Abstract
On July 16th 1995, President Jacques Chirac officially recognized for the first time, the responsibility of the Vichy regime in the genocide of the Jews. This statement was heralded as a break from the past as it had been traditionally asserted that no French governmental authorities had taken part in the Final Solution. The difficulty to acknowledge the accountability of a French regime leads to question the specificity of the Holocaust in France. The Vichy regime was the regime instituted after the defeat of the France of the Third Republic. At that time, France was the only country to sign an armistice with the Nazis. Thus, the new French State benefited from a larger autonomy than its European counterparts. It had some means to limit the attacks against the Jews, 'the French government energetically persecuted Jews living in France', as Paxton and Marrus revealed. One could thus wonder whether France's responsibility in the Final Solution means the failure of the integration of the Jews and the total contamination of antisemitism or whether it was only the product of a few, made possible by an unprecedented historical context. In fact, if one can observe a revival of antisemitism during the 1930s, prejudice against the Jews was not prevalent.
