In Vichy France

To nudge Marshal Petain away from an exclusive Berlin orientation, FDR pursued conciliation toward Vichy France. The hope was that Vichy cooperation with Berlin might be stymied. Unvarnished realpolitik vis-a-vis Vichy ruffled consciences in Capitol Hill and the State Department, though not enough to cause revision. The rival strategic and ethical tugs that agitated her compatriots struck writer Gertrude Stein as neither urgent nor interesting. To her, significance lay elsewhere. France had suffered, admittedly. Yet it would rise again. Stein’s France was perpetual, irrepressible, and safely sheltered under Petain. Entertainer Josephine Baker, like Stein a long-term resident of France, had a viewpoint different from Stein’s and worked as an undercover agent for the Free French. Meanwhile people in the United States anxiously followed the deteriorating human rights condition in France, but this did not convert into calls for action. Exceptions to this hesitancy clustered in private organizations, as in the Emergency Rescue Committee and Varian Fry. He went to Marseilles and managed to help organize the escape of roughly 2,000 people hunted by Vichy and Nazi authorities.