Abstract
On 10 May 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. By 15 May, the German army had pierced the Maginot Line and entered France. The German invasion of France caught Isaac flatfooted at La Guitoune, one of two Isaac vacation homes at Saint-Palais-Sur-Mer (Charente-Inférieure). By 8 June 1940, the German panzers were within 40 miles of Paris. On 10 June, the day the Germans crossed the Seine, the French government departed, first to Tours, thence to Bordeaux. By 14 June, Paris was an occupied city. Two days later, a majority in the Reynaud cabinet voted to request armistice terms, Reynaud resigned as president of the Council and recommended to president of the Republic Lebrun that Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain be invited to form a government. On 22 June 1940, with Pétain at the helm of a new French cabinet, an armistice was signed in Compiègne forest in the very same railway car in which the 1918 armistice had taken place. When the armistice agreement was signed, the consensus view appeared to be that Britain would fall within a matter of weeks and the armistice would give way to a definitive peace settlement under which France would be equal partners with Germany in a new European order. Pending what the French hoped and contemplated would be an early peace settlement, the departments in Alsace and Lorraine that had been German between 1871 and 1918 (Moselle, Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin) were annexed to the Third Reich, the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais placed under Belgian-based German military administration and what remained of France was divided into an occupied and an unoccupied zone divided by a demarcation line. Approximately three-fifths of remaining France north of the Loire valley plus a narrow strip along the Atlantic coast (including St. Palais) were occupied by German troops and administered by a German military governor. France was to defray the costs of this occupation and its forces were to be demobilized. Under the armistice, the French government retained sovereignty over all of France except where its legislation conflicted with German military ordinances in the occupied zone. On 9 July 1940, Parliament, whose sessions had been suspended during the invasion, reconvened at Vichy in the unoccupied southern zone. The following day, a joint session of parliament empowered, as Isaac framed it, “a new government, Pétain at its head, with a Maurras as directeur de conscience,” to draft a new constitution. Travail, famille, patrie replaced the republican trilogy Liberté, égalité, fraternité. “The Third Republic was not killed by the Germans;” writes historian Susan Zuccotti. “it committed suicide. It died because its elected officials did not believe it [the Third Republic Constitution of 1875] worth saving.”
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24 April 2019
The original version of this book was revised. Imprecisions have been corrected and the index backfilled with missing page references where relevant
Notes
- 1.
The other, La Cagouille, had been gifted in 1934 to daughter Juliette and Robert Boudeville on the occasion of their marriage.
- 2.
Adam Nossiter, The Algeria Hotel: France, Memory and the Second World War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 104–5.
- 3.
Isaac, “Survol,” 225.
- 4.
Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 43.
- 5.
Isaac, “Survol,” 225–26.
- 6.
The Loi portant statut des Juifs was signed by Philippe Pétain, maréchal de France, head of l’Etat français, Pierre Laval, vice president of the council of ministers, Raphaël Alibert, keeper of the Seals and minister of justice, Marcel Peyrouton, minister of the interior, Paul Beaudoin, minister of foreign affairs, le général Huntziger, minister of defense, Yves Bouthillier, minister of finance, l’amiral Darlan, minister of the navy, René Belin, minister of commerce, and Pierre Caziot, minister of agriculture.
- 7.
In contrast, the German ordinance issued on 27 September 1940 deemed to be Jewish anyone belonging to “the Jewish religion” or having more than two Jewish grandparents, who in turn were deemed Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religion. Despite more severe sanctions, there was no mention of “la race juive,” nor of the status of half-Jews (i.e. those with one Jewish parent), nor did the marriage of a half-Jew with a Jew have implications.
- 8.
Quoted in Andre Kaspi, Les Juifs pendant l’occupation, rev. and enl. ed. (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1997), 61–2.
- 9.
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972).
- 10.
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), xxvi–xxvii.
- 11.
Quoted in ibid., 13. In 1951, after having been granted clemency and released from a Danish prison where he was serving a five-year sentence (his death sentence had been commuted), Best returned to West Germany and became a lawyer for Stinnes Co., founded by Hugo Stinnes.
- 12.
An October-dated draft of this letter, which does not give the date in October, is to be found in Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. From Isaac’s correspondence, it can be inferred that the statut des Juifs had not yet been published in the Journal officiel, which would imply the letter was sent prior to 18 October 1940. It is even possible the letter was sent prior to the adoption of the statut des Juifs, which would imply that the version that was sent bears the date of 1 October or 2 October 1940.
- 13.
When Laval returned to power in mid-April 1942, he returned not as vice president of the Council but as president of the Council, and therefore as leader of the government. He also held the portfolios of the interior, information and foreign affairs.
- 14.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 15.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 143.
- 16.
Marrus, 85.
- 17.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 18.
Pierre-Etienne Flandin was Laval’s short-lived successor, until 10 February 1941, when Admiral François Darlan replaced Flandin as vice president of the Council, assuming also the foreign affairs, interior and naval portfolios.
- 19.
Isaac, “Survol,” 226.
- 20.
Isaac, Expériences de ma vie. Péguy, 244.
- 21.
Pierrard, 340.
- 22.
Until its destruction, La Pergola was one of two houses, surrounded by gardens, on the left side of avenue des Amandiers, a short dead-end street at the top of montée St-Eutrope (renamed montée Jules Isaac in 1965).
- 23.
Lyon is the second largest city in France, was the largest in the unoccupied zone and the locus of the French resistance during World War II.
- 24.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 25.
In September 1939, the University of Strasbourg, including its library, was evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand.
- 26.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. Marc Bloch’s Etrange défaite addresses the causes and conditions of France’s military defeat in 1940. Tragically, Bloch’s efforts to secure the requisite travel documents were complicated by the death of his mother on 27 April 1941 and the bedridden (with pleurisy) state, until mid-May, of his wife, Simonne. In late 1942 or early 1943, Bloch decided to join the Resistance. Tragically, on 8 March 1944, he was arrested in Lyon by the Gestapo, and on the night of 16 June 1944, ten days after the 6 June Allied landings in Normandy, was shot by the Germans.
- 27.
Curiously, the correspondence exchanges to which Isaac was a party regarding initiatives to place unemployed Jewish lycee professors at the service of Jewish youth would come to an abrupt end at about the time of adoption of the second statut des Juifs on 2 June 1941.
- 28.
Marrus, 76.
- 29.
Ibid., 83.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Quoted in Kaspi, 57–58.
- 32.
Marrus, 91.
- 33.
Quoted in ibid., 88.
- 34.
By the time Vallat had left office in March 1942, yet a third statut des Juifs, never to see the light of day, had been drafted at Vallat’s imitative and under his oversight, and vetted by Darlan and the Conseil d’Etat (see Marrus and Paxton at p. 94).
- 35.
Marrus, 98.
- 36.
For this purpose, a grandparent was deemed to be of the Jewish race if the grandparent belonged “to the Jewish religion.”
- 37.
The Jews in the occupied zone had been the object of a census by virtue of a German ordinance of 27 September 1940.
- 38.
Le Carnet du lepreux, Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 39.
With a view to erasing all Jewish influence from the national economy, a law adopted on 22 July 1941 provided for the placing of Jewish property under the control of administrators who were empowered to convert the property to cash. The property declared pursuant to the law of 2 June was subject to seizure and sale under the law of 22 July.
- 40.
A volume of the third edition published in 1918 and dealing with the period 1789–1912 and the last volume of the edition published in 1930.
- 41.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 148.
- 42.
Le Carnet du Lepreux, Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. Postwar, André Alba would assume the direction and editorship of a retitled Cours d’Histoire JULES ISAAC.
- 43.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 148.
- 44.
Quoted in ibid., 147.
- 45.
Le Carnet du Lepreux, Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 46.
Isaac, “Survol,” 226. Les Oligarques addresses the causes and conditions of the demise in 1940 of the Third French Republic, while Marc Bloch’s Etrange défaite addresses the causes and conditions of France’s military defeat in 1940.
- 47.
A more explicit allusion can be found in Isaac’s use of the phrase “divine surprise” to describe the unexpected and disastrous defeat of Athens at Syracuse in 413 BCE (p. 54, n. 1). Maurras had used this phrase to describe the unexpected defeat of France in June 1940, a fortuitous event for adversaries of the Third Republic (“La Grande Besogne,” Candide, 15 January 1941).
- 48.
In 1989, it was published by Calmann-Lévy (without the Prière d’insérer) along with Isaac’s Paradoxe sur la science homicide and “Nous les revenants.”
- 49.
During the war, the presses of Editions Minuit were situated in Switzerland.
- 50.
No doubt, intended to allude to the Letters of Junius, published in London from 1769 to 1772, against the “personal government” of George III.
- 51.
Isaac, Expériences de ma vie. Péguy, 230.
- 52.
The national anthem of France, written and composed in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (10 May 1760–26 June 1836), a French army officer.
- 53.
A stone relief, 42 feet in height, on the Arc de Triomphe by French sculptor Francois Rude (4 January 1784–3 November 1855).
- 54.
As recounted to the author by Hélène (Caty) Isaac, daughter of Daniel and Juliette (Schmidt) Isaac, on Monday 6 September 2010, at Hôtel Le Pavillon de la Reine, Place des Vosges, Paris, France.
- 55.
On the death of Thucydides in 411 BCE, Xenophon continued the account of the Peloponnesian wars. They were incomparable as historians, in Isaac’s estimation. “The account [of the Peloponnesian Wars] of Thucydides has an ending: it is by Xenophon…They are of the same blood; but one of them, Thucydides, never forgets that he is Athenian, − the other, Xenophon, that he is an aristocrat” (p. 93).
- 56.
Jules Isaac, Expériences de ma vie: I Péguy (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1959), 267–68. Late nineteenth-century lycéens began their study of Latin en sixième and of Greek en quatrième. Isaac entered Lakanal en cinquième in 1888–89 and in the following year (1889–90), en quatrième, he would have begun the study of Greek.
- 57.
Jules Isaac, Les Oligarques, Essai d’histoire partiale (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1946), 160–61.
- 58.
Quoted in Christophe Chandezon, “Les Oligarques: Une Histoire comparée,” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, actes du colloque d’Aix-en-Provence Nouvelle série, no. 2 (1997): 105.
- 59.
Justin O’Brien, “A Letter from Paris,” New York Times, 19 August 1945, BR4.
- 60.
The Oligarchy of the Thirty was dominated by Critias, who was not comparable to Pétain. Critias, student of Socrates, was an aristocrat and intellectual, not a war veteran. To find a parallel to Pétain, Isaac reached back to the first step in the dismantlement of Athenian democracy—the replacement of the 500 with a council of 10 “Anciens” that might have included the poet Sophocles.
- 61.
Isaac, Les Oligarques, 92.
- 62.
Le Carnet du Lepreux, Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.
- 63.
Father Marie-Benoît was born Pierre Peteul on 30 March 1895 in the village of Le Bourg d’Ire, proximate to Angers. On 23 September 1907, in his thirteenth year, he left France for Spy, Belgium, to enroll at the Ecole seraphique des Capucins, a Capuchin-run secondary school for boys. On 8 September 1913, Peteul donned the Capuchin robe and began his one year of novitiate studies in Breust-Eijsden, the Netherlands. One year later, on 8 September 1914, at the age of 19, he became Brother Marie-Benoît to pursue a program of formation as a Capuchin. At the onset of World War I, Peteul returned to France and spent the war as an infantryman, receiving numerous citations. In 1919, he was demobilized and returned to the Capuchin monastery and school at Breust-Eijsden, the Netherlands. As a result of his superior performance, he was transferred to the International College of Saint Lawrence of Brindisi in Rome, where he also had occasion to attend the Pontifical Gregorian University. By the time he received his doctorate in theology on 18 July 1925, he had already been ordained a priest and was Father Marie-Benoît. Several weeks before graduation, on 26 June 1925, P. Marie-Benoît was appointed an assistant professor of theology at the International College of Saint Lawrence of Brindisi, Rome, where he taught until the outbreak of hostilities in May 1940. On 19 May 1940, nine days after the commencement of the German offensive into Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, he returned to France by train, basing himself at the Capuchin monastery, 51 rue Croix-de-Regnier, Marseille. “It is not clear when the first [Jewish] refugees came to him, how they found him or who they were,” writes historian Susan Zuccotti in Père Marie-Benoît and Jewish Rescue – How a French Priest together with Jewish Friends Saved Thousands During the Holocaust (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), p.59. “Pere Marie-Benoit implies that his rescue activities began after and because of the first Statut des juifs in October 1940 or, at the very least, after the second Statut in June 1941.” Until the occupation of the southern zone by the Germans in November 1942, P. Marie-Benoît spent his time securing hiding places and false documents for refugees, mostly Jewish. From November 1942 until May 1943, P. Marie-Benoît traveled between Marseille and Nice/Cannes almost weekly with the objective of securing for Jewish refugees in the Italian-occupied zone east of the Rhone hiding places and false documents. On 3 June 1943, he left France for Rome, where he spent the remainder of the war assisting refugees (again mostly Jewish) in escaping the German roundups and deportations.
- 64.
Lazare Landeau, “La Religion de Jules Isaac,” Sens, revue de l’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France, no. 7/8 (1977): 24.
- 65.
A not surprising confession given the identity between the principles of 1789 and a purified Judaism, allegedly shorn of the superstitions that it had acquired during the centuries of oppression.
- 66.
Le Carnet du Lepreux, Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. Isaac’s “most secret attachment” is evidenced in the following words—circled by Isaac—that were uttered by Albert Camus in the course of an interview published in the 21 December 1957 issue of Le Figaro: “I have nothing but respect and veneration before the person of Christ and before his history; I do not believe in his resurrection. My preoccupations are Christian, but my nature is pagan…I feel at ease among the Greeks, not those of Plato: the pre-socratics, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides; my faith is in the values of antiquity, notwithstanding that these have been badly perceived since Hegel.”
- 67.
Quoted in Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 150.
- 68.
Jules Isaac, “Correspondence de Jules Isaac à son fils, Daniel,” Cahiers de l’Association des amis de Jules Isaac, no. 3 (1981): 4.
- 69.
Landeau: 24.
- 70.
Quoted in Jean Toulat, Juifs, Mes frères (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 137. Isaac was wary of translations (from Greek to Latin and the vernacular) and when it came to Jesus’ teachings, of translations of translations (from Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to Latin and from Latin to the vernacular).
- 71.
While in Chambon, Daniel was active in the Liberation Sud resistance, principally in assisting Jews in their passage from France to Switzerland.
- 72.
Kaspi, Jules Isaac, 181.
- 73.
In 1934, André Trocmé, whose uncompromising pacifism had placed him at odds with his own church hierarchy, had begun a one-year appointment as interim minister in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in south-central France. Two years later, in correspondence to Isaac dated 5 February 1936, Trocmé wrote presciently, “Men like you can play an important role in the spiritual education of tomorrow. You can inspire [students] with the cult of the truth, a blinding Truth – I add, as a Christian, salvific, charitable for mankind.” (Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence.) In 1937, at the insistence of the local parish council, Trocmé was appointed senior minister in Chambon.
- 74.
Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (as well as Catholic theologian Karl Rahner), for whom God was immanent in human life and history, would influence theologian and essayist Gregory Baum. (See Gregory Baum, “Jewish and Christian Reflections on Divine Providence” in Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice (Ottawa: Novalis, 2007), 99).
- 75.
Leon Brunschvicg was an illustrious professor at the Sorbonne until his dismissal in December 1940 under the statut des Juifs. Upon the occupation of the southern zone by the Germans in November 1942, Brunschvicg, with the help of Blondel, would find a clandestine lodging and remain in touch with Blondel until his departure for Aix-les-Bains.
- 76.
ed. Flammarion, 1939.
- 77.
Lazare Landau (1928–2012), Jewish professor of the history of religions, University of Strasbourg, intimates that in his reply, Blondel might have addressed Isaac’s attachment indirectly by referring him to P. Gaston Fessard’s Pax Nostra: Examen de conscience international (Grasset, 1936).
- 78.
Le Fonds Jules Isaac, bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. See also Sens n° 391 (July–August 2014), p. 498–500.
- 79.
Quoted in Philip A. Cunningham, Seeking Shalom: The Journey to Right Relationship between Catholics and Jews (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 4.
- 80.
Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland E. Murphy, ed., The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Inc., 1990), 65:51 at 1031.
- 81.
At the American Bibilical Congress in Niagara, New York, in 1895, Protestant exegetes defined “five points of fundamentalism”: the verbal inerrancy of scripture, the divinity of Christ, his virginal birth, the doctrine of vicarious expiation and the corporeal resurrection at Christ’s second coming.
- 82.
The Protestant notion of inerrancy is qualitatively different than inerrancy for Catholics, for a dogmatic biblicism is by its nature less elastic than a dogmatic traditionalism. The most recent Catholic innovation in this regard is set out in 3:11 of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum, 18 November 1965). “Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of holy scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation [emphasis added].” It was only with the release on 30 September 1943 of Pius XII’s Encyclical Letter Promoting Biblical Studies Divino afflante Spiritu that the Catholic Church permitted the historical-critical exegesis of scripture.
- 83.
Jules Isaac, Genèse de l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1956), 14.
- 84.
In bracketing the Christ of faith, it is open to question whether Isaac was doing violence to Catholic doctrine, according to which there is a oneness in the twoness of Christ’s natures.
- 85.
See, for example, Andre Alba, ed., Cours D’histoire Jules Isaac, vol. Classe de cinquieme (Paris: Hachette, 1958), Chapter XV – Une Religion Nouvelle: Le Christianisme, pp.168–79.
- 86.
Dean P. Bechard, ed., The Scripture Documents: An Anthology of Official Catholic Teachings (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), 72–3.
- 87.
Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 35.
- 88.
Ibid., 34.
- 89.
Quoted in Jules Isaac, Jesus and Israel, trans. Sally Gran (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 240.
- 90.
James Parkes, The Jew and His Neighbour: A Study of the Causes of Antisemitism, 2d rev ed. (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1938), 64.
- 91.
Ibid., 74.
- 92.
These first deportees included the mostly foreign Jews who had been arrested in Paris in August 1941 and the mostly prominent French Jews arrested in December 1941, all arrested in German reprisals and initially interned in a prison compound at Compiègne (see Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, pp. 226–27).
- 93.
Marrus, 258.
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Tobias, N.C. (2017). From Citizen to Leper 1940–43. In: Jewish Conscience of the Church. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46925-6_4
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