Charles du Paty de Clam

Charles Mercier du Paty de Clam (16 February 1895 – 8 April 1948) was a French soldier and civil servant who served as Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs under the Vichy government between March and May 1944. As the governor of North Lebanon, he repressed the Sunni Tripoli riots of 1936. Hesitating between De Gaulle and Pétain, he eventually chose to become Director-General of the Levant States Office for the Vichy regime in 1941. Suspected of passivity and disinterest towards the aryanisation process, he was eventually replaced with Joseph Antignac on 17 May 1944. A reader of La France Juive like his father (he participated in a commemoration of Édouard Drumont on 3 May 1944), his antisemitism was neither virulent nor racial. Opposed to "Jewish dominance" in the economy and Jewish immigration from Central Europe, he dismissed at the same time the so-called "Jewish plot" and those who believed in it. According to the historian Laurent Joly, his hindrances to the organization's agenda were mostly symbolic. While Du Paty de Clam, Joly follows, does not deserve a historical rehabilitation because of his ambivalence, he was nonetheless sincerely interested in the plight of French Jews and was scandalized by the criminal operations of aryanisation.