Many commentators and activists have reacted with fury to the French government’s expulsion of hundreds of Roma, or Gypsies, to Bulgaria and Romania. Many critics liken these expulsions to the deportations of Jews organized by France’s Vichy regime during World War II. It’s hard to know what is more outrageous: the policies practiced by President Nicolas Sarkozy or the analogies proffered by his critics.

Yet in the history of modern France, the wartime Vichy regime has no monopoly on xenophobic reflexes and exclusionary policies. Over the course of the 20th century, it was French republican governments that laid the administrative and legal foundations for official discrimination against Gypsies.

In 1912, the republican government passed a battery of laws ostensibly aimed at vagrancy. Yet the government revealed its hand when it created an identity card that specifically targeted Gypsies. The French law used the term “nomads,” and did not specify “Gypsies,” but the instructions to local officials lent themselves to racial identification. (This is being repeated in Arizona’s proposed anti-immigrant law.)

The identity cards allowed authorities to track the movements of Gypsies during the first World War, but they were rarely interned in camps. That changed by the mid-1930s. With the great influx into France of political and religious refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, France created a new kind of identity card that, as the historian Pierre Piazza noted, sought “to delimit more rigorously the contours [of the national community] and to better locate those who did not make up part of it.”