In the 1930s, the French Third Republic banned naturalized
citizens from careers in law and medicine for up to ten years after
they had obtained French nationality. In 1940, the Vichy regime
permanently expelled all lawyers and doctors born of foreign
fathers and imposed a 2 percent quota on Jews in both professions.
On the basis of extensive archival research, Julie Fette shows in
Exclusions that doctors and lawyers themselves, despite their
claims to embody republican virtues, persuaded the French state to
enact this exclusionary legislation. At the crossroads of knowledge
and power, lawyers and doctors had long been dominant forces in
French society: they ran hospitals and courts, doubled as
university professors, held posts in parliament and government, and
administered justice and public health for the nation. Their social
and political influence was crucial in spreading xenophobic
attitudes and rendering them more socially acceptable in
France.
Fette traces the origins of this professional protectionism to
the late nineteenth century, when the democratization of higher
education sparked efforts by doctors and lawyers to close ranks
against women and the lower classes in addition to foreigners. The
legislatively imposed delays on the right to practice law and
medicine remained in force until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did
French lawyers and doctors formally recognize their complicity in
the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime. Fette's book is a
powerful contribution to the argument that French public opinion
favored exclusionary measures in the last years of the Third
Republic and during the Holocaust.
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