B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Such local outbursts of anger were often linked to national events. The German offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944 stimulated panic about the fifth column, and the return of the deportees in April/May 1945 revived memories of the horrors of the Occupation. Deportees were often involved in vigilante incidents. At the small town of Rambervilliers, in the Vosges, on 31 May 1945 deportees and others set up what was described as a ‘people’s tribunal’ in a local café and shaved the heads of a dozen women. But local vigilantism only retained the support of local communities as long as it was perceived as genuinely redressing injustice. If vigilantes went too far they risked cutting themselves off from the local population. This occurred in the Vosges in August 1945 when two families with young children were found murdered in two adjacent villages. Although both families had been under suspicion of collaboration, public opinion was horrified by the murders. Vigilantism was discredited, and when at the end of the year two local miliciens were pardoned, the local reaction was muted: imperfect official justice was now seen as preferable to lawless violence. By March 1946 the same was true even in Chambéry where emotions had run so high a few weeks earlier. Opinion was shocked by the murder in broad daylight of two naturalized Italians who were alleged to be collaborators. On another occasion five men broke into the farm of a widow, shaved her head, and beat up her nephew. The interesting fact is that the perpetrators of these acts felt it necessary to wear masks: they could no longer rely on the complicity of the local population.55

  The Purges III: The Trials

  The variable intensity of the purges from below was intimately linked to the progress of the official purge from above. From the beginning there was frustration at the slowness with which the courts carried out their task. There were so many cases to consider that massive bottlenecks developed. By the beginning of December the Paris Court of Justice alone faced a backlog of 4,200 cases; in Lyons the court started work on 26 October 1944 but by 1 February 1945 it had only heard forty-four cases.56 The first important cases to come before the courts were those of journalists and propagandists. This was because the evidence against them was easiest to assemble: they had convicted themselves through their own writings. The first of these trials concerned the journalist Georges Suarez who had run the pro-German newspaper Aujourd’hui. He was sentenced to death and shot on 9 November. Next came the turn of Henri Béraud, one of the leading journalists of Gringoire. He too was sentenced to death on 30 December 1944. This decision provoked an article from François Mauriac calling for clemency on the specific grounds that Béraud, despite his violent Anglophobia and anti-Semitism, had never written a single article in support of the Germans or indeed set foot in Paris (Gringoire was published in the Unoccupied Zone), and on the general grounds that writers should be allowed to make mistakes. On 13 January de Gaulle commuted Béraud’s sentence to twenty years’ hard labour.57

  Mauriac spoke out again to appeal for clemency for Robert Brasillach who was sentenced to death by the Paris court in January 1945. Although, unlike Béraud, Brasillach certainly had written pro-German articles, fifty-nine intellectuals (including Mauriac, Valéry, Claudel, and Paulhan) signed a petition calling for clemency. This was taken to de Gaulle by Mauriac in person. On this occasion de Gaulle decided to let the sentence stand and Brasillach was shot on 6 February 1945. The case of Brasillach aroused disquiet even among intellectuals who had not signed the petition. Simone de Beauvoir worried that his death had transformed him from a villain to a martyr; Vercors claimed in his memoirs to have been shocked by the arbitrariness of singling out one writer to assume the sins of so many others who escaped more lightly.

  Mauriac’s plea for mercy—one paper dubbed him ‘St Francis of the Assizes’— led to a debate in the press between him and Albert Camus. Camus argued that although the purges must be carried out without hatred, justice had to prevail over charity: ‘every time I talk of justice, M. Mauriac talks of charity’. Nonetheless Camus did in the end sign the petition in favour of Brasillach, and although he claimed to have done this because he opposed the principle of the death penalty, he had not applied this principle in the case of Suarez whose execution he had approved. It seems likely therefore that Camus, despite his public stance, was himself beginning to have doubts. By August he had begun to find the purges ‘odious’ and retrospectively he judged Mauriac to have been right.58 Whatever the rights and wrongs of the individual cases, there was undoubtedly considerable arbitrariness in the sentences meted out to writers. As passions calmed, the sentences tended to become more lenient irrespective of the merits of the case: the date of the trial mattered more than the gravity of the crime. Rebatet, whose trial was not held until November 1946, was sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted; Céline who was tried in absentia in February 1950 was sentenced to one year in prison and a fine. As Jouhandeau remarked, ‘If Drieu agrees to remain hidden two years in a cellar, he’ll end up as a minister.’59 But Drieu was already dead.

  The work of the High Court began in March 1945 with the trial of Admiral Estéva who, as resident-general of Tunisia, had helped the Germans in November 1942. Estéva, who had obeyed orders without ever being particularly pro-German, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was definitely a second-rank figure, and what people were really waiting for was the trial of Pétain. De Gaulle’s hope that Pétain could be tried in absentia as quickly as possible was dashed when Pétain appeared at the Franco-Swiss border on 26 April. Although he had been offered asylum in Switzerland, Pétain was determined to render his account to the French people. For former resisters, the trial was to have a pedagogic purpose. Mauriac wrote: ‘it is precisely because so many people are still under the spell of this great figure that nothing must be left in the shadows… the sentence must be delivered in the full light of day’.60

  Pétain’s trial opened on 23 July 1945. His defence strategy was devised by the young lawyer Jacques Isorni who had made his reputation defending Brasillach. Pétain began by reading out a prepared statement. It declared that the Armistice had contributed to the Allied victory by keeping North Africa free of German troops, and that Vichy had acted as a shield to protect the French: ‘every day, a dagger to my throat, I struggled against the enemy’s demands’. The statement ended with Pétain refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the court and announcing that he would participate no further in its proceedings. Although he did speak out on one or two occasions, for most of the rest of the trial Pétain was silent, sometimes asleep, sometimes seemingly unaware of what was going on.

  The prosecution began by trying to prove that Pétain’s arrival in power was part of a long-laid plot to bring down the Republic. The problem with this strategy was that most people were much more concerned with what had happened during the Occupation than with going over events of 1940 which seemed almost like ancient history. Ageing Third Republic politicians—Daladier, Herriot, Reynaud, Lebrun—emerged like ghosts to testify about Pétain’s behaviour in 1940. Reynaud and Weygand clashed in an undignified slanging match. No one emerged from this with much dignity except Léon Blum, and the Third Republic did not appear in its best colours.

  Suddenly, on the ninth day of the trial, the prosecutor announced that he did not after all have the evidence to prove any culpability on Pétain’s part before the Armistice, and that the trial would now concentrate on the Vichy government. The defence used the argument that Pétain had been playing a double game. Much was made of supposed secret contacts between Britain and Vichy in 1940, and of the secret telegrams to Darlan in 1942. Most of these claims were false, or did not bear the construction put on them, but this was not so easy to prove, and the defence’s strategy did sow doubts. The defence was not, however, helped by the sudden and unexpected appearance of Laval who had arrived from Spain on 1 August after failing to obtain political asylum from Franco. Shrunken and haggard, Laval had aged dramatically, but his mental faculties were intact. Appearing in court on 3 August, he was unstoppably eloquent, arguing that all his actions
had met with Pétain’s full approval. On 15 August the jury delivered their verdict. Pétain was condemned to death, but with the recommendation— which de Gaulle accepted—that owing to his age the sentence should be commuted to imprisonment.

  Next the High Court had to deal with the case of Darnand. He presented himself as an honest soldier who had obeyed the Marshal and preformed what he believed to be his patriotic duty. If he had made mistakes, he had always acted in good faith. Although Darnand was sentenced to death and executed, his performance had won grudging admiration even from his enemies.61 Quite different was the case of Laval who had been feverishly preparing his defence ever since Sigmaringen. Confident of his abilities until the end, Laval seems to have been half convinced that his eloquence would enable him to persuade the jury that he had acted in France’s best interests. In the end he was never given the chance. His trial opened on 3 October. The president of the Court was incapable of keeping order and jurors shouted abuse at Laval. On 6 October Laval announced that he would no longer participate in the proceedings. His only hope was that the government would order a new trial given the irregularities which had occurred. Although the conditions of the trial caused widespread unease, there was no reprieve, and Laval was sentenced to death. His end was as sordid as his trial. Hours before he was due to be shot he swallowed a cyanide capsule. His stomach was pumped out seventeen times, and he was dragged, half-dead, to be executed on 15 October.62

  The High Court continued to operate, but its proceeedings attracted decreasing attention. The trial of de Brinon in March 1947 was sparsely attended although he was sentenced to death; Benoist-Mechin was sentenced to death in May 1947 but the verdict was commuted; Vallat got a ten-year prison sentence in December 1947.63 The last case was heard in July 1949. The Civic Courts went on until December 1949; by October 1948 there were only four Courts of Justice still working, and the last one, in Paris, was wound up in January 1951.64 The sentences were increasingly lenient—although Luchaire was condemned to death and executed in December 1946—but what caused most public disquiet was a feeling that the punishments were mostly affecting the poor and defenceless while the bigger fish were getting off free. This was not entirely untrue. For example, of those appearing before the court at Valenciennes, one-third of employers and a quarter of artisans, shopkeepers, and professionals were acquitted, but only one-tenth of peasants and workers.65

  The purge, however, went beyond the courts. In both the public administration and the professions, purge committees were set up to judge and punish collaborators. Among public servants the purge of the police was particularly severe. In the Paris Prefecture of Police 3,939 cases were considered—20 per cent of the total force—and 1,906 policemen were sanctioned in some way, half of them with dismissal. Four hundred cases were sent to the courts, resulting in 196 condemnations (twenty death sentences). In the rest of the police force there were 1,162 dismissals, and 857 lesser sanctions.66 The purge was also severe in the Ministry of Information, but less so in posts and telecommunications and the railways.67

  In the private sector, the cases that attracted most public attention were those of film stars and entertainers. Those who had been arrested at the Liberation included Arletty, Sacha Guitry, Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier, Pierre Fresnay, and Ginette Leclerc (the last two both stars of Le Corbeau). Most of them were soon released while their cases were considered. Arletty spent about four months in prison and then eighteen under house arrest. Finally in November 1946 the cinema purge committee allowed her to resume her career, having pronounced a formal sentence of ‘blame’. Carné too was ‘blamed’ for having signed a contract with the Continental although he had never made a film with them. Clouzot, the director of Le Corbeau, received a sanction, as did almost anyone involved in the film. Guitry was soon released but not until August 1947 did the Paris Court of Justice decide that there was no case for him to answer. In his memoirs of these tribulations, he seemed impervious to the fact that if he had indeed never betrayed his country he had hardly brought great honour upon it either.68 Undoubtedly in the cases of Guitry, and others like him, what aroused such resentment—a poll in September 1944 showed 56 per cent approval of Guitry’s arrest—was that they had so palpably enjoyed themselves under the Occupation. Guitry had certainly not been part of any community of suffering.

  More serious than socializing with the Germans was doing business with them. At the Liberation the mood had been strongly anti-capitalist. In the south of France, in places like Marseilles, Toulouse, and Nice, a total of about 100 factories had been taken over by workers’ management committees.69 Louis Renault was arrested but died in October 1944 before he could be tried (in fact his mind had almost completely gone). There was a national purge committee (CNIE), and also regional ones, representing workers, employers, and the State. But working through company accounts to establish guilt—even if it could be agreed what constituted guilt in the first place—was more complicated than exhuming the articles of journalists or establishing membership of the Milice. Once the purge commissions had got around to assembling the evidence, the mood had shifted towards leniency. The regional commission of Paris examined 4,889 cases and pronounced 2,596 sanctions. The CNIE considered 1,538 cases but pronounced only 191 sanctions. In the end few employers lost control of their businesses.70

  Intellectuals in the Dock

  Even if public interest in the purges was waning by 1946, there was a widespread feeling that of all social categories industrialists had escaped most lightly. This was elegantly expressed by Jean Paulhan in June 1946:

  The purge has been hard on writers. The engineers, entrepreneurs, and builders who constructed the Atlantic Wall live peacefully among us. They are building new walls. They are building the walls of the new prisons where we lock up the journalists who made the mistake of writing that the Atlantic Wall had been well built.71

  The impression that the purges had affected writers disproportionately harshly was probably a slight distortion caused by the fact that the first high-profile trials, when interest in the épuration was at its height, had concerned writers, and that those who were tried earliest suffered the severest penalties.72 Paulhan’s remark, however, was not only about numbers. It was a contribution to a wider debate about the responsibility of the intellectual. This debate divided former Resistance allies from each other, and called into question the entire basis of the épuration of writers and intellectuals.

  Two bodies assumed responsibility for the purge of intellectuals: the National Purge Committee of Writers and Composers and the CNE. The former, created by a formal government ordonnance, had the right to prevent writers publishing or republishing their works for up to two years. Sitting intermittently between mid-1945 and mid-1949 it considered ninety-one cases, and pronounced sanctions in fifty-two cases. The CNE’s role was less well defined. In September 1944 it drew up its notorious ‘black list’ of writers who had collaborated. The ninety-four names included Chardonne, Drieu, Giono, Maurras, Montherlant, Céline, Brasillach, Jouhandeau, Guitry, Rebatet, Benjamin, and Fabre-Luce. Two subsequent lists in October and November increased the total number of names to 160. But what was the purpose of this list? The original intention was to communicate the names on it to the Ministry of Justice, but this idea was abandoned after protests from Mauriac and Paulhan. Mauriac commented to Paulhan that writers should not have the ‘soul of cops’. Paulhan wrote: ‘that the first public act of the CNE is to demand the arrests of other writers seems to me to be nothing less than horrible’. His principle was that writers should be ‘neither judges nor informers’.73 In the end it was decided that the CNE would restrict itself to a kind of moral sanction: its members would refuse to write in publications alongside anyone on the list.

  Nonetheless the existence of the list continued to cause disquiet. One problem was its arbitrariness: Morand was on the first list, absent from the second, and back on the third; Cocteau was on none. There was clearly bargaining behind the scenes as to who should be
included. There were differences of opinion as to whether support for Pétain was in itself sufficient to merit inclusion, or was some sign of sympathy with Germany also required?74 Another problem was that while writers were finding themselves sanctioned and vilified, publishers were more lightly treated. Most of them had at least one Resistance writer on their books ready to speak out in their defence. Denoël, one of the most compromised, was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in December 1945 before he could stand trial. Gallimard, the publisher of the NRF, was able to assemble a stellar list of witnesses to testify in his favour, including Malraux, Sartre, Éluard, and Camus. The NRF for the second time served as a useful lightning conductor. Having continued the NRF during the war to save the rest of his publishing house from the Germans, Gallimard wound it up in 1945 to preserve the rest of his publishing house from reprisals at the Liberation. Pierre Seghers and Vercors resigned from the Publishing Purge Commission as early as the winter of 1944, disgusted that the mutual back-scratching between authors and publishers had saved so many skins.75

  For Paulhan, however, the problems of the purge went far beyond the cases of injustice and arbitrariness. At the very first post-Liberation meeting of the CNE on 4 September, he argued that to make a mistake, to take intellectual risks, was the writer’s ‘first prerogative’. As early as October 1944 he had to be dissuaded from resigning from the CNE. But not everybody shared Paulhan’s view. Taking up Paulhan’s comparison between the treatment of industrialists and that of writers, Vercors wrote: ‘to compare the industrialist to the writer is to compare Cain to the devil. Cain’s crime ends with Abel. The devil’s is without limit.’ Or as Sartre put it: ‘we ought to rejoice that our profession involves some dangers’.76