Daniel Lee. Pétain’s Jewish Children

Daniel Lee’s ambitious—and persuasive—new book challenges historians to revise our common understanding of the Jewish experience under Vichy and the nature of French antisemitism during the first few years of World War II. The topic of wartime France, and the experience of Jews in France during the war, has inspired a rich literature since Robert Paxton’s now canonical Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (1972). That scholarship has shattered the myth that Vichy France had been forcibly coerced into partnering with the Nazis, while other scholars have painstakingly documented the daily life of Jews during the Holocaust and the multiple resistance networks that emerged in wartime France to save endangered Jews. Taken together, this work has mushroomed in recent years and revolutionized the field. But with Pétain’s Jewish Children: French Jewish Youth and the Vichy Regime, 1940–1942, Daniel Lee has made a valuable contribution that demonstrates that the categories of “persecution, resistance, and rescue” that have monopolized the current historiographical discussion fail to encompass the diverse range of experiences under Vichy (8).

Antisemitism · Archaeology · Historiography · Judaism · Mythology · Nazism · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Spanish Civil War · The Holocaust · World War II · Classics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies