CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Freiin von Richthofen, Luisa |
|---|---|
| Title | "French Apocalypse?" The internment of "enemy aliens" in France (1939-1940) |
| Summary | This thesis deals with the internment of “enemy aliens” in France after the declaration of war on Germany in September 1939. It has sometimes been assumed that the camp system established under the Third Republic in the second half of the 1930s paved the way for more restrictive internment policies under the regime of Vichy and eventually to the deportation and extermination of the Jews of France. This thesis’ underlying query is to probe these continuities. It uses new archival material to probe the underlying logic of the internment between September 1939 and June 1940. It also pays special attention to the few, little explored instances of organized resistance against the internment policy. It finds that that though the Vichy regime continued to use certain structures, institutions and legal frameworks inherited from the Third Republic, the claim that there is a discernable, straight line between the French internment camps and Auschwitz cannot be substantiated. Rather than the smooth “continuation of a way of life for which the soil had been prepared for years” the thesis argues the path from 1939 to 1942 was tortuous and full of junctures. The camps, in other words, were not an accepted matter of fact up until well into 1941 but rather the object of constant negotiation, even once the democratic Third Republic was but a faint memory. |
| Supervisor | Straner, Katalin; Miller, Michael Laurence |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/richthofen_luisa.pdf |
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