B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  It is clear therefore that although the wilder accusations of the extreme right were unfounded, the purges were far from a cosmetic exercise. But the intense and continuing debate about the épuration is not only about figures. There are many different criteria for judging the effectiveness or success of the purges. In recent years, as attention has focused on the fate of the Jews during the Occupation, and on the fact that those responsible for implementing the Final Solution in France were not punished for this after the war, it has become widely believed that the purges did not go far enough. It is true that the issue of anti-Semitism did not figure as prominently after the war as in recent years—although it was not entirely ignored—but retrospective criticisms of this kind are anachronistic. The interesting question is how contemporaries viewed the purges and what they expected from them. The recent experiences of countries like Argentina, Chile, East Germany, and South Africa show how difficult it is to carry out a transition from one regime to another after a period of intense political polarization. Each of these countries has dealt with the problem differently, and in no case has the process been judged entirely satisfactory. The épuration is interesting because it allows us to observe the French people, whether from below in the épuration sauvage, or from above in the courts, constructing their first representations of the Occupation.

  The single term épuration sauvage to describe what occurred before the courts started functioning is unsatisfactory because there were various distinct phases in the killings which took place in this period. First, about 2,400 killings occurred before June 1944. There may well have been some wild acts of criminality or serious excesses, but they belong to the period of resistance during the Occupation not to the Liberation. Secondly, about 5,000 people were killed during the fighting which occurred between D-Day and the Liberation. These were acts of war rather than examples of ‘people’s justice’. Thirdly, there was the purge itself when about 1,600 people were killed immediately after the Liberation for their alleged behaviour during the Occupation.

  This explosion of post-Liberation violence must, however, be placed in the context of the dramatic intensification of German repression in the summer of 1944. On a smaller scale there were Oradours all over France. In Brittany, for example, atrocities were committed by the SS, the Wehrmacht, and by Ukrainian and Georgian troops working for the Germans. On 13 June, thirty-one hostages were executed in Boudan wood near Saint-Brieuc; on 25 July, twenty people were tortured and then executed in Colpo wood in the Morbihan; on 4 August eleven people were shot in Saint-Pol-de-Léon; on 8 August, fourteen people, including a 78-year-old man and a child of 5, were shot in Plounévez-Lochrist. Often the Milice, PPF, or extremist Breton nationalists in the Perrot group were also involved in these atrocities.31 After D-day, the violence of the Milice had become ever more unrestrained. This was the chance for a final settling of scores. On 20 June, Jean Zay, who had been Popular Front Education Minister, was taken from his prison by three miliciens on the pretext that he was being transferred to another prison. On the journey he was shot dead. Exactly the same happened to Georges Mandel on 7 July. Mandel’s killing was a reprisal for the assassination of Henriot which had sparked off revenge killings all over France. On 29 June, Paul Touvier, the local Milice leader in the Savoy, rounded up and shot seven Jews.

  The events occurring in the little town of Saint-Amand near Bourges, in the centre of France, were not untypical. The Maquis had entered the town immediately after D-day in the absence of the Germans. This liberation was short-lived because the Germans were known not to be far away. The Maquis therefore withdrew, having taken a number of hostages. The Germans and Milice arrived two days later, and seized anyone suspected of links to the Resistance. Some were shot on the spot; others were taken to Vichy and tortured. After several weeks of negotiations, the Maquis leader agreed to give up a number of his hostages, but thirteen remaining ones were considered too guilty to be released. On the other hand, their presence was impeding the mobility of the Maquis and increasing the risk that the Germans would discover its location. The Maquis leader therefore decided to kill the hostages on 20 July, hanging them in case the sound of gunfire was heard by the Germans. On hearing the news, the Milice leader Joseph Lécussan, who had a particularly gruesome reputation—in his wallet he carried a Star of David made from the skin of a Jew— rounded up seventy-six Jews in Saint-Amand, twenty-eight men, thirty-eight women, and ten children. The men were taken to an abandoned farm, pushed into a well, and buried alive under bags of cement and boulders. After the shooting of a milicien in Bourges on 7 August, nine of the women were also killed and thrown into a well.32

  This was the kind of atmosphere in which the immediate post-Liberation purges took place. And it must also be remembered that because the Liberation was not simultaneous throughout the country, one community might not be far away from another which was still occupied. The fear of a ‘fifth column’ was always present. The ‘wild’ purge shootings sometimes took the form of summary executions without any trial, but in most places, immediately after a community was liberated, the FFI quickly set up their own ‘courts’ which dispensed a rudimentary form of rough justice. The fact that these tribunals genuinely saw themselves as meting out justice is suggested by the fact that the executions were sometimes carried out in public in the presence of a large crowd.33 The severity of these courts varied considerably. In Montpellier some seventy-two executions were ordered before the official courts began to operate.34

  One tribunal which acquired a particularly ferocious reputation was that of Pamiers in the Ariège which sat from 19 August to 31 August 1944. It seems that about fifty people were executed, a large number for such a small community. Before their execution the guilty had to cross the town under a hail of insults from the population; some had to dig their own graves. The last four executions occurred on the morning of 31 August, fifteen minutes before the time fixed by the prefect for the transfer of prisoners to the authorities in the departmental capital of Foix. Undoubtedly Pamiers witnessed some scenes of public cruelty and violence which could hardly be characterized as justice, but as in many cases where such excesses occurred, this was a region where the Milice had been particularly ferocious in the months before the Liberation.35 Violence engendered violence. The explosion of popular justice was almost certainly inevitable after four years of occupation and latent civil war. Judgements about whether it was excessive are meaningless: against what measure is it to be judged?

  The Purges II: Cleansing the Community

  Another feature of the épuration sauvage was the shaving of women’s heads.36 Almost all these shavings occurred in August and September although there was a second wave in May and June 1945 after the shock caused by the return of deportees from the German camps. Shavings were carried out all over the country, in cities as well as villages. Frequently they were made into a public spectacle: the women were paraded down the street, sometimes naked; then they were shaved in front of an audience on a hastily erected platform or a balcony; swastikas were daubed on their faces or their shaven skulls. There is no way of knowing how many shavings occurred, but a figure of between 10,000 and 30,000 seems plausible. Sometimes they were the result of personal vendettas masquerading as people’s justice. Sometimes angry crowds searched for scapegoats in a random and sadistic manner. One witness in Toulouse remembered:

  I knew a woman in this area who made funeral wreaths. She worked near to the window for the light. Not far from her house there was a German post which patrolled the crossroads. One of these men went to speak to her in the evening; he stayed outside talking to her; he never went indoors. At the Liberation there was a furious crowd which went to this poor woman’s house. They made her come out, they hit her, they knocked her down, they undressed her and they shaved her head. Then they dragged her round the roads around the area with her daughter behind her who must have been about fourteen. Then, when they had had enough, she went home and did not dare come out for weeks.37

&
nbsp; In many cases, however, the shavings were far from spontaneous: they were ordered, planned, and executed by local Resistance leaders. When the CLL at Trégastel in Britanny constituted itself on 10 August 1944 its first act was to order the shaving of ten women on the following Saturday at 4 p.m. This committee was not composed of young FFI hotheads. Its members, two of whom were women, included shopkeepers, two primary school teachers, and a retired sailor.38 The element of premeditation in the shavings has been underplayed in many retrospective accounts because the initial enthusiasm was quickly replaced by a sense of shame. The Liberation Committee of the French Cinema which produced a film on the Liberation of Paris at the end of August 1944 omitted any scenes of shavings despite having footage of them.39 One witness from the Var claims that ‘true resisters’ were not happy about the shavings.40 But although some contemporary diaries, especially literary ones, do convey disapproval, it is far from certain that this disapproval was widespread. Father Bruckberger, chaplain of the FFI, wrote: ‘these girls could be dipped in tar and it would affect me no more than a fire in the fireplace of a neighbour’s house’.41

  How can the shavings be explained? Some historians have argued that they helped to channel the violence of the Liberation. In this view, the shavings indirectly saved many other men—and women—from execution. But apart from the fact that shaved women were sometimes executed subsequently, the shavings occurred exactly at the time that summary executions were taking place: they were part of the épuration sauvage not a substitute for it. Anthropological interpretations of the shavings draw parallels with the early modern customs like carnival and charivari which still persisted in certain parts of the Midi.42 The carnival-like atmosphere was noted by contemporaries. It was a means by which the community symbolically reappropriated the public space after four years of occupation.

  But why were women singled out as expiatory victims?43 The practice of shaving women for sexual infidelity has a long history. Head shavings had occurred at the end of the Great War in the part of France occupied by the Germans. German women who slept with French soldiers during the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 suffered the same fate. In 1944, women were usually singled out for two offences: delation and relations with Germans. The two were often linked in people’s minds, and even when it could not be shown that a woman had denounced anybody, it was argued that her relationship with the Germans made this likely.44 But the shavings also have to be placed in the wider context of what people expected from the épuration, and how they constructed their images of collaboration.

  The historian Luc Capdevila has suggested that the world-view of the French population at the Liberation was a syncretic one, drawing unconsciously both on the rhetoric of the National Revolution and the Resistance. The years of occupation were seen as the accentuation of a long national decline dating back to the 1930s. Before ‘resurrection’ and ‘renewal’ could occur, France had to ‘cleanse’ herself, cutting out those ‘gangrenous’ elements which had caused her ‘decadence’ (very much the language used by Vichy about Jews and Communists). Those elements which needed to be extirpated included those people who had directly aided and co-operated with the Germans, but also those who had profited corruptly from the misfortunes of the country, especially black marketeers. The Occupation had, as one writer put it, engendered a ‘crisis of public morality’ and a ‘taste for lucre and laziness’ (very much the language used by Vichy about the Popular Front).45

  Obviously it was not the case that most people felt themselves to have been corrupted during the Occupation in this way—in that case France’s resurrection would be impossible—nor, however, could they convincingly represent themselves as having been active resisters. Instead the majority of the population depicted themselves as bons Français, genuine patriots who had kept aloof from the Germans and never doubted France’s victory. They may not have been heroes but they had participated in a shared community of suffering. Conversely those who had profited from the Occupation or frequented Germans had cut themselves off from the national community. They were no longer fully French, and had become embochi(e) (‘krautified’). (The word ‘collaboration’ was sometimes spelt with a ‘K’ to give it a more German sounding connotation.) Thus, although collaboration in its most extreme form was defined as having offered active help to the Germans, and was punishable by law, it was also represented as a moral category, especially in small communities where people scrutinized each other closely.46

  It is easy to see why women were singled out when collaboration was constructed in this way. In the first place, those women who consorted with German soldiers were judged to have defiled themselves and their community: like Marianne they had slept with the enemy and must be punished for it. Their punishment was described as a sort of moral disinfecting of the community and even quite literally a physical one as well: sometimes women who had slept with Germans were instructed to go for regular venereal investigations, as if they were prostitutes.47 Secondly, women who had had any kind of affective relationship with a German were represented as having led a life of debauchery. Whether or not people believed the lurid stories about orgies, such accusations were a way of demonstrating that the women had excluded themselves from the suffering of the community: they had enjoyed themselves at a time when it was the duty of the ‘good’ citizen to suffer.48 Thirdly, these women had forfeited their identity as French even more than was the case of men who had mixed with Germans. Women’s naturally subordinate status meant that they were presumed to have taken on the identity of their male companions. Many women themselves internalized this assumption by defending themselves on the grounds that they had also had lovers who were in the Resistance. It was rare for them to adopt Arletty’s line that their private life was their own affair.49 Interestingly enough no reprobation seems to have attached to French men who had consorted with German women. In June 1945 a female member of the UFF in Toulouse asked the municipal council what attitude should be taken to male prisoners of war who returned with a German wife and child. The council showed no interest.50

  The head-shavings were part of what Capdevila has called ‘neighbourhood purges’ in preference to the term ‘wild purges’.51 Even after the Maquis and FFI tribunals had ceased to operate, resisters continued to take direct action against alleged collaborators, usually with the complicity, even approval, of the local population. These neighbourhood purges from below were not viewed as a challenge to the authority of the courts or the State, but a supplement, or sometimes corrective, to the official purge from above. In Béziers, for example, a group of former FFI fighters penetrated into the prison on 29 December 1944 and shot three suspected collaborators; on 1 January 1945 they shot a milicien in hospital. In total, there were eight such killings in the town in the winter of 1944–5. In Alès, in the same area, a crowd of several thousand gathered outside the prison when their former mayor’s death sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Hearing that the culprit had been transferred from the prison, the crowd’s mood turned ugly, and four other prisoners who had been condemned to death were taken from their cells and shot in the prison courtyard.52

  This was not just an example of southern extremism. In Brittany too neigh-bourhood purges went on well into 1945. There were incidents ranging from the breaking of windows of collaborators’ houses to the throwing of bombs. In the Finistère there were twenty-one bomb attacks on commercial properties in October and November 1944, and nineteen in the Morbihan between June and August 1945. The main target of these attacks were former black marketeers who had escaped the courts. In general the police encountered a wall of silence when they tried to track down the perpetrators. On 5 March 1945 an ex-police inspector who had been assiduous in hunting down resisters was shot near Quimper. The prefect reported that this had ‘provoked neither emotion nor reaction among the population’ who felt that ‘he had deserved to be killed’. At his funeral a crowd gathered to boo and whistle. On 2 June 1945 in Dinan, a crowd of 4,000–5,000 people—almost ha
lf the population—gathered outside the prison to demand the release of five young men who had been accused of carrying out bomb attacks. They stormed the prison and released the men who were carried triumphantly to the war memorial. The police stood by powerless. The prefect was not sure of being able to count on the loyalty of his own men. But in fact the local authorities themselves were not entirely out of sympathy with the perpetrators of such incidents. Despite the fact that there had been thirty-five bomb attacks in May alone, the police chief in the Côtes-du-Nord took a very relaxed attitude to the situation: ‘the situation is calm… bomb attacks are still going on… [but] public security is not threatened. The victims of the various attacks are generally individuals suspected of collaboration against whom no legal action had yet been taken.’53

  These purges were, then, supported by entire communities. Sometimes they were seen as punishing transgressions which were not within the remit of the courts; sometimes they were seen as redressing what was perceived as the insufficient vigilance, or excessive clemency, of the authorities. In Chambéry, in the Savoie, vigilantism had been brought under control by the summer of 1945, but this situation changed in the autumn when the government commuted the death sentence of a young milicien named Capella. This was an area where the conflict between the Resistance and Milice had been very intense. Capella had been responsible for the burning of local farms, the deaths of resisters, and the deportation of others; and he had worked directly with the Germans. The commutation of his sentence outraged local opinion. There were demonstrations and petitions, and in January 1946 there were ten bomb attacks in seven different towns, one of them targeting Capella’s uncle. In Chambéry the archiepiscopal palace was bombed, possibly because the Church was suspected of harbouring former miliciens.54