France: Credit Control and Formalization of Banking Supervision

The banking supervision in France was formalized with the Banking Acts of 1941 and of 1945. In 1941, the Banking Control Commission as the supervisory agency was created, and rigid financial regulation such as a minimum capital requirement and a separation of banking types was introduced. In connection to the 1941 Act, the four largest commercial banks in France were also nationalized. However, with the German occupation and the wartime situation, the formalization of banking supervision was only completed with the Banking Act of 1945. The essential contents of the 1941 Act were upheld, but the supervisory agency was given a lot of measures to enforce bank regulation. Especially, authorization of rigid penalties enhanced effectiveness of supervisory activities. The main drivers of the formalization of banking supervision in France were the policy measures undertaken during the Vichy regime and the Liberation Government's measures. In the post-Second World War era, the banking supervisory system was used mainly to enforce credit control policy actions, in a period of economic recovery and reconstruction. The banking act of January 1984 decompartmentalized the banking system and changed the institutions of supervision.

The political history of France in reflection of the national cinematography (1960s – 1970s)

The goal of this research consists in determination of the place and role of French cinematography of 1960s – 1970s in the political history of postwar France. The object of this research is the process of transformation of political discourse in the context of transfer of power from Charles de Gaulle to Georges Pompidou. The subject of is reflection of the history of collaborationism in the films “Sadness and Pity” (1969) and “Lacombe Lucien” (1973). The author examines such aspect of the topic as reflection of the political and cultural elites on the Vichy regime. Special attention is given to the political consequences of the screening of films about collusion of the Nazi to French citizens. The scientific lies in the analytical overview of the popular films of French national cinematography of 1960s – 1970s, which interpret the phenomenon of “collaborationism” and “opposition" of the period of German occupation. As a result, it is proven that these films distorted the silence on collusion of a number of citizens to the occupier that prevailed in the French political and public discourse. The author notes that resign of Charles de Gaulle as the head of the French Republic led to the emergence of the products of popular culture that revise the previous interpretations of the military past and have a capacity to change the political situation in the country.

The Problem of Pétain: The State Politics of Difficult Reputations

How do governments commemorate salient national figures with contested reputations? The case of Marshal Philippe Pétain, whose fame followed World War I (WWI), but was later stigmatized for having led the Nazi-affiliated Vichy regime during World War II (WWII), suggests that political leaders consider the interests of competing groups. In the case of Pétain, these include veterans’ organizations, Jewish heritage groups, leftists, and, eventually, the rightist National Front. State leaders attempt to reconcile these pressures in the hope of avoiding politically damaging conflicts. Successful commemorations reinforce the legitimacy of the State as the guardian of symbolic compatibility between visions of history and morality. Recognizing memorialization as political process, we describe how Presidents of France attempt to distinguish an honorable Pétain from a dishonorable one. We describe four strategies by which states address difficult reputations: erasing, selecting, reconciling, and differentiating. Competing groups may create ambiguous meanings, attacking the State, while keeping distant from those with difficult reputations.

Modernization of biographical narratology: Reflections on Arnold Zweig’s artistic novella Symphonie Fantastique

This article is devoted to the German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig’s (1887–1968) biographical novella Symphonie Fantastique (1943), told from the perspective of a young musicologist participating in World War II, applied to the life and work of French composer Hector Berlioz. Arnold Zweig not only writes the biography of one of the most prominent French composers for Harold Breton, but he also confronts the Vichy Regime. The aim of this article is to capture the technique of Arnold Zweig, who combines history and the identification of an artist with a given object.

The Entangled Stories of October 17, Vichy, the Jews, and the Holocaust

In a significant number of works about October 17, roles for Jews, the Vichy regime, and the Holocaust are articulated or imagined, pointing up networks of association that may be historical, apocryphal, real, or romanced. Chapter 6 takes up the question of whether Vichy and October 17 can or should be compared. Beginning a discussion of scholarship that has engaged this question, and with reflections on how Henry Rousso’s “Vichy syndrome” can be mapped onto the October 17 context, this chapter identifies a comparative discourse present in materials collected in the polices archives. After a survey of archival contents and a longer analysis of one particular case, the chapter turns its attention to the anarchive, not to unravel, but rather to observe the cultural entanglements of October 17, Vichy, Jews, and the Holocaust. In analysing works of theatre, film, novels, and young adult literature, chapter 6 speculates about why representations of a massacre of Algerians remain yoked to images and tropes of WWII, while also investigating how such representations function within their discrete literary worlds, and how we might speculate about the payoffs and pitfalls of such entanglements.

Writing Occupation

Why did some of the most brilliant—but often forgotten—Jewish émigré writers of the first half of the twentieth century choose to write in French as a second language, even as they faced a double exclusion as foreigners and as Jews under Vichy? Jewish writers of Eastern European origin who immigrated to France before the Second World War (including Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, Irène Némirovsky, and Elsa Triolet) switched from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, even when their Frenchness was being violently denied by the state. In this manuscript, Julia Elsky argues that these Jewish émigré writers harnessed the potential multilingualism of French to express hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities before and during the Occupation. When the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied them their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws, Jewish émigré authors from Eastern Europe began to re-examine, and in some cases, reassert their role in the French nation by exploring the possibilities of writing with a “Jewish voice” in the French language. In depicting key aspects of the war experience—the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the Resistance in France and in London—their work contests the boundaries between foreignness and belonging.