First Published in 1998. Weisberg provides a comprehensive account of the French legal system's complicity with its German occupiers during the dark period known as 'Vichy'. Drawing on archival sources, personal interviews, and historical research, this book reveals how legalized persecution operated on a practical level, often exceeding German expectations. All while comparing the Vichy experience to American legal precedents and practices, opening the possibility that postmodern modes of thinking ironically adopt the complexity of Vichy reasoning to a host of reading and thinking strategies.

The involvement of Vichy France with Nazi Germany's anti-Jewish policy has long been a source of debate and contention. At a time when France, after decades of denial, has finally acknowledged responsibility for its role in the deportation and murder of 75,000 Jews from France during the Holocaust, Richard H. Weisberg here provides us with a comprehensive and devastating account of the French legal system's complicity with its German occupiers during the dark period known as 'Vichy'.
As in Germany, the exclusionary laws passed during the Vichy period normalized institutional antisemitism. Anti-Jewish laws entered the legal canon with little resistance, and private lawyers quickly absorbed the discourse of exclusion into the conventional legal framework, expanding the laws beyond their simple intentions, their literal sense, and even their German precedents.
Drawing on newly-available archival sources, personal interviews, and historical research, Weisberg reveals how legalized persecution actually operated on a practical level, often exceeding German expectations. Further, he presents a persuasive argument for Vichy law as an acquired Catholic response to a flase notion of Jewish Talmudism. The book also compares Vichy experience to American legal precedents and practices and opens up the possibility that postmodern modes of thinking ironically adopt the complexity of Vichy reasoning to a host of reading and thinking strategies.
Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France raises fundamental and disturbing questions about the ease with which democratic legal systems can be subverted.

The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic reasoning, is a persistent theme in the modern novel. Richard Weisberg, who has written extensively on both literature and law, explores the role of legalism and its abuses in eight major novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with Dostoevski and moving by way of trenchant analyses of Flaubert and Camus, Weisberg culminates his argument in a brilliantly revisionist reading of Melville's Billy Budd. In each of the novels treated, Weisberg sees a verbally gifted central character relying on wordiness to avoid or distort previously revealed truths. He argues that the malaise Nietzsche called ressentiment goads these characters to verbalizations that do violence to others and, ironically, indict their very creators. He identifies the legalistic theme as the major mode of iconoclasm in modern fiction and the source of its holocaustic vision. Writers, he reflects, viewed with profound skepticism their culture's tendency to substitute complex narrative formalism for earlier, absolute approaches to justice. In this, Weisberg concludes, their works anticipated the jurisprudential discourse of today. "The Failure of the Word is a creative, provocative, and learned work, written with style and feeling. Weisberg brings to bear on his core themes (the legalistic proclivity and ressentiment) a wide body of knowledge and thought in law and philosophy, literary history and theory."-Robert L. Jackson, Yale University