Les effets politiques d’une protestation religieuse : l’Église et Vichy en 1942

Abstract

This article focuses on a key episode of anti-Jewish persecution in German-occupied France. In the summer of 1942, a small number of high-ranking dignitaries from the Catholic Church played an important role in stopping a carefully planned deportation scheme that started in earnest with the roundups in Paris and resulted in the internment of thousands of Jews in the infamous Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium. The paper specifically addresses the Catholic church’s paradoxical response. While these religious figures did offer stiff and determined resistance, the Church remained indifferent and inarticulate when anti-Jewish legislation and discrimination was initiated by both German occupation authorities and their Vichy collaborators in late 1940. The article contends that it was not despite but because of the Church’s crucial political role, which served as a main pillar of the Vichy regime, that the intervention against the deportations turned out to be powerful and effective. Moreover, the paper clarifies that Vichy was fully committed to collaborating with the SS and Gestapo apparatus and implementing the deportation scheme and that it did not take any initiative to stop the transfer of Jews to the German persecutors, resulting in the mass murder of approximately 76,000 men, women, and children.