Herbert R. Lottman: The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators After World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 3, 1986.
In 1940, Charles de Gaulle set out to make a political revolution in France. For years he had judged a revolution necessary. Parliamentary republicanism was failing to act decisively to defend the country against Nazi ambitions. When Hitler’s troops circumvented the Maginot Line, occupied northern France, and allowed the establishment of a collaborationist French government under the elderly Marshall Pétain in southern France, de Gaulle escaped to London. As the only member of the last administration of the Third Republic to oppose surrender, he established France Libre, a government-in-exile with himself at its head. De Gaulle intended France Libre not only to participate in an Allied victory over the Axis and the liberation of the occupied territories, but to found a new republican regime with a strong executive capable of assuming responsibility for France, and especially for its military and foreign policies. With its petty intrigues and vacillation, parliamentarism had prevented France from achieving the greatness de Gaulle insisted was in her, and at last could not even protect France from conquest.
Simply to participate in the liberation and to restore parliamentary government were ambitions at that moment beyond the average Frenchman, and the average French politician. De Gaulle’s enterprise assured him unusually big obstacles. Man of the French who joined him in London would have opposed de Gaulle’s envisioned new form of republicanism, had he been so foolish as to make his intention explicit. President Roosevelt reacted badly to de Gaulle’s uncompromising independence, and spent much of the war trying to arrange for his replacement with some more pliable soul. At home, both Right and Left had their own revolutions to pursue.
The Right, still anti-republican a century-and-a-half after 1789, generally supported Pétain and at first admired Hitler. The Left, after enthusiastically supporting the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler, just as enthusiastically joined the Resistance after Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the Soviets in 1941. French Communists intended to use the Resistance as a vehicle for their own revolution against ‘fascism,’ which they imagined to be as much a product of capitalism as they claimed parliamentarism was. Finally, and predictably, the majority of the French little understood or cared about political ambitions, noble or base. While not actively collaborating with the Nazis, they passively cooperated, hoping for liberation while not seeing much they could do to effect it, and in the meantime wishing to be left alone by their occupiers.
The French purge of collaborators after the war must be seen in this political context. In his sensible, journalistic history of the purge, Herbert R. Lottman rightly begins by observing that “the liberation of France also liberated anger.” Having returned to Paris from the French colonial city of Algiers, where he established himself after his initial stint in London, de Gaulle gave rein to just enough of that anger to quicken justice, while reining it firmly enough to reestablish the rule of law in the midst of war.
In his radio broadcasts before his return, de Gaulle had rarely called for vengeance. He left that to lesser France Libre spokesmen, thus availing himself of popular anger while carefully distancing himself from it. De Gaulle had his allies among the Resistants criticize the circulation of blacklists within occupied France. In this moderation he received fortuitous help from the Communists, late in the war, whose leadership was told by Moscow in June 1944 “that the liberation would not be accompanied by revolution,” and therefore abstained from widespread terror.
In a risky but necessary and successful move, while still in Algiers de Gaulle gave his “Regional Commissioners of the Republic” near-absolute power—executive, legislative, and judicial—precisely to establish the rule of law by extraordinary means, simultaneously denying power to both the Allied armies and Stalin’s Communists. “Above all,” Lottman writes, the Commissioners “were to represent the ‘new spirit’ of post-Vichy France.” Consistent with that spirit, de Gaulle took a strong but not dictatorial position, establishing a system of laws and courts of law in consultation with representatives of centrist political parties and Resistants, particularly the Christian Democrats.
Ever as pragmatic in life as dogmatic in their theorizing, the French restrained themselves. Lottman does not overlook the “few instances of personal revenge,” illegal shootings, and even torture, but he insists that were indeed few, even in the first, anarchic days of liberation. Summary courts martial scarcely reached the highest standards of legal due process, but they probably averted mob violence, and did in fact acquit many individuals. The French bought time for themselves until, “slowly, step by step, the central authority (which was now Charles de Gaulle and his ministers) transferred their headquarters…to Paris, curbed the anarchy, and dominated.” As Justice Commissioner François de Menthon said at the time, “Tomorrow, when one looks back at the way the purge was carried out in France, we won’t have to blush.” The “Commissioner of the Republic” in Lyon, a Socialist with firm Communist ties, spoke more for the spirit of republicanism than for any leftist ideology when he cautioned, “Wrong opinions are never punishable…. The purge must have its limits, both in time and in its very concept. Otherwise, ‘a pure man always finds a purer man to purify him.'” It is hard not to suspect that the French had learned something from the French Revolution, after all.
Although some of the many surviving collaborationists have claimed that deaths numbered over 100,000, and the historian Robert Aron estimates between thirty and forty thousand, Lottman agrees with the estimate cited by de Gaulle in his War Memoirs and corroborated by subsequent researchers: 10, 842 deaths, most of them after some sort of trial. As in so much else, republican government with the rule of law, even a shaky rule of law, proved far less sanguinary than does state terrorism by ideological fanatics, Right and Left. France actually saw fewer postwar arrests and convictions per capita than did liberated Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway.
If anything, one might call the purge too lenient, and surely too uneven. Newspaper columnists were among the first to be tried, and a few were executed, but wealthy businessmen for the most part escaped personal injury. (It is true that businessmen would contribute rather more to France’s economic recovery than journalists could; this suggest the unfanatical—some would say cynical—wink that accompanies so much Gallic bombast.) No major literary or other artists stood trial for collaboration—not even the despicable Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had complained during the war that the Nazis were not killing enough Jews. Sentimentality about artists is as French as doctrinairism and cynicism, but more appealing than either. The French know that artists can correct one another; Lottman tells the story of the old Fauviste painter Maurice de Vlaminck, who, visiting Germany during the Occupation, saw a painting by a Nazi-approved artist, “stepped back, then commented, ‘Looking at that, you see how people lose a war.'”
Despite many injustices, some nearly inevitable and some not, Lottman concludes that “the French need not be ashamed of their purge.” They nonetheless prefer not to discuss it, and this too marks them as a civilized people. The war set those obedient to republican laws and principles against those obedient to the laws of Vichy; the purge attempted to discriminate between the merely obedient and the enthusiasts of collaboration. This task was necessary, difficult, and in some respects impossible. A police official in the small town of Bayeux “pointed out that in a township of four hundred inhabitants it would be possible to arrest five or six persons for collaborationist activity–or ten times that number, and still remain moderate.” The irremediable imprecision of such judgments, and the painfully unlike consequences of them for citizens of villages all over France, make a certain degree of forgetting more than discreet. After the failure of the Fourth, and still parliamentarian, Republic in 1958, de Gaulle and his successors wisely preferred to celebrate France Libre and the Resistance, leaving the purge to students of history.
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