And all the while the trials continued. In the months following the Liberation until 1 July 1949, as part of the épuration légale (as opposed to the épuration sauvage), the High Court handed down 108 judgements, eighteen of which involved the death sentence. Taking into account other official courts in France, 6,763 people were sentenced to death (3,910 in absentia) for treason and other offences. Only 791 executions were actually carried out as, in addition to those who had escaped, several of those sentenced had died in the interim. The majority of defendants were sentenced to dégradation nationale, a punishment introduced at the Liberation which involved loss of political, civil and professional rights and that was handed out to those found guilty of indignité nationale. The most high-profile of all was the one-day trial at the beginning of the year of Robert Brasillach, novelist, poet, playwright and editor-in-chief of the fascist paper Je suis partout. Brasillach, erstwhile admirer of Irène Némirovsky, had launched wounding attacks on republicans, communists, Jews and foreigners. For a time he was France’s most envied and reviled writer. But on 19 January 1945, on trial for his life, he was unrepentant, convinced by the scenes of brutality at the Liberation that these ‘horrible things show what the Occupation might have been like for four years if there hadn’t been calm, collaborationists, a Vichy government’.
Unlike fellow collaborationist journalists and politicians, Brasillach did not make any attempt to flee but decided he would tough it out, insisting that he was a patriot, loyal to the constitutional Vichy government. He was helped by Marguerite Cravoisier, a woman from his home town of Sens in Burgundy, who had been in love – unrequited – with Brasillach for years and, understanding the dangers he faced, had already prepared a hideout for him in the maid’s quarters of a building in Paris near the Sénat. Cocooned here for a month, he did not know that an armed-resistance group of the FFI had arrested his mother and thrown her into jail, where she was detained with political prisoners and those accused of collaboration horizontale. When he learned this, he immediately handed himself in to the police. His trial, in a special court of justice for treason (for the offence known as ‘intelligence with the enemy’) revealed something of the hypocrisy raging amid the current vengeful frenzy in Paris. The judge, who had served Vichy, may have thought he could exonerate himself by condemning Brasillach. After twenty-five minutes’ deliberation, the jury, all veterans of the resistance Brasillach had so vehemently denounced, called for the death sentence.
One of the new breed of young journalists who wrote about the trial was Arlette Grebel, a twenty-year-old graduate of the Paris journalism college who made her name reporting on the scenes of Liberation for France Libre. Grebel was lucky to graduate first in her class at a time of enormous opportunity; the collaborationist press was being closed down and the events on the street were of unrivalled excitement. She was so inexperienced that when she was sent to cover the trial of Charles Maurras, the extreme right-wing philosopher behind Action Fran?aise, she did not even know who he was. The Liberation provided a window of opportunity for young women such as Grebel. As Simone de Beauvoir, who was present at the Brasillach trial and who wrote about it in an extended essay the following year, commented: ‘to be 20 or 25 in September of ‘44 seemed the most fantastic piece of luck: all roads lay open. Journalists, writers, budding film makers were all arguing, planning passionately, deciding as if the future depended on no one but themselves.’ Grebel, with her little white bobby socks and short skirts, perfectly encapsulated the widespread idea that France had a chance to start afresh with younger people and create a future untainted by wartime rivalries.