From Santé to Drancy: The Laws on the Status of Jews and Trajectories of Persecution in France, 1941-1944
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Individuals convicted by the correctional court of the Seine for breaking the law of June 2, 1941, on the status of Jews were sent to the Santé prison in Paris. The systematic study of the registers of these detainees between July 1941 and the Liberation highlights the pivotal role of the French prison in the internment and deportation of Jews. This article uses little-studied legal archives to shed light on the punishment of offences under the French laws on Jewish status. It also seeks to elucidate the process of the “provisional consignment” of Jews at the end of their sentences in cooperation with the German authorities. Reconstructing the trajectories of their persecution by crossing prison registers with police archives reveals that these detainees were not released at the end of their sentence as the judicial archives suggest, but were instead placed by the French authorities in provisional consignment before being interned in the camp at Drancy. This extrajudicial measure was first applied to foreign Jews and then extended to French Jews from October 1941. Previously unremarked by scholars, this specifically French tool of anti-Jewish persecution was well understood by the judges and police officers of the time. It thus contributed to the genocide of the Jews by moving them from the Santé prison to Drancy, where they remained until their deportation to Auschwitz from March 1942.
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