On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators and activists have reacted with growing fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions – as well as the threat to strip lawbreakers of their French citizenship – to the deportations of Jews organized by France’s Vichy regime during the Second World War.
It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practised by President Nicolas Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics. Vichy has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies in the history of modern France. Over the course of the 20th century, it was the French Republic that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against the Roma.
As in real estate, so in history: Location – in this case, temporal location – counts for a great deal. In 1912, the French republican government passed a battery of laws ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet, the government revealed its hand when it created an identity card that specifically targeted Gypsies. While the French law did not specify “Gypsies,” instead using the term “nomads,” the instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial identification. (This has recently been repeated in Arizona’s proposed anti-immigrant law.)
The identity cards allowed French authorities to track the movements of Gypsies during the First World War, but they were rarely interned in camps – a policy that soon changed. By the mid-1930s, with the great influx into France of political and religious refugees from central and eastern Europe, the republic created a new kind of identity card that, as the historian Pierre Piazza notes, sought “to delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national community] and to better locate those who did not make up part of it.”
With relentless logic, there followed the creation of dozens of “special centres” – soon to become concentration camps – for refugees recently arrived on French soil. At the same time, the republic passed a law empowering officials to strip recently naturalized citizens of French nationality. Finally, shortly before the German invasion in the spring of 1940, the republican government ordered local officials to herd “nomads” into assigned areas. In justifying its action, the government declared: “Wandering individuals generally without a home, a homeland, or an actual profession, constitute a danger for national security … that must be removed.”
When Vichy came into existence a few months later, it built upon policies and structures introduced by the now-defunct republic. But the popular view of Vichy – as a rupture in history, four years that had nothing in common with what went before or what followed – cedes to a more accurate rendering, which shows important and unsettling continuities between democratic governments and authoritarian regimes in France.
Of course, the republic would never have applied a racialist policy toward Gypsies and Jews as Vichy did, much less participate in the systematic deportation of the two groups to the death camps. In this respect, Vichy and the French Republic have nothing in common.
Nonetheless, the continuities between democratic and authoritarian phases in French history lead to a more general observation, often overlooked: the tendency of all democracies to isolate and discriminate against certain minorities. Democracies are as likely as authoritarian states to practice xenophobic or racist politics. Mr. Sarkozy’s policies may be unworthy of the French Republic, as his critics insist, but they are not unprecedented.
