WHEN FDR APPEASED VICHY

Rafael Medoff

Two tiny islands near Nova Scotia and Maine are back in the spotlight, after largely disappearing from public view for more than eighty years.

The islands, St. Pierre and Miquenon, are suddenly attracting tourists, because a Canadian television series set there has become a big hit. In addition, the prime minister of Canada and the president of France held a first-ever meeting there last week, as a kind of symbolic thumbing of their noses at the United States.

A recent New York Times feature about the islands noted that the last time St. Pierre and Miquenon attracted much attention was back in 1941. The islands long have been a French colonial possession, so when the Nazis installed the puppet Vichy regime as the rulers of France, the Vichyites also became the rulers of France’s overseas territories.

On December 24, 1941, the Free French—the government-in-exile headed by General Charles de Gaulle—sent a naval force that ousted the islands’ Vichyite rulers. A plebiscite held the following day found 98% of the islands’ inhabitants supported the overthrow of the Vichyites.

According to last week’s Times article, De Gaulle’s action “upset the US government over what it perceived as interference in North America.”

Not quite.

If the concern really was over “interference in North America,” then the Roosevelt administration could have protested the change from democratic rule to fascist Vichy rule there as a threat to America. The real problem, in fact, was that FDR had a policy of appeasing Vichy, in the hope that it would persuade the Vichyites to be less pro-Nazi.

But appeasing dictators never works.

The most notorious example of that appeasement policy toward Vichy was the Roosevelt administration’s mistreatment of Holocaust rescuer Varian Fry. In 1940-1941, he smuggled more than 2,000 refugee artists, scientists and scholars—most of them Jews—out of Vichy France, until the Nazis and the Vichyites complained to Washington about Fry’s activities. Secretary of State Cordell Hull responded by canceling Fry’s passport, forcing him to leave France.

That’s why the Roosevelt administration denounced De Gaulle’s “arbitrary” action in St. Pierre and Miquenon in 1941. That’s why the US ridiculed the liberating force as “the so-called Free French,” making it clear that it regarded Vichy, not the resistance, as the legitimate rulers of the two islands.

Vichy officials praised Roosevelt’s stance on the islands as “a severe lesson to the dissidents.” A group of prominent American liberal intellectuals, on the other hand, denounced the administration’s policy of “appeasing undemocratic and pro-Axis governments.”

De Gaulle refused to budge from the islands, and FDR eventually dropped the issue.

But Roosevelt’s policy of appeasing Vichy continued even after the US entered the war. Thus following the Allies’ liberation of North Africa from the Nazis in November 1942, President Roosevelt agreed to leave Vichyite Admiral Francois Darlan in power.

As a result, thousands of Moroccan and Algerian Jews whom the Vichyites had imprisoned in slave labor camps were kept there until the summer of 1943—and the anti-Jewish laws that the Vichyites had imposed in North Africa were not completely abolished until October 1943, nearly a year after the region was liberated.

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September 29, 2026 | 3 Comments »

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  1. AI Overview
    “The Jews Will Have to Wait” is a prominent historical essay written by Robert Satloff that explores the controversial and often-overlooked aftermath of Operation Torch, the November 1942 Allied amphibious invasion of North Africa. Originally published as a deep-dive essay for Mosaic (and frequently discussed across intellectual Jewish media like Tablet Magazine and The Washington Institute), the piece examines a dark chapter in U.S. foreign policy where the Roosevelt administration appeased Vichy France collaborators at the expense of North African Jews.
    The Core History Explored in the Essay
    • The Predominantly Jewish Resistance: When Allied forces landed in Algiers, their entry was heavily facilitated by an internal coup. Out of 377 local resistance fighters who successfully neutralized the pro-Nazi Vichy French XIX Army Corps, 315 were Algerian Jews led by José Aboulker. They risked their lives to save American soldiers and pave the way for a smooth landing.
    • The “Darlan Deal” Betrayal: Instead of treating these Jewish resistance fighters as heroes, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and diplomat Robert Murphy cut a deal with Admiral Jean François Darlan, a high-ranking Vichy collaborator. To ensure a seamless military occupation, the U.S. left anti-Semitic Vichy officials in charge of local governance.
    • “The Jews Will Have to Wait”: Under the continued Vichy administration backed by the U.S., the anti-Jewish race laws were not repealed. Algerian Jews remained stripped of their French citizenship, Jewish children were kept out of public schools, and thousands of Jews remained interned in Saharan forced-labor camps. When Jewish leaders protested, the official stance of the U.S. State Department and military planners was that “the Jews would have to wait”—arguing that restoring Jewish civil rights would anger the local Arab majority and destabilize the wartime theater.
    Historical Significance
    The essay highlights how Operation Torch served as the birthplace of modern American Middle East policy. Satloff argues that the campaign established an enduring and problematic U.S. precedent: prioritizing short-term military expediency and partnering with “friendly strongmen” over local civil rights and democratic development. It took nearly a full year after the Allied “liberation” for Algerian Jews to finally have their rights and citizenship restored.

  2. If you are going to write something, get it right. Here is a quotation from Wikipedia. Please note the spelling of Miquelon and the geographic location. It is nowhere near Maine or Nova Scotia. The map at the head of this article is disgracefully wrong. Even the Wikipedia article needs amendment: both St Pierre and Miquelon are located in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

    Saint Pierre and Miquelon, officially the Territorial Collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, is a self-governing territorial overseas collectivity of France in the northwestern Atlantic Ocean, located off the Canadian island of Newfoundland.