In the aftermath of the Allied liberation of France, the
poet Louis Aragon, mimicking his medieval forebear François
Villon while channeling a despondent collaborator in the 1945
ballad “The Snows of Sigmaringen,” famously asked not “Where are
the snows of yesteryear?” but “Where are my henchmen of
yesteryear [Où sont mes sbires d’autrefois]?” It appears
that Aragon’s question will finally be answered in full, albeit
70 years after the restoration of the French Republic, as it has
recently been announced that in 2015 the classified police
archives on French collaboration with the Nazi authorities will
be exposed to the light of day. No longer to be confined to
cardboard boxes ensconced in the basement of the Parisian
Musée des Collections Historiques de la Préfecture de
Police, these documents, including thousands of
names, police logs, and interviews relating to this parlous era
in French history, are to be scanned and made available on the
Internet as soon as the 75-year post-war classification order
(which on passage was made retroactive to 1940) has run its
course.
Though few of the Nazi abettors and
Vichystes named in the files will be
among the living by the time the archives appear online in their
unexpurgated form, the publication of these Second World War-era
annals nevertheless will represent a significant event in a
country that has long been engaged in a Gallic counterpart to
Germany’s so-called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or
“struggle to come to terms with the past.” It was a struggle that
began with the bloody post-war épurations (judicial and
extrajudicial purges), continued over the subsequent decades, and
figures to extend to 2015 and beyond, intermittently capturing
the attention of the nation, the continent, and the world.
The French body politic has long come in for criticism for
its handling of the legacies of the period between 1940 and 1944,
and with good reason. It is genuinely astounding that
François Mitterrand, the 21st president of the French
Republic, could ever have insisted that France “was never
involved” in the discrimination against and deportation of its
Jewish population. One need only have considered the events
surrounding the infamous mid-July 1942 Rafle du
Vélodrome d’Hiver (the Vel’ d’Hiv
Police Roundup), in which French gendarmes and civil servants
were complicit in the detention and deportation of some 13,152
men, women, and children bound for Auschwitz, or the
administrative actions of Louis Darquier
de Pellepoix, the odious Vichy Commissioner of Jewish
Affairs, to know better than to maintain such a
position.
Such outrageous historical myopia was (and is) only a few
steps removed from outright negationism, and constituted a
profound disservice to the French nation. As Tony Judt put it,
“the tortured, long-denied and serially incomplete memory of
France’s war – of the Vichy regime and its complicitous,
pro-active role in Nazi projects, above all the Final
Solution…back-shadowed all of Europe’s post-war efforts to come
to terms with World War Two and the Holocaust.” Measures like the
release of the Préfecture de Police
archives are meant to dispel the “shadow of a lie” cast by
statements like that of Mitterrand, or the government suppression
of the broadcast of Marcel Ophuls’ 1969 revelatory documentary
Le Chagrin et la Pitié
(The Sorrow and the Anger). Much work has had to
be done. Even as late as 1976, the French Ministry of Veterans’
Affairs was requesting changes to a memorial for French victims
at Auschwitz on the grounds that the listed names “lacked a
properly French resonance,” while in 2005 the French Foreign
Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy was reported to have
queried, during an official visit to
Yad Vashem, whether English Jews were also deported
to death camps. Events like these gave the
distinct impression that the realities of the Holocaust had yet
to fully penetrate the French psyche.
Previous efforts, to be fair, had been made to address the
legacy of French collaborationism, including the extrajudicial
justice meted out to between 8,000 and 9,000
individuals in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the
300,000 official investigations and 124,613 sentences passed down
(including 6,763 death sentences, 767 of which were carried out,
and the stripping of civil rights of 5,000 more). Yet the “Jewish
dimension” was all to often ignored, and it was only decades
later, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, that the most
notorious of the anti-Semitic collaborators — Klaus Barbie, Paul
Touvier, René Bousquet, and Jean Leguay —
would be investigated and tried. By 1990 the tide was turning, as
evidenced by the Gayssot Act, which (controversially from a
free-speech standpoint) made Holocaust denial a criminal offense,
and by 1995 President Jacques Chirac had publicly admitted
that those “black hours will stain our history forever and are an
injury to our past and our traditions.” France, “home of the
Enlightenment and the Rights of Man,” had committed “the
irreparable,” but the reckoning had begun in earnest.
By 1999 a Commission pour l’indemnisation
des victimes de spoliations (Commission for the
Compensation of Victims of Spoliation) had been founded, which
over the following decade would award €453,428,986
to claimants, with an average of €28,700 per application. Claims
for reparations would lead to the seminal Conseil
d’État (Counsel of State) decision on February 16, 2009
(N° 315499) concerning the damages of
“Mme Madeleine A” and “M.
Joseph B,” in which the executive branch officially
acknowledged its “state responsibility” for the “absolute break
with the values and principles [rupture absolue
avec les valeurs et principes]” of the republic
that occurred during the years of the Occupation. Moreover, the
Council of State called for monetary awards to be supplemented by
a “solemn remembrance of the collective harm suffered by those
victims [reconnaissance solennelle du
préjudice collectivement subi par ces
personnes]” on the part of the French
government and its people. It is hoped that the release of the
police archives will enable policymakers, researchers, and
ordinary citizens to accomplish precisely that.
One notes with interest the noticeable up-tick of interest
in this era of French history during what is now the 70th
anniversary of the German invasion. The historian and member of
the Académie française Pierre
Nora has gone so far as to denounce the ongoing
“obsession commemorative” that
has led to bookstore display shelves groaning under stacks of
freshly-published studies of the la
défaite française, including Claude Quétel’s
L’Impardonnable défaite (The Unpardonable
Defeat) and Jacques Sapir, Frank Stora and Loïc
Mahé’s Et si la France avait continué la
guerre… (And if France had continued the
war…). In a country whose reading public has in recent years
voraciously devoured Suite française
and other rediscovered masterpieces of the French novelist
and Holocaust victim Irène Némirovsky, and whose
populace (excepting Jean-Marie Le
Pen and his Holocaust-denying ilk) have
exhibited a newfound readiness to grapple with the legacy of the
Final Solution in France, it would seem that a corner has been
turned.
While anti-Semitism remains a serious concern in modern
France, with the Jewish Community Protection Service
reporting 832 anti-Semitic incidents in France in
2009, as compared with 474 such incidents in 2008,
and while Franco-Israeli relations are prone to diplomatic
friction and irritation, one imagines that a complete reckoning
of the crimes committed during the Occupation, a reckoning
enabled by the release of the police archives, will help ensure
that those “henchmen of yesteryear” are named and shamed (however
belatedly). They can then, as Aragon hoped, posthumously “head
away to shame.” The present-day French body politic can only
benefit from such an accounting. As former Prime Minister
Jean-Pierre Raffarin admitted in a 2005 speech at the Holocaust
Museum in Jerusalem, France “is bound forever by the debt she has
incurred,” but any action that serves in some small way to
discharge that debt is to be welcomed.
