The French Resistance and the Persecution of the Jews during WWII

After decades of focus on the Vichy regime and its active collaboration with the German occupiers and the Holocaust, attention has shifted once again back to the Resistance. A new wave of scholarship has emphasized the aid that the French Resistance movements gave to French Jews facing persecution. This talk will show how a closer reading of sources shows that Resistance leaders were actually reluctant to condemn the persecution of the Jews—except for a few months in the summer of 1942—leaving the underground Jewish press to condemn Vichy and its policies.