B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  The pardon caused uproar. After four months of polemics, Pompidou defended his action: ‘are we going to keep the wounds of our national discord bleeding eternally? Hasn’t the time come to draw a veil over the past, to forget a time when Frenchmen disliked one another, and even killed one another?’ Since Pompidou himself had survived the Occupation by keeping out of trouble and devoting himself to producing a critical edition of Racine’s play Britannicus—‘clearly I lacked an adventurous spirit’, he once observed—his desire to forgive and forget appealed to him personally. But drawing a veil over collaboration in a spirit of national reconciliation also conformed to the spirit of the Gaullist myth. Unfortunately for Pompidou, times had changed, and his pardon only contributed further to the unravelling of the myth.44

  Another scandal erupted in October 1978 when the magazine L’Express published an interview with the former head of Vichy’s Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, Darquier de Pellepoix, who had taken refuge in Spain after his condemnation to death in 1947. In the interview Darquier poured out his anti-Semitic bile and alleged that the gas chambers were a Jewish hoax. This was not the first time Darquier had made statements to the press or the first article that had been written about him. But once again timing was all, and the ranting of this crazed octogenarian created a furore in France.45

  By the late 1970s, Vichy was becoming, as Henry Rousso suggests, an obsession. The slightest incident was seized upon and interpreted in the light of Occupation. There was an outcry in 1975 when President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing decided in a spirit of European unity that 8 May would no longer be celebrated as a national holiday. Veiled references were made to the Vichyite past of his parents. Another polemic broke out over the Communist leader Georges Marchais who turned out to have worked in a German factory during the war. Whether he had been there as an involuntary victim of STO or a volunteer, neither alternative conformed to the image of Communist Resistance heroism. The memory of the Occupation haunted the presidential elections of 1981: the Gaullist Colonel Passy urged people to vote for Mitterrand and was supported by a bevy of former resisters who claimed that Mitterrand was the only candidate ‘interested in pursuing the broad programme of the CNR’; de Gaulle’s son-in-law reminded electors that Mitterrand had a Vichy past; the Socialist Gaston Defferre responded by alleging that Giscard’s family had been ‘full of collaborators’.46

  These polemics took place against a background of increasing aesthetic fascination with the period, a sort of Forties Revival, dubbed the mode rétro. It is strikingly illustrated by the novelist Patrick Modiano whose entire output, since his first book La Place de l’étoile (1968), has explored the murkiest aspects of the Occupation—the points at which collaboration overlapped with the worlds of criminality and marginality. But the Occupation is not just a background for his novels. Born in 1945, the son of a Jewish father who survived the war thanks to ruse and compromise, and a mother who worked in occupied Paris for a German film company, Modiano’s obsession with the Occupation is a personal quest for origins and identity. His novels, impressionistic and fragmented, are meditations on the interplay between memory and history and on the possibility of ascribing coherence to the past. To the general public, Modiano is best known as the author of the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien, the film which, after The Sorrow and the Pity, most contributed to undermining heroic representations of the Occupation.47

  Memory on Trial

  In the 1970s then, the old mythology shattered, but it proved impossible to put the pieces together and create a new consensus. In the 1980s it fell to the courts, more than to historians, to offer interpretations of the Vichy past. This was a consequence of the French parliament’s vote in 1964 to end the Statute of Limitations on crimes against humanity. That decision had been taken to allow the possibility of pursuing Nazi war criminals still at large, but in the 1970s the weapon was turned against French perpetrators of war crimes. Even people who had been tried at the Liberation became vulnerable to retrial on new grounds. After the war no one had been specifically tried for their role in the deportation of the Jews. Now this came to be seen as the central crime of the Occupation, and one which could be pursued as a crime against humanity.

  The first Frenchman to be successfully indicted for crimes against humanity was Jean Leguay in March 1979. As René Bousquet’s representative in the Occupied Zone until the end of 1943, Leguay had been profoundly implicated in the round-ups of Jews. In January 1983 followed the indictment of Maurice Papon who had organized deportations of Jews in his capacity as an official in the prefecture of the Gironde. Finally, Bousquet himself was indicted in March 1991. Leguay and Bousquet had both been tried at the Liberation but suffered only minor penalties because they were able to show that they had abetted the Resistance. Papon had not been tried at all. Their role in the Jewish deportations had barely been an issue at the Liberation. All of them had gone on to glittering careers in business and politics. Papon had served as Prefect of Police under de Gaulle in from 1958 to 1967, and Budget Minister under Giscard d’Estaing, until the revelations about his past forced him to resign in 1981. Even after the indictments had been issued, preparing the evidence against these highly placed figures was laborious. Leguay died in July 1989 just as the case against him was ready to come before the courts. Bousquet was assassinated by a publicity seeker in 1993 before his case could be tried. Papon’s indictment was quashed for procedural reasons in 1987, and he was indicted again in 1988. The preparation of his case dragged on for years. Meanwhile in 1989 Touvier was finally discovered hiding in a priory in Nice. He was arrested and indicted, but it took time to prepare the case against him.

  These delays meant that the first trial turned out not to be of a Frenchmen but of the German Klaus Barbie who had been the Gestapo chief in Lyons. Found guilty in absentia of war crimes in the 1950s, Barbie escaped to Bolivia where Beate Klarsfeld located him in 1971. After several abortive attempts to secure his extradition, Barbie was eventually brought back to France in February 1983 and indicted for crimes against humanity. The French government intended his trial to serve as a national history lesson and chance for the French to confront the past—but complications soon arose.

  The crimes with which Barbie was associated in the popular imagination, in particular the death of Jean Moulin, could not be included in the indictment because they were categorized as ‘war crimes’, carried out against combatants. ‘Crimes against humanity’ were those perpetrated against innocent civilians. Thus the central charge against Barbie became the round-up on 6 April 1944 of forty-three Jewish children from the refuge at Izieu. Some former resisters felt aggrieved that the indictment against Barbie had nothing to say about them, but including them would have subverted the claim of the Resistance that its members had been voluntary combatants, a status denied to them by Germany during the Occupation. Before Barbie came to trial these tensions were skilfully exploited by his defence lawyer Jacques Vergès. Vergès was a leftist radical with contempt for bourgeois democracy. He argued that the French had no right to try Barbie when they were unwilling to assume responsibility for their own crimes against humanity in their colonies, especially during the Algerian war. But Vergès’s main counter-attack was to claim that the exclusion of resisters from the trial meant the French State had something to hide: it was terrified that Barbie would reveal who had betrayed Moulin. Vergès knew nothing that had not been common knowledge for years, but his insinuations sowed doubts.

  In November 1985, the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest appeal court, issued a ruling which allowed some crimes against the Resistance to be included in the indictment against Barbie. This was done by redefining crimes against humanity to include acts carried out in ‘the name of a state practising a policy of ideological hegemony … not only against people by reason of their belonging to a racial or religious group but also against the opponents of this political system’. The definition of crimes against humanity was shifted from the identity of the victims to the motives o
f the perpetrators. Barbie’s trial which lasted from 11 May to 4 July 1987 was not the cathartic event which had been expected. He was tried on forty-one separate counts. Thirty-nine lawyers representing Jewish groups, Resistance groups, and individuals appeared in court to file separate suits against him. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. But although Vergès’s claim to have revelations about the Resistance proved to be a bluff, the trial uncovered tensions between Resistance memories and Jewish memories. The inclusion of crimes against the Resistance blurred the focus of what some had wished to be a ringing condemnation of the Final Solution.48 As Simone Veil put it: ‘we the victims have never asked to be considered as heroes; so why do the heroes now want … at the risk of mixing everything up, to be treated as victims?’49

  The trial of Paul Touvier, seven years later, was no more successful in providing simple answers about the past. The main crime alleged against Touvier was the round-up and shooting of seven Jews on 29 June 1944 in retaliation for the assassination of Philippe Henriot. There was no doubt about Touvier’s responsibility for this crime, but in April 1992 it looked as if the trial would not go ahead after the Paris Court of Appeals decided, to universal amazement, that there was no case against Touvier under the strict definition of crimes against humanity. The court’s view was that the Vichy regime, in whose name Touvier acted, could not be said to have been inspired by a policy of ‘ideological hegemony’ since its ideology was confused, and the Jews were not defined as an enemy of the State as in Nazi Germany. The spectacle of judges, three of them known for their right-wing sympathies, setting themselves up as historians of Vichy caused outrage. Seven months later the judgement was partially overturned by another appeal court. While declaring itself incompetent to contest the assessment of Vichy, this court decided that Touvier had acted on German orders, and therefore on behalf of a State inspired by a policy of ideological hegemony. This judgement made it possible to judge Touvier, but meant that his trial could not consider crimes committed by Vichy. It led to the absurd result that, in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, ‘the same acts are crimes if they are committed by the Germans or anyone in their service, but cease to be so if their authors are French, acting for the French State or French institutions’. Law was being manipulated ‘to meet the political objective of the moment, instead of allowing it to judge individual cases according to unchanging criteria’.50

  The trial opened on 17 March 1994 and closed on 20 April 1994. Four historians, including Robert Paxton, testified. Touvier was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Throughout the proceedings, there was a sense of frustration at the banality of the 79-year-old defendant who seemed half absent from the proceedings. The main problem was that evidence which had been painstakingly assembled to prove that Touvier had acted for Vichy now had to be marshalled to prove the opposite—that he had acted at the instigation of the Germans. What had once been used by Touvier in his defence—that it was the local Gestapo head who had forced him to kill the hostages—now became the basis of the case against him. Witnesses who had previously claimed that Touvier was not acting on German orders now alleged the opposite. These contradictions caused a certain embarrassment. To the irritation of his colleagues, one of the prosecution lawyers, Arno Klarsfeld, the son of Serge, refused to accept the theory that Touvier had acted at the behest of the Germans—although he claimed that this did not affect the issue of crimes against humanity. But the truth was that Touvier’s conviction could only be secured by distorting the historical record.

  Obsessive Memory

  The trials of Barbie and Touvier, while failing to clarify understanding of the Occupation, had intensified the preoccupation with the persecution of the Jews. The fiftieth anniversary of the Vel d’Hiver round-up on 16 July 1942 was a moment of high emotion. A commemorative ceremony was held on the site of the former Vel d’Hiver in the presence of numerous dignitaries, including the President of the Republic, François Mitterrand. A petition appeared in Le Monde, signed by over two hundred personalities calling themselves the ‘Vel d’Hiver 42 Committee’. They demanded that Mitterrand formally acknowledge France’s complicity in the Final Solution. Although Mitterrand was unwilling to do this, in February 1993 his government decided to designate 16 July as a national day of commemoration of the persecution of the Jews.

  This has recently led the historian Henry Rousso, director of the Institut du temps présent, to warn against the danger of creating a new myth about the Occupation. Rousso argues that concentrating on the persecution of the Jews to the exclusion of almost every other aspect of Vichy—what he calls ‘Judaeocentrism’—neglects other victims of the regime: Communists, Freemasons, resisters. There are now national days to commemorate the end of the war (8 May), the deportees (April), and the Jews (16 July), but there is none to commemorate the Resistance. The contemporary focus on the Jews redresses the previous neglect of their plight, but since, as Rousso reminds us, many Jewish survivors in 1944–5 wanted to be considered as French citizens not as Jews, it would be anachronistic to attribute that neglect only to the existence of anti-Semitic prejudice. Rousso also identifies problems in selecting 16 July to commemorate France’s guilt towards the Jews. French complicity in the Vel d’Hiver round-ups is undeniable, but it was primarily a result of Vichy’s policy of collaboration rather than Vichy’s anti-Semitism. Certainly the two policies cannot, in this instance, be entirely separated, but Vichy’s anti-Semitism was one of persecution not extermination. Extermination was a German policy. If France genuinely wished to confront her own anti-Semitic demons, it would, Rousso argues, be more appropriate to commemorate the Jewish Statute of October 1940. Finally, Rousso questions whether it is healthy for a society to become too fixated on the past. There may be a ‘duty to remember’, but there is also sometimes a need to put the past behind one in order to confront the problems of the present and the future.51

  However salutary Rousso’s call for a sense of proportion in discussing anti-Semitism during the Occupation, there is a danger that he could give ammunition to revisionists with their own political agendas. Rousso himself has no such ulterior motives. On the contrary, born in 1954, he is one of the leading historians of the period, too young to have any personal scores to settle, and he was quick to denounce the pro-Vichy revisionism of a recent book. Indeed one of his points is that if a distorted picture of the Occupation were allowed to gain credence it would be vulnerable to attack from people wishing to rehabilitate Vichy. Having refuted those distortions, they would be able to cast doubt even on the existence of the regime’s genuine crimes. Thus Rousso’s warning against an obsession with Vichy deserves to be listened to. But in other hands this warning could become apologetic. In this context, one should note that the title of Rousso’s book echoes a well-known article by the German historian Ernst Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’. It is notorious that Nolte’s own call for relativization of the Holocaust was serving a contemporary conservative agenda, and leading him into increasingly troubled waters. In this context it is not insignificant that Rousso’s book has been commented upon favourably by Jean-Marc Varaut, the defence lawyer of Maurice Papon, the Vichy functionary accused of crimes against humanity, and author of a recent revisionist account of Pétain’s trial. Varaut applauds Rousso’s rejection of Manichaean explanations and praises his stress on the complexity of events. In short, the dilemma is: how to historicize without becoming Nolte?52

  This dilemma is all the more acute given the strength of the extreme right in contemporary France. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national has provided a home to former Pétainists and collaborationists. For example, Paul Malguti, who stood for the FN at elections in 1992, was a former member of Doriot’s PPF, involved in a massacre of resisters by the Gestapo at Cannes in August 1944, and condemned to death in absentia in 1945.53 The old Pétainist sage Gustave Thibon emerged from the shadows to give the FN his support. Le Pen himself makes little secret of his loathing for de Gaulle, his indulgence
for Pétain, and his dislike of Jews. Asked in 1987 what he thought about negationism—the attempt to deny the existence of the Holocaust—he said that he was not competent to comment on this historical issue, but that in any case the Holocaust was merely a ‘detail’ in the history of the Second War. In 1988, he attacked a government minister by making a tasteless pun about crematorium ovens.

  Negationism has enjoyed remarkable success in France. Indeed it was invented in France by the former Socialist resister Paul Rassinier who had been in Buchen-wald. He became convinced after the war that the gas chambers, of which there were indeed none at Buchenwald, had never existed.54 In 1978 Robert Faurisson, a lecturer at the University of Lyons, announced his support of Darquier de Pelle-poix’s allegations that the gas chambers had not existed. Faurisson’s case acquired notoriety in 1980 when Noam Chomsky foolishly prefaced one of his books in a spirit of defending free speech. Faurisson was in the end required to pay symbolic damages to those whose memory he had insulted. In 1985 another academic, Henri Roques, was awarded a doctorate which contained negationist claims. The degree was revoked a year later.55

  Negationism is beyond the boundaries of respectability even to most supporters of the Front national, but there are other subtly apologetic accounts of the Occupation on offer. One of the best-selling authors on the period is Henri Amouroux, a journalist whose nine-volume history of the life of the French under Occupation provides a minute chronicle which submerges judgement and analysis in detail. Amouroux’s account offers neither heroes nor villains, only an immensely complicated tragedy in which everyone has their reasons. The moral seems to be that to understand everything is to forgive everything. There is no explicitly political agenda, but Amouroux has made it clear that he dislikes what he see as the denigration of France by American historians (that is to say, Robert Paxton).56