Yesterday's declaration by France's top judicial authority that the state bore responsibility for the deportation of Jews during the second world war should have been a welcome recognition of what historians have argued since the 1970s: the Vichy state persecuted Jews independently of the Nazis.
This fact, linked as it is to the deportation of 75,721 Jews from France, fewer than 3,000 of whom returned, has haunted the French for decades. The healing of this national wound is far from over; it is an ongoing process that demands sensitivity, respect and, above all, recognition of what happened. So why has the council of state released a statement full of historical revisionism, minimising its language and making a pitiful attempt to claim that compensation has been delivered?
After recognising the Vichy state's responsibility for the deportations, the council gets straight to its revisionist point.
These persecutions [of Jews], in total rupture with the values and principles, notably that of human dignity, as consecrated by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and by republican values, provoked exceptional damages and an extreme gravity.
That the antisemitic persecutions provoked serious damages and gravity is not in question; that they were a total rupture with French republican values is.
In fact, many historians will disagree with the council's point, which appears to confirm the old Gaullist myth that the Vichy regime was a "parenthesis of history" rather than a continuation of the "traditional republican values" that existed prior to the fall of France in May 1940.
By stating that the Vichy state bore responsibility for the deportations from France, and that those deportations occurred in total rupture from France's republican values, the council implies that some other, non-republican value system shaped Vichy's discriminatory policies, with all their terrible consequences.
Yet in his book, The Republican Origins of Vichy, the French historian Gérard Noiriel demonstrates powerfully the continuities between Third Republic France and Vichy France with regard to discrimination and internment.
His American colleague, Robert Paxton, whose Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order detonated the locked doors of Vichy's history four decades ago, has argued along similar lines: yes, there were extenuating circumstances of military defeat and occupation, but the Vichy regime and its discriminatory policies took inspiration from France itself.
This continuity partly explains why so many French officials continued to serve the Vichy regime without protest, even after it began dismissing their Jewish colleagues.
In addition to revising the historical record, the council of state commits a serious linguistic setback by judging that:
[The] actions and acts of the state, having led to the deportation of persons considered Jews by the Vichy regime, constituted errors (fautes) and engaged its responsibility.
In French, the word faute means "error", "fault", and "wrong"; it does not mean "crime". Yet under French law, how the Vichy state treated Jews is considered a very specific crime: a crime against humanity, a crime so serious that it has no statute of limitations.
This is why Maurice Papon, the only member of the Vichy administration to be convicted of crimes against humanity in 1998, was brought to trial more than 50 years after he helped arrest, intern and deport 1,560 Jews.
By calling the acts that led to such deportations "errors" rather than "crimes", the council is telling France's Jewish victims that they have been compensated enough.
The most worrying aspect of the council's decision is its view that the different measures taken since 1945 to compensate the victims of Vichy's antisemitism "have repaired, as much as was possible, the discriminations that led to deportations".
This is difficult to understand, given that France has succeeded in prosecuting and convicting just one man for crimes against humanity relating to the deportation of Jews from France.
In his journal of Papon's trial, Éric Conan, the French journalist and co-author of Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, observed that the lawyers for the civil parties had only filed complaints on behalf of 72 of the possible 1,560 victims Papon had helped deport from Bordeaux, because they were unable to locate the relatives of the other victims.
The public prosecution – in other words, the French state – chose not to exercise its option to open a judicial enquiry regarding the 1,488 other victims who did not have any descendants to represent them.
In the end, Papon was found guilty of the illegal arrest of 37 people and the arbitrary detainment of 53 others – compensation, in the form of official recognition, for the suffering of 90 people, or 0.12% of the 75,721 Jews deported from France.
The compensation that those 90 victims and their families received was somewhat mitigated in 2002, when Papon was released from prison on health grounds just three years into a 10-year sentence.
Is this what the council had in mind when it wrote that France's compensation measures have repaired, as much as possible, the discriminations that led to the deportations?
There are currently 400 cases before the courts in France, in which the plaintiffs are seeking compensation for the wartime antisemitic discriminations, including the particular case which led to the council of state's decision, that of a woman whose father was deported to Auschwitz and who suffered herself during and after the occupation. She is seeking reparation from the French state.
The courts have a duty to hear her case without the prejudice of the council's decision, which considers the acts leading to her father's deportation to be an "error" and not a crime, something inspired by values other than those of republican France, and a discrimination which has already been repaired.
She deserves justice.