His rise to the highest political office in the land was at once extraordinary and entirely to be expected. A descendant of Marrano Jews who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition of 1684, Pierre Mendès France was born in Paris in 1907. From an early age, he assumed the wholly secular sense of identity long held by middle-class Jewish families of the Third and Fourth republics, who trusted that an assimilationist but condoning France would satisfy their sense of belonging. Ambitious and brilliant, he had served as the precocious undersecretary of finance in Léon Blum’s second ministry in 1938 and
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