franco in Spain, institute regimes that are too “personal,” ending abruptly when the leader dies.
The French, en masse, have always been aware of the failure of the Great Revolution (1789) and they have periodically tried to “complete” it – in 1830, 1848, 1851 (the last actually a coup) and 1871 (with the incendiary communards). Each effort was relatively futile. Even today, while French society, as the Fifth Republic, in spite of chronically recurrent demonstrations, is essentially stable, the remnants of the revolutionists are still battling persistent counter-elements in French history – authoritarianism and excessive clerical influence – and the “battlers” do it in the traditional fashion – street demonstrations which, in the 1960s, actually resorted once more to the barricades.
As an aspect of this, during the Third Republic, the disgraceful and prolonged Dreyfus Affair demonstrated how close to the surface the bigoted elements of the ancien régime still were. It was while observing vicious street demonstrations by anti-Dreyfusards that Theodor Herzl came to believe that Jews would have reliable civil security only in their own homeland.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the French army was both large and well equipped. Its rapid and total defeat, only 39 days after the start of the Wehrmacht offensive, was striking evidence of the malaise of the Third Republic and the near total incompetence of its general staff. Actually, in light of the near coup d’état by a mob of Rightists in 1934, as Adolf Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany, the French collapse was not surprising. However, it was what happened afterwards that revealed the basic weaknesses of French republicanism, particularly as concerned the Jews.
The French not only capitulated, very largely, they collaborated. Moreover, their collaboration had a distinct element of zeal. During the Second World War, France provided Germany with far more weapons than any other occupied country. The cosmetics giant, Oreal, for example, switched from lipstick containers to cartridges. France, especially the Vichy government, which ran the territory unoccupied by the Germans until the Allied invasion of North Africa, mimicked the Nazis in defining who is a Jew, depriving Jews of almost all of their civil rights and, worst of all, capturing them and sending them for “resettlement in the east,” meaning, of course, either slave labor until they perished or, on arrival at their destination, immediate gassing and cremation. The Germans themselves were surprised at the zeal with which, for example, the Vichy Milice, rounded up Jews. Simply brutal, it was entirely lacking in gleichschaltung und ordnungsgemass (synchronization and orderliness) that were the earmarks of the “Final Solution.” Even some elements of the relatively minor Resistance were antisemitic.
It may be argued that such zealousness by many of the French were based on the belief that Hitler would win the war – that Britain, alone, simply couldn’t hold out against the Luftwaffe and the U-boats’ sinking of ships carrying vital supplies, and that the USSR had signed a pact with Germany, so France simply had to make the best of it. This was the argument used after the war to justify this super-collaboration. But the behavior of the Vichyites did not change after the USSR entered the war nor, indeed, after American entry, which more or less guaranteed a Nazi defeat.
It was after the war, when there was a règlement de comptes (settlement of scores) that the true nature of French collaboration became evident. Charles De Gaulle, who had been sentenced to death by the Vichy government, in absentia, of course, always the poseur, then became magnanimous toward the collaborators, as did François Mitterrand, the future socialist president of the republic, who had seriously compromised his own purported principles during the occupation.
But France has changed. The swift reaction by President Nicolas Sarkozy and local governments to the recent, apparently hate-motivated killings in Toulouse, and the widespread outrage, both locally and federally, may revive memories of the synagogue bombing and that of Goldenberg’s restaurant a few years ago, but there is no doubt that, among the mainstream French, antisemitism now has little currency. Even among the ultra-nationalist followers of Jean-Marie Le Pen (and now his successor-daughter, Marine), Holocaust denial or downgrading is no longer considered a vote-getter.
Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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