Denaturalized

In Denaturalized, Claire Zalc combines the precision of the scholar with the passion of a storyteller...This is a deftly written book. Zalc combines in an accessible style (smoothly translated by Catherine Porter) the stories of people trapped within a bureaucracy that was as obsessed, perhaps, with clearing files as with hunting Jews. In other words, Zalc reminds us how cruel the banality of indifference could be. * Wall Street Journal * Claire Zalc's book is an important and original contribution to the history of Occupied France. It examines one of the key organisms of xenophobic persecution and discrimination set up by France's collaborating Vichy regime: the Commission for the Review of Naturalizations. Since the archives of that body have disappeared her work is a brilliant piece of historical detective work which situates the work of the Commission within the wider anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime. Her book not only analyzes the workings of an institution but recovers the stories of individuals whose lives were destroyed by it. -- Julian Jackson, author of <i>De Gaulle</i> Some 15,000 newly naturalized people were stripped of their French citizenship by the Vichy administration during the Nazi occupation of France; many of the Jews among them were then deported to their deaths. Here, Claire Zalc ingeniously unravels the mechanism of 'denaturalization' and gives us vivid portraits of both perpetrators and victims. -- Robert O. Paxton, author of <i>The Anatomy of Fascism</i> During World War II the experience of denaturalization was akin to a death sentence for many Jews. Some were already at Auschwitz when their citizenship was revoked. For others this change in legal status sealed their fate. Zalc's eye-opening book invites us to consider the true nature and fragility of national identity. At a time when a global crisis is forcing many of us to return to our country of origin, this is a book of great civic and political relevance. -- Annette Wieviorka, author of <i>The Era of the Witness</i> Zalc delivers an insightful and distressing look at efforts to revoke citizenship in Nazi-occupied France...This is an enlightening portrait of how the tools of bureaucracy can be bent to evil ends. * Publishers Weekly * Her detailed investigation provides unique insights into how bureaucracies in authoritarian regimes produce and reproduce violence...Drawing on the Vichy government's archives, Zalc follows the life stories of some of those who were naturalized as French during the interwar years, only to be stripped of their citizenship and deported under wartime France's collaborationist regime...Zalc's work provides direct evidence of how state power-and sometimes state violence-functions through the routine processes of registration, categorization, and counting. -- Laura van Waas and Natalie Brinham * Project Syndicate *