A much wounded and decorated World War I veteran, politician, lawyer, and self-proclaimed “serious antisemite,” Xavier Vallat continued a French form of rural, Catholic antisemitism; reminiscent of Edouard Drumont, he stressed the impossibility of Jewish assimilation and the destructive influence of Jews on French life. During World War II, he served the Vichy state in several capacities, but he is remembered primarily as the first director of the Commissariat General aux Questions Juives (General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs), a key institution of the Final Solution in France.
The tenth child born to a reactionary teacher and a peasant mother in the rural Ardeche, Val-lat came of age during the Dreyfus Affair and the subsequent wave of anticlerical legislation. He read the antisemitic clerical press aimed at a rural audience and then discovered the writings of Charles Maurras, the chief ideologue of the monarchist and antisemitic Action Frangaise. By age twenty, he had formed his worldview, composed of a defensive Catholic piety and an aggressive antisemitism.
Briefly a teacher, Vallat welcomed World War I, to which he sacrificed an eye and a leg. After the war, he earned a law degree and served as deputy for the Ardeche from the years 1919 to 1924 and 1928 to 1940, always as a member or ally of rightist factions. Although he had written anti-Jewish texts in the early 1920s, he did not become generally known as an antisemite until June 6, 1936, when, in front of a full parliament, he expressed his outrage toward the Jewish Leon Blum, the new head of government. Receiving numerous congratulatory letters, he convinced himself that he was competent—and destined— to pursue the Jewish Question.
Having served Marshal Henri Philippe Petain as minister of veterans’ affairs and secretary-general of the French Legion of Combatants, his own creation, Vallat returned to his area of “competence.” In the spring of 1941, he became director of Vichy’s newly created General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs. As director of the commissariat from April 1941 until his ouster in May 1942, Vallat was charged with applying Vichy’s existing anti-Jewish legislation, creating new laws, and administering the liquidation of Jewish property in all French territories. Appalled by the laxity of the initial Jewish statute of October 3, 1940, the director set about widening the definition of Jews in a second statute, promulgated June 2, 1941 (and in a more draconian but unenacted third statute), to include race and religion with the goal of eliminating Jewish social and economic influence. Surprising even the Germans, he ordered a census of Jews in the unoccupied zone administered directly by Vichy and introduced Jewish identity cards in December 1942—both measures crucial to the later deportation and murder of Jews in France.
Although he was a fervent antisemite, it is unclear whether the Germanophobe Vallat foresaw the Final Solution in France and at least doubtful that he approved of it. Nonetheless, by legally defining and registering Jews, stripping them of citizenship and property and livelihood, and directly or indirectly blaming them as a group for the ills of French society, Xavier Vallat contributed significantly to the legislative and administrative apparatus that enabled the Final Solution in France.
—Benn Williams
See also Action Frangaise; Dreyfus Affair; Drumont,
Edouard; France; Holocaust; Jewish Question;
Maurras, Charles; Ultramontanism; Vichy
References
Marrus, Michael R., and Robert O. Paxton. Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Weisberg, Richard H. Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
World History
