In the 1930s, the French Third Republic banned naturalized citizens from careers in law and medicine for up to ten years after they had obtained French nationality. In 1940, the Vichy regime permanently expelled all lawyers and doctors born of foreign fathers and imposed a 2 percent quota on Jews in both professions. On the basis of extensive archival research, Julie Fette shows in Exclusions that doctors and lawyers themselves, despite their claims to embody republican virtues, persuaded the French state to enact this exclusionary legislation. At the crossroads of knowledge and power, lawyers and doctors had long been dominant forces in French society: they ran hospitals and courts, doubled as university professors, held posts in parliament and government, and administered justice and public health for the nation. Their social and political influence was crucial in spreading xenophobic attitudes and rendering them more socially acceptable in France. Fette traces the origins of this professional protectionism to the late nineteenth century, when the democratization of higher education sparked efforts by doctors and lawyers to close ranks against women and the lower classes in addition to foreigners. The legislatively imposed delays on the right to practice law and medicine remained in force until the 1970s, and only in 1997 did French lawyers and doctors formally recognize their complicity in the anti-Semitic policies of the Vichy regime. Fette's book is a powerful contribution to the argument that French public opinion favored exclusionary measures in the last years of the Third Republic and during the Holocaust.
"Although other scholars have considered aspects of her subject, this book stands out by systematically comparing the development of exclusion in two French professions, and it provides new information on how the process worked in practice. Fette analyzes the role of students, professionals, and governments and the motives behind exclusion, including not just the prejudices invoked in the book's s
Matthew Ramsey, Journal of the History of Medicine
"Her study is extremely detailed often technical and has the advantage of underlining the differences from one region to another... In sum, this is an excellent essay in social history that expands our knowledge of the years of the occupation as well as of those that preceded it."
Contemporary French Civilization
"Julie Fette argues in this definitive work that medical and legal professionals helped prepare the ground for the Holocaust through generations of systematic efforts to limit professional competition by progressively narrowing the definition of eligibility to practice. Efforts to protect professional monopolies are as old as the professions themselves, but a consequence of time and circumstance m
