Creating a Holocaust landscape on the streets of Paris : French agency and the synagogue bombing of October 3, 1941

On October 3, 1941, the French right-wing Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) bombed six synagogues and one Jewish prayer house in Paris. The only scholarship addressing this “Nuit Bleue” focuses on the Nazi Security and Police Service, who provided the explosives but neither planned nor executed the attacks. Below, the authors restore memory of the bombing and re-establish French agency and culpability. They also explore Jewish reaction and resistance. The authors argue the the MSR created a “Holocaust landscape” in Paris, with serious implications for Jews in occupied and unoccupied France. Several threads of the narrative thus interject the story of the bombing into the larger history of the Shoah.