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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
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