Antisemitism

Antisemitism in the novel is not confined to the past: it shapes the history of the Djourescu family, resurfaces in the present through inherited grievance and racialized accusation, and exposes the human cost of treating identity as a basis for exclusion. The story sets these forces against both the everyday practice of Muslim prayer in public and a civic ideal in which religious belief does not determine who belongs.

Historical Persecution and Public Memory

The history reaches back to the occupation. At the Caserne Auvare, a former detention site, Agnès explains to two visitors that local police rounded up Jews there in August 1942. More than five hundred people were eventually deported to a holding camp near Paris and then to Auschwitz. Her explanation gives the building’s past a concrete human consequence: detention was part of a route that ended in mass murder.

The history is also recalled through testimony about the Djourescus. Asked whether anyone knew who had informed on Adam Djourescu’s family, an elderly witness says that theories multiplied but that none seemed well founded. For a time, even her husband Albert was suspected. She adds that the destruction of the Jews was welcomed by many, a shameful fact that makes the past larger than one betrayal. The account preserves uncertainty about the informant while insisting that collaboration and antisemitic sentiment did not require universal agreement or a single, conclusively identified culprit.

Betrayal and Inherited Identity

The family secret reaches Jean Florian through a letter from his half-brother Emil. After their father’s death, Emil tells Jean that he will receive nothing from the will because he is not a true Florian. He then reveals that Jean was a Jewish baby given away at birth, and recounts the fate of Jean’s biological grandparents, Adam and Elena Djourescu. A fellow officer betrayed them, and they were sent to Auschwitz. Emil’s mother, according to the letter, knew the story but apparently did not know the informant’s full identity; Jean had only the forename Vincent.

Jean passes the revelation to his son David because he believes David should know what happened to his real grandparents. The discovery also gives Jean a painful explanation for the way the Florian family treated him after Emil arrived. He recognizes that he repeated that emotional cruelty in his treatment of his own wife and son. His account does not excuse that conduct: it links inherited humiliation to later neglect while leaving Jean responsible for what he did.

For Jean, telling David is an attempt at reconciliation, not a plan to avenge the original betrayal. His wife is already dead, and he accepts that she had reason to leave him and that she and David came to hate him. David, however, responds to the family history in a different way. The contrast makes the inherited past consequential without suggesting that it dictates a single response: Jean seeks to recover a relationship, while David turns the revelation toward retaliation.

Present-Day Exclusion and Misplaced Blame

The novel places this historical memory beside contemporary scenes of religious difference. On Fridays, the prayer room in Old Nice’s Babazouk fills quickly, leaving other worshippers to pray outside on mats, towels, or flattened packing materials donated by local shops and cafés. Marie observes that Catholics praying inside the basilica may be interrupted by sightseers, while Muslims in the street have to contend with delivery vans, footballs, onlookers, and abuse. Her attention to the public setting shows how religious practice is exposed to everyday inconvenience and hostility, without treating worshippers as an abstract group.

A separate encounter shows how administrative categories can also reduce a person to a status. Darac tells Mansoor that the police know he is living in the country illegally and has tried to do so in several other countries. Mansoor answers by invoking the annual deportation quota of twenty-five thousand and accusing the authorities of subtracting one person from it. This exchange is not itself evidence of antisemitism; it belongs to the novel’s wider concern with the consequences of sorting people into vulnerable categories, and it distinguishes that present-day exclusion from the specific history of persecution directed at Jews.

The distinction matters when Agnès considers the design of Jarret’s threat. She concludes that blaming the supposed outrage on the Muslim community would have drawn attention away from the abductions’ personal motive; the use of the “Just Cause” name helped point suspicion in that direction. The framing exploits existing suspicion of Muslims rather than identifying them as perpetrators. By making a community the intended target of false blame, Jarret’s scheme echoes the wider danger of collective accusation: prejudice can be used as cover for private wrongdoing.

Belonging Beyond Blood

The novel also articulates a civic counterpoint to religious exclusion. In a courtroom exchange, Darac invokes the separation of church and state: citizens are not required to observe, believe in, or show respect for the Catholic faith. He insists that they are French first and last. The statement does not erase the historical persecution recalled elsewhere, but it supplies a principle against which religious tests of belonging can be measured.

That principle is tested by Jean’s discovery that his identity does not match the family name and history in which he was raised. It is also sharpened by Agnès’s reflection after the abduction plot is understood: race and blood remain recurring grounds for division, and the persistence of that division is, to her, the saddest aspect of the case. Her observation joins the family secret to the wider social pattern without equating their circumstances. The story’s final emphasis is not that inherited identity can be made harmless, but that people can choose whether to perpetuate its injuries or seek a different relation to one another.