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not far from the headquarters of Le Monde. The books fill countless
shelves—the multitude of volumes befits a towering figure in French
intellectual history. Born in Lourdes in 1940, Birnbaum is a leading
authority on France’s Jewish history—and, these days, the return of
anti-Semitism. He is used to being asked by journalists to explain
why France has been struck by a new wave of anti-Semitic violence,
but when I tell him I want to ask about Georges Mandel and why
he’s not very well known in the English-speaking world, he smiles.
“Is he that well known in France?” Birnbaum says.
Even historians, Birnbaum admits, have a hard time pinning Man-
del down. “He was somewhat atypical in his ideology, with a quite
hard political line, one that was even supported by the right-wing,”
he says. A respected figure in French politics but not a major one,
Mandel rose to become what Birnbaum calls a “juif d’État,” Jew of
the state, a loyal civil servant who bracketed his or her individual
identity inside the ostensibly universal promise of the French Repub-
lic. “His value is different,” Birnbaum says. “He’s a dramatic figure
because of what he lived.”I
n 1791, France, an infant republic, became the first Western Euro-
pean country to emancipate its Jews, granting them full legal
rights. In many this inspired a fierce loyalty, a feeling that was
perhaps rooted in indebtedness but ultimately culminated in pride.
Mandel’s friend Emmanuel Berl, who was also Jewish, saw some-
thing in Mandel that typified the promise of the Third Republic,
the system of government that fell in 1940. “His passionate love of
France, spread among Jewish families like his own, who detached
themselves from Judaism and brought to their homeland the zeal
their ancestors brought to their ancient law, was eager for sacrifices
and renunciations,” Berl wrote in La
fin de la IIIe République. And Mandel
certainly made them.
Mandel entered politics first as
Clemenceau’s aide. A staunch fis-
cal conservative, he soon developed
a reputation for assiduousness, ris-
ing through the ranks of the ThirdRepublic. In 1919 he was elected to the Assemblée Nationale, the
French parliament, as a deputy from the Gironde, the administra-
tive department in southwestern France that encompasses the city
of Bordeaux. In 1932 he steered a universal suffrage bill through
the Assemblée Nationale that would have extended the franchise to
women. The French Senate rejected the bill, and women could not
vote in France until as late as 1944.
But nowhere was Mandel more forward-thinking than regarding
the rise of fascism in Europe. In the mid-1930s, when many in the
French government still thought that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mus-
solini might be reasoned with, Mandel—like Winston Churchill,
who soon became a close ally—was a constant voice of dissent. As
Berl remembered: “From 1934, he would say, ‘We can no longer save
ourselves, we can only be saved.’” But a few years later, who had said
what and when became academic. In June 1940, France fell to Hit-
ler’s army, and the French government had to flee the capital, first
to Tours, then to Bordeaux. Mandel, by then France’s minister of the
interior, was part of the convoy.
In the early days after the invasion, it was unclear how the Nazis
would rule their latest conquest and how the existing French gov-
ernment would respond. In the midst of the chaos, on the night of
Thursday, June 13, Mandel spoke privately on the steps of the town hall
in Tours with Charles de Gaulle, a relatively obscure military officer
in whom Mandel nevertheless saw something. He urged de Gaulle
that night to leave for London, where he could continue the fight.
“You have great duties to perform, general, but with the advantage of
being, out of all of us, an intact man,” Mandel said, a line de Gaulle
later recorded in his memoirs.
Churchill preferred Mandel to de Gaulle, who could be arrogant
and intractable, and he tried to convince Mandel to come to London
as well, sending a plane to Bordeaux on the morning of June 17. But
Mandel would not leave. Edward Spears, Churchill’s aide, was with
Mandel the night he refused to go, and he later recalled the scene
in his memoirs. “You fear for me because I am a Jew,” Mandel told
Spears. “Well, it’s just because I am a Jew that I will not go tomorrow.
It would look as if I was afraid, as if I was running away.”
Once it became clear that the nominallyAvenue Georges Mandel in Paris was dedicated in 1945
by André Le Troquer, France’s minister of the interior;
after the war a monument was erected in Fontainebleau
Forest (right), where Mandel was executed in 1944;
France issued a stamp to honor him in 1964 (above), on
the 20th anniversary of his death.[CONTINUED ON PAGE 151]