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Centre for History and Economics online seminar
Claire Zalc speaks on “Discretionary Power in the Hands of an Authoritarian State: Denaturalizations under the Vichy Regime, 1940-1944“.
France’s Vichy regime introduced a policy of denaturalization on July 22, 1940, almost immediately after it came to power. Under the new law, it established a commission tasked with reviewing every naturalization that had been granted since 1927. The work of this commission offers an exceptional window onto the tension between an ideological project and its implementation. This talk explores how political norms were processed, accepted, amended or rejected as they became administrative criteria. Moreover, it shows how ideology shaped bureaucratic decisions and how an administrative apparatus exercised discretion in implementing a policy.