France Confronts Its Vichy Past Through a Box Office Film About Bureaucratic Complicity

A seemingly ordinary state administrator becomes an unwitting participant in an authoritarian machinery, responsible for the bureaucratic logistics of mass deportation — and French cinemas are taking notice.

Notre Salut (Our Salvation) defies conventional wartime drama with its modern cinematography, improvised performances, and anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack.

Yet this award-winning portrayal of ordinary citizens complicit in the Vichy puppet regime — which facilitated the deportation of a quarter of France’s Jewish population — is poised to become a box office sensation.

Released in English as A Man of His Time, the film posted a strong opening weekend in France, particularly among younger viewers, as the nation engages in introspection ahead of next spring’s presidential election.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) continues to lead presidential polling despite controversy stemming from a Mediapart investigation alleging that party leader Jordan Bardella made antisemitic remarks in his youth — allegations he denies.

Notre Salut arrives amid a surge of French WWII cinema, including a two-part Charles de Gaulle biopic that has sold over 5 million tickets, the controversial Les Rayons et les Ombres about Nazi-collaborating press baron Jean Luchaire, and the upcoming Moulin, focusing on resistance leader Jean Moulin’s final days.

Rather than focusing on renowned heroes or villains, the film examines how ordinary individuals under Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime participated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps.

Writer-director Emmanuel Marre drew inspiration from a cache of family letters discovered in a drawer, offering rare insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri Marre, a Vichy regime administrator.

“History is shaped not only by great figures but by the grassroots actors on the ground,” said historian Marc Olivier Baruch, a specialist in Vichy state administrators. “That is what makes this film compelling.”

For Baruch, the most unsettling sequence depicts bureaucratic fussiness over the cost of providing straw and chamber pots for Jewish deportees on cattle trucks. The central character, administrator Henri Marre, “never pauses to reflect on his actions or consider his margin for manoeuvre.”

Baruch attributed the film’s resonance to contemporary unease, noting that France is “in a time of great uncertainty … There is a profound lack of confidence among French people in their elites and their state, a sentiment that has persisted for years.”

The Vichy regime holds contemporary relevance, Baruch argued. “The Pétain dictatorship represents the only period since 1820 when the far right held power. Those four years at the heart of the 20th century matter for French people in 2026 and 2027 … There exists a discomfort in modern France with continually confronting Vichy, a desire to draw a line and end the perceived masochism of remembrance. That, of course, is both stupid and impossible.”

Critics suggest modern audiences are seeking context for the rise of the far right across Europe and within France.

Historian Henry Rousso, who has studied the Vichy regime’s place in collective memory, wrote in Le Monde: “The RN is neither the fascism of the 1930s nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but understanding this history illuminates what the RN inherits and how the gradual abandonment of democratic and republican values led to catastrophe.”

Emmanuel Marre, the writer-director who won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, began developing the project over a decade ago after uncovering family letters his relatives had kept in a drawer.

In an interview with France Inter, Marre stated: “There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France … a phantom memory of collaboration. We wanted to open those drawers and let all families look inside — not as self-flagellation, but because after the war France pushed much of this beneath the carpet to survive.”

He emphasized the importance of examining the nuanced spectrum between resistance and collaboration. “Between the two extremes lies a vast range of human emotions, including the most ambiguous.”

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