Claire Zalc. Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2020. 397 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-98842-2.
Reviewed by Robin Buller (University of California Berkeley)
Published on H-War (August, 2022)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
On July 22, 1940, France’s Vichy government passed a law ordering the review of all naturalizations granted to foreigners in the country since 1927. In the thirteen years between 1927, when France expanded access to citizenship and allowed foreigners to apply for naturalization after three rather than ten years in the country, and 1940, the government granted over nine hundred thousand naturalizations. France was the world’s immigration hub in the interwar years, and naturalization—the process by which a foreign-born immigrant becomes a citizen—was then (and remains now) a critical feature of French republican democracy. In July 1940, that value was subverted, and the nearly one million naturalized citizens in France faced the threat of being stripped of their nationality. Ultimately, some fifteen thousand people, many of them Jews, lost their French citizenship during the occupation. In Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France, Claire Zalc deftly explores the origins, mechanisms, and repercussions of that national rejection.
First published in French in 2016, this new edition (translated by Catherine Porter) delves into the important and understudied topic of denaturalization in occupied France for an English-reading audience. The subject has been previously addressed in Holocaust scholarship in relation to the disproportionate rates of deportation of foreign Jews from France but has yet to be the focus of a dedicated historical study.[1] Faced with the fact that the Vichy Commission for the Review of Naturalizations (the agency in charge of the denaturalization process) left behind no records, Zalc’s source base consists primarily of naturalization files, “incomplete puzzles” that “trace the sometimes chaotic pathways, the professional, geographic, military, and matrimonial itineraries, [and] the social networks and kinship ties of people who aspired to French nationality” (p. 10). Noting that the files are lengthy, dense, and detailed, Zalc limits her focus to the four departments (or states) with the most material: Pas-de-Calais, Seine-et-Marne, Isère, and Vaucluse. Writing what she describes as an “ethnography of power relations,” the author treats each file “as a site of relations, confrontations, and interactions between individuals and institutions,” and thereby examines both victim and perpetrator perspectives (p. 11).
The book contains nine chapters, organized to reflect the structure of the naturalization dossiers themselves. Chapters 1 and 2 outline the legal and institution framework that undergirded naturalization and denaturalization. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the criteria, logic, and political motives behind denaturalization from centralized and local perspectives. Chapters 5 and 6 analyze the impact of bureaucratization and administrative reform institutionally as well as on the ground, while chapters 7 and 8 focus on the experiences and protests of denaturalization’s victims. The book concludes by reflecting on the possibilities (and limitations) of studying this history in chapter 9.
The denaturalization law of July 22, 1940, was one of the first laws enacted in Marshal Petain’s Vichy state, preceding any official anti-Jewish legislation. In chapter 1, Zalc shows how through the law, the Vichy regime aimed to distance itself from its Third Republic predecessor by creating new boundaries for national inclusion. Revocations of nationality had occurred in France prior to 1940. Indeed, France’s imperial power was largely rooted in the limitation of colonized peoples’ citizenship rights. Still, Zalc argues, the July denaturalization law marked a break from past republican policy in that it lacked specificity in its target and methods. In other ways, however, there were continuities, namely, in the personnel charged with conducting denaturalizations. In chapter 2, Zalc introduces the reader to those government bureaucrats working for the Commission for the Review of Naturalizations, many of whom had worked in the Bureau of Seals (a subsidiary of the Ministry of Justice in charge of citizenship) prior to the war. They therefore had intimate knowledge of the naturalization process—as well as how to undo it. At times, the detailed biographies of Vichy officials distract from the chapter’s important interventions, such as the fact that workers with backgrounds in governmental, legal, or military service were inclined toward xenophobia and antisemitism. This does not take away, however, from Zalc’s skillful explanation of the complex decision-making process, which involved interactions between five distinct groups, each with their own structures and motivations: the Commission for the Review of Naturalizations, the Bureau of Seals, local authorities, occupying authorities, and the commissariat-general for Jewish Affairs.
Zalc makes a compelling case that antisemitism was a guiding force in the earliest denaturalization cases in chapter 3. She shows that officials first targeted naturalizations granted in 1936 under Jewish prime-minister Léon Blum’s Popular Front government, evidence that “undoing what the Popular Front had done was clearly a priority from the start” (p. 84). If a letter of recommendation from a Popular Front official was found in a file, the individual was targeted for denaturalization under the auspices that their citizenship had been “improperly” acquired (p. 86). Further, the term “Israelite” was frequently given as a rationale for denaturalization, often with the added stipulation that their naturalization had been granted against “national interest” (p. 92). The “Jewishness” of an individual was often determined with antisemitic—and logically flawed—methods, such as last name or political affiliation.
Importantly, denaturalization was articulated and applied by local and national authorities in different (albeit complementary) ways. In chapter 4, Zalc outlines the bureaucratic “avalanche of memoranda” received by officials at various departmental and local levels, arguing that the vague and “indigestible substance” of those instructions made for a notable inefficient system (p. 117). As Zalc asks, “how were ‘morally tainted or insufficiently assimilated’ individuals to be identified”? (p. 115). Making matters even more complicated, documents and forms used by different municipalities were heterogeneous and unstandardized, and agents were often thus left confused by the task assigned to them. Focusing specifically on the Isère department, Zalc argues that Vichy’s naturalization policies were applied remarkably unevenly at local levels. “The instructions were relayed, read, and applied, but also modeled and adapted by the local authorities” in disparate ways from place to place depending on an agent’s experience and motives, as well as specific local contexts (p. 116). As a result, only 5 percent of the 6,590 naturalizations granted in the department since 1927 were brought to the commission’s attention—not as a result of active resistance against the Vichy regime but rather due to ineffective bureaucracy.
Beginning in 1941, the commission embarked on a project to systematize the denaturalization process. In chapter 5, we learn that despite efforts to make their work more efficient, the pace of citizenship withdrawals slowed, largely due to communication backlogs and deepening investigative processes. Compellingly, files completed in the mornings were more likely to lean toward maintaining nationality, whereas files completed in the afternoons more frequently led to investigations or withdrawals—a finding that Zalc attributes to either the ordering of files (with simpler files being completed first) or the presence of certain overseers at different times of day. Crucially, the criteria that officials used to determine denaturalization were often rooted in antisemitism, although an individual’s Jewishness was no longer cited explicitly as a reason. Rather, an individual’s country of origin, profession, or political leanings functioned as antisemitic dog whistles between bureaucrats who were partial to withdrawing the citizenship of immigrants from eastern Europe, merchants or doctors, and accused communists. Investigators also connected stereotypes to questions of morality and national loyalty—two categories cited as central to the denaturalization process. In chapter 6, Zalc shows that military service, prisoner-of-war (POW) status, dual nationality, political activity, and familial virtues each could determine how a case was processed, and emphasizes the commission’s obsession with policing morality by underscoring the number of naturalizations that were revoked on grounds related to alcohol use or sexual behavior.
While denaturalization was a punishment in and of itself, “exclusion from the national community entailed a set of material, legal, and social consequences” that greatly diminished and complicated the lived experiences of targeted individuals. In chapter 7, Zalc argues that denaturalization was not only a loss of rights (although it was certainly that) but also a “loss of status” in that affected persons were also deprived of relationships they previously held (p. 215). In a particularly strong section of the book, Zalc illuminates the demeaning nature of denaturalization, a process that involved the publication of one’s national exclusion in an official journal as well as a summons to rescind one’s French papers. The state of having been denaturalized, she emphasizes, was one defined by uncertainty and precarity, especially for individuals who were also Jews and who faced the threat of deportation. Highlighting the particular threats faced by Italian and Turkish Jews, Zalc shows that statelessness was for many Jews a death sentence, as their countries of origin refused to reissue them citizenship papers or grant any sort of protection. Nationality was often a “determining factor” in whether or not an individual would be deported, and Zalc asserts that by 1942, members of the commission would have been aware of the potential consequences of rescinding a Jew’s French citizenship (p. 237).
In the absence of public protests against the denaturalization law, objections were primarily raised by victims themselves—by naturalized people who were at risk of denaturalization, or their representatives—through letters to the commission. While in earlier sections of the book the author's continued emphasis on how sources can and should be read can take away from the narrative, Zalc’s decision to include lengthy excerpts of these sources in chapter 8 is both effective and moving. Digesting the excessively polite letters in which individuals desperately underscored what they saw as indisputable evidence for their loyalty and belonging to the nation, readers can sense the confoundment felt by victims of the denaturalization process. While options for legal recourse were limited, the early years of the war did see about one-quarter of cases file for appeal. By mid-1942, however, that number markedly decreased, in part because more people had realized just how difficult the appeal process was but mostly because victims had more urgent priorities as deportations increased. In chapter 9, Zalc evaluates the various figures and statistics concerning denaturalization, concluding that it is nearly impossible to pinpoint exact numbers related to the rationale for and effects of denaturalization, especially considering the absence of the commission’s own records.
Naturalization files represent “the place where decisions were made, amid onionskin papers, marginal notations, cross-outs and corrections, as to who were the good and the bad French citizens under Vichy,” writes Zalc in the book’s introduction (p. 2). With meticulous research and deep analysis, Denaturalized brings readers into the archive, enabling them to experience the tedium and weightiness, distance and intimacy, of the dossiers that drive its story. Zalc’s aim, as the subtitle suggests, is not only to explore the mechanics that belied the revocation of thousands of individuals’ French nationality but also to assess the role that denaturalization had in the unfolding of the Holocaust in western Europe. In the book’s conclusion, she stakes a claim: the commission and its actions most certainly “contributed to the implementation of the Final Solution” by identifying and making Jews more vulnerable in a state in which foreigners were more likely to be deported than those with French nationality (p. 300). An immensely successful volume, Denaturalized will make an important addition to the reading lists of scholars of modern France and the Holocaust, as well as those interested in the methods of studying democracies and citizenship, police surveillance, and the relationship between immigrants and the state.
Note
[1]. Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); and Susan Zuccotti, The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
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Citation:
Robin Buller. Review of Zalc, Claire, Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57150
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