based on interviews with French, British and German subjects. There was almost nothing in it about the Holocaust and not much about Vichy: its theme was the widespread venality and daily collaboration of the war years: Ophuls was peering behind the self-serving post-war story of resistance. But even this was too much for the authorities in the last year of De Gaulle’s presidency. And not just the authorities: when the film was finally released two years later, not on national television but in a small cinema in Paris’s
It is a point of some note that in France, uniquely, the breakthrough into a more honest engagement with wartime history was the work of
As so often in France in those years, such sentiments probably had more to do with wounded pride than with unadorned racism. As recently as 1939, France had been a major international power. But in three short decades it suffered a shattering military defeat, a demeaning occupation, two bloody and embarrassing colonial withdrawals, and (in 1958) a regime change in the form of a near-coup. La Grande Nation had accumulated so many losses and humiliations since 1914 that the compensatory propensity to assert national honour on every possible occasion had become deeply ingrained. Inglorious episodes—or worse—were best consigned to a memory-hole. Vichy, after all, was not the only thing that the French were in a hurry to put behind them—no-one wanted to talk about the ‘dirty wars’ in Indo-China and Algeria, much less the torture practised there by the army.
De Gaulle’s departure changed little in this respect, even though a younger generation of Frenchmen and - women showed scant interest in national glory and had no personal investment in the myths surrounding France’s recent history. In coming years the French undoubtedly became more aware of the Holocaust and sensitive to Jewish suffering in general—in part thanks to the outrage that followed De Gaulle’s notorious press conference of November 27th 1967, in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, when the French President referred to Jews as ‘a people sure of themselves and domineering’. And the 1985 documentary film
But even though French historians—following in the wake of their foreign colleagues—were now establishing beyond question the overwhelming responsibility of France’s wartime rulers for the fate of Jews deported from French soil, the official French stance never varied. From Georges Pompidou (president from 1969 to 1974) through Valery Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981) and on to Francois Mitterrand (1981-1995), the line remained the same: whatever was done under or by the Vichy regime was the affair of Vichy. Vichy may have taken place in France and been the work of certain Frenchmen. But Vichy was an authoritarian parenthesis in the history of the French Republic. Vichy, in other words, was not ‘France’, and thus France’s public conscience was clear.
President Mitterrand, the last French head of state to experience World War Two as an adult (he was born in 1916), had special reason to maintain this Jesuitical distinction. A former Vichyite civil servant, Mitterrand built his subsequent political career in large measure by obscuring the compromises and ambiguities of his own biography and by projecting those ambiguities onto the country at large. He studiously avoided any reference to Vichy on public occasions; and while he was never reluctant to speak out about the Holocaust in general—whether in Jerusalem in 1982 or at home on the fiftieth anniversary of the July 1942 round-up of 12,884 Parisian Jews—he never let slip any suggestion that this was an affair in which France had debts to pay.
The taboo that Mitterrand enforced, embodied and would surely have taken to his grave was finally broken (as so often in this matter) by a series of trials. In 1994, after nearly fifty years in hiding, Paul Touvier—an activist in Vichy’s wartime Milice—was caught and brought to trial for the murder of seven French Jews in June 1944 near Lyon. In himself Touvier was unimportant: a cog in the Vichy machinery and a collaborator of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo head in Lyon who had been captured and tried in 1987. But Touvier’s trial—and the evidence that came out concerning the Vichy authorities’ collaboration with the Gestapo and their role in the deportation and murder of Jews—served as a kind of
In the wake of Touvier’s condemnation, and in the absence of Bousquet, the French judiciary at last found the courage (after Mitterrand’s death) to inculpate, arrest and prosecute another major figure, Maurice Papon. A sometime government minister and police chief of Paris under De Gaulle, Papon had been employed as secretary- general of the Bordeaux administrative region during the war. This was a purely bureaucratic post, and his stint in Bordeaux in the service of Petain had proven no impediment to Papon’s successful post-war career as a public servant. While in Bordeaux, however, Papon had been directly responsible for authorising the arrest and despatch of the region’s Jews to Paris and thence into deportation. It was for this—now defined under French law as a crime against humanity—that he was placed on trial in 1997.
The Papon trial, which lasted six months, revealed no new evidence—except perhaps about the man himself, who displayed an astonishing absence of pity or remorse. And of course the trial came fifty years too late: too late to punish the octogenarian Papon for his crimes; too late to avenge his victims; and too late to save the honour of his country. A number of French historians, called to testify as expert witnesses, declined to appear. Their task, they insisted, was to recount and explain what had happened in France fifty years before, not deploy that knowledge in a criminal prosecution.[425] But the trial was exemplary nonetheless. It demonstrated conclusively that the fine distinction between ‘Vichy’ and ‘France’ so carefully drawn by everyone from De Gaulle to Mitterrand had never existed. Papon was a Frenchman who served the Vichy regime and the subsequent French Republic: both of which were fully aware of his activities in the Bordeaux prefecture and neither of which was troubled by them.
Moreover, Papon was not alone—indeed both the man and his record were decidedly commonplace. Like so many others, all he had done was sign the death warrants of people he never met and to whose fate he was indifferent. The most interesting thing about Papon’s case (and that of Bousquet, too) was why it had taken official France nearly fifty years to locate them in its midst—and why, at the very end of the century, the crust of silence finally broke open. There are many explanations, not all of them flattering to the French political class or national media. But the passage of time, together with the psychological significance of the ending of an era, is perhaps the most pertinent.
So long as Francois Mitterrand remained in office, he incarnated in his very person the national inability to speak openly about the shame of the occupation. With Mitterrand’s departure, everything changed. His successor, Jacques Chirac, had been just eleven years old when France was liberated in 1944. Within weeks of taking office, on the fifty-third anniversary of the same round-up of Parisian Jews about which Mitterrand had always been so circumspect, President Chirac broke a fifty-year taboo and pointedly acknowledged for the first time his country’s role in the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Ten years later, on March 15th 2005, at the newly inaugurated Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, Chirac’s Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, solemnly declared:
By the end of the twentieth century the centrality of the Holocaust in Western European identity and memory seemed secure. To be sure, there remained those occasional individuals and organisations—‘revisionists’—who
