Xavier Vallat

Vallat was accused by the left of responsibility for the physical attack on Blum by a right-wing mob in the streets of Paris which occurred not long after this speech.

After the German occupation of France in June 1940, Vallat supported the rise to power of Marshal Philippe Pétain at the head of a collaborationist regime based in Vichy.

On 10 July 1940, he voted in favour of granting the Cabinet presided by Marshal Pétain the authority to draw up a new constitution, thereby effectively ending the French Third Republic and establishing Vichy France.

[2] In this position, he oversaw the "Aryanisation" of the French economy, education system, civil service and professions, and the enforcement of laws requiring all Jews to be registered with the police.

As the historian Robert Paxton has demonstrated, these laws were passed by the Vichy regime on its own initiative and not under German pressure, as both Pétain and Vallat claimed at their trials after the war.

At his trial before the High Court of Justice in December 1947, Vallat remained an unrepentant anti-Semite, demanding that one of the judges, Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont, be disqualified because he was Jewish.

The court said he received a relatively lenient sentence in light of his service in World War I, and the many witnesses who said he had saved Jews by giving them false papers.