Mécanique de la destruction des Juifs de France : Le cas Benzacar, de la déportation à la mémorialisation (1940-2017)
Joseph Benzacar (1862–1944), professor at the Faculty of Law in Bordeaux and deputy mayor, died in deportation in Birkenau in May 1944, aged 81. For many observers, his case is exceptional: an academic and elected official until his dismissal from the municipal council in October 1940, he was allege...
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| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Français |
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2024
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | Joseph Benzacar (1862–1944), professor at the Faculty of Law in Bordeaux and deputy mayor, died in deportation in Birkenau in May 1944, aged 81. For many observers, his case is exceptional: an academic and elected official until his dismissal from the municipal council in October 1940, he was allegedly abandoned by his political friends. The reality is more complex: what is exceptional about Benzacar’s case is not so much his deportation as the context in which it took place. In Bordeaux, there had been a synergy between the municipality, the law faculty and the prefecture since the end of the 1930s. These three actors played a major part in the dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas, the mechanics of persecution, and the dehumanization of Jews. From autumn 1940, anti-Semitic legislation was effectively applied by the municipal team led by Mayor Adrien Marquet, a former minister under Marshal Pétain and the author of the first statute governing Jews (the law of October 3, 1940). Benzacar was a victim of the repressive policy pursued by the prefectoral team, which had been led since June 1942 by secretary general Maurice Papon. As the persecution intensified in the winter of 1943–44, elderly Jews who were perfectly assimilated, deeply rooted, and well integrated into the bourgeoisie were arrested and transferred to Drancy before being deported to Poland. The case of Benzacar provides an opportunity to look back at the difficulty of remembering the Holocaust on the scale of a city like Bordeaux. Initially, the memory of Benzacar was controlled by those in the city council who had contributed to his legal disgrace and social exclusion (Robert Poplawski). It wasn’t until the Papon trial (1997–98) that his name came out of the shadows; however, competition with the memory of the Resistance (Manon Cormier) or a simplification of history was unavoidable: to compensate for the trauma left by the “complicity” of the town hall and the prefecture with the occupying forces, Benzacar became the symbol of the good municipal councilor and the upright academic. |
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