If the Liberation was a moment of national communion it was only, as Hoffmann observed, ‘fleetingly’ so. De Gaulle may only have heard a ‘single cry’ as he proceeded down the Champs-Élysées, but in reality the celebrations concealed very different interpretations of the past and very different visions of the future. The Resistance looked to a political and moral regeneration of France; the mass of the population wanted food and a return to peace; de Gaulle wanted order and France’s re-entry into the war before it was too late.
Restoring Order
From the moment he entered Paris on 24 August, de Gaulle’s every action had been calculated to bring the Resistance to heel and reassert the supremacy of the State. It was not by coincidence that he had immediately installed himself at the Ministry of War and then paid a visit to the Prefecture of Police: these were symbols of state power. Only reluctantly had he been prevailed upon to visit the Hôtel de Ville where the CNR was waiting to receive him. The Hôtel de Ville was the symbol of revolution in the nineteenth century: from its balcony, the Second and Third Republics had been proclaimed. De Gaulle, who was only too aware of these historical associations, refused Bidault’s request that he proclaim the restoration of the Republic. He replied that the Republic had never ceased to exist. Having made a short speech, and treated the Resistance leaders with formality, de Gaulle departed.
Paying this visit to the CNR was the only symbolic concession de Gaulle was ready to make to the Resistance. On 27 August, he wrote to the CNR thanking it for its services to the nation, and emphasizing that its role was now over. Its members were now to be integrated into the government or into the Consultative Assembly which had previously sat in Algiers and was now transplanted to France. On 28 August de Gaulle ordered the dissolution of the FFI: members of the FFI who wished to go on fighting were to be incorporated into the regular army. On the same day, de Gaulle received leaders of the FFI and the members of COMAC. On entering the room, he declared, ‘there are rather a lot of colonels here!’ As de Gaulle shook each officer’s hand in turn, he asked what they had done in civilian life, and made it clear that their duty was now to return to the factories, schools, or offices where they had worked before. On leaving the meeting, one of the participants remarked: ‘I have already witnessed human ingratitude in my life, but never on this scale.’9 The provisional secretary-generals, who were no firebrands needing to be summoned to discipline, encountered the same icy formality when de Gaulle received them on 29 August.10
Outside Paris it was the role of the commissaires de la République and newly appointed prefects to ensure that de Gaulle’s orders were carried out. Owing to the fragmentation of the country, the local situation varied enormously. In areas like Normandy, where the Resistance had been comparatively weak, and the Allies were present in force, de Gaulle’s representatives had little difficulty in imposing their authority. Often the outgoing Vichy authorities eased the process of transition. In Rambouillet, Maurice Schumann was surprised on 21 August to see a Rue Ferdinand Dreyfus. The sub-prefect told him that during the war it had been changed to Rue Jeanne d’Arc, but on the day before he had ‘thought it right to give it back its old name’.11 In Normandy, by the end of August, the commissaire was already writing his official correspondence on paper headed ‘La République française’ (his colleague in Brittany was still having to use the old Vichy notepaper and cross out the heading ‘État français’).12 In the South the situation was more volatile.
When it came to restoring State authority a lot depended on how quickly a département had been liberated. Because liberation was such a gradual process, by the time prefects were able to take possession of their offices in the main city (chef-lieu) of the département, other localities had often been liberated for several days already, and the Resistance forces had taken over: Pamiers in the Ariège was liberated by the FTP on 18 August, but the prefect was not able to install himself in the chef-lieu Foix until 25 August. In other cases, communications difficulties delayed the arrival of the prefect. In the Var the prefect was held up at Hyères until 24 August although the chef-lieu, Draguignan, was liberated on 17 August.13 Owing to the highly fragmented situation, the Liberation process did not go entirely as planned. The CFLN decree of 21 April 1944 prescribed that local councils elected before 1939 be restored. If the councils had been retained by Vichy and were judged to have ‘favoured the designs of the enemy’, the decree stipulated that the prefect would nominate a new council in consultation with the CDL. Every département had a CDL which had been secretly constituted in the months before liberation but, immediately after the Liberation, Local Liberation Committees (CLLs) also constituted themselves—in the Côtes-du-Nord 93 per cent of localities had them, in the Var 28 per cent14—and in many places they immediately moved to replace or purge the existing local councils. The extent of this grass-roots municipal revolution should not be exaggerated—even in a fairly radical département like the Côtes-du-Nord in Brittany, out of 387 councils 86 (22 per cent of the total) were unchanged and 206 (53 per cent) retained the majority of those elected in 193515—but nonetheless the CLLs, originally a proposal of the Communists, ended up playing a much more significant role than had been originally planned.
The Soviet chargé d’affaires reported back to Moscow in mid-September that ‘especially in the provinces’ there was a ‘duality of power’ between the representatives of de Gaulle’s government—commissaires and prefects—and the Resistance—CDLs and CLLs.16 This was possibly wishful thinking; it was certainly an oversimplification of the complicated and varied relationships between the prefects and the Resistance. In most cases the prefects and CDLs worked together, especially where, as in the Var, the prefect had been a respected local Resistance leader.17 Sometimes the CDL, while not challenging the prefect’s authority, did act as a sort of pressure group to represent Resistance interests. Finally, in a small minority of cases, the CDLs did figure as competitors and rivals to the prefect.18
Even where this third situation existed, it did not necessarily represent the threat to order so feared by the central authorities. For example, in the Côtesdu-Nord the prefect complained in November 1944 of the ‘constant attempt’ by the CDL to ‘install a duality of powers’. But the real problem was that the prefect was hardly known to the local Resistance whereas the head of the CDL, Henri Avril, enjoyed a good Resistance reputation. The prefect felt aggrieved because Avril had greater local legitimacy than he did. There was a situation of dual power, but this did not mean that the CDL was pushing for more radical policies or contesting the authority of the government. Sharing the prefect’s objective of restoring order, Avril was better placed to achieve it. Recognizing this, the government in June 1945 appointed Avril as prefect instead. In neighbouring Finistère the situation was very different. The prefect reported in November that his relations with the CDL ‘were marked by the most extreme cordiality’ while the CDL publicly proclaimed its task as ‘assisting the prefect in his difficult task’. Many documents were co-signed by the two of them. In another Breton département, the Morbihan, the co-operation between prefect and CDL was so seamless that the CDL risked cutting itself off from the local Resistance represented in the CLLs. When delegates from the CLLs assembled at a congress in Vanves in November 1944 there was violent criticism of the CDL.19
The most explosive situation existed in the south-west, where the Maquis was strong, Allied troops were absent, and German atrocities had been particularly violent. In Limoges, one Communist leader talked of gathering sufficient forces to march on Paris and replace the government of ‘Kerensky-de Gaulle’ by that of ‘Lenin-Thorez’.20 In the Hérault, the CDL and the prefect worked well together, but they were unable to control the situation in the town of Béziers. Here, in an atmosphere of exalted rhetoric reminiscent of 1793, the CLL, presided over by a socialist lawyer, tried to implement some of the more radical ideas of the Resistance, taxing profiteers and requisitioning goods. In mid-November, however, the CLL president was forced out
of office, having lost the support of the Communists. Béziers’s revolutionary days were now over.21
In Toulouse, instability was exacerbated by the fact that the commissaire, Pierre Bertaux, was a last-minute replacement for the original nominee, Jean Cassou, who was thought to have been killed in an accident. The region was swarming with armed resisters, many of whom contested Bertaux’s authority. This subsequently gave rise to the idea that Toulouse had been on the verge of anarchy or a Communist revolution. It was true that the local Resistance, and not just the Communist Resistance, was highly politicized. But the myth of Red Toulouse was largely created by the alarmist reports of BCRA agents who transposed their own fears of communism on to a situation which was confused but not revolutionary. The myth, however, proved useful to de Gaulle’s fledgling government in proving the necessity for firm policies to restore order. In his memoirs, de Gaulle claimed that the local Resistance had formed itself into a Soviet. The moral was that he had saved France from revolution.22
The case of Béziers, however, demonstrated that challenges to the authority of the Provisional Government did not necessarily come only from the Communists. Some of the most radical elements were to be found rather, among leftwing Socialists like the Libérer et Fédérer group in Toulouse. Nonetheless only the Communists, who represented easily the most powerful political force in France at the Liberation, could have posed a serious threat to de Gaulle. The Party’s membership stood at 205,000 in September and 384,000 by the end of the year. Newspapers run by the Communists or their satellites accounted for 21 per cent of the national press, and L’Humanité, selling 289,000 copies per day in September, was the most popular newspaper in France. The FTP had about 200,000 members and the FN 530,00. The Patriotic Militias, which had hardly got off the ground before the Liberation, swelled massively after it, acquiring 40,000 members in the Paris region alone. Finally, the Communists held about 30 per cent of the seats in the CDLs, and in some areas, like the south-east, up to 50 per cent.
What use would the Party make of its massive potential power? As before and during the Liberation, the Party continued its dual strategy of participating in, and supporting, the government while building up its strength in competing sources of power associated with the Resistance, and using these to challenge the government. From the start of September to the end of November the Communists blew hot and cold, and the possibility of a formal rupture with the government had probably not been ruled out.23 There were certainly signs that the Communists hoped to exploit the CDLs as a counterweight to the government. In the south-east, some CDLs tried, with Communist support, to co-ordinate their activities. Delegates from six CDLs gathered at Vizille on 5 September 1941; and delegates from thirty-seven of them assembled at Avignon on 8 October. They protested against any attempt to phase them out, and called for a national Estates General of CDLs in Paris. One Communist leader wired to Thorez in Moscow that the Avignon meeting opened up great possibilities. The Communists envisaged a pyramidal structure of committees which would represent, in their words, a ‘direct and active democracy’. It was interesting in this context that the Party opposed any premature holding of municipal elections since these would obviously have led to the supplanting of the organisms which had emerged out of the Resistance. Duclos declared at the end of October that the ‘Resistance represents the legal basis of the Provisional Government’. This was certainly not de Gaulle’s view.
The Communists had at first done all they could to obstruct the incorporation of the FFI into the regular army. But by the middle of September they abandoned this strategy and fell back on arguing for the creation of a new army in which the cadres who had been formed by the Resistance would prevail over the professional career officers. They drew analogies with the Revolutionary army of 1792–3, the Red Army, and the Spanish Republican army of 1936. The real moment of truth in the relationship between de Gaulle and the Communists came at the end of October when the government decreed the dissolution of the Patriotic Militias. The Communists protested vigorously and refused to implement the measure. On Armistice Day 1944 the Communists paraded their militias and other armed groups—allegedly 100,000 of them—through the streets of Paris. For the next month the Party kept up its campaign of protest, but without going as far as to withdraw its two ministers from the government.24
On the day de Gaulle announced the dissolution of the militias, he had also declared his readiness to amnesty Maurice Thorez who had been condemned as a deserter in 1939 and was still languishing in Moscow. Whether this was meant to sugar the pill or whether de Gaulle had information that Thorez would be likely to support a more moderate Party line, Thorez’s return to France at the end of November brought the Party’s dual strategy to an end. In his first speech on 30 November Thorez pointedly omitted any reference to the militias. At a meeting of the Central Committee between 21 and 23 January 1945, he was more explicit. The Party’s policy was now ‘one state, one army, one police’. There was no place for competing forces like the militias. On the CDLs Thorez could not have been clearer: ‘the local and departmental Committees of Liberation must not act as a substitute for the municipal and departmental administrations, any more than the CNR must act instead of the government’.25 Although there are signs that some local activists were disorientated and perplexed by this change of policy, it was applied rapidly and without difficulty. One commissaire reported to the government in mid-February 1945 that there had been ‘a complete reversal… in the policy of the CDL since M. Thorez’s speech at Ivry’.26
There were doubtless many reasons for the new Communist line. First, if the Party had adopted a more confrontational—even insurrectionary—line, it could not necessarily have counted upon the reliability of many new recruits who had joined the Party because of its role in the Resistance. Secondly, in any direct confrontation with the government, the Communists would have found themselves taking on the large number of Allied troops on French soil. But perhaps most important of all, a disruption of the war effort against Germany would not have served the interests of the Soviet Union. Germany was still not defeated, and Stalin was haunted by the possibility of a reversal of alliances and an Anglo-American peace with Germany. The last thing that he needed was an attempted revolution in France which might put a strain on his relations with his allies. As the venerable Communist Marcel Cachin wrote in his diary in February 1945: ‘many thought that we were heading to power as in February 1917. But in 1917 the Bolsheviks wanted peace, while peace today would be to save Hitlerism.’27
The Purges I: Myth and Reality
One issue on which the Communist kept up a constant barrage of criticism against the government was the need for a thorough purge of collaborators. They claimed that the purges—the épuration—were being carried out in a half-hearted manner. But even today the épuration is so encrusted with myths that it is difficult to know exactly how many people were punished. After the Liberation, Vichy apologists depicted the purges as a bloodbath—a new Terror— with up to 100,000 victims. Even if this exaggerated figure never gained general credence, it was widely felt in the early 1950s that terrible excesses had been committed. Robert Aron followed his indulgent history of Vichy with a non-indulgent history of the Liberation which suggested that between 30,000 and 40,000 people had been killed, a figure which seemed to have been reached by splitting the difference between the largest estimates and the smallest ones.28 In the 1950s, the Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale launched a study of the purges on a département by département basis, reaching the conclusion that about 9,000 suspected collaborators were killed in the period before and immediately after the Liberation, mostly without any form of trial. This épuration sauvage (‘wild purge’), as it is often called, preceded the setting up of the special Liberation courts in early September. From this point, the State took in hand the process of carrying out the purges.
Four different kinds of courts were set up to judge alleged collaborators. First, there was a High Cour
t to judge the cases of Vichy ministers and secretary-generals. It consisted of three presiding magistrates, and twenty-four jurors selected by the Consultative Assembly. Secondly, Courts of Justice (cours de justice) dealt with other cases of collaboration. They consisted of one magistrate and four jurors chosen by CDLs from citizens who had ‘proved their patriotic sentiments’. Thirdly, Civic Courts (chambres civiques) dealt with less serious cases of unpatriotic behaviour which were not technically crimes, but could be punished by dégradation nationale, the loss of civic rights. Finally, there were military tribunals which were particularly important in the early days before the other courts had started to operate.
The High Court pronounced eighteen death sentences, ten in absentia. Of the eight death sentences pronounced in the presence of the accused, three were carried out (Laval, Darnand, de Brinon). The Courts of Justice pronounced about 6,760 death sentences, 3,910 in absentia and 2,853 in the presence of the accused. Of these 2,853, 73 per cent were commuted by de Gaulle, and 767 carried out. In addition, about 770 executions were ordered by the military tribunals. Thus the total number of people executed before and after the Liberation was approximately 10,500, including those killed in the épuration sauvage.29
A total of 311,263 alleged cases of collaboration were sent for consideration to the courts. Given that these cases sometimes involved several people, it is possible that some 350,000 people had at some time a threat of legal action hanging over them. In 60 per cent of these cases the courts eventually decided that there were no grounds to proceed further. In total, 171,252 cases were judged and in three-quarters of them sentences were pronounced: over 40,000 people were sentenced to prison or detention of some kind, and some 50,000 to dégradation nationale. In addition, most professional organizations set up their own purge committees, as did the state administration. Many people not convicted by a court might find themselves subject to a professional sanction ranging from a reprimand to dismissal. For a long time it was generally accepted by historians that 11,343 public servants suffered some kind of sanction at the Liberation. But this figure has recently been revised upwards since it excludes the police and employees of the local administration. The true figure lies between 20,000 and 28,000.30
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