Confronting Collaboration in France
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
THE TOUVIER CONTROVERSY Confronting Collaboration in France BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris French journalists have rushed in where French judges feared to tread. On April 13, acourthere dismissed...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...It might then open its archives as well, so that all can be known about its own ambiguous role in World War II...
...Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld believes it is essential to try these three surviving officials of the Vichy regime for the role they played in the death of tens of thousands of Jews...
...Indignation over the Touvier ruling has hence been all the greater, for many see it as an attempt to whitewash the Vichy regime...
...The Germans had asked for 40,00016-45-year-old Jews...
...to develop in its midst...
...His organization's official objectives included "the fight...
...Following the War, he managed to evade arrest, thanks in part to ecclesiastical help, and went into hiding...
...Perhaps his message will reach the Vatican...
...was at any given time a state practicing a policy of political hegemony...
...Other sections of the decision further reveal a subjective appraisal of the period...
...Today, the media are drawing a similar contrast between the Touvier ruling and Spanish King Juan Carlos' visit earlier in the year to Madrid's main synagogue, where he commemorated the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain...
...Others believe the French courts are inherently conservative and always one step behind the rest of society...
...In 1985, preparing for the Barbie proceedings, the French Court of Appeal determined them to be "inhuman acts and persecutions systematically carried out in the name of a state practicing a policy of ideological hegemony, not only against people on the grounds of race or religion, but also against opponents of that policy, whatever the nature of their opposition...
...A third, bearing the signatures of more than 200 artists and intellectuals, asked Mitterrand to mark the 50th anniversary of the July 1942 roundup of Jews by officially proclaiming that Vichy was responsible for anti-Seimtic crimes...
...The last hope of trying Touvier rests with the Supreme Court...
...President Francois Mitterrand admitted a feeling of "surprise—to express myself mildly...
...Recalling Queen Isabel La Catolica's expulsion of the Jews in 1492, Decourtray recently said that "the memory of Christianity" is in need of "purification...
...As chief of the Milice in the Lyons region, where Klaus Barbie headed the Gestapo, he was allegedly responsible for the deportation and execution of Jews and Resistance fighters in 1943-44...
...the multifarious political universe of Vichy...
...Given the evidence, what accounts for the Touvier ruling...
...That is why Barbie could be tried and convicted in 1987...
...The first attempts to break the taboo on the notion of collaboration did not come until the late 1960s, with the publication of works by Canadian and American historians...
...Only after a second appeal has been heard is the verdict of the higher court final...
...but in Vichy France Jews were never considered State enemies, as was the case in Germany...
...Not one of those collected in the operation and deported to Germany survived...
...Barbie described the Miliciens he worked with as "sharing the ideas of National-Socialism or fascism, and being anti-Semitic, like us...
...Judges can again hold that Touvier'sacts do not constitute crimes against humanity...
...The legal catch-22 is the definition of crimes against humanity...
...Earlier, Cardinal Albert Decourtray of Lyons, in an unprecedented move, opened his archives to a commission of independent historians and asked them to review the Church's involvement in aiding Touvier's postwar escape...
...After the Franco-German armistice of June 1940, it will be recalled, Vichy became the capital of the southern half of France, controlled by Petain...
...He reappears at different periods, spattering the institutions: executive, religious, and now judicial...
...Comte, though, incriminates the Church for "allowing weaknesses of judgment, confusion and ignorance...
...Thus Vichy had no "vocation" to impose a "conquering ideology," though some "supporters of the Marshal" were "cynics who occasionally behaved revoltingly...
...He considers the Touvier trial to be of critical importance, and prays that the nascent effort to reconcile the Catholic Church and Jews would continue...
...Simone Veil, a former judge and perhaps France's most respected politician, did not hesitate to term the ruling "revisionist...
...Many historians believe Touvier must be brought to trial to counter the revisionism being cultivated in far-Right university circles and publications...
...in 1971 French President Georges Pompidou quietly pardoned Touvier, reasoning that the nation should at last "forget those times...
...The founder of the Milice, Joseph Darnard, was a member of both the SS and Petain's government...
...The northern half was occupied by the Germans until November 1942, when they took over the whole country but left Petain nominally in power...
...It was in the spring of 1942, 50 years ago, that the first Jews were deported from France to Nazi extermination camps...
...Prime Minister Pierre Beregovoy declared France had been "bruised," an opinion confirmed by a poll indicating that 73 per cent of the French are "shocked...
...As for anti-Semitism, "There was certainly a powerful anti-Semitic movement...
...If the French authorities were slower to comply with subsequent German requests for Jews, it was, Klarsfeld says, because of the revulsion these roundups produced in French citizens and the Catholic hierarchy: "Vichy contributed efficiently to the extermination of 75,000 Jews, and the French helped efficiently to save three-quarters of the Jews [living] in France...
...Historians signed a petition rejecting its "historical clauses" and objecting that truth had been "travestied by specious arguments, plays on words and serious ignorance...
...Consequently it cannot be said that the Vichy State...
...That the Milice "pursued a 'hegemonic goal,' seeking to set up a to-talitarian regime," proves "the State was not totalitarian and did not practice a policy of ideological hegemony...
...This willingness to come to terms with an unpleasant past is most apparent in enlightened Catholic circles...
...Since then, the trial of Touvier has been taking place in newspaper columns and television studios...
...The Decourtray commission has concluded that churchmen and monastic orders helped Touvier without consulting their superiors, often out of a misguided concept of charity...
...The Gaullist-Communist wartime myth that the French were all Resistance fighters contributed to Vichy's anti-Semitic persecutions and, as a result, its most reprehensible collusion with Hitler...
...On October 3, 1940, anticipating the wishes of the German authorities, Petain signed the statut des Juifs, the first in a long list of ignominious laws that banned Jews from public service and liberal professions, stripped them of the right to own such belongings as a radio or a bicycle, and forbade them to enter cinemas, theaters or public baths...
...Members of the French Cabinet and Parliament, who traditionally refrain from commenting on court judgments, are speaking out too...
...One magazine, for example, maintained that the rejection of the charges "honored French justice...
...In this instance, they do seem attuned to the ambivalence of past decades...
...On April 13, acourthere dismissed the latest charges brought against Paul Touvier, one of the leaders of the Milice, a paramilitary force that worked fist in glove with the Gestapo in Marshal Petain's pro-Hitler France...
...and demonstrated] implicit contempt for human justice...
...Far-Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, meanwhile, speaks of the founder of the Belgian SS, whom he has met, as "a monument of World War II...
...The judiciary is tripping under the weight of its past," says Beatrice Patrie, leader of a union of magistrates...
...A recent television program shows how on July 16-17,1942, massive arrests of Jews were carried out by 4,500 French police in an operation codenamed "Wind of Spring...
...The intense coverage of the case suggests that France now generally agrees Petain and all those who supported him could and should have resisted German pressure...
...On the orders of Petain's Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, children were rounded up, too...
...Although he was condemned to death in absentia in 1946 and '47, those sentences lapsed because of a 20-year statute of limitations...
...The genocide did not begin on the fringes of Poland," said a government minister attending a May commemoration service, "but here, in the heart of France...
...In 1970 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the memorial at the Warsaw Ghetto...
...against the Jewish leprosy...
...Trials, he says, "personalize" the horrors of genocide and are "the best way of gaining an audience in the media and in public opinion...
...Much of this is distasteful hair-splitting...
...In May, the Socialist-Catholic periodical Esprit ran an 80-page analysis of the Vichy years that examined the Church's role with uncompromising scrutiny...
...Patrick Devedjian, a neo-Gaullist deputy in the National Assembly, observes that over the years judges have tended to be "lenient toward collaborationists...
...But it is significant that the can of worms was opened by academics, journalists, film directors, and lawyers, not by officialdom...
...The judges in the Touvier case, after reviewing the "factions and clans" that surrounded Petain, concluded that "no precise ideology ruled in...
...The announcement of the decision coincided with a grim anniversary...
...Nearly 200 writers, journalists and celebrities signed another one entitled Nous Accusons, a direct echo of Emile Zola's J'Accuse (written in defense of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish Army captain wrongly accused of treason almost a century ago...
...Ergo, its officials cannot be guilty of crimes against humanity...
...The upshot was a countermyth of 40 Million Petainists, to quote the title of a book by historian Henri Amouroux...
...The question confronting three judges in the office of the director of public prosecutions was whether Touvier committed "crimes against humanity...
...None of Marshal Petain's speeches contained anti-Semitic language...
...France's Attorney General has lodged an appeal there, but even if the present ruling is overturned, a trial may not take place very soon...
...This leads one to question the shortcomings of clerical education, and the intellectual distortions within the Church...
...One explanation is that the judicial system, with special courts of exception, was a crucial pillar of the repressive Vichy regime...
...And it is why the charge is the only one still applicable to Touvier, to Rene Bousquet, head of Petain's police, and to Maurice Papon, prefect of the Bordeaux region...
...Francois Hollande, a Socialist deputy, described Touvier "as symbolizing the bad conscience of our history...
...By assisting Touvier, he adds, churchmen proved'' oblivious to the moral and spiritual stakes of World War II...
...There is no limitation on crimes against humanity, however...
...Schools and television showed Nuit et brouillard, Alain Resnais' film on the death camps...
...The June issue of another Catholic journal, Cahiers Universitaires, published an interview with Bernard Comte, a Catholic historian participating in the investigation...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 8
