? ? ?
FRANCE DESPERATELY NEEDED a sense of continuity and legitimacy. The embers of civil war had never stopped burning since the Revolution in 1789. Royalists and Catholic reactionaries had fought the Republic from its inception. German occupation and the Vichy regime had given them a temporary victory. General de Gaulle was hardly a man of the left, nor did he hold much truck with the messy business of multiparty democracy. But for the sake of continuity he set himself up as the natural heir of the Republic which he despised. Even though the National Assembly had voted constituent power to him in 1940, Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government was declared illegitimate as soon as the war was over. De Gaulle’s task in 1944 and 1945 was to stitch France back together again.
The fear of civil war was real enough. The communists, who had played such a major role in the resistance, had as far back as 1941 already prepared lists of enemies to purge. They wanted to go after the industrialists as much as the petty thugs in the pro-Nazi milice. The important thing for all former resisters was to punish the elite, the leaders, and not only the “lampistes,” the subordinates hanging from the lampposts while the bosses went free.37 Aware that justice had to be seen to be done, and that France couldn’t afford purges on a scale that would put intolerable strains on an already battered society, de Gaulle wanted to get the process over with as quickly as possible, preferably within a few months. The deadline was February 1945, which was of course impossible.
By then, however, much of the rough justice had already been done. Prisoners had been lynched, more than four thousand people summarily executed, some hanged by frenzied mobs. Especially in the south of France, some regions were almost in a state of anarchy. De Gaulle disapproved of this kind of thing; only the state should have the right to punish. A number of former resisters were, in fact, arrested for showing excessive zeal in executing suspected collaborators. But could de Gaulle really blame them? Pascal Copeau, a journalist and resistance leader in the south, wrote in January 1945:
During four terrible years the best of the French learned to kill, to assassinate, to sabotage, to derail trains, sometimes to pillage and always to disobey what they were told was the law . . . Who taught these Frenchmen, who gave them the order to assassinate? Who if not you, mon général?38
For the state to regain the monopoly of force, the first thing de Gaulle had to do was disarm the resistance. Since the maquisards, the underground fighters in the French resistance, had gained their weapons at great risk during the war, while de Gaulle had lived in the safety of the British capital, this was a delicate task. Communist resisters still had hopes of a second French Revolution for which they would need their guns. But this possibility was cut short, not only because the communists lacked enough support for such a radical venture in France, but also because Stalin made it clear that he would not back a revolution in the American sphere of influence. Stalin had other fish to fry. So he told the French communists to back off. And de Gaulle made a deal with the French communists. If they wanted permission for their leader Maurice Thorez, who had deserted the French army in 1939 and fled to Moscow, to come home without being tried for his treachery, they had to agree to disband their armed fighters. Many weapons were still carefully hidden in remote farms, under floorboards, or in warehouses. But the communists gave in, and little by little the state regained control.
Some token figures, who had been particularly egregious or conspicuous during the occupation years, were put on trial. Pétain himself was tried, but was deemed to be too old and too grand to be executed after being convicted for treason, so he was banished instead to a small island off the Atlantic coast. He died there, and was buried there, a demented old man stripped of his military honors, an ignominious fate which enraged some of his loyal followers. An attempt was made by loyalists in 1973 to rectify Pétain’s humiliation by disinterring his bones and transporting them to the mainland for a more glorious burial in the cemetery for the war dead. When the Maréchal’s bones were discovered in the garage of his lawyer, Ma?tre Jacques Isorni, they were swiftly shipped back to the island where, as far as is known, they remain.
Pétain’s most powerful minister during the war, the unprepossessing and much loathed Pierre Laval, was less lucky, and his death sentence was carried out. He was shot in October 1945 after his attempt to take cyanide failed because the poison was too old to be effective.
There were other war crime trials too. But before they could be seen to be at all persuasive, the judiciary had to be purged. Since only one judge in wartime France had refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain, this was a problem. A purge commission of judges and former resisters had to decide whether magistrates had behaved as loyal Frenchmen. According to this very loose definition, 266 were judged to have been deficient. The same criteria were applied to civil servants. Sanctions ranged from temporary suspension on half pay to losing one’s job, as well as one’s civic rights, entirely. Out of roughly a million civil servants, 11,343 received some kind of sanction and 5,000 lost their positions. As was true in other countries, the business and industrial elite was left largely unscathed. Notorious sympathizers with the Nazis, such as the founder of L’Oréal, the perfume manufacturer, were not touched at all.
Louis Renault, founder of the Renault motor car factory, was not a known Nazi. In his own account, he was given an awful choice by the Germans: either let his concern be taken over by Daimler Benz and see his workers shipped to Germany, or make vehicles for the German armed forces. He chose the latter. In communist resistance circles Renault was seen as the worst kind of industrial traitor, a class enemy of the first order. The communist newspaper L’Humanité wrote in August 1944: “The directors of the Renault factories must be made to pay for the lives of Allied soldiers killed as a result of their enthusiasm to equip the enemy.”39 Since so few other industrialists were purged, it is possible that Renault was a scapegoat, a bone thrown by the Gaullists to the left. Renault died of head wounds in prison before he could defend himself in a trial.
In many cases of purged magistrates and civil servants, they quickly returned to their former positions, or to respectable careers in the private sector. The case of Maurice Papon, the last Frenchman to be tried for war crimes, was typical in every way except for its final denouement. Responsible as a senior police official in Bordeaux for sending more than a thousand Jews to the camps, he was never tried in 1945. On the contrary, he went on to become an important bureaucrat in various governments: secretary of state under de Gaulle, prefect of Corsica, prefect in Algeria where he helped to crush the anticolonial rebellion, and Paris police chief, again under de Gaulle, who presented him with the Legion of Honour for services to the French state, and finally budget minister under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. What was unusual about Papon’s illustrious career is that he lived long enough for his unsavory past to catch up with him. His trial began in 1995. He was jailed in 1999, released in 2002, and fined the equivalent of about three thousand dollars for illegally wearing his Legion of Honour decoration, of which he had been stripped.
De Gaulle mended France in the same way Japan was “mended,” or Italy, or Belgium, or even Germany: by keeping damage to the prewar elites to a minimum. He could not afford to polarize his nation further. The expertise of businessmen, financiers, lawyers, professors, doctors, and bureaucrats was needed. They had the right contacts.
Men and women of the resistance had played their roles as brave mavericks risking their lives while others kept their heads down. They had done this for all manner of reasons: religious faith, political ideology, boredom, rage, a thirst for adventure, or just a sense of decency. But in the choices they made they were less representative of most people than were the opportunists and sycophants.
Punishment for wrongdoing, in France no more or less than anywhere else, was frequently symbolic anyway, and the distribution was hardly fair. While the establishment remained relatively untouched, a former prostitute and possible spy named Marthe Richard lobbied in December 1945 to close the brothels in Paris. A year later the Loi Marthe Richard closed all the brothels in France. The reason given for this most un-French zeal was that brothels during the German occupation had been the principal centers of “collaboration.”