The Statutes on Jews in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXII

The Statutes on Jews - October 3, 1940 and June 2, 1941

The Vichy regime promulgated two statutes on Jews, which explicitly revealed the official political and ideological tendencies toward discrimination and numerus clausus. The first statute represented a French policy initiative, expressing state antisemitism. In the second statute of June 1941, religion had become the focal point of the definition of Jew and was a more rigorous extension of the principle of exclusion that was central to the Vichy system. The statistics on licensed Jewish civil servants confirm that in 1940 there were already few Jews in public office. In conclusion, the Jews became pariahs in a society into which they had struggled for decades to assimilate. The study of the behavior of the French administration reveals the bureaucratic logic that facilitated the mechanism of persecution.