Eric Adams said he’d ‘collaborate’ on immigration enforcement — so did Vichy France during WWII
New York’s mayor has more in common with Marshal Pétain than a telling word choice
At Left: Mayor Eric Adams and Tom Homan. At RIght: Marshal Pétain
Robert Zaretsky February 20, 2025
Last week, Mayor Eric Adams appeared on Fox & Friends, alongside the Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan, to discuss their plans to work together on immigration enforcement. With Homan sitting close enough to literally “get up his butt” — which he threatened to do if Adams did not “come through” — the mayor sought to reassure him. “I’m not standing in the way,” Adams declared. “I’m collaborating — against so many others who don’t want to collaborate.”
Tellingly, Adams described his role in the government’s new immigration policies in terms of collaboration. This choice of words was, in part, morally telling. Among the policies pursued by the administration is the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants to detention centers — overwhelmingly owned and run by private prison corporations — as well as the camp at Guantanamo Bay built after 9/11, described by several experts, including Michael Ratner, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, as a concentration camp. Moreover, the administration, as part of its assault on the birthright clause embedded in the 14th Amendment, is trying to strip citizenship from thousands of naturalized Americans, who will then also be subject to deportation.
But the choice of words is also historically telling. At its inception, the meaning of collaboration was straightforward. According to the Dictionnaire de l’Academie Française, to collaborate meant “travailler avec une ou plusieurs personnes à une œuvre commun” — i.e., “work with one or more people to reach a shared goal.” The New York Jets, for example, have collaborated for decades to have losing seasons.
But the meaning of words, unlike the ending of Jets’ seasons, change over time. The reason I quoted a French dictionary is not just because the word’s initial meaning changed in the mid-20th century, but the place where it changed was France.
This year marks the 85th anniversary of the French State, better known as Vichy thanks to the spa town where it set up shop in 1940 following the defeat and partial occupation by Nazi Germany. The regime was not just authoritarian and antisemitic, but from the very outset was actively collaborationist. This is not the description later offered by historians, but the description offered in real time by the regime’s leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain. In October, he informed the French in a radio address that their country was now clattering down the “road of collaboration.”
By that phrase, Pétain meant “state collaboration” — namely, the collaboration between two states, one dominant and the other subservient, which served their common interests. Convinced that the Thousand Year Reich would last, if not that long, more than the four years it did, Pétain & Co. sought to retain shreds of national sovereignty. (In this case, it was their naval fleet and colonial possessions.) In exchange for this sham independence, these men made an escalating series of humiliating concessions that climaxed in the deportation of French men to work in German armament factories, and the deportation of foreign and French Jews, including thousands who had been denaturalized, to die in German death factories.
In short, collaboration turned out to be a many-squalid thing. The political scientist Stanley Hoffmann famously described Vichy as the “revenge of minorities” — a motley collection of monarchists and traditionalists, antisemites and Catholics who had been sidelined by the 20th century. Of course, many of those who made the pilgrimage to Vichy, like Pétain’s second-in-command Pierre Laval, were mere opportunists in search of relevance and influence. Yet the line between opportunism and collaboration is easily crossed. In his pursuit of power, Laval ended in a place he did not anticipate in 1940 — a place where he trumpeted his wish for “the victory of Germany,” authorized the creation of la Milice (the paramilitary organization that hunted down resisters and Jews), and enabled the unfolding of the Final Solution in France.
This was the case of yet other opportunists, whether industrialists or intellectuals, located on the spectrum of what historian Philippe Burrin defines as “accommodation.” At one end were those who, when necessary, compromised, thus limiting themselves to accepting German offers. At the other end were industrialists who actively solicited orders, even those complicit with German war aims. The most notorious case was the car maker Louis Renault, who insisted that “Only one thing counts, me and my factory.” Not only was his math faulty — not one, but two things counted — but clearly, so too were his morals: Renault was soon seeking orders for armored personnel carriers and tanks for the Wehrmacht.
Similarly, French writers and intellectuals were scattered across this scale of accommodation. Unless they were willing to close shop or go clandestine, publishers agreed not to publish any authors who were banned in Germany and, more insidiously, any work that might “damage German prestige and interests” in France. This invitation to self-censorship often led publishers, in the phrase of the American historian Timothy Snyder, “to obey in advance” — anticipate and enact the desires of a tyrannical power.
As for writers, most did not have the mettle to join the Resistance or the self-mastery to cease writing. Many continued to publish not just in respectable venues, but others, including Colette and Paul Léautaud, in journals notorious for their antisemitic and collaborationist tilt. For the writer Jean Guéhenno, who refused to publish during the Occupation, these individuals were blinded by the belief that “French literature and thought would die without them.” Yet even admirable figures like Albert Camus, who eventually entered the Resistance, made concessions. To allow the publisher Gallimard to publish his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus agreed to remove the chapter devoted to Franz Kafka.
Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, there are the committed collaborators — the true believers who sought to make France great again. They were convinced that the undocumented, unwelcome, and unlike were unmaking France, vermin who were poisoning the purity of the people. Some of these believers took up arms in the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen SS while others took to the pages of collaborationist journals like Le Gerbe and Je suis partout to vomit their bilge. Some carried pistols, others carried pens, but all were united in a world view that deemed certain human beings unworthy of sharing the world with them.
You might well ask what the experience of the French during those four dark years might mean for the experience of Americans in the coming four years of darkness. Well, it means everything and nothing. It means the latter insofar as history, which is the course of events specific to a time and place, cannot repeat itself. For this same reason, those who forget the past, George Santayana notwithstanding, are not doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Instead, we are, for better or worse, doomed to make new mistakes.
But this is why Vichy should also mean everything for us. As we gaze upon the tech billionaires making pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and listen to their praise of (and payments to) our new management, as we speak guardedly to colleagues at work and friends in a public place, as we marvel over Republican senators who opposed Putin last year and applaud him this year, we rediscover a truth first revealed by the ancient Greeks — namely, that history is less an exercise in historical imagination than an exercise in moral imagination.
In other words, studying the past does not help us repair our present circumstances, but it does help us to reflect on the tragic nature of history. We recall how our reason often fails to rein in our passions and how social norms are mostly defenseless against individual egos. It also reminds us that immoderation, or hubris, almost always leads to a fall of the most admirable characters, as well as the most despicable. This might be a reason for hope, but better yet, it should be a reason to hold fast to moderation when that fall, as it most assuredly and tragically will, comes.
This requires the collaboration of all those who refuse to despair. And, for that matter, the refusal to forget the original meaning of a perfectly innocent word.
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