The Inqusition

Pierre Laval had to reach back into the Middle Ages to justify himself. Said he: "I am only applying to Jews the same treatment prescribed centuries ago [the Inquisition] by the Catholic Church."

Laval said he had no intention of extending the anti-Jewish laws of his German masters (particularly the wearing of the yellow Star of David) to Unoccupied France. But he insisted: "No man and nothing can sway me from my determination to rid France of foreign Jews and send them back where they originated."

If Jews died in sealed boxcars and concentration camps, that made little difference to Laval. It did to Catholic prelates in Toulouse and Lyon.

Copies of the eloquent pastoral letter (TIME, Sept. 21) of Archbishop Jules Geraud Saliege of Toulouse passed from pocket to pocket. In Lyon, Pierre Cardinal Gerlier repeatedly protested mass deportations, and a "Christian Amity" group preached tolerance for all. Laval ordered Father Chaillet, leader of the group, interned in a fixed residence at Privas.

"I'll take no lessons in humanitarianism from any country," snorted Laval. But by week's end he had learned one lesson: even the once reactionary, fascist Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire) was disgusted with him. Charles Vallin, the order's vice president, withdrew his support of the Petain-Laval "national revolution" and fled to England. With Vallin went Pierre Brossolette, Socialist editor, long active in the French underground. Once bitter political enemies, both men were mentioned in dispatches during the battle of France; now they were pledged to work side by side with General Charles de Gaulle. Their common aim: the liberation of a France that (in the words of Archbishop Saliege) once preserved "traditional respect for the human individual" in "the conscience of all her children."

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