One clarification is needed before getting into the meat of this question. The racial laws of the Third Reich, and to a lesser extent those of Vichy France did not really concern themselves much with Judaism as a religious practice. Whether one believed or not in the Hebrew faith, attended synagogue, or was an otherwise observant Jews was irrelevant in the eyes of the Nazi authorities. Judaism was a racial category under the Nuremberg Laws and defined via ancestry, not belief. An individual in question could be an atheist from two generations of non-practicing Jews and still be classified as a Jews under the Nazis' racial laws. The Vichy racial laws aped the Nuremberg Laws in a number of ways, albeit with a tad more leeway given to ancestral converts.

As for the wider question of what would happen to a gentile, apolitical Frenchman during the occupation, well there would not have been that much of a direct impact of the occupation. Although the popular myth is of a stalwart resistance fighting to liberate France from a jackbooted tyranny is still quite popular in film and literature, the reality is both aspects of the occupation- resistance and terror- were greatly inflated in the postwar period. While sporadic instances of resistance did occur prior to 1942, it was far more the exception to daily routine rather than the rule. As with the rest of occupied Europe, only the Communists managed to form a cohesive and sustained insurgency against the Germans. But Communist and Communist-affiliated groups took a while to pick up steam, and it was only after the invasion of Barbarossa when various Communist cells started to organize did resistance noticeably pick up, and even then it tended to be in isolated areas like the mountainous areas of southern France. German occupation policy could be quite brutal with hostages shot and reprisals, but this obscures the fact that most German soldiers considered France a soft billet until the Allied invasion in 1944. German occupation troops often toured the country buying up French goods with their Francs. German occupation policy paid its garrison troops in the currency of the country they occupied, often at highly favorable exchange rates to the Reichsmark. France was no exception and the exchange rate of 20 Francs to 1 RM meant German troops could go on a spending spree (by way of contrast, the 1938 exchange rate would have been around 10/12:1).

It was the side-effects of these occupation policies that impacted the larger French population the most. German requisitions of industrial machinery, raw materials, and foodstuffs, whether paid in an unfair exchange rate or simply taken, destroyed the French domestic economy over the course of the war. The shortages of 1941 became endemic by 1942 and the black market became an unavoidable means to acquire the basic necessities of life. French food became noticeably poorer both in terms of taste and caloric value as the occupation dragged on. German requisitions did not just impact food. The German need for fuel meant gasoline disappeared for French consumers and coal became a rare quantity. When the Germans returned the body of Napoleon's son to foster a spirit of Franco-German reconciliation , a Parisian joke captured this aspect of the occupation: they have taken the coal, but have returned the ashes. Heating homes became quite difficult and brownouts became more common as it became harder to return to normalcy. One of the more common features in reminisces of the occupation was of families huddling together in one room during winter months as limited fuel made body heat a necessary way to get through the cold.

One way in coercive power did make itself known was through its requisition of forced labor back into the Reich. The Vichy regime created the Service du travail obligatoire (STO) in 1942 under intense pressure from the Germans to harness French productive labor in the service of Germany. The STO conscripted some 600000 French men to serve in German factories between 1942 and 1944. The working conditions for STO laborers was often quite harsh and their pay was quite low, but they did not suffer the same restrictions as forced laborers from Eastern Europe whose working conditions were much more restricted and in the case of Jews, functionally slaves. STO workers could enjoy the benefits of airraid shelters, restricted access to the German civilian world, and German authorities did not treat French fraternization with Germans as a capital offense. Vichy persistently under-delivered its quotas of STO levies, partially because of footdragging, but also because of the unpopularity of the STO. Those wishing to evade the STO corvees also found an unlikely ally in Albert Speer who logically argued that such workers would be better off working for Germany within their own countries of origin.

The occupation regime became much more violent and indiscriminate as the war dragged on. The growing strength of the Maquis in southern France as well as upticks in armed resistance did lead to hostage-taking and reprisals by the Germans. However, France remained largely free of the type of fire and sword occupation methods that characterized German rule in Eastern Europe and the Balkans where not only was armed resistance activity more apparent, but also wholesale massacres. Such Eastern methods only began to be in evidence in France with the Allied invasion. The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in which 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment executed an entire French village in June 1944 was the most famous of these mass reprisals, and tellingly, a number of the Waffen-SS troops involved were veterans of the Eastern Front. But as terrible as these massacres were, they tended to be the exception rather than the rule for the whole of the German occupation.

But postwar mythologies about resistance and occupation presented both Oradour and the Maquis as typical examples of the occupation experience. Anti-German resistance became one of the cornerstones of legitimation in both the Fourth and Fifth Republics. This process often erased niggling details that diluted this Manichean picture of oppression and resistance; Gaullists for example seldom acknowledged the Communist presence in the resistance while the postwar French left tended to ignore the period of relative inaction by Communist cells during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Moreover the PCF also tried to project an ideological homogeneity onto the Communists in the resistance both during and after the war when the reality was the Communist groups often enfolded a variety of left-wing causes ranging from Trotskyites to anarchist veterans of the Spanish Civil War in addition to more mainstream Communists. Collaboration became a punishable offense in the immediate postwar years, but what qualified as resistance also became incredibly plastic in the postwar period as well. Many Frenchmen qualified their actions during Vichy as a form of passive resistance that worked for the wider cause of liberation. Some of this took absurd levels with some Vichy authorities claiming that cooperation with the Germans was a form of resistance otherwise the Germans would take matters in their own hands and harm more Frenchmen than if these matters were implemented by their own countrymen. Postwar punishments and trials for collaborators typically punished those whose choices in the occupation were limited, most notably women who were "horizontal collaborators," but for whom a sexual relationship with a German allowed them to feed their families, while many of the right-wing intellectuals and other fellow travelers of fascism sailed through the courts. Powerful men in Vichy like Charles Maurras had social capital that they traded in on so their trials were often protracted and the verdicts much less harsh than they probably deserved.

Overall, while the German occupation was nowhere near as violent as popular memory holds it, it was not a pleasant experience for the French people. The domestic economy devolved into a quasi-barter system and all indices for quality of life plummeted under German hegemony. Moreover, even if France was a soft billet for German troops, the occupation was always in danger of turning more violent. But the ins and outs of the German occupation were manageable for most Frenchmen in this period. Living with defeat and occupation involved compromises and adjustments, and a good many Frenchmen did just that. German occupation was certainly not loved, but it was livable in France.

Sources

Fritzsche, Peter. An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.

Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944. New York: Knopf, 1972.