The direct role played by France's collaborationist leader in the second world war persecution of the Jews was emphasised today after the draft of a decisive memo, annotated by Philippe Pétain, was made public for the first time.
A hitherto unseen copy of the original statute on Jews, vehemently antisemitic legislation passed in October 1940 after defeat by the Nazis, reveals that Pétain "completely redrafted" the memo to make it even harsher and wider-ranging, according to France's foremost Jewish historian.
"The statute on Jews was a statute that was adopted without pressure from the Germans, without the request of the Germans: an indigenous statute," Serge Klarsfeld, a veteran lawyer, told French radio. "And now we have decisive evidence that it was the desire of Marshal Pétain himself."
Handed by an anonymous donor to the Holocaust memorial in Paris and authenticated by experts, the papers show for the first time how Pétain, the reactionary head of Vichy, wrote his personal antisemitism into the politics of the new-born French state.
Led by the Vichy government, that state would go on to aid the deportation of 77,000 Jews to concentration camps until liberation in 1944.
Already an "extremely antisemitic" text that barred foreign Jews from large swaths of public sector jobs and other parts of society, the statute that emerged from Pétain's office extended those measures to French Jews. The caveat protecting "descendants of Jews born French or naturalised before 1860" is clearly crossed out in the document brandished by Klarsfeld.
Scribblings in handwriting, which experts insist is that of the Vichy leader, indicate he broadened the exclusion of Jews, barring them completely from jobs in education and the law, and stopping them from running for elected office.
"The main argument of Pétain's defenders was to say that he protected French Jews. This argument has now fallen," said Klarsfeld, describing the discovery of the papers as "fundamental".
Until now, he said, historians had known little for sure about Pétain's personal contributions to the antisemitic laws, although it has been well-established that the French authorities often implemented German commands with more zeal than had been requested.
Paul Baudouin, the foreign minister of Vichy, had previously referred to his boss's "severe" approach to the Jews in an October cabinet meeting two days before the publication of the statute. "Baudouin's testimony was very clear, but doubt could be cast on it," said Klarsfeld.
Pétain, a veteran of the first world war who took the helm of the collaborationist French state in his mid-80s, was tried by Charles de Gaulle's provisional postwar government and had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by the Resistance hero, his onetime protege. He died in 1951.
