In the early hours of 16 July 1942, four hundred and fifty policemen and gendarmes, the very men whose task was to ensure respect for the law and the protection of citizens, came to arrest almost ten thousand women, men and children. With the roundups that followed, seventy-six thousand Jews in France were sent to their death. How many of them, in their death throes, felt that their faith in the magnificent Yiddish proverb “Happy as a Jew in France” had been destroyed.
The atrocious images, so forcefully reconstituted in the film La Rafle (The Roundup), of civil servants in French uniforms, separating mothers from their children, mercilessly and without respect for old people, throwing them into the rail cars that were taking them to their death, opened up a wound that time will not heal. To deny or hide this reality was to run the risk of seeing our collective conscience infected by the worst of all poisons: self doubt.
As Head of State, I considered it my mission and my duty to acknowledge that the criminal folly of the occupying forces had indeed been abetted by Frenchmen, by the French State; that France, the birthplace of the Enlightenment and Human Rights, a land of welcome and asylum had, on 16 July 1942, committed an irreparable crime.
France had to acknowledge it to its Jewish compatriots. It owed it just as much to itself. To know how to qualify the darkest moments of your history is to know who you are. It is to be able to affirm, in full conscience, that France is not what happened then. France is the home of Zola’s J’accuse, of de Gaulle’s call to resist on 18 June 1940, of the Free French Forces at Bir Hakeim and of the Resistance.
France, as my friend Simone Veil has often reminded me, is also a country of the Righteous, those French men and women who saved so many Jews. Like a symbolic game of mirrors, the speech at the Vel d’Hiv in July 1995 and the tribute paid to the Righteous at the Pantheon in January 2007 reflect each other in the same pride of being French. For remembrance sheds light on the future and prompts us to claim with pride the values that define French identity, values that are useful to France and to the world.
Ever since the Revolution, ever since General de Gaulle and the National Council of the Resistance laid the foundations of modern France, our social pact has been grounded on the principles that we should all feel are ours: equal rights and opportunities for all the sons and daughters of the Republic, whatever their origins; solidarity as the cement of our national cohesion; and the courage to affirm everywhere in the world that force must never be allowed to dominate over law. At a time when many references are being shaken, let us ensure that the values that founded the French model are received as obvious, and as assets for taking up the challenges of our future."
On the occasion of the release of the film La Rafle, the City of Paris wished to be associated with the duty of remembrance. It will reprint 10 000 copies of a booklet written by a resistance fighter who witnessed the tragedy, for distribution in the capital’s middle and high schools.
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