News and Letters Editorial--November 1997

The Papon trial and French fascism

After 16 years of legal delays orchestrated from high places to prevent just such an occurrence, the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon finally went on trial in a Bordeaux courtroom on Oct. 8.

Bordeaux was the city where Papon perpetrated his crimes against humanity during the years 1942-44. As a high official of the pro-Nazi Vichy government, he ordered the deportation of over 1,500 Jewish children, women, and men. He sent them to Drancy, a concentration camp outside Paris, from which they went to their deaths at Auschwitz.

These long-suppressed facts about Papon, who later claimed to have been working for the anti-Nazi Resistance, became public only in 1981 when incriminating documents were discovered by researchers. After the war, Papon served in a number of high positions in conservative governments, including in Algeria as a high colonial official, and then in Paris as police chief and later as the nation's budget minister.

During the Occupation, Bordeaux was notorious for the enthusiasm with which its local officials carried out Nazi orders, often going beyond those orders as well. Papon was a central figure in the Bordeaux government, but he was also an impersonal and flexible bureaucrat who would serve whoever was in power.

High former police and government officials have testified as character witnesses for Papon, resulting in a decision by the judge in the case to take the shocking step of releasing him from prison for the duration of the trial, ostensibly for health reasons. In France, such pre-trial release in a serious case is extremely rare, and unprecedented in one involving the murder of 1,500 people.

The Papon trial has once again pointed to the extent of collaboration in World War II France, undermining the myth, carefully preserved for many years by the Right and parts of the Left, that collaborators were a tiny minority, and that the Resistance was widely supported from the beginning.

The trial has also raised questions about the degree of cover-up in postwar France by the Gaullists, who relied on many former Vichy officials like Papon to create their own state apparatus. They needed these ex-Vichy functionaries as a counter-weight to the Left, especially the Communists, who dominated many sectors of the Resistance and who might otherwise have exercised power in many regions.

Additionally, the trial has brought new attention to another sinister period in French history, the repression of opposition during the 1954-62 Algerian War, something in which it has long been known that Papon played a key part. As the Algerian War drew to a close, the Gaullist state, desperate to avoid handing over their former colony to the liberation fighters, lashed out violently at its domestic opponents.

In her memoirs, one of those opponents, the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, singled out Papon's role as Paris police chief in October 1961, when up to 300 Algerians were murdered after attempting to march in Paris against the war:

"The police waited for the Algerians to come up out of the metro stations, made them stand still with their hands above their heads, then hit them with truncheons.... Corpses were found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne, and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine... Ten thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vel' d'Hiv' [stadium], like the Jews in Drancy once before. Again I loathed it all -- this country, myself, the whole world" (Force of Circumstance, p. 599).

Four months later, in February 1962, Papon went too far even for De Gaulle. His men killed five white French citizens at a Communist-led antiwar demonstration. This time, reported de Beauvoir, the French working class began to awaken to the very real fascism in French colors which De Gaulle and Papon were creating. 700,000 workers marched at the funeral of the five protestors while a general strike shut down Paris. After the workers spoke, even Papon had to rein in his dogs.

However, while the five killed in February 1962 became prominent martyrs for the Left, little was done to raise the issue of the 300 Algerians murdered by Papon's men in October 1961. Today, in the wake of the Papon trial, the recently elected Socialist Party-led government has finally agreed to open its archives regarding October 1961.

It is not only the Right, however, whose history is being questioned today. The Socialist Party is still smarting from the revelation three years ago that its most important postwar leader, Francois Mitterrand, was a far rightist in the 1930s, and then worked as a Vichy official until he quit to join the Resistance in 1943.

The Communist Party also has many questions to answer, whether concerning its non-resistance in 1940-41 during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, its apparent execution in the maquis of Pietro Tresso and several other Trotskyists who tried to join the Resistance, or the curious history of its longtime top leader Georges Marchais who never took part in the Resistance, but did join a volunteer brigade of French workers in German factories.

All of these skeletons are beginning to come out of the closet in part because of democratic pressures from below, whether from the massive strikes of 1995-96, the stinging defeat of the conservatives in the 1997 elections, the growing anti-racist movement, or the new militancy shown by the gay movement in the wake of police repression.

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