After a resounding defeat, France officially left the war and a new government, retaining some sovereignty over part of the country and settled in the city of Vichy put an end to the Republican regime and collaborated with the Nazi occupiers. As a result, the Jews were faced with a double persecution, led by the German occupier as well as by the Vichy regime. Marginalization and exclusion led to internment before deportation to the East and extermination.

A propaganda war soon began, between on the one hand the new regime and the Nazi occupiers and, on the other hand, emerging Resistance movements, both in metropolitan France and in London around General de Gaulle. A large array of clandestine publications and daily French-language BBC broadcasts spared no effort to gain French opinion to the idea of Resistance, exposing Vichy’s betrayal of all the key values that shaped France.

Yet, a close reading of these texts reveals that the Resistance leaders were reluctant to deal with the persecution of the Jews and condemn it and kept a policy of extreme discretion on this matter, except for a few months during the summer of 1942. At the same time, numerous and detailed denunciations could be found in a Jewish clandestine press. A whole range of reasons explain what may seem surprising. These propaganda choices were based on numerous reports tracking opinion trends and reveal high versus low priorities topics in the eyes of these leaders. More generally they allow to decipher how Jews were perceived in French society, beyond the binary distinction usually made between those who were or were not anti-Semites.

At a time when some historians have shifted the spotlight from the State’s policy of collaboration in the persecution of the Jews to the aid allegedly provided to persecuted Jews by the population as a whole, the discourse to be found in the propaganda texts published by the Resistance movements add some nuances to the overall picture.

Renée Poznanski is Professor emerita in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University – a department she has created and headed during several years and former head of the Simone Veil Research Institute for Contemporary European Studies.

She has published extensively on Jews in France during World War II: her research examines their daily lives, relations between Jews and non-Jews, Rescue and Resistance of the Jews and the impact of memory on the historiography of this period. Her book The Jews in France during the World War II, (University Press of NewEngland, 2001; published originally in French) has been awarded the Jacob Buchman Prize for the Memory of the Holocaust and a French enlarged version has been reedited by the CNRS Editions in 2018. Her book on Propaganda and Persecution: The French Resistance and the “Jewish Question”, (in French, Fayard, 2008; in Hebrew, Yad Vashem, 2022, and in English, Wisconsin UP, 2024) has been awarded the 2009 Henri Hertz prize by the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris. She has been a fellow at The Remarque Institute (NYU), the Center for Advanced Studies (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, DC), Sciences Po (Paris), the EHESS (Paris) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University). Her last book (with Denis Peschanski) focuses on the Drancy internment camp (Drancy, un camp en France, Paris: Fayard). She is presently writing a book on Revisiting the Resistance of the Jews in France during the Second World War.