Renée Poznanski. Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the “Jewish Problem.” Translated by Lenn J. Schramm. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024. 632 PP. $79.95 Cloth. ISBN 9780299345600.
After a Gestapo agent orders him to vacate his Paris apartment within twenty-four hours, Monsieur Lévy attempts to bid farewell to his neighbors. Neither the woman whose son is serving in the Free French Air Force, nor the man who writes articles for the underground press, nor the concierge who conceals her residents’ resistance activities from the German authorities occupying France, pays this target of antisemitic persecution the least bit of attention. Unwitnessed by these indifferent patriots, Monsieur Lévy commits suicide in his living room. Renée Poznanski opens the epilogue to her study of antisemitism in Second World War-era France with this scene from Romain Gary’s novel A European Education.[1] In many ways, the dynamic depicted here between a Jewish Parisian and non-Jewish resisters embodies one of the Holocaust scholar’s central arguments: organized French resistance to the German occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime largely avoided publicly confronting the persecutory measures that hounded Jewish men, women, and children across France.
Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the “Jewish Problem,” an abridged translation of Poznanski’s 2008 French publication, makes a defining contribution to the study of both antisemitism and resistance movements in France. Although these fields have tended to evolve separately, Poznanski brings them into dialogue to argue that widespread prewar debates about French and immigrant Jews’ influence on the government, economy and society shaped resisters’ portrayals of wartime persecution. She aims less to measure antisemitism in the organized resistance than to identify how cultural codes that had long shaped the French imaginary led resisters to depoliticize, minimize, or outright ignore antisemitic laws and evidence of extermination. There were, of course, notable exceptions, and Poznanski analyzes them in detail. But most resisters chose to respond discretely, Poznanski contends, in order not to delegitimize their efforts in the eyes of a public they believed to be deeply preoccupied with Jews’ alleged influence over the French nation and the war’s course.
The book is organized chronologically. Though the bulk of it focuses on the war period, several chapters treat pre- and post-war France. This structure allows Poznanski to trace significant cultural continuities from their roots in prewar antisemitic debates, through wartime persecution and the organized resistance’s responses, to Liberation-era discretion regarding restitution measures and the restoration of full rights. As a substantive historiography now demonstrates, the Vichy period did not represent a parenthetical moment in French republicanism. Poznanski’s work is original because it explores widely shared Judeophobic beliefs that persisted across decades – even structuring the strategies deployed by those who risked their lives to reestablish democracy in France. Some resisters considered German antisemitic practices unnecessarily brutal and a sign of the French government’s submission to the occupying forces, but nevertheless insisted that France needed to find its own solution to the “Jewish problem.” Others claimed not to harbor any hostility toward Jews, but their language revealed just how much their arguments had been permeated by prewar antisemitism. Given the substantial Resistance and Holocaust memory that flourishes in France, this issue remains a sensitive one. Poznanski’s careful documentation explores discourse that structured the public sphere without castigating individuals.
The “deep cultural penetration of the Jew as always and forever different” accelerated in the 1930s (Poznanski, 9). Far-right polemicists characterized the waves of Jewish refugees entering France as an invasion of undesirables. They accused Jews of controlling the government and overrunning the labor market. Certain pacifists worried Jews would lead France into war for financial gain or to defend their people against Hitler. From the Central Consistory to Yiddish-language newspapers, Poznanski explores how a variety of Jewish institutions and publications fought these characterizations. Yet the far-right succeeded in imposing the terms of the debate on most of society. As a result, Jewish leaders and intellectuals struggled to gain credibility in critiquing National Socialism unless they made clear that they spoke above all as French people concerned about their country’s future.
Prioritizing the national interest emerged as the organized resistance’s principal approach to wartime antisemitic persecution. Focusing on Free France BBC broadcasts from London and the underground press published in metropolitan France, Poznanski offers an impressive close reading of propaganda produced in various geographic regions and by resisters across the political spectrum. Before the 1942 imposition of the yellow star in the occupied zone and brutal roundups in both zones, the majority remained silent on Vichy’s antisemitic measures. Though Poznanski notes that the lack of condemnation may have resulted from certain resisters’ own antisemitism, she argues that it primarily derived from resisters’ belief that prewar debates about the “Jewish problem” continued to drive a general dislike of Jews. Resisters had to build credibility with their audiences so they could unite the population against the occupier. They therefore sought to convince the French they were not fighting a “Jewish” war by circumventing the divisive political issue of antisemitic exclusion.
After the 1942 mass arrests provoked a public outcry, notably by prominent Catholic leaders, resisters felt they had more space to go on the offensive. However, in order not to provoke contention, they emphasized humanitarian objections rather than an outright denunciation of the “Jewish problem.” Moreover, resistance propaganda often minimized the specificities of antisemitic persecution. The BBC, for example, preferred to link Jews’ deportation to the fate potentially awaiting the whole French population. This argument grew particularly salient after a 1943 labor conscription law resulted in the “deportation” of many young workers to Germany. Poznanski is careful to highlight differences between resistance movements. She credits the Jesuit-run journal Les Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien as a rare example of consistent and thorough condemnation. Generally, however, resistance propaganda objected to persecution only episodically, in response to events like the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Resisters used examples of Nazi antisemitic cruelty to warn French people of the violence the occupiers might visit on them next.
One of the exceptions to the common strategy of demonstrating “compassion” but “discretion” toward the Jews was the Jewish Communist press. The Jewish section of the Main d’oeuvre immigré (M.O.I.) “shattered a taboo” by defending immigrant Jews and, “when the subject made it possible,” insisting on the “specificity of the persecution that targeted the Jews, and the Jews alone” (Poznanski, 346). Particularly after the Polish government in exile confirmed reports of extermination in Eastern Europe, newspapers like Droit et Liberté, published by the Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide, provided detailed reports of mass murder. However, some Jewish Communist publications (especially those with a more general audience, like J’accuse, printed by the Mouvement national contre le racisme, which also had non-Jewish members) adopted a strategy deployed by French BBC broadcasters. They portrayed “Jews and patriots or Jews and [labor] draft evaders” as a “consecrated couple,” connecting Jews’ fate to that of the general population (Poznanski, 342). As in the broader resistance movements, concerns about building credibility and unity with the French population drove their work.
After the war, Jews and non-Jews diverged on whether the specificity of antisemitic persecution should continue to be subsumed in discourse about wider French suffering. Leaders in Charles de Gaulle’s Liberation-era government were loath to distinguish between victims, and proved “too sensitive about the public perception of the ‘Jewish problem’ to tackle the results of the wartime legislation head on” (Poznanski, 401). This belief provoked complications for Jewish survivors who sought restitution measures. Poznanski’s book concurs with recent arguments that, contrary to longstanding belief, Jews did not remain silent about the specificity of their suffering and postwar needs. They were often met with admonishments to remain discreet so as not to risk reigniting the antisemitism latent in the general population. As a result, they often confined their writings about wartime persecution to Jewish publications.
One of the major strengths of Poznanski’s book is her treatment of a wide variety of Jewish and non-Jewish actors in a shared analytical lens. The separate evolution of Second World War and Holocaust historiography in France dates from the Liberation period, when the Comité d’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale gathered documents to write a history of France during the war and the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine focused on Jewish history (Poznanski, 422). Poznanski puts them into conversation by indicating how information and opinions circulated between Jewish and non-Jewish actors, shaping the evolution of propaganda content.
In analyzing those sources, Poznanski mobilizes a remarkable range of materials from archives in five countries. She complements her study of BBC broadcasts and underground newspapers with excerpts from BBC listeners’ letters, police and postal censor reports, and personal journals. Through these last three collections, she attempts to gauge the extent to which resisters’ perceptions of popular opinion corresponded to the population’s actual beliefs. This is a difficult undertaking for any historian, and, despite Poznanski’s clear attention to the issue of reception, the book would benefit from a deeper discussion of how ordinary actors responded to resistance propaganda. Indeed, one of the drawbacks to a cultural history of discourse is its relative separation of speech from practice. However, one book cannot be expected to tackle every angle of a question. Readers interested in reception could study this book in conversation with the growing number of social and micro histories that explore Jews’ and non-Jews’ daily interactions in the context of deeply ingrained indifference or hostility. Poznanski’s book is most of all a noteworthy achievement. Sensitively demystifying the organized resistance, it demonstrates that “[a]n ideological analysis of National Socialism was possible while bracketing its antisemitism” (Poznanski, 3).
[1] Romain Gary, A European Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960 [1943]).
Hilary Handin is a historian of the Second World War and the Holocaust in France. She is currently a Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah postdoctoral fellow and invited researcher in the Université de Strasbourg’s ARCHE research unit. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University in November 2023. Her work focuses on the expulsion of Alsatians and Lorrainers by German occupying authorities in 1940, the expellees’ wartime exile, and the survivors’ return after the war. She has also written on Liberation-era housing conflicts between Jews and non-Jews in Paris as a member of the Connus à cette adresse research collective. Her translations of several academic chapters and articles have been published by Berghahn Books and are forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press and in peer-reviewed journals.