Monday, November 1, 2021

Petain, Vichy, and Anti-Semitism

. . ."Zemmour is not immune from controversy. In his 2014 book, The French Suicide, he wrote that France is in decline and that its traditional values are being replaced by gender equality, race, gay rights, and immigration". . . 



"As time goes by, there is a consensus that Casablanca, the story of the cynical hard-drinking American expatriate nightclub owner choosing between his love for a woman or helping her and her husband, is one of the greatest films of all time. Its characters, dialogue, and theme song have become iconic. We’ll always have Casablanca. It is a film of moral ambiguity, that can be seen either as a theme of love and sacrifice or as a political allegory about resistance against Nazism.

"However, this brilliant film has a flaw. In one scene the camera focuses on the prefecture of the corrupt chief of police on the wall of which is the motto of the French Third Republic, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” inherited from the 1789 French revolution. But the Third Republic had ended in May 1940, and its motto had been officially replaced by the slogan, “work, family, homeland,” of the new French state, popularly known as Vichy. The differences between the two mottos are still pertinent in French politics and culture today." . . .

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