Another factor was that by 1941 almost everyone in Paris knew someone who had been arrested. As Germany limbered up in its attempt to eradicate all Jews, Vichy collaboration helped accelerate it. The first wave of arrests took place on 14 May 1941, when 3,710 ‘foreign’ Jews were arrested, followed three months later, after a raid on the 11th arrondissement, by a further 4,230 Jews, both French and foreign; in December 734 prominent French Jews and 250 immigrant Jews were seized. The victims were interned in four camps: at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, south of Paris, at Compiègne to the north-east (the only one not run by the French) and at Drancy, an unfinished municipal housing estate on the outskirts of the capital itself. Drancy, lacking basic sanitary facilities and still without windows, was never intended to hold more than 700 but, from the outset, was crammed with thousands of desperate, hungry people held in atrocious conditions.
Anti-Semitism in Vichy may have been different in tone from that in occupied Paris. As Professor Julian Jackson has observed, when Vichy issued its first anti-Jewish statute in October 1940, without any prior request from the Germans, it did so almost apologetically, insisting that the government ‘respects Jewish persons and property’ and that the statute would be applied in a ‘spirit of humanity’. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism for Vichy ‘was an autonomous policy with its own indigenous roots’. Pétain’s entourage included several fanatical anti-Semites for whom introducing anti-Jewish measures was both a deep-seated belief and a way of winning German favour. In order to coordinate anti-Semitic policy throughout France, the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (CGQJ) was set up in March 1941 and run by Xavier Vallat, a zealous anti-Semite and veteran of the Great War in which he had lost his left leg and right eye. One decree followed another in 1941; within twelve months Vichy had issued twenty-six laws and twenty-four decrees* concerning Jews. The second statute against Jews, passed in June 1941, had serious consequences for businesses because it required authorization to sell or take over a company: Jewish businesses had to register, and receivers and administrators were appointed to monitor their conduct. There were criminal penalties for anyone caught engaging in the prohibited activities. Aryanization of businesses in the free zone now matched that in the occupied zone. Decrees imposing quotas on Jewish lawyers, doctors, students, architects and pharmacists were swiftly followed by laws excluding Jews altogether from any profession, commercial or industrial. No payments were ever made for Jewish property as these were regarded as ‘ownerless’.
In May 1941 the Germans requisitioned 21 Rue La Boétie, former home of the art-dealer Paul Rosenberg and, with deliberately painful irony, installed there a bizarre organization called the Institut d’Etude des Questions Juives (Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions) – IEQJ – to be run by Captain Paul Sézille, one of Vichy’s most uncouth and violent agitators. The IEQJ’s main task in 1941 was to arrange an exhibition at the Palais Berlitz entitled Le Juif et la France (The Jew and France), which was intended to show the harmful effect Jews had had on France. Sézille explained in the introduction to the catalogue: ‘By presenting the Jew in its various manifestations, showing through compelling and carefully selected materials how deep was the Judaic influence on all activities of France, showing the depth of evil that gnawed at us, we want to convince those of our citizens who are still of sound mind and good judgement, how urgent it was to take action.’ Ugly posters were displayed at Métro stations and on billboards throughout the city to advertise the exhibition, with further encouragement from loudspeakers strategically placed on boulevards between the Opéra district and the Place de la République.
During the four months when the exhibition remained open, some 200,000 Parisians paid the three-franc entry fee and many others were admitted free. Among those who attended were Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac, born in 1925 to an anti-Semitic French family of noble standing. When she was young, Marie-Pierre’s father instructed her: ‘Do anything you like, but don’t marry a Jew. We’re one of the only families of the French nobility not to be Jew-ridden.’ During the Occupation, Marie-Pierre’s mother hosted high-society parties for Nazi collaborators, gave her child Mein Kampf to read and took her to the notorious exhibition with unpredictable results.*