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Au Pilori was a far-right publication in France from 1938 until 1944. It was the crudest and most extreme of the antisemitic mouthpieces of the German occupying forces.

Context

Like most places in the world, France has had a long history of antisemitism. The Dreyfus Affair sprang out of a resurgence of anti-jewish sentiment in the late nineteenth century to cast a long shadow onto the future of the country that blighted even its period under German occupation during World War II. Eduard Drumont wrote his best-selling La France Juive, or "Jewish France," in 1886 and it influenced, among other people, men who used the power of the press to promote Jewish persecutions during the Nazi occupation. Among these were Jean Drault and Jean Héritier, the son of a Dreyfus supporter who switched sides because of Drumont's writing.

After the German invasion in the summer of 1940 most of France's newspapers, including its largest ones, fled the occupied zone to continue publishing from south of the Demarcation Line. This left a vacuum that editors of lesser quality rushed to fill. Jean Galtier-Boissière would later write, "At the start of the occupation a crowd of misfits appeared who rushed to lick the boots of the occupiers. Men forgotten for twenty years, like Jean Drault of Soldat Chapuzot fame from around 1896, author Lucian Pemjean, or the serialist Jean de la Hire, came out of retirement to write vengeful editorials on Jewish freemasonry. The most obscure editor of a confidential pre-war anti-Semitic rag seized a position of authority." They wrote for publications like Au Pilori.

The publication

Henri-Robert Petit was one of these misfits. He had mysteriously gone to Erfurt Germany for a year in the early 1930s and came back an antisemite after working for the magazine Welt-Dienst. He was mixed up with Henri Coston and Louis Darquier de Pellepoix in 1937 but broke with the former when Coston accused him of theft. In 1938 he began publishing his own small monthly paper called Le Pilori, housed in offices on Rue d’Argenteuil. It was antisemitic from the start, but legislation in 1939 banning this type of hate speech closed it down. The police had been investigating him for being a dishonest insurance agent and a cocaine addict when they lost track of him in May of 1939. Northern France fell to the Germans on June 25 of the following year and by July 12 Otto Abetz gave his approval for Petit to restart the paper, not just as monthly but a weekly named Au Pilori. Its new home was the luxurious house the Nazis commandeered from the elite Kraemer family of antique dealers on 43 Rue Monceau. Jean Lestandi, another creature from France's Nazi-sponsored, prewar antisemitic underworld, came out of the shadows to found the Société d'édition de propagande française (French Propaganda Publishing House) and this financed Au Pilori, among other publications. Unfortunately Petit's plush new circumstances did not increase the quality of his reasoning. In Au Pilori he claimed Jesus was an anti-Jewish Aryan. He also published an open letter to Marshal Petain, claiming the Vichy government was stuffed with Jews and Freemasons and calling for a brutal surgical operation to excise the threat.

The new publication was the reincarnation of Le Pilori and it reconstituted the old antisemitic tropes within the context of the French defeat. It called for all Jews, frauds, profiteers and other troublemakers to be confined to forced-labor camps employed in repairing war damage. It also called for a census of all jews and issuance to them of the same passport given to non-citizens. A recording of all their wealth was called for in order to take steps to gradually exclude them from the economy, which was destroyed by international Jewish capitol. Jews were to be forbidden employment in public administration, the judiciary, radio and the press, and there would be a numeric cap to the amount of Jews allowed to practice law or medicine. It also called for Freemasons and their affiliate bodies to be dissolved.

Au Pilori enlisted Newspaper mogul Robert Hersant who at this time lead the Jeune Front, the Vichy version of the Hitler Youth, to help sell the newspaper. Hersant and a group of Au Pilori sales reps were arrested on August 13 for beating up a saleswoman at a dressmaker's shop. In the days that followed, it might have seemed as if Kristallnacht had come to the Champs Élysées as Jeune Front members threw cobblestones and chanted "Death to Jews!"

Celine and Sorbonne professor Henri LaBrue were contributors. In August it launched a series of articles called "Les Juifs doivent payer pour la guerre ou mourir" ("Jews must pay for the war or die") In September it was taken over by Jean Lastandi de Villani, a member of Abetz' stable of French writers who met in at the Club du Grand Pavois in the penthouse of the National City Bank building. Lastandi turned it from merely a French antisemitic newspaper to a mouthpiece for the German invaders. It had already called for the names and addresses of freemasons, along with their alleged horrific deeds, to be posted on their homes, at their workplaces and their townhalls when it then offered the most extensive coverage of the Petit Palais' early October exhibit of these supposed misdeeds. After an editorial calling fremasons the murders of France, it began publishing the addresses of Masonic lodges.