The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

posed a threat to all of the “admirable mixed breeds” responsible for the uniqueness and
“prodigiously interesting” aspects of the nation. 76
The French Catholic paper La Croix (The Cross) echoed the opinion of the French
delegation to Evian that the admittance of two hundred thousand refugees following the
end of the Great War had brought France to the saturation point and could no longer
accept forced émigrés. While France had traditionally served as a “haven” for involuntary
migrants further admissions would place the nation in “danger…of self-destruction on the
altar of love of its neighbor.” The totalitarian regimes had been “generous enough to
make us a present of some of their bacteria,” i.e. Jews who were the purveyors of Marxist
dogma. Nonetheless, despite such potential perils, France could not ignore human
suffering and owed a “duty to be upright and humane.” 77 Otherwise the nation would be
complicit in the absolute “extermination” of an entire people. Others in the United
Kingdom averred that inaction would “make cowards of us all." 78
76 “Faisons le point,” Gringoire, October 13, 1938; "Des Centres spéciaux de concentration pour les
étrangers indésirables", Le Journal, Nov. 21, 1938; Lucien Rebatet, "Les Emigrés politiques en France:
Peut-on éviter le pogrom?" (“The Émigré Politics in France: Can We Avoid the Pogrom?”) Je Suis Partout,
March 4, 1938; Maurice Ajam, “Le Mélange des races,” La Dépêche de Toulose, August 29, 1938, 1 cited
in Caron, Uneasy Asylum, 276.
Lucien Rebatet (1903-1972) was a French fascist with pro-Nazi sympathies who wrote for the rightwing
publication, Je Suis Partout (I am Everywhere). He was also a journalist, author and movie and film
critic for Action Française. During the occupation in 1942 he blamed French politicians, military leaders
and Jews for the fall of France (published in The Ruins or Les Decombres). Robert Michael and Philip
Rosen, Dictionary of Antisemitism from the Earliest Times to the Present (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
Inc., 2007), 381. Jews, represented in Rebatet’s world view a form of vermine. Solange Leibovici, “Pierre
Drieu La Rochelle: Le roman de la haine,” cited in Roland A. Piorloot, Henk Hillenaar and Walter
Schönau, eds., Fathers and Mothers in Literature: Psychoanalysis and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V.,
1994), 179. Following the end of the war Rebatet was accused of collaboration with the Vichy
Government and was described as a “true killer, a hunter-down of Jews, Resistance fighters, and Gaullists.”
He was condemned to death but later received amnesty. George Steiner, George Steiner at the New Yorker
(NY: New Directions Books, 2009), 207.
77 La Croix, July 7, 1938 cited in Katz, “Public Opinion,” 114.
78 The Economist, July 10, 1938. Ibid., 114.
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