Propaganda and Persecution

Renée Poznanski (Author), Lenn J. Schramm (Translated by)

9780299345600

Hardback, published 23 January 2024

526 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.272 kg

“RenÉe Poznanski is one of the finest scholars of our time on the subject of France during the Holocaust and World War II. Her central question here—How much did the French Resistance care about Jews and antisemitism?—is timely, and she presents a mountain of evidence to support her thesis.”—Ethan Katz, University of California, Berkeley

“This book adds to our understanding of the Resistance, the persecution of the Jews, and the clandestine press in ways likely to make it a fundamental work for future scholarship.”—Holocaust and Genocide Studies

RenÉe Poznanski’s magisterial history of the French Resistance during World War II offers a comprehensive exploration of the most significant issue in that period’s social imaginary: the “Jewish question.” With extraordinary nuance, she analyzes the discourse around Jews and Judaism that pervaded the Resistance’s propaganda and debates, while closely examining the fate of Jews under Vichy and after. 

Poznanski argues that Jews in France suffered a double persecution: one led by the Vichy government, the other imposed by the Nazis. Marginalization and exclusion soon led to internment and deportation to terrifying places. Meanwhile, a propaganda war developed between the Resistance and the official voice of Vichy. Poznanski draws on a breathtaking array of sources, especially clandestine publications and French-language BBC transmissions, to show how the Resistance both fought and accommodated the deeply entrenched antisemitism within French society. Her close readings of propaganda texts against public opinions probe ambiguities and silences in Resistance writing about the persecution of the Jews and, in parallel, the numerous and detailed denunciations that could be read in the Jewish clandestine press. This extensive synthesis extends to the post-Liberation period, during which the ongoing persecution of Jews in Europe and North Africa would be portrayed as secondary to the suffering of the nation.

The winner of the 2009 Henri Hertz Prize by the Chancellerie des UniversitÉs de Paris, Sorbonne, Propaganda and Persecution makes major contributions to the study of the Resistance and of antisemitism. Lenn J. Schramm’s English translation brings Poznanski’s dynamic prose to life.

• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue: The Loss of Moral and Ideological Markers
• 1 The “
  Jewish Problem”
  in an Age of Suspicion
• 2 The Range of Rebuttals
  Part I. We Are All Patriots
• 3 The Assault on the Jews
• 4 Across the Channel, on the Defensive
• 5 Above All—
  Don’
  t Bring Back Blum
• 6 France Cannot Be Muzzled or Seduced
• 7 Variations in the Shadow of the Comintern
• 8 A Careful Choice of Words
• 9 Christians and Jews, Jews and Resistance Activists
  Part II. The Curtain Rises
• 10 “
  The Springtime of Liberty”
  
• 11 The Shock of the Yellow Star
• 12 Summer 1942: Swings in Public Opinion
• 13 The Crime of Lè
  se-Humanité
  
• 14 A Plan for Extermination
  Part III. The Judeo-Gaullists in London
• 15 Under the Sway of the French Goebbels
• 16 No One Is Safe from Deportation
• 17 From London to Algiers
  Part IV. The Judeo-Bolsheviks of France
• 18 Variations on Silence
• 19 The Specter of Philosemitism
  Part V. The Sense of Being Abandoned
• 20 All Humanity Rises Up against the Murderers
• 21 The Earth Didn’
  t Shake
• Epilogue: Jewish Voices in a Strange Silence
  
  
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index