It's difficult to believe this legal admission has taken this long. Maybe the government has been waiting for that generation to die or maybe it has been too controversial to accept but either way, it's about time.
France's highest court put an end to decades of legal timidity and moral taboo yesterday when it issued a ruling recognising the state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during the second world war.For those who have flown into Paris and taken the train into the city from Roissy-CDG, you have passed through the Drancy train station which was the primary camp in France. Joelle's great uncle Jean was also sent through Drancy before being tortured on the Hell Trains of July 1944 where he died.
Citing "mistakes" made by the collaborationist Vichy regime, the council of state said the government's share of blame was clear in acts which had not been forced on it by the occupiers and which "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of antisemitism".
The ruling, which will be recorded in the official state legislative journal, marks the first time any French judicial body has acknowledged in such stark terms the government's role in Nazi-era atrocities.
Calling for a "formal admission of the state's responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered", the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government's guilt. "As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state ... became its responsibility," it added.
The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France's unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris's police force.
"It is a decision with which I am content," Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. "France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s."
