The trial of 87 year old Maurice Papon in the French city of Bordeaux is more than just that of an individual for crimes against humanity. In the dock is the postwar French political system and its complicity with collaborationists from Marshal Pétain's wartime regime, which today's rulers claim never represented the real France.
Papon was a high ranking Vichy official in occupied Bordeaux in 1942 during that dark period when Vichy played its part in Hitler's final solution. He is accused of being responsible for the deportation of 1,560 Jews about half the city's Jewish population to the notorious concentration camp at Drancy, near Paris, from which they were shipped to the gas chambers in Germany.
His trial has been 16 years in the making. The evidence for Papon's complicity in anti-Semitic crimes first surfaced in the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné during the 1981 presidential election. Papon dismissed them as 'last minute electoral manoeuvres' and successfully sued for libel. Right wing politicians attacked them as a left wing plot.
Papon called for a special inquiry made up of former Resistance figures to clear his name. Experts established that it was well and truly his signature on the deportation documents. At the end of the year the inquiry reported. The judges recognised Papon's status as a resister. But they also stated that he had had to act in ways apparently opposite to what the court deemed honourable behaviour and that he should have resigned in July 1942, at the time of the roundup of the Jews.
Had Papon admitted his regrets there the matter might have lain. But he refused. 'I fulfilled my duties at the risk of life and liberty,' he kept repeating. No doubt he thought he could depend on the charges disappearing for good into the labyrinth of the judicial system. He was nearly proved right.
What changed matters was the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyons, in 1987. This turned the spotlight on the murkier corners of French collaboration with the Nazis and the degree to which some of the most notorious collaborationists had survived in postwar France. One such, Paul Touvier, a notorious accomplice of the Lyons Gestapo, turned out to have been secretly pardoned by Gaullist president Georges Pompidou in 1971. Another, René Bousquet, the equally notorious Vichy chief of police in 1942, turned out to have been protected from justice by his close friend, Socialist president François Mitterrand, who also proved to be a secret admirer of Pétain.
Papon's trial has opened a can of worms. There is not only the question of how a man like Papon could get away with disguising his wartime record and climb into positions of high authority. It also strikes at the sacred symbol of the Liberation itself, General de Gaulle, and the notion that Vichy was a kind of illegitimate interruption of normal French political life. This suits the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen down to the ground. For if Vichy does not have pariah status and the revelations of the trial show the hypocrisy of mainstream politicians then neither does its admirer, the fascist National Front.
Unlike Touvier or Bousquet, Papon's background was not right wing. He was a left leaning republican in the 1930s. Yet, like thousands of others, he opted to serve the new regime on pragmatic grounds better an administration which guaranteed some form of 'order' than no order at all, however distateful the conditions of national humiliation under which Vichy had come into being.
That entailed close daily collaboration with the German authorities in places like Bordeaux, which was in the occupied part of France, though under the independent jurisdiction of Vichy. Once made, the decision to collaborate had no boundaries. Anything could be justified on the grounds that it was a necessary cost of survival. Like thousands of others Papon defended himself by saying, 'I can't stop them doing what they want. But it is preferable for me and my civil servants and my police to carry out their orders, because we at least are French.'
This suggests that the Vichy régime was a helpless pawn, forced to do Germany's bidding. This is not true. Vichy had its own agenda. It rushed to introduce anti-Semitic legislation without any prompting from the Nazis. It wanted to create an authoritarian state which would have its own independent role to play in the supposed New European Order. In particular it hoped to use its empire in North Africa as a bargaining chip with Hitler.
Hitler on the other hand was reliant on Vichy's cooperation. Germany could not easily have held down such a large and populous country as France just by using its own forces. Certainly, as the case of occupied Denmark proves, Vichy could have made the roundup of Jews in France in 1942 as part of the Nazis' extermination plans virtually impossible by refusing to allow for the active participation of its officials and police.
When it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Papon and many other high ranking officials began quietly to distance themselves from the regime. It was a question of knowing when to jump ship. Papon accomplished this perfectly. In May 1944 he allowed himself to be contacted by a representative of de Gaulle, Gaston Cusin. Two days before the liberation of Bordeaux Papon presented the chiefs of police he had summoned to his office to Cusin.
The loyal servant of Vichy was now the loyal servant of the Liberation. Cusin's backing ensured promotion to the position of prefect. He won de Gaulle's enthusiastic backing. He even invented a Resistance past, declaring to the local press that 'he had not worked in the Resistance to perpetuate the privileges and prolong the errors of 1939.' In vain the departmental Liberation Committee complained that Papon had never shown any anti-collaborationist sentiments and that the Bordeaux area showed the highest levels of deportation. France was being reconstructed and Papon was indispensable.
Papon did not look back. By 1956 he became pro-consul in the eastern region of Algeria, where, as the war of national liberation spread, Papon followed orders to 'pacify' the region with exemplary force. Thousands of rebels were killed and hundreds of thousands were driven out of their homes.
His efficiency was rewarded. When the war spread to Paris and the Fourth Republic began to collapse in 1958, Papon was made chief of police. Security was not his only concern. He found time to obtain what had hitherto eluded him a membership card for the Resistance. Papon did not fall with the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle told him to 'hold Paris'. This he did with the utmost brutality. In 1961 the Paris police gunned down Algerian demonstrators protesting against a night time curfew. Those arrested were tortured at police headquarters. Corpses were fished out of the Seine and there were hundreds of suspicious deaths. Papon blocked all attempts to hold an inquiry. In 1962, when the right wing terrorist organisation dedicated to keeping Algeria French injured a child, the Communist Party and the CP led CGT trade union called a protest demonstration. It was charged by the police. Dozens tried to escape by fleeing into the metro station at Charonne: Nine were crushed to death. Papon dismissed all criticism on the grounds that the demonstration was illegal.
His apparently indestructible career as police chief only came to an end in the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of the Moroccan opposition leader, Ben Barka, in the middle of Paris in 1965. With evidence implicating two police officers and other agents, de Gaulle reluctantly demanded that Papon had to quit, but only in 1967. Yet that was not the end of his career. He took up politics after the May 68 events, in which he queried whether the presence of the German anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a return to the occupation!
Elected as an MP in June 1968, he presided over the financial affairs of the National Assembly and in May 1978 had his reward. President Giscard d'Estaing's prime minister, Raymond Barre, made him finance minister.
Papon, then, is not like other Vichy supporters accused of crimes against humanity. He pursued an eminent career in the Fourth and particularly Fifth Republics under the protection of de Gaulle and his successors. His reputation is now not only in tatters as a man who fabricated a Resistance role while colluding with Nazi extermination plans. It seems that the great and the good of the postwar regimes knew and turned a blind eye.
This has created a dilemma for the parliamentary right. For de Gaulle to be shown to have turned a blind eye to the record of those who served under him appears to be a tacit admission that Vichy was an authentic part of French national life. This undermines the myth that de Gaulle was the legitimate voice of France during the war and the claim of his successors to hegemony on the right. Conversely it allows the extreme right to claim that, if national necessity justified anti-alien measures in the past, it does so today. Le Pen has exploited the situation by saying that 'it was more comfortable to resist the Germans from London than in Paris'.
President Jacques Chirac has tried to distance the parliamentary right from contamination with anti-Semitism by apologising for the role played by France in the Second World War. But that is to compound the problem by seemingly going against de Gaulle's assertion that Vichy never acted in the name of France. To counter this, another leading Gaullist, Philippe Séguin, leader of the RPR, has rejected any idea that France was collectively guilty for anti-Semitic persecution. But that does not resolve the dilemma either. Rather it appears to excuse the links between Papon and the Gaullists.
Further controversy has been caused by Giscard d'Estaing, the former president. Interviewed by the Le Monde newspaper, he questioned another sacred tenet of Gaullist orthodoxy the claim that the vast majority of the French followed de Gaulle's lead in resisting German occupation. If there was little resistance to Vichy, then Papon should not be picked on as a scapegoat.
D'Estaing's case, for all its self justification (he did, after all, appoint Papon to high office) raises an important point. Just how widespread was wartime resistance? Did the Resistance play any part in liberating France? Can the French be accused, as the Germans have recently been, of being Hitler's willing executioners?
The truth is that both versions ignore the class element. The French ruling class at the time by and large was not hostile to defeat at Hitler's hands because it smashed the Third Republic and its 'bolshevik excesses'. France's rulers were therefore pro-Vichy and anti-de Gaulle. As Vichy turned increasingly on the working class (it organised sending labour to work in German industry in 1943 and 1944), the Resistance began to grow and with it the influence of the Communist Party.
De Gaulle was cunning enough to realise that he would have to use the CP to provide him with a base, yet contain the Resistance to make France safe for the class interests he championed. He refused to make any public compromises with Vichy, thus keeping his base intact and providing him with an independence in relation to the Allies. At the same time, with victory secure, he was anxious to bring on board any servants of the Vichy regime as a counterweight to popular pressure and as a way of quickly reconstructing the capitalist state machine.
This explained the clash between the Gaullist myth of a nation united in resistance to the Nazis and its puppet Vichy regime, and the reality of the cover up which the Papon trial has brought into the light of day.