Xavier Vallat

Vallat in 1929

Xavier Joseph Vallat (born December 23, 1891 in Villedieu , Vaucluse , † January 6, 1972 in Annonay , Ardèche ) was a French lawyer, journalist and far - right politician who worked under the Vichy regime from March 1941 to May 1942 Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (“General Commissariat for Jewish Questions”) and was sentenced to ten years in prison after the Second World War .

Life

Youth and First World War

Vallat was born the tenth of eleven children of Jean Auguste Cyprien Vallat and Thérèse Victorine, née Morlat, and was raised strictly Catholic. The father came from Pailharès in the Ardèche department, where Vallat was later temporarily mayor. In his youth he belonged to the Association catholique de la jeunesse française and later turned to the radical nationalist Action française . Before the First World War he worked for two years as a teacher at the Catholic College in Aix-en-Provence before he was called up for military service in the 61e regiment d'infanterie in 1913 .

Used as a non-commissioned officer, he was seriously wounded for the first time in August 1914 and was appointed officer in June 1915. His brother Alphonse had died in the Argonne in January 1915. After further wounds and working as a recruit trainer, Vallat contracted keratitis in 1916 , which severely restricted the eyesight of his right eye. In the same year he was transferred to the 114e battalion de chasseurs alpins , which fought in the Somme area and in 1917 at the Chemin des Dames . At the end of March 1918, Vallat lost his left leg in the fighting during the German Michael Offensive . He reached the rank of first lieutenant and was awarded a Knight of the Legion of Honor and the Croix de guerre with a palm branch. In 1921 he was honorably discharged from the army.

Political career in the Third Republic

In the elections of November 1919 Vallat was elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the list of the Union républicaine nationale et sociale (part of the Bloc national ) in the Ardèche department . He was also a member of the General Council of the Canton of Saint-Félicien . Working as a lawyer since 1923, Vallat also worked as a journalist. After losing his seat in 1924, he joined the Fédération nationale catholique (FNC) founded by General Noël de Castelnau and was re-elected to the National Assembly in 1928, to which he was a member until it was suspended in 1940.

In the 1920s, he worked for the right-wing extremist organizations Faisceau des Combattants and Croix de Feu, which were founded as veterans' associations . He withdrew from the latter after Colonel François de La Rocque began to build a political mass movement from it. He never gave up his sympathies for Action française , even when Pope Pius XI. condemned this from 1926 as hostile to the church and remained friends with Charles Maurras .

In the 1930s Vallat established himself as one of the most important figures of the political right in the Chamber of Deputies, who gathered in the Fédération républicaine . His speaking talent was also recognized by political opponents. Vallat acted from February 1936 as vice-president of the parliamentary group of the Fédération républicaine and stood against Édouard Herriot as a candidate of the opposition for the post of president of the Chamber of Deputies in June 1936 . He sharply attacked the new Prime Minister of the Popular Front , Léon Blum , in the Chamber - for the first time "the old Gallo-Roman country would be ruled by a Jew", he stated on June 6th. Since the Stavisky affair of 1934, Vallat had increasingly attracted attention with anti-Semitic remarks. From 1933 on, he and his colleague René Dommange were also involved in the dissolution of the Masonic lodges . Vallat's anti-Semitism went back to an older conspiracy theory, according to which Jews, Freemasons and (Prussian-German) Protestants worked together to disintegrate the Catholic French nation, and took up stereotypes of a Judeo-Bolshevism . During the Spanish Civil War he sided with the Franquists and was an admirer of Salazar .

Under the Vichy regime

After the defeat of France in June 1940, Vallat enthusiastically advocated Marshal Pétain's takeover . On July 10th he voted for the transfer of the constitutional powers to the marshal and on July 16th he was appointed general secretary for the former combatants in his government. At his suggestion, the Légion française des combattants was founded on August 29th .

In March 1941, the French government under François Darlan gave in to pressure from the German occupation forces and set up its own Jewish Commissioner, whose first Commissioner General Vallat was appointed on March 29, 1941. He immediately began to work out a new "Jewish Statute", which replaced the first Statute, dated October 3, 1940, on June 2, 1941 and significantly tightened the living conditions of Jews living in France. Among other things, the Vichy regime expanded the definition of who should be considered a Jew, tightened professional bans and forced Jews in the unoccupied zone of France to register with the authorities. In July the regime began to carry out Aryanizations here too . In November 1941, Vallat signed the decree establishing the Union générale des israélites de France . Since both the German occupiers (because of his lack of determination) and his own government (because of his activism) were dissatisfied with his work, Vallat had to vacate his post in early May 1942. He was followed by the more brutal anti-Semite Louis Darquier de Pellepoix , who helped organize the later mass deportations of French Jews.

Vallat held subordinate positions in the ministries for foreign affairs and agriculture. After the assassination attempt by the Resistance on his long-time companion Philippe Henriot at the end of June 1944, he was made his successor as a propagandist at the radio station Radio Nationale in Vichy. He was arrested by the Allies on August 27, 1944 in Vichy.

After the war

Vallat had to answer in 1947 for his collaboration, namely 1) his work in high positions in the Vichy government and 2) his work as a radio propagandist in 1944 before the Supreme Court. In his defense he reaffirmed his hostility to Jews and his loyalty to Marshal Pétain. With 14:13 votes he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and loss of honor ( indignité nationale ), the alternative would have been the death penalty. Released from prison in 1949, he was given an amnesty in 1954.

He later served as the editor of the weekly Aspects de la France , a publication of Action française. He remained true to his clerical-fascist views until his death in 1972, but later described himself as a "Zionist" and supporter of the State of Israel. He was buried in Pailharès.

literature

• Laurent Joly: Xavier Vallat. Du nationalisme chrétien à l'antisémitisme d'État, 1891–1972 . Foreword by Philippe Burrin , Grasset, Paris 2001.
• Stephane Boiron: Antisémites sans remords: les «bons motifs» of the juristes de Vichy. In: Cités , No. 36, 2008/4, pp. 37-50, doi : 10.3917 / cite.036.0037 .

Web links

Commons : Xavier Vallat  - Collection of images, videos and audio files