Half a century later, most Frenchmen would rather not know what went on during the “black years” of the wartime Vichy regime. In a nation where history is treasured, where almost every hamlet has a monument to the dead of two world wars, France’s collaboration in the crimes of its German occupiers was all but ignored for decades after World War II. “The dominant view was that all good Frenchmen were part of the Resistance. Vicky was carted in by the Germans … and the Vichy officials did all they could to put the brakes on,” says American historian Robert Paxton, an authority on the Vichy regime.
Now the French are slowly coming to terms with the legacy of Vichy. Last week an appeals court ordered police surveillance for Paul Touvier, 78, a Vichy official awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. The first real debate over French complicity with the occupation began with the 1983 capture of German fugitive Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyons. Barbie was tried and convicted of war crimes in 1987, and a revisionist view began to challenge the old orthodoxy: Vichy was a French creation; members of the Resistance were a small minority-and as many as 76,000 Jews were deported with the willing assistance of French officials.
This year, l’oubli (the forgetfulness) was supposed to be dispelled even more by the trial of a Frenchman, Rene Bousquet, 84, the Vichy police chief who sent thousands of Jews to Germany. But last month Bousquet was shot dead by a vigilante, and France was robbed of what might have been its last, best chance to confront its past. “The Bousquet trial would have freed us from ’the Vichy syndrome’,” say French historian Henry Rousso. “It would have forced us to answer the question: how could France have become that?”
The crimes of Vichy were hushed up after the war, when political leaders who had collaborated with the Germans made common cause with the victorious Charles de Gaulle, who wanted to heal the wounds of a divided nation-and keep communist members of the Resistance from gaining political power. The conspiracy of silence lasted for more than a generation. In 1971, President Georges Pompidou secretly pardoned Touvier, Barbie’s French lieutenant in Lyons, on war-crimes charges. “Isn’t it time,” Pompidou asked, “to throw a veil over this period when French killed French?” It wasn’t until last year that President Francois Mitterrand conceded publicly that “the French state”–Vichy–had actively cooperated in the deportation of Jews and Gypsies.
With Bousquet’s death, almost no one is left to answer for any of Vichy’s atrocities. Last year Touvier stood trial on crimes-against-humanity charges. He had admitted ordering the execution of seven Jews. But a three-judge panel acquitted him, ruling that seven deaths were too few for a crime against humanity. Public outrage led to new charges.
He could be tried again as early as next year, though his lawyers will try to delay it. Touvier is in poor health, and even if he lives long enough to stand trial, Vichy’s ghosts will not be exorcised. “A Bousquet trial would have put Vichy on trial; he ran the system [of deportations],” says Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. “A Touvier trial will just put Touvier on trial.”
As a nation, the French are no more eager to learn about their war-time failings than are the Japanese. Only 200 to 300 people visit the Lyons museum each day, mostly high-school students on field trips. Two new movies about the era-including a docu-drama on the life of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the World War I hero who led the Vichy collaboration with Hitler have had more success with critics than with ordinary moviegoers. The national archives still refuse to release records on the Vichy period, citing privacy laws.
Right-wing organizations still hoist portraits of Petain in their parades. And even the mainstream French have difficulty dealing with people regarded as aliens. Last month the National Assembly passed a tough new bill restricting the right of foreigners to enter and reside in France. Klarsfeld points out that under the legislation. “children born on French soil to immigrants could be returned to their parents’ country of origin” if they commit certain crimes. “That’s called deportation,” says Klarsfeld. Undoubtedly many of his countrymen will fail to see any connection.
