Paris After the Liberation: 1944 - 1949 (15 page)

Some stories are so terrible that they are hard to believe. Roger Codou, a Communist veteran of the International Brigades, reached Lyons in October 1944. He had been summoned back by the party from Algeria, officially to work in the Cabinet of the Communist minister, Charles Tillon, but also to help set up a secret factory in Paris for manufacturing false papers. In Lyons, a Communist major from the FTP looked after him. During their time together he took Codou out to the military airfield of Bron. In August, the Germans had massacred 109 prisoners from Montluc prison on the runway, now used by French bombers flying over enemy territory ahead of de Lattre’s 1st Army. One of the pilots asked: ‘Have you got any customers for us tonight?’ The major then explained to Codou that, as a fitting punishment for traitors, any Vichyist prisoners acquitted by the courts in Lyons were kidnapped, bound and gagged, then taken to the airfield after dark and put in the bomb-bay of an aircraft on top of the bombs. They were then dropped on ‘their friends’ during the next sortie. Nearly fifty years later, Codou still did not know whether this was a ghastly revelation or told only to shock.

The scale and nature of the
épuration
are bitterly contested to this day. The wildest figures – 100,000 to 120,000 victims during the Occupation and after the Liberation – have long been discredited. Yet although the difference between the estimates has now narrowed considerably – approximately 10,800 according to the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, and around 14,000 to 15,000 according to Henri Amouroux – strong disagreements remain. They reflect the conflicting attitudes of two generations – the older one, which experienced the dilemmas and sought to justify many of the compromises; and the younger one, which refused to condone Vichy’s assistance in deporting Jews to Germany.

There is, however, a general agreement that some 39,000 French were executed during the Occupation. Out of that figure, the Milice probably killed between 2,000 and 3,000– a tenth of the total, or less. The Milice was without doubt responsible for a large proportion of the other deaths, having in many cases provided information. Nevertheless, nobody can yet give an accurate idea of how many French men and women were betrayed to the Germans by the French of Vichy, or simply by neighbours with a grudge.

The battle lines of the debate have tended to concentrate on how many people were killed by the Resistance. This turns on the huge problem of defining the whole process. Do you include the settling of private accounts? Do you include the victims of criminal gangs who operated under Resistance colours?

The figures in certain areas are still contested. The
département
of the Seine, with the city of Paris, had the greatest population. Yet the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent lists a total of only 208 killings by members of the Resistance during the war, of which fifty-seven took place after the Liberation. And while it is true that there were no mass killings in the capital, there were countless deaths in suspicious circumstances in the sixteen months following the Liberation. For example, from September 1944 there was a very marked increase in the number of deaths listed as ‘violent death of undetermined nature’. From August 1944 until the end of the year they amounted to 424, while in the five months before the Liberation there had been only 259 cases. Murder by firearm more than doubled, from forty-two cases in 1943 to 107 in 1944.

How, for example, does one classify the case of the blacklisted publisher Denoël, who had brought out Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit
in 1932 and more recently the work of the pro-Nazi polemicist Lucien Rebatet? Denoël, a Belgian, was found killed beside his car in December 1945. This may well have been a common crime, for there were many that particular winter, but one cannot rule out the possibility that the motive was political.

The
épuration sauvage
throughout France was not a phenomenon which burnt itself out within a couple of months of the Liberation. There was another surge of killings in January and February 1945, perhaps influenced by the fears raised during the Ardennes offensive. A larger wave, however, occurred in June 1945, following the shock of the deportees returning from the prison, labour and concentration camps. Many returning prisoners had scores to settle. Almost any Vichy official was at risk, however indirect his involvement in the policy of sending workers or prisoners to Germany. Others were frequently regarded as guilty simply for having supported a regime capable of sending French men and women to such a fate.

According to the less than comprehensive files of the Renseignements Généraux, the number of assassinations ‘
de caractère politique
’ did not begin to tail off until the second part of August 1945. Between 3 July and 13 August there had been 410 killings in a total of twenty
départements
. A small revival was recorded later in October. The most striking statistic, however, is revealed in the detailed figures for the week of 13 August 1945. Out of thirty-seven killings, thirty-three were carried out by explosives. Unfortunately, this is the only week for which such a breakdown is provided. One must of course be extremely wary of reading too much into it; yet perhaps it sheds light on the curiously high number of people listed as dead from‘gas explosions’.

In the Archives de la Ville de Paris, figures for causes of death in the metropolis are scrupulously broken down, even if the categories are not always consistent. From September 1944 the casualties from gas explosions increased dramatically. In 1942, 184 people died in gas explosions during September, October and December. In 1943,183 died during this period. But in 1944, no fewer than 660 died. Even allowing for pipes fractured during the fighting and the frequent interruptions of supply, it is hard to explain such a massive rise. The possibility must be acknowledged that a portion of the German demolition charges, discovered at the time of General von Choltitz’s surrender, might have been used for ‘popular justice’, or private revenge, with the explosions listed in the most convenient category by officials later.

Alfred Fabre-Luce wrote that ‘France is a country where, in revolutionary times, hysteria is tempered by corruption.’ Although partly true of many upheavals, this view is unduly cynical in the case of France in 1944. The restraint on hysteria came almost entirely from examples of physical and moral courage, men and women standing up and daring to say that it was wrong to punish people without a proper trial.

The real argument in the historical debate is essentially a question of degree. How brutal was the
épuration sauvage
in its context? If the reaction after the occupation of France is compared with those of the other occupied countries of north-western Europe – Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway – the
épuration
in France was ‘moderate’, according to Jean-Pierre Rioux. His colleague Henry Rousso has argued, on the other hand, that if one compares the number of executions with the number of French who served in German uniform, then it was much harsher than elsewhere. Accurate atrocity figures are of course vital, but the debate they inspire can quickly turn into a moral quagmire.

The euphoric welcome accorded to General de Gaulle when he marched down the Champs-Élysées appeared to confirm his authority as unchallengeable. But the relationship between the provisional government and the Resistance was still unresolved. French Communists had rightly suspected during the Occupation that his policy, aided by the British, was to ‘deform’ the popular nature of the Resistance and ‘prevent at any price a true national insurrection’. They even tried to claim that the Allies had held back from Paris in August 1944 in the hope that the Germans would crush the largely Communist-inspired insurrection. This was also a shameless attempt to counter criticism of the Red Army’s failure to come to the aid of Polish nationalists during the Warsaw uprising.

De Gaulle, with a great deal of justification, was convinced that the Communists had wanted to seize power just before Leclerc’s troops reached the city. ‘De Gaulle,’ wrote Georgi Dimitrov in a briefing for Molotov and Stalin, ‘is afraid of the French Communists and considers their activity a threat to his authority, but he is obliged to take into consideration their power established during the clandestine struggle.’

Even after the triumph of the Liberation, the provisional government’s authority remained tenuous, especially in the provinces, cut off from the capital by the destruction of roads, bridges and railway lines. De Gaulle also knew that if France was to have any claim to a seat at the conference table alongside the Americans, British and Russians, then all her available troops, both regular army and freshly brigaded FFI contingents, had to make a conspicuous contribution to the war effort by continuing the advance on Germany. He therefore could not hold back regular troops to assure law and order. This also meant leaving in place the rest of the FFI and ‘patriotic militias’, which often contained the least reliable and the most politicized elements.

Travelling across France was not easy, even for a government official with car, petrol coupons and every
laissez-passer
imaginable. At towns and villages, vehicles would be stopped by militiamen or a sort of ‘committee of public safety’ who would not only study the documents of all passengers in laborious detail but often subject them to an examination in patriotism. Paris, like Madrid in 1936, may have had great symbolic importance, but decrees issued there carried little weight in the countryside, especially in the south-west.

Well before the invasion of Normandy, General de Gaulle and his entourage had foreseen the main problems they would face. Several months before D-Day they had begun to select men to take over from Vichy officials in the provinces and re-establish Republican legality before it was usurped by revolutionary committees.

The provisional government could never hope to produce a fresh and untainted state apparatus to drop into place all over France. It had to work with existing institutions, most of them compromised. To curb the excesses of popular justice, gendarmes, even if they had worked with the Germans, were needed on the streets. The vast majority of magistrates who had sworn allegiance to Marshal Pétain would have to return to their courtrooms. Civil servants who had loyally served the Vichy régime were required back at their desks. And to revive the pulverized economy, factories had to be restarted with managers who had in many cases collaborated with the Germans. The instruments charged with this difficult programme, each responsible for a region, were called Commissaires de la République.

Their first priority was to provide food and essential services for the population. Claude Bouchinet-Serreulles, who remained with the Ministry of the Interior as Commissaire de la République at large, emphasized that food was the key to almost everything. Without it, public order would collapse.

Neither law nor order existed in many areas during the first few months of the
épuration
. In November, some twenty former members of the Resistance broke into a prison. They seized a colonel who had commanded a reprisal expedition against the
maquis
and, contemptuously ignoring the fact that he had been spared the death sentence by de Gaulle, shot him in a nearby field. Louis Closon in the north of France had to cope with 30,000 liberated Red Army prisoners of war who had ‘a provoking attitude, considering themselves to be in conquered territory’. But probably the most chaotic situation in the whole of France existed in the south-west, around Toulouse.

‘At the time of the Liberation,’ wrote the philosopher A. J. Ayer, on a semi-official tour of the south-west for SOE, ‘the whole of the area was in the hands of a series of feudal lords whose power and influence was strangely similar to that of their fifteenth-century Gascon counterparts.’

One of the most powerful of these modern barons was Colonel George Starr, the senior SOE officer in the south-west of France. Starr was an immensely tough man, a mining engineer who had proved a strong military leader and whose popularity had been immeasurably increased when he was able to arm most of the
maquis
in south-west France with air drops from England. Another was Colonel Serge Asher-Ravanel, an Alpinist, a Communist and a graduate of the École Polytechnique, who by the age of twenty-five had proved himself one of the most inspired warriors of the French Resistance.

In Toulouse itself, there were many armed bands which included large numbers of foreigners, mostly Spanish Republicans, but also Georgian deserters from General Vlassov’s renegade army. The Spanish Communists, meanwhile, were plotting an invasion of the Val d’Aran, which took place in October. Some 3,000 men organized in twelve guerrilla brigades crossed the frontier, hoping to stir a national rising across Spain, but they did not last long once the Spanish Foreign Legion had been let loose after them.

‘Toulouse was the souk for all sorts of adventurers,’ remarked Jacques Baumel of the Combat Resistance movement. Not all the groups were left-wing. A colonel of extreme anti-Communist views tried to seize the border area and link up with General Franco’s forces. He was reputed to be the main organizer of the ‘
maquis blanc
’, which owed allegiance to the Comte de Paris.

Pierre Bertaux, Commissioner of the Republic for the region, knew the area well, having been a professor at the university before the war. He found himself sitting in an empty Prefecture, ignored by everyone except a few
naphtalinés
– mainly Pétainist army officers who had earned the name by joining the Resistance at the eleventh hour, in uniforms reeking of mothballs. When Colonel Starr came to see him, it was to make the point that he took his orders from the Allied chain of command, not from an as yet unrecognized provisional government.