And it’s not Captain Renault’s throwaway line about the Americans marching into Berlin (which, of course, did not happen in 1918). The error that Michael Curtis points out is very easy to miss:
Still from Casablanca (1942), with Captain Renault (Claude Rains) asking Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) why he came to Casablanca.
As time goes by, there is a consensus that Casablanca, the story of the cynical hard drinking American expatriate night club owner choosing between his love for a woman or helping her and her husband, a resistance hero escape from the town of Casablanca, a complex town controlled by the Vichy state under Nazi occupation, is one of the greatest films of all time. Its characters, dialogue, theme song, have become iconic. We’ll always have Casablanca. It is a film of moral ambiguity, that can be seen either as a theme of love and sacrifice, or as a political allegory about resistance against Nazism.
However, this brilliant film has a flaw. In one scene the camera focuses on the prefecture of the corrupt chief of police on the wall of which is the motto of the French Third Republic, “liberty, equality, fraternity”, inherited from the 1789 French revolution. But the Third Republic had been ended in May 1940, and its motto had been officially replaced by the slogan, “work, family, homeland”, of the new French State, popularly known as Vichy. The differences between the two mottos are still pertinent in French politics and culture today.
Some political and cultural problems are easy to solve, even if costly. Scotland recently spent seven months of research and $162,000 to create a new slogan that would increase tourism. It finally came up with a banal slogan, “Welcome to Scotland”. There is no easy solution for France which has been and remains a sharply divided society still confronting its history of the World War II years, the defeat of the French army by the Germans in June 1940, the end of the Third Republic and its replacement by the French State headed by 84 year old Marshall Philippe Petain, regarded as a hero of Verdun in World War I, located in Vichy, a spa in the Auvergne.
The Vichy régime participated in persecution and discrimination of the Jewish population, by aryanisation of property, propaganda, antisemitic ideology, anti-Jewish legislation, roundups, deportation to death and concentration camps. In view of this antisemitic attitude, it is a paradox that after the War, 75% of the Jewish population in France remained alive, the result of complex religious, cultural, and international factors. This can be compared to extermination of 80% of Jews in the Netherlands, and 45% in Belgium.
Nevertheless, 75,721 Jews were deported from France, and fewer than 2,000 survived. Persecution was extensive. Jews were banned from professions, civil service, journalism, business, entertainment, refugee Jews were held in concentration camps under French control, antisemitic legislation affected all Jews, and the tragedy of Vel d’Hiv occurred. French police carried out the first mass arrests of Jews in Paris in May 1941, and the first French deportation train left on March 12, 1942. The most infamous event, the roundup by French gendarmes, using batons and hoses, of 13,000 Jews took place on July 16-17, 1942 when the victims were taken to the Vel d’Hiv indoor bi-cycling stadium in Paris before being deported to Nazi camps. They included 7916 women, 1129 men and 4115 children.
By the so-called National Revolution, France would be rescued from the decadent Third Republic, and returned to purer values. The controversy continues. Was France guilty of contributing to the Holocaust, and who was responsible? First, were collaborators and sympathizers with the Nazis only a minority of the population and was Petain the “shield”, protecting France and the French people as much as it could within the country, while General de Gaulle abroad was the “sword”. A second defense was that Vichy could do little while the Germans occupiers were responsible. A third point is that Vichy tried to protect French national Jews by collaborating in the persecution, the deportation and ultimately extermination of foreign Jews in France.
