Who was worthy of being French in Vichy France? Claire Zalc seeks to answer this question by examining how the regime used citizenship to implement the ideals of the National Revolution. By painstakingly researching the naturalization files beginning in 1927 from four departments (Pas de Calais, Seine-et-Marne, Isère, and Vaucluse) in occupied, unoccupied, and parts of France where non-citizens were forbidden to settle Zalc examines the ways in which Vichy bureaucrats undertook the task of deciding who should and should not remain French.

Zalc brings her expertise to an area of Vichy history that has not been previously studied. Her research threads together two historiographical approaches to the material: the study of the institutions implementing denaturalizations and the individuals impacted by them. Zalc's goal was to study the “relations, confrontations, and interactions between these individuals and institutions” (11). Her challenge was that the relevant institution created by Vichy, the Commission for the Review of Naturalization, left no files behind. According to Zalc, the Commission's archives have never been found and may have been destroyed after the war (14). As a result, she focused on the individual naturalization files themselves to try to determine how the “civil servants responsible for denaturalizations” behaved (15). Ultimately, the question asked is how big of a role did antisemitism play in the administrative ranks of the Vichy government? The consequences of denaturalization for Jews during the Vichy era was a matter of life and death. The notion that the Nazis used terror and repression to wield power is known—less acknowledged is the fact that national laws continued to exist and were implemented in ways that at times aided the Nazis, and at other times thwarted them. Zalc reveals not only the process by which the National Commission operated but also how focused it was on repealing laws enacted under the Third Republic. She shows the broader scope of the Commission's work, which was to disenfranchise those deemed unworthy of French citizenship and, to larger extent, undo the work of a prior liberal republican regime.

Zalc's study takes the reader through the steps of how the denaturalization policies came to be and how they were implemented. The process started with a series of measures that were announced on July 22, 1940 by the government established by Marshal Philippe Pétain. The policy set forth that all naturalizations granted since 1927 should be reviewed. Zalc notes that the concern regarding who should have French citizenship was not a new issue in French history. Since 1889, citizenship could be legally revoked if one accepted a public function abroad, enrolled in a foreign army, or traded in or possessed slaves (21). The law shifted during World War I, when concerns regarding national loyalty emerged, and in 1915 the law changed to allow for reviewing the naturalization of those born in enemy countries. In 1927, naturalizations became less restrictive by changing the residency requirement from ten years to three and giving easier access to citizenship based upon marriage. The policies enacted in 1940 countered the laws put into place in 1927—Zalc argues that the French government undertook these measures initially to settle “its accounts with the Republic” (31). The task faced by the government was twofold: What criteria should be used to measure worthiness, and who should be deemed unworthy? The Commission for the Review of Naturalizations was established to settle this question.

Zalc describes how the National Commission was organized and how it created a set of criteria to implement the review process. Those chosen to lead the Commission were initially selected to reflect “the way the Vichy regime conceived of the policy” and were judges representing the elite of the judicial system (47). The work of tediously sifting through the thousands of files was left to a group of rapporteurs who had bureaucratic and legal experience in naturalization issues. The rapporteurs had to determine which cases to prioritize, since the instructions from the top were ambiguous. The directive was to focus on those who were born outside of France and were the object of “unfavorable information” (186). The motives to single out individuals for review could range from political disloyalty to unsavory behavior such as public drunkenness or disinterest in work. Women were singled out if they lived outside of the conservative family norms extolled by the National Revolution. Given the antisemitism of the regime, Jews were also an intended target of the denaturalization policy. However, as Zalc shows, disenfranchising Jews was complicated initially by the lack of a consistent way to identify them. In some cases, particularly in the occupied zone, a file might indicate race, but otherwise agents had to rely upon informants or make assumptions about surnames that “seemed Jewish.” Over time, the antisemitism of Vichy found its way through the different branches of the administration, and the identification of alleged Jews became more prevalent in the naturalization files.

Zalc concludes by examining the consequences of being denaturalized and whether there were protests about these policies. She determines that the denaturalizations played a role in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust. She argues that while the denaturalization policy was open to interpretation as written, the implementation of it changed over time as pressure from the Germans increased to focus on denaturalizing Jews. While some rapporteurs and judges took on the task of stripping Jews of citizenship as part of their everyday duties, others chose to delegate these decisions rather than protest. Thus, Zalc demonstrates another form of complicity in the Holocaust that would otherwise be unseen. The book successfully illustrates the complexity of interpreting an imprecise policy in a bureaucracy across time and space. The book's strength is also its weakness. It is hard to put all of the details together, and perhaps that is the intention. The reader is left with an unsettling glimpse into the inner workings of Vichy administrators and the devastating consequences wrought by them.