Why the Cremieux Decree was abrogated

[Four months and seven days after American troops landed in North Africa, General Henri Giraud, French High Commissioner, declared null and void all Vichy legislation affecting the country. The step followed months of strong public protest in Britain and America, and appeared to be taken with some reluctance after much explanation for the delay. General Giraud's declaration was made in an international broadcast on Sunday, March 14, but it was not until the next day that the British and American public learned with considerable indignation that they had been misled. Easily overlooked among Giraud's pledges of adherence "to the democratic principles of republican France was a brief sentence repealing a time-honored law of the French Republic. "With the same desire to eliminate all racial discrimination," General Giraud had said, "the Cremieux decree of 1870 instituting distinctions between Mohammedan and Jewish inhabitants is abrogated." Stripped of its diplomatic verbiage this sentence meant, as the American press was quick to explain, that Algerian Jews were being deprived of their citizenship in order to appease the allegedly disgruntled Algerian Mohammedans. It completely ignored the fact that French citizenship has been available to Muslims for over seventy years. With one stroke it relegated the entire Algerian Jewish population to the status quo 1865! The real reasons for this measure in the midst of a war for the freedom of all peoples lie not in General Giraud's explanation but rather in the traditional powerseeking of French colonial and military groups.—THE EDITORS.]