Denaturalized: How Thousands Lost Their Citizenship and Lives in Vichy France

Historian Zalc delivers an insightful and distressing look at efforts to revoke citizenship in Nazi-occupied France. Established in July 1940, the Vichy government’s Commission for the Review of Naturalization scrutinized individuals who had become French nationals since 1927. Criteria for stripping citizenship rights included “left-wing sympathies”; loose morals (a category that included alcoholism, prostitution, and homosexuality); and Jewish heritage. According to Zalc, more than 15,000 people were denaturalized between 1940 and 1944. The commission members were mainly senior or retired jurists and bureaucrats; some had belonged to anti-Semitic, pro-fascist groups before the war, while others had been friendly with Jews. Their informants across France relied on “rumors and gossip,” Zalc writes, and the process of denaturalization often ended in Kafkaesque fashion, with those whose citizenship had been revoked never being told why. The dire implications ranged from loss of employment and legal protections to deportation and death in the Holocaust. Zalc enriches her narrative with individual stories of people investigated by the commission, but the book’s narrow focus best suits scholars of the Holocaust and modern French history. Still, this is an enlightening portrait of how the tools of bureaucracy can be bent to evil ends. (Oct.)