French Vichy travel document

 

État français puppet-state SERVICE passport.

 

When it comes to rarities and exquisite travel documents, I think the specimen here surely falls into the above-mentioned category. It is surely a once-in-a-life-time opportunity to see and examine close-up images of document that has eluded me for many years, and though I suspected and deep in my gut I had a feeling that it SHOULD exist, I had never seen one before, not until this week, when the images were sent to me.

 

Every state and government issues regular passports and also official examples, for its officials and diplomats when travelling abroad. This is done in order to make sure that they travel without any hindrance and to offer the user of such documents all the protection they may need in order to fulfill their mission and objective for going abroad in the first place.

 

As explained in previous articles, there are about 4 main travel documents that fall under the following categories bellow:

 

1. Regular passports – issued to citizens for traveling abroad, be it for business or pleasure;
2. Service/official passports – issued not to diplomats and mainly for a specific objective and can be limited to a duration of time;
3. Diplomatic passports – issued to members of government, army officials or diplomats being sent to their respective missions abroad, such as consulates or embassies;
4. Stateless travel documents – issued to those who cannot obtain a passport from their country of origin or do not possess the nationality of the country they are currently residing in, for what ever the reason may be.

 

The document in this article falls under category No. 2 above, and issued to the family of an official who was sent abroad earlier, in order to reunite them all together.

 

The document was issued by the government of Vichy France at their “capital”, the city it is named after. It is commonly known as the French State (État français) and was headed by French general officer (marshal) Philippe Pétain, who gained this title at the end of World War I and was well known and famous throughout the country before World War II erupted in 1939.

 

As mentioned above, this is most likely one of the rarest of WW2 related travel documents one can locate, and thus deserves to be addressed here.

 

French service passport No. 156 was issued to the family of renowned professor René Poirier (who was born in Saigon and was elected to the Sorbonne in 1937; he was sent back to Brazil, after a brief return home in 1940, to take up a  position after he contributed to the founding of its National University earlier, remaining there until the war ended in 1945) to his wife Jeanne-Marie and her two young children aged 8 and 12 at the time. Passeport De Service was issued on February 27^th 1941 at Vichy by head of Bureau 6 from the Ministry of Interior (Ministère de l’intérieur – DIRECTION de la Police du Territoire et des Entrangers 6e BUREAU) which was also in charge of passports & ID’s being issued to foreigners and Jews as well in occupied France during the war (from 1940 to 1942) – the head of the Police du Territoire et des Etrangers at the time the document was issued was Yves Fourcade, who was appointed as director of police administration and was also active in the deportation of foreign Jews out of France and to their death during the period of August-October of 1942. I suspect the signature is of this individual, I am trying as well to verify this.

 

The document has interesting visas being issued in occupied France, such as Brazilian, Portuguese and Spanish official and diplomatic visas. The last two were important in order to allow safe exit out of Vichy France into Spain and from there into Portugal (page 9 we can see the border stamp for “Valencia de Alcántara Viajeros”, a crossing point into neighboring Portugal) in order to board a boat for South America.

Regarding the visas inside the passport, sometimes I am able to locate biographical material on some of the diplomats and sometimes on others I am not that lucky. Here are details on the Spanish diplomat who issued the visa in Vichy, on February 28^th of 1941:

 

Juan Felipe de Ranero y Rodríguez de la Viña (1898-1980):

 

• Locations of his diplomatic postings throughout his career: Tánger, League of Nations, Caracas, Copenhagen, International Conference of Air Legislation, Rome, Hague, Paris, Vichy, Rome, Beirut, Athens and Tokyo.
• In 1936 at the start of the Spanish Civil War his official duties came to a temporary halt and after extensive formal investigations he was able to resume his work where he was then transferred to France, before its fall in 1940.

 

As for the Portuguese visa, it was issued by Manuel Nunes da Silva, diplomat, Secretary of the legation in Vichy.

 

It is interesting to note that Marie and her children sailed on the famed SS Serpio Pinto, the same boat that took many Jewish refugees to safety during the war and also the Lubavitcher Rebbe, an American Russian Empire born Orthodox Jew and viewed by some as one of the most important and renowned Jewish leader of the last century.

 

Her passport is validated and extended again in Rio de Janeiro during the war and again, before her departure and return to France, in May of 1945. She obtained the proper Portuguese and Spanish entry visas from their respective consular offices in Brazil prior to sailing back home with her family.

 

 

 

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