Police and Politics in Marseille, 1936-1945

Editors

Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland) John France (University of Wales, Swansea) Michael S. Neiberg (United States Army War College, Pennsylvania) Frederick Schneid (High Point University, North Carolina)

VOLUME 95

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hw Police and Politics in Marseille, 1936-1945

Simon Kitson

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Marseille, 1943: evacuation of the Vieux Port district (Référence Reportage: DAT 591 L12) © ECPAD/France/GEBAUER.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kitson, Simon. Police and politics in Marseille, 1936-1945 / by Simon Kitson. pages cm. -- (History of warfare, ISSN 1385-7827 ; volume 95) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-24835-9 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-26523-3 (e-book) 1. Police--France- -Marseille--History--20th century. 2. Police--Political activity--France--Marseille--History--20th century. 3. World War, 1939-1945--France--Marseille. 4. Marseille (France)--Politics and government--20th century. 5. Marseille (France)--History, Military--20th century. 6. Marseille (France)--Social conditions--20th century. 7. Front populaire--History. 8. France--Politics and government--1940-1945. I. Title. HV8206.M36K58 2014 363.209449’1209044--dc23 2014002467

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

Acknowledgements vi List of Abbreviations viii A Note on Sources x A Note on the Organisation of the Police xi

Introduction 1

1 From Hope to Disappointment: The Police Experience of the Popular Front 8

2 Marseille Chicago 38

3 Enthusiasm and Co-operation: The Start of the Vichy Government 65

4 Policing Opposition 86

5 Anti-Semitic Policing 107

6 The Hunt for German Spies 125

7 Ripping the Heart out of Marseille 149

8 Disaffection and Unreliability 163

9 The New Slave Trade 186

10 New Rivals 209

11 Towards Liberation 229

12 A New Police for a New France? 244

Conclusion 269 Bibliography 291 Index 303

Contents Contents—v Acknowledgements—vi List of Abbreviations—viii A Note on Sources—x A Note on the Organisation of the Police—xi Introduction—1 From Hope to Disappointment: The Police Experience of the Popular Front—8 Marseille Chicago—38 Enthusiasm and Co-operation: The Start of the Vichy Government—65 Policing Opposition—86 Anti-Semitic Policing —107 The Hunt for German Spies—125 Ripping the Heart Out of Marseille—149 Disaffection and Unreliability—163 The New Slave Trade—186 New Rivals—209 Towards Liberation—229 A New Police for a New France?—244 Conclusion—269 Bibliography—291 Index—303 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Brill publishers for bringing this book out. I have really enjoyed working with them and I wish, in particular, to thank Julian Deahl and Marcella Mulder. The research for this book, spread over 22 years, would have been impossible without the financial support offered by the British Academy and subsequently by the Society for the Study of French History. My interest in this period was first developed at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, where the atmosphere and attention of tutors, especially Graham Gargett, was invaluable. The exceptional enthusiasm and intelligence of Rod Kedward, my supervisor at Sussex, kept alive this interest and helped stimulate it further. I have trouble imagining a better thesis supervisor. I would also like to thank Professors Mark Mazower and Clive Emsley for their helpful input as examiners of the thesis. Like all Marseille scholars of my generation I acknowledge the unfloundering support of Christian Oppetit in the contemporary section of the departmental archives. Oppetit combined not only a sensitive concern to the needs of the historian, but also an exhaustive knowledge both of the archives he directed and of the history of Marseille. The active help and encouragement of local historians was of particular importance to me. In this vein I would like to thank: Jean-Marie Guillon, Robert Mencherini, Pierre Guiral (U), Madeleine Baudoin(U), Grégoire Georges-Picot, Giovanni Paris, Paul Jankowski and David Levy, all of whom were ready to discuss my project and to offer advice. All of those whom I interviewed or who agreed to send me their written evidence deserve a special thank you. On a national level, the Archives Nationales made a large number of documents available to me and in this respect I should particularly like to thank Chantal Bonazzi, Jean Favier and Anita Maison. The Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale et Contemporaine let me use their facilities as did the Centre de Documentation Juive et Contemporaine where I am especially grateful to Vidar Jacobsen. The Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent allowed me access to their documentation centre, but also actively encouraged my work and gave me the opportunity to present some of my ideas in the framework of their seminars on Justice and Repression. I am especially indebted to Denis Peschanski. With regard to the Police, the support offered by the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Sécurité Intérieure was invaluable. Their regular seminars gave me the opportunity to meet other Police scholars whilst their documentation centre allowed me to peruse a vast literature on all matters relating to the Police. Particular thanks are due to Catherine Gorgeon, Jean-Claude Salomon and in particular to Jean-Marc Berlière, Acknowledgements vii

France’s leading specialist on questions related to Police history. The help of the IHESI was particularly useful in gaining me access to the archives of the Commissariat Central in Marseille where I was aided by M. Ottavi, Mme Paul and Inspecteur d’Al Colletto. Mme Paul also helped me gain access to the resource centre of the Ecole Nationale de la Police near Lyon, where I should like to thank Mme Thomas. Thanks to René Levy I was able to make use of the documentation centre at the Centre d’Etudes Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Instances Pénales. Xavier Rousseaux kindly made a couple of articles known to me. Marie-Thérèse Vogel introduced me to the rich archives of the Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs. For useful discussions, suggestions or contacts I am grateful to Jacques Delarue, Alain Pinel and Alain Guyomarch. For offering me accommodation in Marseille and showing me the complexities of the city, I am grateful to Françoise Petit, Jacqueline and Annie-Paule Djian. For making the archives a fun place to work in, I owe a special mention to Peter Jackson, Talbot Imlay, Martin Thomas, Becky Pulju and Shannon FOGG. For many fruitful discussions I am indebted to Jackie Clarke, Joan Tum- blety and Hanna Diamond. A particular note of gratitude must be offered to Mark Ledbury who I spent 11 years at school with in Bath and 4 years at Univer- sity with in Sussex. I was best man at his wedding and he was best man at mine. His constant revelations about the relationship between Sedaine and David were a source of amusement. Mark and Cathou Mehta are also long standing sources of support. I am sure that all academics will be acutely aware of the importance of having good colleagues and good managers working together in a collegiate atmosphere. Superb colleagues at the University of Birmingham and the University of Auckland created a fertile environment in which to be an academic and in these institutions I especially wish to thank Martyn Cornick, Christine Arkin- stall and Jean-Jacques Courtine. Miles Taylor at the Institute of Historical Research is owed a special thank you for allowing me to become a Senior Research Fellow of that wonderful Institute. The world class ‘Queen Mary team’ of Julian Jackson, Colin Jones, Jeremy Jennings and Miri Rubin were invaluable sources of support during my time at the University of London’s Institute in Paris (ULIP). A final word of thanks is extended to my family: my mother Ann, my sisters Debbie and Nicci and my brother Jem, my nieces Saskia and Freya, my neph- ews William and Timmy, my cousin Jenny and of course my wife Kate for her consistent support and help. I’d like to dedicate this book to my son, Laurie, and daughter, Gaby.

Simon Kitson Auckland, New Zealand, August 2013 viii List of Abbreviations used in this ManuscriptList of Abbreviations List of Abbreviations

AD Archives Départementales AN Archives Nationales BCRA Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Militaire) BDIC Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine BDR Bouches-du-Rhône CAA Commission Allemande d’Armistice CAC Centre d’Archives Contemporaines, Fontainebleau CD Commissaire Divisionnaire CDJC Centre de Documentation Juive et Contemporaine CDL Comité Départemental de Libération CGQJ Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives CGT Confédération Générale du Travail CIE Centre d’Information et d’Etudes CNI Commissariat National à l’Intérieur CNR Conseil National de la Résistance CRS Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité CT Contrôle Technique DSA Direction des Services de l’Armistice FFI Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur FRS Force Républicaine de Sécurité FTP (F) Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (Français) GMR Groupe Mobile de Réserve GP Groupes de Protection GPRF Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Française GRM Garde Républicaine Mobile IGS (A) Inspection Générale des Services (Administratifs) IHESI Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Sécurité Intérieure IHTP Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent LVF Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme MOI Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée MP Milices Patriotiques MUR Mouvements Unis de la Résistance NAP Noyautage des Administrations Publiques PCF Parti Communiste Français PDG Président Directeur Général PJ Police Judiciaire List of Abbreviations ix

PN Police Nationale PPF Parti Populaire Français PQJ Police aux Questions Juives PRE Police Régionale d’Etat PRO Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London RG Renseignements Généraux SAP Section des Affaires Politiques SD Sicherheitsdienst (Security service) SEC Section d’Enquête et Contrôle SIPO Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police) SN Sûreté Nationale SOL Service d’Ordre Légionnaire SSS Service des Sociétés Secrètes ST Surveillance du Territoire STO Service du Travail Obligatoire x A note on sources A Note on Sources A Note on Sources

Since 1991 this author has been actively researching questions of policing and counter-espionage during the Vichy period. The aim of this research was to get behind the polemics and to give as honest a presentation of the subject matter as possible. To do this the multiplication of high quality sources from a range of sources was a necessity. Particularly useful were the investigations of the Police inspectorate (Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs) as well as the periodical reports of the Prefect and Police reports of all natures. These were supplemented with documents originating from various official sources such as the Armistice Commissions, accounts on Police and public opinion written by the postal censors or the papers of Vichy head of State Philippe Pétain. Police trade union documents were of most use for the years either side of the Vichy government. Documents drawn up within the framework of the purge of Police officers are important sources but the historian should be careful not to uncritically read backwards from these documents written in the politically charged atmosphere of the Liberation. Considerable use has been made of general Resistance documents from the Commissariat National à l’Intérieur and the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action as well as archives emanating from Resistance groupings specific to the Police. This information was supplemented by both written and oral evidence gathered from former Police officers and those particularly targeted by Police action (Jews, Resisters, réfractaires from the STO). Likewise, memoirs of former Police officers as well as those from these targeted categories completed the documentation.1

1 The documents consulted during this research are located in diverse centres and in particular from the Departmental Archives in Marseille (henceforth AD BDR), the National Archives in Paris (henceforth AN), the Centre d’Archives Contemporaines at Fontainebleau (henceforth CAC), the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine and the Centre de Documentation Juive et Contemporaine (henceforth CDJC). Additional material was also made available in Marseille by the Central Police station, the Association de Policiers Résistants de Marseille, as well as by the Provençal newspaper. The author has also consulted material held by the Departmental Archives of the Seine-St. Denis at Bobigny, the Paris Préfecture de Police and the Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (henceforth SHAT). A Note on Athe note Organisation on the organisation of the Police of the Police xi A Note on the Organisation of the Police

Before launching into the subject it is necessary to outline briefly Police structures and personnel as they appeared at the beginning of the Front Populaire, the left-wing government which assumed power in 1936.1 The structure of these forces often appears confused and contorted to the uniniatiated. In order to minimise such confusion let’s start with an over-simplification which I will subsequently nuance considerably: provincial urban Police forces could be considered either as part of the Sûreté Nationale, directly responsible to the Minister of the Interior’s delegate, the Directeur Général, or part of the muni cipal Police forces, administered locally by elected mayors or in the case of a handful of towns, of which Marseille was one, by the Prefect. The Sûreté Nationale, which became the Police Nationale in 1941, was a national umbrella organisation for French Police forces. A significant caveat needs to be added to this statement since so much of the French Police escaped its control. Most of the policing of France’s capital was controlled by its fierce rival, the Préfecture de Police, which has often been seen as something of ‘a State within the State’ in France. Indeed, by a peculiarly French quirk of nature, it was considered a promotion to pass from being the director of the Sûreté Nationale, with jurisdiction spread nationally, to being the Prefect of Police whose authority was uniquely Parisian. The caveat widens when it is remembered that much of the day-to-day policing of rural France was the responsibility of the Gendarmerie, who were actually military personnel attached to the War Ministry. A third complication needs to be added: the daily policing of urban France, outside of Paris, was controlled by the municipal Police forces. What does this leave in the hands of the Sûreté Nationale? Essentially, a series of regional Police branches which, for the sake of clarity, we will here limit to three specialist groupings: the Police Spéciale (which would become the Ren- seignements Généraux in 1941); the Surveillance du Territoire and the Police Mobile (which would become the Police Judiciaire).2 The most ancient of its regional services was the Police Spéciale to whose name the suffix ‘des chemins de fer’ (‘of the railways’) was sometimes attached.

1 Subsequent changes will be dealt with in the main body of the text. 2 Jean-Marc Berlière, “Ordre et Sécurité, les Nouveaux Corps de Police de la IIIème République”, Vingtième Siècle, No 39, July-September, 1993, p 24; Marcel Rougé, La Sûreté Nationale, Thèse de Droit, Université de Dijon, 1935; Anonymous, “Réformes d’autrefois, la Sûreté Générale devient Sûreté Nationale”, Revue de la Sûreté Nationale, n° 66, 1967, p 9. xii A Note on the Organisation of the Police

This organism was a synthesis of a series of 19th century structures.3 On the one hand, it operated as a form of transport Police which had been set up to come to terms with the problems caused by the development of the railways since the opening of the first lines in 1823.4 On the other hand, because these Policiers Spéciaux were not distracted by the time-consuming local tasks of the Municipal Police, they had the leisure to supervise the evolution of public opinion and adopted a role of surveillance in this domain. Being at the nerve centre of the communication system with the possibility of easy movement and by the same token in constant contact with those crossing the commune also made them obvious candidates for the monitoring of foreigners. This was the sign that their mission was becoming increasingly political.5 The expansion of their functions led inevitably to an extension of their geographical implantation. No longer confined to the train stations, Commissariats spé- ciaux began to spring up in the ports as well. A decree of 18 December 1893 allowed them to extend their competence to the whole département so that the Police Spéciale began to operate in working-class urban centres, and in particular those containing large colonies of foreigners.6 Despite temporary reductions in their personnel for budgetary reasons in the 1920s, the Third Republic was careful not to do away with this essentially political Police.7 On the eve of the Second World War, its political activities included the observation of public opinion and the evolution of important social and economic

3 The first Commissaires spéciaux were created by Napoleonic decree on 25 March 1811, with a public opinion monitoring mission. They were abolished on 28 March 1815 but the term Commissaires spéciaux reappeared in November 1846, this time with the suffix “des chemins de fer”. In 1855, 30 Commissaires spéciaux des chemins de fer were appointed, including one in Marseille. 4 From a Police point of view, these problems took two forms. Firstly, there were tasks associated with the functionning of the railways themselves, which required a Police presence to maintain order in the stations, to guarantee the security of passengers and freight and to protect railway installations and their personnel. Then, there were the possibilities which the railways offered criminals; faster transport allowing more rapid escape from the scene of crimes. Because no authority had the possibility of pursuing these criminals, the number of unpunished crimes grew provoking a press campaign stressing the need for a new Police. 5 In this context the Policing of the railways became a mission of secondary importance, Faivre, ‘L’évolution des structures de la Police de la IIIe à la Ve République’, DESS, Nice, 1990,.pp 7 & 23. 6 Albert Englinger, L’organisation de la Police administrative. Les villes à Police d’état, Paris, 1939, p 60. 7 J.-M. Berlière, ‘L’Institution Policière en France sous la Troisième République, 1875-1914’, Thèse, Université de Bourgogne, 1991, p 437. A Note on the Organisation of the Police xiii questions, as well as a more direct scrutiny of certain individuals or groups (politicians, trades unions etc..), deemed, for whatever reason, to be suspect.8 To this effect, its agents infiltrated political parties, trade union rallies and public gatherings of all natures, as well as establishing an elaborate system of informers. In Marseille, there were Commissaires Spéciaux installed in the Gare St Charles and in the Gare d’Arenc railway stations. As for the port of Marseille, both La Joliette and La Grande Bigue docks were equipped with Commissariats Spéciaux des Ports.9 The Surveillance du Territoire (ST) was engaged in counter-espionage activity. In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, the task of counter-espionage in France was taken away from the War Ministry and entrusted to the Department of the Interior, resulting in a running battle between the two ministries for control over this activity.10 In reality, both agencies continued to concern themselves with this issue and the central authorities were keen to co-ordinate their activities to a maximum. The agents of the ST attempted to gather as much information as possible concerning those indicated as suspect by its central services or those singled out by the relevant departments of the War Ministry.11 They also had an initiative in this process themselves and could tail anyone they suspected. The offices in Marseille fell within the jurisdiction of the 7th regional district of Surveillance du Territoire as defined by a decree of 13 June 1934, with their headquarters in Nice.12 In order to detect the entry into the country of known suspects they would work in close co-operation with the Police de l’Air (aeronautical Police) which also fell under the direction of the Contrôle Général de la Surveillance du Territoire. Its offices installed in Mar- seille Marignane airport formed the headquarters of the 4th regional sector of this branch.13 The last Police activity dependent on the Contrôle Général de la Surveillance du Territoire was the Police de la TSF (Radio Police) of which Mar- seille was established as one of four regional stations.14 This service was responsible for the control of pirate radio stations. It would also assure the

8 A. Bozzi, ‘La Police d’Etat, (Etude documentaire, historique et critique)’, Thesis (Law), ‘Aix- en-Provence, 10 April 1945, p 148. 9 Although the city’s port had a unique Police regime. The ‘Commissaire Spécial’ would control a personnel of Policemen appointed by the Prefect but paid for by the city’s ‘Chambre de Commerce’. J.-M. Berlière, l’Institution Policière, p 520. 10 A. Bozzi, ‘La Police d’Etat’, p 158; André Martin, Histoire des Statuts des personnels de Police, Ministère de l’Intérieur, Paris, décembre 1988, p 103. 11 A. Martin, Histoire des Statuts, p 96. 12 Colonel Vohl, La Police Française, Charles-Lavauzelle, Paris, 1936, p 99. 13 Colonel Vohl, La Police Française, p 119. 14 Colonel Vohl, La Police Française, p 131. xiv A Note on the Organisation of the Police broadcast and reception of telegrams between local and national Police services. The final regional service to be studied here, the Brigades Régionales de Police Mobile (regional brigades of mobile Police), was relatively recent, dating from 1907. The bill instigating them aroused fears that this Police Mobile would become another political Police like the Police Spéciale, and it was only once Interior Minister Georges ‘Tiger’ Clemenceau had given assurances that this would remain a crime fighting Police that the necessary funds was allowed by parliament.15 Their role was supposed to cover mainly serious crimes like murder and armed robbery. The Brigades du Tigre, as they became known, were implanted in consideration of a number of factors ranging from the den- sity and professional characteristics of the population of an area, but they also respected existing administrative divisions.16 Thus, the 9ème Brigade de Police Mobile established in Marseille was attached to the Appeal Courts in Aix and Nîmes and operated within the départements of the Vaucluse, the Var and the Bouches-du-Rhône.17 Its personnel had jurisdiction throughout the entire territory of this region. They also had a right of pursuit, should their investigation lead them outside their usual jurisdiction, although it was usual for the Con- trôle Général in Paris to take over affairs which had ramifications in a number of jurisdictions. Mobility was one of the attributes of these regional crime squads. To have the necessary mobility, its agents would make ample use of the train and each brigade was equipped with an automobile. Inspecteurs chauf- feurs were specially employed to drive and maintain these vehicles. Specialist personnel were also present to make use of the latest Police techniques in photography, ballistics and fingerprinting.

15 If its eventual passage through parliament on 28 February 1907 was relatively unopposed, Jean-Marc Berlière believes this was due to two factors: the presence of Georges Clemen ceau at the head of the government and the rise of insecurity in France at the beginning of the century. Before earning a nickname “premier flic de France”, Clemenceau had had a reputation of being hostile to the Police. He was known to believe that “la Police des crimes et délits” was “la seule Police qu’une démocratie puisse avouer” seeing it as “la protec- trice de tous les citoyens”. He offered further assurances concerning the non-political nature of these mobile brigades in a circular in April 1908, specifying that “les enquêtes à caractère administratif et surtout à caractère politique leur sont rigoureusement interdites”, their exclusive mission being to back up “l’autorité judiciaire dans la répression des crimes et délits de droit commun”, J.-M. Berlière, L’Institution Policière, pp 869 & 876; Quotation taken from Clemenceau’s speech in his Draguignan consituency, 14 October 1906 in Berlière, l’Institution Policière, p 869; Circulaires quoted in Berlière, Ordre et Sécurité, p 30. 16 A. Englinger, L’Organisation de la Police Administrative, p 55. 17 A. Englinger, L’Organisation de la Police Administrative, p 57. A Note on the Organisation of the Police xv

The emphasis on expanding these specialist regional services was at least partially a consequence of the perceived inadequacy of the municipal Police forces. These Police forces were controlled by the Mayor, although here too we need to add an additional caveat since in a handful of towns, including Mar- seille, Lyon and Strasbourg this control had officially been wrestled out of the mayor’s hands in a process called ‘étatisation’, literally ‘bringing under State control’.18 In Marseille, the municipal force had been ‘étatisée’ by a law of 1908 and henceforth adopted the title Police d’Etat. As in other cities with State Police forces, the services were administered by the departmental Prefect with each local ‘State controlled’ Police run independently of, and often on very different lines to, other ‘étatisée’ forces. It is worth noting that although the Mayor had officially lost control of the Police he often found back door ways of influencing them, as we shall see. In Marseille the direction of operations was the responsibility of a Commis- saire Central who had his offices in the Place de la Major. From here two types of services were co-ordinated and controlled: the Sûreté (not to be confused with the Sûreté Nationale) and the Commissariats d’arrondissement (district Police stations). The municipal Sûreté was the branch of the Police d’Etat concerned with the repression of minor crimes and offences which also had sections concerned with public morality policing, gambling and drugs and even a brigade engaging in political policing.19 Whilst the Sûreté was centralised into three sectors, the Commissariats d’arrondissement were, as their name suggests divided between the 26 arrondissements (districts) of Marseille.20 These Commissariats were open between 8 o’clock in the morning and 8 o’clock in the evening to receive complaints, supply certificates, etc. They also had the task of assuring public order in the arrondissement. Relations between the different branches within the Police were often strained. Police specialists refer to this rivalry as the ‘guerre des Polices’.21 This is typified by a row which broke out in early 1939 between the Police Spéciale and the Police d’Etat in Marseille. Contrôleur Général Sallet of the former complained in a letter to the head of the Sûreté Nationale that Commissaire Cen- tral Pierre Cals, a representative of the latter force, had been rewarded by the radical Prime Minister Edouard Daladier with France’s highest honour, the Légion d’Honneur. Sallet suggested that this honour was being bestowed on

18 Denis Peschanski, ‘Vichy, singular and plural’ in Sarah Fishman (et al), France at War, Vichy and the Historians, Oxford, 2000, p 119. 19 AN F1A 4525, Le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, October 1938. 20 Tout Marseille, Annuaire de la Société Marseillaise, Marseille, 1938, pp 460-461. 21 Jean-Jacques Gleizal, La Police en France, Paris, 1993, p 60. xvi A Note on the Organisation of the Police

Cals because Dalaider mistakenly believed that the Commissaire Central had personally entered a burning hotel to retrieve the Prime Minister’s luggage when a fire broke out at the Radical party’s convention in Marseille in 1938. His letter underlined that it was actually officers of the Police Speciale who had saved Daladier’s suitcases. Its author could not resist a swipe in passing at the on-going investigation for corruption within Commissaire Cal’s Police d’Etat.22 Just as services were divided into Sûreté Nationale and Police d’Etat, so too were the personnel, although even this was far from straightforward. Commis- saires were the senior Police officials in both the regional services of Sûreté Nationale and the Police d’Etat branches and had a general role of directing and co-ordinating the services under their control. This civil servant could come in a number of forms: Commissaire Divisionnaire, Commissaire Central, Commissaire de Police Spéciale, Commissaire d’arrondissement, etc.., but whatever their title they belonged to the same category and could be transferred between these posts according to the needs of service. Regardless of whether they were attached to the Police d’Etat or the Sûreté Nationale, the Commissaire invariably belonged administratively to this latter structure. Inspecteurs (Detectives) were also present in both the Sûreté Nationale and the Police d’Etat, but unlike their superiors, the Commissaires, Inspecteurs belonged to the branch in which they served. Thus, while an Inspecteur of the Police Mobile, of the Police Spéciale or of the Surveillance du Territoire was an Inspecteur of the Sûreté Nationale, an Inspecteur serving in the municipal Police in Marseille belonged to the Police d’Etat of that city. Such a distinction had considerable ramifications both for the status and material conditions of the individual concerned: the Inspecteur of the Sûreté Nationale being much better reputed and compensated than their Police d’Etat counterpart. How- ever, whatever their status, the basic function of the Inspecteur was broadly speaking similar, consisting of carrying out all information-gathering or verification tasks demanded by their respective Commissaires. Secrétaires de Police were in reality one of the most important spokes in the Police wheel. These Police officers were invariably members of the Police d’Etat but could be attached either to the Sûreté Urbaine or the Commissariats d’arrondissement or to the Commissariat Central. The Secrétaires de Police relieved the Commis- saires of many of their administrative functions and were usually charged with receiving the public in the Commissariats. In the absence of the Commissaire, it was the Secrétaire de Police who was responsible for the smooth running of the Commissariat, but since their status was not officially regulated, their

22 AN F7 13985, Le Contrôleur Général Sallet à Monsieur le Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale, 5 January 1939. A Note on the Organisation of the Police xvii authority in this capacity was not always respected by their subordinates. The Secrétaires, Inspecteurs and Commissaires all fulfilled their functions in plain- clothes, except in exceptional circumstances such as State occasions where they donned a ceremonial uniform.23 The vast majority of law enforcement officers, however, belonged to the category of ‘Gardiens de la Paix’, in other words the uniformed officers charged with walking a beat, guarding a building or otherwise making Police presence visible. As such the Gardiens all belonged to the Police d’Etat. Within the police there was something of an internal class structure. Commissaires usually came from middle-class backgrounds; Gardi- ens were often from working-class origins. As a reflection of this administrative reports will normally capitalise the Commissaire’s title but use a small ‘g’ for ‘Gardien’. I have chosen to capitalise all ranks. Some important features of these policing structures need to be underlined. The mission of the Police was torn between operating for the benefit of the State and working in the interests of the wider community. Republicans had, since the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, insisted that the Police should operate in the general public interest and not merely those of the government. Successive regimes had, however, found it difficult to resist the temp- tation of trying to use the Police primarily to defend the State.24 The history of the Police under the Third Republic was also marked by an on-going battle between Central government and local administration, which meant that, contrary to received wisdom, obedience to the central government was not necessarily the primary characteristic of provincial Police forces. Historians working on provincial Police forces during our chosen time- frame need to avoid a triple trap. The first would be a failure to recognise the local nature of Policing under the Third Republic. The Police forces in each town in France were run on different lines, being the responsibility of local mayors. This point is valid even for cities, like Marseille, with a Police d’Etat rather than a straightforward municipal force. Even where ‘étatisation’ had taken place the statutes differed between one city and the next. The Marseille example suggests that the Prefect’s control of the Police was also severely compromised by local forces. Bearing in mind the local nature of policing does not preclude there being significant similarities in the type of attitudes one could expect from Police officers or the types of demands made on them. But it means that any loyalty to the central government was filtered through the

23 Commissaires directly responsible for a corps of Gardiens de la Paix, were often also asked to perform their duty in uniform. 24 Jean-Marc Berlière, ‘L’impossible pérennité de la police républicaine sous l’Occupation’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, No. 94, Apr. - Jun., 2007, pp 183-198. xviii A Note on the Organisation of the Police prism of local politics. Outside of the branches of the Sûreté Nationale (Police Mobile, Police Spéciale and Surveillance du Territoire) there was no pre-war tradition of being primarily an instrument of national as opposed to local government. Even the national branches of the Sûreté Nationale did not entirely escape local pressures as contacts with political forces in the city had some influence on their behaviour. The second trap would be to extrapolate out from the Parisian Police, as so many historians seem to do. Provincial Police forces were very different from their Parisian counter-parts. Indeed the Paris Police continued to operate as an entirely separate institution and would only be merged with the other forces of order in the 1960s.25 France’s capital city had more Police officers and more equipment than all of the provincial forces combined. Codes of professionalism were undoubtedly far more advanced within that force than they were in the Police of smaller towns. The final trap would be to see the Police of the 1930s and 1940s as an exact replica of today’s Police force. Post-war innovations such as the walkie-talkie which encourage Police officers to seek clarification from a central office reduce the autonomy of the officer on the beat making him or her more controllable by the institution.26 In the 1930s policing was more based on establishing relations within the local community and this sometimes involved turning a blind eye to some of the abuses one might encounter on one’s beat. Undoubtedly the police were less institutionalised through training at that time than today. These factors need to be borne in mind.

25 Jean-Jacques Gleizal, La Police en France, Paris, 1993, p 44. 26 Albert J Reiss, Police and Public, New Haven, 1971, p 125. IntroductionIntroduction 1 Introduction

In 1972, in an influential and important text entitled Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order the respected American historian Robert Paxton complained of the absence of research concerning the Police in France during World War Two.1 This silence was part of a wider gap within French scholarship where, until the end of that decade, policing questions were generally given little academic consideration.2 But absence of research was indeed even more obvious with regard to the years between 1940 and 1944 when the semi-autonomous Vichy government used its Police in collaboration with the Nazi occupier. Scholarly reluctance to address this period of Police history originated partly from a practical question: the belief that archival sources could not be found or that the subject was likely to be something of a minefield. But there was also a more political consideration. Before the 1970’s it had been assumed that when the Police had rounded-up Jews or those to be sent for forced labour or when it had arrested Resisters they were simply obeying the dictates of the Nazi occupier. The realisation, inspired by Paxton and others, that the French government had a large dose of initiative in the process opened up a new field of scholarly enquiry. From the late 1970’s onwards the historiography began to examine much more closely the responsibility of French policing agencies in carrying out German dirty work. Another brick was added to the historiographical edifice in the early 1990’s when researchers began to apply a ‘history from below’ approach to examine how Police officers themselves reacted to the constraints and opportunities offered by the Occupation.3 The policing of

1 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, old guard and new order, 1940-44, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982 (new edition), p 398. 2 For a discussion of this general absence of research see the introductions to: Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle[ed], Police et Société, Presses de l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Toulouse, 1989 and Marie Vogel & Jean-Marc Berlière, Police, état et société en France, 1930-1960, Cahiers de l’IHTP, n° 36, March 1997. 3 Alain Pinel, Une Police de Vichy: Les Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (1941-1944), Paris, 2004; Jean- Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000; Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996; Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, ‘Police et policiers parisiens face à la lutte armée, 1941-44’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski (eds), Pouvoirs et Polices au XXe Siècle, Editions Brussels, 1997, pp 137-176; Yves Damé, ‘La Police française en Allier sous l’Occupation, Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies (history), Université Clermont-Ferrand, 1984; Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police’, in Azéma & Bédarida, Vichy et les Français, Fayard, Paris, 1992, pp 303-311; Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police sous l’Occupation’, L’Histoire, n° 29, 1980, pp 6-15; Lineda Hafid, ‘La Police à Orléans sous l’Occupation’, Mémoire

Second World War France is now firmly established on the historiographical map, even if much work still needs to be done, especially with regard to local studies offering a worm’s eye view.4 The attitude of the Police to the Popular Front continues to be systematically ignored by the historiography, thereby minimizing opportunities to consider continuities between pre-war and Occu- pation time policing. The title of this contribution to the historiography, ‘Police and Politics in Marseille, 1936-1945’, leads us to a number of questions of contextualisation: What makes the Police worthy of a particular study, how was this study conducted and how will its results be presented? What makes the politics of the period 1936-1945 so important? How far is the city of Marseille, in the départe- ment of the Bouches-du-Rhône, typical or unusual within France? There should be no doubting the importance of the Police as a subject of study. The Police are at the heart of the organisation of society and in particular of its political system.5 Their role as an intermediary between the State and

de Maîtrise, Orléans, 1993; Bernd Kasten, ‘Gute Franzosen’ die französische Polizei und die deutsche Besatzungsmacht im besetzen Frankreich 1940-44, J. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen, 1993; Simon Kitson, ‘The Marseille Police in their context, from Popular Front to Liberation’, D phil (supervised by Roderick Kedward), Sussex University, 1995; Simon Kitson, ‘The Police in the Liberation of Paris’ in Kedward (H.R) & Wood (Nancy), The Liberation of France. Image and Event, Berg, Oxford, 1995, pp 43-56; Simon Kitson, ‘The Police and the deportation of Jews from the Bouches-du-Rhône in August and September 1942’, Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 5, N° 3, August 1997, pp 309-318; Simon Kitson, ‘L’évolution de la Résistance dans la Police marseillaise’, in Jean-Marie Guillon & Robert Menchérini (eds), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2000, pp 257-270; Simon Kitson, ‘Arresting Nazi agents in Vichy France, 1940-1942’, Intelligence & National Security, Spring 2000, pp 80-120. Henri Longuechaud, Conformément à l’ordre de nos chefs. Le drame des forces de l’ordre sous l’Occupation, 1940-1944 Paris, 1985; Jean-Marie Muller, Désobéir à Vichy. La résistance civile des fonctionnaires de Police, Nancy, 1994; Alain Pinel, ‘Contribution à la sociogénèse des forces civiles de maintien de l’ordre: les groupes mobiles de réserves sous Vichy, 1941-44’, Mémoire de DEA (Sociologie politique), Université Paris 1, 1994; Maurice Rajsfus, La Police de Vichy, Paris, 1995; Paul Ramé, ‘La Police dans le Finistère pendant l’Occupation et la Libération’, mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Bretagne, 1999; Yvan Stefan, A broken sword: policing France during the German Occupation, Chicago, 1992; John F. Sweets, ‘La Police et la population dans la France de Vichy: une étude de cas conforme et fidèle’, Guerres mondiales et Conflits contemporains, n° 155, 1989, pp 63-73; Bernard Vaugon, ‘La préfecture de Police de Paris pendant l’Occupation allemande’, Administration, n° 144, 1989, pp 143-145; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001. 4 For an overview of the bibliography of the Police see: Marie Vogel & Jean-Marc Berlière, Police, état et société en France, 1930-1960, Cahiers de l’IHTP, n° 36, March 1997. 5 cf David H. Bayley, Forces of order: Police behaviour in Japan and the United States, University of California Press, Berkley, USA, 1976, p ix. Introduction 3 the public gives them a privileged view of society, allowing the study of the Police to throw an important light on the society which surrounds them, but also requiring the Police scholar to understand the socio-political context of the Police. I have tried throughout to remain sensitive to the societal environment in which the Police were operating. Societal pressure on the Police meant that ‘alternative hierarchies’ were established with regard to the Police, chal- lenging the assumption that the Police operated simply in response to orders from their hierarchical superiors. The study that follows will be much more a study of the grass roots of the Police and their interactions than of the act of policing per se. If I have investigated the organisation of the Police or their repressive activities, it is above all in their capacity to reveal or to influence grass-roots attitude to the events and protagonists of the moment. This study is concerned almost exclusively with the Police forces of the Ministry of the Interior, and forces such as the Gendar- merie, Milice or Milices Patriotiques are dealt with only indirectly in their rivalry with the Police. The period 1936-1945 is fascinating for the political upheavals underway. During this period France had both its most left-wing and its most right-wing governments of the 20th Century with the Popular Front of 1936-1938 followed by the Vichy regime of 1940-1944. The question of how Police officers responded to these change of political circumstances will be central to this study. It should be noted that the Popular Front’s mission of defending democracy underlined the significance of this institution. For Vichy, an authoritarian State which would violate individual rights, the Police also assumed massive importance both in terms of promoting an internal political agenda and of offering collaboration to the German Occupation authorities. In order to convey satisfac- torily the dynamism within this time-span and to avoid confusions and anachronisms, the main body of this book attempts to pay heed to the chronological evolution of the period. It is presented thematically but in a way which broadly respects the chronological context of the period. The period in question raised many interesting questions with regard to the Police. How far were the Police still a local force and how effectively were they controlled by the central State? Were they just passive instruments of that State or did they have some initiative and personal input into the repressive process? Who were they serving: the State or the population? How far did their professional sub-culture make them different from the society that surrounds them? How could they balance out their role as French citizens with their professional responsibilities, which sometimes raised challenges to their most fundamental patriotic instincts? How far were the Police politicised or did 4 Introduction they just operate as an apolitical structure which accepted the Republic as readily as it accepted Vichy? Marseille is especially interesting during this time-frame. It is a provincial city in a country where many historians focus readily on Paris. Marseille acquires a special importance during the war as powers and influence temporarily devolved away from Paris to unoccupied towns such as Lyon, Marseille or Vichy. All French regions suffered during the war, but Marseille was, in some ways, particularly hard hit. Many of the city’s buildings were damaged by the war and this, of course, affected the availability of premises from which the Police could operate.6 To the Nazis’ brutal destruction of a whole district of the town at the beginning of 1943 must be added the Italian bombing of June 1940 as well as the American attacks of 1944 and in particular the bombing of May 1944 which hit civilian targets, leaving over 1000 casualties in the space of ten minutes. The geographical position of the city was at the root of the extreme shortages of food in the area in the 1940s. Lacking an agricultural hinterland, it had become dependent on its port for much of its supplies. Moreover, its clear blue waters lack the plankton necessary to support much marine life and in 1938 Marseille even imported two thirds of its fish stocks from the Atlantic. The reduction of maritime trade culminating in the closure of Marseille’s port at the end of 1942 left the city ill-equipped to cope with its important nutritional crisis. The traditional role of this port as a transit point was at the centre of friction between the indigenous population and its immigrant communities. In the 1930s, Corsican and Italian immigrants had often formed the backbone of competing political clans, which were defined at least as much by the charisma of their leaders as by the ideological content of their programmes. Faced with both shortage and conflict, the population felt it should be able to have recourse to public administrations, and in particular the Police, who were expected to intervene in the street fights of the 1930s and against the black market of the Vichy period. How far can Marseille be seen as typical of the rest of France and any con- clusions drawn here be generalised elsewhere? Marseille has traditionally stood out through and gloried in its separateness. It is no accident that Louis Pierrein chose to entitle one of the sections of his book on the city “Une ville particulière” (‘a singular city’).7 Pierre-Marie-Stanis- las Fréron, the representative of the Convention, wrote in 1794 that:

6 Of the 87,725 buildings existing in the city in 1939, 3603 were completely destroyed by the war, whilst 10,053 were partially destroyed: Pierre Guiral, La Libération de Marseille, Hachette, Paris, 1974, p 103. 7 Louis Pierrein, Marseille et sa région, Braun, Mulhouse, 1965. Introduction 5

The Marseille resident, by nature, considers themselves as different. The city’s geographical situation, its mountains, its rivers which separate it from the rest of France, its peculiar language, everything encourages this federalist opinion …. Marseille is their country; France is nothing.8

The independent spirit of the “Republic of Marseille” has long been a source of comment. Whether these comments are reflections of a basic truth, a prejudice or the desire of the Marseillais to distinguish themselves, is the subject of some debate.9 When Marseille was named as European Capital of Culture for 2013 many eyebrows were raised and much of the subsequent commentary found it difficult to avoid mentioning criminality and drug trafficking. Historically, Marseille has always undoubtedly been a difficult place to Police. The city’s administrative surface area of 28000 hectares was five times that of Lyon and nearly three times that of Paris, but its Police force numbered about a tenth of that of the capital. Made up of 111 districts (‘quartiers’), many of which resembled villages more than the districts of a city, Marseille spread like a huge sprawling mass. These villages were separated from each other, but also isolated from the city centre, by semi-rural spaces known as terrains vagues.10 The bourgeois population often lived in the outlying southern areas. The population of the inner city was largely working class and much of it consisted of casual labourers whose lack of security of employment encouraged them to rent furnished property by the day or week. These were the districts most associated with transience, criminality and social instability. The peripheral areas to the north also contained a predominantly working population and included many foreigners but here the population were more rooted.11 The particular character of the city came largely from its extensive access to the sea and status as France’s oldest and largest port: 57 kilometres of coastline and 23 kilometres of docks fell within the city’s boundaries. This brought with it all the complexities of policing traditionally associated with ports regularly visited by ships from all corners of the globe. Marseille, it has been claimed, became the world capital for drug smuggling as Turkish opium and Lebanese

8 Edmond Poupé, Lettres de Barras et de Fréron, en mission dans le midi, impr. Latil frères, Draguignan, 1910, pp 156-157. See also: Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin club of Marseille, 1790-1794, Cornell UP, Ithaca, USA, 1973, p 2. 9 Sophie Biass and Jean-Louis Fabiani, ‘Marseille, a city beyond distinction ?’, Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 50, No 1, Spring 2011, pp 83-94. 10 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic, Palo Alto, 2007, p 26. 11 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic, Palo Alto, 2007, pp 32-33. 6 Introduction

Morphine were converted into heroine.12 Traffic of goods and peoples through the port and thriving prostitution encouraged local corruption. Marseille had long held an international reputation for prostitution. It was said that only the Barrio Chino in Barcelona could compete with the famous « quartiers réservés » around St Jean in the old suburbs of Marseille. The status of Mar- seille as a centre of communications had not been alien to this development. Soldiers stationed in Fort St Jean or the Ste Marthe camp awaiting transport to an overseas location or sailors whose ships docked in the port were frequent customers. Immigrant workers who frequently arrived without their wives also represented a potential clientele. Cosmopolitan Marseille, it should be noted, was famous for its history of immigration stretching back at least a century with migrants making up around one third of its population in 1932, a proportion which was roughly five times the national average.13 Its 700000 odd population at that time included, amongst others, 125000 Italians, 60000 Corsicans, 20000 Spaniards, 15000 Armenians, 10000 Middle-Easteners, 5000 Greeks and 5000 Russians. Immigrants were attracted to the city ‘like moths to light’ not only because it was a major commercial and industrial centre but also because, as a port, it was their initial point of entry, it contained support networks built around earlier waves of immigration and it offered a great deal of casual employment opportunities which allowed the new arrival some income whilst looking for more permanent posts.14 The fact that the population was constantly changing, as immigrants came and went, and that so much of the work- force were employed on a casual basis made it difficult for the Police to keep tabs on everyone.15 The Marseille Police themselves have often been seen as rather an idiosyn- chratic organisation. In 2012, a major corruption scandal erupted within the force as 30 Police officers were suspended, and some of them arrested, following suggestions that they were stealing drugs and money from local narcotic traffickers. The press suggested it was one of the biggest scandals ever to befall the French Police.16 In the mid-1990s, when I was in the earlier stages of this

12 Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada, Mississauga (Ontario), 2009, p 230. 13 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘The strangeness of foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille’, French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No 3, Fall 2000, p 70. 14 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic, Palo Alto, 2007, p 10. 15 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic, Palo Alto, 2007, p 28. 16 http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2012/10/08/scandale-a-la-bac-de-marseille-questions-sur-l-encadrement-des-policiers-mis-en-cause_1771759_3224.html, http://www.tele graph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9605614/Marseille-Police-crime-corrup tion-and-cover-up-at-the-highest-level.html. Introduction 7 project, I was called into the French Ministry of the Interior to explain myself because of the sensitive nature of some of the archives I had asked for. John Franks, a British liaison officer working with the French Police, interviewed me. He suggested that the authorities were concerned that I may be looking to blacken the name of the Marseille Police. He then smiled and said ‘I am not sure you can blacken the name of the Marseille Police’. In the study that follows I try to rise above such stereotypes of the local Police force and to give a bal- anced ‘warts and beauty spots’ portrayal. It will be for the reader to decide if I succeed in escaping from the polemics. From the above remarks it is clear that the policing of Marseille did, and does, have its peculiarities. But it should be remembered that the Police force in every city in France prior to 1941 was administered differently, so that no single local study could be assumed to be totally representative. In the majority of towns local Police forces were under the control of the mayor and the Police force was often recruited with political considerations in mind. In a small number of strategically important towns, such as Lyon, Marseille or Strasbourg, the local Police force was officially under State control but these State controlled forces each had different statutes, were run in different ways from each other and had no administrative co-ordination between them. The Paris Police remained culturally unique and administratively separate from the rest of the Police until the 1960s. So it could be argued that only by building up a series of local studies can we get a true picture of how the Police reacted to the events of the period 1936-1945. A collection of essays put together by Denis Peschanski and Jean-Marc Berlière dealing with aspects of local Police forces during this period suggests that many of the themes which emerge from my study do indeed have parallels elsewhere.17 Hopefully, other historians will rise up to the challenge of contributing to this historiography.

17 Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000. 8 Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1 From Hope to Disappointment: The Police Experience of the Popular Front

In Marseille, the general election campaign of 1936 got off to a violent start. On 16 April, an off-duty Gardien de la Paix, Charles Antoine Castola, was beaten and then mortally wounded by two bullets in the kidneys in the Boulevard Camille-Pelletan at the entrance to the Celona bar which served as campaign headquarters to the Socialist candidate, Pierre Ferri-Pisani. Castola was not an officer of whom the Police were particularly proud. Born in Ajaccio in 1901, he had entered the force in 1925 and after promising beginnings had fallen out of favour. Each summer he would apply for sick leave, seemingly in an attempt to prolong his holidays to his family’s village of Zevaco in Corsica. In 1932, he took over one hundred days off through illness and soon after returning to work the following year he contracted a hernia raising his truncheon to direct the traffic necessitating further convalescence. In his annual assessments he had passed from a young, energetic, intelligent officer uninterested in politics and with a bright future to a mediocre revolutionary who spent his time provoking colleagues. Almost as soon as Castola died the campaign to claim him politically began. Ferri-Pisani, who accompanied the dying man to the Hôtel-Dieu, that vast creamy-orange hospital reconstructed in the 18th century, immediately had posters glued on the walls of the city claiming that Joseph (sic) Castola had been a good friend of his and accusing Simon Sabiani, to whom Ferri-Pisani had previously served as political lieutenant before Sabiani’s shift to the extreme-right, of having organised his assassination. Using the medium of their bi-weekly newspaper Marseille-Libre, the Sabianistes replied in turn, reminding their readers that Charles Castola had been a member of the ‘Comité Simon Sabiani’ (‘Friends of Simon Sabiani’) and had spent the afternoon before his death in their company in Sabiani’s headquarters, situated not twenty meters from Ferri-Pisani’s, and accusing the Socialists of having killed ‘one of theirs’. The campaign to claim Castola politically was symbolic of the importance the Police held in political debate in France at that moment.1

1 AD BDR, 4M 76, dossier Castola; AD BDR 4M 178, Commissariat Central, daily report of 16 to 17 April, 1936; Marseille Libre, 19 April 1936 & 23 April 1936; Marseille Soir, 17 April 1936; Petit Marseillais, 18 April 1936; Petit Provençal, 18 April 1936 & 21 April 1936; Loup Durand, Le Caïd, Paris, 1976, p 233; J.-B. Nicolai, Simon Sabiani, Paris, 1991, pp 198-199.

Public order issues were at the very heart of the foundation of the Popular Front, a political alliance of Socialists, Radicals, Communists, trade unions and civil rights groups. The need for a defensive alliance of left-wing forces had become apparent in reaction to the bloody evening of 6 February 1934: one of those tumultuous riots with which Parisian history is littered. In the wake of the Stavisky and Raynaldi politico-financial scandals and the consequent sacking of Jean Chiappe, Prefect of Police known for his friendly relations with the leagues of the extreme-right, anti-Republican militants had taken to the streets to demonstrate their hostility to the parliamentary regime. By the light of burning buses and flames provoked by gas spurting out of broken street-lamps, Police and extreme-right militants fought a pitched battle using iron bars, clubs, sabres and handguns. As the number of casualties mounted, reaching a total of 17 dead and 2300 injured, the Police were outflanked. 3000 militants from the para-military league the Croix-de-Feu found just a feeble roadblock of 38 Police officers separating them from the parliament buildings. Historians are still debating why the Croix-de-Feu leader, de la Rocque, decided to send his troops towards the Esplanade des Invalides rather than to force this roadblock but most agree that his grouping could easily have invaded the parliament. Coming just a year after Hitler’s seizure of power, contemporaries viewed this riot as proof of a ‘fascist’ threat in France. From these events, the left drew the lesson that it needed to stop its sectarian in-fighting, recognise the extreme- right as its principal enemy and form an alliance to defend Republican institutions and public order.2 In the elections of 1936 even the Communists made public order one of their priorities. The headline of the Communist daily L’Humanité of 24 April read: ‘For public order, vote Communist’. The Radicals and the reformist wing of the Socialist party had always been profoundly legalist and so pleading for public order came much more naturally to them. The Socialist Léon Blum, who became prime minister after the Popular Front’s triumph in the general elections of 26 April and 3 May 1936, stressed that failure to preserve public order would paralyse the government. The Interior Minister Roger Salengro, also a Socialist, announced that between anarchy and order he would always opt for the latter and promised that whatever the cost he would make order prevail. In Salengro’s conception order would be maintained primarily by assuring social harmony and by encouraging a partnership of employers and employees so that negotiation would replace conflict. Salengro was proud to be able to report

2 Chambre des députés, Rapport des événements du 6 février 1934, Paris, 1934; Philippe Bourdrel, La Cagoule, p 22; Jan Stevenson, The Cagoule Conspiracy, Dissertation for Bachelor’s degree (history), Yale University, 1972, pp 17-18. 10 Chapter 1 that the social unrest which immediately followed the elections ended peace- fully with no bloodshed and no violent interventions by the Police.3 Despite stressing the need for social harmony, none of the Popular Front leaders were naive enough to believe that they could bypass the Police for purposes of preserving order. However, the Left did not have a tradition of philoso- phising about the Police. In France, Socialists and Communists had always been more interested in the army as a subject for debate. The great Socialist thinker Jean Jaurès had made reform of military institutions one of his priorities for the re-organisation of the State; his reflection had rarely strayed on to how the Police should be run. But with the approach of power in 1936 Police issues assumed an unprecedented importance in left-wing discourse as Popu- lar Front leaders began to consider ways of using the Police constructively. The Socialist Henri Tasso, elected Mayor of Marseille in 1935, pointed out that this was an administration upon which the very life of his city depended. Given the institution’s importance the government underlined the need of disposing of a reliable force. Vincent Auriol, Socialist Deputy in the Haute-Garonne and future Finance Minister (from June 1936), drew attention to the need of a purge to make sure that the government could count on this administration politically. He declared that the hierarchy was in the hands of half-hearted Republi- cans or avowed fascists and that France should follow a similar tactic to America where, when power changed hands between Democrats and Republi- cans, the incoming government would bring a new administrative team in on its coat-tails. According to Auriol this was just what junior Police officers were asking for, although as Herrick Chapman has noted the ‘French Police had long enjoyed a tradition of surviving regime changes relatively unscathed’. The left- wing journalist Jean-Jacques Compère-Morel urged the Police as an institution to change direction by replacing bourgeois legality with Socialist legality and in a declaration, reminiscent of the Fabians in Britain, advocated the slow and progressive penetration of all milieus with Socialist ideas.4

3 Léon Blum in parliament, Journal Officiel, Chambre des députés, session of 6 June 1936, p 1336; Roger Salengro in parliament, Journal Officiel, Chambre des députés, 1st session of 26 June 1936, p 1607; L’Humanité, ‘Pour l’ordre, votez Communiste ’, 24 April 1936; André Varin, ‘Le Front Populaire a mis au point son programme immédiat’, Petit Provençal, 10 January 1936; Vincent Auriol, ‘Après l’avertissement’, Petit Provençal, 19 February 1936; Compère-Morel, ‘Méthode Révolutionnaire’, Petit Provençal, 30 April 1936; Guy Mollet, L’action des Socialistes en 1936, Arras, 1953, p 7; Jean Lacouture, Léon Blum, Paris, 1977, p 287; Jacques Rouvière, L’affaire Salengro, Paris, 1982, p 83; Georges Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XX Siècle, Paris, 1990, p 114. 4 Vincent Auriol, ‘Après l’avertissement’, Petit Provençal, 19 February 1936; Compère-Morel, ‘Méthode Révolutionnaire’, Petit Provençal, 30 April 1936; Guy Mollet, L’action des Socialistes From Hope To Disappointment 11

In Marseille, although already dominated by the Socialists, the local Police were divided politically. One current declared itself apolitical. Official discourse had traditionally glorified neutrality in policing and this type of language was re-iterated further down the hierarchy. The national president of the professional association of Commissaires and Inspecteurs of the Sûreté Nationale, Commissaire Jean-Félix Buffet, claimed that it would be an insult to the Republic, ‘an infidelity to that beautiful girl that our fathers called Mari- anne’, if the Police failed to rise above politics. Gardiens de la Paix wrote to their trade union organ, L’Etatiste, affirming their desire to be able to intervene in public order issues without worrying about the political opinions of those they were confronted with. However, the efficiency of Police professional organisations often depended on the quality of the political contacts they made, making an apolitical stance hard to preserve: Buffet himself enjoyed good relations with a number of Radical politicians. What’s more, when the Police mission was so often political, real neutrality was difficult. Supervising political meetings and demonstrations encouraged political debate and reflection amongst rank-and-file Police officers, sometimes even in a direction favourable to those being supervised. In Neil Jordan’s film ‘Michael Collins’, one of the characters is a Police Resister in the Anglo-Irish difficulties of 1916-1921 who, after surveying a Sinn Fein rally, sides with the revolutionary Collins telling him: ‘you can be mighty convincing’. A similar dilemma is faced by many law enforcement officers asked to perform such surveillance.5 Moreover, many Marseille Policemen were politically active on an individual level. For one thing a number had been recruited to the institution using a letter of recommendation from a local politician and this sort of support was rarely offered gratuitously. For another, Policemen spent considerable amount of time in bars: whether to escape the cold on wet winter evenings walking their beat, to seek refreshment from the summer heat, to establish good relations in the community that they policed, to use the telephone to ring their headquarters, to keep track on criminal and political milieus who also haunted these establishments or simply to unwind after a stressful day at work. Bars

en 1936, Arras, 1953, p 11; Lucien Zimmer, Un septennat policier, dessous et secrets de la Police républicaine, Paris, 1967, p 214; J.-J. Gleizal, Le désordre policier, Paris, 1985, p 119; Jacques Danos & Marcel Gibelin, Juin 1936, Paris, 1986, pp 232-233; G. Cogniot, ‘Le bilan du Front Populaire’, Cahiers du Communisme, Vol. 9, 1966, p 124; L’Etatiste, Organe officiel du Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat, ‘ manifestation de reconnaissance ’, n° 94, February 1937, p 3. Herrick Chapman, ‘Moments in State-Making’,in Kenneth Mouré and Martin S. Alexander (eds), Crisis and Renewal in France: 1918-1962, Oxford, 2002, p 186. 5 Speech of J.-F. Buffet, 19 May 1936: Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commis saires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, April-May 1936, pp 183-184; L’Etatiste, March 1937. 12 Chapter 1 were the hub of political activity in inter-war Marseille: venues for most meetings, they also served as centres of political recruitment and debate. It was difficult to stay entirely aloof in such circumstances. The Popular Front encouraged such politicisation by circulating an instruction allowing Police officers to read political newspapers during their hours of service, providing that these newspapers were not from extremist movements. The electoral lists of 1938 suggest that Policemen were not indifferent to politics with over 97% of Mar- seille officers registered to vote and a few who were so keen on politics that they had had themselves registered twice.6 It is traditional to think of Police officers as right-of-centre conservatives and undoubtedly in many localities such a portrayal would be a true representation. In 1930s France, however, much of the Police had been alienated from the centre-right by the government of Pierre Laval. This Prime Minister is often presented historically in terms of the derision or repulsion he provoked. Com- mentators often make reference to the scruffy and unappealing physical appearance of the chain-smoking Laval. Douglas Johnson remarked that he ‘was swarthy, with a somewhat greasy appearance, a strangely asiatic countenance which was emphasised by his always wearing a white tie’.7 He is usually seen as something of a scheming opportunist of little ideological coherence, as he shifted from being a Socialist in the early part of his career to being a key figure of the right. But he was undoubtedly a man who was loyal to his closest political friends and there were some constant underlying themes to his politics, especially his anti-communism. Laval had come to power on 7 June 1935 pursuing a deflationist policy with the aim of cutting production costs. Amongst other measures, he introduced a reduction of 10% from the salaries of all civil servants, including Police officers. However, due to an unforeseen increase in the price of agricultural produce, the cost of living increased. Civil servants, who until then had been relatively sheltered from the economic crisis, were angered into widespread mobilisation. The ‘decree-laws’ of Laval which had instituted this policy were denounced as much by Police trade unions as by the associations of other civil servants. In an effort to compensate for the loss of income to Police households, Laval felt compelled to offer them an increase in their special professional allowances

6 AD BDR 3M 164-170, Electoral lists, Marseille, 1938; Lucien Guigon, ‘Les statuts spéciaux des personnels de Police’, Doctoral Thesis, Paris, 1962; M.-F. Attard-Maraninchi, Le Panier, village corse à Marseille, Paris, 1997, p 115. 7 Douglas Johnson, ‘A question of guilt: Pierre Laval and the Vichy regime’, History Today, Jan, 1988, Vol. 38(1), p 11. From Hope To Disappointment 13

(‘indemnité de fonctions’) but this failed to compensate entirely for their 10% reduction in salary. The Police Federation, a national umbrella for many professional associations, denounced this government which had been so ‘anti- social’. In Marseille, the trade union representing Inspecteurs of the Police d’Etat voted the insertion of an advertisement in a number of local newspapers condemning all the governments of the previous legislature for having failed to keep their promises. However, the fact that Henri Ponsard, of the right-wing formation Etiquette Nationale, was one of only two Deputies from the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône, (along with Henri Tasso), to belong to the Groupe Parlementaire de Défense de la Police, a cross-party lobby which spoke up for Police interests in parliament, suggests that the centre-right still hoped to maintain some influence in Police circles and hence undoubtedly that there remained some officers of centre-right persuasion, but this position was far from dominant.8 Some Policemen could certainly be categorised as of extreme-right wing conviction; many more were ‘Sabianiste’. Charles Castola was not the only Policeman to belong to a committee of support for Simon Sabiani, a physically unimposing but charismatic local politician. Sabiani was born in 1888 in the Corsican village of Casamaccioli and arrived in Marseille in 1907. His political career began with him supporting a nationalist right candidate, Chanot, in the 1914 elections. But the First World War, during which he lost three of his four brothers and received five injuries, including the loss of his right eye, modified his politics. Upon his return from the front he was profoundly pacifist, joining the local Socialist party, before becoming one of the founder members of the city’s Communist party. His spell as a Communist was short-lived and he spent much of the 1920s drifting and creating diverse unorthodox left-wing formations. At various moments between 1919 and 1940, he occupied the functions of Municipal, District and General Councillor becoming Mayor in all but name as well as a Deputy with solid pockets of popular support around the area of the port. Clientelism was an essential element of the politics which came to be known of as ‘Sabianisme’. Corsicans in difficulty would speak to members of

8 CGT 34J 115, Le Secrétaire Général du Syndicat National des Secrétaires de Police d’Etat, François Zwingestein, to Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices, Pierre Vidal, 31 July 1935; CGT 34J 125, Pierre Vidal, Report concerning trade union rights, 20 April 1936; Le Populaire, 30 July 1935, p 2; Marseille Matin, 1 July 1936, p 4; L’Etatiste, ‘Du nouveau!’, n° 86, June 1936, p 1; L’Etatiste, ‘compte-rendu du 14e congrès du Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat ’, n° 96, April 1937; L’Etatiste, n° 98, June 1937, p 2; Simon Kitson, ‘The Marseille Police in their context, from the Popular Front to the Liberation’, D. Phil. thesis (history), University of Sussex, 1995, p 28; Fred Kupferman, Laval, Paris, 1988, p 143; A. Crinière & C. Oppetit, Les années 1930 à Marseille, Marseille, 1987, p 39. 14 Chapter 1

Sabiani’s entourage and receive the customary reply ‘ne parlaremu a Simon’ (‘we’ll speak to Simon’)- this expression, which is still used in Marseille today, became synonymous with a quick and rapid solution to a problem.9 The unity of the left, beginning in the Cantonal elections of October 1934, was the beginning of an electoral decline for Sabiani who lost the town hall in 1935 to a Popular Front coalition led by Henri Tasso and was unable to fight off the challenge of the Communist François Billoux for his parliamentary seat in 1936. Lacking breathing space on the left, he had begun a shift to the right in 1934, ultimately joining forces with the ‘fascist’ Jacques Doriot of the Parti Pop- ulaire Français (PPF) by 1936. Some Police officers remained faithful to him throughout this drift rightwards and not all of these were Corsican, as for example a Parisian born Commissaire of the Police Spéciale. For many, loyalty was dictated by personal friendship or clientelistic considerations: Sabiani having enabled some of them to join the Police in the first place. A number of Policemen lived or worked in Sabiani’s electoral constituency often facilitating contact with him: if Sabiani benefited from a large number of contacts in the ‘Police Spéciale’ it was undoubtedly partly because they assured the policing of the port of the Joliette and the Grande Bigue as well as the St-Charles and Arenc railway stations which all fell within his constituency. For others, political affinity was the decisive factor. Some continued to feed Sabianist newspapers with Police reports or offer help to arrested PPF members.10 But Sabiani’s influence in the Police was in net decline. In 1934, he had too openly taken the defence of Marseille’s most illustrious gangsters, François ‘Lydro’ Spirito and Paul ‘Venture’ Carbone, when Inspecteur Bonny of the Paris Police accused them of involvement in the murder of the financial consultant Albert Prince whose mutilated body was discovered attached to a railway track near La Combe-aux-Fées on the Paris-Dijon line. On the morning of 3 April 1934 the walls of Marseille were plastered with massive posters claiming that ‘Carbone and Spirito are my friends’ and threatening that the wrath of Sabiani would fall on any who touched a hair on their heads. Those Police officers gen-

9 Madeleine Baudoin, ‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Doctoral Thesis (History), Uni- versité de Provence, 1977, p 242; Jean Maitron & Claude Pennetier (eds), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, Paris, 1992, Vol. XLI, pp 38-44; Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, Simon Sabiani and politics in Marseille, 1919-1944, New Haven, 1989; Jean-Baptiste Nicolai, Simon Sabiani, un ‘chef ’ à Marseille, Paris, 1991. 10 AD BDR M6 10886, Jean Cristofol à M le Préfet des BDR, 15 November 1938; Marseille Libre, ‘Et le scandale de l’affaire du Commissaire Blancheland’, 13 November 1938, p 3; Georges Marion, Gaston Defferre, Paris, 1989, p 64; Jean Bazal, Marseille entre les deux guerres, Paris, 1977, p 125; M.-F. Attard-Maraninchi, Le Panier, village corse à Marseille, Paris, 1997, p 109; Jean Contrucci, Ça s’est passé à Marseille, Marseille, 1992, p 130. From Hope To Disappointment 15 uinely trying to clean up Marseille’s image as a ‘European Chicago’ were embarrassed to be associated with a politician who had made such a public display of his attachment with gangsters. It was probably no coincidence that when Car- bone’s brother François was involved in a fight with Socialist militants on the Vieux Port in June 1936, Inspecteur Louis Galinier, an active trade unionist, stepped forward as the principal witness, going much further than the victims of this assault by claiming that it was with the butt of a revolver that the younger Carbone had attacked the Socialists. This testimony had important ramifications for Carbone: a law of October 1935 having increased the penalty for possession of firearms in public demonstrations. François Carbone was sentenced to three months imprisonment whilst Galinier was promoted to the rank of Commissaire.11 Sabiani’s biographers rightly stress his loyalty to his ‘clients’ but, as Paul Jankowski points out, Sabiani was involved in a difficult balancing act between conflicting interests. It must be thought that the Police were not near the top of his list of priorities because Policemen considered him somewhat unreliable. The last explicit reference to him in the internal correspondence of their trade unions dates from December 1933 when the General Secretary of the union representing the Secrétaires de Police, François Zwingestein, himself a Corsican, wrote to Pierre Vidal, General Secretary of the Police Federation, asking the latter to accompany Sabiani to the national headquarters of the Police to make sure that the politician was speaking the truth when he put it about that, thanks to him, they would receive satisfaction in their wage claims- a rumour about which Zwingestein was entirely sceptical. The electoral decline of Sabiani reduced his influence in the city and hence his ability to intervene making it necessary for him to reserve his assistance for his more favoured ‘clients’. The PPF still tried to play on the Police’s traditional anti-communism, but to less avail. On 19 December 1937, the PPF paper Marseille Libre issued a detailed plan of supposed Communist plans for a revolution in Marseille. Commissaire Divisionnaire Emile Sallet, in charge of the Police Spéciale, had already received a copy of this plan from an informer placed in the PPF head-

11 CGT 34J 115, Le Secrétaire Général du Syndicat National des Secrétaires de Police d’Etat, François Zwingestein, au Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices, Pierre Vidal, 14 December 1933; Le Petit Provençal, p 3, 24 June 1936, « La bagarre du Cours du Vieux Port »; Ibid, 16 July 1936, p 3; Ibid, 29 July 1936, p 3, « une manifestation de sympa- thie chez les Inspecteurs de Police Judiciaire d’Etat de Marseille »; Jean Bazal, Marseille entre les deux guerres, Grenoble, 1977, p 115; Eugène Saccamano, Bandits à Marseille, Paris, 1968, p 77; Alain Jaubert, D comme drogue, Paris, 1973, pp 35-36. 16 Chapter 1 quarters and now dismissed it as ‘PPF nonsense’ and pure propaganda designed to push the Police into repressive actions against the Communists.12 Increasingly, relations between Sabiani and the Police were defined by out- right hostility. Shortly after the Left’s arrival in power, an editorial by Sabiani’s close friend Philibert Géraud in the newspaper Marseille Libre claimed that although Sabianists were still in the Police, the attitude of many Policemen, looking for the best posts under their new Moscovite masters, was repugnant. Marseille Libre attacked the attitude of individual Police officers accused of being in the service of the Socialist party: a favourite target was the Inspecteur Jean Martini, born in the Corsican village of San Gavino d’Ampugnani in 1886. In the book which he published in 1936, Sabiani launched into a tirade against the Police, accusing them of being totally immoral and insisting on the necessity of cleaning up the ‘Police stables’ if France was to re-find its past morality. By October 1937, at the Conseil Général, Sabiani was letting it be known that he had lost all respect for this force, particularly since he claimed that the Gardien de la Paix Tassy, from a family of Policemen born in the Vaucluse département, had threatened to put a bullet in his head should ever they meet. In a characteristic display of bravura Sabiani defied Tassy to pluck up courage to challenge him directly without the protection of a Police uniform. Sabiani went on to list some of what he considered as the abuses of the Police since the Popular Front had taken the reins of power: the failure to arrest Gardien Charles Castola’s assassins, despite the presence of 22 witnesses on the scene; the inability to track down the killers of the PPF spokesman Louis Revertégat; the non-arrest of 300 Communists who had ‘physically assaulted’ Sabiani; Police inability to get to the bottom of the blinding of a PPF militant attacked by 50 Communists and inertia concerning extremist attacks on his house. Newspapers, fed with information from the PPF, lent their weight to these criticisms by attacking the Marseille force for failing to show the same zeal when arresting Socialist militants that it had in the pursuit of members of the anti-Republican grouping the Cagoule.13

12 AD BDR M6 10886, CD Police Spéciale to the Prefect, 21 December 1937; J.A. Vaucoret, Un homme politique contesté: Simon Sabiani, doctoral thesis, (history), Université de Provence, 1979; Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, Simon Sabiani and politics in Mar- seille, 1919-1944, New Haven, 1989; Jean-Baptiste Nicolai, Simon Sabiani, un ‘chef ’ à Mar- seille, Paris, 1991. 13 AD BDR M6 10886, le CD Sallet à M le Préfet des BDR, 15 December 1937; Simon Sabiani at council meeting of 29 October 1937 in Conseil Général des BDR, Procès-verbaux des délibérations, Marseille, 1938, pp 601-631; Roland Lennad; ‘Trop connu ce coupable, lais- sons-le en liberté: l’autre complot qu’on ne veut pas découvrir’, Le Jour, 29 & 30 April 1938; Simon Sabiani, Le colère du peuple, Paris, 1936, pp 199, 205 & 219. From Hope To Disappointment 17

Sabiani’s criticisms of the Police together with his shift rightwards caused him to be lumped together with other movements of the extreme-right, who were considered as the principal detractors of the institution: much more so than even the Communists had ever been. It is significant that when the Inte- rior Minister Roger Salengro committed suicide in November 1936, following an outrageous and totally unfounded extreme-right campaign criticising his war record, the tribute paid to him by Police professional associations stressed that, better than other French people, the Police could understand his agony because they had been victims of venomous attacks from these same quarters. The far-right politician Philippe Henriot had claimed in an editorial in 1934 that the Marseille Police were the most unreliable in the world, whilst in 1937 the Parti Social Français, successor to the Croix-de-Feu, attacked the Police as putty in the hands of the Communists, and the fascist writer Lucien Rebatet later accused the Police during the Popular Front of having been the faithful protectors of the Marxists. Criticisms not meant to endear them to the Police rank and file.14 A constant bone of contention for the extreme-right were the links between the Police and the Free-Masonry: an organisation which in France was dominated by the Radicals and the Socialists. These attacks culminated in the publication of a book in 1939 by the Cagoulard journalist Viscount de Boisjolin which basically consisted of a list of Free-Masons in the institution. This text, which focused for the most part on the Paris Police, was in any event very par- tial and only touched the tip of the iceberg as regarding the true influence of Free-Masonry on the Police. It is difficult to measure this influence precisely because many denunciations in this respect were inspired by political motivations and the Free-Masonry, being a secret organisation, did not publish lists of its members. It is certain, however, that these links existed and are recognised by much more impartial sources. The importance of the Free-Masonry in the Police is one of the favourite themes of one of France’s leading experts on Police questions, Jean-Marc Berlière. Some Policemen openly vaunted their masonry and most of the Police trade union leaders belonged to a lodge. These

14 AD BDR M6 10874, CD Police Spéciale to Prefect, n° 1783, 3 April 1937; Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commissaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, ‘Mort de Roger Salengro’, October-November 1936, p 359; Philippe Henriot in France d’Abord, 15 October 1934; Geoffrey Warner, « The Cagoulard Conspiracy », History Today, Vol. X, 1960, pp 443-450; Lucien Rebatet, Les décombres, Paris, 1942, p 40; Robert Soucy, French Fascism: the Second Wave, 1933-1939, Yale, 1995, p 146. 18 Chapter 1 links were one of the factors directing Police personnel towards the centre- left.15 The Police trade unions and professional associations were themselves another decisive influence on the politics of the Police. Police and civil servants more generally had been excluded from the law of 21 March 1884 concerning the recognition of trade union rights but had made use of texts of 1898 and 1901 to organise their professional associations, and drawing on the model given by other sectors of activity together with the importance of working- class recruitment to the institution these organisations had rapidly expanded, despite official reluctance to recognise them. The Police has traditionally been one of the most unionised sections of French society and this was already the case on the eve of World War Two. By the middle of the 1930s the Marseille associations were very sizeable. The Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commissaires et des Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale had 105 paid-up members in 1935, whilst the Association Amicale et de Prévoyance des Secrétaires de la Police d’Etat de Marseille claimed 75 (70 of the 72 Secrétaires in service in the town, together with 5 ‘Agents Divers’). A nominative list dated March 1936 establishes that 314 of the 375 Inspecteurs of the Sûreté Urbaine belonged to the Syndicat des Inspecteurs des Polices d’Etat. The Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat, composed of Gardiens and their officers, claimed around 1500 Marseille Policemen in March 1937 amongst its 3426 national members and stressed the rise in membership since the beginning of the Popular Front. The number of these who attended its meetings varied between a few hundred on 27 March 1937 to an absolute record of 1600 on 8 January 1938, when the meeting was held in two sessions to allow all members to attend. The average attendance turned around about one thousand during the years 1936 to 1938, according to the nature of the questions to be discussed and the mood of the moment. The hall in which these meetings were held, the backroom of a Socialist bar situated in the rue des Dominicaines in the Belsunce district, was frequently too small for these gatherings: some Policemen were obliged to stay in an adjoining room or on stairways where a loud-speaker would convey pro- ceedings to them.16

15 F. de Boisjolin, La Franc-Maçonnerie dans la Police, Yssingeaux, 1939; Paul Allard, L’Anarchie de la Police, Paris, 1934, p 23; Léon Daudet, La Police Politique: ses moyens et ses crimes, Paris, 1934, p 74; Jean-Marc Berlière, Le Monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, p 173; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 22. 16 CGT 34J 115, Liste nominative d’adhérents de l’Association Amicale et de Prévoyance des Secrétaires de la Police d’Etat de Marseille, 1935; CGT 34J 41, Effectifs de la Section Syn dicale des Inspecteurs de la Police d’Etat de Marseille, 9 March 1936; L’Etatiste, Organe From Hope To Disappointment 19

These associations had not entirely purged their Sabianist elements but they were becoming increasingly associated with centre-left reformism. In the Gardiens’ union elections of 1930, Joseph Pollet, the candidate of the Socialist Tasso, had beaten Sabiani’s man, Jacques Cesana, by 536 votes to 370. When in the middle of 1936, following Pollet’s unexpected death, the leadership came up for renewal Séraphin Frégier was elected unopposed. Frégier, born in the Bouches-du-Rhône commune of Peynier in 1901, made no secret of his Social- ist convictions. In the union representing Secrétaires de Police, François Zwingestein, a 53 year-old Corsican in declining health, was delegating increasing amounts of his power to (Jean-Baptiste) Xavier Culioli. Born in the Corsi- can village of Sotta in 1896, Culioli had entered the Police in the 1920s with a letter of recommendation from a Socialist Deputy after failing a medical exam to become a teacher. Like many Corsicans he had enjoyed good relations with Sabiani in the 1920s but had broken off contact after the politician’s failure to condemn the riots of 6 February 1934. Henceforth, he devoted himself unam- biguously to Free-Masonry and socialism, organising trips to Corsica to demonstrate against fascist Italy’s designs on the island. A close friend of Horace Manicacci and Jean-François Guérini, two Socialist militants from the Corsi- can village of Calenzana, Culioli was an important link in the process of entering left-wing Corsicans into the Police. Culioli’s house in the Impasse Allard, Chartreux district, was one of the addresses regularly given to newly-arrived Corsicans to go to for help and advice. The Inspecteurs of the Sûreté Urbaine continued to be represented by Charles Blanc, born in the Corsican parish of Vinzolasca in 1901 and who insisted in internal union correspondence on the necessity of supporting Henri Tasso, in whose electoral district he lived. His union gave public voice to support for the Socialists by issuing newspaper communiqués stating their confidence in the Popular Front and by buying 30000 francs worth of government bonds as a financial support to the new administration. The Gardiens bought similar bonds, made statements at meetings praising the Popular Front and declared their firm attachment to Republi- can institutions. Statements of this kind came from grass-roots members as well as from the elected leadership. After all many Policemen originated in départements traditionally associated with the Left. 25% were born in the Bouches-du-Rhône which had strong Socialist traditions, being the birthplace

officiel du Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat, n° 96, avril 1937, « compte-rendu du 14e con- grès du Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat », p 1; L’Etatiste, n° 96, avril 1937, p 4, « Assem- blée Générale: Section de Marseille »; L’Etatiste, n° 105, janvier 1938, pp 2 & 3, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille »; L’Etatiste, n° 92, décembre 1936, p 4, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille ». 20 Chapter 1 of the French Socialist party and in 1937 having the third largest Socialist Fed- eration in France.17 Levels of militancy varied between different associations and even within each individual association. The gatherings of the professional association of Commissaires and Inspecteurs of the Sûreté Nationale were extremely tame affairs, deliberately modelled on paternalistic family gatherings. Moreover the material demands of these elements of the Police were often transmitted not through the associations but simply through letters from the senior Commis- saires to the Minister of the Interior. Even in the more active associations of the junior personnel of the Police d’Etat few members seem to have been inspired by the concept of being part of a wider social conflict. Certainly, there were those who stressed Marxist ideas and looked to a redefinition of their position with regard to the working class. But idealists were a minority. Many saw the union mainly as a chance to improve their material conditions or even as a social occasion: meetings were often accompanied by drinking, singing and sometimes even fighting. Despite chastising members of their unions for being self-interested, the association leaders ultimately played on this selfish- ness. They used meetings, trade union publications and even the minutes of their general assemblies, which were regularly reproduced in centre-left newspapers, to act as publicity agents for the local Socialist party, underlining all that Policemen could gain through loyalty to the government. A speech of Frégier reproduced in the Gardiens’ organ L’Etatiste was quite explicit in this sense. He claimed that Policemen could be in no doubt as to what Tasso had done for them, because the leadership of the union had continually repeated his achievements to them in their corporate papers and rallies. Clearly, the trade unions were one way of channelling support in favour of both Tasso and the party he represented. In turn, when invited to their meetings, Tasso would take the opportunity to remind them that the present left-of-centre government was much better disposed to them than had been its predecessors. This was the two-way exchange of the politics of clientelism.18

17 L’Etatiste, n° 88, August 1936, p 4, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille »; L’Etatiste, n° 88, August 1936, p 4, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille »; Le Petit Provençal, 29 July 1936, p 3, « Le Conseil d’administration du Syndicat des Inspecteurs de Police de Marseille souscrit pour 30.000 francs aux bons de trésor »; Michel Bergès, le syndicalisme policier en France, 1880-1940, Paris, 1995, p 226 & 241-242; Nathanael Green, Crisis and decline of the French Socialist Party in the Popular Front era, Ithaca, 1969, pp 307-310; André Crinière & Christian Oppetit, Les années 1930 à Marseille et dans le département, Marseille, 1987. 18 AD BDR 4M 22, CD Police Spéciale to Prefect Bouches-du-Rhône, 1 August 1936; Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commissaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté From Hope To Disappointment 21

Decorated war-hero Henri Tasso had all the sartorial trappings of a town dandy often sporting a silk cravat and a neatly-folded handkerchief carefully inserted in the upper outside pocket of his jacket. His external appearance defied his humble origins. He had risen from working class origins to become Mayor of Marseille, combining this mandate with those of Conseiller Général, Deputy then Senator of Marseille and throughout the whole Popular Front period a ministerial portfolio responsible for the merchant navy. Despite this impressive social advancement he had never forgotten his origins: born in 1882 in the misnamed Grande Rue, a tiny street to which legend accords the status of the oldest road in France, he had remained firmly attached to the poverty- stricken old districts of Marseille, living most of his life in the same house in the rue Caisserie. He claimed both Corsican and Italian ascendants which, together with his overwhelming personal charisma, was one of the factors which helped secure his electoral base, particularly as his constituency included the densely populated Le Panier district. Situated to the immediate north of the Vieux Port, much of this district dated back to 600 Bc and Mar- seille’s original Greek settlers: tiny decrepit houses often scarcely 9 feet-wide, so tightly constructed that they propped each other up and in which several families would sometimes co-exist. Because the Panier also encompassed the Commissariat Central in the rue de l’Evêché, 98 Policemen lived here: 29 born in Corsica and 2 in Italy. Le Panier formed part of the 1st electoral constituency, which stretched onto the other side of the Vieux Port taking in the voting stations of the rue des Tyrans and the rue du Vallon des Auffes. Throughout the constituency Tasso’s electoral support was exceptionally solid. Of 20,898 registered voters, 15,136 had shown up to vote for him in the general elections of April 1936, assuring him an easy 1st-round victory over the other two candidates: the Communist César Matton for whom 2,727 expressed their preference and the anarchist Vian who polled no votes at all.19 In reality, even in his heyday Sabiani had had trouble competing with Tasso for the affection of Policemen. Police trade unionists considered that the

Nationale, February-March 1938, pp 153-155; L’Etatiste, n° 95, March 1937, p 1, ‘Patience et non complaisance’; L’Etatiste, n° 96, April 1937, p 2; L’Etatiste, n° 102, October 1937, ‘Dans l’attente de … .’; M. Bergès, Le syndicalisme policier en France, 1880-1940, Paris, 1995, p 309. 19 AD BDR 3M 164-170, Electoral lists, Marseille, 1938; Petit Provençal, 27April 1936; Antoine Olivesi, ‘Henri Tasso, 1882/1944’, Marseille, n° 100, 1st Trimester, 1975, pp 45-54; Louis Blin, Marseille inconnue, Avignon, 1941, pp 113-119; Jacques Greber, Ville de Marseille, plan d’aménagement et d’extension, Paris, 1933, pp 44-45; Jean Bazal, Marseille entre les deux guerres, Paris, 1977, p 127; Georges Marion, Gaston Defferre, Paris, 1989, p 71; B.D. Graham, Choice and Democratic Order: The French Socialist Party, 1937-1950, Cambridge, 2006, pp 57-58. 22 Chapter 1 power of Tasso was such that he was something of an unofficial Prefect of Police, even though he had no official Police mandate. Tasso, who was a member of the parliamentary association for the defence of the Police, had been elected an honorary member of the Gardiens’ union on 14 January 1928. On Monday 25 January 1937, the professional organisations of the Gardiens and the Inspecteurs joined forces to offer a banquet of honour for the Mayor. The three rooms of the Automobile Club of Provence in the rue Joseph Autran, which had been specially hired out for the occasion, were crammed full of Policemen desirous to demonstrate their gratitude to a man who had long earned the title of ‘friend and defender of Policemen’. Upon his arrival, Tasso was greeted by rapturous applause. In his toast Séraphin Frégier claimed that when the Police needed defending they had no need to ‘ring 50 doorbells’ because they had found in Tasso the man who was always ready when his help was needed. Using the emotional language of clientelism, Tasso replied that it was through his heart and his feelings that he reached out to them.20 Despite some disappointments experienced with regard to the central government, Tasso’s support amongst Police officers remained solid throughout the Popular Front. At the end of 1937, when the Commissariat Central had forgotten to give public recognition of his presence at the all-saints festivities, where he went each year to bow before a plaque bearing the name of Police officers who had died on the field of battle, Tasso wrote to the Gardiens’ association newspaper, L’Etatiste, to let them know how saddened he was by this over-sight. The Gardiens’ union having placed responsibility for this over-sight firmly on the offices of the Commissariat Central, the Secrétaire de Police Xavier Culioli and other Policemen from these offices wrote to L’Etatiste to let it be known that their respect for Tasso was no less considerable than that of the Gardiens: ‘we know as well as you, Frégier, the great recognition that all Police officers, without distinction of category, owe to Mr Henri Tasso, their eternal defender, the most devoted, the most active, and our devotion to him, in all domains, is no less than yours’.21 Dominated by the Socialists, the Marseille Police looked to the Popular Front as the dawning of a new era: the moment when their material demands

20 CGT 34J 137, Secrétaire Général du Syndicat National des Inspecteurs aux Camarades Secrétaires Généraux, 12 January 1936; L’Etatiste, n° 86, June 1936, p 1; L’Etatiste, n° 94, Feb- ruary 1937, « manifestation de reconnaissance », p 3; L’Etatiste, n° 96, April 1937, p 1; L’Etatiste, n° 97, May 1937, p 2; L’Etatiste, January 1938, p 2. 21 L’Etatiste, ‘manifestation de reconnaissance’, n° 94, February 1937, p 3; L’Etatiste, letter from Henri Tasso, n° 104, December 1937, p 3,; L’Etatiste, letter from Xavier Culioli (et al), n° 105, January 1938, p 3. From Hope To Disappointment 23 would be met and when they could look forward to a new relationship with the public. As historian David Levy has noted, one of the main reasons for the local success of the Socialist party was that they presented themselves as the most efficient political vehicle ‘to obtain favours for Marseille in Paris’, in other words to gain concessions from central government.22 Scarcely had this government been elected than the Police began to feel the benefits of its benevo- lence. The unions were pleased to be able to announce that the government had immediately set about humanising the ‘decree-laws’ of Pierre Laval. The decree of 6 July 1935, which had slowed down promotion prospects, was abro- gated on 20 June 1936. The new government promised that the promotional delays caused by this decree would be re-examined. The Police saw their remuneration increase beyond the advantages given to other categories of civil servants: not only did they benefit from the abolition of Laval’s deduction of 10% from their salaries, but their special professional allowances were maintained at the July 1935 rate, in other words including Laval’s compensatory bonus which had been designed to soften the blow of the 10% deduction. The ‘decree- law’ of 30 October 1935 concerning retirement was replaced by a return to the more advantageous law of 14 April 1924. By a law of 19 November 1936, Com- missaires were allowed to benefit from an honorary Police medal which had previously been reserved for Inspecteurs. This measure allowed 27 Commis- saires in the Bouches-du-Rhône to be awarded this medal in February 1937, with all the pecuniary advantages that entailed. Police auxiliaries also saw benefits, as they were granted an unprecedented right to holidays. The professional associations made no attempt to conceal their satisfaction with this range of measures. The Commissaires’ association regretted only that they had not obtained the honorary medal under previous legislatures. At its general assembly of 27 March 1937, the Gardiens’ union, the Syndicat National des Polices d’Etat, could present a very favourable assessment of Blum’s government: ‘The present government has given us satisfaction on all our demands. All the decree-laws which had harmed us have now been abolished. The law of 14 April 1924 has been re-introduced’. The government, who needed to dispose of a loyal Police force in the event of internal friction, could be satisfied that the feelers it had sent out had been well-received.23

22 David A.L. Levy, ‘From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander & Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, Cambridge, 1989, p 205. 23 AD BDR 4M22, Ministre de l’Intérieur à M le Préfet des BDR, 28 May 1937; CGT 34J 125, Pierre Vidal: Rapport concernant le droit syndical, 20 April 1936; L’Etatiste, n° 86, June 24 Chapter 1

However, as early as the autumn of 1936, trade unions and the government had come close to a disagreement with regard to the question of pension con- tributions from the special Police indemnity. The law of 31 May 1933 which had classed the Police as a ‘special category’ had allowed the government of the time to allocate them a ‘special indemnity’ which was subsequently paid in three instalments. In 1935, when the last instalment was to be paid, the government had rejected the proposition that this special indemnity, considered as a wage supplement, should be accompanied by a pension contribution of 6%. When Léon Blum arrived in power, this dispute was still very vivid. The unions placed it at the top of their list of priorities, given the large number of Police- men approaching retirement because although the average age in the Police was forty, even in the youngest corps, that of the Gardiens de la Paix, 20% of personnel were over fifty. The government promised them satisfaction, and believing that the issue was settled the unions announced to their members that the question would be definitively resolved in the next budget. Towards the end of the year, however, it became apparent that the draft budget was silent on this point, provoking a profound disillusionment in Police circles. Union leaders sent to Paris to force the issue had trouble being received by either the Interior Minister, Roger Salengro, or the Finance Minister, Vincent Auriol, because of their heavy ministerial schedules, and were only finally received after an intervention from Henri Tasso who insisted with his overworked colleagues on the importance of this question. Satisfaction was finally given by article 63 of the Finance law of 31 December, and the storm calmed down.24 The real disappointments revealed themselves from the spring of 1937. From February, corporate newspapers began to refer to the worry of Police officers, on their fixed income, when faced with the rising tide of inflation. They quoted a speech by Prime Minister Blum in which he revealed that the price index was severely undercutting the material advantages civil servants had obtained in the previous eight months. Inflation was estimated at 30% for the last six months of 1936 and it showed no signs of levelling out. Faced with this threat,

1936, p 1, ‘Du nouveau! ‘; L’Etatiste, n° 88, August 1936, p 4; L’Etatiste, n° 92, December 1936; Fred Kupferman, Laval, Flammarion, Paris, 1988, p 143. 24 CGT 34J 137, le Secrétaire Général du Syndicat National des Inspecteurs des Polices d’Etat au Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices,, 12 January 1936; CGT 34J 115, Secrétaire Général du Syndicat National des Secrétaires de Police au Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices, 5 January 1937; CGT 34J 115, Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices aux Secrétaires Généraux des Syndicats de Police, 22 September 1936; L’Etatiste, editions of June, August, October and December 1936 and October 1937. From Hope To Disappointment 25 the Police unions began by asking for the patience of their members, underlining that the responsibilities for the economic difficulties lay with those individuals ‘without conscience’ who were getting rich on the stock exchange. They reminded their members that the government was trying its best to improve the position of civil servants. But as the situation continued to show no signs of improvement, patience began to be severely tested. Policemen felt neglected and by September their unions were questioning whether the government really understood the resentment growing amongst the rank and file. They depicted the difficult position of their members, chastised by their wives for failing to put food on the table. They prophesied, in threatening tones, about the effect these difficulties would have on their enthusiasm for the job and potential ramifications on their professional integrity: an integrity which could only be assured if they were not wallowing in poverty.25 Threats of a similar nature were advanced after the non-application of the ‘forty-hour week’ to Police personnel. Reducing the working week had been an integral part of Socialist thought in France since the second half of the Nine- teenth Century. As an unemployment reduction scheme, the Popular Front had promised to embark on a policy along these lines and the figure of forty hours, which had previously figured in the Communist programme, was adopted by parliament on 12 June 1936. The average working week at that time was just over 44 hours, whilst the Police worked a minimum of 48 hours per week. The possibility of applying this measure to the Police had been put forward timidly at the end of the 1936 when its application in other sectors of activity was evoked. The question resurfaced the following spring and even more clearly in the summer. The rank-and-file accepted at that moment that their demand in this respect had little chance of success and that its application would require a huge increase in personnel, necessitating massive expenditure which would have the unhappy effect of putting the government in difficulty. New life was given to this debate when Salengro’s successor at the Interior Ministry, Marx Dormoy, allocated 318 million francs to apply all of the social laws to their Parisian counterpart (and envied rival) by 1 March 1938. The injustice was too blatant for provincial Police forces. Articles were published in the Gardiens’ organ, L’Etatiste, claiming that the Parisian Police were the only ones to obtain all that they wanted and asking whether the capital’s force was really more important than provincial ones. Their authors suggested that a

25 L’Etatiste, n° 95, mars 1937, p 1, « Patience et non complaisance »; L’Etatiste, n° 101, septembre 1937, p 1, « A quand la revalorisation de nos traitements ?»; Henri Dubief, Le déclin de la IIIe République, 1929-1938, Paris, 1976, pp 199-203; G. Cogniot, « Le bilan du Front Pop- ulaire », Cahiers du Communisme, Vol. 9, 1966, p 106 26 Chapter 1 revolution was much more likely to take place in the provinces than in Paris and that failure to obtain a forty-hour week could seriously undermine Police loyalty in the event of such a revolution. From that moment, this demand became the principal preoccupation of the unions of junior Police personnel- without, however, obtaining satisfaction.26 The Police hierarchy and trade unions pushed in the same direction in at least one domain: the demand for the latest technology in policing. These demands were often justified by the necessity of competing with the equipment used by criminals, but also with that of the Gendarmerie, thought to be much better endowed. Demands in this respect could expect a favourable reception because the Popular Front was keen to harness the use of technology in all domains, even if it sought to re-evaluate the relationship between man and machine, giving pre-dominance to the former. Just as revolvers had replaced sabres in the first third of the century, the Police now sought to replace these revolvers with automatic pistols and so the Gardiens’ union asked for 1625 Herstal pistols. It underlined that the revolvers currently in service, some of which could only use lead bullets, were of an 1892 design. On his side, the newly appointed Commissaire Central, a dynamic 42 year-old, Pierre Cals, insisted on the insufficiency of the means of transport and communication available to the Sûreté. The four Renault saloons in Police possession had been in service for nearly 7 years and of the four, only one was still in good working order: the other three necessitated expensive repairs. The Police telephone network had already been in operation for 29 years in 1937. The number of communications had quintupled since its installation in 1908. Those ringing ‘Colbert 19.40.’ to obtain the Commissariat Central would often experience considerable delays before being connected to a very unreliable network. Many of the telephones in the offices scarcely worked and in some services Police officials had little choice but to keep popping out to local bars under the pretext of using the telephone.27

26 L’Etatiste, n° 92, December 1936, p 2, « démarches à Paris, les 12-13-14 novembre »; L’Etatiste, n° 96, April 1937, p 2, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille »; L’Etatiste, n° 99, July 1937, p 3, « Assemblée Générale: Section de Marseille »; L’Etatiste, n° 106, Feb- ruary 1938, p 1, « Il faut appliquer les 40 heures dans les Polices d’état »; L’Etatiste, n° 108, March 1938, p 1, « Nous devons obtenir les 40 heures »; Alfred Sauvy, Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres, Paris, 1984, T.1, pp 239-254; Jean Bouvier, « Un débat toujours ouvert: la politique économique du Front Populaire » & Jean-Charles Asselain, « La loi des quarante heures de 1936 » in J. Bouvier (dir), La France en mouvement, 1934-38, Paris, 1986, pp 156-193. 27 Journal Officiel, Chambre des députés, « réponse du Ministre de l’Intérieur à M François Billoux, (question du 23 July 1936), p 2758; L’Etatiste, n° 88, août 1936, p 3, « Cahiers de From Hope To Disappointment 27

In July 1936, the Communist Deputy François Billoux had received a government promise that funds would be made available to overcome these shortages. But, given the economic situation, the Popular Front could not hope to resolve all the problems it had inherited from its predecessors. To make matters worse, the Defence Minister Edouard Daladier announced an increase of 47% in defence expenditure for the 1937 budget placing a heavy burden on the already overstretched government finances and forcing other ministers to cast about for spending cuts. This made it particularly difficult to satisfy requests regarding weapons, as the army also needed automatic pistols. The unions had to accept that not all of the personnel could be re-armed in one fell swoop. The sum of 150,000 francs for the purchase of weapons obtained from the Prefec- ture in the summer of 1937 was only enough to buy 300 pistols. The Commis- saire Central was also force to massively down-scale his demands.28 The need for these resources was felt particularly keenly because of a perceived inadequacy of Police numbers. A superficial examination of the government’s official publication, le Journal Officiel, would give the impression that the situation greatly improved in this respect under the Popular Front. After all, conscious that its legitimacy ultimately lay with its ability to assure order and to defend Republican institutions, this government continued and accelerated the Twentieth Century trend towards growth in the numbers of Police- men budgeted for. Between 1936 and 1938, the budget allowed for an increase of 15.5% in the personnel of Inspecteurs of the Sûreté and 6.95% of Gardiens de la Paix. This represented an average annual increase of nearly 8% for the Inspecteurs compared to a yearly average of 1.7% since 1908 and of 3.5% for the Gardiens compared to the 2.4% average allowed for each year since 1908. How- ever, what counted in terms of assuring public security was not the budgetary personnel but the actual personnel which took unfilled posts into account. For the numbers of junior personnel, the situation was as follows in March 1937:

revendications »; L’Etatiste, n° 96, April 1937, p 2, « Section de Marseille: Assemblée Générale »; L’Etatiste, n° 99, July 1937, p 3, « Section de Marseille: Assemblée Générale »; L’Etatiste, n° 102, October 1937, p 1, « armement des Polices d’état »; L’Etatiste, n° 108, March 1938, p 1, « Nous devons obtenir les 40 heures »; AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Cen- tral à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 March 1937. 28 Journal Officiel, Chambre des députés, « réponse du Ministre de l’Intérieur à M François Billoux, (question du 23 July 1936), p 2758; L’Etatiste, n° 88, August 1936, p 3, « Cahiers de revendications »; L’Etatiste, n° 96, April 1937, p 2, « Section de Marseille: Assemblée Générale »; L’Etatiste, n° 99, July 1937, p 3, « Section de Marseille: Assemblée Générale »; L’Etatiste, n° 102, October 1937, p 1, « armement des Polices d’état »; L’Etatiste, n° 108, March 1938, p 1, « Nous devons obtenir les 40 heures »; AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Cen- tral à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 March 1937. 28 Chapter 1

Table 1 Police Numbers

Post Budgeted for Present Deficiency

Secrétaires principaux 1 1 - Secrétaires 72 59 13 Agents Spéciaux 13 11 2 Inspecteurs Principaux 10 7 3 Inspecteurs Chefs 19 19 - Inspecteurs Sous-Chefs 58 58 - Inspecteurs 300 248 52 Officiers de Paix 15 13 2 Brigadiers-Chefs 75 64 11 Brigadiers 164 111 53 Gardiens 1561 1472 99

The shortfalls are due to a combination of administrative and economic factors. An administrative anomaly meant that Secrétaires or Inspecteurs promoted to the rank of Commissaire would only be replaced at the end of the 10 month training period required by their new functions. With administrative delays in the appointment of their replacements, posts would lie vacant for around 16 months after a promotion. In the economic domain, the devaluation of the franc introduced by the Popular Front helped to cut unemployment by reducing the cost of French exports. New employment possibilities offered potential recruits alternatives in less thankless, less arduous and better paid sectors than the Police. In reality, the situation regarding Police numbers was more dramatic than the above table suggests. Many Policemen were seconded to other administrations and after taking account of sick or holiday leave and of rotation by shift, there were only about 250 officers available for service on the public thoroughfare at any one time in a city whose administrative surface area was more than twice the size of Paris intra muros.29

29 Le Petit Provençal, 1 June 1936, p 3, « Les effectifs de la Police de Marseille vont être aug- mentés »; L’Etatiste, n° 121, May 1939, p 1, « Une Police sans agent »; CGT 34J 115, Le Secré- taire Général du Syndicat National des Secrétaires de Police d’Etat, François Zwingestein, au Secrétaire Général de la Fédération des Fonctionnaires, Charles Laurent; CGT 34J 115, Secrétaire Général de la Fédération Nationale des Polices aux Secrétaires Généraux des Syndicats de Police, 22 September 1936; AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 March 1937; AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, Octo- bre 1938; AD BDR 11355, le Préfet des BDR à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 22 January 1938; From Hope To Disappointment 29

When asking for increases in manpower or improved resources administrative reports traditionally underlined the difficulty and specificity of policing a city like Marseille, with its large surface area, its port and transient population. Moreover, for a whole series of reasons, often unconnected with the government’s activity, these years were particularly hectic ones for the Police.30 The Commissaire Central complained of a sharp up-turn in the level of crime and unfortunately not all crimes were as easy to solve as a curious case where an individual approached two Gardiens de la Paix in the Place de Lenche announcing ‘arrest me, I’m a thief’ before leading Commissaire Victor Chargois to the flat in which he had stored merchandise stolen from a train. Despite this reported rise in criminality, the number of arrests by the Sûreté declined from 4240 in 1935 to 2846 in 1936. Traditional Police tasks like controlling criminality were not political questions in themselves but they certainly had political ramifications. They affected the public image of the Police and the demands the population made of the institution. Since the turn of the Twentieth Century, reducing criminality had become an increasingly important electoral issue causing politicians to ask for ever-greater efficiency from the Police.31 One particular crime which was growing significantly in the 1920s and 1930s was inti- mately linked to politics: electoral fraud. Politicians used local gangsters to organise ‘flying’ voters who would intimidate political opponents or vote in the name of dead people or sailors known to be at sea.32 But, because sections of the Police were implicated in this practice little was actually done about it. The responsibility of the Police regarding controlling traffic and other means of locomotion was also proving to be an increasing headache by the second half of the 1930s, as the mobility of the population reached new sum-

Journal Officiel: 16/05/1908, p 3041; 10/04/1912, p 3586; 30/12/1913, p 11235; 08/07/1919, p 7006; 14/01/1922, p 680; 27/04/1927, p 4578; 24/05/1928, p 5783; 19/08/1931, p 9128; 31/05/1936, p 5779; 24/06/1937, p 7069; 12/03/1938, pp 2917-2919; Simon Kitson, ‘The Marseille Police in their context, from the Popular Front to the Liberation’, D Phil, Sussex University, 1995, pp 30-34; Paul Jankowski, Communism and Collaboration, New Haven & London, 1989, p 11. 30 AN F7 13985, Note de la Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône, 5 November 1937; Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919- 1944, New Haven, 1989, p 3; Y. Lacoste (ed), Géopolitique des régions françaises: La France du Sud-Est, Vol. 3, Paris, 1986, p 889. 31 AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 March 1937; Le Petit Proven- çal, 1 May 1936, p 5, « Après un vol en gare d’Arenc ». 32 David A.L. Levy, ‘From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander & Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, Cambridge, 1989, p 205. 30 Chapter 1 mits. Beyond their direct political missions, the Police Spéciale were responsible for supervising boats docking in the port, aeroplanes arriving in the rapidly expanding Marignane airport and passengers boarding or alighting from trains in the city. 1937, the year in which France organised a highly successful international exhibition, saw a record 700,000 passengers passing through the port of Marseille. The urban Police force, expected to intervene in case of incidents on public transport and to direct the traffic, also had their work cut out for them. The writer André Suarès has described the human clusters clinging to the trams of Marseille as workers hung on for dear life to this cheap but massively overcrowded means of transport, which boasted of having transported 120 million passengers in the city in 1937, supplementing the 18 million who travelled by bus. Fortunately for the Police, horses were virtually disappearing as a means of transport, except in the old part of town whose streets were too narrow and steep for other vehicles, but the number of automobiles in circulation in France was rapidly rising, passing from a national production of 143,000 cars in 1935 to 180,000 in 1936 and 199,000 in 1938. Between November 1937 and July 1938, around 6000 new cars were registered in the Bouches-du-Rhône, almost exclusively in Marseille. In addition to the increasing number of cars in private ownership the city had 1054 taxis and boasted the cheapest taxi fares in France.33 Having expanded as a huge urban sprawl established around an old town built by the ancient Greeks in 600 bc, the Phocaean city was particularly ill-designed to cope with the rise in automobile usage, particularly since the city, like Rome or Brighton, was built on seven hills: the steepness of many of its roads forced much of the traffic to cross the city using the flatter thoroughfares in the centre, thereby adding to their problems of congestion.34 Increase in traffic was also encouraged by changes in the local economy with the creation of new chemical and petro-chemical factories on the outskirts of the city, which meant that a large number of workers spent up to an hour per day com- muting out to the factories which were in areas where housing estates were still incomplete.35 To help the Police deal with this huge increase in traffic the municipality set about expanding the network of traffic lights to replace the Gardiens with their white truncheons at the busiest junctions. Before Tasso’s arrival in the town

33 Le Petit Provençal, 27 November 1938, p 3. 34 Louis Pierrein & Pierre Guiral, Les Bouches-du-Rhône, histoire et géographie, Grenoble, 1945, pp 193 & 198; Routes et circulation routière en France, Paris, 1958, p 39. 35 David A.L. Levy, ‘From clientelism to communism the Marseille working class and the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander & Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, Cambridge, 1989, p 207. From Hope To Disappointment 31 hall, the city had just two sets of traffic lights: situated at the Cours St Louis and Boulevard Dugommier cross-roads. The busiest intersections and even some secondary ones were now kitted out with this modern device. The system installed at the Réformés junction, where 1849 vehicles would pass in a sixty- minute period during the lunch time rush hour, was a particular source of pride as it was claimed that it was the most complex in France. But this advanced technology created almost as many problems as it solved: having got drivers used to the idea of traffic lights, the municipality claimed to be fighting a losing battle to discipline pedestrians, complaining that ‘the Marseille population is too proud of its independence not to demonstrate its hostility to the discipline of pedestrian crossings’. As usual it fell to the Police to assure the ‘thankless task’ of disciplining pedestrians and this it was claimed required ‘a lot of patience and a lot of tact’.36 Demography contributed to Police difficulties. The Bouches-du-Rhône was one of 36 départements whose population had increased between 1931 and 1936. Because of this the population to watch over increased as well as the number of potential plaintiffs. Particularly stressed in administrative reports was the size of the immigrant population which represented roughly a third of the city’s populace in the 1930s, including around 125000 Italians.37 In his book singing the praises of Marseille, the lawyer Paul Lombard called forth a number of ‘witnesses’ who had spent at least part of their life there. One of the principal arguments he put forward in the city’s defence was its cosmopolitanism, claiming that just by staying in Marseille you could beat Jules Verne’s record for around-the-world travel: standing on its most famous thoroughfare, the Canebière, you could see the whole world in eighty minutes, as faces and cos- tumes from every origin passed you by. If cosmopolitanism certainly offered a positive contribution to the diversity of local culture, for the administration the presence of such large immigrant communities provided both difficulties and opportunities.38 Having in many cases fled from fascism in their native countries these immigrants were sometimes highly politicised and had a keen sense of the international dimension of the fight against fascism. The Police were asked to keep tabs on their activities and to oversee the administrative formalities of their

36 S. Tremolet, ‘La circulation à Marseille’, Marseille, n° 9, February 1938, pp 25-29. 37 David A.L. Levy, ‘From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander & Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, Cambridge, 1989, p 202. 38 L’Etatiste, n° 108, April 1938, p 4; A. Crinière & C. Oppetit, Les années 1930 à Marseille, Mar- seille, 1987, p 7. 32 Chapter 1 arrival. In his regular chronicles about Marseille in the Socialists’ national paper Le Populaire, the Corsican journalist Paul Quilici stressed that the greater part of these immigrants had considerable difficulty expressing themselves in French and hence experienced problems in their contacts with the administration. Increasingly, Policemen were being expected to learn foreign languages to cope with this situation. Credits were given in initial recruitment as well as in subsequent annual assessments for those able to speak one of the major European languages. Each Thursday between 7 and 8 o’clock in the evening, Police officers could attend Professor Edelstein’s English or German lessons in the Commissariat Central. For Policemen walking the beat the presence of immigrants offered an opportunity to relieve hierarchical pressure. Due to the obligation to align themselves with immigration formalities in addition to accepting the obligations and constraints applied to native French citizens, immigrants were subject to more regulations than their Gallic counterparts and hence were more likely to fall foul of the law.39 This made them an easy target for Police officers, who simply by bringing in immigrants caught in violation of regulations concerning residence or work permits could show their superiors that they had been active on their beat. This fed into a deep-rooted xenophobia in the institution as well as having the advantage for the arresting officer that the more time he devoted to arresting immigrants the less time he used for pursuing native Marseillais, thereby reducing the extent to which he entered into conflict with the permanent local population. It is hardly surprising that in the 1930s, satirists mockingly transformed the Republican triptych of ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ into ‘Liberté, Egalité, Carte d’Identité’.40 In an excellent article on the subject, Mary Dewhurst Lewis has suggested that Police treatment of foreigners in the mid-1930s was ‘context dependent’. Assessments of the danger posed by a particular immigrant were filtered through considerations such as their age, gender, marital status, profession, social stability and place of residence. There was a particular fear of transient populations with no family ties. As a result, the populations installed around the old port area of the city were subject to far greater discrimination. In these

39 Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: the origins of modern immigration control between the wars, Ithaca, N.Y., 2006. 40 AD BDR 4M 21, Le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, 4 March 1936; Paul Quilici, ‘Marseille, ville cosmopolite: l’antique corporation des écrivains publics existe toujours à Marseille’, Le Populaire, 7 March 1937, p 6; M.-F. Attard-Maraninchi, Migrance, p 69; Roger Colombani & Charles-Emile Loo, C’était « Marseille d’abord », les années Defferre, Paris, 1992, p 17. From Hope To Disappointment 33 central districts, immigrants, like their local counterparts, tended to live in overcrowded and unstable accommodation often comprising furnished rooms rented on a short-term basis. They were usually employed in a casual capacity as day labourers. Often, these immigrants were males who were either single or separated from their families. All of these factors made them appear socially unstable in the eyes of Police officials. Dewhurst Lewis has estimated that inner-city migrants were five times more likely to be targeted by expulsion orders than immigrants living a more settled life in peripheral suburbs.41 Beyond immigration, another difficulty for the Police of the mid-1930s was that the general political climate on the international, national and local stage was so highly charged. When the Interior Ministry discovered a plot to assas- sinate Hitler and Mussolini, the Marseille Police was asked to investigate and it discovered that, Pierre Roze, one of the 14 people implicated had briefly sayed in the city.42 Whilst Marseille was a city prone to political disturbances, the Popular Front years were particularly tense as indicated by a parliamentary debate of June 1936. According to their political affiliations, local Deputies reported that armed gangsters supporting their Croix-de-Feu friends were imposing a regime of terror or, alternatively, that the streets were in the hands of left-wing revolutionaries who insulted passers-by before asking them for donations. Both sides demanded more rigorous policing underlining that the Police were powerless against their opponents, but the difficulties continued as local political forces radicalized. The post-office in Marseille was decorated with a red flag next to the French tricolour, taxis circulated with emblems displaying their political allegiance, while right-wing demonstrators were alleged to be carrying a tricolour in one hand and a revolver in the other. With the local membership of extreme-right groupings like the Parti Populaire Français and the Parti Social Français (PSF) reaching 20000 people supporters of the Popu- lar Front became aware of the urgency of organising anti-fascism.43 At PSF and PPF rallies, militants were seen saluting in fascist style, resulting in an inevitable spiral of violence as counter-demonstrations were organised. Following one PSF rally, a 43 year-old insurance broker and member of de la Rocque’s formation, fired from the n° 82 tram onto an anti-fascist crowd: it was only

41 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, ‘The strangeness of foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille’, French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No 3, Fall 2000, pp 65-96. 42 AD BDR M610886, Télégramme, Intérieur Sûreté Police Criminelle aux Préfets, France et Algérie, 29 April 1938.; AD BDR M6 10886, Le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, 1 May 1938. 43 David A.L. Levy, ‘From clientelism to communism: the Marseille working class and the Popular Front’ in Martin S. Alexander & Helen Graham (eds), The French and Spanish Popular Fronts, Cambridge, 1989, p 208. 34 Chapter 1 thanks to the intervention of the Gardiens Vigne, Guigues and Genona who overpowered the armed man that the incident ended without casualty, but the 3 Gardiens still had to run the gauntlet of the hostile crowd who were set on lynching the arrested man.44 Political scuffles were even recorded in some of the more bourgeois areas of Marseille. At weekends, militants from the Socialist party’s 10th Section dressed in their Sunday best and led by the young lawyer Gaston Defferre would gather in the Place Castellane to sell their newspaper. Invariably, royalists or members of the PSF would show up to oppose them and the whole scene would descend into a fist-fight. But the venue of the worst disturbances was the Canebière. This was the kilometre long street cutting through the city centre and known affectionately as the ‘Can o’ Beer’ to Anglophone visitors. As the variety of dress and the exotic languages of newspapers in its kiosks testified, numerous foreigners passed through this thoroughfare reputed for its view onto the rec- tangular enclave of the Vieux Port, where one could hear the lapping of the water against the concrete banks or taste the saltiness of the sea-breeze; reputed also for its animation, its variety of shops, its hotels and above all its ornate cafes: it was here that the Armenian Pascal had established France’s first café in the Seventeenth Century. But locals also crowded on to the Canebière. It was this animation, together with the centrality of the street, right at the heart of Marseille’s communication system, which caused it to be the scene of such political upheaval. With so many people passing through, control of the Canebière became an important objective: newspaper vendors would shout out slogans; political rivals would insult or attack them and others would wade in to defend them. A typical incident took place on 25 February 1937 when Alexis Barlès, an 18 year-old student, began hawking the royalist paper ‘Action Française’ in front of the Nouvelles Galéries department store only to be shouted down by political opponents. The intervention of Gardiens de la Paix to restore the calm inspired the wrath of the crowd who preferred their own methods for dealing with Barlès.45

44 Petit Provençal, ‘une réunion de protestation du Front Populaire’, 25 July 1936, p 7; Petit Provençal, 8 November 1938; Journal Officiel, 1er Séance, 26 June 1936, pp 1602-1608; D. Ble- itrach, Classe ouvrière et Social-démocratie: Lille et Marseille, Paris, 1981, p 44; J. Danos & M. Gibelin, Juin 36, Paris, 1986, p 129; Pascale Boyer, Débats parlementaires et Problèmes de Police, 1919-39, Toulouse, no date, pp 17-19. The quotations are those of Henri Ponsard (Eti- quette Nationale) and François Billoux (Communist). 45 AD BDR M6 10874, Commissaire Central to Prefect, Bouches-du-Rhône, 26/2/37; AD BDR M6 10809 bis, Commissaire de Police, Chef de la Sûreté to Commissaire Central, n° 10717. CC, 11/7/37; Petit Provençal, ‘la bagarre du cours du Vieux Port’, 24 June 1936, Georges Mar- ion, Gaston Defferre, Paris, 1989, pp 58-59. From Hope To Disappointment 35

Public order had been a priority of the Popular Front and L’Etatiste had reacted favourably to a speech of Roger Salengro, in which the Interior Minis- ter had affirmed this priority- the editorial of the Gardiens’ paper read: ‘you’re a partisan of order and so are we’. But increasingly, Police officers were complaining of a lack of instructions with regard to public order issues. An article from an irate Gardien in L’Etatiste of March 1937 claimed: ‘we have had enough of presiding over these fights, without orders or instructions, with an attitude which might be considered indulgent: we are waiting for directives that never come’. Local politicians also put the blame firmly on the Police leadership for public order difficulties. At the Conseil Général meeting of October 1937, the Communist César Matton made a distinction between the personnel at the grass-roots whom he claimed had ‘demonstrated on numerous occasions that they were pro-Popular Front and firmly attached to the Republican regime’ and the senior hierarchy who in his view were in connivance with Sabiani. A purge of the senior hierarchy had been promised in 1936: this had been limited to the removal of André Jacquemart from the post of Secrétaire Général responsible for the Police in the Prefecture and of Commissaire Central Sar- bach, given a ‘false promotion’ to the higher but less visible rank of Contrôleur Général in February 1937. Pressure for changes in Senior Police personnel mounted due to the Clichy shootings of 16 March 1937, where the hierarchy of the Parisian Police were held responsible for the death of 6 Popular Front demonstrators killed by Police during a riot in the suburbs of Paris, with the inevitable repercussions on the image of the Police throughout the country. Renewed calls for a purge were also part of a domino effect of events in Spain. Given that much of the Spanish Police had sided with the fascist rebels in the civil war raging since the summer of 1936, Spanish left-wing forces had tried to ensure themselves of a reliable Police force in the parts of that country they controlled: thus in June 1937, the Communist Lieutenant Colonel Burillo became Madrid’s Police chief. This situation was bound to affect representations of the Police in neighbouring France increasing demands to weed out anti-Republicans in Police ranks.46 However, a straight-forward opposition of hierarchy and grass-roots to explain Police difficulties is undoubtedly too simplistic. Sabiani certainly had contacts in the senior echelons but he also had his supporters at grass-roots level. Besides, many Commissaires were fervent Republicans. The problems of controlling the Marseille force went well beyond questions of political

46 Conseil Général des BDR, Procès-verbaux des délibérations, Marseille, 1938, p 595; François Billoux: Journal Officiel, chambre des députés, 1st session of 26 June 1936, pp 1602-1608; James Cortada, Historical dictionary of the Spanish civil war, 1936-1939, London, 1982, p 136. 36 Chapter 1 affiliation. The Commissaire given the title Commandant des Gardiens de la Paix responsible for the workings of the uniformed branches could not take single-handed control of all the Gardiens under his orders. He was therefore dependent on the intermediary hierarchy and in particular the Officiers de Paix.47 But each of these Officiers had more Gardiens (140) under their orders than in 1908 (100). Moreover, once risen to this grade most had reached their promotional ceiling, being too old to aspire to an appointment as Commis- saire, thereby undermining their motivation. The next level of hierarchy, the Brigadiers, who were the intermediate stage between the Officiers de Paix and the Gardiens, had been promoted from the ranks of the Gardiens and, according to the Commissaire Central, were too well known to their men to benefit from the necessary authority without the exceptional qualities few were said to possess. A clear decline in discipline was reported in the force. Between 1929 and 1935, an annual average of 122 punishments were inflicted on the Gardiens. In 1936 and 1937, this average was of 40. In the Sûreté, problems were of a similar order. The Commissaires were submerged in their administrative tasks and left the control of the Inspecteurs to the Inspecteurs Principaux, again promoted from the lower ranks. Once again, by the time they had reached this grade they had no promotion prospects and, rarely called to account by the Commissaires, saw little reason to overstretch themselves. The inefficiency of this system was evident in the fact that 51% of the investigations carried out by the Sûreté Urbaine in 1937 had to be subsequently passed on to the Gen darmerie, because the service had been unable to bring them to a successful conclusion.48 The Popular Front had clearly failed to deal with all the problems associated with policing inherited from its predecessors. The Police continued to complain of being overworked and underpaid and, perhaps the common denominator of Police forces at all times and in all places, of being unappreciated victims of society. The failure to overcome these difficulties was unsurprising given the economic situation and the tense political climate. But, in some respects and to some extent, the experience must be viewed as a success. The initial raison d’être of the Popular Front was to defend Republican institutions against fascism. Popular Front policy was not the only reason that this defence was successfully assured but the government’s efforts almost certainly helped,

47 AD BDR M6 11355, Le Préfet des BDR à M Le Directeur General de la Sûreté Nationale, 22 January 1938. 48 AN F1a 4525, le Commissaire Central à M le Préfet des BDR, 19 January 1938; AN F1a 4525, Rapport de l’Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, « Objet: La Police d’Etat de Marseille », 10 November 1938. From Hope To Disappointment 37 as did the Police in uncovering and undermining the extreme-right Cagoule conspiracy. Police demands for improvement in their material conditions were ultimately not completely satisfied but if 1936 was later seen by Police personnel as a reference point, as the Police Federation’s organ La Voix des Polices made clear in 1939, it was because the Popular Front had at least tried to improve these conditions. Such efforts would be remembered within Police ranks.49

49 La Voix des Polices, May 1939, p 5. 38 Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2 Marseille Chicago

In interwar America the exploits and downfall of Al Capone had occupied many column inches of newspapers who were looking to satisfy a readership convinced of the country’s slide into decadence and perfectly willing to associate this decline with Italian immigrants of the Capone ilk. In France it fell to Marseille to accept the dubious honour of a reputation as a ‘European Chi- cago’. The Paris press and international news agencies thrived on it. Artists and film-makers loved it. The singer Alibert popularised it with his hit ‘Les gangsters du Château d’If ’, as did the writer Carlo Rim with his script for the film ‘Justin de Marseille’. Rich gangsters, wearing made-to-measure suits and shoes, silk shirts, garnet silk scarves, putty-coloured overcoats, pale grey or green felt hats known as ‘Borsalinos’, with diamonds on their fingers and pearls in their ties, became symbols of the Phocaean city. Although exaggerated, there was some truth in this image and Marseille seemed the perfect stage for such a spectacle. André Suarès has written that the city was the ideal place to commit a murder with its numerous waste-grounds, not to mention the sea; excellent for disposing of a body. Despite its campaign to play down Marseille’s criminality, the newspaper Le Petit Provençal attributed the whole thing to an aspect of local culture reporting that in the children’s game of ‘cops and robbers’ few Mar- seillais ever chose the role of the cops. Marseille children formed gangs from their early years and engaged in street-fights with rivals from neighbouring districts. But it was more usual to link organised crime with the city’s high immigration levels. Most immigrants had nothing to do with gangsterism, indeed many were victims of it, but in any sociological profile of Marseille’s gangsters the Corsican community would undoubtedly be very well represented. In her work on immigration to the city Marie-Françoise Attard-Maraninchi stresses the overlapping of Corsican and gangster culture: both revolved around an exaggerated sense of personal honour, attachment to a clan, mutual solidarity and the respect of the law of silence.1 Three groups of gangsters are particularly associated with the Marseille of the 1930s and 1940s. The first was the Carbone-Spirito group who are said to

1 John Kobler, Capone: the life and world of Al Capone, New York, 1971; Marie Paoleschi, Le Milieu et moi, Paris, 1987, p 19; Jean Bazal, Le clan des Marseillais, des Nervis aux Parrains, 1900-1988, Marseille, 1989, pp 126-127; Time Magazine, ‘Beyond Paris’, Vol. 23, issue 22, 1934, p 23; Louis Roubaud, Pays de Marseille, Paris, 1933, pp 81-82.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_004 Marseille Chicago 39 have inspired Jacques Deray’s 1970 film Borsalino starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. Charming and elegant, tall and lanky, nicknamed ‘the hand- some piece of string’ (‘beau ficelle’) in spite of the smallpox craters which scarred his face, François ‘Lydro’ Spirito was born in 1900 into an Italian family originally from Naples. By the age of 12, he already had a Police file for theft and would have numerous subsequent scrapes with the law for participating in the white slave trade, for desertion, murder, assault, smuggling, carrying weapons and having false identity papers. In the 1920s he became the accomplice of Paul ‘Venture’ Carbone. Born in the southern Corsican village of Propriano in 1894, Carbone had moved with his family to the poverty-stricken Panier district of Marseille during his early childhood. The death of his father, when he was only 12, changed his destiny. This formerly hard-working pupil was forced to leave school and go out to work in support of his mother and younger brothers, Jean and François. Times were hard and he took up any small job he could find: newspaper vendor, docker, sailor. He adopted the distinctive markings of outcasts of society: his numerous tattoos included ‘for the pleasure of the ladies’ inscribed above his genitals. Although he was smaller than Spirito, Carbone was very stocky and he had a reputation as a formidable streetfighter and knife handler. His physical courage saw him rewarded with a military medal during the First World War. After his return to Marseille in 1919 he began smuggling small quantities of opium and pimping for some prostitutes. The Carbone-Spirito clan held considerable influence over Marseille’s underworld from the late-1920s, recruiting widely and putting their fingers into a number of pies. Together with their brothers, Jean Spirito and François Car- bone, they owned the Amical Bar in the rue Pavillon and the Beauvau restaurant in the rue Beauvau, although ownership of this latter was accredited to a front by the name of Jean Noël. From here they organised prostitution, the white-slave trade, gambling, protection rackets and traffics of all kind, particularly of the increasingly popular narcotics: heroin and cocaine which they converted in a laboratory in Bandol near Marseille and then often forwarded to the American market, working in conjunction with Lucky Luciano. Using a solid business sense they would exploit any opportunity to make money: organising sporting events or taking advantage of embargoes and trade restrictions. Per- nod 68° had been banned in France since 1915; this did not stop Carbone and Spirito importing it from a factory in Tarragone in Spain. Economic sanctions had been imposed on Italy in 1936 following her armed intervention in Ethio- pia the previous year: these two gangsters smuggled in 34 tons of Parmesan cheese for Marseille’s huge Italian population, whose pasta needed flavouring. Civil war had erupted in Spain; this allowed Carbone to make money selling arms to Franco’s supporters. Paul Carbone also maintained prostitution rings 40 Chapter 2 in Egypt, Argentina and Spain. These activities highlight that this clan operated well beyond just the local level with operations extending nationally and internationally. From the early 1930s, Carbone enjoyed close relations with the then Prefect of Police in Paris, Jean Chiappe, which probably facilitated his activities in the French capital which included the ownership of nightclubs in Pigalle.2 Probably less economically astute and undoubtedly less involved in smuggling were the second group of gangsters, the Guérini brothers, who arrived progressively in Marseille in the 1920s and 1930s. They became known as the ‘Calenzanesi clan’ as a reference to their birthplace of Calenzana, a village in north-western Corsica near Calvi reputed for its olive oil and honey but offering precious little else to eat. It was hunger and difficult relations with their lumberjack father, Félix, which encouraged their departure. Antoine, the eldest of a family of 8 children including 5 brothers, was of herculean build but very introverted. He became the clan leader in Marseille and encouraged his brothers Barthélémy, alias ‘Mémé’, François, Lucien and Pascal to join him. Antoine’s initial investment in the bar des Colonies in the rue Bernard du bois having proved such a success, the clan quickly took possession of a second bar, the bar de l’Etoile in the rue Thubanneau. A number of senior Police officers were invited to the bar’s opening. The ‘Calenzanesi clan’ enjoyed considerable importance in the control of prostitution imposing an increasing rivalry on Carbone and Spirito. Indeed, Carbone and Spirito decided that it was prudent to reach an agreement with their rivals and at a meeting with them in 1937 it was decided that the Guérini’s should be allowed to continue their activity in this domain provided that they did not rival Sabiani’s henchmen in drug trafficking. The strength of the Guérini’s was built around a strong sense of clan loyalty but they also resorted to the widespread use of bribing public officials. Like the Carbone-Spirito crew, the ‘Calenzanesi clan’ seemed practically untouchable and when Antoine was accused of a double murder at the end of the 1920s he was rapidly acquitted.3 Barthélémy was the other brother who

2 AD BDR, M6 11078b, Le Commissaire de Police, chef de la Sûreté, à M le Commissaire Central, n° 678 c.b., 28 February 1941; Ibid, rapport de Police, 23 March 1942; Le Petit Provençal, 23 September 1936, p 2, « tenue de maison de jeux ou jeux sur la voie publique ». Eduardo Saenz Rovner and Russ Davidson, The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling, and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution, Chapel Hill NC, 2009, p 105; Martin Garrett, Provence: A Cultural History, Oxford, 2006, p 121; Marie-Hélène Porri, De Mémé à Jean-Noël Guérini, Paris, 2012, pp 17-20; Laurence Montel, ‘Crime organisé et politique en France, aperçu historique’, Pouvoirs, 132, 2010, p 23. 3 Marie-Christine Guérini, L’empreinte du nom, Paris, 1985; Marie Paoleschi, Le Milieu et moi, Paris, 1987; J. Bazal, Marseille entre les deux guerres,; J. Bazal, Le clan des Marseillais, Marseille, Marseille Chicago 41 particularly stood out for his activity in the underworld, although the Police, who had him listed as living off the earnings of his hairdresser’s shop at 56 rue Thubanneau, had only ever formally charged him with minor acts of violence and theft.4 The third grouping, the Renucci brothers whose family hailed from Zicavo in Corsica, also formed a powerful lobby. They were more inclined to acts of banditry: directly engaging themselves in bank and train robberies, although they had prostitutes too and ran the ‘Club Dan’s’ in the rue Haxo and various gambling dens. Born in 1908, Jo Renucci, also known as ‘Jo the stutterer’ or ‘little Jo’, was small, around 5 foot 3, and thin. But he was reputed for his fiery temper and his ready use of guns, having been arrested on three separate occasions for possession of firearms. With only these rare convictions on his record, the Police described him as lucky given the number of times he was suspected of involvement in criminal activity. He frequently operated under a false identity: Antoine Monge, Albert Pera and Joseph Pera all featuring as aliases in his Police file. It was under this last identity that he was said to be involved in a significant robbery on a bank in Nice in 1937 which bagged over a million francs. His elder sibling, Noël, born in 1902 was somewhat bigger, more corpu- lent and had the physical appearance of a country priest. Noël’s criminal record included prosecutions for murder, adultery, carrying weapons and organising gambling rackets. The eldest brother, Félix, born in 1894 was known to the Police on account of a drug smuggling case but spent much of his time in Paris. The Renucci’s had frequent dealings with the Carbone clan. Jo started his gangster life in 1929 working directly for Carbone before breaking out on his own. Noël married into the same Salducci family as one of Carbone’s brothers.5 The gangsters’ power came partly from the ease with which they would descend into acts of violence. This was something the pastry-cook Jules Man- fredi had discovered to his cost in September 1936 when, in a moment’s

1989; Eugène Saccamano, Bandits à Marseille, Paris, 1968; Michel Bergès, “Clientélisme et corruption politiques dans les années trente”, Amiras, n° 8, 1984; B.D. Graham, Choice and Democratic Order: The French Socialist Party, 1937-1950, Cambridge, 2006, p 58; Felia Allum and Renate Siebert (eds), Organised Crime and the Challenge to Democracy, London, 2008, p 159. 4 AD BDR5W 189, Arrêté préfectoral du 8/2/43; AD BDR 5W 189, rapport de l’Inspecteur Chiffaudel, 6/2/43; AD BDR 5W 189, Arrêté du Préfet de la Région de Marseille astreignant le nommé à résidence, 8/2/43; AD BDR 5W 189, Casier judiciaire de l’arrondissement de Calvi, 3/7/43; AD BDR 5W 189, Note d’information, juin 1943. 5 L. Durand, Le Caïd, Paris, 1976; AN F7 13985, Contrôleur Général Blanc à Monsieur le Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale, 24 November 1937; AD BDR M6 11078b, rapport de Police, 23 March 1942; AD BDR 5W 249, Commissaire de Police Mobile Robert Mattei à M le Commissaire Principal, chef de la 9e Brigade de Police Mobile, 20 October 1944; Damien Michel, Un flic se met à table, Paris, 1992, p 116. 42 Chapter 2 negligence, ash had fallen from his cigarette onto the trousers of a gangster on the terrace of a bar in the rue Poids-de-la Farine. His bullet-ridden body was later discovered dumped in the rue de l’Arbre. But such wanton outbursts of violence were relatively unusual: normally violence was used with a clear purpose in mind. It was the protection they could offer and the pressure they could impose which persuaded local politicians to recruit these gangsters as electoral agents and enforcers: intimidating electors; rigging elections; protecting candidates, meetings and bill-posters. Carbone and Spirito were well- known for the support they offered Sabiani, who had served with Carbone’s brother in the First World War. The Guérini’s, whose sister Restitude was married to Horace Manicacci, one of the important figures of the local socialist party, and who were distant relatives of socialist militant Jean-François Guérini, were energetic but relatively discreet supporters of Henri Tasso and the Senator Léon Bon. The Renucci’s were undoubtedly the most politically ambiguous of the gangsters. They were officially agents of Fernand Bouisson, the former prime minister, who had deserted the socialist party to become an independent candidate. But, the Renucci’s could also be seen at PPF rallies. For the Marseille underworld these links to the political milieus offered prestige and legitimacy but more importantly could provide a layer of protection through political interventions to prevent Police enquiries delving too deeply into their affairs. Thus, when Carbone’s brother François was arrested for kill- ing a pimp, Sabiani is said to have intervened to have him released. Sabiani also created a city council post as a stadium inspector for the youngest Carbone, Jean. In its use of political patronage to gain prestige and influence organised crime in Marseille was structured in a similar way to the ‘Camorra’ system of Napolitain gangsterism.6 Police inability to deal with gangsters was denounced by numerous sources. Nevertheless, there were some Policemen who were genuinely trying to clean up Marseille’s image: no easy task. Xavier Culioli, of the Secrétaires de Police union, broached the subject with the socialist Pierre Ferri-Pisani, reproaching the socialist party for its contacts with the Guérini brothers. Ferri-Pisani’s angry but pragmatic answer said much about the reality of Marseille politics: ‘Xavier, you’re getting on my nerves with your moral principles. Sabiani shame- lessly relies on Carbone and Spirito. Marseille is a port. If we get no support

6 P. Jankowski, Communism & Collaboration, New Haven & London, 1989, pp 19 & 37. Felia Allum and Renate Siebert (eds), Organised Crime and the Challenge to Democracy, London, 2008, p 159; Laurence Montel, ‘Crime organisé et politique en France, aperçu historique’, Pouvoirs, 132, 2010, p 21; AD BDR, Le Commissaire Central à Monsieur le Préfet des BDR, 28 October 1938. Marseille Chicago 43 from the crooks we’re done for’.7 Police impotence in this domain was hardly surprising. Enjoying little support from either politicians or the justice system and faced with the refusal of witnesses or even victims to testify, Policemen would sometimes drop a case rather than take the dangerous and usually thankless decision to pursue affairs concerning gangsters to their bitter end. Some even made themselves accomplices to acts that their profession condemned. Many simply chose to overlook abuses. The Gardiens’ union showed no qualms about inviting the opera singer Jean Flor to its association dinners. Flor, who had helped finance Tasso’s campaign for the municipal elections of 1935, made much of his money from the ownership of one of Marseille’s most famous brothels, Chez Aline. Such a fact would certainly have been well-known in the institution. Gangsterism was only the most spectacular side of a corruption which flourished in the murky waters of Marseille politics. In 1938, a brick-layer who happened to find himself in the city centre one August evening was attracted by the charms of a street-walker who lured him into an hotel in the rue Nation- ale. Imprudently, in his trouser pocket was a wallet containing more than 20000 francs. Later that evening he was less than amused to notice that this wallet had disappeared: an incident he immediately reported to a near-by Police station where Commissaire Picq, newly-arrived in the city, began an investigation. Having revealed the identity of the prostitute who had stolen his wallet, Picq then established that this prostitute was benefiting from the protection of a Commissaire in the very branch of the Police responsible for controlling prostitution: the Police des Moeurs, French equivalent of the vice-squad. This seemingly banal anecdote was to have far-reaching ramifications, as following Picq’s report, the Commissaire Central called in the Police Inspectorate, the Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs (IGSA), whose subsequent enquiry revealed that this incident was merely the tip of the iceberg as regarded Police corruption.8 Widespread abuses and misconduct were uncovered. The most frequent allegation was of links with the underworld and in particular the world of prostitution. The Inspection Générale frowned upon the situation of a married Inspecteur, who had set up a second home with his mistress, a former prostitute, underlining the incompatibility of her background with his professional

7 Gabriel Xavier Culioli, La Terre des Seigneurs, un siècle de la vie d’une famille corse, Paris, 1986, p 299. 8 Author’s interview with Robert Picq, son of Commissaire Picq, Marseille, 18 September 1993; AN F1a 4525, Rapport de l’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, Objet: La Police d’Etat de Marseille, 10 November 1938. 44 Chapter 2 obligations, especially since two of the rooms in their house were used by prostitutes. A Secrétaire de Police was accused of having arrived at a Commissariat at three o’clock in the morning to ask the Commissaire to release an arrested brothel-keeper. Insinuations of links between the Police and prostitution reached a climax in the case of the Sous-Chef de la Sûreté, the branch of the municipal Police concerned with minor criminality. At the beginning of Sep- tember 1938, the Commissaire Central had addressed a note to the Chef de la Sûreté asking him to investigate a house of ill-repute in the rue de la Palud and the connection of his deputy (Sous-Chef) with this establishment. The Chef de la Sûreté being absent, the note came directly into the hands of the deputy himself, who, instead of ordering an investigation of his own activity, sent an Inspecteur to alert the brothel-keeper of the on-going inquiry. When the Com- missaire Central, together with the Inspecteur Général, inspected this brothel, they were surprised to see not only a photograph of this Sous-Chef clearly displayed on the mantel-piece of the brothel’s reception, but also to discover an Inspecteur of the Sûreté hiding in a cupboard.9 It was no accident that such a high proportion of abuses concerned prostitution. Like many ports, Marseille had an international reputation for prostitution. André Suarès, with his customary sense of provocation, wrote that the monuments of Marseille were most remarkable for their incomparable hide- ousness and that only in its prostitution could the city find a source of pride, because this was the lone beauty it had to offer. To the initiated it was never hard to identify a prostitute in the doorways or bars in Marseille: the red glow of a cigarette in the mouth; a particular way of laughing, half-spiteful, half- mocking; a silk vest; pink stockings; short-skirts and high-heeled shoes were the signs of the trade. Nicknamed ‘Cagoles’ by a popular song, these girls, usually from modest background and a neglected childhood, tried to tempt sailors, soldiers or lonely foreign workers into sordid hotels or dingy rooms with tiny windows and little furniture, except for the inevitable jug of water and the occasional religious painting. Street-walkers were divided into two sorts by the Police: the ‘clandestines’ who operated outside of official control and the ‘filles en cartes’ who were officially registered and forced to abide by an 1821 regulation obliging them to bi- weekly medical checks. Then there were the girls in the brothels in Marseille’s famous red-light district, the Quartiers Réservés, which competed for international prestige with Toulon’s Chapeau Rouge, the Abdallah Guèche in Tunisia, Algiers’s Casbah, Casablanca’s Bousbir and the legendary Barrio Chino in

9 AN F1a 4525, Rapport de l’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, Objet: La Police d’Etat de Marseille, 10 November 1938. Marseille Chicago 45

Barcelona. Situated between the Vieux Port and the new docks of the Joliette, the boundaries of the Quartiers Réservés had been clearly defined by a municipal reglementation of 1863: delimited by the rue de la Reynarde, the rue Cais- serie, the rue Radeau, the rue de la Loge and the rue de Lancerie. Although often frequented by middle-class customers, many of Marseille’s 31 brothels had thus been confined to the poorer districts of town. The best known was Chez Aline in the rue Ventomagy where a massive sign over a tiny door pointed the way in. Once inside the customer would mount a vast stairway with its thick red carpet into rooms with high ceilings covered with erotic paintings which reflected in the huge mirrors on the walls. The Police reacted differently to the clandestines than to the filles en cartes or to the prostitutes in the brothels. The clandestines were arrested unceremo- niously and forced to register. 706 clandestines suffered this fate in 1937 and more were undoubtedly asked for sexual favours in return for non-registration. The other forms of prostitution were officially tolerated by the Police who took an unambiguous stance in the debate concerning the existence of brothels. When Professor Gemähling of Strasbourg University had launched a campaign in the 1920s to have them banned on moral grounds, he had found the Police as one of his principal opponents. In 1934, Commissaire Cals explained to journalist Jean Dorian the logic of the Police position. For Cals, prostitution would continue regardless of attempts to ban it and it was easier to control the venal love trade if this activity took place within open limits defined by the administration than if clandestine prostitution, with all its health risks, was encouraged to flourish. Nevertheless, the regulations governing even the control of this officially tolerated prostitution were perversely vague. No regime in France since the Revolution of 1789 had been prepared to legislate on an issue thought by many to be morally shocking, but all had been keen to respond to public demands that it should be controlled. Such a situation left a judicial no-man’s-land in which the Police had a free hand to behave much as they pleased relying on vague municipal regulations. Police officers enjoyed the power this offered. In his short story Quartiers Réservés, written in 1931, novelist Pierre MacOrlan described the red light district of Marseille. Towering over this district in MacOrlan’s account is the colossal figure of Paul Leudon, an Inspecteur de la Sûreté charged with controlling its 25 streets. So complete was his control that Leudon earnt himself the nickname of the ‘sheikh’. Although fictitious and hence exaggerated, MacOrlan’s portrayal nevertheless contains some truth regarding the Police relationship with the world of prostitution because, although there is no reason to think that Police officers decapitated prostitutes as Leudon did, it is certain that many took advantage of their function for 46 Chapter 2 sexual contacts. Leudon’s attitude to women was a fairly accurate representation of the attitude displayed in the all male world of the Marseille Police, an attitude which underlay Police reluctance to limit the abuses inflicted on prostitutes. Newspapers were littered with reports of acts of violence committed by drunken Police officers against their wives. Misogyny was displayed even in the unions which should have been the most progressive sectors of the Police. In the Gardiens’ union it was customary to vote a financial compensation to members whose wives had died and this compensation was even offered to a Gardien who had killed his wife and her lover in a fit of jealousy before being acquitted by the courts on the grounds that her adultery excused his action. In the association of Commissaires and Inspecteurs of the Sûreté Nationale, Commissaire François Giorgi gave a nauseating portrayal of Police wives whose role in his perception consisted of waiting at home, worrying about their husbands’ safety.10 Combating Police misogyny had been one of the justifications of a campaign launched by the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises in 1927 aimed at introducing a brigade of women to Police prostitution. But it was more a result of moral pressure than of this campaign that in April 1935 two Assist- antes Sociales became the first women to be incorporated as active members of the Parisian Police. Two provincial cities followed suit on an equally limited scale: Grenoble in December 1935 (2 Assistantes Sociales); Lyon in 1937 (3 Assistantes Sociales). Marseille adopted the same project soon after Lyon, but no appointments were made for want of candidates. The reasoning behind the proposal of a female brigade to Police prostitution was that, on the one hand, women were thought likely to be more sensitive in their dealings with prostitutes and, on the other, that they would not be open to the same temptations as their male counterparts. However, to limit the abuses of the Police des Moeurs to temptations such as sexual favours would be naive. The surveillance of prostitution also played an essential role in political policing. In crude terms, prostitutes had become a ‘commodity’ in local politics. Not only did Marseille politicians maintain links with gangsters who organised brothels for financial gain, but the sexual contacts of their opponents with prostitutes could be turned against them through the threat of revelations. Control of the brothels thus became paramount and the Police formed an essential part of this political jigsaw. Their knowledge of and contacts within the underworld could be used not only to serve a political master but also by extension to further their professional careers or feather their own nests. Some Policemen were clearly

10 F. Giorgi in Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commissaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, February-March 1939, pp 189-190; Marseille Chicago 47 living beyond their means: several drove around in expensive cars and one lived in a château.11 But the IGSA report also discovered abuses stretching beyond links with prostitutes. There were allegations of violence. An individual arrested by the motorcycle brigade on 28 February 1938 for stealing a car had been transferred into the offices of the Sûreté for interrogation. The individual later claimed that he had been punched, kicked, hit with a long, black object and threatened with a revolver. His demand for a Commissaire to intervene to restrain the violent Inspecteurs was greeted with a laconic: ‘all you have to do is confess and they’ll stop hitting you’. The Inspecteurs’ version was that during the interrogation, the suspect had suffered a nervous fit causing him to bang against a cupboard and fall on the floor where he knocked his head repeatedly against a number of objects, including a box of evidence. The Commissaire responsible for this service initially defended his subordinates’ version in the IGSA enquiry before forensic evidence caused him to review his position. In another case, a father complained that his daughter had been raped in Police custody. Else- where, suspicion was cast upon an Inspecteur who, in 1924, had married a woman previously implicated in a drug-smuggling affair. It was pointed out that although her photograph still featured in Police archives, the dossier accompanying it had disappeared. A Gardien de la Paix was accused of engaging in an illegal traffic of the spice saffron.12 Besides the IGSA report, there were a number of other investigations into corruption within the local force in the late 1930s. In early 1939, for instance, the State Prosecutor in Marseille was looking into the activity of three Inspec- tors of the Sûreté. Inspecteurs Jean Martini and Pierre La Rue were accused of blackmailing individuals involved in illegal gambling. These individuals were informed that they would not be investigated for their gambling activities on condition that they shared their profits with the Police. Until such time as they made payments, their establishments received regular Police visits, which was off-putting to those wishing to gamble. A former Policeman served as an intermediary between the officers and the bookmakers. The 1939 investigation looked with suspicion on the lifestyle led by these Inspecteurs. Martini, born in

11 Michel Bergès, “Clientélisme et corruption politiques dans les années trente”, Amiras, n° 8, 1984, p 21; J.-M. Berlière, La Police des Moeurs sous la Troisième République, Paris, 1992, p 107; B. Rolland & H. Reybier, La Police féminine, son rôle dans la lutte contre le proxéné- tisme et la prostitution (vers un nouveau régime de moeurs), Paris, 1947, p 7; for photographs of these Assistantes Sociales see Georges Carrot, Histoire de la Police Française, Paris, 1992, section of photographs between pp 128 &129. 12 AN F1a 4525, Rapport de l’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, Objet: La Police d’Etat de Marseille, 10 November 1938. 48 Chapter 2

San Gavino d’Ampugnani in Corsica in 1886, owned a luxurious house which was considered beyond the means of a Police officer. 46 year-old La Rue had bought himself a pleasure boat, an expensive car and owned two properties. La Rue was also suspected of being involved in the murder of the owner of the ‘Cinq parties du Monde’ bar in the Cours Belsunce, although evidence had been insufficient to secure his conviction of this crime. The third Inspecteur under suspicion, Louis Pascal, born in Gap in 1894, was considered dubious in part because of the activity of his mistress, a former prostitute. She was said to have extorted around 200000 francs (around eight times Pascal’s annual salary) by intimidating money lenders using the professional status of her husband. The Inspecteur would subsequently intervene to threaten the loan sharks against pursuing his mistress. It was noted that Pascal had previously assaulted a woman on the tram. In the days following that assault he had summoned her to the Police station where he suggested that he would charge her with insult- ing a Police officer unless she gave him 5000 francs. Since she refused to pay this sum he progressively reduced his demand to 500 francs, stil unsuccesfully.13 Corruption and deviant behaviour are present to some extent in all Police forces. Violence against suspects is a frequent criticism. In France Police violence had become so institutionalised that a special vocabulary had developed to describe it. The expression ‘passer à tabac’, meaning ‘to beat up’, originated with a turn-of-the-century Police practice which consisted of rewarding inter- rogating officers with tobacco for each confession they obtained: the ‘passage à tabac’ referred to the method most frequently used to obtain these confes- sions. Limited improvements in Police training and the development of Police science with its consequence of supplying empirical evidence, thereby reducing dependence on the suspect’s confession, reduced the reliance on this brutality but some old habits die hard. Other types of deviant behaviour are even more universal. The most common is undoubtedly what scholars refer to as ‘mooching’. This is the practice of receiving free cups of coffee, meals or beers from local cafes and restaurants or reductions from local shops; advantages offered (often spontaneously) by local traders to Policemen. Police officers, who constantly complained of low pay and status, sought solace in these unofficial perks and supplements. Besides, this practice had advantages to the Policeman walking the beat: it allowed him respite from the monotony of his rounds; contributed to his acceptance by the local community by demonstrating his friendliness and gave him the opportunity to casually converse

13 AD BDR 4M 20, Le Procureur de la République à Monsieur le Préfet des BDR, 7 March 1939; AD BDR 4M 20, Le Préfet des BDR à Monsieur Le Procureur de la République, 25 February 1939. See also Police reports on these Inspecteurs in the same box. Marseille Chicago 49 with and obtain information from locals. But undoubtedly ‘mooching’ cor- rupted authority by the obligation it supposed: traders offering these favours did so on the implicit understanding that the Policeman would offer better protection to their establishment to the detriment of less co-operative ones. Sometimes gifts were more sizeable and offered more publicly. In 1938, the film-maker Marcel Pagnol offered the 5829 franc proceeds from the first screen- ing of ‘Regain’ to the Gardiens’ union. If this might testify to a feeling of gratitude for the difficult task of the Police and an appreciation of their role in society, it might also be hazarded that film-makers need the willing co-operation of the Police to protect their studios and to clear unwanted passers-by during filming.14 That corruption in the Marseille force exceeded universal norms was not merely due to the presence of powerful gangsters or the scale of local prostitution. It was also a result of poor administrative organisation and local political culture. Often nominated through a direct entry examination, many individuals named to the post of Commissaire had little notion of how a Police force was run. Once recruited they were given very limited guidance and, immersed as they were in administrative tasks, usually chose to leave to their subordinates the everyday responsibility of running the force. The shunning of their responsibilities often led to a pass-the-buck mentality. The IGSA were amazed to discover that the Commissaire in charge of the Sûreté had taken no action against his subordinates concerning the complete inefficiency of the service in combating crime. In his defence, this Commissaire argued that he could not possibly have been aware of all that was going on and that his immediate subordinate should have informed him of the state of play. This immediate subordinate’s defence was that he was not responsible for the service and that it was up to his superior to know what was going on. Many cases of hierarchical passivity regarding abuses were obvious. The number of punishments meted out was in decline in the mid-1930s and in annual assessments very good marks were given to poor quality officers, particularly since, contrary to previous practice, a decision of 1937 had obliged senior officers to inform subordinates of how they had been assessed and the criticisms levelled against them. Such openness undoubtedly encouraged reluctance to give poor marks. Moreover in some cases there was evidence of more active complicity in abuses between

14 L’Etatiste, n° 109, May 1938; E.R. Stoddard, ‘The informal code of Police deviancy: a group approach to blue coat crime’, Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 1968, Vol. 59 n° 2, pp 291-313; T. Barker & J. Roebuck, An empirical typology of Police corruption, Illinois, 1973; Clive Emsley, The English Police, Hemel Hempstead, 1991; James Morton, Bent Coppers: A survey of Police corruption, London, 1994. 50 Chapter 2 senior and junior personnel. Compromising reports concerning subordinates had been removed from files by their superiors. The Sous-Chef of the Sûreté had failed to investigate the suspect activity of a Secrétaire de Police under his orders, despite repeated requests from the Prefect. In their analysis of Police corruption Barker and Roebuck report that Police chiefs often cover up subordinates in this way, partly because of a sense of comradeship within services and the institution’s norm of secrecy, but also because the organisation realises that the activity of a few of its members may cause the whole to be tarnished with an image of corruption leading to a preference to resolve matters internally so as not to spoil social identity.15 But in Marseille another factor must be added to this: the importance of ‘alternative hierarchies’. The simplest form of alternative hierarchy were the relations established by Inspecteurs in the everyday performance of their duties. In return for turning a blind-eye to certain offences, Inspecteurs could obtain information gathered by petty criminals or prostitutes concerning other crimes, judged to be more important. Arrangements of this kind took place directly between Inspecteurs and such informers without recourse to any official process of justice. By grouping criminals into those that he would pursue and those that he would use as unpaid informers, the Inspecteur thus established his own clientele and transformed himself into an unofficial “chef”, although the effect of this on the internal hierarchical ladder of the Police was of only limited significance. Much more important for distorting relations within the Police were the activities of the Police trade unions. It is usual to conceive trade union relations with employers in one of two ways: collaboration or conflict. Collaboration or partnership unions were those who sought strength through cordial relations with the employer, seeking to obtain a significant say in the management of the institution. Conflict unions were those whose tactics consisted of forcing demands through industrial action, often combining with unions from other activities judged to be of the same social class. Unions would rarely fit exclusively into either category: most would use both tactics to some extent, although there was usually a dominant model. The Police unions had tried both: the Commissaires were keen on co-management; the Gardiens had on occasion been tempted into conflict, as in 1919 when they participated in the trade union confederation (CGT) general strike, although even they hoped for some involvement in the running of their institution through participation in disciplinary commissions. However the real strength of these professional associations came from neither of these tactics but rather from an approach which is best referred to as ‘bypass politics’. This consisted of soliciting the help

15 T. Barker & J. Roebuck, An empirical typology of Police corruption, Illinois, 1973. Marseille Chicago 51 of political forces alien to the running of the Police but which, usually for cli- entelist reasons, were prepared to intervene on their behalf and could do so to such a degree that the official hierarchy of the Police was bypassed. The IGSA report highlighted this aspect stressing that if local Police chiefs had failed to sanction the abuses of certain subordinates, it was because the latter held important trade union functions and they hoped to benefit from the extra- administrative contacts of these subordinates.16 In his study of patrons and clients in Mediterranean societies Ernest Gellner suggests that one of the factors encouraging clientelism is the State’s desire to centralise in circumstances where its technical resources to do so are inadequate, encouraging administrative chaos and conflicts of interest. This was one of the problems afflicting the Marseille Police. Since the ‘étatisation’ bill of 1908 the municipal Police in Marseille had been taken out of the mayor’s control and entrusted to the central State’s representative the Prefect. But the Pre- fect found himself increasingly unable to compete with his hierarchical subordinate, the mayor, particularly once Tasso took the town hall. Beyond his municipal functions, Tasso was a member of parliament, a minister and, from October 1938, a senator. He enjoyed the accumulation of these functions, based on local plebiscite, as well as a massive network of local contacts. In particular, as regards the Police, he combined an unofficial but important status as patron of their trade unions with a number of relations in the underworld in which the Police were in daily contact. Little wonder that the official hierarchy of the Police was bypassed.17 The political aspects of this corruption were lost on no one. The journalist Hubert Boucher insisted in the magazine Détective on the failure of ‘étatisa- tion’, stressing that the Marseille Police were subject to the worst kind of political compromises. For the IGSA it was difficult to imagine a professional group more prone to the influence of clientelism. They highlighted that recruitment was organised around letters of recommendation from local politicians who would subsequently intervene throughout the career of Police officers to ensure their promotion. In return the politicians expected favourable treatment for their activists, protection for their abuses and help organising the naturalisation of immigrants who could then be used as voters. The IGSA made no mention of the political party targeted by its criticisms. Indeed it stressed and slightly exaggerated the number of Corsicans in the Police, claiming that

16 G. Audebert, Organisation et méthodes de la Police française, p 121; C. Chenevier, De la Combe aux fées au Lurs, Paris, 1962, p 22. 17 Ernest Gellner, ‘Patrons & clients’ in E. Gellner & J. Waterbury, Patrons & Clients in Medi- terranean Societies, London, p 4. 52 Chapter 2

20% of the Sûreté and 15% of the Gardiens were Corsican (the real figures were 18% and 11.5%). This might lead to the conclusion that it was Sabiani, whose corrupt practices were a secret to no one, who was implicated. Although Sabi- ani did have considerable influence in Corsican circles he certainly did not hold the monopoly over their affections. For instance, historian Marie- Françoise Maraninchi has shown that one group of Corsicans who were particularly effective at securing employment in public sector employment, including the Police, were migrants from the settlement of Calenzana, whose patrons in Marseille society were strongly associated with centre-left politics.18 On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that it was the Socialists who were the focus of current investigation. The embarrassed reaction of Le Petit Prov- ençal faced with the on-going enquiry pointed clearly to this conclusion. This paper, which despite being owned by the radical senator Vincent Delpuech was the local vehicle for all forces of the centre-left, began by maintaining a prudent silence before playing down the whole scandal, stressing that ‘a few black sheep were not enough to dishonour the whole corps of the servers of order who, in often difficult circumstances, generally display an exemplary devotion and honesty’. It went on to underplay the charges against even some of the individuals involved and in particular the Sous-Chef de la Sûreté, who for the IGSA was one of the principal instigators of this corruption, but for this paper had simply lacked firmness regarding subordinates. The personalities involved also confirm the conclusion that it was the socialists who were in the line of fire. The Chef de la Sûreté, whose authority over his personnel was seriously criticised by the IGSA, had been the beneficiary of all manner of compli- ments from the centre-left press for a number of years. Le Petit Provençal had seemingly been unable to mention his name without adding a prefix like ‘active’ or ‘distinguished’. An implicated Inspecteur Principal, responsible for overseeing the city’s gambling rings, had been one of the principal focuses of Sabianiste attacks for several years previously. An Inspecteur of the vice-squad, whom the IGSA attacked as the ‘evil genius’ of the Marseille Police, criticising his influence on the ‘totality of his colleagues’, was none other than the Presi- dent of the Inspecteurs’ union, whose close links with Tasso have already been referred to. Furthermore, less than two months later the President of the Gar- diens’ association was also to fall victim of the on-going purge: removed from his post on accusations of extortion and replaced by Albert Grafeille, a 30 year- old Gardien born in the Lot and Garonne, who presented himself as ‘apolitical’.19

18 M.-F. Maraninchi, ‘Un exemple de migration dans l’entre-deux-guerres. L’exode Calenza- nais’. Mémoire de Maitrise, Université de Provence, 1972, p 101. 19 Détective, n° 521, 20 October 1938, p 1. Marseille Chicago 53

Pressure to purge the institution came from a number of sources, even from within its own ranks. The strong internal rivalry between different branches was highlighted as members of the Sûreté Nationale revelled in the plight of their Police d’Etat counterparts. The Police Mobile lent their willing co-operation to the IGSA investigation and were glorying in their own rapid success against Marseille’s great train robbers when the results of this enquiry were announced. In their annual assessment exercise, the Police Spéciale of Mar- seille had just risen to the status of first Commissariat Spécial in France. Arsène Leclerc, the professional association delegate of this branch, gloated on this success before launching an attack on his Police d’Etat rivals. In a speech celebrating the promotion of Commissaire Divisionnaire Emile Sallet to the post of Contrôleur Général, Leclerc urged Sallet to show no softness for Police corruption, to load his pen with vinegar when writing reports against corrupt Police officers and to chop off the gangrenous member which would infect and tarnish the whole body of the Police. He stressed that no corruption would be found in the Police Spéciale, although a month later irregularities were noted regarding the election of professional association delegates in this branch.20 Pressure to purge and reform also originated with external forces. The collapse of the Popular Front coalition in April 1938 accelerated a renewal of the left’s bitter in-fighting. From July the communist newspaper ‘Rouge Midi’ launched a campaign on the corruption within the Marseille Police, fitting this into the puritanical theme of ‘clean Marseille’ which had been so cherished to the communists since François Billoux took over as their local leader in 1934. France’s new prime minister the radical Edouard Daladier was also keen to enforce administrative changes on Marseille. All the more so since he visited the city in October 1938 for his party’s annual conference and found himself the witness of a huge fire provoked by a carelessly discarded cigarette in the Nouvelles Galéries department store on the Canebière. The local fire brigade’s complete failure to control the blaze, necessitating the intervention of brigades from Toulon and even Lyon, confirmed the impression that something was rotten in the ‘Republic of Marseille’. Daladier ordered an immediate enquiry which discovered widespread abuses in many branches of local administration, although many of these had been inherited from Sabiani. Fur- ther scandal erupted as it was revealed that Dr Franchi, socialist municipal councillor, had organised fraudulent exemptions from military service for a number of local figures including Noël Renucci as well as four professional

20 Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Commissaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, December 1938-January 1939, p 53; Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoy- ance des Commissaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, February-March 1939, p 127; 54 Chapter 2 players of the Olympique de Marseille football team. As it became increasingly apparent to France’s leaders that the country was drifting to war, it became ever more important to know that the administrations of such an economically important city as Marseille could be counted on.21 The proposition adopted to tackle this mismanagement was to replace the Mayor with an administrator appointed by the central government and given the title of ‘Administrateur Extraordinaire’ who also inherited the Prefect’s prerogatives over the Police d’Etat. Such a solution demonstrated that the problem rested not merely with the municipal structure but also with the control exercised by the Prefect. It was claimed that the decisions of the mayor had, without exception, received his approval. That the Prefect was directly in question was underlined by the furious reaction of the Minister of the Interior, Albert Sarraut, to Daladier’s administrative reform of Marseille, instituted by the decrees of 20 March and 18 April 1939. Sarraut’s anger was directed not merely against the fact that until 10 March his department had been kept entirely in the dark about this project, but also that the reform created an unprecedented new hierarchy. The Administrateur Extraordinaire, a ‘municipal dictator’ according to Sarraut, reported not to the Ministry of the Interior but directly to the Prime Minister and in Sarraut’s view, reduced the Prefect to the role of a ‘lazybones king’.22 The post-reform hierarchy was more complicated than Sarraut’s aforemen- tioned reaction would imply and left ample scope for confusion. If the Prefect was stripped of the powers over the Police d’Etat which he had acquired in 1908, he still maintained his prerogatives concerning the Police Spéciale and Police Mobile, thus effectively limiting any strict geographical delimitation of their respective Police services. The full extent of the Police powers of each was also open to debate, with many jurists considering the new administrator’s requisition of Police powers illegal. With the Administrateur Extraordinaire was created a new layer in the Marseille Police, in the form of the Directeur des Services de Police, situated hierarchically between the Administrateur and the Commissaire Central. The creation of this Directeur, however, did not abolish the post of Secrétaire Général de la Police, the assistant to the Prefect as regards the administration of the Police. Given that the Prefect’s powers over the Police

21 Raoul Busquet, Histoire de Marseille, Paris, 1945, p 448; Adrien Blès, La Canebière dans le temps et dans l’espace, Marseille, 1994, p 60. 22 AN F2 2235, Rapport relatif à la réorganisation administrative de la ville de Marseille, undated, but post-December 1938; AN F2 2235, Ministry of the Interior to Daladier, undated but presumably March 1939; Journal Officiel, issues of 21 March 1939, p 3671 and of 20 April 1939, p 5030. Marseille Chicago 55 d’Etat were scrapped, such a situation should have been without importance, except that the Directeur des Services had no administrative staff and had to ‘borrow’ them from the Secrétaire Général, who remained under the control of the Prefect. The right-wing newspaper Le Petit Marseillais did not spare its irony claiming that the Marseille population were bemused by the reform as all that had been achieved was to substitute imbroglio for chaos.23 At the heart of Marseille’s importance for preparing for war was her port. The old port had lost its economic importance to the new port of La Joliette which had become the principle docking point along Marseille’s 34 kilometres of rocky white limestone shoreline. Prior to the First World War the port had been a gateway to the East, but increasingly its activity focused on trade with the French Empire in Africa. The city was dependent on the income derived from this activity which was also vital to the national economy. Much of its imports consisted of raw materials which were refined in local factories before being re-exported. Its exploitation offered huge profits to local entrepreneurs and a subsistence income to the day labourers who, grimy with dirt and greasy with sweat, found precarious employment here. Its vast steamers whose decks brimmed with passengers and whose holds were crammed with merchandise were the pride of the local population, offering the reality of travel to those who could afford it and flights of fantasy to those who could not. The Djenné, the Sinaïa, the Ville d’Alger, the Cap Corse and others were household names to locals who, like Marius in Pagnol’s film, dreamt of escape. In his short story Les feux du Batavia, Pierre MacOrlan conjures up the image of a brothel whose employees spent most of their time dreaming of a steamer due to arrive in Marseille and which rumour had it was packed with German millionaires looking to take them away to luxurious brothels in Hamburg. For children too there seemed something magical about the docks as on Sunday strolls with their parents they would marvel at the eroticism of imported panthers or snakes. Even the more prosaic piles of timber, wool or coal and the enormous warehouses containing a huge range of products could fire a child’s imagination. The economic importance of the port and the vast array of merchandise it contained necessitated close surveillance. This operation involved three different Police forces whose task ironically was not necessarily facilitated by the reform. The first, the Police d’Etat, was the Administrateur’s responsibility and was charged with controlling access to the port, as well as with general policing

23 AN F2 2235, Rapport relatif à la réorganisation administrative de la ville de Marseille; Journal Officiel, 21 March 1939, p 3671 & 20 April 1939, p 5030; Le Petit Marseillais, 8 Septem- ber 1939: “Marseille, ses Préfets, ses sous-Préfets, ses Directeurs”; AN F1a 4526, L’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, rapport sur le régime de Police à Marseille, 10 April 1940. 56 Chapter 2 on the docksides. On this latter task, its role overlapped with the Police Spé- ciale who were also responsible for checking passports, controlling the maritime border and boarding ships to check on their cargo and passengers. A third Police, like the Police Spéciale answerable to the Prefect, but whose tasks were ill-defined, was a special guard employed by the chamber of commerce to make up for deficiencies in the numbers of the other two services. A mission by an undercover agent of the Ministry of Colonies in spring 1940 was said to have uncovered serious gaps in co-ordination between the Prefect’s Police forces and those of the Administrateur. This agent had had no trouble entering the port, although not using the necessary official pass: on several occasions he had simply brandished assorted scraps of paper (including a hotel receipt) at the Gardien de la Paix on duty and on one occasion he had even informed this Police officer that he did not have the necessary pass, at which point he was told to come back later because, as the Gardien explained, ‘an Inspecteur of the Sûreté Nationale is wandering about and those people are a real pain’. Once in the port, the agent noted, it was easy to approach the large quantities of unguarded merchandise on the dockside and no one seemed the slightest bit interested as he carried large packages around, despite the high security risks of the period. His report noted that surveillance seemed to be non-existent.24 Improvements in the surveillance of the port were also thought necessary to keep tabs on immigrants for whom it represented a point of entry. The attitude of the Third Republic had always been ambivalent with regard to foreigners. The late 1930s saw this situation reach new heights. Historian Ralph Schor stresses the importance of Albert Sarraut’s period at the Ministry of the Inte- rior from April 1938 as the beginning of a tougher campaign against foreigners.25 Two main concerns were expressed in the administrative circulars of this period. The first was the threat of these foreigners forming some kind of invasion, such a fear being undoubtedly a symptom of what Pierre Laborie has portrayed as a crisis of national identity.26 The second worry regarded the possibility of political activity amongst these immigrants. This concern was expressed regarding the possibly ‘subversive’ activities of Spanish Republicans or from those of their supporters in the International Brigades. The attitude to members of the International Brigades hardened as their countries of origin, fearing fascist retaliation, withdrew nationality from those citizens who had

24 AN F1a 4526, L’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, rapport sur le régime de Police à Mar- seille, 10 April 1940; AN F1a 4526, Ministère des Colonies, Etat-Major des Colonies, 5è bureau, n° 1712/SR. Col., Paris, 28 March 1940, “renseignements, source: agent sûr”. 25 Ralph Schor, L’opinion française et les Etrangers, 1919-1939, Paris, 1985, pp 666-667 & 704. 26 Pierre Laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy, Paris, 1990, pp 56-66. Marseille Chicago 57 formed part of the Republican brigades in Spain. Such was the case for the Poles belonging to these militias who were deprived of their original nationality in December 1938 and henceforth refused access to France. But political activity could also take the form of spying. Espionage was a subject which fas- cinated the French in the 1930s owing partly to the recurrence of this theme in the fiction of the moment, but also to the publicised increases in those arrested for this offence by French counter-espionage: 35 in 1935; 153 in 1937; 274 in 1938 and 300 in the first half of 1939.27 The fact that spying was a growing concern for the authorities is shown in the fact that espionage once again became a capital offence, therefore punishable by death, under the terms of a law of 28 June 1938.28 Circulars sent to Police services concerning spying sometimes took the form of arrest warrants for individuals. Such warrants might be extremely precise giving detailed information about a specific individual. The description of a suspect aviator was so elaborate that it even included details of inscriptions on his jewellery. Other warrants were much vaguer. One suspect American’s description did not go much beyond the information: ‘authentic American, of the cowboy type’. Such vagueness was a licence to mark out whole groups as suspect and to subject them to constant vigilance. Similar encouragement to any xenophobia existing in Police services came from the designation (with no limitations of the ‘cowboy’ type) of national groups as containing enemy spies. Stateless persons were thus signalled as suspect by the Surveillance du Terri- toire on 29 November 1938; Croatians and Slovenians on 26 August 1939; Ger- man exiles on 3 September and 3 November 1939 and 3 January 1940 (although by that time they had been designated as being ‘of Jewish origin’); Czechs on 3 November and Poles on 15 November and 4 December 1939.29

27 AD BDR 4M 11, Ministre de l’Intérieur à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 August 1938, n° A.17; AN F7 13986, Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, circulaire n° 18, Paris, 28 January 1937; AN F7 14662, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 22 December 1938; Paul Paillole, Services Spéciaux, 1939-1945, Paris, 1975, p 110. 28 Regina Delacor, ‘From potential friends to potential enemies: The internment of “hostile foreigners” in France at the beginning of the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, n° 3, July 2000, p 365; Herrick Chapman and Laura Levine Frader (eds), Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, Oxford, 2004. 29 AN F7 14662, Stateless persons in Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, n° 162, 29 November 1938; Croatians and Slovenians in Contrôleur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire à MM les Commissaires de la Surveillance du Territoire, circular S/358, 26 August 1939; Germans in Contrôleur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire à MM les Commissaires de la Surveillance du Territoire, circulars n° S/359 of 3 September 1939, n° N-C/C374 of 3 November 1939 & S/412 of 3 January 1940; Czechs in 58 Chapter 2

National defence through counter-espionage is a valid preoccupation of those preparing for a war. It was certainly possible that the Nazis could have infiltrated the ranks of the immigrants finding their way into France in 1939. However, it should not be overlooked that the main aim of those planning espionage is to obtain the maximum amount of information on their enemies. In order to do this, they attempt, as far as possible, to use their enemy’s own nationals who do not stand out in the same way as someone speaking with a foreign accent. Therefore, given the over-heavy emphasis placed on the surveillance and the internment of immigrants in the counter-espionage of the late 1930s, it might be asked how far political motives underlay its official purpose. Possible explanations as to why local Police authorities implemented such instructions indiscriminately and why a number of those who found themselves interned in 1939 and 1940 were actually drawn from the ranks of the anti-Nazis must include xenophobia, confusion about the texts in force, fluctuations in official policy, laziness and a lack of staff to assure any genuine vetting.30 Overall, some 13000 ‘enemy aliens’ were rounded up by the Marseille Police in the first month following the declaration of war.31 The internment of foreigners in France, all too easily given the tag ‘suspect’, was only one element of the fight against those depicted as the ‘enemy within’. The communists being the other victim, it should be no surprise to see the two forces associated in government circulars. After the Nazi-Soviet pact announced on 23 August 1939, and the defence of this pact accorded, not without hesitation, by the French Communist Party, it was suggested that communist propaganda in the French army was in fact being spread by the Nazis. A hardening of the position of the authorities with regard to the communists had been noticeable immediately following the breakup of the Popular Front in July 1938. The Police had displayed ready willingness to intervene against communist strikers on 30 November 1938 and with even greater brutality during a communist- inspired demonstration of municipal workers on 12 August 1939. Now the pact acted as a further trigger for a series of sanctions. Although the new round of punitive measures officially began on 26 September with the dissolving of the Communist Party, it is clear that preparations for repression had been planned

Contrôleur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire à MM les Commissaires de la Surveillance du Territoire, circular n° NE/C374 of 3 November 1939 and Poles in Con- trôleur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire à MM les Commissaires de la Surveillance du Territoire, circulars n° S/387 of 15 November 1939 & n° S/396, 4 December 1939. 30 AN F7 14662, Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 19 October 1939. 31 Mary Dewhurst Lewis, The Boundaries of the Republic, Palo Alto, 2007, p 229. Marseille Chicago 59 weeks before. The specialist on the communists in Marseille, Marcel-Pierre Bernard, claims that orders for searches of communist premises in the city had been issued from the beginning of September thus preceding the measures proposed by Minister of the Interior Albert Sarraut on 17 September. It is estimated that from September through to 10 November 1939, nearly 200 searches were carried out in the Bouches-du-Rhône, with 80% of these taking place in Marseille. The predominance of the departmental capital in such action is due to the proportionally higher number of communists in Marseille than in the surrounding areas and in particular the installation of the local leadership in the city. Not surprisingly, it was this leadership which was the principal focus of repression. François Billoux and Jean Cristofol were arrested on 8 October 1939, whilst the heads of communist cells in the south-east and north of Mar- seille were arrested in May and June 1940.32 The Police were well-informed about the situation of the local communist movement. The Communist Party had been subject to Police scrutiny for some time, allowing the building-up of a network of informers, such as the former regional secretary of the local communist youth group. Rispoli, the head of the anti-communist section within the Police Spéciale, had been a close school friend of a couple of the leading lights of the local movement. Even after the dissolution of the party its militants continued to ignore the most elemental rules of clandestinity, making surveillance that much more simple. The possession of detailed information on communist structures must be considered one of the principal factors of Police successes in this repression. Such successes were achieved despite persistent complaints from senior civil servants about the overlapping of the Police services charged with communist questions, with all that that implied of problems of co-ordination. The confusion resulting from this overlapping was not due to an orchestrated campaign to undermine activity by deliberate incompetence. It testifies rather to the over-enthusiasm of local services who, both at the level of the hierarchy and the grass-roots,

32 AN F7 14662, le Contrôleur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire à MM les Commissaires de la Surveillance du Territoire, circular n° Ne/R.381, 14 November 1939; F.P Auriol, Une initiative Daladier-Reynaud, l’extraordinaire “réorganisation” de Marseille, undated; Antoine Olivesi, ‘La région marseillaise du congrès d’Arles (décembre 1937) à l’entrée dans la clandestinité (octobre 1939)’, in Jean-Pierre Rioux & Jean-Pierre Azéma (ed.), Les communistes français de Munich à Châteaubriant (1938-1941), Paris, 1987, p 278; Marcel-Pierre Bernard, ‘Marseille: un parti en marge (août 1939-juillet 1941)’ in ibid., pp 281-282. 60 Chapter 2 approached the repression of communism with a particular keenness, all vying to be in its forefront.33 The mutual hostility of the Police and the communists predated the late 1930s and notwithstanding an uneasy truce during the Popular Front was now as vigorous as ever. The Police, as has been seen, fitted into the clientelistic practices of 1930s Marseille. It was the socialists, traditional rivals of the communists (despite a temporary reconciliation during the early Popular Front), who wooed the Police. The communists for their part had not only deliberately excluded themselves from such clientelism, for reasons of ideological purity, but also bitterly attacked Police practices. Corrupt Police officers are unlikely to have appreciated communist denunciations of their activity. Those not engaged in such corruption undoubtedly resented such misconduct being publicised so openly for fear of being tarred with the same brush. Communists also raised questions about Police officers’ concept of public order. Criticisms of brutalities against demonstrators were not likely to win over many Police officers, who felt themselves every bit as much the victims of street violence as those they were accused of man-handling. If the Police, as implied above could not be said to be in the communist camp, there is good reason to believe that their reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact would follow a similar pattern to that of the rest of non-communist France. Roderick Kedward has claimed that this pact ‘furnished the opportunity for most of France to externalise its own guilt’ concerning its inaction during the Spanish Civil War and its support for concessions to Hitler at Munich. In this view the repression of communists in 1939/1940 was punishing them as much for having been ‘right’ during three years of purity in foreign policy matters, as for their sudden about-face in 1939.34 Kedward argues that the war against Hitler was not in any way helped by an internal war against the communists. As regards the Police, the anti-Commu- nist campaign diverted resources from the control of crime, and the genuine vetting of those being interned under the label ‘foreign spy’. Such an argument was made explicit in a letter from the Bouches-du-Rhône Prefect to the Minis- ter of the Interior on 15 January 1940. In this correspondence, the Prefect inquired about the possibility of using Commissaires Municipaux to do the work of the Police Spéciale in communes outside Marseille to compensate for the excessive workload of Marseille’s Police Spéciale as a result of the surveil-

33 AN F1a 4526, L’IGSA à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, rapport sur le régime de Police de Mar- seille, 10 April 1940. 34 H.R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, Oxford, 1978, p 2. Marseille Chicago 61 lance of communist activity.35 Of course behind these increased demands on their time, traditional gaps in resources also continued. The Police hierarchy continued to complain about a shortage of buildings and the need to transfer certain Police stations, such as the one in the new port of La Joliette, into more adequate surroundings. Even when new facilities were installed, as for the creation of the Radio-Police designed to intercept suspect radio messages and to transmit telegrams to the central services, they were equipped with no heating. The Police Spéciale tried to hang on to members of the Police d’Etat seconded to their services, less out of esteem for their professional capacity than because these officers automatically benefited from a free tram card denied to police Spéciale officers: a serious advantage in terms of mobility. The war also added its own weight to this question. Resources such as paper became extremely scarce owing to import controls and had to be used sparingly by Police services. Typewriters, once broken, could not be replaced because the army had requisitioned the factories of their manufacturers for its own use; but it was in human resources that gaps in the Police were most keenly felt.36 This was a Police force struggling to come terms with the needs of an approaching war. Mobilisation of Police officers had begun comparatively late. In January 1939 no Marseille Police officers were absent for reasons of military preparation but by April 1939 the number had reached 55 and by 2 September 344. Damien Michel, Inspecteur de la Sûreté in Marseille, claims that following the General Mobilisation, more than half the Police officers of the city had been sent off to the Front. Such an estimation needs to be treated with care. To begin with, mobilisation did not affect all categories of personnel equally. Thus, if the number of Gardiens de la Paix in the city had declined drastically to 1030 by January 1940, the number of Inspecteurs de la Sûreté had actually risen (to 405). This latter figure takes into account the fact that many Police officers were sent back to their professional posts after their initial mobilisation. Michel’s own situation was not entirely dissimilar to this and serves as an example of the confusion inherent in the mobilisation prior to World War two. Having been informed, several months before the declaration of war, that on General Mobilisation he was to report immediately to Toulon naval-base, Michel was instructed in August 1939 that his mobilisation would no longer be

35 AD BDR 4M 22, Ministre de l’Intérieur à M le Préfet des BDR, January 1940; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Préfet des BDR à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 15 January 1940; H.R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, Oxford, 1978, p 3. 36 The question of shortage of paper is addressed in AD BDR 4M 22, Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 5 January 1940; problems with typewriters appear in AD BDR 4M 11, CD de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, 5 December 1939. 62 Chapter 2 immediate and that he should wait in reserve for personal orders. At the beginning of 1940, he was told that, in fact, he would not be mobilised and would benefit from a special designation in the Police. Such designations were widespread, with full mobilisation being viewed, from 22 September, as a punishment for those Police officers not serving zealously enough in their civil function.37 The fact that a large number of Police officers were sent back to their jobs or not mobilised at all has at least two explanations. Firstly, the paranoia of the moment, for if a large Police presence was required to Police communism, similar pressure was exerted from anti-Semitic quarters. According to Ralph Schor, once a series of Jewish organisations had pronounced themselves favourable to the war, a section of right-wing parliamentarians argued that Police mobilisation should be extremely limited, in order to combat any attempts at a coup d’état by these ‘dangerous foreigners’ in France. Secondly, restrictions on full Police mobilisation resulted from the inadequacy of the measures taken to compensate for the absence of those at the Front. Such measures revolved largely around the recruitment of auxiliaries, either taken from the ranks of retired Police officers or gendarmes, or from those totally unconnected with the Administration. Damien Michel remembers that such auxiliaries were drawn from all walks of life, including some accountants, bank clerks and shop-keepers. The auxiliary appointed to assist him, allowed him to overcome one of the primary Police difficulties of the moment, namely transport, by making two cars available to the Police but in general these auxiliaries were noted for their poor quality.38 Rather than rallying behind the war effort, many Police officers complained of their mobilisation and, in the case of those not mobilised, of the sacrifices demanded of them as a result of the war. If Police officers were exempt from the contribution nationale extraordinaire, which was the equivalent of a 15% tax on the wages of some of their compatriots, they suffered from a temporary suspension of their holidays from March to May 1939 and, to prevent promotional disadvantages for mobilised Police officers, a complete cessation of their promotion prospects beginning in September. Their reluctance to accept these sacrifices reflected a wider phenomenon: the French were more resigned to than enthusiastic about the war declared on 3 September 1939. A widespread

37 AD BDR 4M 22, Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 22 September 1939; AD BDR 4M 21, Rapports journaliers du Commissariat Central; AD BDR M6 13079, lists of Police officers serving in Marseille; Damien Michel, Un flic se met à table, Paris, 1992, pp 12-14. 38 R. Schor, L’opinion française, p 705; G. Carrot, Le Maintien de l’ordre, p 134; D. Michel, Un flic se met à table, pp 14-17. Marseille Chicago 63 pacifism had gripped a France haunted by memories of the carnage of 1914-18. For many French people in 1939, not only was there no desire to die for Danzig, but the real enemy was perceived as war itself. The illusory peace offered by the Munich agreements had been greeted by smiling faces, vigorous hand- shakes and kissing in the streets and offices of Marseille together with grateful posters in shop-windows proclaiming: ‘Vive Roosevelt! Vive Chamberlain! Vive Daladier! Vive la vie!’ Local bar-owners had had difficulty serving all the extra drinks ordered to celebrate peace. Although pacifism should by no means be taken as synonymous of defeatism, there were some indications that, despite official rallying cries of confidence, optimism was far from being universal. Questions were being asked of France’s ability to engage in a new conflict, particularly by those who considered her the victim of decadence.39 Preparing for a war about which they were unenthusiastic and which increased demands on limited Police resources represented a considerable strain on the personnel. Outward signs of poor morale were not lacking. The hierarchy complained about the tidiness and politeness of Police officers, particularly in ports and railway stations. The Minister of the Interior painted the picture of certain Inspecteurs who, cigarette in the corner of their mouth and hat or beret on the side of their head, would approach members of the public in a rude tone asking them questions totally unrelated with their functions. In Marseille, the Prefect and the Commissaire de la Police Spéciale issued instructions in August 1939 to put an end to such slovenliness. Although their subordinates did temporarily apply such instructions, as soon as this hierarchical pressure was relaxed, they lost sight of these orders. New instructions were therefore sent out in the summer of 1940 which made it clear why senior Police officers were so interested in this question. It was underlined that with Police numbers as such a low ebb and their tasks so heavy, policing by consent was more important than ever. Tidiness, it was argued, would increase the authority of Inspecteurs when confronted with members of the public in need of help; when intervening in a brawl or asking for assistance from Gardiens de la Paix. But smartness was also associated with efficiency, and it was therefore significant that these instructions stressed the importance of the effect of Police presentation on French or foreign travellers. Raising the morale of the

39 AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 21 March 1939; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 17 May 1939; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre des Finances à MM les Ministres, 8 September 1939; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 18 January 1940; Bulletin de l’Association Amicale de Prévoyance des Com- missaires et Inspecteurs de la Sûreté Nationale, August-September 1939, p 382; Henri Michel, La 2è guerre mondiale commence, Brussels, 1980, p 73. 64 Chapter 2 population by showing the smartness of the French Police, was as nothing compared with giving French communists and foreign spies the idea that the French Police was an efficient force. Instructions were also issued to Gardiens de la Paix to improve personal appearance. Upon his arrival in the city the Administrateur Extraordinaire had instructed them to buy ankle boots within twenty-four hours, to obtain Dolman collars and in the case of the bicycle brigade to don black shirts. The fact that Police officers were expected to purchase these items from their own wages was not well received. Indeed it provided the opportunity to vent frustration by raising a whole host of other lingering grievances: a hideous pair of trousers they had once been given to wear; the question of insufficient arming; the state of the grimy flea-infected hovels which served as Police stations and contravened many of the hygiene laws the Police were expected to enforce and the fact that the Administrateur complained that Police officers were not punished enough, a view which it was felt failed to take into account the beatings Police officers had suffered during the strike movements of November 1938. Outward signs of poor morale, such as those noted regarding personal appearance and politeness, were accompanied by frequent absenteeism, requiring the Minister of the Interior to issue instructions obliging Police officers to produce a medical certificate in the case of sickness.40 It was against this backdrop of poor French morale and lack of enthusiasm that the country went to war. However, it would be wrong to blame the humiliating defeat that French armies suffered in 6 weeks of fighting in May/June 1940 on the failure of public opinion to enthuse about the war. The responsibility for that setback lay rather with the ruthless determination of the enemy together with the strategy favoured by the country’s aged military leadership, symbolised by the hero of Verdun, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had based their hopes on an impressive wall of fortifications, known as the Maginot line, which the reluctance of the Belgians had prevented from stretching northwards to the coast and which in the event had simply been outflanked. How- ever, the fragile state of public morale helps explain the readiness with which the population accepted the subsequent armistice and the establishment of the Vichy government, and initially endorsed some of the new regime’s plans for reforming France.

40 AD BDR 4M 22, Le Préfet des BDR à M. le CD, Chef de la Police Spéciale, 26 August 1939; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 22 September 1939; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Préfet des BDR à M. le CD, Chef de la Police Spéciale, 10 June 1940; AD BDR 4M 22, Le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, 22 April 1940; L’Etatiste, n° 122, June 1939, p 1, ‘la réorganisation à Marseille’. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 65

Chapter 3 Enthusiasm and Co-operation: The Start of the Vichy Government

When Hitler turned his ruthless war machine against Western Europe on 10 May 1940, Marseille was at a comfortable distance from the military action. A German bombing targeting the installations of the port was followed three weeks later on 21 June by an indiscriminate Italian attack vehemently denounced for its cowardice. This Italian ‘stab in the back’ left in its wake 143 bodies, including 7 Gardiens de la Paix, with the worst of the damage occurring around the central Police station, known locally as ‘l’Evêché’ because it was housed in an eighteenth-century mansion which used to be the Bishop’s residence.1 But compared with many of the conurbations of the North and East, the city came out of the campaign relatively unscathed. Police reports depicted the local population as indifferent to the defeat and more interested to know when the night-clubs would re-open. This was a little unfair. Many Marseillais were genuinely concerned by national events particularly since these were intricately interwoven with the fate of those fellow city- dwellers (and relations or work-mates) not yet returned from the front. Even in the Police d’Etat, where mobilisation had been relatively slight, 152 local Police officers were still absent in October 1940 for reasons related to the war. 127 (including 108 Gardiens de la Paix) were being held as Prisoners of War, whilst 20 were missing or injured. It was later confirmed that 9 had died during the military campaign.2 In Marseille, as in the rest of the country, the relief at the announcement of the armistice was underpinned by a profound sense of dis- belief at the speed and the scale of the rout. The local population was particularly relieved when it learnt that the armistice secured an unoccupied zone in which Lyon and Marseille would compete for the position of France’s largest ‘free’ city. The new regime deliberately chose to avoid locating itself in either. Over the next four years it was from the spa town of Vichy that France would officially be governed. ‘Vichy’ was directed first by the First World War hero Philippe Pétain, coupled with the scheming parliamentarian Pierre Laval. Then after

1 A. Sauvageot, Marseille dans la tourmente, Paris, 1949, p 78; André Ducasse, “Chronique du Vieux Port en Guerre, 1939-45”, Arts et Livres de Provence, n° 31 (special edition), 1957, p 84. 2 AD BDR M6 12070, Police d’Etat de Marseille, Secrétariat particulier du Commissariat Central, 15 October 1940.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_005 66 Chapter 3 the end of 1940 power would pass to Pétain and the opportunistic naval admiral François Darlan. Finally Laval would return in April 1942 when Pétain was relegated to a largely symbolic role. The parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic had given way to the unregulated authoritarianism of the ‘Etat Français’.3 How then did law enforcement officers respond to this new regime? Few voices of dissent were raised in the Police when the Vichy regime first came to power. Vichy was not only considered as legitimate but, even amongst formerly Republican Policemen, many actually welcomed its arrival in power. If this position would seem an unlikely descendent of the political stance adopted by the Marseille Police at the end of the 1930s several explanations must be invoked. These explanations revolve around the silencing of mechanisms previously used by Policemen for political expression, the hopes raised by the new government and some overlapping of culture between the Police and its new rulers. Influences which might have helped push Police officers into opposition to such a regime were immediately silenced. The links with the local socialist party which many Police officers had chosen to maintain either through an attachment to their programme or in most cases through clientelism were undermined by a number of considerations. The retirement of the socialist Henri Tasso, who had been the patron of local Police trade unions, deprived them of a natural ally. The socialist party itself was forced underground. The banning of all trade unions in 1940 and the seizure of their funds between July 1941 and August 1942 eliminated structures which had been influential in terms of political orientation. The apolitical stance officially endorsed in Vichy discourse corresponded both to that current in the Police which had been singing the virtues of apoliticism as well as to that of many who had performed their professional duties with obvious political preferences, who were now pushed into a position of mea-culpa by the military defeat. The free masons, who had been very active in Police circles, were outlawed.4 The head of the Vichy regime Marshal Philippe Pétain held considerable public prestige, not least amongst former soldiers of which the Police counted a large number within its ranks. As military leaders go he was seen as particularly attentive to the welfare of his troops. It was hoped that now he had been given a civilian role he would prove equally attentive to the welfare of his citi-

3 H.R. Kedward, Occupied France, Resistance and Collaboration, Oxford, 1985, pp 1-2; William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, London, 1970, pp 1-13; Alistair Horne, To lose a battle: France 1940, Harmondsworth, 1970, pp 643-644 & pp 646-648. 4 The funds of 7 Police associations, most of whom had their headquarters in Marseille bars, were ceased by arrêté préfectoral between July 1941 and August 1942, AD BDR M14 2167. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 67 zens. The Police were especially hopeful of attention: a new regime often means new opportunities.5 In its discourse, Vichy elevated the Police to the status of an elite corps. It promised more resources and better pay. Govern- ment officials also referred obsessively to their love of public order.6 Indeed, this was one of the central themes of the new government. This helped fuel initial enthusiasm by encouraging Police officers to expect an input of badly needed resources into their institution and a limitation on restrictions governing Police powers. Although not an entirely new phenomenon, a spate of incidents involving violence against suspects in the Commis- sariat of the 1st district as well as in the Sûreté offices in October and November 1940 are indicative of an atmosphere where Police officers expect their excesses to go unpunished.7 In a democratic regime such excesses may be countered by pressure from the press or questions raised in parliament, mechanisms which were inoperative in the system Vichy had installed. Even if some Police officers were opposed to such abuses, most welcomed a widening of Police powers more generally. As regards the means at their disposal, the period was marked by an increase in sources of information through the interception of private letters, as well as the advent of anonymous letters on a large scale, although in reality none of these sources was entirely new to Vichy. France had a long tradition dating back to at least the 16th Century of the State intercepting private correspondence. Under Vichy the interception of private letters and telephone calls was the task of the ‘Contrôle Technique’.8 Re-established by a circular of 12 December 1939 to detect correspondence transmitting information likely to affect French national security, it evolved into an important device for measuring public opinion under Vichy. Nation- ally, around 300,000 letters were intercepted each week, their contents read and noted. This postal censor also developed a Police function in that corre-

5 Denis Peschanski, ‘Dans la tourmente’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 62-63; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 205. 6 D. Peschanski, ‘Du régime d’exception à l’assainissement national’, in J.-P. Rioux, Antoine Prost & J.-P. Azéma, Les Communistes français de Munich à Châteaubriant, Paris, 1987 p 155; J.-M. Guillon, ‘la philosophie politique de la Révolution nationale’, in J.-P. Azéma & François Bédarida (eds), Vichy et les Français, Paris, pp 171-172. 7 AD BDR M6 11053, le Préfet à M le CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale, 16 October 1940; AD BDR 5W 361 note de la 5è Division, 3è Bureau à M le Commissaire Central, 18 November 1940. 8 Robert W. Parson, Every Word You Write … Vichy Will Be Watching You: Surveillance of Public Opinion in the Gard Department 1940-1944: The Postal Control System During Vichy France, Tucson, 2013. 68 Chapter 3 spondence relating to crimes or ‘political subversion’ were passed on to the relevant authorities for investigation. Although this provided new possibilities for Police investigation, it also brought increased responsibilities as regards the secrecy of sources, as demonstrated in repeated reminders to Police officers to stop divulging to suspects that their telephone calls or mail had been intercepted.9 Less welcome were the sack-fulls of anonymous letters of denunciation which had to be ploughed through. The scale of anonymous accusations under the new regime reflected the tone of revenge within Vichy’s political programme, known as the National Revolution. Such accusations raised concerns amongst Police officers for four reasons.10 Firstly, the investigation of such complaints increased their workload. Generally these investigations were fruitless, with the accusations proving unfounded. The second reason for the unpopularity of such practices was that these denunciations escaped Police control. It is well-established that to morally outraged or malicious informants the Police greatly prefer informers over whom they have direct power, either through financial incentives or offers of leniency regarding the informer’s own offences. Thirdly, such anonymous accusations increased centralised control over local Police activities. The popularity of Pétain meant that many sent their denunciations directly to him thereby obliging local Police officers to transmit their copies of their findings directly to these central bodies. Finally, the object of these accusations was not infrequently Police officers themselves, denounced generally as Free-Masons, sometimes as communists, more rarely as Jews.

9 AD BDR M6 11062, le C.D, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Procureur de la République, 26 October 1940; AD BDR M6 11062, le C.D, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet, 11 October 1940; AD BDR 5W 360, le Général Dentz à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 2931 CT/i, 12 October 1940; Pierre Laborie, L’opinion française sous Vichy, Paris, 1990, p 34; Roger Austin, ‘Surveillance and intelligence under the Vichy regime: the Ser- vice du contrôle Technique, 1939-1945’, Intelligence & National Security, Vol. 1, N° 1, 1986, pp 123-137; Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services, from the Dreyfus affair to the Gulf war, Oxford, 1997, p 6; Richard Vinen, The Unfree French, London, 2006, p 86. 10 AD BDR 5W 362,le Commissaire, chef de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Central, n° 2971 cb, 21 August 1940; AD BDR 5W 362, CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 17233 DE/LO, 4 November 1940; AD BDR 5W 366, CD des RG à M L’Intendant de Police, 2234 SI/FF, 2 March 1942; AN 2AG 520 C, lettre anonyme de Marseille à Pétain, 3 April 1941; AD BDR M6 11062, anonymous letters referred to in CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 17521/606 AE-FA, 16 October 1940; AN 2AG 520 C, Note de l’Inspection Générale des Services de Police criminelle, 19 April 1941; F. Cathala, “les dénonciateurs”, Revue de la Sûreté Nationale, 1962, part one in n° 44 pp 47-56, part two in n° 45 pp 45-51; John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1986, p 100. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 69

Besides the hoped for input of new resources it should be recognised that between Vichy and the Police there were also some common enemies. The Police had long tracked down communists. Hostility was bitter, particularly in the wake of bloody street fights between Police officers and militants beginning in 1925. In the pages of communist newspapers, many angry column inches were given over to anti-Police tirades and these sometimes even went as far as to call for ‘death to the pigs’ (‘mort aux vaches’). Little wonder then that when Vichy asked for Police help in its anti-Communist crusade, Police officers responded willingly, monitoring communist activity, arresting militants, tor- turing many and eventually handing over some to the Nazis.11 Another common enemy were foreigners a fact which was to have dire consequences for refugee Jews. Although in Republican France the Police had no specific history of anti-Semitism, it did have a long tradition of xenophobia. Given that an important proportion of the Jews targeted by Vichy were foreigners from central Europe, the Police was easily able to adapt its xenophobic traditions to the anti-Semitic stance of this new government. These traditions were not alien to the important contribution of the French Police to the policy of identifying and interning Jews from 1940 onwards and, then, of participating in their deportation to the death camps of Eastern Europe from 1942.12 Most of the 76000 Jews deported from France were arrested by the French, not the Ger- man, Police. Here Vichy was exploiting undercurrents of ambiguity in the

11 Service Historique de l’Armée de Terre (SHAT) archives 1K 545 6, diary of General Bridoux, entry for 23 October 1942; Denis Peschanski, ‘‘La répression anti-communiste dans le départment de la Seine (1940-42)’, in Denis Peschanski (ed), Vichy 1940-44, Archives de guierre d’Angelo Tasca, Paris, 1985, pp 111-137; Denis Peschanski, ‘Exclusion, persécution, répression’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida [eds], Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, pp 209-234; Christian Bougeard, ‘Le Finistère’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschan- ski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 92-93; Jeanne Gillot-Voisin, ‘Concurrence et coopération en Saône-et-Loire’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 118-119; Michel Goubet, ‘Etude départementale: répression et exclusion dans la région toulousaine’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida [eds], Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, p 236. 12 Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz. Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 volumes, Paris, 1983; Serge Klarsfeld, Le calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France, 1940-44, Paris, 1993; Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police et l’administration’, in G. Wellers, A. Kaspi et S. Klarsfeld (eds), La France et la question juive 1940-1944, Paris, 1981, pp 57-79; Wil- liam Guéraiche, ‘Administration et répression sous l’Occupation: les “affaires juives” de la préfecture de Charente-Inférieure (septembre 1940- juillet 1944’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, n° 45-2, April-June 1998, pp 480-503; Simon Kitson, ‘The Police and the deportation of Jews from the Bouches-du-Rhône in August and September 1942’, Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 5, N° 3, August 1997, pp 309-318. 70 Chapter 3 political position of Police officers. The Police had been firmly attached to Republican institutions. The ideals of the Republic had included the notion of equality. In theory this should have led to the conclusion that foreigners and French people were equal. However, the concept of national unity lauded by the Republic tended to reduce to the level of a threat those who refused to assimilate or chose to express their difference from the dominant model. Republican practice had treated foreigners with greater suspicion than the notion of them being equal should have permitted and the Police were the instrument of this practice. Vichy’s ability to draw on a reliable Police force was encouraged by the ambition of Policemen, both personal and professional. Gaining promotion has always been an important source of motivation and for some it remained so even in the Vichy years. Given the serious bottleneck in promotion possibilities within the Police, this was undoubtedly less important than in other sectors of activity. But the professional ambition of doing one’s job to the best of one’s ability existed nonetheless, particularly in those areas where Police officers considered their mission useful. Vichy used its Police as a political instrument but even this regime did not entirely do away with the notion of the Police as a public service. In his novel ‘SS-GB’, the thriller writer Len Deighton imagined the situation of the British Police force in a United King- dom occupied by the Germans; his leading character Super-Intendant Douglas Archer echoed a sentiment which many French Police officers could share and apply to their own predicament: ‘The British public have a right to be protected against murder, robbery and violence. Do I have to tell the victims of such crimes that I don’t like working under the Germans?’13 Combating crime and overseeing distribution of food supplies were consistent public demands of the Police at this time. The Police were not always successful in these domains but many officers were sincere in their efforts and difficulties in distinguishing between common law crimes and clandestine political activity were sometimes genuine. In 1940, in most respects what Vichy was asking of its Police officers was not that drastically different from that demanded by Edouard Daladier’s government between 1938 and 1940. As has been mentioned the campaign against foreigners and communists predated the armistice. Arguably, its motivation was different. Daladier’s government had imposed internment as an exceptional measure for reasons of national security, as indeed also happened in Britain and the USA. Vichy used internment as part of its policy of exclusion of these categories from the national community for reasons of ideology. But for

13 Len Deighton, SS-GB, London, 1991 edition, p 195. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 71 grass roots Policemen at this early stage, it was undoubtedly less this change in motivation that was apparent than the change in scale of these policies, and since the administrative habits had already been formed, drawing the line in the sand became increasingly difficult. The limited sense of genuine change between the last government of the Third Republic, which had ruled by decree and used strong arm tactics, and a Vichy government determined initially to appear relatively civilised helped encourage loyalty on the part of Police personnel, ensuring that their first reflex to the change of government was to consider the new government as legitimate. It might be argued that once they had taken the decision to stay in the administration, Vichy was sure to be able to rely on its Policemen owing to the passive obedience of civil servants. But the cult of obedience should not allow us to forget the importance of grass roots enthusiasm in determining the efficiency of Police action. It should not be forgotten that the Police relationship with their institution was a two-way process. Police officers were given orders by their superiors, but it was not unusual for reports written by junior officers to pass up the institutional hierarchy almost unchanged and such reports could have considerable importance in the subsequent treatment of a case. Also, the subsequent investigation of crimes and civil disobedience often relied on Police officers detecting and acting upon such behaviour in the first place. When a government can whip up genuine enthusiasm on the part of the sub-ordinate personnel those areas of Police activity dependent on zealous input will be exploited to the maximum. In many ways Vichy in its earliest incarnations succeeded in doing just that. Moreover, the idea of passive obedience itself needs examining more closely. It is certain that a cult of obedience existed in the Police. This was one of the institution’s fundamental values and all connected with it made reference to the notion. The State frequently referred to obedience hoping thereby to encourage a passive acceptance of its instructions. Individual Police officers could shelter behind the same notion to deny any personal responsibility for their actions. How far the institution’s cult of obedience could develop into a genuine culture of obedience was subject to a number of considerations and varied between different branches within the Police as well as according to the type of mission being accomplished. As sociologists have demonstrated Police agencies operate selectivity in deciding which missions to pursue zealously and where slackness can prevail.14 Where the institution was most in control over its personnel was in ‘direct missions’ in which an officer was charged with going to a certain address and

14 Dominique Monjardet, Ce que fait la Police, Sociologie de la force publique, Paris, 1996. 72 Chapter 3 held accountable for the arrest of a named person or in operations where a direct control was exercised by members of the hierarchy. Some branches of the Police have particularly tight hierarchical control thereby helping to assure obedience. This was the case in the Police Mobile where Police officers were directly accountable to both the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice and where Inspecteurs would very often be accompanied by Commis- saires in their missions. On the other hand, Gardiens de la Paix, who accounted for the vast majority of Police personnel, enjoyed a degree of autonomy in their everyday activity. The laws which they were expected to enforce were written in very vague and general terms leaving considerable scope for interpretation. Two-way radios were yet to come into effect and Gardiens had to use their initiative in unexpected circumstances encountered on their beat. Of course, controls did exist: Officiers de la Paix would carry out impromptu checks on the beats of their Gardiens, but given their own limited numbers these were infrequent; Gardiens would sometimes operate in pairs or groups making their autonomy subject to colleagues’ assent; the wearing of a uniform made them subject to public scrutiny. Obedience was subject to constant negotiation between the different actors. That Vichy was not convinced that it would be able to count on passive obedience in the long term is shown clearly by the range of measures designed to tighten and reinforce controls or to offer incentives for successful completion of a mission. A law of 11 August 1941 allowed Prefects to suspend civil servants ‘whose activities appear dangerous or are likely to be detrimental to the activity of the government’.15 The following day, Pétain made his oft-cited ‘ill wind’ speech on the radio. In it he acknowledged that public opinion had turned away from the government and, amongst other reasons for this, listed disobedience on the part of civil servants. It was in this context that an oath of fidelity to the head of State was extended to the whole of the civil service, including the Police, evidently hoping to profit from Pétain’s continued popularity and to invest his government with his authority.16 Other measures of tightening control followed. In the summer of 1942 it was decided to expand the use of identification numbers sown on to Police collars as a means of allowing the public to more easily monitor the activity of Policemen. A second measure instituted by René Bousquet, the national head of the Police, that July was to break with

15 AN F7 14908 [632], le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 1136 SG Pol., 19 August 1942; AN F7 14907 [556], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 443 SG Circ., 27 July 1942. 16 AN F7 14907 [484], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 390 Pol. I Circ., 20 June 1942. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 73 a practice emanating from a circular of 23 June 1887, whereby Prefects were forbidden to gather information concerning the professional conduct of Com- missaires de Police transferred into their département from the Prefects who had previously controlled that Commissaire. The motivation of the 1887 circular was to protect these civil servants from unfavourable prejudices.17 Given that transfer was one of the principal sanctions used against those accused of sympathising with the Resistance in their jurisdiction, the influence of the repeal of this circular must be seen as a means of increasing government control over its employees. Hierarchical pressure; obedience; personal or professional ambition; love of order; areas of political overlapping with regard to xenophobia and anti-communism; a lack of political alternatives: these were the factors encouraging initial compliance for the regime. Vichy needed this Police compliance in order to support both its internal program of reform and its foreign policy choices with regard to the Nazis. As in other authoritarian states the Police would ensure the suppression of public liberties and in the absence of democratic means of expression would monitor public opinion on behalf of the government.18 Vichy considered the institution as a means of guaranteeing the survival of the State, particularly since ministers were aware that from as early as the middle of 1941 their government was extremely unpopular.19 The institution thus became an essential pillar in the extensive program of social reform, known as the National Revolution, introduced from France’s makeshift capital.20 Especially important for France’s new rulers was that the Police were a symbol of the legitimacy of the prerogatives of a sovereign State and since they were so determined that French sovereignty should be preserved it was vital that the Police were efficient enough to deter the Germans from interfer- ing directly in questions of policing.

17 AN F7 14907 [538], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 1er Bureau n° 419, Pol. I Circ., 9 July 1942. 18 For policing of other authoritarian states check out: Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschan- ski, (eds), Pouvoirs et Police au XXe Siècle, Brussels, 1997; Mark Mazower, (ed), The policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1997. 19 For unpopularity of Vichy see: Archives Nationales (henceforth AN) 2AG 618, Bernard de Plas à M Bernard Ménétrel, 12 February 1942. See also Pétain’s speech of 12 August 1941 admitting to this unpopularity: Jean-Clause Barbas (ed), Philippe Pétain: discours aux Français, Paris, 1989, pp 164-173. See also the work of Pierre Laborie and in particular L’opinion française sous Vichy, Paris, 1990. 20 AN 2AG 520 CC 104 A, document entitled ‘le Ministère de la Police’, undated but evidently summer 1941. 74 Chapter 3

In spite of the initial loyalty of law enforcement officers Vichy regarded with great mistrust a force inherited from a predecessor of differing ideological persuasion.21 The government’s position in this respect was dictated partly by the influence of its anti-Republican and extreme-right element who had been in almost permanent conflict with the Police under the Third Republic. Scrap- ping the Police force altogether and starting afresh was never really an option, but there remained other ways of trying to ensure the long-term reliability of the Police force upon which it could rely. Vichy could follow the example of other authoritarian regimes in tolerating parallel Police forces; it could purge serving Policemen, replacing them with its own personnel or it could revitalise regular law enforcement structures with a view to tightening institutional control and improving efficiency. As with many of the totalitarian regimes of the time, Vichy did explore the possibility of setting up institutional rivals to challenge the monopoly of existing forces. Most notable of the new forces was the Légion des Anciens Combat- tants and the movements born from it. This Legion, which was established on 29 August 1940, was designed to gather together the war veterans of both global conflicts. Replacing the plurality of the veterans’ associations which had mush- roomed in inter-war France, it was marketed as an attempt to unify the nation. Defenders of the movement also sought to play up its patriotic overtones, since its processions offered an occasion to proudly don a beret and to display the military medals won fighting the Germans. But its social and ‘patriotic’ roles were underpinned by a more political mission. In the absence of parliament, the Légion was to act as a go-between linking government and people. Some historians, such as Yves Durand, have seen it as the equivalent of the single party prevalent in fascist states. Its Police function derived from its avowed intent to be the ‘eyes and the ears of the Marshal’, in which capacity it denounced supposed opponents of the regime and kept tabs on the administration. The Légion itself became increasingly superfluous after the summer of 1941, it had two more radical coloured-shirted offspring, the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire born in December 1941 and the Milice which replaced it in January 1943. These might be seen as French equivalents of the SA and SS. Amongst other parallel Police units were the Groupes de Protection which operated in relative obscurity from public gaze but served to put pressure on Police officers. Set up in the late autumn of 1940, under the control of an officer of the General Staff, Colonel Groussard, and subjected to harsh military training, these units drew a proportion of their membership from the ranks of

21 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 23. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 75 former Cagoulards and concentrated on hunting down communists and dissi- dents. It played a prominent role in organising security during Pétain’s visit to Marseille in December 1940. Far less discreet were the activities of Sabiani’s blue-shirted PPF, the fascistic political party having imbued themselves with a self-appointed parallel policing mission. Specialist parallel Police structures were also set up to deal with some of the regime’s main enemies. These were usually made up of extreme-right fanatics as in the case of the Police aux Ques- tions Juives involved in anti-Semitic persecution, the Service des Sociétés Secrètes which operated against the free masons or the Service de Police Anti- Communiste which saw itself as the champion of anti-bolshevism.22 For the most part these parallel structures remained marginal in wartime France.23 It was only from January 1944 with the Milice, the extreme-right militia established a year earlier, that one of the new institutions began to really replace the regular Police institutions.24 Vichy mirrored the pattern established in other dictatorships in its reluctance to simply disenfranchise the regular Police in favour of these fanatical parallel Police movements. Instead it allowed the simultaneous existence of regular forces with such parallel structures. Such a tactic would make use of the age-old theory of ‘divide and rule’, hoping that new and old structures would mutually spur each other into action through rivalry, with the infusion of a political agenda from the new force and professional expertise from the old. None of these movements were popular with the Police, for political or professional reasons. They tended to be viewed as rivals for power and scarce resources. Indeed the Police themselves tried their best to marginalise them still further. Nonetheless, they undoubtedly served as a spur to Police activity, at least in the early stages of the Vichy regime.25

22 Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police’, in Azéma & Bédarida (eds), Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, pp 303-311; Lucien Sabah, Une Police politique de Vichy: le service des sociétés secrètes, Paris, 1996; Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, pp 59-60. Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, pp 174-184. Julian Jackson, France, the dark years, 1940-44, Oxford, 2001, pp 260-262. 23 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 181. 24 Jean-Pierre Azéma, ‘La Milice’, Vingtième Siècle, n° 28, 1990, pp 83-105. France Socialiste, ‘la Milice est bien une Police’, 2 March 1943; Marcel Déat in L’Oeuvre, ‘la tâche civique des miliciens’, 16 July 1943. 25 AN 2AG 515, “Vu, entendu et constaté”, notes de Police, October 1940; Jules Belin, Trente ans de Sûreté Nationale, Paris, 1950, p 316; Georges Groussard, Services Secrets, 1940-1945, Paris, 1964; H.R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, Oxford, 1978, pp 36-39 & 41-42; John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1986, pp 139-140; Jean-Marc Berlière, Le Monde 76 Chapter 3

What of the other two means of ensuring long-term reliability: purging the Police or reforming its structures? In Marseille, a purge of personnel began at the top. Henri Cado, the Prefect’s subordinate responsible for the Police in the city was removed from office by the law of 17 July 1940, regarding the competence but more often than not the political allegiance of civil servants, after having been denounced as a Free- Mason. This did not prevent him from returning to more senior responsibilities in April 1942 when Pierre Laval appointed him as Director of the National Police force. Cado’s replacement in Marseille was Captain Maurice Anne- Marie de Rodellec du Porzic, a naval officer from an aristocratic Breton family. Rodellec du Porzic chose as his assistant another naval officer, the Lieutenant Robert Stéphane Auzanneau. This new Directeur des Services de Police, a self- confessed Action Française supporter, shared with his assistant strongly-held anti-left-wing, anti-Semitic and anti-Republican opinions and a keenly felt affection for Pétain; but neither had ever belonged to a political party.26 Both were anti-German and to a certain extent hostile to the coloured-shirted pseudo-fascist parties who now became known as ‘collaborationists’. The need for a purge of the lower ranks of the hierarchy was stressed by both the public and the government. In anonymous letters to the authorities, the public expressed criticism of a force whose service ‘left a lot to be desired’, whose personal appearance was ‘disgraceful’ and who performed their functions ‘without the slightest morality’. The supposed lack of morality translated into claims that if the Marseillais were starving it was partly due to the fact that the Police were entirely in league with the Black Marketeers.27 Particularly singled out were Police auxiliaries who, according to one correspondent, were even more corrupt than regular officers. They were said to be profiting from their new authority to favour the businesses from which they had been recruited.28 Some public criticisms were more political. In April 1941, a protestant

des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, p 174-184; Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, pp 59-60. 26 AD BDR 56W 101, Interrogation of de Rodellec du Porzic, 24 January 1946; AD BDR 56W 7, evidence from Jacques Faure-Brac, 25 July 1945; AD BDR 56W 7, evidence from Victor Roux, 18 August 1945; AD BDR 56W 7, evidence from Michel Thibal, 18 August 1945. 27 AD BDR 11057, Contrôle Technique, Interception de Courrier, Expéditeur X... Marseille à M Alfred F., 22 April 1941; AD BDR M6 11065, Robert P. Pastor, Marseille to M & Mme Alex M., Geneva, Switzerland, 22 April 1941. 28 AD BDR M6 11053, Lettre anonyme à M le Préfet, 6 July 1940. On the quality of auxilaries see also: AD BDR M6 11053, le Maire d’Aix à M le Préfet des BDR, 7 November 1940; AD BDR 5W 365, le Préfet des BDR à M le Directeur de l’Assistance publique, 21 July 1941; AD BDR M6 11065, “lettre ouverte à M de Rodellec du Porzic, Directeur de la Police de Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 77 pastor described the Marseille force as having ‘remained solidly Popular Front, hostile to Pétain, pro-de Gaulle and Anglophile’ and claimed that Police officers were doing everything in their power to obstruct French renovation.29 Oth- ers attacked the continued influence of Free-Masons on public administrations, demanding a purge.30 Vichy officials underlined the validity of some of the concerns expressed. Rodellec du Porzic drew attention to the poor quality of personnel and ‘the high proportion of obese or aged Policemen’.31 Even the central government’s Propaganda Ministry had comments to make on the quality of Inspecteurs of the Marseille Sûreté highlighting their close links with the local underworld and insisting ‘a purge is necessary and without delay’.32 The existence of a purge aimed at eliminating those of feeble professional capacities33 complicates the task of historians attempting to measure the scope of political purification, particularly given the political nature of some of the corruption within the institution. In reality the application of the law of 17 July 1940 to junior Police officers was limited. Paul Gillet and Claude Angeli have calculated that at a national level 64 Police officers were forced into retirement, 101 removed from their functions whilst 112 were transferred or given warnings in the purge of the second semester of 1940.34 The Marseille archives tend to confirm such a calculation. The only branch of the local administration which made use of the July texts to purge personnel in the second half of 1940 was the Police Spéciale, which removed three Inspecteurs, invoking not political but professional motives for their elimination under the law of 17 July.35 It

Marseille”, 30 May 1941; a communiqué in Le Petit Provençal, 6 May 1941, spoke of the need to “strengthen the sense of security of honest citizens”. 29 AD BDR M6 11065, Contrôle Technique, Interception de Courrier, Pasteur, Robert P., Mar- seille à M & Mme Alex M., Genève, Suisse, 22 April 1941. 30 AN F41 266 Synthèse des Contrôles Techniques, 21 January-5 February 1941; AD BDR M6 11057, Préfet des BDR à M le Secrétaire Général à la Police, objet: état d’esprit de la population, 2 December 1941. 31 AD BDR M6 11053, le Directeur des Services de Police à M le Préfet des BDR, 21 January 1941. 32 AN F41 266, Rapport pour le Service de la Propagande, Marseille, 3 December 1940. 33 For an example of the continuation of disciplinary purges see AD BDR M6 11053, le Com- missaire Central à M le Préfet, 19 September 1940. 34 C. Angeli & P. Gillet, La Police dans la Politique, Paris, 1967, p 22; for the political inspiration of the law of 17 July see AN 3W 310, letter from Marcel Peyrouton to Maréchal Pétain, 17 December 1940. 35 AD BDR 5W 361, le CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 16697 DE/LO, 26 September 1940; the responses of the Police Mobile (20 September 1940) and the Surveillance du Territoire (4 October 1940) are also contained in AD BDR 78 Chapter 3 is significant that to eliminate one of the leading representatives of the Social- ist Police trade unions from the Administration, Auzanneau resorted to catching this Policeman red-handed in a corruption which appeared carefully staged.36 This incident highlights the fervent desire of the new hierarchy to purge their administration but also underlines the practical difficulties of applying the texts specifically created for this purpose. This difficulty emanated from a question of institutional solidarity. Police officers were more likely to accept the dismissal of one of their colleagues for reasons of professional misconduct than for a question of political affiliation. Besides such passive opposition to political purges, there were also examples of direct interventions. Commis- saire Guibbal, head of the local brigade of the Police Mobile claimed to have intervened to Rodellec du Porzic in a number of cases involving the purge of his subordinates.37 Such interventions could be highly effective, because Guibbal could claim to have a better knowledge of the political attitude of his underlings than the recently appointed Directeur des Services. There were also sound practical reasons limiting the scope of the purge, of which the age-old problem of manpower was the principal. This difficulty was heightened by the progressive laying-off of Police auxiliaries in application of a Ministry of the Interior directive of 26 July 1940, a measure dictated not only by the poor quality of this personnel but also by the need to restore some semblance of peacetime normality through the abolition of measures designed as temporary compensations for mobilisation.38 This shortage caused the Direct- eur des Services to postpone the purge in the hope that the circumstances would be more favourable once alternative resources of personnel could be found, through the transfer of personnel from elsewhere, the return of Police prisoners of war or the recruitment of new officers.39 None of these alternatives materialised. Transferring personnel from other Police departments was deemed likely to disrupt the donor services, although Rodellec du Porzic did

5W 361, as is the Préfect’s summary if the purges: le Préfet des BDR à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 8 October 1940; see also AD BDR 5W 362, le Préfet à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 11 November 1940. 36 AD BDR 56W 7, evidence from Marius Leydet, 29 August 1945; AD BDR 56W 7, evidence from Antoine Bossu, 22 August 1945; Le Petit Provençal, “trois fonctionnaires sont inculpés pour trafic d’influence et écroués”, 10 June 1941, p 2. 37 AD BDR 56W 101, pièce 95. 38 AD BDR M611062, CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, 2 September 1940; AD BDR 5W 362, le Préfet à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 11 November 1940. 39 AD BDR M6 11053, le Directeur des Services de Police à M le Préfet des BDR, 2 January 1941. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 79 recuperate a small number of refugees of the Alsatian Police.40 Some Germans did hope that a carefully chosen release of French prisoners could be used to shift the political orientation of the Police to the right. Writing in September 1941, Schleier of the German embassy hoped to ‘replace a large number of these Popular Front Policemen with non-commissioned French officers currently in Germany’, claiming that ‘the freed prisoners would allow their Police colleagues to benefit from the experience they would have gained in National Socialist Germany’.41 But when push came to shove, the Germans showed only a marginally greater propensity to release Police POWs than any other categories, despite the urgency of Vichy’s requests. Recruitment proved slow, as the number of candidates was limited.42 Hence the removal of individual officers for political motives did not reach the same level as in other administrations. It should be noted however that although the purge was of only limited scope the threat of being purged remained present throughout the 4 years of Vichy’s reign. As Denis Peschanski has noted, this threat hung like a ‘sword of Damo- cles’ over the head of Police officers.43 The limited nature of this purge of personnel was probably a factor in encouraging a complete overhaul of Police structures in order to ensure better control over subordinates and their more rational deployment. Undoubtedly the deep suspicions harboured by many Vichy ministers with regard to the institution were a crucial factor in this respect. Minister of the Interior, Marcel Peyrouton, writing to Pétain in December 1940, claimed that he was just waiting for German authorisation to overhaul what he described as ‘the electoral Police forces of France’.44 A Police heavily influenced by extra-administrative

40 Le Petit Provençal, “les Commissaires municipaux vont rejoindre leur poste”, 22 July 1940, p 1; AD BDR 5W 365, CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Directeur des Services de Police, n° 6216, 22 April 1941. With regard to Alsatian Police officers, a list drawn up in 1945 showed that even at that date there were still 6 such officers serving in the Marseille force, and this does not take into account those who had rejoined their original post by then: AD BDR 1M 667, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Préfet n° 2765/45/Sec Adm. 2, 23 March 1945. 41 CDJC V 37, note pour M l’Ambassadeur Abetz, 22 September 1941. 42 AD BDR M6 11053, le Directeur des Services de Police à M le Préfet des BDR, 2 January 1941. 43 Denis Pescahnski, ‘Vichy singular and plural’, in Sarah Fishman (et al), France at war: Vichy and the historians, Oxford, 2000, p 119. 44 AN 3W 310, Peyrouton à Pétain, 17 December 1940; this sentiment is echoed in a letter in AN 2AG 618 from General Besson (Inspecteur des 13ème et 16ème régions) to M le Général d’Armée, Inspecteur Général des Formations Terrestres, on 20 July 1940 suggesting that “leur [les Policiers] sens moral est trop souvent faussé par leur rapports constants avec des milieus corrompus et pervertis” and that “de ce fait les enquêtes qu’ils ont à faire sont parfois, inconsciemment partiales et tendancieuses”. 80 Chapter 3 political forces ran counter to Vichy’s conception of the State which required the undivided loyalty of public servants. This does not imply that Vichy con- ceptualised its Police in genuinely apolitical terms. At a time when this government felt its authority increasingly disputed, a document written for Pétain by his circle of advisers presented the 1941 Police reform as the government’s means of survival: ‘thus it is on the Police that the State, shaken in its social and political foundations and two thirds occupied, will depend for its recovery and salvation’. The same document highlighted the political overtones of such a reorganisation: ‘the first concern of Richelieu, Cromwell, Talleyrand, Metter- nich and of Bismarck, was precisely to organise the Police of their government’.45 The reference to historical figures shows that Vichy had sought validation in the distant past, but its reform was also complemented by more contemporary influences. Vichy tapped into a Third Republic current, drawn from diverse political backgrounds, which demanded a thorough overhaul of the institution. In particular, the nationalisation of Police forces instituted by a 1941 project was partially based on a 1930s document written by the Commissaires’ trade union.46 Foreign Police forces also formed a mould for the 1941 reform. Stanley Hoffmann has compared the French right-wing, dominant at Vichy, with a rabbit frightened by the headlights of an approaching German vehicle.47 Impressed by the Nazis’ use of technology, Vichy determined that its Police should draw on the examples of the ‘Modern’ techniques and training used in Germany but that in turn the French Police should impress by its efficiency because ‘the foreigner has his eyes fixed upon us’.48 The first wave of measures were brought into force through a series of twelve legislative texts between April and December 1941. These texts renamed important areas of the Administration. The superstructure changed from being the Sûreté Nationale to become the Police Nationale; the Police Spéciale was replaced by the Services des Renseignements Généraux (RG); the Police Mobile

45 AN 2AG 520 CC 104 A, document entitled “le Ministère de la Police”, undated but evidently summer 1941. The underlining features in the original. 46 M. Sicot, Servitude et grandeur policières, Paris, 1959, pp 239-240; Denis Pescahnski, ‘Vichy singular and plural’, in Sarah Fishman (et al), France at war: Vichy and the historians, Oxford, 2000, p 119. 47 Stanley Hoffmann, in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida (eds), Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, p 253. 48 AN F41 300, 1941 brochure entitled “Police Nationale”; in its presentation of the reform Le Petit Provençal claimed that the Police training schools were similar to those already existing in Berlin and London (Le P.P., 6 May 1941) and that the equipment to be made available to this new Police would bring it into line with “les Polices étrangères” (Le P.P., 28 May 1941). Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 81 was transformed into the Police Judiciaire; whilst the Polices Municipales (Police d’Etat in the case of Marseille) adopted the title Police Régionale d’Etat and operated under the umbrella of the Service de la Sécurité Publique.49 In May 1941, de Rodellec du Porzic, like his counterparts, saw his title change from Directeur des Services to Intendant de Police, (reminiscent of the pre-Revolu- tionary officials the Intendants Généraux de Police).50 These transformations, which went well beyond a simple change of names, contained two aspects: modifications of Police structures; attempts to adapt the personnel to the new political climate and circumstances. As regards Police structures, the reform marked a considerable rationalisation of the system. The Ministry of the Interior greatly increased its influence through the Regional Prefect who was given direct control over all Police operating within his jurisdiction. The Region was sub-divided into “districts” and “circumscriptions”. The Marseille region contained seven such districts, six of which corresponded to the departments of Corsica, the Var, the Vaucluse, the Hautes-Alpes and the Bouches-du-Rhône (excluding Marseille), whilst the city of Marseille constituted a seventh Police district.51 The roles of the three branches of the Police were theoretically much more clearly defined than previously by the 1941 reform which tended towards greater specialisation. The Sécurité Publique branch, concerned with public order, contained a newly established organisation called the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (GMR) specialising in crowd control, whilst the Sécurité Publique’s regional organisms, the Police Régionale d’Etat, were stripped of their role in the policing of minor criminality by the incorporation of its Sûreté Urbaine section into the regional crime squads of the Police Judiciaire.52 The greater specialisation was to be accompanied by the use of more modern equipment, which in turn necessitated better education for Police personnel. One specialist on the subject has claimed that in the Sûreté Nation-

49 AN F60 484, le Général de Corps d’Armée Beynet, Président de la Délégation Française auprès de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice à Herr General der Artillerie Vogl, Prési- dent de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice, n° 30138/BT, 5 December 1941; AN 2AG 520 CC 104 A, Cabinet Civil du Maréchal Pétain, note sur la réorganisation de la Police, sans date; Louis Lambert, Cours de Police Judiciaire, Lyon, 1944, p 80. 50 De Rodellec du Porzic officially changed title in May in application of the text of 23 April, see Le Petit Provençal, 8 May 1941 and interview with Rodellec du Porzic in Le Petit Proven- çal, 13 May 1941. 51 Le Petit Provençal, 11 December 1941. 52 Alain Pinel, Une Police de Vichy – Les Groupes Mobiles de Réserve, (1941-1944), L’Harmattan, 2004; Alain Pinel, Histoire de la Police, du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Robert Laffont, 2005, pp 703–707. 82 Chapter 3 ale under the Third Republic, Police training was most remarkable by its absence.53 The sending off of small batches of Police officers to Paris for technical and scientific courses was not sufficient to compensate for a situation where the failure of attempts to establish Police schools in Lyon and Bordeaux in 1895 had effectively left provincial France with no such facilities.54 In Mar- seille, the scientific Police laboratory, created in 1927, also tried to double up as a learning centre, but given its small size, this laboratory could not hope to make up completely for the deficiencies in the knowledge of the Police.55 Vichy’s reform attempted to tackle these problems head on. It was decided to create a National Police School at St Cyr au Mont d’Or in the suburbs of Lyon which would offer facilities to complete the professional education of both new recruits and serving Commissaires and Inspecteurs of the Police Nation- ale from throughout France. At the same time, centres were to be established in each circumscription to give similar training to Gardiens de la Paix and their Brigadiers.56 How successful this reform was is open to debate. In March 1942, Minister of the Interior, Pierre Pucheu, claimed that the action of the Police had been greatly improved owing to its more unified structure.57 The principles of rationalisation and specialisation have remained enduring legacies of these reforms right through to the present day suggesting that successive governments have seen some merit in the super-structure introduced by Vichy. On a local level, the amalgamation of the two organisms concerned with criminal policing, the Brigades Régionales of the Police Mobile and the Sûreté Urbaine section of the Police d’Etat, into the Service Régional de Police Judiciaire put paid to an illogical situation where these services had acted in a rivalry which paralysed both.58 If the government’s reform offered certain advantages on a structural level, its success in other respects was more limited. The new training facilities only slowly came into operation; the reform failed to deal with recruitment problems; an important section of public opinion was horrified by the nature of these reforms and even in the Police the reaction was mixed.

53 A.-F. Delay, La formation professionnelle dans l’Institution Policière, 1870-1941, Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies, Lyon II, 1980, p 49. 54 A.-F. Delay, La formation professionnelle dans l’Institution Policière, 1870-1941, Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies, Lyon II, 1980, p 52. 55 AD BDR 4M 16, le Dr. Béroud à M le Préfet des BDR, 3 May 1928. 56 AN F60 484, le Général de corps d’Armée Beynet, Président de la Délégation Française auprès de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice à Herr General der Artillerie Vogl, Prési- dent de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice, n° 30138/BT, 5 December 1941. 57 Le Petit Provençal, 31 March 1942. 58 Louis Lambert, Cours de Police Judiciaire, Lyon, 1944, p 81. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 83

The training school at St Cyr was slow to get under way59 but the local centres for Gardiens de la Paix were put into operation in the second half of 1941. The Prefect was particularly impressed by the in-service training provided for the so-called hirondelles (bicycle patrolmen). Even here, however, training was hampered by a lack of equipment and manpower. The Prefect noted that ‘due to the lack of personnel it is not possible to give full scope to this program, because, particularly in Marseille, it is important not to withdraw too many men from the public thoroughfare’.60 To overcome such difficulties a massive recruitment drive was launched, both through posters and the local press, but this was an unmitigated failure. In January 1942, only 1750 candidates applied for 4000 posts of Gardiens de la Paix in the region, whilst an examination in March attracted only 400.61 What’s more, the harsher requirements for entrance limited the number of candidates eligible, whilst the expansion of services increased recruitment needs at a time when previous recruitments had already fallen well short of their targets. The creation of the GMR and the étatisation of Municipal Police forces in the Region absorbed many of those who would normally have been destined for Marseille.62 In any event many of those incorporated quickly resigned owing to the acute shortage of housing. The Prefect continued to complain of the poor quality of new recruits.63 The problem in recruitment reflected a more general propaganda failure. The poster proclaiming ‘Police Nationale, Révolution Nationale’, which accompanied the recruitment drive, was widely criticised: its graphics seen to mirror too precisely Nazi advertising techniques, at a time when the Police was seen to be aping German methods. Moreover, the slogan ‘Police Nationale, Révolu- tion Nationale’ suggested that the two notions were interchangeable and that ultimately Vichy’s political program, La Révolution Nationale, meant little more than a Police State. Such clumsiness was rapidly exploited by the Resist- ance. Le Père Duchesne, a clandestine newspaper in Lyon, commented sarcasti- cally: ‘Police nationale, Révolution nationale, and if after that you haven’t understood …’.64 The interviews carried out by Gaullists with French citizens arriving in Britain or in the Caribbean were unanimous in their disapproval of what appeared as a Police State. They described a new Police force which had

59 A retrospective enquiry into its function was carried out in March 1947; AN F60 942, note de M. Rogez, Inspecteur des Finances, sur l’organisation et le fonctionnement des Ecoles de Police de la Sûreté Nationale. 60 AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, March 1942. 61 AN F1C III 1143, Rapports du Préfet, January, March & April 1942. 62 AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, April 1942. 63 AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, April 1942. 64 Le Père Duschesne, n° 1, April 1942. 84 Chapter 3 more than a passing resemblance to the SS and claimed that a Nazi style terror was being introduced by the Vichy authorities.65 Rather than defeating opposition to Vichy, the Police reform increased it and brought into question the very legitimacy of a regime governing through force, or still more through terror.66 Nor were such criticisms limited to the Resistance. Local dignitary Jean Fraissinet (a sympathiser of the far-right movement the Croix-de-Feu), referring to the poster campaign, asked the Pre- fect whether it was advisable to present the Police as such an obvious copy of the Nazi example, and argued that, although a new regime needed a strong Police, a regime relying solely on the Police could not last.67 As a concession to the failure of this propaganda, Darlan sent out urgent instructions in Novem- ber 1941 to paste over the words ‘Révolution Nationale’ on these posters, and the poster ended up with the slightly ridiculous slogan ‘Police Nationale, Police Nationale’.68 Even within the Police there were rumblings of discontent with regard to the reform. The effect it had on the public image of the Police was not welcomed. Moreover the reform was felt to have offered insufficient improvements in the material conditions and promotion prospects of Policemen, although many appreciated the more rational structure. Despite the radicalisation of its image, there were those at Vichy who still questioned the reliability of the Police. In such a vein Bernard de Plas of the Centre d’Etudes Techniques et Sociales think-tank wrote to Pétain’s secretary in February 1942.69 After defining the three forces whose support was a pre- requisite for a revolutionary movement as the Army, the Police and the working classes, he went on to depict Vichy’s situation: ‘In a country where the government’s popularity is limited, where the army is materially and morally weakened by the circumstances and where the Police is likely to be divided by questions of national sentiment, it is certain that an homogeneous and well- led mass working class movement would be able to successfully execute a coup d’Etat’.70 A Swedish newspaper, observing the extent of Vichy’s reform of administrative structures but the limited extent to which personnel were purged, warned ominously of the limited chances of survival for Vichy’s political reform, known

65 AN F1a 3766. 66 AD BDR 5W 369, Lettre anonyme, adressée d’Aix-en-Provence à l’Amiral Leahy, 17 Decem- ber 1941. 67 AD BDR M6 10982, “Libres réflexions d’un Conseiller National” addressed to Regional Pre- fect in Marseille, 25 March 1942. 68 AN F41 300, le Vice-Président du Conseil à l’affichage Giraudy, Marseille, 8 November 1941. 69 AN 2AG 618, Bernard de Plas à M. Bernard Ménétrel, 12 February 1942. 70 AN 2AG 618, Bernard de Plas à M. Bernard Ménétrel, 12 February 1942. Enthusiasm And Co-operation: The Start Of The Vichy Government 85 as the National Revolution. It claimed that: ‘if the old badly-cleansed bottle with the new label is filled with old sour wine, with little new, the result is that the whole bottle becomes sour’.71 There were certainly already the first tentative beginnings of an opposition to Vichy within the police. Commissaire Auguste Clary, who would later stand out for his Resistance activities, was beginning to make his hostility to the government known. In early 1942, Clary wrote a report about a pimp accused of trafficking precious metals. He presented him in the most negative terms possible as a petty criminal of suspect morality before concluding: ‘None of these facts prevent him from being a supporter of the Marshal and his government. But his patriotism seems rather doubtful’.72 But such early opposition should not be exaggerated. For the time being, it seems that, overall, the Police accepted the new government. Being surrounded by the same faces helped foster the impression that the early Vichy years were really just business as usual. This impression was further harnessed by the fact that Vichy chose initially to make use of existing laws wherever possible. Moreover the categories being targeted by the new government were similar to those which had been singled out by the government of Edouard Daladier at the end of the Third Republic.73 How ready were the Police to pursue Vichy’s enemies?

71 Stockholms-Tidningen, 15 September 1942. 72 AD BDR 5W 217, Commissaire de Police sous-Chef de la Sûreté à M le Chef de la Sûreté, 19 January 1942. 73 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, p 169. 86 Chapter 4

Chapter 4 Policing Opposition

As has just been noted one of the key tasks asked of the Police under Vichy was defending the State. Perhaps nowhere was this mission more explicit than during the visit to Marseille of Vichy head of State Marshal Pétain. For Pétain’s visit on 3 and 4 December 1940, security arrangements were at a maximum. The Service des Voyages Officiels, responsible for the visit’s organisation, noted ‘a lot of communist activity’ in the run-up to the visit and promised that ‘communists, Popular Front sympathisers and Jews will be the subject of particular surveillance from the Police’.1 Memories of the assassination of Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French foreign Minister Louis Barthou on the Canebière thoroughfare in October 1934 were fresh enough for the authorities to assure that no risks were taken this time.2 Police round-ups followed. It has been estimated that some 20,000 individuals were imprisoned not only in the regular jails but also in four boats, four barracks and three cinemas specially commissioned for the purpose, living off a diet of stale bread and uncooked meat whilst the Head of State sat down to a seven course lunch.3 Eyewitness accounts of these Police activities are provided by Varian Fry, Daniel Bénédite and Jean Gemähling of the Emergency Rescue Committee, an American organisation which established itself in the city in 1940 to help in the emigration of refugees.4 The spacious villa in the Quartier de la Pomme suburb which these three shared with a group of intellectuals, including the revolutionary Victor Serge and the surrealist André Breton, was singled out for a Police search prior to the Marshal’s visit owing to the political tendencies of its occupants and its position next to the railway line along which Pétain’s train would pass.5 He gives us a particularly vivid picture of the bullying, nose- picking and seemingly drunken Commissaire in charge of this search, whose

1 AN 2AG 438, Services des Voyages Officiels, in M. Ferro, Pétain, Paris, 1987, p 232. 2 AN F1a 4526, l’IGSA, rapport à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 30 October 1934. 3 A. Sauvageot, Marseille dans la tourmente, Paris, 1949, p 117; Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, p 147, claims that “at the last minute the Police had even locked people into cafés and restaurants until the parade passed”. 4 V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, p 147; Daniel Bénédite, La filière marseillaise, Paris, 1984; oral evidence from Jean Gemähling, Paris, 2 February 1993. 5 Oral evidence from Jean Gemähling, Paris, 2 February 1993; AD BDR 5W 360, le Préfet des BDR à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, n° 90, 30 December 1940.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_006 Policing Opposition 87 very presence accompanying Inspecteurs de la Sûreté in the sort of operation they would usually carry out alone underlines the importance given to this search. Fry portrays this Commissaire as particularly zealous, pointing to the ‘evident pleasure’ at the incriminating material discovered in this villa. He immediately filed a number of documents in a foreign language as ‘revolutionary propaganda’. His delight was even more obvious upon finding a surrealist drawing containing a Gallic cock and the words ‘the terrible cretin Pétain’. Remaining unimpressed by Breton’s argument that it was debatable whether the cock really represented France and his insistence that the word in the in- scription was ‘putain’ (‘whore’) rather than ‘Pétain’, the Commissaire announced simply that it was ‘revolutionary propaganda as clear as the nose on your face’.6 The Inspecteurs accompanying him are portrayed as completely unprofessional. They were taken in by ‘the old trick’ of Fry asking to go up to his office to get a handkerchief, an excuse the American had invented in order to dispose of a false passport lying on his desk. They also allowed themselves to be engaged in conversation as a distraction, whilst Fry and his secretary disposed of incriminating evidence in a fire.7 After this search, the occupants of the villa were interned with others on a boat, the Sinaïa, moored in President Wilson Dock. Fry’s account, confirmed by Bénédite and Gemähling, of their fellow internees provides interesting insights into the nature of these Police round-ups. Since the origin of this operation was supposedly a security measure, it is no surprise to find amongst the interned those classified as ‘suspect’ who happened to live along the route marked out for Pétain’s visit. Thus, two English friends of Fry’s who had made the ‘mistake’ of living in a room next to the quai de Belges where Pétain was scheduled to pass now found themselves on the Sinaïa.8 Equally predictable was the presence of the owner of a book-shop in the rue Saint-Ferréol whose window display for the preceding few days had featured two large portraits, one of Laval, the other of Pétain, surrounded by piles of Victor Hugo’s Les Mis- érables.9 Other cases were notable for their apparent arbitrariness. A correspondent of a Swiss newspaper, who, out of gallantry, had offered to accompany his French girlfriend to the commissariat where she was required to explain the fact that she had no identity card, found himself detained while she was immediately released. Two Syrians whose identity had been checked in a café and

6 V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, pp 133-141. 7 V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, p 137. 8 V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, p 145. 9 D. Bénédite, La filière marseillaise, Paris, 1984, p 146. 88 Chapter 4 found satisfactory, walked outside to find a Police van and a detective telling them ‘there are two places left, get in’. A similar experience befell an English- man and his Egyptian born brother. More surprising was the situation of a Pétainist butcher who owed his presence on the Sinaïa to a Policeman who had objected to a pro-Pétain slogan which he had painted on his shop-front. Simi- larly three businessmen who had come from Nice to applaud Pétain found themselves arrested within an hour of taking a room in the Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix on the Canebière.10 Out of this apparent chaos, it is possible to see at least two patterns emerging. Firstly, a desire to ‘make up numbers’. This phenomenon had already been the subject of an anonymous complaint against the Marseille Police during round-ups carried out in July 1940.11 With regard to the December operations must be added to this traditional Police practice a desire to offer a display of their efficiency, however superficially, in order to fend off the challenges to their authority emanating from a number of parallel Police forces. After all, alongside the official operations, alternative groups had been given a major Police role in Pétain’s visit: the Légion des Anciens Combattants; Minister of the Interior Peyrouton’s Groupes de Protection and finally local extremists of Sabiani’s Parti Populaire Français. Secondly, behind the apparent arbitrariness, there was a very definite gender and geographical bias, with males and those from outside the city (and particularly foreigners) being over-represented in the category marked out as suspect. Although it is possible to see Police zeal as exaggerated by the desire to preserve their professional sovereignty, it should not be forgotten that their enthusiasm for these preventative measures were also fuelled by their sentiment towards Pétain. There is no reason to doubt that most Police officers shared their compatriots’ excitement at the news of the Marshal’s visit. The concern for Pétain’s safety during this visit highlights that, despite the apparent conformity in the unoccupied zone of France, there were clear signs that opposition had not been altogether snuffed out. A week after the creation of Pétain’s regime, known as l’Etat Français, the centre-left newspaper Le Petit Provençal regretted Vichy’s abolition of the Republic. In an article of 18 July 1940, under the subtitle ‘it’s not a scrap of paper but rather a beautiful page of our history that the wind of defeat has just swept way’, the newspaper listed the achievements of the 1875 constitution, ending on the words ‘Vive la liberté!

10 D. Bénédite, La filière marseillaise, Paris, 1984, pp 141-153; V. Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, pp 133-141. 11 AD BDR M6 11053, lettre anonyme à M le Préfet, 6 July 1940. Policing Opposition 89

Vive la République!’12 The counter-espionage service, the Surveillance du Ter- ritoire, was probably exaggerating the situation when it reported back at the beginning of August that left-wing parliamentarians were planning ‘an action against the government’ but it was certainly true that a clandestine resurrection of the socialist party was being organised under the auspices of Félix Gouin.13 The Police received instructions to monitor parliamentary circles closely, whilst the Prefect inquired about the possibility of isolating local politicians from the public in a form of quarantine.14 By August 1941 Pétain was making radio broadcasts bemoaning the unpopularity of his ministers and the day before Laval’s return to power in April 1942 Marseille newspapers carried details of a report written by André Amiaux, law professor at Paris University, noting the failures of official propaganda and the gulf between the public and the government.15 The Ministry of Information devoted a lot of energy to trying to win over public opinion and it fell partly to the Police to record the government’s successive failures in this respect. From the start, Marseille was an important centre for Resistance.16 This was partly a result of its traditions of stubborn independence from the rest of France but also because, with Paris occupied, the city’s political importance grew. More than anything its early role as a focal point for Resistance was due to its status as a port. This gave it a strategically important position for intelligence gathering. It also meant that there were a large number of demobilised soldiers in the city, awaiting their passage elsewhere, and at least some of these were determined to work for revenge against Germany. In addition, the city’s status as a port made it a natural destination for those seeking to escape, whether these be Jews or anti-Nazis or Allied service personnel stranded in France. As a consequence of their presence it was only natural that France’s oldest city should be a main focus for escape networks. Individuals looking to recruit members for their embryonic Resistance movements often started looking in the Phocean port. They were not always successful. Emmanuel d’Astier started his quest here for like-minded people for what would become the Libération-Sud movement, but after recruiting his first member he quickly

12 Le Petit Provençal, 18 July 1940. 13 AD BDR M6 11061, le Commissaire Spécial, chef du CST à M l’Inspecteur Général des Ser- vices de la Surveillance du Territoire, 3 August 1940; Paul Jankowski, Communism and Col- laboration, New Haven, 1989, p 73. 14 AD BDR M6 10964, le Préfet à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 24 July 1940. 15 Le Petit Provençal, 17/04/42. 16 Robert Mencherini, ‘Naissance de la Résistance à Marseille’, in Jean-Marie Guillon & Pierre Laborie (eds), Mémoire et histoire: la Résistance, Toulouse, 1995, pp 137-147. M.R.D. Foot, SOE in France, London, 1966, p 216. 90 Chapter 4 headed for Clermont-Ferrand. Franc-Tireur never managed a large recruitment in this southern port. It was what would turn into Captain Henri Frenay’s Com- bat movement which proved the most successful at recruitment here, as he had many friends amongst the demobilised soldiers in the city.17 Escape networks became the focus for surveillance from the outset. The Scottish pastor Donald Caskie, who organized the clandestine repatriation of members of the Allied armed forces, later claimed that the 6 am raids on the Sailor’s Home in the rue Forbin where he housed these servicemen were so regular that he hardly needed an alarm clock.18 Thirty-two year old Varian Fry, always elegantly dressed in outfits from Brooks Brothers in New York, was a Harvard-educated journalist who would successfully engage in a mission to rescue Jews and intellectuals trapped in France. His Emergency Rescue Com- mittee therefore attracted Police attention from shortly after his arrival in Mar- seille.19 One of his assistants, Mary-Jane Gold recalled that outside their offices lurked shifty characters who looked so much like pimps that they could only be Police officers. The offices of the organisation were subjected to raids. Fry detected from a regular clicking noise on his telephone that his phone conver- sations were being recorded.20 Generally these escape networks experienced a mixed reaction from Police officers. In his memoirs, Caskie described how ‘Many French Policemen showed kindness towards me, because they sympathized with the Allies.’21 He insisted on the fact that it was officers of the Surveillance du Territoire who informed him that the British citizen Harold Cole, who had infiltrated his network, was in fact a German agent. Fry highlights the antipathy of de Rodellec du Porzic to his movement claiming that the Intendant de Police told him that his hostility to Fry was based on the fact that he had ‘protected Jews and anti- Nazis’.22 But Fry also makes many references to help received from these Police agencies and sympathy expressed. Barallet in the alien’s bureau helped with administrative paperwork. An Inspecteur Garandel, who was assigned to accompany Fry to the Spanish border when the American was expelled from France, was friendliness itself. He disobeyed his hierarchy’s instructions that

17 Henri Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France, Volume 1, Paris, 1967, pp 103 & 228. 18 D. Caskie, Le Chardon d’Écosse: un pasteur écossais dans la Résistance, 1940-1944, Lausanne, 1969, p 63. 19 AD BDR 5W 360, Le Préfet des BDR à Monsieur le Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur r, 30 December 1940. 20 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Boulder, 1997, p 216. 21 D. Caskie, Le Chardon d’Écosse: un pasteur écossais dans la Résistance, 1940-1944 Lausanne, 1969, p 164. 22 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Boulder, 1997, p 224. Policing Opposition 91

Fry should be put in a cell in Perpignan whilst awaiting his visas and instead organized a hotel for him. Garandel seemed obsessed by the impression that Fry would have of his country: when they met the Inspecteur declared: ‘It is my duty to show you that we French are not barbarians’ and his parting words were ‘I hope you will not think ill of France’. Commissaire Dubois of the Sur- veillance du Territoire is another presented in glowing terms in Fry’s mem- oires: ‘he was friendly to England and America’. Dubois, with heavy Marseille accent, would tip off the organization about on-going enquiries into its activities, including informing Fry that he was being followed. It seems, however, that Dubois might have been playing something of a double game as he had warned his institutional hierarchy that Fry’s activity was ‘extremely damaging to collaboration between American and French authorities’.23 The Police also interacted with those that Fry’s committee was trying to help, arresting many and offering help to some. When the poet Walter Mehring tried to board a boat in Marseille harbour the Police Inspecteur conducting checks on embarking passengers noted that Mehring was banned from leaving France by order of the German Kundt commission, but let him through anyway with a wink and the words ‘I guess it must be a different Walter Mehring’.24 Another Police officer who had dealings with some of Fry’s dependents was Commisaire Etienne Mercuri of the Police Mobile, an early and prominent Police Resister. In a depressed mood, Mercuri took an aperitif with Alfred Apfel, a German anti-Nazi lawyer who was a protégé of Fry’s. The Commissaire suddenly asked what would happen to two very prominent German political refugees if they should fall into the hands of the Nazis. His question was a reference to Rudolf Hilferding and Rudolf Breitscheid, two German Social Demo- crats who Mercuri had just driven to Vichy in accordance with government instructions.25 Upon being told that they would probably be murdered, Mer- curi went silent, gulped down his aperitif and declared ‘the life of a Policeman is not always a pleasant one’.26 Hilferding and Breitscheid had been handed

23 AD BDR 5W 360, Le Préfet des BDR à Monsieur le Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, 30 December 1940. 24 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Boulder, 1997, p p 173-174. 25 For more details of this affair see: Vincent Auriol, Hier, demain, Paris, 1945, pp 85-88; Alex- ander Stein, Rudolf Hilferding und die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung, Hamburg, 1946; Arthur Koestler, La lie de la terre, Paris, 1971; D. Benedite, La filière marseillaise, pp 175-188; Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Boulder, 1997, pp 176-177; J. Grandjonc & T. Gruntder, Zone d’ombres, pp 210-211; AN 3W 312, ‘Affaire Hilferding-Breitscheid’. For examples of the work of Hilferding and Breitscheid, see R. Hilferding, Le Capital financier, Paris, 1970; R. Breit scheid, Antifaschistische Beiträge, 1933-1939, Frankfurt am Main, 1977. 26 Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Boulder, 1997, pp 176-177. 92 Chapter 4 over to the Germans in February 1941 by Vichy as the government sought to gain German good will after Petain’s sacking and arrest of his Premier Pierre Laval the previous December.27 En route for France’s provisional capital Breitscheid had asked Mercuri why he did not just admit that they were being handed over to the ‘Gestapo’ to which the Commissaire replied: ‘You have a very low opinion of France’.28 As it turned out, and contrary to what Fry and members of his committee later claimed, Hilferding and Breitscheid were not actually directly murdered by the Germans: Hilferding made his friend aware of his suicidal intention before taking his own life in a temporary cell in Paris, whilst Breitscheid’s wife was with her husband when he died during an Amer- ican air raid on the camp where they were held once arrived in Germany.29 Monitoring escape networks was one aspect of Police work but in the political domain the main components were keeping track on supporters of the rebellious General Charles de Gaulle who had fled to England in 1940 to promote Resistance to the Germans and cracking down on a communist party who rapidly declared themselves Vichy’s opponents but, Nazi-Soviet pact oblige, initially kept up an ambivalent attitude towards the Germans. The post-war role of Gaullists as a centre-right political party should not mask the fact that Resisters categorised under this term between 1940 and 1944 were not infrequently of left-wing persuasion, often drawn from socialist or radical-socialist currents. Neither should the Gaullian myth that de Gaulle’s BBC broadcast of 18 June 1940 calling for France to continue the fight was the starting point and inspiration of all subsequent non-communist Resistance be whole-heartedly accepted. This speech was remarkable for its vision. In the uncertain climate of 1940 it was also an act of bravery. It had the considerable merit of offering an alternative to Vichy’s defeatism to those who would hear it and it would ultimately serve as a symbolic rallying-point. But in the chaotic situation of the summer of 1940 few heard the broadcast. In Marseille, Le Petit

27 AN 3W 312, pièces 826, 838. 28 AN 3W 310, déposition de Mme Breitscheid, 18/3/47; D. Benedite, La filière marseillaise, p 184. 29 AN 3W 312, pièces 802, 814. Both Hilferding and Breitscheid died during their period of detention following their handing over to the Germans. Hilferding committed suicide in his cell in the Prison de la Santé in Paris where he was being held by the Gestapo, although it is possible that the Gestapo finished him off after he had poisoned himself. Breitscheid died during an American air-raid on Germany. These versions of events, contested by both Fry and Bénédite, are confirmed by Frau Breitscheid who was with her husband when he died, and had confirmation from her husband concerning the suicidal intentions of his friend; AN 3W 310, déposition de Mme Breitscheid, 18/3/47. A French prison guard also confirmed Hilferding’s cause of death, 3W 312, pièce 808. Policing Opposition 93

Provençal published the text the following day but significantly misspelt its author’s name (‘de Gaule’). Only gradually would this broadcast become famil- iar to a wide public and it would take even longer for the ideological concep- tions of the most junior General in the French army to become well-known. Acts of Resistance occurred before de Gaulle’s broadcast and it was entirely independently that many of the early Resisters arrived at the conclusion that the struggle must continue. Ironically the authorities labelled these individuals as Gaullists long before they considered themselves as such. In 1940, the term ‘Gaullist’, which began to emerge in Police reports in September, was still not very clearly defined. It was this vagueness which explains how one of those arrested in October for ‘defeatist’ activity was a PPF sympathiser, who was apprehended for shouting ‘I am Sabianiste and long-live de Gaulle’ on a Mar- seille tramway.30 Such vagueness was unlikely to attract those Police officers whose professional lives in the late 1930s had been marked out by a demand for clear instructions. Add to this that the Police did not immediately become a specific target for Gaullist interest or recruitment propaganda and it is easy to see why no Marseille Police officers made the difficult journey to England to join de Gaulle (at least until November 1942). Moreover, Police officers undoubtedly shared the same reservations as much of the French population regarding the apparent lack of realism of the continuation of resistance. The left-wing journalist, Georges Boris, wrote in 1942 that ‘the arguments advanced by those in favour of prolonging the struggle may have expressed the instinctive wishes of the majority of Frenchmen, but from the practical point of view they seemed to be little more than the voicing of a pious wish’.31 After all, the question occurred to a number of French people: ‘if the French army- the best, the only organised force available- had been beaten in five weeks, how and where could resistance be continued?’32 Initially, Police services tended to equate Gaullism with a form of criminality. This is unsurprising given that Vichy did not initially entrust its repression to the political branch, then known as the Police Spéciale. To begin with, the Police Spéciale was only concerned with the Gaullist movement in general terms in its capacity of surveillance of Marseille’s maritime border and the monitoring of public opinion. The more specific control of such activity was

30 AD BDR 5W 360, le Procureur de la République à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 4525, 25 October 1940; Le Petit Provençal, “Un appel du général de Gaule” (sic), 19 June 1940, p 1. 31 Georges Boris, French public opinion since the armistice, Oxford, 1942, p 5. 32 Georges Boris, French public opinion since the armistice, Oxford, 1942, p 5. Cf also: Richard de Rochemont, Reports on France, New York, undated, p 3. 94 Chapter 4 passed to the criminal Police, where a special service was created in September 1940, as soon as Vichy began to believe that the Gaullists presented a serious opposition.33 The government’s classification of Gaullism as criminal and the fitting of anti-Gaullist repression as far as possible into existing legislation was clearly an attempt to deny (or an inability to accept) the relativity of the circumstances of its existence and to present it in terms of traditional treason or criminality.34 The reaction of local Police services to ‘Gaullism’ was undoubtedly partially a reflection of these hierarchical pressures. Given that the Police Mobile had been almost exclusively confined to missions of criminal policing under the Third Republic and that the professional experience of its personnel had therefore revolved around this theme, it is predictable to see ‘Mobilards’ represent ‘Gaullists’ as self-interested or criminals. They began searching for suspects in the criminal milieus. They singled out Sabiani’s henchmen, the gangsters Carbone and Spirito, as possible ‘Gaullists’ before excluding them from their enquiries on the grounds that they seemed to have rallied Marshal Pétain.35 Other Police Mobile reports referred to ‘Gaullism’ as ‘the work of individuals who are generally looking for profit rather that acting out of any idealism’.36 Early Police definitions of Gaullism made little distinction between Gaullists and Anglophiles or even those from other countries attempting to continue the war alongside France’s erstwhile ally. A number of those arrested by the Marseille Police for so-called ‘Gaullist’ activity in the second semester of 1940 were simply Polish soldiers attempting to re-join their army in London, showing clearly that this definition was open to wide interpretation demonstrating

33 A monthly bulletin concerning the repression of Gaullism was established by the central services in Vichy. AN AJ41 46, Note n° 1 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle du mois de Septembre à ce jour, Vichy, le 16/11/40. 34 Gaullism could be suppressed under the “décret-loi du 24 May 1938 (visant les atteintes à l’intégrité du territoire national)”; the “décret-loi du 21 April 1939 (tendant à réprimer les pro- pagandes étrangères)”; “article 77 du code pénal, étendu par le décret du 29/7/39 ( frappant d’une part ceux qui ont tenté d’exposer l’Etat à un danger de guerre, et d’autre part, ceux qui ont tenté d’affaiblir la puissance de l’Etat en cas de conflit)” and under two new texts: “article 75 du code pénal, élargi par la loi du 27/7/40 (visant toute action militaire dirigée contre la France)” and “la loi du 24/9/40 instituant la cour martiale, pour assurer la répression des crimes et manœuvres commis contre l’unité et la sauvegarde de la patrie”. See AN AJ41 46, Note n° 1 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle du mois de Septembre à ce jour, Vichy, le 16/11/40. 35 AN AJ41 46, le Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le CD, chef de la 1ère Section des Ser- vices de Police Criminelle, 12 December 1940. 36 AD BDR 5W 360, le Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le CD, chef de la 9è Brigade Régio- nale, n° 6967, 15 December 1940. Policing Opposition 95 the profound confusion regarding the exact nature of the movement.37 For instance, a Pole called Antony Kryska was apprehended after Police got wind of the recruitment office he set up for Polish soldiers wishing to join the Polish army in London.38 Indeed, when one looks more closely one realises not only that there are a wide range of offences being labelled as ‘Gaullism’ but also that many of the arrests were for quite minor offences. An individual called Tollard was found to be carrying a letter addressed to de Gaulle.39 Irénée Jiremus, Oscar Deutsch and Guy Hutle were all arrested for helping individuals escape to London.40 Georges Bauret, a 44 year-old journalist, was arrested in mid- April for ‘pro-British propaganda’.41 Gradually clearer, and more political, definitions emerged. Police reports learnt to differentiate between ‘Gaullism’ on the one hand and ‘Anglophilia’ on the other but attitudes towards Gaullists could never be entirely divorced from the evolution of attitudes towards the British.42 Anglophobia, based either on long-term hostility or recent memories of British ‘perfidy’ such as the Dunkirk evacuation or the British sinking part of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir, is present in Police reports and accounts of Police attitudes in the last half of 1940, as it is in reports on public opinion more generally. For instance, Danièle Bénédite, a left-winger and former Police- man now working for Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, remembered the reaction of a Commissaire upon reading his war diary in December 1940: ‘you’re as nice as pie about those bastard English’.43 By the beginning of 1941 this situation had begun to change. Hostility to the British, though not entirely absent, became increasingly less prominent in Police reports at a time when public opinion began to associate the British with a hope of salvation.44 The

37 AN AJ41 46, Notes au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, Vichy. 38 AN AJ41 46, Note no 1 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, 16 November 1940. 39 AN AJ41 46, Note no 4 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, 18 December 1940. 40 AN AJ41 46, Note no 5 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, 1 January 1941; AN AJ41 46, Note no 12 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, 15 April 1941. 41 AN AJ41 46, Note no 12 au sujet de l’activité séditieuse des partisans de l’ex-Général de Gaulle, 15 April 1941. 42 AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 1866 AD/SN, 25 February 1942. 43 D. Bénédite, La filière marseillaise, Paris, 1984, p 144. 44 In December 1940, Félix Gaborit of the Propaganda Ministry claimed that in Marseille ‘pro-British propaganda is intense’ and declared himself stupefied by the number of 96 Chapter 4 revolutionary Victor Serge claimed that by the middle of 1941 at least half of Marseille’s Policemen were ‘anglophiles, discreetly anti-Nazi’.45 Although such quantitative statements based on personal perception must be treated with extreme care, the evidence suggests that Serge’s view is not entirely unfounded.46 British military personnel, stranded in France after Dunkirk, were officially interned in the Fort St Jean at the entrance to the Vieux Port harbour but found that the Police left them free to come and go as they please.47 As 1940 became 1941, revellers at a New Year’s Eve party were pleased to note that Policemen turned a blind eye to the collective toasts to ‘de Gaulle and England’ in one of the city’s bars.48 A pro-British/pro-Yugoslavian demonstration in Marseille in the spring of 1941 was greeted sympathetically by Police officers,49 who, in some cases even reportedly expressed anglophile sentiments.50 In the margins of a report about a Gaullist who wished for an English victory, an anonymous Police officer graffiteed ‘who wouldn’t wish for it?’51 Whilst Vichy continued to regard ‘Anglophilia’ with the utmost suspicion, Police officers began to portray pro-British sympathies as no stain on a character. Thus, in

people spreading such propaganda, but continued ‘I should add that Gaullist actions are declining. It seems that Anglophiles are ashamed to mention his name’, AN F41 266, Rap- port du service de la propagande, Marseille, 3 December 1940. Gaborit also noted what he described as the ‘stupidity’ whereby the public attributed the British bombing of Marseille in November 1940 to the Italians. Implications that this bombing was the work of the Ital- ians also figures in a Gendarmerie report which made no reference to the British but announced that the bombing had been accompanied by the dropping of tracts in Italian, AN 2AG 515. In April 1941, an anonymous letter from Marseille addressed to Pétain by a “Français 100%” denounced the idea that the French were divided because ‘80 to 90% want a British victory, even those who don’t like them or who have complaints against them, which is my case’ AN 2AG 618, eleven-page letter which figures in the Archives Nationales inventory under the title: “Lettre adressée au Maréchal Pétain par ‘un Français 100%’ de Marseille, au sujet de l’état d’esprit de la population devant la politique de collaboration et les mensonges de la Propagande allemande”, April 1941. 45 Victor Serge, Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901-1941, Paris, 1951, p 388. 46 AD BDR 56W 87. Donald Caskie, Le Chardon d’Ecosse, un pasteur écossais dans la résis- tance, 1940-44, Lausanne, 1969, p 164. 47 AN AJ41 476, Commissione italiana di Armistizio con la Francia (signé Confalonieri), Note n° 2738, 18 April 1941. 48 Eve Curie, They speak for a nation: Letters from France, Milton Keynes, 2010, p 194. 49 AD BDR M6 10973, Directeur des Services de Police à M le Préfet, 31/3/41; AN 2AG 618, “Français 100%” à Pétain, April 1941; the PPF newspaper Midi Libre, “Les Juifs manifestent”, 30/3/41, p 11. 50 AN F60 1690, lettre à la BBC d’un lycéen à Marseille, 25/11/41. 51 AD BDR 56W 7, déclarations de Marius Leydet former Chef de Division in the Préfecture, 29 August 1945. Policing Opposition 97

January 1942, Vichy ordered an investigation concerning an individual noted for his ‘anti-national and pro-British sentiments’. The importance attached to this request is shown by the urgency given to the completion of this enquiry ‘as quickly as possible’ being typed in the text, whilst the words ‘very urgent’ appear in pen in the margin.52 Over a month later, the newly restructured political Police, the Renseignements Généraux, replied that this individual ‘is known for his anglophile feelings, but is not engaged in any anti-national propaganda’, adding that by all accounts the person in question was ‘an excellent patriot’.53 Although latent Anglophobia never entirely disappeared, the hope of an Allied victory undoubtedly helped soften Police attitudes towards the British and hence those who supported them. This was one factor which enabled new perceptions of the Gaullists to emerge. The Gaullists could still be seen as diso- bedient adventurers but at least they were keeping alive the notion of France remaining faithful to an ally who represented the only slim hope of salvation. Other factors were also pushing towards a re-assessment of non-communist Resistance. The Gaullists championed the cause of Republicanism. There were a number of indications hinting at the revival of Republicanism in Police ranks in 1942. For many junior civil servants, including Police officers, the question of salaries was becoming an increasing pre-occupation, particularly given the rise in food prices as a result of shortages.54 The Republic was remembered with nostalgia as a period of relative well-being. Moreover, it had offered the opportunity to those who considered themselves unjustly treated to form trade unions which would seek to improve their conditions. The hope for a Republi- can style regime became synonymous with the return of plenty. In the last days of Darlan’s rule and the first months of Laval’s second stint as Vichy Premier, the regime fanned these flames of discontent by issuing new instructions allowing professional associations, a right from which the Police were once again nominatively excluded.55 The hated Pierre Laval’s return to power in 1942 brought back bitter memories. He was still associated with the decree- laws of 1935 which had effectively cut the wages of civil servants. A document written by the editor of the Revue économique Franco-Allemande for the

52 AD BDR 5W 369, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Préfet Régional, n° 1304 Police Jud. 1A, 27 January 1942. 53 AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 1872 DA/FF, 3/3/42. 54 AD BDR M6 11057, Le Préfet Régional à M le Secrétaire Général à la Police, 3 August 1942. 55 Journal Officiel, 22/4/42; AN 2AG 25, Bulletin Hebdomadaire du Secrétariat d’Etat à l’Intérieur, n° 87 & 88, 5 May 1942; AN F60 1666, CNI, news digest, n° 869 of 10 July 1942. 98 Chapter 4

German Information Ministry claimed that ‘the Police, in general, is hostile to the new head of government’.56 The increasingly dominant position of the socialists within ‘Gaullist’ ranks was not alien to a Police change in attitude to this type of Resistance. In the 1930’s the Police had been infiltrated by a trade-unionism dominated by socialists and Free-Masons, often of Corsican extraction. The collapse of parliamentary democracy, the outlawing of trade unions and of the Free-Masonry had initially allowed the new regime to counter the importance of these networks. A farcical trial at Riom between February to April 1942, where the defendants were the leaders of the dying years of the Third Republic, did much to boost the self-confidence of the socialists. Vichy had attempted but failed to shift responsibility for the defeat onto the Popular Front but former premier Léon Blum turned the tables on his accusers. This new climate encouraged socialists to reassert themselves. The re- organisation of the clandestine party was by then at an advanced stage. Horace Manicacci, leader of the local branch of the underground party sought out the help of his friend the Secrétaire de Police Xavier Culioli to help solicit the support of the Police.57 As a Corsican, a Free-Mason and a socialist, Culioli perfectly symbolised the 1930’s networks. He was sacked by Vichy in 1942 and was thus able to devote himself full time to organising a Police Resistance. Follow- ing Manicacci’s instructions he began drawing up lists of Police officers whom the Resistance could rely on and would later organise recruitment of Police- men for the Réseau Brutus and the Milices Socialistes Resistance organisations. In the meantime some socialists within the police were offering help to Resisters. When the socialist lawyer Gaston Defferre’s office were subjected to Police surveillance the two Police officers assigned to the task entered into contact with him, informing him that they were former members of his party and that they would not put anything incriminating in their reports.58 Sympathy was displayed through the minimisation of cases involving those accused of Gaullism. In response to a letter from the Intendant de Police about an individual identified as Gaullist, a Renseignements Généraux (RG) report claimed that the person in question was viewed favourably by his entourage and argued that if he had expressed Gaullist remarks it was simply that he had a nervous temperament which provoked a violent reaction in him upon hearing the words ‘Italian’ or ‘German’ but that he had inherited this disposition

56 AJ40 449, Note du rédacteur en chef, la Revue économique Franco-Allemande. 57 Georges Marion, Gaston Defferre, Paris, 1989, pp 83-84. 58 http://brutus.boyer.free.fr/chroniques/g_defferre.html. Policing Opposition 99 from his father, a ‘a disabled ex-serviceman’.59 In another case a dentist accused of Gaullism was protected by the RG report which claimed that his remarks were inspired by commercial considerations, because his surgery was in a working class district where most of the population was Gaullist and so he had to pretend to similar sentiments to protect his custom.60 This was an innova- tive distortion of the idea that Gaullists were self-interested, a notion which was in decline in Police reports by the beginning of 1942, owing partly to the fact that the policing of Gaullism had been taken out of the hands of the criminal Police by the reform and entrusted to the political branches (RG and Sur- veillance du Territoire), more inclined to view the question from a marked political perspective. The Resister Jean Gemähling remembers that when he was arrested by the Surveillance du Territoire in November 1941, they easily accepted the defence which his lawyer, Gaston Defferre, recommended, whereby Gemähling claimed to believe that de Gaulle and Pétain were two sides of the same sword.61 He received only a 4 month prison sentence. The most public demonstration of Police reluctance to come down firmly on Gaullists came during the demonstrations celebrating Bastille Day on 14 July 1942.62 Thousands of locals responded to the Gaullist call for citizens to gather in the streets and before the monuments symbolising Republican freedoms. Historical sources leave no doubt as to the tolerance of the Police that day. Vichyists and collaborationists were outraged. The Légion des Anciens Combattants and a Franco-German friendship committee known as the Groupe Collaboration complained to the Prefect about the inertia of the majority of Policemen when faced with demonstrators openly chanting slogans hostile to the Marshal or to Laval.63 They requested the right for their members to carry guns given that they could no longer count on the Police in moments of crisis. Sabiani, whose militants had shot at the crowd and physically assaulted Inspecteur Gabriel Morine of the Sûreté, was beside himself with rage. He complained bitterly to the German consul in Marseille of the

59 AD BDR 5W 366, le CD, chef des RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 17370 AT/SN. 60 AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 1508/67 GR/FF, 12 February 1942. 61 Oral evidence from Jean Gemähling, Paris, 2 February 1993. For reference to lack of Police zeal against Gaullists elsewhere in France, see the memoirs of former Resister Yvon Morandat: Laurent Douzou (ed), ‘Souvenirs inédits d’Yvon Morandat’, Cahiers de l’IHTP, n° 29, September 1994, pp 74-75. 62 AD BDR M6 11007. AN F1CIII 1143, Rapport du Préfet, August/September 1942. André Ducasse, “Chronique du Vieux Port en Guerre, 1939-45”, Arts et Livres de Provence, n° 31 (special edition), 1957, p 86. 63 AD BDR M6 11007, Motion de protestation de la Légion de Marseille, 22 July 1942 & AD BDR M6 11007, le Président du Groupe Collaboration à M le Préfet, 16 July 1942. 100 Chapter 4 attitude of the local Police. Members of an Italian Armistice Commission present in the city were appalled by the events they watched unfolding. They explained to their French interlocutors that it would be impossible to grant an ‘important armament for this Police which is not reliable even for the French government’.64 The reports sent to London by Resisters left little doubt concerning the delight of Gaullists regarding Police behaviour that 14 July. Different agents recorded varying degrees of Police sympathy. One reported simply that the ‘Police were very mild with the crowd’. Another gave them a more active role by underlining that they were ‘favourable’ adding that they had made no attempt to dissuade demonstrators placing ‘v-shaped’ bouquets in front of the war memorial. The underground paper Libération recorded that: ‘the people of Marseille were well impressed by the correct attitude displayed by the Police of this town’. Determined to milk the events for all that they were worth instructions were sent to the BBC: ‘it would be a good idea to flatter the Marseille Police who are very worked up and could pass in large numbers over to our side’ adding that the assault of Inspecteur Morine by the PPF could be exploited for propaganda purposes. Shortly afterwards Police officers received the first Gaullist tracts specifically aimed at them, inviting them to ‘remain in the service of the National Revolution government, but to try to facilitate the under- takings of the Fighting French’.65 Nevertheless, it should be noted that the dynamics of obedience could still come into operation when officers were called upon to operate against Gaullists or the Allies when sufficient hierarchical pressure were applied. Instructions to arrest 200 Britons living in the Bouches-du-Rhône in March 1942 were carried out.66 From September 1940 through to April 1941 the Police claimed 595 arrests for cases involving the ‘subversive actions of supporters of the ex-General de Gaulle’.67 Towards the end of 1941, the Police conducted the arrests of members of the ‘Liberté’ group, the British sabotage group the Special Operations

64 AD BDR M6 11007, Section de liaison auprès de la 2e Section italienne de contrôle à M le Chef du détachement de liaison auprès de la 2e Section italienne, July 1942. 65 Libération, 1 August 1942. AN F1a 3922, source: 394 d/BCRA/NM, cl. R III n° 18, undated; AN F1a 3922, Source AM31, Cl. D7-III, s/télégr. received the 16 July 1942; AN F1a 3922, D.7/3, Marseille, 17 July 1942. The Resistance belief that the Police could be sympathetic to their cause was not limited to Marseille: See for example AN F1a 3922, CNI, document n° 54-KW71, source 95130, dated 31 October 1942. 66 F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, April 1942. 67 AN 2AG 520 C, Note de l’Inspection Générale des Services de Police Criminelle, Vichy, 19 April 1941. Policing Opposition 101

Executive (SOE) and the MI9 escape network.68 In addition, of course, it should be noted that there were some genuine anti-Gaullists present in the Police.69 Jean Léonard, Commissaire of the Surveillance du Territoire, is sometimes presented as one of these. In late 1941, this Commissaire carried out an extensive operation against the British espionage network, the Intelligence Service, and its links with the Gaullists. This operation was triggered by extremely precise information provided by Paul Paillole of the army counter- espionage service, who combined anti-German operations with repression of Allied activity. Amongst those identified by this particular operation were Jean Moulin, who would ultimately become one of the most famous figures of the French Resistance.70 Pierre Hennequin was one Resister who complained of a less than favourable reception at the hands of Léonard. It should be noted, however, that although he complains of the attitude of this Commissaire, he makes no claim to have been beaten: mistreatment obviously had different definitions for Gaullists than communists. A very real gulf existed between the zeal shown in the repression of communism compared to Gaullism. Police officers would generally not take excessive risks and would respond to precise instructions of this kind. But since the input from subordinate levels of the institution was an essential element of the repressive process, the absence of enthusiasm for anti-Gaullist policing caused a slowing-down of this type of repression. The authorities portrayed the communists as a major threat from the outset. In August 1940, the Surveillance du Territoire noted ‘a trend towards regroup- ing of the communists after lying dormant during the period of hostilities’.71 In November, the Prefect recorded a growth in communist activity.72 By 3 December, the Ministry of Information was reporting that in Marseille communist tracts were very widespread, whilst revolutionary slogans were painted on certain walls. He underlined that ‘if serious troubles were to break out in Marseille- and that’s a possibility that shouldn’t be excluded out of hand- the Police would be rapidly overwhelmed’.73 The number and range of sources

68 Robert Mencherini, ‘Naissance de la Résistance à Marseille’in Jean-Marie Guillon & Pierre Laborie (eds), Mémoire et histoire: la Résistance, Toulouse, 1995, p 141. 69 AD BDR 5W 366, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 17428 VI/LJ, 24 January 1942. 70 Robert Belot, La Résistance sans de Gaulle, Paris, 2006, pp 277-278. 71 AD BDR M6 11061, le Commissaire Spécial, Chef du Commissariat de la Surveillance du Territoire à M l’Inspecteur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire, 3 August 1940. 72 AD BDR 5W 362, le Préfet à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 11/11/40. 73 AN F41 266, rapport pour le service de la propagande et de l’information, Marseille, 3 December 1940. 102 Chapter 4 claiming this communist revival tend to confirm its existence.74 However, there is reason to believe that the authorities considerably exaggerated the strength of this movement. With regard to the Police, exaggeration of the ‘threat’ occurred for reasons both of pragmatism and ideology. The strength of the communists could be used to plead for an input of resources. Writing in September 1940, the Com- missaire Divisionnaire head of the Police Spéciale drew attention to the limited personnel at his disposal claiming that the 7 members of the Police Spéciale and the 30 Inspecteurs of the Police d’Etat specifically set aside for anti-Communist repression were insufficient.75 Ideological hostility instilled Police officers with a natural propensity to over-estimate the communist ‘danger’. A knee-jerk reaction allowed them to see reds everywhere and to blame this movement for all anti-government propaganda. In February 1941, when the letters “M-C-F” was discovered painted on walls on the Promenade de la Corniche, the Boulevard de la Corderie and the rue Breteuil, the Police jumped to the immediate assumption that these letters represented the acronym of ‘Mouvement Communiste Français’. Inspecteurs of the Sûreté began a surveillance to try to catch the German Jews to whom they immediately accredited this slogan.76 However, a week later the three young Frenchmen actually responsible for this graffiti were caught red-handed and revealed that the letters were an abbreviation of ‘Mouvement-Croix-de-Feu’, a reference back to an extreme-right grouping of the 1930’s.77 The mutual incomprehension and dislike between the Police and the communists has already been referred to with regard to the 1930’s and some of the

74 For example: AD BDR M6 11062, le CD, Chef des Services de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, n° 15483 GT/RI, 2 September 1940; AN F41 266 synthèses décadaires de Contrôle Technique; AN 2AG 438, Services des Voyages Officiels, in M. Ferro, Pétain, Paris, 1987, p 232; AN F41 266, rapport pour le service de propagande et de l’information, Marseille, 3 December 1940; AN 3W 310, le Ministre de l’Intérieur à M le Préfet des BDR, 4 February 1941. 75 The Commissaire Spécial in particular underlined ‘the excessive shortage of personnel for the Police Spéciale’, AD BDR M6 11062, le CD, chef de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet, 2 September 1940. AN F41 266, Contrôle Technique, synthèse bimensuelle, 6 March-20 March 1941; AN 3W 310, le Ministre de l’Intérieur à M le Préfet des BDR, 4 February 1941; AN F41 266, rapport pour le service de propagande et de l’information, Marseille, 3 December 1940. AN 2AG 438, Services des Voyages Officiels, in M. Ferro, Pétain, Paris, 1987, p 232. 76 AD BDR 5W 366, Le Commissaire, Chef de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Central, 8 Febru- ary 1941. 77 AD BDR 5W 366, Le Commissaire, Chef de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Central, 15 Febru- ary 1941. Policing Opposition 103 reasons for hostility remained constant. The communists viewed the Police as class enemies and the even greater tendency to use the Police as a political instrument under Vichy merely accentuated this. The Police were unlikely to appreciate the criticisms they received from this political current. Communist tracts in la Joliette struck at the very heart of the Police mission denouncing the inability to assure public security and attributing this to widespread corruption and murky links with the world of crime.78 Moreover members of the institution often felt that this traditional enemy was using an insidious propaganda campaign to profit from present hardships. If Police officers remained immune to the appeal of the communists, it was not only due to their long- running battle with these militants but also because communist propaganda did not touch current Police preoccupations. Despite Pétain’s personal popularity, the communists were able to exploit concrete grievances, such as the poor morale of demobilised soldiers returning home to find no work, or the restrictions through the slogan ‘your children lack milk’ which specifically targeted mothers.79 Although subject to restrictions like everyone else, comparatively few Police officers had been mobilised and thus the number returning from the front demoralised was small. When they did return they found not unemployment but their old jobs in the force. The Police also saw themselves as defenders of the national community and there was a tendency to portray communists as a threat on patriotic grounds. Often communism was associated with foreign subversion both because the party followed instructions from Moscow and because a number of Spanish Republicans and former members of the International Brigades were involved with the movement. Although many communists entered Resistance long before the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, it should not be forgotten that for much of the first year after the armistice the official line of the communist party was still that of defending the Nazi-Soviet pact. The sudden about-face in their policy following Bar- barossa could lead to claims of hypocrisy. The communists were considered as a major threat to public order. Not only were they likely to organise workers’ strikes but from 29 November 1941 they also began to engage in direct ‘terrorist’

78 AD BDR M6 11065, “’ettre ouverte à M de Rodellec du Porzic, Directeur de la Police de Marseille’, 30 May 1941. 79 AN F41 266, Contrôle Technique, synthèse décadaire, 20 December 1940-5 January 1941; AD BDR M6 11062, le Commissaire Spécial, chef de la Surveillance du Territoire à M le Préfet, 26 September 1940; AD BDR M611061, le Commissaire Spécial, Chef du Commis- sariat de la Surveillance du Territoire à Marseille à M l’Inspecteur Général des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire, 3 August 1940. 104 Chapter 4 operations beginning with the blowing up of an Italian armistice vehicle in Marseille.80 Vichy’s evident desire to destroy the communist movement thus coincided with the hostility of many Policemen to its activities. Zeal abounded. The Pre- fect recorded that this repression was being actively pursued by all Police services.81 The Police devoted considerable resources to this question and did untold damage to communist structures. They rapidly amassed an impressive documentation regarding the communists allowing them to maintain the upper hand. In July the Commissariat Central seized the Regional archives of the party, including 5000 circulars, 1000 individual notices and 20000 official orders.82 In October, the Police Spéciale claimed to have precise information on communist directives, a number of the current leaders and on the location of their printing presses.83 When they decapitated the movement with arrests of local leaders in March and April 1941, they disrupted its operations much more than previous reports would have led to believe possible. Not content with arresting individual militants the Police Spéciale also tried to divide the communist movement by fanning the flames of a rumour that a group of communists under Joseph Pastor were actually working for the Police.84 Examples of Police hostility are demonstrated in the vocabulary used to describe communist activity: ‘cunning and insidious propaganda’, or the description of a communist sailor on board the Florida as ‘most undesirable’ or suggesting that some communist militants at least were repenting after their former ‘errors’.85 A Police Judiciaire report of February 1942 made no attempt to hide its author’s opinion concerning: ‘this underground communist party, whose propaganda is all the more noxious because it’s aimed at a working- class population under-nourished and suffering from a host of restrictions, represents a mortal danger for our still weakened country’.86 Hardly the

80 AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, January 1942. 81 AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, April 1942. 82 AD BDR M6 11062, le CD, chef de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet, 2 September 1940. 83 AD BDR M6 11062, le C. D., Chef de la Police Spéciale à M le CD, chef de la 9è Brigade de Police Mobile, n° 16945 RI/SP, 1 October 1940. 84 Robert Mencherini, ‘Naissance de la Résistance à Marseille’, in Jean-Marie Guillon & Pierre Laborie (eds), Mémoire et histoire: la Résistance, Toulouse, 1995, p 145. 85 AD BDR 5W 362, le Commissaire Spécial à M le CD, Chef de la Police Spéciale, n° 1136/A.I., 30 July 1940; AD BDR M6 11061, le Commissaire Spécial, chef de la Surveillance du Terri- toire à M l’Inspecteur Général de la Surveillance du Territoire, 3 August 1940; AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant, n° 2996/722 DL/FF., AD BDR M6 11065, CD, Chef de la Police Spéciale à l’Inspecteur Général des Services, 20 June 1941. 86 AD BDR 5W 369, Commissaire de P.J. à M le CD, Chef de la 9è, n° 1860, 14 February 1942. Policing Opposition 105

language of neutrality. Newspaper vendors in the rue d’Italie and boulevard Gustave Desplace who announced important Soviet advances at the beginning of 1942 found themselves arrested for infraction of an 1889 Law, whilst a year before those advertising their papers with slogans such as ‘macaronis cuits en Grèce’ to describe Italian setbacks in Greece had been undisturbed by the Police.87 Hostility was also manifested through physical violence, as a nurse from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital found out when she faced a Police Judiciaire interrogation in February.88 The communists complained that some of their militants had been tortured during interrogations by police officers in the unoccupied zone through flagellation of the soles of their feet using a bull pizzle whip or through the burning of their toes with the aid of a cigarette lighter.89 It was only in the second half of 1942 that the first tentative signs of a decline in the zeal of anti-communist policing began to emerge. An internal document of the Communists’ political bureau in the Southern Zone, intercepted by the Marseille Police in December, attributed this to the way the government was running the institution: ‘The Police and the Gendarmerie (…) no longer offer any satisfaction to Vichy’s leaders. These two branches have difficulty accepting the imposed militarisation (…) Recently, we have noted with satisfaction a marked fall in repression in diverse localities’.90 There were still few signs of any warmth of feeling between members of the institution and the communists. Some rare Policemen had sympathies in that direction. Inspecteur Paul Fary was one such. Fary operated as an agent for the Pat O’Leary network helping stranded British pilots escape from Marseille but it was the discovery of his sympathetic contacts with the communist movement which assured his removal from office. A report written for the Ministry of Information, a few days prior to Pétain’s visit to Marseille in December 1940 made a contrast between the active anti-communism of the Police hierarchy and the complicity of a handful of Police subordinates with members of the party. But such

87 AD BDR 5W 366, Le Commissaire Principal des Gardiens de la Paix à M le Commissaire Central, 26 January 1942; AN F1C III 1143, Rapport du Préfet, March 1942. 88 AD BDR 5W 369, Le Directeur de l’Assistance Publique à M le Préfet, n° 41/42, 19 February 1942. 89 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les voix de la Liberté, Paris, 1975, volume 3, p 118; AD BDR M6 11065, “’ettre ouverte à M de Rodellec du Porzic, Directeur de la Police de Marseille’, 30 May 1941. 90 AD BDR M611071, Circulaire confidentielle de la section du bureau politique pour la zone libre, SFIC, non datée, interceptée le 7 December 1942. 106 Chapter 4 references are rare and communist sympathies should be considered the exception amongst Police personnel.91 Generally, in the first two years after the armistice, the Police devoted extensive resources to the pursuit of Vichy’s political enemies. How zealous they were in this pursuit was clearly linked to historic precedent, as well as political preference and the level of hierarchical pressure. The Gaullists were newcom- ers on the political scene. This meant not only that the Police took time to understand the phenomenon but also to infiltrate the Gaullist groupings. Anti- communism, on the other hand, was zealous from the outset. A mutual hostility between Police and communists had been built up over a number of years. The Police were well informed about the communists and thereby found it easier to know where to look for them, although by the same token the communists, who had a long experience of having to live on the margins of political acceptability, were quicker to adopt the basic procedures of clandestine security. Police Resistance to early measures aimed at Vichy’s opponents should not be exaggerated. It was initially limited and did not prevent a large number of communists and a smaller number of Gaullists from being arrested. Neither did it prevent the expulsion of Varian Fry nor the eventual arrest of Donald Caskie nor the internment of 200 Britons. It was largely the acts of isolated individuals, the possibilities of a wider, more organised Resistance within the Police were not really explored before the Summer of 1942. If early Police Resistance to measures targeting opposition groups should not be exaggerated neither should it be ignored. Although embryonic this Police Resistance did exist. Michael Foot, the historian of the SOE, has noted: ‘Some of SOE’s earliest efforts in France depended on clandestine Police co-operation’.92 How would the Police respond when Vichy’s designated target was racial rather than political?

91 AN F41 266, rapport pour le service de propagande et de l’information, Marseille, 3 December 1940. 92 M.R.D. Foot, SOE in France, London, 1966, p 119. Anti-semitic Policing 107

Chapter 5 Anti-Semitic Policing

Between 11 August and 11 September 1942, 2089 foreign Jews were crammed into 5 convoys in a railway station near Les Milles, a former brickworks transformed into a transit and internment camp which had provided primitive and dusty accommodation to many foreign refugees since 1939. The railway carriages were cattle wagons strewn with straw, containing a jug of water and a bucket to serve as a toilet. Jews were packed in like sardines. As the convoys prepared to make for an ‘unknown destination’, many parents decided to leave young children behind in the care of aid agencies like the Quakers or the YMCA believing that few youngsters could survive the conditions they were likely to endure. The decision was heart-rending. Parents were effectively assigning their offspring to total strangers, unsure if or when they would ever set eyes upon them again. The convoys went first to Drancy, a French controlled camp on the outskirts of Paris. From here internees were transferred to the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz in Poland. Few survived the ordeal. Many died during the journey. Cramped conditions, poor sanitation, excessive heat and lack of food took their toll. Most of those who eventually arrived at Ausch- witz were immediately gassed to death. Others succumbed to the rigours of forced labour. Very few of the children left with aid agencies would ever see their parents again.1 These deportations were the culmination of a process of persecution and exclusion co-sponsored by the Nazis and Vichy. Nazi anti-Semitic persecution continued throughout Hitler’s 12 year reign. Mistreatment of Jews in the Reich and the occupied territories caused many to emigrate to unoccupied France. The Nazis also engaged in a policy of expulsion from territory they controlled. In October 1940, 7000 Baden and Saarland Jews were crammed into sealed trains and transported into the Southern unoccupied zone where Vichy placed them in internment camps. It was at the beginning of 1942, at the Wannsee conference, that the Nazis decided on a systematic industrialised extermination of the Jews by gas. Historians have established that anti-Semitic leanings were not forced on the French government by their Nazi allies but rather were indigenous. Vichy is generally attributed with the desire to exclude the Jews from its national

1 Susan Zuccotti, The holocaust, the French and the Jews, Lincoln, 1993, pp 121-124; Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, pp 79-127.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_007 108 Chapter 5 community. The use of the word ‘exclusion’ over-simplifies Vichy intentions and fails to highlight one of the essential differences between Nazi and French government policy toward the Jews. Unlike the French, the Nazis made no philosophical distinction between Jews who were their compatriots and those that were not. The difference between Vichy’s policy towards French and foreign Jews needs to be underlined by a difference of vocabulary. The word ‘exclusion’ should be reserved for the treatment of foreign Jews, whilst the word ‘relegation’ seems more appropriate to describe the policy towards French Jews. Vichy sought to relegate French Jews to the status of second-class citizens by limiting their influence within the national community. It introduced Jewish Statutes (Statuts des Juifs) which defined Jewishness, obliged Jews to register for a census and limited the access of French Jews to certain professions. These measures isolated Jewish communities making them more vulnerable to subsequent persecutions. But for the government most French Jews remained citizens and it showed initial reticence to organise or encourage their expulsion. It was not until the beginning of 1943 that French Police arrested Jewish compatriots other than those who were children of immigrants or who had been naturalised French.2 Unlike their French counterparts, foreign Jews could be interned from as early as October 1940 for the simple fact of being Jewish. Extermination was never the avowed intent of the Vichy regime even for foreign Jews. Nevertheless, Laval’s government allowed itself to become an active accomplice in the Holocaust by handing over Jews for deportation to an ‘unknown destination’. This was an area where considerable hierarchical pressure was exerted. From 1940, Pétain’s government sent clear signals to local subordinates about what it expected regarding the Jews. Vichy ministers were delighted when Police operations arrested what they considered a satisfactory number of Jews. The Director of Pétain’s cabinet could not contain his satisfaction in the spring of 1941 with the results of round-ups in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the administrative ‘département’ of which Marseille is the capital. As 147 Jews from the département were assigned to residence between 25 May and 5 July he gloated ‘the figures are becoming impressive and correspond to the wishes expressed by the government’.3 Then in the context of the deportations a year later, the anti-Semitic zeal of central government placed huge pressure on subordinates.

2 L. Lazare, Rescue as Resistance: how Jewish organizations fought the Holocaust in France, New York, 1996. 3 AN 2AG 520 C, Le Directeur du Cabinet Civil à M le Secrétaire Général pour la Police, 28 May 1941. Anti-semitic Policing 109

The role of Vichy’s Police chief, René Bousquet, must be particularly underlined. Born in 1909, Bousquet was seen as a rising star of the French administration: a dynamic man of action who had been the youngest Prefect in France. In the 1930s, he had saved a drowning stranger by jumping into a river to pull him out. Politically he had been close to the moderate left Radical party, a party whose political position has been described as being like a radish: ‘red on the outside, white on the inside and always on the side the bread is buttered on’.4 Bousquet was well-connected and had earned the respect and friendship of Pierre Laval who made him his Police chief when he returned to power in April 1942. Bousquet now asked Prefects and the senior local Police Chiefs, the Intendants de Police, to personally supervise anti-Semitic operations and insisted that they should not hesitate to ‘smash all forms of Resistance that you come across in the population and to single out those civil servants who have complicated your task through indiscretions, passivity or ill will’.5 He ordered the internment of anyone found hindering the execution of his instructions.6 To stimulate the zeal of local services, he sent out a circular on 20 August 1942 reminding Prefects of the illegal activities of Jews whom he accused of black market activity and anti-governmental propaganda. He called for constant surveillance of Jews in their regions.7 In Marseille, the senior Police hierarchy needed no prompting. The SS- Obersturmführer Theodore Dannecker, of the Nazi Jewish affairs bureau, had included the Intendant de Police de Rodellec du Porzic in the category of those Vichy administrators ‘interested in a rapid solution to the Jewish question and just waiting for the orders from his superiors’.8 Once these instructions were received, his co-operation knew no bounds and he proved himself a zealous and efficient prosecutor of Vichy’s anti-Semitic programme. In a conversation with Protestant Pastor Henri Manen the Intendant justified Police actions against the Jews claiming that however harsh the measures might seem they were in French interest.9 Both central government and local administration underlined their fervent desire for these operations to reach their quantative target, as highlighted in their treatment of the old and infirm. A number of the categories of exemptions originally laid down were not respected by de

4 Daniel Singer, ‘Death of a Collaborator’, The Nation, July 19, 1993, Vol. 257(3), p 101. 5 AN 3W 91, Secrétaire Général à la Police aux Préfets Régionaux, télégr. n° 12776, 22 August 1942. 6 AN 3W 91, Secrétaire Général à la Police aux Préfets Régionaux, télégr. n° 12640, 20 August 1942. 7 AN 3W 89, le Conseiller d’Etat à MM les Préfets, n° 489. Pol 4/ circ., 20 August 1942. 8 CDJC XXVb-87, Rapport de Dannecker, 20 July 1942. 9 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 358. 110 Chapter 5

Rodellec du Porzic: men over 60 were included in the departures.10 Most witnesses also underline that the convoy of 2 September included carriages made up of those considered too ill to transport who had been extracted from the camp’s infirmary. Although this is generally attributed to the Intendant’s personal initiative, a government instruction of 28 August made it clear that the sick and infirm should be included in the convoy.11 It was under the pressure of men capable of going to these extremes that the Police operated. Central government was keen to make the maximum use of the handing over of Jews as a means of gaining concessions in negotiations with the Ger- mans. It was also felt that successful completion of anti-Semitic round-ups in the late summer of 1942 could restore to the Police much of the discredit lost during Resistance demonstrations on 14 July where the Police had been seen to side with the demonstrators.12 Dannecker raised the stakes by calling into question the capacity of the French Police to carry out this operation.13 He saw the institution as thoroughly corrupt and claimed it understood nothing of the ‘Jewish question’. Bousquet was determined to prove him wrong by displaying the efficiency of his services. Central to Vichy’s concerns in the area of anti-Semitic policing was the desire to maintain sovereignty. This meant on one level making sure that it was foreign Jews who were deported instead of French ones. Sacrificing foreign Jews from the southern zone was meant to save French ones in the north where the Germans were threatening to carry out anti-Semitic operations. In fact it was not the Nazis but rather Vichy Police Chief René Bousquet who first suggested deporting Jews from the southern zone. He brought up the subject during Heydrich’s visit to Paris at the beginning of May 1942. France thus became the only country to hand-over Jews to the Nazis from an unoccupied territory. Maintaining sovereignty also involved assuring that policing remained firmly in the hands of the French authorities. Bousquet insisted that the French Police have exclusive control over these operations. In reality, however, the Nazis had little choice but to rely on the support of French forces in these operations. German presence in the unoccupied zone at this stage was by definition limited. In fact German forces were short staffed everywhere. In mid-1942, the

10 J. Ribot, ‘Les Juifs étrangers à Marseille’ in C. Oppetit (ed), Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 103. 11 Serge Klarsfeld, Les transferts de Juifs de la région de Marseille vers les camps de Drancy ou de Compiègne en vue de leur déportation, 11/8/42-24/7/44, Paris, 1992; J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, pp 343 & 373. 12 AN 3W 91, p-v de Helmut Knochen, 5/2/47. 13 J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 330. Anti-semitic Policing 111

German Police comprised somewhere between 2500 and 3000 officials in the whole of France.14 Their number was clearly inadequate for round-ups on the scale now being proposed. The use of indigenous law enforcement services was also considered less likely to cause a public outcry. Equally, French Police officers had the advantage of more local knowledge and greater facility to com- municate with locals for gathering information about refugees. For Bousquet the independence of the French Police in these operations also implied that French parallel Police services should not infringe on the prerogatives of the regular forces of order. A specialist parallel service the Police aux Questions Juives (PQJ) had been established in the framework of Vichy’s Jewish affairs office (CGQJ). It was never really accepted by local Police forces who viewed it as unprofessional and an unwelcome rival. In Marseille the PQJ saw itself refused office space in the central Police station.15 Bousquet had it closed down in July 1942 and although it was immediately replaced by the more disciplined SEC (Section d’Enquête et de Contrôle), the Police made sure that the role of this new organisation remained relatively limited. It was in the area of the policing of French, as opposed to foreign, Jews that the role of the CGQJ and its parallel Police services was the biggest. The application of anti-Semitic legislation, such as quotas for the number of Jews allowed to work in a particular profession, fell to the CGQJ and the particular profession’s governing bodies. It was only once Jews contravened a law that the regular Police got involved. Thus, Jews who failed to register for the 1941 census became subject to Police measures. Against foreign Jews Police activity was much more vigorous and multi-faceted. There was a constant watch on Jews waiting to leave Marseille, as for instance in the case of five hundred Jews awaiting a departure for Greece between August and October 1940.16 Poten- tial clandestine emigrants had to run the gauntlet of Police controls around the ports and stations. The monitoring of access to the docks remained as inefficient as in the pre-Vichy period. In one case in September 1940, an incompe- tent Gardien de la Paix even gave permission to enter the port to a vehicle driven by someone fraudulently claiming to be the Minister of the Interior.17 Once inside the port, however, individuals were subject to stringent identity controls designed to establish that their paperwork was in order. Police services also maintained a surveillance on boats likely to be facilitating illegal

14 M. Marrus & R.O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, New York, 1981, p 241. 15 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 53. 16 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 63. 17 AD BDR M6 11062, Information pour M le Préfet, en provenance du Commissariat Spécial de Marseille, 26 September 1940. 112 Chapter 5 departures.18 These operations were particularly intense because their purpose was dual: to prevent illegal emigration and to curtail Gaullist recruitment.19 However, the fact that controls were especially strict on vessels embarking to South America suggests that illegal emigration was the primary concern.20 The case of the Alsina which left Marseille on 15 January 1941, dem- onstrates how seriously this control was taken. The day before its scheduled departure, this boat was searched from top to bottom by 30 Policemen supervised by a Commissaire Spécial du port. Once this search was completed an eight-man guard was mounted around the boat, and boarding was supervised by officers of the Police d’Etat, Police Spéciale and Police Mobile, respectively the urban Police, the regional crime squads and the political branch.21 Even if a ship full of refugees managed to make it out of the harbour it could still be subject to Police measures as the example of another boat, the Bouline, proves.22 The Police thus played a role in trapping foreign Jews in Marseille. They were also the principle practitioners in the actual internment of foreign refugees. The identification, surveillance and arrest of foreign Jews living freely in Marseille was part of the Police mission. Almost all Police services, ranging from the vice squad to the counter-espionage services had a role to play in such anti-Semitic operations and the mobilisation of Police personnel to carry out the arrests was massive.23 This was particularly the case in the summer of 1942. During the deportations, it was the Police and the Gendarmerie that arrested Jews in the street, guarded internment camps and accompanied trains transporting Jews into the northern zone, from where they were subsequently transported eastwards by the Germans to be gassed to death.

18 AN AJ41 46, Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le CD, Chef de la 1ère Section à l’IGS de Police Criminelle, n° 2880/B, 17 January 1941. For the arrest of people attempting illegal departure see the monthly reports of the Commissaire Spécial des Ports in AD BDR M6 11062 and AD BDR 5W 376. 19 Thus, in October 1940, a boat (called the ‘Storn’), identified as preparing to transport French volunteers to England, had a piece of its rudder removed before being placed in a dry dock on the initiative of the Police Spéciale. AD BDR M6 11062, CD, Chef de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet, 16 October 1940. 20 AN AJ41 46, Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le CD, Chef de la 1ère Section à l’IGS de Police Criminelle, n° 2880/B, 17 January 1941. 21 AN AJ41 46, Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le CD, Chef de la 1ère Section à l’IGS de Police Criminelle, n° 2880/B, 17 January 1941. 22 AN AJ41 46, Le Commissaire de Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, 4 November 1940. 23 Evidence from a Swiss citizen, published in Berner TageWacht, 2 September 1942, quoted in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 342. Police records confirm the massive mobilisation of personnel: AD BDR 5W 378, Commissariat Spécial des Ports, La Grande Bigue, rapport quotidien, 27 August 1942. Anti-semitic Policing 113

Anti-Semitic persecution was facilitated by the slowness of public opinion to condemn it. Although Police reports noted in October 1940 a degree of sympathy towards Jews as a reaction against Vichy’s anti-Jewish statutes, this was short-lived and initial reaction to foreign Jews was mostly defined by indifference or hostility.24 Theodore Dannecker, the SS head of the Jewish affairs bureau, observed that in 1940 French public opinion had only been moved by measures taken against long-established French Jewish communities. Thus, they tended to remain indifferent to the 30,000 foreign Jews interned in appalling conditions in Vichy camps.25 The unique glimmer of reaction to measures against foreign Jews was a conversation the Police overheard in a Marseille restaurant and referring to the brutal way in which Jews were expelled from Germany and interned at Gurs.26 By the middle of 1941 criticisms of the anti- Semitic brutalities of the Marseille Police started to be voiced. An anonymous letter written to head of State Philippe Pétain in April denounced Policemen who ‘take pleasure in mistreating foreigners whose only crime is that of having loved France’, describing how these Jews were beaten up in Police stations.27 However, such reactions were still an exception and the absence of concerted reaction severely limited the political clout of immigrant communities. It was not until the beginning of 1942 that a wave of popular sympathy for Jews began to be noted. News of German round-ups in Paris in August and December 1941 had bestowed on the Jews the status of martyrs. The brutality of the deportations of the summer of 1942 stirred up still further amounts of public compassion for the plight of the Jews. The departure of convoys took place far from urban centres in order to minimise the alarm to the population.28 Despite this there was considerable public disarray at the sight of the huge Police identity controls, the disappearance of a neighbour or the vision of cattle trucks packed with human beings passing through train stations. The postal censors noted that in the private correspondence they had intercepted the question of the inhuman treatment of the Jews was one of the public’s major concerns in the months of August and September 1942.29

24 AN 2AG 515, Police reports entitled ‘Vu, entendu et constaté à Marseille entre le 16/10 et le 5/11/40’; see also AN F41 266, Synthèse des Contrôles Techniques, 5 December-20 Decem- ber 1940. 25 CDJC XXVI-1 (p 60), ‘Les questions juives et leur traitement’, report from SS-Obersturmfüh- rer Dannecker, Paris, 1 July 1941. 26 AN 2AG 515, ‘Vu, entendu et constaté à Marseille entre le 16/10 et le 5/11/40’. 27 AN 2AG 618, Un Français 100%, Marseille, au Maréchal Pétain, April 1941; L. Feuchtwanger, Le diable en France, Paris, 1985, p 194. 28 R.R. Lambert, Carnets d’un témoin, 1940-43, Paris, 1984, p 184. 29 See the monthly reports of the Contrôle Technique for this period in AD BDR M6 11057. 114 Chapter 5

Two types of protest were registered. Firstly, there were expressions of sympathy for ‘poor and defenceless foreign refugees’. Even the catholic clergy of Marseille, who continued to be firm admirers of Vichy, raised their voices in this vein. Monsignor Delay, the bishop of Marseille, not only read out a prepared message of sympathy in a sermon but he was also amongst those readers of the anti-Semitic newspaper Gringoire to protest against the tone of an article which praised the deportations. Intermingled with simple expressions of sympathy, there was a second category of reaction, which consisted of intro- spective interrogations as to what these anti-Semitic measures revealed about the status of France. This interrogation was most elegantly expressed in an anonymous letter addressed to the Prefect and signed by a ‘Frenchman who stubbornly continues to believe in God and in France’. His letter claimed that earthworms often appeared nobler than mankind but that what distressed him the most was that this time it was French Policemen who had reminded him of the baseness of the human race.30 The Prefect described public concern in his monthly report: ‘the rights of man and the international right of asylum have been violated and the handing over of foreign Jews to the Ger- mans is considered by many as a national disgrace’. He went on to add that ‘measures involving the breaking up of the families of stateless Jews have cast a certain amount of discredit on the government and its Police force’.31 In many respects Police attitudes to immigrant Jews mirrored that of the public at large. Immigrants were initially labelled as rivals for scarce resources; as potential political trouble makers; as enemy spies or criminals. But the hostility of the Police to these groups was undoubtedly more intense than that of the average citizen. One of the specificities of Police xenophobia lies in its interaction with the professional responsibilities of law enforcement officers. Immigrants were accused of being a drain on scarce resources such as food; the Police had a role to play in over-seeing the distribution of these resources. Immigrants were accused of being a threat to national security or public order; it was the Police who had to counter any threat in this area. The evolution of Police opinion on this matter also followed a similar pattern, beginning with hostility or at best indifference and culminating in a degree of sympathy and a position of ambiguity.

30 AD BDR M6 10986, Français qui s’obstine encore à croire en Dieu et en la France à M le Préfet des BDR, 6 August 1942. 31 AD BDR M6 10982, Jean Fraissinet à m Max Bonnafous, préfet régional,‘Libres reflexions d’un conseiller national’, 25 March 1942; AN F1CIII 1143, Rapport du Préfet, August/Sep- tember 1942. Cf also: S. Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France, Paris, 1993, p 670. Anti-semitic Policing 115

The importance of the perception of immigrant Jews as a drain on resources was particularly important in Marseille. In the wake of defeat Marseille was massively overcrowded. The exodus brought floods of civilians from France and beyond. Their ranks were swelled by political refugees: Jews, Socialists or Communists from Occupied Europe, many of whom thought they had found in 1930s France a secure haven. Fearing imprisonment, brutality, persecution, repression or in some cases death, these refugees arrived in pitiful condition, the desperation of their flight having limited their material possessions to a strict minimum. Most were tired, hungry and weak on their arrival and overcome by the experience they had suffered. In the second half of 1940 the city’s atmosphere was more cosmopolitan than ever as potential émigrés crowded into the docks and the platforms of the railway stations, adding even more diversity to the linguistic cacophony of Marseille. Pre-war accommodation problems reached crisis levels. Hardly a hotel room was free; sources of rented accommodation dried up: people were sleeping rough in public squares, clutching their bags. Required to keep tabs on this floating population and expected to oversee the administrative formalities of their movements, the Police had little time for their routine tasks and this added to the strain of their job.32 Almost invariably overworked and keen to relieve hierarchical pressure by the production of results with the minimum effort, the Police homed in on easy targets. Foreigners fit neatly into this category because, subject to a wider range of legislation than the native population (residence permits, etc...), they are more likely to be in infringement of the law if questioned. The Vichy law of 4 October 1940 allowing the internment of foreign Jews with no other justifica- tion than that of their origin, made such refugees even easier pickings.33 Moreover, the circumstances of 1940-44 forced many foreigners into an illegality which brought them increasingly into conflict with the Police. Obliged to live clandestinely and deprived of resources, many had little choice but to have recourse to black market food supplies.34 Eager to leave France for safer havens, Jewish immigrants often found their possibilities for legal departure limited or

32 AN 2AG 438, Service des Voyages Officiels, ‘dossier voyages’, December 1940; AD BDR, M6 11061, le Commissaire Spécial à M le CD, Police Spéciale, 25 July 1940; CDJC XXVI-1 (p 60), SS-Obersturmführer Dannecker: ‘Questions Juives en France et leur traitement’, Paris, 1 July 1941; Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, New York, 1945, p 21; Donald Caskie, Le chardon d’Ecosse: un pasteur écossais dans la Résistance, Paris, 1969, p 46; Henri Frenay, La nuit finira, Paris, 1973, Vol. 1, p 38; Paul Jankowski, Communism & Collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 71. 33 Dominique Rémy, Les lois de Vichy, Paris, 1992, p 91. 34 Léon Poliakov, L’auberge des musiciens, Paris, 1981, p 90. 116 Chapter 5 excessively complicated. Legal escape meant overcoming a number of administrative hurdles.35 To leave France foreign nationals had to obtain an exit visa and an entry visa for their country of destination. They also had to have transit visas for any country they had to cross on their journey. The validity of these documents had to coincide. Potential emigrants originating from the Reich, aged between 18 and 50, had to present a certificate declaring them unfit for military service. Those wishing to pass through North Africa had to be in possession of a special safe-conduct. To these complicated procedures must be added the problem of the long queues in front of the consulates, making legal escape a virtual impossibility for many and encouraging them to seek alternative departure methods.36 In their investigations on the black market or illegal departures Police officers frequently found the involvement of Jews. This further reinforced the stereotype of criminality which Vichy propaganda was keen to associate them with. Once a social category is identified as engaged in criminal acts it becomes subject to increasing Police surveillance. Once surveillance of that category increases so too does the likelihood of members of that category being arrested for criminal offences, thereby further nurturing Police prejudice about the behaviour of that group. This is the vicious circle of marginalisation. Many of the Jews in Marseille were of German or Central European nationality. This helped to foster an image of them as spies. Behind this association of Jews and spies there was the traditional suspicion of a community who were seen to have no country and to wander nomadically.37 There was also a more recent French reference in the form of the Dreyfus affair- a turn of the century scandal in which a Jewish French army officer was falsely accused of selling secrets to the Germans. Although Dreyfus was cleared of the espionage charge, there were still a certain number of French people, such as the writer Léon Daudet, who had never believed his innocence. Undoubtedly this feeling was most rife in the circles of the French secret services who had been humiliated by the scandal. Paul Paillole, head of a clandestine counter-espionage service based in Marseille between 1940 and 1942, insisted on the role of Jews from the Reich in pro-German espionage after the armistice, even claiming that he had

35 On these questions see AD BDR M6 11062, Commissaire Spécial de la Surveillance du Ter- ritoire à M l’Inspecteur Général de la Surveillance du Territoire, n° D1898, 4 September 1940; AN AJ41 46, Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le Chef de la 1ère Section à l’IGS de la Police Criminelle, n° 2880/B, 17 January 1941; D. Bénédite, La filière marseillaise, Paris, 1984. 36 Oral evidence from Pierre Guiral, February 1992. 37 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, pp 82-83. Anti-semitic Policing 117 not realised the humiliation of the defeat until a German Jew whose arrest for spying he had organised spat in his face.38 It was these military services who were providing much of the information used by the Police in their own counter-espionage operations. Anti-Semites in the Police also drew ready conclu- sions about the involvement of Jews in spying. Assistant Intendant Robert Auzanneau drew particular attention to the position of an Austrian Jew whom he claimed was making false identity cards and was in contact with the Ger- man armistice commission.39 Further investigation cleared this individual but some residue of this association between Jews and spies remained well into 1942. In order to encourage the zeal of his men during the deportation operations an officer of the crowd control Police force (the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve) underlined how dangerous these German Jews were and insisted that they should be deported to their destination ‘dead or alive’.40 The Police were particularly sensitive about counter-espionage operations, partly because, ironically, they were accused by members of the public of not having been severe enough with nomadic foreigners at the end of the Third Republic.41 Concrete examples of Police xenophobia are evident from an early stage. This can be seen in the evidence left by witnesses regarding Police behaviour. One of the clearest memories of Ignace Doboin, a refugee from Paris, was of Gardiens de la Paix shouting in an aggressive tone ‘ locals first’ (‘Marseillais d’abord’) to the queues waiting at the Prefecture for food tickets.42 Prejudice can also be detected in the tone and content of Police reports. In September 1940, the head of the counter-espionage Police, the Surveillance du Territoire, took the initiative of suggesting to his superior that Jews should be taken temporarily out of circulation and interned, at their own expense, far from the city centre.43 In June 1942, the Political Police, the Renseignements Généraux, wrote a damning report portraying a person as ‘an unscrupulous individual, always on the look-out for seedy deals … he is suspected of being a Jew’.44 Two months later a Gardien de la Paix involved in the transfer of Jews from les

38 P. Paillole, Services Spéciaux, Paris, 1975; Léon Daudet, L’avant-guerre: études et documents sur l’espionnage juif, Paris, 1913; AD BDR M6 11053, lettre anonyme à M le Préfet, 6 July 1940. 39 AD BDR 5W 367, le Commissaire de Police s/chef de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Princi- pal, Chef de la Sûreté, n° 1624 cb. Ref. 80r Pol., 8 June 1942. 40 AD BDR 56W 101, p-v de Joseph C. ex-Gardien des GMR, 31 May 1945. 41 Léon Daudet, L’avant-guerre: études et documents sur l’espionnage juif, Paris, 1913; AD BDR M6 11053, lettre anonyme à M le Préfet, 6 July 1940. 42 Oral evidence from Ignace Doboin, Paris, 6 February 1993. 43 AD BDR M6 11062, le Commissaire Spécial, chef du CST à M l’Inspecteur des Services de la Surveillance du Territoire, 4 September 1940. 44 AD BDR 5W 368, CD RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 7272/BE, 26 June 1942. 118 Chapter 5

Milles took the initiative of denouncing to his superiors the bar du nord in proximity to the camp, claiming that it was a meeting place for interned Jews and underlining that it was a centre of prostitution and suspect goings-on.45 A number of sources, including German Jew Lion Feuchtwanger, noted how enthusiastically the Police arrested Jews in the middle of 1941, sometimes inflicting physical violence on them.46 Once deportations began there were numerous accounts of mistreatment of Jews, of insults to internees or simply a lack of respect for their dignity, as in the case of Policemen who made women to be arrested get dressed in front of them during the home visits.47 During a roll-call of internees in les Milles internment camp on 10 August the Police together with staff of the camp carried out a search of the dormitories after which 154 thefts of internees’ possessions, ranging from gold watches to pairs of shoes, were reported.48 Both the protestant pastor Henri Manen and the Union Générale des Israélites de France representative R.-R. Lambert reported that Jews loaded on to the convoy of 12 August 1942 were subjected to brutalities, prodded and kicked by Police officers.49 The thefts might be attributed to a Police desire to improve their own material conditions; the brutalities committed might be explained by the boredom of those guarding the camp, in much the same way that riot Police lash out at demonstrators after long hours of waiting for something to happen; but in both cases the specific circumstances of the summer of 1942 lead to the conclusion that such atrocities were underpinned by a certain anti-Semitism. Despite the existence of this current of barefaced anti-Semitism in the Police it would be mistaken to depict it as representative of the attitudes of the totality of officers. Although there was undoubtedly more xenophobia here than in the mass of the population, such prejudice did not exclude wide divergence within the Institution. For example, a Commissaire of the regional Crime Squads (Police Mobile) sent from Vichy to investigate the illegal departures from Marseille’s port was far more sympathetic to refugees than was his colleague from the political branch (Police Spéciale) commenting on the same question. The former writing in January 1941 found the attitude of potential

45 AD BDR 5W 368, p-v n° 1141 du 5 August 1942. 46 L. Feuchtwanger, Le diable en France, Paris, 1985, p 194; AD BDR M6 11057, M Kurt X. à M H. Lansb., 11 April 1941. 47 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 367. 48 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 361; Israël Salzer in ibid., pp 395-396. 49 R.R. Lambert, Carnets d’un témoin, 1940-43, Paris, 1984, p 185; Pasteur Manen in J. Grand- jonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, pp 362 & 367. Anti-semitic Policing 119 emigrants ‘very understandable’, particularly given persistent rumours of a Nazi invasion of the Southern zone, and he proceeded to minimise their ‘offence’ by insisting that they had no intention of rallying to the British army.50 In a report of November 1940 the Commissaire head of Police Spéciale, on the other hand, gloated about the difficulty of illegal departures.51 It is not clear whether this discrepancy is a reflection of their respective political affiliations- the former already having developed Gaullist sympathies, the latter being noted as a contact for the extreme-right wing party the Parti Populaire Français in the Police52 – or a result of professional considerations, with the political branches having been much closer to the pulse of Third Republic anti- Semitism. Police reports were not all hostile to the Jews or those who helped them. A January 1942 investigation into a woman accused of aiding Jews offered a min- imalist interpretation of her actions, claiming that her behaviour was dictated by sentimental and not political motivations, although this may have been linked to a misogynistic inability to take women’s political activity seriously.53 A report written a few weeks before the 1942 deportations concerned a couple of Polish Jews whose suspect behaviour had been reported to the Police. The detective who wrote it offered a favourable account, concluding that the couple were well thought of in their district and confined themselves to looking after their child. Despite the fact that their address was known to the Police and that they were not in a category considered exempt from arrest, they did not feature in the convoys which left the Bouches-du-Rhône that summer. It is probable that had the Inspecteur investigating been less favourable in his con- clusions the couple could have found itself interned from July and hence deported in August.54

50 AN AJ41 46, Le Commissaire de la Police Mobile à M le CD, chef de la 1ère Section à l’IGS de Police Criminelle, n° 2880/B, 17 January 1941. 51 AN AJ41 46, CD de la Police Spéciale à M le Préfet des BDR, 4 November 1940. This report was in keeping with other documents from this same fonctionnaire and notably one concerning the case of individuals accused of facilitating the illegal departures of foreigners in which this senior Police officer took the initiative of proposing an extension of the charges against them. AD BDR M6 11062, CD de la Police Spéciale à M le Procureur de la République, 26 October 1940. 52 For the Commissaire Mobile’s attitude see 72AJ 35, evidence from Commissaire Léoni; for the Commissaire Spécial’s attachments see the interception of a correspondence between Simon Sabiani and Frasson, the head of the PPF in Châteaurenard in AD BDR M6 11053. 53 AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 17103 DE/L.J., 15 January 1942. 54 AD BDR 5W 370, le CD RG, à M le Préfet Régional, n° 8053/PY.FF, 8 July 1942. 120 Chapter 5

It would be wrong to exaggerate the sympathy found in reports, after all in some cases a report favourable to an individual Jew made an implicit contrast with their co-religionists. For instance a favourable Renseignements Généraux report concerning a family of Russians of Jewish religion who had been naturalised French praised them for using no subterfuge to disguise their origins, thereby making an implicit comparison with the ‘illegal’ tactics of others in similar positions.55 Moreover in some cases sympathy was purely pragmatic. Reports expressed disapproval of PPF activists who smashed the windows of Jewish homes and shops in August and October 1940 and again in March 1941. This disapproval was undoubtedly partly inspired by the concern that such hooliganism was a threat to public order.56 As with public opinion, Police sympathy grew once the brutal operations of the summer of 1942 got under way. Eye witness accounts of Police reactions to the deportation procedures are provided by the Rabbi Israël Salzer, Lambert of the UGIF and the Protestant clergyman Pasteur Henri Manen. Salzer reported on a conversation he overheard where a group of GMR expressed disgust about the theft of inmates’ property and a desire to find the culprits.57 The effect of seeing the departure of convoys first hand cannot be over-stressed in the evolution of opinion. Lambert remembers that ‘the Police didn’t hide their disgust at having to carry out such a mission’.58 The departures from les Milles feature a number of high points of emotion. Following the separation of adults and children in the camp on 8 August Pasteur Manen noted: ‘all around me the Policemen are ghostly pale, one of them said to me the next day: “I have been in the colonies. I have been in China. I have seen massacres, war and famines. I have never seen anything as horrible as this”’.59 The departures caused a clear progression in Police attitude. Commenting on the preparations for the convoy of 2 September Pasteur Manen could by then write of the ‘admirable attitude of all the guards and Policemen’, claiming that ‘they were compassionate and humane, full of gentleness for all, sharing all the agony, rejoicing at each salva-

55 AD BDR 5W 369, le CD, RG à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 16928/940 BN/FF, 30 December 1941. 56 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 194. 57 Israël Salzer in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 395. 58 R.R. Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin, 1940-43, Paris, 1985, p 185, although he contradicts this version slightly on page 189 of the same publication. Cf also Hans Fraenkel who remembers that a number of Police officers commented on what a painful task they were fulfill- ing in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 388. 59 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 359. Anti-semitic Policing 121 tion, offering all sorts of practical help ’. Manen concluded that ‘a breath of love had touched their hearts ’. Lambert remembers seeing Police officers cry during this departure.60 The hierarchy’s attempt to instil the lower ranks with their anti-Semitism were less likely to be greeted with success, as Police officers became personally aware of the sufferings caused by anti-Semitic persecution. A member of the GMR observed that the instructions he had received from his hierarchy which portrayed these Jews as a threat were at odds with what this Gardien saw with his own eyes: ‘during the journey, I was able to see for myself that in my wagon there were only poor people’.61 Through their institutional position in the forefront of anti-Semitic persecution Policemen had the possibility to spearhead Resistance to these measures. Some seized it. Certain types of Police Resistance on this issue had begun before the August operations. The historian Léon Poliakov who found himself in Marseille at the beginning of the 1940’s, records that Victor Roux, the head of this service, was sympathetic to those whose papers were not in order.62 A number of Police officers in the 2nd district have testified that although their superior Commissaire Alexandre Vincentelli was not generally noted for his pro-resistance credentials he had passed down instructions not to bother the Jews and had personally undertaken the fabrication of false identity cards.63 Similar work was undertaken in the Aliens’ Bureau. Police Resistance also existed at each stage of the deportation operations themselves. Discreet warnings of the imminence of round-ups were issued by some Police officers. Some survivors recalled that Policemen inspecting their identity papers chose to ignore irregularities.64 Others decided not to arrest individuals even when they fell into the categories of those who were considered ‘deportable’ or allowed individuals time to escape.65 One internee at les Milles, Hans Fraenkel, has indicated that although the Police guard around the camp was rigorous, their attempts to flush out Jews hidden in cellars in the camp were half-hearted. He

60 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 372. 61 AD BDR 56W 101, p-v de Joseph C. ex-Gardien des GMR, 31 May 1945. 62 AD BDR 56W 87. See also Léon Poliakov, L’auberge des musiciens, Paris, 1981, pp 89-90; Karine Labernède, ‘Filières Juives à Marseille’ in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 413; Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Mar- seille, Chicago, 1996, p 36. 63 AD BDR 55W 86. 64 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 63. 65 Evidence from Pasteur Henri Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 369; A. Cohen, Persécutions et sauvetages, Paris, 1993, p 295; Susan Zuccotti, The holocaust, the French and the Jews, Lincoln, 1993, p 288. 122 Chapter 5 also recounted how another internee caught after having broken through the perimeter fence was congratulated on his escape attempt by a Police officer who then personally escorted him back to the assembly point making sure that he was placed amongst those who were not to be deported.66 During one convoy leaving les Milles an internee escaped in circumstances suggesting the complicity of the Gendarmerie accompanying the train: not only had the strict instructions to lock the wagons been ignored but the senior Gendarme present did not report the escape to the Groupe Mobile de Réserve (GMR) officer in charge of the convoy until subsequent recapture was unlikely. Despite the diversity of the forms of Police Resistance in this domain, such behaviour should not be exaggerated. As Marrus and Paxton point out: ‘disciplinary problems did not seriously hamper these operations. Not until August 1943 were German officials having to take account in their planning for a general unreliability of the French Police in serious cases’.67 If the round-ups in the southern zone fell short of their targets, Vichy still managed to transfer a large number of Jews into the hands of the Nazis. Police Resistance on this issue remained the activity of individuals and never assumed proportions of rebellion. Several factors can be invoked to explain the limits of Police Resistance on this question. As has been shown, not all Police officers shared sympathetic attitudes towards the Jews. A degree of anti-Semitism remained and some who expressed more favourable opinions towards the Jews were ambivalent in their attitude. Moreover expressions of sympathy did not necessarily translate into acts. The Police had been handing individuals over to the Germans since the armistice. Sympathy would most likely translate into action if there was a recognition of what made the arrests of the summer of 1942 different than early round-ups. One Inspecteur claimed later: ‘I can’t say whether the Jews were interned or deported, because they were immediately taken to the camp des Milles near Aix under GMR escort and we didn’t know what became of them.’68 If this testimony is taken at face value such ignorance could be seen as an inevitable consequence of the traditional Police practice where the involvement of officers in a case frequently stopped at the moment of the arrest; subsequent enquiries being carried out by specialist branches. The specific circumstances in the arrests of Jews that summer should have alerted Police officers to the

66 Evidence from Hans Fraenkel in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en- Provence, 1990, p 388. 67 M. Marrus & R.O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, New York, 1981, p 260. 68 AD BDR 56W 47, déposition d’un Inspecteur de la Police Régionale d’Etat, 9 February 1946. Anti-semitic Policing 123 fact that these were no ordinary arrests. BBC warnings, widespread public knowledge of the handing over of Jews to the Germans and the horror on the faces of those arrested ought to have helped Police awareness in this sense. Probably many Policemen made no attempt to recognise what made these round-ups different from those of the period 1939-41. Even for those who did, Resistance would be limited for reasons of professional culture, of hierarchical pressure and of the nature of these particular operations. Disobedience rarely occurred in missions where the Police had precise instructions and were subject to close scrutiny from above. The general urgency of the anti-Semitic round-ups also served as a psychological deterrent to resistance. In many cases officers attempted to pass the initiative of saving Jews on to others. Thus, Pas- teur Manen received the visit of a Police officer who, overcome by emotion, had solicited his help, announcing ‘I had to arrest this person. Do what you can for them!’69 This is an example of what I call ‘resistance by proxy’- there may be a desire on the part of the Police officer to resist but in an attempt to limit one’s own risk the initiative for the action is passed to a proxy, in this case a Protes- tant clergyman. Resistance sources make reference to some Police officers leaving the administration in protest at the inhumanity of these events.70 Henri Cado, the national Director of the Police, did acknowledge in September a large number of resignations. In fact this defection of personnel reached such levels that Cado banned further resignations before they caused too much disruption of Police services. Whilst it is highly probable that the anti-Semitic measures encouraged some of these transfers out of the institution, Cado’s communication makes apparent that the main destination for those leaving was the Gen- darmerie, whose involvement in the operations of summer 1942 was undeniably no less significant than that of the Police.71 Consequently, the majority of these resignations should be seen more as the expression of a desire to improve working conditions by changing institutions than the sign of a protest. In any event, any resignations inspired by anti-Semitic persecutions took place after the operations and did nothing to undermine the efficiency of these measures. These anti-Semitic measures contributed to placing further strain on an

69 Pasteur Manen in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (ed), Zone d’ombres, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 368. 70 The anonymous work: ‘la libération de la pensée française, Alger-Paris 1943-44’, published by the documentation centre of the French Press & Information service, New York, gives the example of the resignation of a gendarme in the Auvergne in direct protest to these round ups. Cf also AN F1a 3922, CNI, document n° 2263/RNA-Z, 1 September 1942. 71 AN F7 14908 [752], Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 99-Pol. 2, 10 March 1943. 124 Chapter 5 already overworked Police force. Discontent with professional demands was summed up by the Police Inspectorate (IGSA- Inspection Générale des Serv- ices Administratifs). In September they claimed that the instructions of de Rodellec du Porzic coupled with those of the central administration were creating a weariness amongst the personnel. The Police were exhausted. A decision to cancel all leave for personnel in order to make sufficient manpower available for the operations had not been well received. The IGSA warned that overwork coexisting with a rising level of inflation, which was eating into Police salaries, was causing a dangerous situation. This was likely to severely undermine the efficiency of law enforcement services in future operations.72 Although in Republican France the Police had no specific history of anti- semitism, it did have a long tradition of xenophobia. Given that an important proportion of the Jews targeted by Vichy were foreigners from central Europe, the Police was easily able to adapt its xenophobic traditions to the anti-Semitic stance of this new government. These traditions were not alien to the important contribution of the French Police to the policy of identifying and interning Jews from 1940 onwards and, then, of participating in their deportation to the death camps of Eastern Europe from 1942.73 The French, not the German, Police arrested most of the 76000 Jews deported from France.

72 AN F1a 4525, l’IGSA, Rapport n° 111, 23 September 1942; see also AD BDR M6 11052, le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 11 September 1942. 73 Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz. Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 volumes, Paris, 1983; Serge Klarsfeld, Le calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France, 1940-44, Paris, 1993; Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police et l’administration’, in G. Wellers, A. Kaspi & S. Klarsfeld (eds), La France et la question juive 1940-1944, Paris, 1981, pp 57-79; Wil- liam Guéraiche, ‘Administration et répression sous l’Occupation: les ‘affaires juives’ de la préfecture de Charente-Inférieure (septembre 1940- juillet 1944’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, n° 45-2, April-June 1998, pp 480-503; Simon Kitson, ‘The Police and the deportation of Jews from the Bouches-du-Rhône in August and September 1942’, Modern and Contemporary France, Vol. 5, N° 3, August 1997, pp 309-318. The Hunt For German Spies 125

Chapter 6 The Hunt for German Spies

One of the quintessential tasks of policing is defending national territorial sovereignty. As has been seen this mission could be perverted to include a xenophobic tendency to view all foreigners as a potential threat to national integrity and this was never far from the surface of the anti-Semitic policing just described. Another aspect of defending sovereignty which has already been explored was that of fending off the ‘menace’ posed by Gaullists or Allied agents. But it is too often overlooked that included in the Police agenda was the tracking down of German agents infiltrating the Southern zone.1 How did the Police go about this task of protecting unoccupied France from German infiltration? Given that they had possibilities for overseeing French territory through the framework of the Armistice Commission, it might be wondered why the Ger- mans violated the armistice by endorsing illicit information gathering in the unoccupied zone. One reason was that they hoped to widen the possibilities for control offered.2 The Armistice Commissions lacked spontaneity since they had to inform the French of their intention to visit a particular site and had to be accompanied by a liaison officer. Clearly, the French could take advantage of advance knowledge of these visits to hide any infringements of the Armistice. The Germans, who quickly became aware of the existence of clandestine arms dumps, were looking to keep an accurate picture of the state of French military capabilities and morale in case another conflict should spark up. In this respect they were also keen to track down the former members of the French secret services and to discover the archives intelligence services had moved from Paris during the 1940 exodus.3 Scrutinising public opinion in the Southern zone and the Empire was another way of monitoring the likelihood the French would engage in future hostilities. It was no coincidence that spying increased in volume after December 1940 when Pétain, in reality acting for reasons of internal politics, decided to sack and arrest his ‘pro-German’ Prime Minister Pierre Laval, a measure seen as an act of hostility

1 Simon Kitson, The Hunt for Nazi Spies, Chicago, 2008. Malcolm Anderson, In Thrall to Political Change: Police and Gendarmerie in France, Oxford, 2011, p 105. 2 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 229. 3 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 229 & 240.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_008 126 Chapter 6 on the other side of the Rhine. German intelligence services were particularly sensitive to a possible clandestine resurrection of their erstwhile enemies because they themselves had secretly risen from the ashes after 1918 and they were anxious to ensure that the French were allowed no such facilities.4 Spy- ing in the Vichy zone was also a way of preparing future military operations of their own, whether this be staking out potential future battle zones in North Africa or the preparations for the invasion of the Southern Zone which finally took place in November 1942. In addition, a presence in the Vichy territory was a way of checking on the activity of Allied agents in that area or of supervising Embassies of potential future enemies, such as the USA. Verifying the attitude of individuals in the Vichy zone was also a means of assessing applications from those who wished to work for Nazi administrations in the northern zone or who simply requested passage northwards across the demarcation line. As German personnel and spies were arrested further agents were sent into the Southern Zone to find out what had happened to those who had not returned from previous missions.5 A couple of examples of spying activity in Marseille will give concrete illustration of what the Germans were looking for. Asoke Chand, who was an agent of the SS offices in the avenue Foch, was born in India in 1901 and was driven to action by hostility towards British colonialism. Besides speaking Hindi he was a fluent speaker of English, French and Spanish and his linguistic skills as well as his British passport offered him access to milieus to be monitored. Chand entered the Unoccupied Zone of France on mission around twenty times beginning in February 1941 and ending in October of that same year when he was arrested in Grenoble. Chand’s role included monitoring Allied activity. He was asked to discover the secret activity of US consulates in Lyon and Marseille to assess how much they were helping in clandestine escapes for England. Uncovering the state of the Gaullist movement involved detecting Gaullist recruitment centres and examining Gaullist influence within State administrations and on public opinion. He was also to establish contact with the French Secret Services in Marseille.6 Keeping track of French military personnel and their opinions was also a key concern of German intelligence. Suzanne Vieux, a sales assistant from Nancy in her early thirties, was sent on three missions to

4 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 229. 5 AN AJ 41 495, Le Général de Division Bérard, Commandant la 17 ème DM à Monsieur l’Amiral de la Flotte, Direction de la Justice Miliatire et de la Gendarmerie, Toulouse, 15 April 1942 (case of Jean Bilotta). 6 On Chand’s activity see AN AJ41 496, ‘dossier Chand’. The Hunt For German Spies 127

Marseille early in 1942 to collect information on army units, noting in particular the identity of officers, their attitude towards the Germans, the size of their units and the equipment available to them.7 The spies sent into the southern, unoccupied, zone of France were working either for the German military intelligent branch, known as the Abwehr, or directly for the SS intelligence service which worked within the Sicherheitsdi- enst-Sicherheitspolizei (SD-Sipo or ‘Security Office, Security Police’) of which the ‘Gestapo’ was one sub-branch. Whilst on operation they would either report to a local ‘post box’, ie an individual who gathered their information and co-ordinated their activity, or else they would work under cover of an official authorised German structure, either the Armistice Commissions or the Red Cross. For instance, Jakob Herbert, an officer with their armistice delegation in Marseille, allegedly recruited a French pilot called Robert Crétier for a hare- brained scheme where Crétier would make his way from the port city to Eng- land where he would steal a British plane and fly it back to occupied France.8 As early as 1940 the ST were aware that German agents were operating under cover of the Red Cross.9 The following July the Resistance expressed concern about the growth of such Red-Cross camouflaged espionage activity.10 Marseille was of paramount importance in spying operations because of its status as France’s biggest port. Monitoring port activity was one of the missions entrusted to several agents, including Maurice Petit. After mobilisation in 1939 Petit had been assigned to the French naval counter-espionage service. Unfortunately, during the defeat of 1940, this service had left behind a list of its staff members in an office in Paris. Petit’s name featured on that list allowing the Germans to contact him and other colleagues and managed, through various threats of reprisals for his previous anti-German activity, to recruit him to their own spy ring. He was sent on missions to Marseille to record the names and, if possible, the cargo of ships leaving the docks. Petit claimed, and this version appears to have gone unchallenged, that he limited himself to reporting back information which was readily available in the specialist shipping press.11 Being a port also made Marseille the gateway to France’s North African colonies. Several of the agents arrested there were making their way to these

7 AN BB30 1709, Military Justice report on Suzanne Vieux. Undated but 1942. 8 AN AJ 41 499, dossier Crétier. 9 AD BDR M6 11066, le Commissaire de la Surveillance du Territoire à M le Préfet, Marseille, 23 November 1940. 10 Les Petites Ailes de France, 8 July 1941. 11 AN 2AG 597, Maurice Petit, détenu à la Maison d’Arrêt de St Etienne à M le Maréchal de France Chef de l’Etat, 26 April 1942. 128 Chapter 6 territories. Willy Ebert, a travelling salesman by profession born in Hamburg in 1894, was arrested in the city whilst on his way to North Africa carrying a ques- tionnaire about shipping movements.12 Marseille was also important because it served as a Headquarters to part of the French Secret Services. Both military and civilian structures were responsible for countering this unwelcome German intrusion into the unoccupied zone. The Second Bureau of the Army General Staff was concerned with centralising and analysing information gathered from other sources (intelligence services, Police, Embas- sies, etc) in order to enlighten the government. After the 1940 armistice, its German section re-established itself in Lyon under the leadership of Lieuten- ant-Colonel Baril and it continued to supply the government with information on the Axis.13 Even more important for counter-espionage were the activities of two structures born of the pre-war spy-catching services. In conformity with German instructions the pre-existing structures were dissolved in the wake of the armistice.14 However, this dissolution was merely a veneer. A new counter- espionage apparatus was created in the framework of a re-organisation plan put forward on 27 June 1940 by its pre-war leader, Colonel Louis Rivet, and accepted by the General Staff of the army in July.15 Counter-espionage was now entrusted, on the one hand, to a visible official structure, the Bureaux des Menées Anti-Nationales (BMA or ‘Anti-National Activities Bureau’) created on 25 August 1940 under the direction of Lieuten- ant-Colonel Guy d’Alès.16 These BMA were authorised by the Occupation forces because their declared purpose consisted of protecting the French army

12 AN AJ41 491, capitaine de Bruce, officier de liaison auprès du Délégué Allemand au Rapa- triement, à M l’Amiral de la Flotte, Ministre de la Défense Nationale, DSA, Vichy, n° 317, Marseille, 28 February 1942; AN AJ 41 496, Liste des détenus figurant sur la note allemande du 10/8/42, ‘note remis de la main à la main, le 13 août par le Colonel d‘Alès- très secret’, August 1942. 13 Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, p 237. A complaint of the pro-Allied flavour of 2e Bureau reports which were said to be influencing Vichy opinion (sic) are contained in AN 3W 311, Le Directeur Général de l’Agence Nationale d’information de Presse ‘Inter France’ (Dominique Sordet) à M Marcel Déat, 27 November 1942. 14 AN 72AJ 82, ‘Résumé de l’Action des Services de Contre-espionage Militaire français de juillet 1940 à novembre 1944’, Vol. 1, 1946. 15 Henri Navarre, Le temps des vérités, Paris, 1979, p 81; Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935- 1945, Paris, 1975, pp 213-214. 16 Henri Navarre, Le temps des vérités, Paris, 1979, p 82; Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935- 1945, Paris, 1975, pp 232-234 & 238; Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 226. The Hunt For German Spies 129 from the designs of British, Gaullist or Communist agents.17 To do this the BMA recruited officers in each regiment whose mission was to report any subversive activity on the part of their fellow soldiers or any external attempt to penetrate the army to the BMA offices contained in all eight of the military regions in Southern France and the Empire.18 Although this mission was genuine, in that BMA officers did keep track of the activities of these publicly designated enemies (in particular the communists),19 in reality the BMA combined this mission with a secret anti-Axis counter-espionage activity.20 ‘BMA-15’ was the office operating in the Marseille region under the leadership of Commandant Jonglez Del Ligne. When the BMA were officially abolished on 24 August 1942, they were transformed into the Service de Sécurité Militaire.21 The BMA’s activity was supplemented by a clandestine organism called the Travaux Ruraux (TR or ‘Rural Works’). The TR was officially attached to the Ministry of Agriculture and to the outside observer it was an enterprise concerned with agricultural production, an excellent cover in traditionalist Vichy France with its slogan of ‘back to the land’.22 However, in reality it was an anti- Axis counter-intelligence service working in close co-operation with the BMA. Under the leadership of Commandant Paul Paillole, the TR was run from a villa at 23 promenade de la plage in Marseille and had regional outposts throughout France and North Africa. It was financed via the secret coffers of the pre-war counter-espionage services together with money smuggled through the army accounts or confiscated from arrested German and Allied agents.23 Local Police authorities were made aware of the presence of the TR structure in their

17 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 233. 18 SHAT 3P 102, ‘Directive pour servir à l’Instruction des Officiers MA des régiments’, 14 Feb- ruary 1941; Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 244. 19 Robert O. Paxton, Parades and Politics in Vichy, The French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain, New Brunswick NJ, 1966, pp 303-304; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 42; Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, p 55. 20 Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, pp 233-234; SHAT 3P 102, ‘Directive pour servir à l’Instruction des Officiers MA des régiments’, 14 February 1941. 21 AN 72AJ 82, ‘Résumé de l’Action des Services de Contre-espionage Militaire français de juillet 1940 à novembre 1944’, Vol. 2, 1946; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 93. 22 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, pp 40-41; Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, pp 233, 245 & 252. 23 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, pp 40-41 & 48; Paul Paillole, Services spé- ciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, pp 214-221; Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, p 53; Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, 130 Chapter 6 district when Lieutenant-Colonel d’Alès made a courtesy visit to Intendant Rodellec du Porzic in November 1940.24 The army services were all concerned with information gathering and preparing dossiers against suspect individuals. Working partly from this information it was the Police authorities, especially the Surveillance du Territoire (ST), who carried out the actual arrests of Ger- man agents.25 In the immediate aftermath of the French defeat in 1940 the ST wound down much of its operation.26 It was only from September 1940 that it seriously resumed anti-German activity, combining this with its new anti-Brit- ish and anti-Gaullist missions. Beyond services whose raison d’être was spy-catching, a wide range of individuals, social groups or administrations added their contribution to counter- espionage. Just as the Nazis established widespread contacts in the underworld, so the Secret Services sought out the help of certain gangsters. It was no coincidence if after the 1944 Liberation senior members of the Police hierarchy, drawn from the ranks of the wartime ST, intervened to offer protection to certain underworld figures such as the Renucci brothers in Marseille. During the Vichy years, the resourcefulness and ruthlessness of some of these individuals could be used to eliminate enemy agents or later to help organise jail-breaks of arrested members of counter-intelligence networks. In asking gangsters to eliminate some of the German spies counter-espionage forces were effectively delegating Police monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to figures from the underworld.27 Parallel Police forces also added their brick to the counter- intelligence edifice. This was the case of the Centre d’Information et d’Etudes established by the army officer Colonel Georges Groussard. Groussard’s organisation was short-lived and sometimes its help was more a hindrance but it did

Paris, 1967, pp 223-224; SHAT 3P 102, Secrétariat d’Etat à la Guerre (Cabinet), n° 523/SP, Vichy 27 July 1940, ‘note au sujet du service des renseignements’, (unsigned). 24 SHAT Fonds de Moscou 1095/1415, Compte-rendu de mission du Commandant d’Alès à Marseille, Montpellier et Toulouse, 8 November 1940. 25 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 23; Henri Buisson, La Police, son histoire, Imprimerie Wallon, Vichy, 1950, p 306; B. Warusfel, ‘Le cadre juridique et institutionnel des services de renseignement en France’ in Pierre Lacoste (ed), Approches françaises du renseignement: y-a-t-il une ‘culture’ nationale?, Paris, 1997, p 15; M. Châlet, ‘La DST, service français de contre-espionnage’ in Pierre Lacoste (ed), Approches françaises du renseignement: y-a-t-il une ‘culture’ nationale?, Paris, 1997, p 58. 26 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 230. 27 Laurence Montel, ‘Crime organisé et politique en France, aperçu historique’, Pouvoirs, 132, 2010, p 24. The Hunt For German Spies 131 recommend some officers for service in the BMA.28 Another example of such parallel Police activity was provided by the Section Spéciale set up by the head of the Criminal Police in Vichy, Pierre Mondanel. Mondanel’s force, which lasted until Laval’s return to power in April 1942, also engaged in actions against Gaullist targets, but through contacts in various diplomatic or journalistic milieus in France’s temporary capital Mondanel was able to collect information on German activities.29 Counter-espionage services also acquired the co- operation of a number of administrations. It was the Gendarmerie which assured delivery of messages between different BMA. Prefects, mainstream Police forces and structures under the auspices of the French Armistice Com- mission all forwarded documentation to the BMA and much of this documentation was clearly designed to help in the surveillance and repression of Axis activity in the Vichy controlled zone.30 Government services for intercepting mail, telephone calls and telegrams supplemented this documentation.31 Henri Frenay, founder of the Resistance movement ‘Combat’, was a friend of Paillole’s and has insisted on the importance of personal contacts in cement- ing the complicity of these diverse services.32 When choosing to establish the headquarters of the clandestine TR in Marseille one of the factors which influenced Paul Paillole’s decision was the fact that he was aware that within the Marseille Police there were a number of individuals on which he could count unreservedly. In particular he pointed to the presence of Commissaire Robert Blémant in the ST and Commissaire Jean Osvald of the Sécurité Publique. Blé- mant has developed into something of a local folklore legend in Marseille even becoming the hero of N’Guyen’s novel ‘La peau d’un caïd’ and figuring under the name Albert Clément in Jean Bazal’s novel ‘Le Marseillais’ and as Robert Flamant in Loup Durand’s tale ‘Le Caïd’.33 His wartime heroism is recounted in most of the memoirs of those involved in counter-espionage, as are his links with local gangsters- he would eventually be assassinated in the 1960s in an

28 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, pp 72-91. 29 AN 3W 310, Evidence from Jacques Moutet, 17/10/45. 30 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 52. 31 AN AJ41 491, L’Aspirant Masurel, faisant fonction d’Officier de Liaison près du délégué de la Croix-Rouge allemande à Pau à M le Chef de bataillon, Chef de la délégation française de liaison, n° 3/RKG, Pau, 18 February 1941; AN AJ41 491, Le Chef d’Escadrons d’Amecourt, Officier de Liaison auprès du Délégué de la Croix-Rouge allemande à Royat à M L’Amiral de la Flotte, Ministre de la Défense Nationale, (DSA), Clermont-Ferrand, 17 April 1942. 32 Henri Frenay, La nuit finira, Mémoires de la Résistance, 1940-1945, Paris, 1973. 33 Georges N’Guyen Van Loc, La peau d’un caïd, Paris, 1994; Jean Bazal, Le Marseillais, Paris, 1991; Loup Durand, Le Caïd, Paris, 1976. 132 Chapter 6 inter-gang feud after having given up Police work for a life of crime.34 Osvald, who was appointed as Commissaire Central in July 1940, is a less well-known figure but his role in anti-German counter-espionage activity was important.35 Overall, counter-espionage services could count on a vast network of contacts in Marseille. This widespread complicity raises the question of the attitude of Pétain’s government to the anti-German aspect of counter-espionage activity. It might be tempting to assume that, since the activities of these structures were shrouded in mystery, either that the government was unaware of what was really going on or that it was unable to prevent it. This had some truth as regards the activity of the Travaux Ruraux whose existence was known to few.36 However, the ST and the BMA were both official organisms of the State. Although the fine detail of the day-to-day running of these services might have escaped close scrutiny from senior echelons of the French State, it is completely inconceivable that the general trends of this activity were unknown to Ministers and senior officials. The Germans regularly complained to Vichy of the orientation of these services. French Ministers issued various instructions on the theme and summoned the chiefs of these services to explain themselves. They also participated in the negotiations to decide what to do with those arrested for this offence and, following the decision of the courts, it was Pétain himself who decided whether an individual would be pardoned or face the firing squad. This underlines that there was more initial tolerance to this counter-espionage activity than many of the memoirs of those involved imply. However, numerous scholars have shown Vichy was never a homogeneous block but rather was made up of competing factions drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, often with vastly different objectives.37 The area of counter- espionage was no exception and the position of senior officials on this question covered a vast spectrum.

34 At the Liberation Blémant left the Police to become an important figure in the local underworld. He was shot dead in 1965 on the orders of his one time associate Antoine Guérini, one of the most famous gangsters of the post-war period. Pascale Froment, René Bousquet, Paris, 1994, pp 312-313; Philippe Bernert, Roger Wybot et la bataille pour la DST, Paris, 1975, pp 27-36. 35 Jacques Abtey & Fritz Unterberg-Gibhardt, 2e Bureau contre Abwehr, Paris, 1967, p 28. 36 Henri Frenay, La nuit finira, Paris, 1973, p 167. 37 On the question of Vichy heterogeneity see for example: Denis Peschanski, ‘Le régime de Vichy a existé. Gouvernants et gouvernés dans la France de Vichy: juillet 1940-avril 1942’ in D. Peschanski (ed), Vichy 1940-1944, Archives de Guerre d’Angelo Tasca, Paris, 1986, pp 3-50; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La philosophie politique de la Révolution Nationale’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida (eds), Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, pp 167-183. The Hunt For German Spies 133

Vichy had strong strategic reasons for needing important counter-espionage services. Indeed the strength of its bargaining position with the Germans depended on the maintenance of sovereignty in the Southern Zone. The regime had few trump cards: its Empire; its territorial independence; its fleet; its reduced-sized army; its Police and administration. Holding on to these attributes, assuring their integrity and independence thus became of paramount importance.38 But sovereignty was not just a territorial question, it also concerned the sovereignty of the State over the individual. One vital but often overlooked element of Vichy policy in this respect was that although Pétain’s government was entirely sincere in its search for State collaboration, the government wanted to reduce to a minimum the attempts of individual citizens to enter into contact with the Germans without passing through Vichy channels. Only if the government became responsible for such initiatives could it hope to use them as a bargaining counter in negotiations with the Nazis.39 Gradu- ally, however, a more ambivalent position began to dominate senior Vichy circles. Secret service activity provoked a number of diplomatic incidents. Leading Vichy figures such as Admiral Darlan wanted to keep a tight rein on this activity in order to avoid diplomatic confrontation. Also, although they were not opposed to preventing unlimited German penetration of the Vichy zone they placed great emphasis on the need to fend off the threat of Allied agents.40 French intelligence and counter-intelligence was already chronically under- funded and under-equipped in the pre-war period.41 This situation deteriorated further after France’s defeat. After having re-grouped in the Southern

38 Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, pp 54-55. 39 For example in the area of the economy Vichy established ‘Comités d’organisation’ which were designed to get manufacturers to negotiate contracts with Germany through the medium of a government run organisation: Renaud de Rochebrune & Jean-Claude Hazéra, Les Patrons sous l’Occupation, Paris, 1997, Vol. 1, p 68. AN AJ41 491, Le Général d’Armée Huntziger, DSA, à M le Secrétaire Général aux Anciens Combattants (Pau), n° 20341/DSA/cab, Vichy, 27 June 1941. 40 Unpublished memoirs of Colonel Louis Rivet, p 15; Henri Navarre, Le Service de Renseigne- ments, Paris, 1978, p 134; Martin Thomas, ‘Intelligence in Defeat: signals intelligence and Vichy France, 1940-1944’, Intelligence and National Security, 1999, Vol. 14(1), pp 176-200; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, pp 59-61. AN 72AJ 1911, ‘Note Rollin sur le fonctionnement du Service des Renseignements de la Sûreté Nationale, 2/5/41’. Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 247; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 53. 41 Robert J. YOUNG, ‘French military intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1938-1939’ in Ernest R. May, Knowing one’s enemies, Princeton NJ, 1984, p 275; Jacques Abtey & Fritz Unterberg- Gibhardt, 2e Bureau contre Abwehr, Paris, 1966, p 29; Henri Navarre, Le service de rensei- 134 Chapter 6 zone services had to improvise with the resources available.42 One particularly thorny problem was access to the stock of archives established in the previous years. At the very heart of pre-war counter-espionage activity was the efficiency of the archive system which had allowed services to catalogue even the most seemingly useless information in the knowledge that when confronted with other sources this information could prove valuable. The system allowed archivists to rapidly put together a weighty dossier containing all references to a particular individual about whom information was sought.43 The Police archives contained in the Sûreté Nationale buildings in the rue des Saussaies in Paris were captured by German troops in June 1940, allowing the Abwehr to exploit them at will.44 As regards the archives used by the Service de Rensei- gnements, some of this documentation was destroyed for reasons of security and mobility when fleeing Paris on 11 June 1940. It took some time to rebuild the system in the Southern zone and the possibility of moving this documentation to the greater security of North Africa met with the constant refusal of the Navy to transport them. Re-establishing in the Southern zone also meant rebuilding a network of agents, particularly since, in the chaos of the exodus, many of the existing agents were scattered. Recruiting reliable new agents and establishing the right dose of mutual confidence was a painstaking and time- consuming affair which in normal times could take several years to complete. In the armistice context recruitment had to be more rapid and hence more risky. Moreover, there was little time to train new agents. Whilst German Secret Services disposed of vast sums of money, their French equivalents could offer very little pecuniary reward to attract new agents.45 Therefore the rewards given to agents willing to work for the French often came in the form of protection against arrest for other types of offences. Thus, German refugees were recruited in return for the assurance that they would not be hassled for the inadequacy of their residence permits. Similarly captured Nazi agents who agreed to change allegiance did so against the promise that if their work for French services was satisfactory they would not be tried

gnements, 1871-1944, Paris, 1978, pp 38-41; Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, pp 21-37; Henri Navarre, Le temps des vérités, Paris, 1979, p 81. 42 Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 39. 43 Jacques Abtey & Fritz Unterberg-Gibhardt, 2e Bureau contre Abwehr, Paris, 1967, pp 27-28. 44 Oscar Reile, L’Abwehr: le contre-espionnage allemand en France de 1935 à 1945, Paris, 1970, p 80. 45 AN 72AJ 82, Evidence from Colonel Hurel, 18/11/49; Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, p 36; Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 252; Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, p 257. The Hunt For German Spies 135 for their initial spying offence. In this way, the French managed to build up a network of informers, throughout the unoccupied and occupied zones.46 Despite the difficulties, the arrest of Nazi agents after the armistice was a common occurrence. Putting an exact figure on the number of arrests is not possible.47 Paul Paillole of the Travaux Ruraux suggests in his memoirs that counter-espionage was actually more effective after the armistice than before. From only 40 arrests of Axis spies in 1936 and 494 in 1939, Paillole claims that the number arrested for pro-Axis activity passed to 601 in 1941 and 1223 in 1942.48 Unfortunately Paillole failed to give a source for his figures so reserves must be expressed regarding their accuracy. Undoubtedly more reliable is an internal document addressed in November 1942 from the head of the Surveil- lance du Territoire in Marseille to his hierarchical superior in Vichy claiming that, between January 1941 and November 1942, the Marseille branch of this service had arrested over 170 German agents, of whom 12 were sentenced to death.49 Whatever the exact number these figures and the vast array of cases brought to the attention of the Armistice Commission confirm that the numbers involved were far from insignificant. The success of counter-espionage activity depended in a large measure on the vigilance of the Police and related administrations. The correspondence of German services in France was subject to systematic scrutiny although the interception of letters, telephone messages and telegrams was often far from discreet.50 German services, such as their Red Cross office in Marseille, complained of considerable delays in the delivery of their mail or claimed that they would not receive mail for several days and then a whole sack-full would arrive at once often bearing signs of having been tampered with.51 Key German

46 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 236; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, London, 1959, p 50. 47 Robert Belot, La Résistance sans de Gaulle, Paris, 2006, p 273. 48 Paul Paillole, Services spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, p 579. 49 AN 3W 91, le Commissaire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4488, 15 November 1942. 50 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 246; Henri Navarre, Le temps des vérités, Paris, 1979, p 95. 51 AN AJ41 491, Compte-rendu hebdomadaire du Capitaine Bruce, Officier de Liaison auprès du Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement, Marseille, 1 September 1941; AN AJ41 491, Compte- rendu hebdomadaire du Capitaine Bruce, Officier de Liaison auprès du Délégué Alle- mand au Rapatriement, Marseille, 10 September 1941; AN AJ41 491, Joseph Pasternak au délégué allemand, 26 March 1942. AN AJ41 499, Service Civil des Contrôles Techniques, Note de Service, n° 3123/SCCT, Vichy, 14 August 1941. 136 Chapter 6 services and diplomatic missions were kept under close supervision.52 Lists were drawn up of those who visited their diplomatic buildings or who mixed too freely with members of armistice commissions. This information was systematically forwarded to the BMA and these individuals in turn became the object of Police surveillance measures.53 Venues where Germans would regularly meet were subject to bugging.54 Once it was established that a particular address was used by German intelligence this building could be kept under Police scrutiny.55 Those who behaved suspiciously or who mixed in dubious circles obviously increased the chances of their capture. Public shows of pro-German sentiment were likely to raise Police eyebrows. An investigation was carried out in Sep- tember 1940 into a Marseille company producing a health tonic. The reason for the enquiry was that the label on a bottle of this product contained what appeared to be a swastika alongside its promises of inducing force and vitality. Inspecteur Louis Barbier of the Sûreté investigating the manufacturer concluded that this was a pure coincidence since the label in question had been out of production since 1914.56 The names of those who had received passes to enter the Southern zone without passing through the Ministry of the Interior were collected together: the list of 23 July 1941 contained a long collection of names and although one of these was noted as a communist sympathiser, almost all the rest were followed by a commentary to the effect that they were ‘Gestapo’ or Abwehr agents.57 The bank accounts of persons receiving funds from the Axis were monitored and close attention paid to the activity of the

52 AN AJ41 499, Etat-Major des Troupes de Maroc, ‘Note sur l’activité extra-conventionnelle de la Délégation Economique Allemande’, n° 317, 18 September 1941. 53 SHAT 1P 200, contains a number of examples of such lists. See also: AN AJ41 499, Le Préfet de Vaucluse à M le Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, Direction Générale de la Sûreté Nationale, 7ème bureau, 10 February 1941; AN AJ41 499, Le Capitaine de Bruce, en liaison près le Délégué de la Croix Rouge allemande, Marseille à M le Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à la Guerre, DSA, Vichy, 31 March 1941. 54 AN 72AJ 82, ‘Résumé de l’Action des Services de Contre-espionage Militaire français de juillet 1940 à novembre 1944’, Vol. 1, 1946; Henri Navarre, Le Service de Renseignements, Paris, 1978, p 68. 55 AN 3W 91, interrogatoire du suspect, effectué par le Commissaire Piani, p-v n° 196, 7 Octo- ber 1942. 56 AD BDR M6 11062, Le Commissaire de Police Sous/Chef de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire chef de la Sûreté, n° 3452.cb, 24 September 1940. 57 AN AJ41 499, DSA, ‘Liste d’individus suspects ou douteux ayant obtenu un laissez-passer de la Délégation Générale à Paris, sans consultation préalable du Département de l’Intérieur’, n° 23246/DSA/11, 23 July 1941. The Hunt For German Spies 137 account holder.58 In many cases, individuals were stopped by the Police for routine controls or for a fairly minor incident but their situation when examined or their personal possessions when searched proved suspicious. Contrary to the cliché not all spies had their papers in order. Francis Voelkel was arrested in Marseille on 31 March 1942 because his identity papers were suspicious and it was subsequently discovered that a pass in his possession had been issued by an office in Strasbourg which the Police knew was often used by Abwehr agents.59 In some cases allegedly suspect behaviour which lead to an arrest would appear to have been a pretext for bringing them in for questioning. The report on the arrest of Ernst Ramstetter claimed that he was apprehended in the rue Haxe for attacking a woman and it was only subsequent investigation which revealed his German contacts. However, since it was the Surveillance du Territoire that arrested him it is unlikely that their presence in that street was pure coincidence.60 The carelessness of German agents was one of the primary weapons of French counter-espionage services. In many cases, contrary to the instructions they had been given by their German employers, individuals had not memo- rised their questionnaires about French military installations or political or economic questions and had kept this documentation in their wallets.61 Showing an unhealthy interest in the anti-aircraft installations at Marseille’s Marignane airport Herbert Silbermann and Hélène Gerstl were arrested by the Commissaire Spécial on 25 November 1940. The questionnaires found in their

58 AN AJ41 499, Note de la Direction Générale des Services de la Police Administrative, ‘Objet: ‘personnes recevant des fonds d’Allemagne’, n° 910/1, Vichy, 11 February 1941. SHAT 1P 200, Ministre de la Défense à la DDSA, Alger, 26 January 1942, ‘note sur la propagande allemande auprès des prisonniers nord africains’. 59 AD BDR 56W 87, Témoignage de René Cappelutti, Inspecteur au service des étrangers, 30 October 1944. AN AJ 41 499, le capitaine de Bruce, en liaison près le Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement à M le Général de Corps d’Armée, Secrétaire d’Etat à la Guerre, DSA, Marseille, 17 May 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Le Lieutenant-Colonel d’Alès, Bureau M.A., note pour la direction des services de l’armistice, n° 002686/M.A./B, 14 April 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Direction des Services de l’Armistice, (signé Pettier) à M. Benoist-Mechin, Secrétaire d’Etat à la Présidence du Conseil, n° 769M/DSA/7, 4 May 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Le secrétaire d’état à la vice-présidence du conseil à M le Général Bridoux, secrétaire d’état à la guerre (EMA- services de l’armistice)- «traduction d’une note de l’ambassade d’Allemagne Rück 3616 du 13 juin 1942 », 18 juin 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Rapport du Commissaire Principal de Police de la ST, Marseille, 28 août 1942. 60 AN AJ 41 499, Rapport du Commissaire Principal de Police de la ST, Marseille, 28 août 1942; Pierre Nord, Mes camarades sont morts, Geneva, 1970, Vol. II, p 265. 61 AN AJ41 499, Note de l’Inspection Générale des Services de Surveillance du Territoire, n° M1, Vichy, 2 December 1940. 138 Chapter 6 possession confirmed their activity as Nazi agents.62 Others foolishly had the address of German intelligence services in their address book. Silberstein, who was collecting information about the French military, had unwisely consigned the telephone number of the German armistice commission in Aix to his address book.63 Faced with such material evidence it was difficult to deny the facts. Once an individual became suspect Police confirmed their suspicions by tailing them in order to discover more about their activities and their range of contacts. Jane Morel, a Parisian manicurist in her late twenties who had had to work throughout her teens following the death of her mother when she was just 9, conducted spying missions in the southern zone which conformed to the stereotype of spy novels. She received mysterious packages at post office boxes, some contained large sums of money, others military information collected by her informers. She filled ‘Vade Mécum’ brand toothpaste tubes with rolls of information and sent them to Paris. Morel was followed by the ST for several days before her arrest on 1 August 1941.64 Two cases particularly highlight the enthusiasm with which the ST carried out missions against German agents. The first concerned Jean Bernolles, a former Inspecteur of the Police Mobile in Reims who had turned into an agent of the infamous ‘Bonny-Lafont team’ of French Gestapo auxiliaries working out of the rue Lauriston, Paris, following his removal from the Police under the law of 17 July 1940. In September 1942, this former Inspecteur was singled out as suspect by the services of Commandant Paillole and arrested in Toulouse by the former Commissaire Principal of the ST of Marseille, Robert Blémant, now working free-lance. The arrest had attracted too much attention for any irregular methods to be used in the suppression of this German agent and so Blé- mant handed him over to his former brigade in Marseille. Commissaire Piani’s interrogation of this suspect left little doubt as to how well-informed the Police were concerning his activity. Piani insisted that his prisoner had been involved in the arrest of two Resisters in Paris. Moreover, the former Inspecteur’s claim that he was not gathering information for the Germans was greeted with a cold ‘you’re not telling the truth’ by the Commissaire who insisted on the dubious

62 AN AJ41 499, Note de l’Inspection Générale des Services de Surveillance du Territoire, n° M1, Vichy, 2 December 1940; AN AJ41 499, Rapport de l’Officier de Liaison: Renseigne- ments recueillis au cours des entretiens de Mr Von Kirschten avec les allemands du Reich ou ‘de race’ détenus pour espionnage dans les prisons civile et militaire d’Alger, 16 Septem- ber 1941 63 Paul Paillole, Services Spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, pp 241-245 64 AN BB30 1709, Military Justice report on Jane Morel. The Hunt For German Spies 139 nature of an address found on the suspect: ‘we have established beyond doubt that the building situated at 8 rue de Pâtures is used by German intelligence’.65 Bousquet intervened on behalf of this prisoner, whose acquaintance he had made in 1938, and issued a warrant for the arrest of Robert Blémant.66 The second case which illustrates Police enthusiasm in this domain, also led to the intervention of a Senior French official, the Vichy ambassador to the occupied territories, Fernand de Brinon, although this time the intervention was less successful as the arrested person had already been sent off to Germany as a ‘volunteer’ for the labour draft. De Brinon portrayed this individual as an active member of the Groupe Collaboration who had been on a mission for the Prime Minister in the Southern zone but had fallen into the hands of the Surveillance du Territoire in Marseille who called him a ‘dirty turncoat’ and ‘collaborationist’.67 This serves as a reminder that once arrested suspected Nazi agents could expect no sympathy or easy ride from local Police services. A large number of those detained complained of having been insulted by their interrogators. Léona Schmitt claimed that during her interrogation in a villa called ‘Fantaisie’ on the Corniche a Commissaire of Alsatian origin insulted her, in particular referring to her as a ‘boche’ (Kraut).68 Karl Langer made the rather unlikely claim that during his interrogation in this same villa the ST had threatened to forcibly take him to England.69 Much more serious were the accusations of beatings received at the hands of the Surveillance du Territoire.70 Complaints

65 AN 3W 91, interrogatoire du suspect, effectué par le Commissaire Piani, p-v n° 196, 7 Octo- ber 1942. 66 AN 3W 91. 67 AD BDR M6 10990. 68 AN AJ41 499, le Capitaine de Bruce, en liaison près le Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement à M le Général d’Armée, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à la Guerre, DSA, DSA, n° 92, Marseille, 9 October 1941, ‘objet: Visite du délégué à la prison présentines’. 69 AN AJ41 499, Rapport de l’Officier de Liaison: ‘Renseignements recueillis au cours de la visite de Mr Von Kirschten avec les allemands du Reich ou ‘de race’ détenus pour espionnage dans les prisons civile et militaire d’Alger le 16/9/41’. 70 AN AJ 41 496, intercepted letter from Chand (Prison Militaire de Nontron, Dordogne) to Monsieur l’Officier Commandant la Délégation de la Commission d’Armistice à Royat, 1 April 1943; AN AJ41 491, capitaine de Bruce, officier de liaison auprès du Délégué Alle- mand au Rapatriement, à M l’Amiral de la Flotte, Ministre de la Défense Nationale, DSA, Vichy, n° 317, Marseille, 28 February 1942; AN AJ41 491, Fiche concernant les renseignements obtenus par le Capitaine Simonin (officier de liaison) au cours des entretiens du Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement avec les détenus de Tunisie, déplacement du 25 au 29 October 1941; AN AJ 41 499, Le secrétaire d’état à la vice-présidence du conseil à M le Général Bridoux, secrétaire d’état à la guerre (EMA- services de l’armistice)- « traduction d’une note de l’ambassade d’Allemagne Rück 3616 du 13 juin 1942 », 18 juin 1942; AN AJ 41 140 Chapter 6 of serious injuries were recorded. Francis Voelkel for instance claimed to have lost the hearing in one ear.71 Ernst Ramstetter showed two scars above the eye which he claimed were incurred during his Police interrogation. There was considerable overlapping in the descriptions of the violence used: many of the prisoners talked of having been attached to an electrical device and tortured.72 A number also identified their torturer as Commissaire Blémant.73 TR boss Paillole has described how he had trouble preventing Blémant and his colleagues from lynching one individual. Robert Terres counter-espionage operative, recalled how Blémant would take suspects to a villa between Mar- seille and Toulon, where, to create the right atmosphere, he had splattered the walls with blood and left rotting meat on the floor to simulate the smell of decomposing corpses. There he would then shine a spot-light into the suspect’s eyes and insert an electrode into their anus until they gave him the information he was looking for.74 Violence was an easy and rapid way of obtaining information. This was important because in order for information obtained from spies to be useful in catching other agents it had to be obtained quickly. It was also a way of letting treasonous individuals know of the disregard in which they were held. Finally, violence was a means of assuring that, whatever subsequent action may be taken by the courts, these individuals would at least have received some form of punishment. It is clear that counter-espionage officers were keen to act in this domain but that their situation was difficult and subject to the diplomatic whims of the Vichy government. Secret services were used to government indifference to their findings and lack of concern for their needs. However, under Vichy, the

499, Rapport du Commissaire Principal de la ST, Marseille, 28 août 1942; AN 3W 91, le Commissaire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4488, 15 November 1942. 71 AN AJ 41 499, le capitaine de Bruce, en liaison près le Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement à M le Général de Corps d’Armée, Secrétaire d’Etat à la Guerre, DSA, Marseille, 17 May 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Le Lieutenant-Colonel d’Alès, Bureau M.A., note pour la Direction des Services de l’Armistice, n° 002686/M.A./B, 14 April 1942; AN AJ 41 499, Rapport du Com- missaire Principal de Police de la ST, Marseille, 28 August 1942. 72 AN AJ41 491, le Capitaine de Bruce, en liaison près le Délégué Allemand au Rapatriement à M le Général d’Armée, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à la Guerre, DSA, DSA, n° 128, Mar- seille, 2 November 1941, objet: Visite du délégué à la prison militaire St Nicolas, 29 October 1941; AN AJ 41 499, Compte-rendu de l’ officier de liaison sur la visite de M Klaube à Alscher et Gassner, 24 November 1941. 73 AN AJ41 499, Rapport sur la visite de M von Kirschten aux Allemands détenus pour atteinte à la Sûreté Extérieure de l’Etat, 19-20 September 1941. 74 Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, pp 115-117. The Hunt For German Spies 141 relationship with central government was especially rocky. Forces of hostility within the regime questioned the very existence of these services and their long-term survival was constantly threatened making for a very insecure working environment.75 Certain government policies ran directly counter to their needs. In particular, the armistice which Vichy signed included a clause, in article 19,76 which allowed the Germans to claim any of the citizens of the expanded Reich held in French custody at the time of the armistice. This allowed the Nazis to reclaim a certain number of those who had served as their agents before the armistice. There is no doubt that many released thanks to this clause resumed their previous espionage activity. When Pierre Laval became Premier in April 1942, the difficulties presented by central government multiplied. Laval and his Police Chief René Bousquet stepped up the process of gratuitously handing over prisoners to the Germans and insisted that the Sur- veillance du Territoire break off all relations with the Special Services of the army.77 Worse still in the infamous Desloges affair, which began in September 1942, Laval actually agreed to use the French Police to accompany a mission of 280 Nazi agents into the Southern zone to detect Gaullist and British radio transmitters and their operators.78 In the autumn of 1942, a joint French and German Police operation was launched which seemed to fly in the face of the previously adopted policy of defending territorial sovereignty but which really involved the sacrificing of a

75 Michel Garder, La Guerre Secrète des Services Spéciaux Français, 1935-1945, Paris, 1967, p 291. 76 Article 19 was based on article 228 of the treaty of Versailles, which had established similar obligations for the Germans after the First World War: Barbara Wormeier, “La situation des réfugiés en provenance d’Allemagne (septembre 1939-juillet 1942)” in J. Grandjonc & T. Grundtner (eds), Zone d’Ombres, 1933-1944, Aix-en-Provence, 1990, p 195. 77 AN 3W 91, déposition (undated) du Commissaire Léonard; AN 3W 91, déposition du sous- directeur à la Sûreté Nationale, 14/4/48. 78 AN 3W 91, le CD Marc Berge à M Le Président Mitton, SN/RG 2° SN, 1947 (undated); AN 3W 91, déposition de Helmut Knochen, 30 April 1947; AN 3W 91, déposition de Remy Desloges, 28/3/46; AN 3W 91, le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M Le Préfet Bouches-du- Rhône, n° 1311/SCC, 1 September 1942; AN 3W 91, le CD Marc Berge à M Le Président Mit- ton, SN/RG 2° SN, 1947 (undated); AN 3W 91, déposition de Rolf Mühler, 29/5/47; AN 3W 91, le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M Le Préfet Bouches-du-Rhône, n° 687 299, 17 Sep- tember 1942; AN 3W 91, 8e note concernant la mission spéciale de détection des postes clandestines, (undated); Oscar Reile, L’Abwehr: le contre-espionnage allemand en France de 1935 à 1945, Paris, 1970, pp 177-185; Jacques Delarue, Histoire de La Gestapo, Paris, 1962, p 384; Pierre Nord, Mes camarades sont morts, Geneva, 1970, Vol. II, pp 266-267; Fred Kup- ferman, Laval, 1883-1945, Paris, 1988, pp 344-345; Philip John Stead, Second Bureau, Lon- don, 1959, p 96. 142 Chapter 6 violation of territorial integrity against a commitment to administrative sovereignty. An agreement was reached between Vichy and the Germans that the Surveillance du Territoire should collaborate with German security services in hunting down the Resistance in the Southern Zone. Although this allowed the Germans to operate in territory which had previously been forbidden to them the agreements insisted that the Germans were only providing technical assistance to the French Police: arrested agents were to be kept in French Police hands. This operation was known to the French as the Desloges mission, after one of the senior officers involved in its execution. On the German side it was referred to as the Donar operation, Donar being the God of thunder who had also been declared patron of radio broadcasts in Germany.79 Beginning in September and ending in November 1942, the Desloges mission, involved the sending of Nazi agents into the Southern zone in order to detect clandestine radios transmitting messages to the allies. Using specialist equipment and combining 280 men drawn from the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Ordungspolizei, it sent teams into the areas of Lyon, Marseille, Pau and Montpellier.80 German agents had long been passing into the Vichy zone, but this time they had official French protection. The members of this group were equipped with French identity cards and their vehicles given local number plates registered with the Prefectures.81 These missions were given facilities at local Police head-quarters to send their reports in the form of coded telegrams to Geissler, the Gestapo official in Vichy, using French Police channels.82 Moreo- ver, the teams were to be accompanied by 16 Inspecteurs of the Surveillance du Territoire (4 per team) operating under the overall control of the army captain, Desloges. These Police officers were responsible for the escorting of the missions from Châlon-sur-Saône into the Southern zone, the liaison with local

79 The name Donar was chosen by Boemelburg. Donar was the God of thunder who had already been declared patron of radio in Germany: J. Delarue, Histoire de La Gestapo, Paris, 1962, p 384. 80 AN 3W 91, le CD Marc Berge à M Le Président Mitton, SN/RG 2° SN, 1947 (undated); AN 3W 91, déposition de Helmut Knochen, 30 April 1947. 81 AN 3W 91, déposition de Remy Desloges, 28/3/46; AN 3W 91, le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M Le Préfet Bouches-du-Rhône, n° 1311/SCC, 1 September 1942. 82 AN 3W 91, le CD Marc Berge à M Le Président Mitton, SN/RG 2° SN, 1947 (undated); AN 3W 91, déposition de Rolf Mühler, 29/5/47; AN 3W 91, le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M Le Préfet Bouches-du-Rhône, n° 687 299, 17 September 1942. The Hunt For German Spies 143

Police services and the handing over to French justice of anyone arrested by the mission.83 The Marseille mission was accompanied by 4 Inspecteurs of the Surveil- lance du Territoire of Nice and Marseille, under the control of Inspecteur Jean Goubil.84 Following instructions from Desloges, they took advantage of this position to keep tabs on the activity of their German companions and to report back to the ST hierarchy in Vichy as well as to de Rodellec du Porzic in Mar- seille. Goubil’s reports established that this group consisting of 32 members and 12 vehicles, had taken up residence in the Hôtel de Provence, Cours Bel- sunce, but had installed its equipment in a building used by the GMR in les Aygalades and parked its vehicles in the Police garage in the rue Moullet.85 Beyond such details Goubil was able to discover useful information concerning the composition of this group, as well as the nature of their operations. His reports attempted to establish the institutional origin of each of the members of the group, as well as their true identity.86 In addition, Goubil’s Inspecteurs passed on useful information concerning the extent and nature of the operations of their companions. They reported that the Germans had not limited their activities to hunting down clandestine radios. The Abwehr in particular was said to be intent on gathering information, taking photos of the docks, of boats and maritime installations. Its agents were involved in the recruitment of female agents, such as a woman known as Elisabeth who frequented the Brasserie de Provence. Special note was taken of the contacts made, with the Inspecteurs using all their counter-espionage experience and much daring to discover in the diary of one of the drivers the address 26 rue des héros, and a passport number of a German staying in the Hôtel de Provence.87 Interest in the methods used for detecting clandestine transmitters went beyond professional fascination. The Intendant de Police was passing on the information received to members of the 2e Bureau, the Army’s intelligence analysis section, who in turn passed it on to the radio operators who would undoubtedly be interested to know that the German detection process took 25 minutes to

83 AN 3W 91, 8e note concernant la mission spéciale de détection des postes clandestines, (undated). 84 AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Jean Goubil, 17 May 1945. 85 AN 3W 91, 7e note concernant la mission spéciale de détection des postes clandestines, n° 10899, 2 November 1942; AN 3W 91, le CD Marc Berge à M Le Président Mitton, SN/RG 2° SN, 1947 (undated); AN 3W 91, déposition de Rolf Mühler, 29/5/47. 86 For example: ‘this driver is going under the French name of ‘Reynaud’ but his real name is Schwarz (Joseph), 52 years old, originally from Moravia’. 87 AN 3W 91, 8e note concernant la mission spéciale de détection des postes clandestins, (undated). 144 Chapter 6 localise with precision the signals sent from a transmitter.88 Despite this, two transmitters were discovered. The first post was localised on 2 October at 5 rue Colbert and led to the arrest of three Resisters, Simone Bothorel, Philippe Valat and Marcel Portal, who were handed over to the ST before being interned in the prison in Castres, from which 2 of them later escaped. The second find was in a villa called La Pinède at number 10 traverse de la Lise on 6 November and this time led to seven arrests, including, Commandant Faye and Marie- Madeleine Fourcade, leaders of the Alliance network who had just organised the escape of leading Resister General Giraud.89 Besides these arrests, this villa also contained important equipment and documentation, including information concerning the whereabouts of 21 other transmitters.90 However, having made these arrests, the Germans were obliged by the very terms of their agreement with Vichy, to leave both the prisoners and the material in the hands of the French authorities. The seven prisoners and their equipment were taken into the custody of the ST Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s account of their treatment by this branch of the Police leaves little doubt as to the warmth of their reception.91 The allied invasion of North Africa two days after their arrest, greatly enthused these Police officers. But Fourcade listed this enthusiasm as one of the reasons prompting Commandant Faye to ask for a meeting with Laval, believing that even Vichy must now see that it could not continue in its present policy and that he could convince Laval to change his attitude. Commissaire Simon Cottoni, assigned to drive Faye to Vichy, was himself a member of the Alliance network and expressed his surprise to make his first acquaintance with the leaders of the network in such conditions. He tried to convince Faye that he was wasting his time and offered to drive him to Geneva rather than Vichy; but Faye was stubborn. His arrival in Vichy coincided with Laval’s trip to Germany and so it was not the head of government that he saw but the Secrétaire Général à la Police, who ordered his internment.

88 AN 3W 91, confrontation de témoins, déclarations du Général Delmotte, 15/12/46; AN 3W 91, déposition de Jean Goubil, 28/5/47; AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Jean Goubil, 17 May 1945. 89 France Soir, “souvenirs de l’agente secrète n° 1, ‘Marie Madeleine’”, 23 April 1947; AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Jean Goubil, 17 May 1945; AN 3W 91, déposition d’Oscar Reile, ex- chef de l’Abwehr en France, 8/12/47. For the escape of General Giraud in the night of 5 November 1942 from Le Lavandou (Var) see J.-M. Guillon, Le Var, la guerre, la résistance, 1939-45, Le Revest, 1994. 90 France Soir, “souvenirs de l’agente secrète n° 1, ‘Marie Madeleine’”, 24 April 1947; AN 3W 91, déposition du Commissaire Léonard, undated; AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Jean Goubil, 17 May 1945. 91 Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, L’Arche de Noé, Paris, 1989, p 264. The Hunt For German Spies 145

Both Vichy and the Germans viewed this manoeuvre as an insult. The Germans began to make threatening noises to the ST in Marseille asking for the documentation seized to be handed over to them. Léonard, the Commissaire in charge of the ST in Marseille gave into pressure from his remaining prisoners to allow them to sift through their archives to decide what could be handed over, whilst Fourcade’s brother drew up a replica of a map showing the installation of Resistance radio transmitters; a replica which was similar to the original in form but differed significantly in its detail.92 Shortly afterwards, Vichy asked for the transfer of the prisoners from Marseille to Castres. Marie- Madeleine Fourcade remembers the consternation within the brigade at the news of their impending transfer: ‘I know, cos I have been living in their company, that not one of these men wants to hand us over to the enemy and they have done everything they could to save us. But their whole careers are on the line. Many of them are married, with children.’93 After some persuasion from the prisoners, three Corsican members of the brigade, Commissaire Piani and the Inspecteurs Reverbel and Rutali agreed to organise their escape. The transfer to Castres had been scheduled for the 11 November and was supposed to be carried out by a contingent of the specialist crowd control Police the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (GMR). At the last moment, Léonard convinced the Intendant de Police to leave the transfer to these three officers of the ST. Although Léonard’s report on the incident claims that this was because Piani had Police business in Castres, it seems that the Intendant de Police was aware of the real purpose of the change.94 The three Corsican officers, their six prisoners, together with several machine guns and handguns belonging to the Police, left their headquarters and drove round Marseille to say goodbye to the Policemen’s families.95 After calling in at the Commissariat Central to pick up some jewels which Fourcade had registered at the moment of her imprisonment, the van headed off in the direction of Avignon. Eight days later the three Police officers were flown into London on the Lysander, much to the confusion of the welcoming party who had expected to greet Fourcade.

92 AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Jean Goubil, 17 May 1945. 93 France Soir, “souvenirs de l’agente secrète n° 1, ‘Marie Madeleine’”, 24 April 1947. 94 AN 3W 91, le Commissaire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4479, 13 November 1942; AN 3W 91, le Commis- saire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4488, 15 November 1942. 95 France Soir, “souvenirs de l’agente secrète n° 1, ‘Marie Madeleine’”, 24 April 1947. 146 Chapter 6

This case is highly significant in a number of ways. The contrast between the attitude of the Intendant de Police in this operation and in the deportation of foreign Jews highlights that co-operation with Vichy was certainly not an ‘all- or-nothing’ matter. Obedience was not aloof from ideological considerations or prejudice. Moreover, a zealous attitude in one domain could often cover up or allow disobedience in other respects. The second question to bear in mind is that the importance of institutional conditioning did not necessarily deter Resistance. Of course, the ST under Vichy orders engaged in activities against Gaullist or Allied spies, but their professional traditions since the founding of the ST were firmly rooted in searching out the activity of Germans and this encouraged their attitude to be more severe with regard to this particular enemy. Finally, this affair underlines the importance of juncture. Had Four- cade and her companions been captured in October like the group discovered in the rue Colbert, they would most likely have ended up in the Castres prison. The juncture of November 1942, with the enthusiasm of the invasion of North Africa and the dangers implied in the German invasion of Marseille, caused members of the brigade to make a break that might not otherwise have been made. The importance of this juncture for the ST was highlighted by the fact that on 12 November, two other Inspecteurs, Pierre Le Tullier and Robert Gautier also abandoned their posts; the first to become Chef de Secteur of the Alliance network in Rennes.96 These departures suggest that a number in the brigade who had been happy to make use of Vichy’s existence as a cover for their anti- German activities now had no illusions as to what could be achieved within a Vichy framework. With total Occupation, the situation for the Surveillance du Territoire became untenable and too dangerous.97 In normal circumstances counter-espionage on home soil represents one of the safer areas of secret service activity.98 During the years 1940-1944 it was fraught with danger.99 Paillole has claimed that on more than one occasion his hotel room in Marseille was ransacked, presumably by German secret service agents. There were constant rumours that the southern zone would be invaded and once this invasion occurred members of these services either had

96 Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, “Le réseau Alliance et les Policiers” in the anonymous collective work Association des anciens résistants et combattants du ministère de l’intérieur, Paris, 1975, p 98. 97 AN 3W 91, le Commissaire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4488, 15 November 1942. 98 Robert Terres, Double jeu pour la France, 1939-44, Paris, 1977, p 40. 99 Pierre Nord, Mes camarades sont morts, Geneva, 1970, Vol. II, p 264; Paul Paillole, Services Spéciaux, 1935-1945, Paris, 1975, p 256. The Hunt For German Spies 147 to flee or go into hiding. A letter from Commissaire Principal Jean Léonard of the ST in Marseille to the Directeur de la Police de Sûreté in Vichy underlined the threat that hung over the Inspecteurs and Commissaires of his service in the newly occupied zone. The members of the brigade were open to a very specific danger owing to their professional responsibility, firstly in pre-war counter-espionage but also in such activities since the armistice. Léonard singled out the position of four of his subordinates who had been in Nice before the war and had been particularly zealous in their anti-Italian activity. Léon- ard’s own position was far from reassuring. Born in the Lorrain region, he had joined the Police as an Inspecteur in 1920 and been detached to the French army on the Rhine until his transfer to a Police post in Strasbourg in 1929. In these capacities he had been heavily engaged in counter-espionage activity causing him to become the object of a violent German press campaign. But Léonard also drew attention to the large number of arrests of Nazi agents carried out by his services since the armistice. Amongst these were a number of German nationals, 12 of whom had thereafter been condemned to death by military tribunal but subsequently released by Vichy only to complain of the brutalities they had suffered at the hands of the ST. That the ST should find itself in a delicate position in the event of a German invasion had been fore- seen and precautions had been taken. With the likelihood of invasion growing members of the brigade were issued with special false identity cards six months before the invasion of the zone by the Intendant Rodellec du Porzic, and were given special ration tickets in November 1942.100 The value of this oft forgotten aspect of the Police role is open to debate. The official history of these structures sees their value in the fact that they preserved the notion of treason in France.101 But surely, the Resistance was much better at this than Secret Services tainted by their association with Pétain’s government- a government it should be remembered that has frequently been accused of betraying France. Historians and specialists of counter-espionage frequently maintain that part of the value of counter-intelligence is that it reveals the intentions of the enemy country through an analysis of the type of information the captured enemy agent was trying to collect.102 The BMA, the

100 AN 3W 91, le Commissaire Principal de la Surveillance du Territoire, Marseille à M Le directeur de la Police de Sûreté, Vichy, n° 4488, 15 November 1942. 101 AN 72AJ 82, ‘Résumé de l’Action des Services de Contre-espionage Militaire français de juillet 1940 à novembre 1944’, Vol. 1, 1946. 102 Marcel Châlet, ‘La DST, Service français de contre-espionnage’ in Pierre Lacoste (ed), Approches françaises du renseignement, Paris, 1997, p 57; Pierre Nord, Mes camarades sont morts, Geneva, 1970, Vol. 2, p 19. 148 Chapter 6

TR and the ST could claim some minor role in having protected individual arms dumps secreted by the French army or having prevented Nazi infiltration of a Resistance movement like ‘Combat’. However, Vichy handed over many of these clandestine stocks of arms shortly after the German Occupation of the southern zone and the Germans managed to conduct mass arrests in Frenay’s movement from the spring of 1943, so any contribution here must be seen as a short term victory.103 Ironically, it might be argued that the activities of these services formed the first part of the post-war purge of those who had collaborated with the Nazis. After all some of the reports written by counter-espionage services at this time were the same documents which formed the basis of post- war trials of collaborators. Despite operating under the umbrella of a government which was itself heavily and sincerely involved in State collaboration, it is undeniable that Vichy secret services kept a number of Nazi agents and collaborators in prison and out of circulation for many months.104 When the Ger- mans invaded the Southern Zone of France, 48 German agents were still being held in the Marseille prison and many more arrested by local services had already been sent off to prisons in North Africa. Indeed some Nazi spies would remain interned in Vichy prisons until the summer of 1944. Ultimately, the value of counter-espionage services must be seen in the fact that, although these structures did damage to some Allied and Resistance networks, they also severely restricted German penetration of the Southern zone and the Empire up until November 1942. This fact is acknowledged in the memoirs of Oscar Reile, one of the leaders of the Abwehr in France. That, in order to operate freely in the Southern zone prior to total Occupation, the Nazis had to resort to negotiating with Vichy in the form of the Desloges mission is a tribute to the efficiency of these services.105

103 AN 72AJ 82, ‘Résumé de l’Action des Services de Contre-espionage Militaire français de juillet 1940 à novembre 1944’, Vol. 1, 1946; AD BDR M6 10988, Le Commissaire de Police de Sûreté, ‘note au sujet du chef du service des affaires indigènes à Marseille’, Pol. Sûr. 7/R, 20 January 1943; AN F1a 3690-32, le Directeur Adjoint du Cabinet à M le Secrétaire Général pour la Police, AC/MG, 14 April 1942. Robert O. Paxton, Parades and Politics in Vichy, The French Officer Corps under Marshal Pétain, New Brunswick NJ, 1966, pp 400-401; Henri Navarre, Le temps des vérités, Paris, 1979, p 95. 104 AN AJ 41 499, Secrétariat d’Etat à la Guerre, télégramme n° 3381/JC de la 15° Division Mil- iatire (14/11/42 à 18h30) à Guerre Cabinet et Justice Miliatire. 105 Oscar Reile, L’Abwehr: le contre-espionnage allemand en France de 1935 à 1945, Paris, 1970, pp 181-182; Philippe Aziz, Tu trahiras sans vergogne, Paris, 1970, p 194. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 149

Chapter 7 Ripping the Heart Out of Marseille

In a carefully prepared counter to the Allied invasion of North Africa four days previously, German tanks and camouflaged vehicles poured into Marseille on 12 November 1942, drove through the Porte d’Aix, turned down the boulevard d’Athènes and the Canebière into the Vieux Port and the city centre. Marseille was occupied for the first time since 1815. Wehrmacht soldiers took up residence in local schools and filled the bars and cinemas. Although the invaders had much to learn about local culture, they brought with them a solid prejudice against this city, judged as a ‘den of international criminals’ and a French version of Hamburg.1 Would such prejudices have any unfortunate consequences for the city of Marseille? What effect would this have on the role of the Police and its interaction with the public? The Germans were not alone in making disparaging assertions about the city. It had become customary for successive French governments to view Mar- seille with suspicion. Most recently, the assassination of Alexander I of Yugo- slavia on the Canebière thoroughfare in 1934, the street fights of the 1930s and the widespread corruption had given Marseille the reputation of a ‘European Chicago’. Moreover, since the armistice, the influx of refugees into the city had caused the fascist writer Lucien Rebatet to nickname it ‘Marseille the Jewish’.2 With a Jewish population of over 30,000 in 1940, the département of the Bouches-du-Rhône did indeed have the largest Jewish population in the unoccupied zone. Both French and German criticism focused particularly on the Le Panier district, also known as the Vieux Quartiers or quartiers napolitains. Situated to the immediate north of the Vieux Port, much of this district dated back to 600 Bc and the original Greek settlers, although a number of buildings, particularly the hotels, had been added between the 14th and 17th centuries. It was populated essentially by minor civil servants, small-time traders, sailors, fishermen and dock workers, many of whom were of Italian or Corsican extraction. It was this combination of the origin of its inhabitants, the transient nature of many of their jobs and the age of the district’s buildings which was at the base of its reputation. Even authors sympathetic to the district have underlined the uniqueness of its noises and smells. Louis Blin writing in 1941 described the

1 AD BDR 56W 71. 2 Lucien Rebatet, “Marseille la Juive”, in Je Suis Partout, 30 August 1941.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_009 150 Chapter 7 misnamed Grand’rue. Less than 10 feet wide and built before the invention of automobiles, it had become too narrow to fulfil its modern role as one of the city’s main thoroughfares.3 The frustrated outbursts of car drivers blocked by the street’s welter of activity competed with the cacophony of radios and gramophones blasting out the songs of Tino Rossi or Rina Ketty. The odour of pizzas baking in its pizzerias or ‘chichi-frégis’, doughnuts perfumed with orange flower water, frying in the street mingled with the smell of cheap per- fumes in popular hairdressers’ shops. The bright colours of the laundry hanging above the street on pulley ropes like so many flags, gave the district an appearance of constant festivity or constant poverty depending on how you looked at it.4 But the district was also noted for its black market activity. The Prefect’s office complained about such activity in the place de Lenche, but Police enquiries consistently drew a blank.5 Anti-government activity was also denounced. Letters of complaint were sent to Pierre Laval declaring that ‘this district shows no restraint in criticising the government that you lead’.6 There had long been talk of raising the whole district to the ground and a project, named in honour of the architect Eugène Beaudouin, was drawn up to this effect in 1942. Historians have been unable to firmly establish a direct link between the ‘Beaudouin plan’ and the German-inspired operation to destroy the district at the beginning of 1943, but it is certain that the French obsession with the seed- iness of the Vieux Quartiers lent credibility to German prejudice. Himmler even claimed that eventually the French would come to thank the Germans for this operation of cleaning up ‘the pigsty of Marseille, the pigsty of France’.7 German dignitaries seemed to be operating under an exaggerated sense of the threat that the city posed.8 Oberg, the supreme head of the SS in France, called the city a ‘cancer’ on the face of the continent and suggested it was ‘the criminal centre of Europe that is full of strange races and hostile political ele-

3 Louis Blin, Marseille inconnue, Avignon, 1941, pp 113-119; Jacques Greber, Ville de Marseille, plan d’aménagement et d’extension, Paris, 1933, pp 44-45. 4 Louis Blin, Marseille inconnue, Avignon, 1941, pp 113-119. 5 AD BDR 5W 371, le Préfet délégué à l’administration de Marseille à M l’Intendant de Police, n° 0/2 EMP 23 June 1942; AD BDR 5W 371, Commissaire de la Section Judiciaire à M le Commissaire Principal, chef de la section de PJ, n° 32819, 21 July 1942; AD BDR 5W 368, M André P., Quai Maréchal Pétain, à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 27 July 1942. 6 AD BDR 5W 368, M André P., Quai Maréchal Pétain, à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 27 July 1942. 7 Thomas J. Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940-1944, Oxford, 2010, p 265. 8 Ahlrich Meyer, L’Occupation allemande en France, Toulouse, 2002, p 151. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 151 ments’.9 The Nazi authorities were worried that the dense lattice of lanes and chutes of this district could form the stage for street combats, which Resisters could all too easily escape using the secret underground passageways linking these old buildings to each other and that a number of German deserters may have found shelter here. The significance of these concerns was amplified by a lack of faith in the local Police. When Vichy Police chief Bousquet met the Ger- man Generals Oberg and Daluege in Paris in December 1942, the latter brought up this question underlining that the demonstration of 14 July 1942 had shown where Marseille Police sympathies lay. A few days later in Paris Laval met Kno- chen, commander of the Sicherheitsdienst in Occupied France. Knochen insisted on ‘the critical situation in which the city of Marseille finds itself and the negligence of which the French administration in general and the Police forces in particular are accused’.10 The feeling that German troops were unprotected by the local authorities seemed confirmed, firstly by attacks against the requisitioned Hôtel Astoria on the Canebière and a military vehicle on the Cours St.Louis on 2 December 194211 and then on 3 January 1943 by what the Germans described as ‘explo- sions heavy in consequence’ carried out by the immigrant branch of the communist Resistance, the FTP-MOI, and aimed at a German brothel in the rue Lemaître and the requisitioned Hôtel Splendid.12 In the hours following the attacks of 3 January the Regional Prefect, Joseph Rivalland, was summoned to the Hôtel Noailles, where the German general staff instructed him to draw up a list of hostages who would be shot in the event of further incident. In application of a government circular of 7 May 1942, Rivalland refused and, taking a courageous attitude, added that the only hostage he would name was himself.13 The Germans, irritated by the Prefect’s intransigence, declared a state of siege and announced that the Marseille Police was to pass under direct SS control.

9 John Gimlette, ‘The destruction of Le Panier’, History Today, March 2008, p 6; Thomas J. Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940-1944, Oxford, 2010, p 265. 10 AD BDR 56W 71, déclarations de Bousquet, 14 June 1945; AN 3W 92, déclarations de René Bousquet, 4 October 1948. 11 AD BDR M6 11071, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 30 November-6 December 1942. 12 AN 3W 90, le Général von Neubronne au Secrétariat d’Etat près le chef de gouvt., 4 Janu- ary 1943; AN 3W 90, déclarations de Rolf Mühler, Commandant du SD de Marseille, 21 May 1947; Christian Oppetit (ed), Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 42; Jacques Delarue, Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation, Paris, 1968, pp 245-247. 13 C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 27; AN F1a 3922, CNI, 31/S/L1A/O, 28 January 1943; AN F1a 3922, CNI, CE. Libe/ 31501, rapport n° 19, R III 9A, 11 February 1943. For the Vichy circular, see AN F7 14907 [346], Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM les Préfets, n° 88, 7 May 1942. 152 Chapter 7

The following ten days were marked by a series of negotiations. On 5 Janu- ary in Paris, René Bousquet met Karl Oberg, supreme head of the SS and Police in France. At this meeting it was agreed to return the Police to French control.14 It is not clear what Bousquet offered in return but it is not unreasonable to make a connection between this meeting and the replacement three days later of the Prefect Rivalland by Lemoine, a career Prefect from Limoges. On 13 January, a group of senior Nazi officials, including Oberg, met the upper echelons of the local French administration together with Bousquet, in a villa in the Roucas Blanc district. The German plans to destroy the Vieux Quartiers and to make thousands of people homeless were countered by the Intendant de Police’s suggestion, raised at a meeting the following day, that the French Police, acting in complete independence, should carry out an operation aimed at purging the city of its criminal element.15 The Germans accepted the French plan but refused to renounce their own project only agreeing to reduce the perimeter of the area to be destroyed. The decision to allow French forces such a prominent role and indeed a complete independence in the whole operation, with the exception of the sealing off and actual destruction of the Vieux Quartiers must be explained by four factors. Firstly, the arrests throughout the city were entirely of French inspiration, conceived as a bargaining counter to save the buildings of the Vieux Quartiers. Next, the operations were to be supervised personally by Bousquet who still enjoyed complete German confidence. Thirdly, the unreliability of the Marseille force would be diluted by the participation of other Police services from outside the city. Finally, the Ger- mans could not have undertaken such an operation on their own and indeed Himmler had insisted to Oberg that during the preliminary negotiations, the latter should play on the French desire to maintain a semblance of sovereignty to persuade them, not only to provide the manpower necessary but also to believe that in so doing they were being offered a major concession.16 Henceforth, there were to be two operations in Marseille: a German operation to seal off and blow up the Vieux Quartiers; a French operation to carry out vast Police operations throughout the city and to perform the evacuation of the district to be destroyed by the Nazis. The new Prefect insisted on the separateness of these measures: ‘In order to show clearly that our concern is to make the Police operation as successful as possible, and convinced that limiting such an operation to just

14 AD BDR 56W 71, déclarations de Bousquet, 14 June 1945; AN 3W 92, déclarations de Bous- quet, 4 October 1948. 15 C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, pp 28-29. 16 C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, pp 28-31. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 153 the Vieux Port district would only give minimal results, we have proposed that vast Police operations should be carried out in two stages: a. in the night of Friday 22 to Saturday 23, in numerous districts of the city. b. in the night of 23 to 24, between 8pm and 6am in the Vieux Port district.’17

On the evening of Saturday 23 January, the silence of the curfew was broken by the sound of the arrival of a large number of canvas-covered lorries and motor- cycles with sidecars in preparation for the dragnet operations.18 Cars with loud-speakers got the operations underway announcing that:

For military reasons and in order to guarantee the security of the population in all circumstances, the high German authorities have decided that you must evacuate. Prepare to leave your homes immediately, carrying only hand-baggage: blankets, underwear, warm clothes, cutlery, food for 48 hours.19

In the end, the city-wide Police operations ran from the 22nd through to 29 January and involved home visits, round-ups in the street and identity checks in public places such as cafés or cinemas.20 In order to prevent feigned absences, locksmiths were recruited to open up any apartments which did not respond to the sinister knock on the door.21 The targets of the operation were listed as the following: habitual criminals; pimps; vagabonds; vagrants; anyone without ration tickets; all Jews [both French and foreign]; illegal immigrants and anyone who had been out of work for more than a month.22 The operations were to be the largest in French history, not only by their duration, but also by the size of the forces mobilised and the number of identity checks car-

17 AD BDR 56W 71, le Préfet Régional à M le chef du Gouvernement, 30 January 1943. 18 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 2. 19 Pierre Roumel, ‘Dessous et dessus du Panier’, Marseille: Revue Culturelle, n° 181, p 12. 20 For the day to day unfolding of the operations see: AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943; AD BDR 56W 71, résumé des rapports parvenus au Consistoire Central sur les événements survenus à Marseille du 22 au 29 January 1943; CDJC CCCLXIV-4, Knochen-Oberg, Pt. III, p 195; AD BDR 56W 71, le Préfet Régional à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 30 January 1943. 21 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 3. 22 AN 3W 90, the list of targets figures on an instruction issued to senior Police officials on 18 January 1943 under the title: “recherches des indésirables de Marseille” and which claimed the operation should net 8000 people. 154 Chapter 7 ried out. Beyond the entire mobilisation of the local Police, Bousquet had ordered the drafting in of all available personnel from forces throughout the country. It is estimated that between 7000 and 9000 officers were brought in to supplement the local force.23 These reinforcements were drawn from the GMR, urban Police forces and the Gendarmerie, who bedded down in improvised dormitories in local schools and other public buildings. These forces supplemented the 5000 Germans from the Ordnungspolizei and Bernhard Griese’s Tenth SS Police Regiment present.24 The scale of the operation is underlined by its results which, according to the Prefect, included 400 000 identity checks, 5956 arrests (of whom 3997 were subsequently released), 1642 sent by special train to Compiegne internment camp and 600 retained as suspect or dangerous by a vetting commission in Fréjus (Var).25 These 1642 people were crammed into cattle-car wagons with no seats, no water and only 60 loaves of bread to be shared between them and directed to Compiègne.26 In the absence of any toilet facilities they had to relieve themselves on the floor.27 They were given no opportunity to inform their families of their plight. This train, sent in the early hours, was made up of about 1300 individuals sent to the Baumettes prison for verification of their identity between 22 January and the evening of the 23rd, together with 300 or so arrested during the night of 23 January and sent directly to the Commissariat Central. The French authorities had little time to vet these individuals and their figures must be seen as approximate, because the vetting commission set up in the Baumettes by the Intendance de Police was only able to operate for a few hours before its registers were seized by the Nazis and instructions were issued to send the internees on to the Arenc train station.28 Serge Klarsfeld has been able to establish that 782 of those taken that evening were Jewish.29 Filled with a premonition of the fate that awaited them, those squeezed into at least one of the wagons of this train began in unison to recite ‘The Mourners’

23 On this point see: AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943; AD BDR 56W 71, déclarations de Buffet, 28 October 1944; AD BDR 56W 71, rapport du Commissaire Dautun, 22 February 1945; Jacques Delarue, Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation, Paris, 1968, p 258; C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 30. 24 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 183. 25 AD BDR 56W 71, le Préfet Régional à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 30 January 1943. 26 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 4. 27 Renée Poznanski, Les Juifs en France pendant la Second Guerre Mondiale, Paris, 1994, p 445. 28 AD BDR M6 11046, l’Intendant de Police à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 29 July 1943. 29 Serge Klarsfeld, Les transferts de Juifs de la région de Marseille vers les camps de Drancy ou de Compiègne en vue de leur déportation, 11/8/42-24/7/44, Paris, 1992, p 39. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 155

Kaddish’; the Jewish prayer for the dead.30 The Jews arrested during these round-ups were deported for extermination to the Polish death camps of Sobi- bor, Majdanek and Cholm over the course of the month of March.31 It seems that none of them survived. The responsibility of Vichy in these deportations was manifold.32 A letter from a woman in the boulevard d’Accès, whose two sisters and aunt had been taken in the round-up of 22 January, was addressed to Pétain in desperate tones asking him to find out what had happened to her relations and pleading:

Do you have any idea what words like ‘unknown destination’ mean in a period as troubled and evil as the present one ?!!? Imagine your loved ones interned in these dreadful concentration camps, God knows where ?!!?

There can be no denying the sense of betrayal in her request:

My family had done nothing wrong other than to be born Jewish. We had scrupulously complied with the racial legislation in place. Besides if their identity cards didn’t carry a red stamp indicating they were Jewish in large letters, I am sure that we would not currently be trembling at the thought of the fate which awaits them.33

Vichy’s insistence that all Jewish identity cards comply with the law of 11 December 1942 whereby they were to be stamped with the word ‘Juif’ (‘Jew’) in large red letters was one more stage in the process of degradation which now made such citizens easy targets for Police round-ups.34 Moreover, all those transferred for deportation on the morning of 24 January had been arrested during the French initiated operations and without exception they were arrested by the French Police. The German operations which destroyed 1400 buildings making 25000 people homeless did not begin until later that day when the sappers moved in to prepare for the detonation of dynamite which would start on 1 February, although the evacuation of the district defined by

30 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 186. 31 Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 187. 32 C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, pp 31-32. 33 AN 2AG 82 SP10M, Aimée Cattan au Maréchal Pétain, 28 June 1943. 34 The text of this law can be consulted in S. Klarsfeld, le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France, 1940-44, Paris, 1993, p 707. 156 Chapter 7 the Nazis was to account for a number of the 600 people later transferred via Fréjus. Vichy’s responsibility was also an expression of the naiveté of its Police chiefs who seriously believed they were gaining some concessions in their negotiations with the Nazis. The morality of offsetting round-ups of suspect individuals in return for a limiting of the destruction of buildings was, to say the least, dubious. It is not difficult to find examples of callousness in the attitude of the Police hierarchy in this affair. The photograph of a smug René Bous- quet smiling whilst surrounded by Nazi officers during the negotiations is very well known. No historians have yet quoted a Resistance report, (whose precise inside knowledge of the details of the operation suggest it originated with a Police Resister), which described the Directeur de la Sûreté as particularly keen to take back to Vichy a living souvenir of his excursion to Marseille and who instructed a Commissaire and number of locksmiths to open up abandoned houses in order to find a parrot. The Resistance report regretted that the bird found was unable to speak and hence ‘could raise no objection and could not bear further witness’.35 Even amongst the Senior hierarchy, however, there were examples of protest. Although it was de Rodellec du Porzic’s suggestion to carry out the dragnet operation throughout the city, it was this same civil servant who protested the most vigorously against the destruction of the Vieux Quartiers. Following the negotiations of 13 January, de Rodellec had suggested that the French authorities should use the intermediary of a neutral embassy to alert world opinion as to what was about to happen in Marseille. Shortly after the operations were terminated, de Rodellec resigned his post of Intendant de Police and was replaced by Robert Andrieu. His reported threats to the Germans to scuttle the French Administration did not prevent de Rodellec from carrying out Bousquet’s orders to the letter during the operation and even from giving them an even more marked anti-Semitic slant.36 As could be expected from an operation mobilising several thousand Police officers the reports concerning their attitudes contain wide divergences. In order to assess more accurately the attitude of Police officers during these operations, it is necessary to distinguish between the measures taken between 22 and 29 January which targeted categories of outcasts and particularly Jews, and the operations of the night of 23-24 January which aimed at the evacuation of the population of the Vieux Quartiers.

35 AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943. 36 Foreign Office, France Basic Handbook, n° 2: the Region of Marseille; part 1 – people and administration, London, 1943, p 15; AD BDR 56W 101, Interrogatoire de de Rodellec du Porzic, 24 January 1946 & déclarations d’Alexandre Guibbal, 31 March 1945. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 157

As with the deportations of the summer of 1942, there was no mass rebellion of Police officers. In summarising Police attitude during the week of operations, the Prefect wrote:

It is only fair to point out that the Police services have demonstrated a spirit of discipline and tact in carrying out this delicate mission which deserves to be underlined.37

A Resistance report, seemingly of Police origin, spoke of uniformed officers who had little choice but to execute orders and esteemed that their rank eliminated all possibility of initiative.38 Obedience was encouraged by the fact that in most cases Policemen were divided off into pairs containing officers from different branches and from different towns, obliging potential Police Resisters to make hasty assessments of the opinions of their companions if they wished to avoid denunciation for any act of Resistance. The presence of Commissaires outside buildings, noted by a number of witnesses, opened up the possibility that the thoroughness of the search could be the subject of immediate verification by hierarchical superiors. The possibility of agents provocateurs amongst the potential victims and the general sense of urgency in these operations could both serve as deterrents to initiative. If these hierarchical pressures made Resistance difficult it certainly did not render it impossible, as the very existence of a (limited) Police Resistance to these measures testifies. It was more than anything a question of plucking up enough courage. There were certainly risks involved in helping potential victims: Brigadier Louis Vaugier lost his job after deliberately letting a Jew escape.39 Often attempts to help were too half-hearted or couched in ambiguous tones. Roxane Matalon remembers that the Police officers who arrested her father in their home in the rue Glandèves, offered him the chance to go back and fetch some cigarettes, an offer which she interprets as an invitation to escape, but which her father, believing that the regularity of his situation would be a sufficient protection, failed to act on.40 There were examples of more active Resistance. Before the round-ups, Ignace Doboin received the visit of an officer, whom he had befriended during their period of military service in 1939-40, who now tipped him off as to the imminence of the operations.41 In

37 AD BDR 56W 71, le Préfet Régional à M le chef du Gouvernement, 30 January 1943. 38 AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943. 39 AD BDR 56W 15, pièce 28. 40 Oral evidence from Roxanne Algazi (née Matalon), Marseille, 18 December 1992. Her evidence also features in C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, p 120. 41 Oral evidence from Ignace Doboin, Paris, 6 February 1993. 158 Chapter 7 another case, a potential victim was accompanied to the station and put on a train by a Commissaire friend of his to facilitate his escape.42 But the personal acquaintance of a Police officer was not always sufficient protection once the operations got under way. Simone Beraha who was 14 in 1943 remembers that one of the two Policemen who knocked at her family’s door, 9 rue Vacon, was well-known to her father and even addressed him by his first name when asking for his identity papers, but this did not stop them from loading him on to a Police truck.43 This is not to say that there was no help from Police officers during the operations. Victor Algazi recalls that the Inspecteur who called on his family told them to lock their door and to answer to no one. When another officer began banging at their door, the Inspecteur called out ‘it’s done here, they went down’. Algazi attributes this act to the fact that the Inspecteur was acquainted with his mother’s birthplace – Smyrna (Asia-Minor) and had fond memories of it. It is far more likely that his initiative was prompted by the fact that he had entered the Algazi flat unaccompanied.44 Following the arrests, there were examples of Police Resistance at the Baumettes prison, the immediate destination of a number of those rounded-up. Sarah Aboaf remembers how a Police officer took her and her mother off to one side whilst the other Jews were loaded up for transfer to the Arenc station and once the departures were completed put them on to a bus for Mazargues with the words: ‘we are all human beings’.45 This last incident illustrates the series of choices Police officers were making. The officer who helped Sarah Aboaf and her mother did so despite watching a number of other Jews being taken out for transfer. Like many of his colleagues he worked on the logic that by participating in the operations he could save a few people, even if this meant standing by and watching or even participating as others were loaded up. It was the policy of the so-called ‘lesser evil’ which in the event proved so disastrous. There was no room in this logic for a questioning of whether the Germans really had the capacity to carry out the operations themselves and what they would have done in the event of mass defections from the Police. This series of choices was encouraged by the instructions given to Police officers at a conference in the run-up to the operations. Bousquet, fearing that his policy might be misconstrued by the rank and file, had addressed two large gatherings of officers in which he had claimed

42 AD BDR 55W 86, Letter from J. Ben... to Mme Vinc.., 6 December 1944. 43 Evidence from Simone Beraha in C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 119. 44 Oral evidence from Victor Algazi, Marseille, 18 December 1992. 45 Evidence from Sarah Aboaf in C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, pp 119-120. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 159 that ‘the intervention of the French Police is only justified because we wanted to avoid direct action by the German army’. The choice he suggested was between leaving the Germans to carry out the operations ‘with the risk that the French population would suffer terribly’ and having the administration work with the Nazis, thereby achieving concessions. The head of the RG in Marseille recorded that ‘on the whole those present took away a favourable impression of this conference’, thereby implying that whatever their general hostility to Vichy, they had accepted the essence of the choices Vichy was making.46 The high proportion of Jews amongst those arrested in the operations suggests that there was a trading-off of the arrest of Jews for the non-arrest of Aryans. Even within the Jewish community the Police made a certain number of distinctions between those they would and those they were more reluctant to take. The Rabbi Israël Salzer has described ‘the very rare exceptions’ where ‘a less ill-disposed Policeman left behind a woman with a small child, whilst still taking away the father and older children’.47 To claim that this practice was rare contradicts the evidence left by a number of witnesses and victims.48 Of course, the value of their accounts must be set against the fact that a large number of those arrested could not leave any record of their suffering as a consequence of their almost immediate deportation. But it is clear that a considerable gender and age bias existed in arrests. This is not to say that there were not a large number of cases where whole families were taken or much more exceptional ones where both parents were arrested whilst the children were left unaccompanied, but it was certainly not unusual for the father and elder children to be taken whilst the mother was left tending the younger children. This brutal application of traditional gender stereotypes goes some way to explaining why of those Jews who were included in the convoy of 24 January, there were 517 men and 228 women. This trading-off of different categories of Jews suggests the coexistence of a latent anti-Semitism, combined with a shock at the harshness of the measures taken. On the one hand, gender categorisa- tion has already been noted as an element of Police behaviour with regard to the round-ups preceding Pétain’s visit in 1940. Women, with the exception of prostitutes or those classed as such, are traditionally viewed as less politically or criminally “suspect” than men. If the Police are selecting from those considered most suspect within this group this implies an implicit compliance with

46 AD BDR 56W71, déclarations de Bousquet, 14 June 1945; AD BDR 56W 101, déclarations de Jean Magnoac, 28 May 1945 & Michel Brumter, 30 April 1945; AN 3W 90, déclarations de Paul Marabuto, 12 July 1948; Loup Durand, Le caïd, Paris, 1976, p 143. 47 AD BDR 56W 101, déposition de Israël Salzer, rabbin de Marseille, 5 January 1945. 48 See for example the evidence from individuals in C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, pp 115-137. 160 Chapter 7 the notion of Jewish “guilt”. On the other hand, the decision to leave the children in a number of cases was also a reference back to the shock many Police officers had experienced in the summer of 1942 when confronted with the horror of the separation of children and parents prior to deportations, or subsequently when children themselves began to be deported. Similar shock had been experienced the previous summer as regards the deportation of sick people, and this shock was to have some over-spill on to the current operations. Elie Arditti, a 19 year-old Turk, remembered that it was thanks to a young GMR who intervened with a plain-clothed Police officer in favour of his sick mother, that Arditti’s mother and sister were allowed to stay at their home, 13 rue d’Aubagne, although this Inspecteur passed on the ultimate responsibility of this decision to a Commissaire waiting downstairs who would settle the matter once Arditti had presented the identity cards of his relations and explained their situation. As it happened, Arditti took advantage of the absence of zeal of a GMR who allowed him to go to a toilet at the end of the stairway, where he hid their identity papers. Once arrived at the Baumettes prison, he saw a woman from another lorry complaining to a GMR that her crutches were still in the back of the Police truck and that she could not walk without them. The GMR replied simply: ‘oh! Soon you won’t be needing them’.49 As with the question of the arrest of children, Police attitude to sick people during these arrests was most polarised in the branches of the GMR and the Gendarmerie. This was doubtless a repercussion of the 1942 operations where members of these two branches had been present in the camps at the moment of the transfer of Jews and had witnessed more vividly than their colleagues from other corps, the horror of these deportations, causing them to be much more definite in their reactions. Of course, even this shock did not necessarily translate into active support of the Jews in January 1943. Many were reduced to simple expressions of horror or impotence, once those they had arrested began to be transferred by the Germans on 24 January. Police officer Jacques Delarue who was present on the morning of the departure summarised his feelings in this way: ‘one felt oneself overcome with anger and shame at the same time, and then by the feeling of total impotence, one felt shame to see men led away like this and to let it happen’.50 A sense of impotence was also experienced by Police officers during the second phase of the operations, that is to say the evacuation of the population of the old quartiers in preparation for their destruction by the Germans. The Resistance report of Police origin claimed ‘it is not possible to describe the

49 Evidence from Elie Arditti in C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, Marseille, 1993, p 117. 50 J. Delarue, Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation, Paris, 1968, p 261; AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943. Ripping The Heart Out Of Marseille 161 heart-rending scenes which 90% of Police officers watched impotently’.51 The sense of impotence emanated from the feeling that the operations were beyond their control and indeed, short of armed rebellion, it is difficult to see what Police officers could have done to prevent the destruction of these districts. Participation in this phase was not underpinned by the same sort of choices inherent in the operations throughout the town. The involvement of the vast majority of Police officers was limited to issuing instructions to people to leave their houses and offering help through words of comfort or through carrying the bags of the evacuated. This was a point the Director of the GMR particularly stressed:

I wish to underline that, during the evacuation phase of the Vieux Port district, GMR personnel showed themselves extremely well-disposed and devoted to the population whose distress they shared.52

The Resistance report made a similar claim underlining that the Police had been ‘90% with the population’, although it should be noted that a certain amount of the looting from evacuated houses was subsequently attributed to the Police.53 Even previously collaborationist Police officers were said to have tears in their eyes at the sight of these operations.54 The population, for their part, railed against Vichy’s involvement in this operation, even in some cases, such as the priest of the Eglise St Laurent, claiming that the Germans had been used by Vichy as a cheap way of implementing the Beaudouin plan. Particularly denounced were the destruction of the houses, the arrest of ‘respectable’ people amongst those taken and the injustice in the difference between the brutal way these people had been made homeless and the much more civilised way in which the Germans had taken over the homes of a number of rich property owners in the rue Paradis in November 1942. One witness has described how the rubble remained ‘like a Verdun in the city center’ until 1948. Two months after the port had closed down Marseille had lost another essential part of its character. The Prefect was threatened with popular vengeance by a correspondent who claimed that:

51 AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943. 52 AD BDR 56W 71, déclarations de l’ancien directeur des GMR, 16 November 1944. 53 André Ducasse, “Chronique du Vieux Port en Guerre, 1939-45”, Arts et Livres de Provence, n° 31 (special edition), 1957, p 87. 54 AN F1a 3922, CNI rapport n° RIII, n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax.O3. 3/14, 1 February 1943. For the question of pillaging see for example: AD BDR 56W 71, déclarations de Robert Auzanneau, 7 November 1944; A. Sauvageot, Marseille dans la tourmente, p 210. 162 Chapter 7

In 1812 under Napoléon, discontent reached the same levels as today and when the Marseillais saw English ships docked they wondered whether the real enemy was the English or the Emperor’s government.55

Another correspondent warned that the operations had done no end of good to the communists, whilst a Resistance document claimed that no propaganda could have achieved the same effects as those produced by this operation.56 However, the Gaullists regretted the loss of a district in which they had made considerable inroads and spoke of the fear which the operation had instilled in their ranks.57 Overall in the Vieux Port incident, the Police carried out Vichy’s wishes. This might be taken to suggest that ultimately the weight of the institution counted for far more than their concern for public opinion. Many would see in Police obedience an example of traditional civil servants caught in the spiral of passive acceptance of the will of their government and believing that they owed the same sort of obedience to Vichy as to the Republic. Such a view would not be entirely founded. There were certainly those who continued to believe that their function was to serve the government, but obedience had not been the dominant legacy of the 1930s. The hierarchical pressures exerted on Police officers during these operations were incomparable with anything they had experienced in Third Republic France. But the emphasis on obedience would cause one to ignore any question of a community of interests between Vichy and its Police. By the beginning of 1943, Police officers had begun to have considerable reservations about Vichy, particularly as regards Police wages and Vichy’s Anglophobia, but this did not exclude marriages of convenience between the two. The belief that if the operations were kept in the hands of the French they would be carried out less brutally and would offer greater possibility for selection of those to be rounded-up was a common denominator between many Police officers and Vichy on this issue. It was in this perspective the Police could claim to be serving the population’s interests by serving Vichy. The flaw in this logic is the fact that had Vichy forces refused the operation, then the round-ups would have been extremely limited indeed as the Germans had neither the manpower nor the local knowledge to perform them on a similar scale.

55 AD BDR M6 10988, F. Gireuil à M le Préfet des BDR, 30 January 1943. 56 AD BDR M6 11019 Edouard Garnier à M le Préfet des BDR, 9 February 1943; E. Pasque à M le Préfet, 16 February 1943; Monsignor Delay à M le Préfet, 24 January 1943; MM les direc teurs des journaux de Marseille à M le Préfet, 27 January 1943. For the effect on the Resis- tance see AN F1a 3922, CNI, A/M AX.03 3/10, Mazur 1, “France politique”, 16 February 1943. 57 AN F1a 3922, CNI, A/M AX.03 3/10, Mazur 1, “France politique”, 16 February 1943. Disaffection And Unreliability 163

CHAPTER 8 Disaffection and Unreliability

The Police were emerging as an essential tool of collaboration, vital to Vichy’s external political objectives. The prominent place held in Franco-German negotiations by questions of policing became even more paramount as Vichy lost most of its other early bargaining counters. Once the Empire was occupied by the Allies and the French fleet sunk, pretty much the only things left to Vichy to negotiate after November 1942 were the collaboration of State administrations and the resources of French industry and agriculture. The potential importance of the French Police from a German perspective should not be underestimated. Vichy’s obsession with sovereignty and willingness to do the Nazis’ dirty work for them, could allow the Germans to occupy France with the minimum deployment of German Police and military resources. In 1942 it had been decided to renegotiate the terms of Police collaboration, which hitherto had been conditioned by article 3 of the 1940 armistice instructing French administrations to collaborate correctly with the Germans. René Bousquet, Vichy’s Secretary General in charge of the Police, was concerned that the Police in the Northern Zone was not adequately under his control, as the Germans often requisitioned them for joint Police missions. He was also worried that, in the period September 1941 to May 1942, the Germans had executed 471 civilian hostages in reprisal for Resistance attacks against German military personnel.1 Bousquet’s wish was that a more efficient Police force would deter the Germans from intervening directly. On the German side, it was hoped more than ever to be able to use French administrations for the application of Nazi policy. This would spare German personnel needed in other thea- tres of operation. So a new basis for Police collaboration was established in the form of the ‘Bousquet-Oberg agreements’ of August 1942.2 Oberg, the SS General recently given charge of German security in France, heeded Bousquet’s warning that the Police were suffering from a patriotic identity crisis. He recognised the independence of the French Police. The Germans would henceforth refrain from issuing direct orders to the Police and agreed to pass through the proper administrative channels. The Germans also agreed to abandon the collective execution of civilian hostages, although in fact they still executed 254 between

1 Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, Oxford, 2001, p 182. 2 AN 3W 92, Evidence from Karl Oberg, 16 April 1947.

May 1942 and December 1943.3 The French courts were to be given jurisdiction to try those arrested by the French Police, except in cases where a crime explicitly targeted the Germans. The French side of the bargain was that they would increase their campaign against ‘terrorism, anarchism and communism’. The agreements were extended to the newly occupied Southern zone in the spring of 1943. The application of the agreements to the southern zone was partly as a result of a worrying growth in Resistance there. In Marseille, an increase in clandestine activity was particularly evident in the first few months of 1943. The spreading of Resistance messages became more prolific in both quantity and in the methods used for their dissemination.4 Armed Resistance in Mar- seille also became more active with no fewer than 20 armed attacks on Occu- pation troops, members of the Milice or Police officers in the months of March through to May.5 These included a coach belonging to the Wehrmacht being blown up; bombs being thrown at German barracks in the Boulevard Oddo, Boulevard Garibaldi and the rue Peysonnel; a motorcyclist firing on German soldiers with a pistol in the Boulevard National and 30 shots fired from a car at a group of German soldiers in the Boulevard Longchamp. During the same period 2 of the leading members of the fascist Milice organisation in Marseille were assassinated. Overall, there were 218 separate recorded incidents of Resistance guerrilla attacks and acts of sabotage between January 1943 and August 1944.6 By the middle of 1943, however, it became apparent that the Police were not fully trusted by either Vichy or the Germans.7 Widespread disaffection had

3 Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, Oxford, 2001, p 217. 4 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 28 March-3 April 1943. The RG noted that Resistance propaganda was increasingly obvious following German setbacks in Tuni- sia: AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 17-23 April 1943. 5 AD BDR M6 11073, Rapports du Chef d’escadron, Commandant la Compagnie de Gendar- merie Nationale des Bouches-du-Rhône, sur la physionomie du département du 20 mars au 20 avril & pour le mois de mai 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Rapport du Lt. Colonel, Com- mandant la 15e Légion, mai 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletins Hebdomadaires de RG, de mars à mai 1943. 6 Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France, Palgrave, 2004, p 101. 7 Simon Kitson, ‘L’évolution de la Résistance dans la Police marseillaise’, in Jean-Marie Guil- lon & Robert Menchérini (eds), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud, Paris, 2000, pp 257- 270; Robert Zaretsky, Nîmes at war, Penn State UP, 1995, pp 208-211; John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1994, p 185; Peter Lieb, ‘Répression et massacre’, in Eissmann & Martens (eds), Occupation et répression, p 173; Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat, Paris, 1997, p 402; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doc- toral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, p 302. Disaffection And Unreliability 165 set in within Police ranks, both at the national and local level, a fact recognised by sources from all sides. The Germans complained of the ‘general political attitude of Police officers and gendarmes who refuse to collaborate with the German Police’,8 argued that ‘Senior officers in the Army and the Gendarmerie, high-ranking officials within the Police and the Administration are working for the enemy’9 and that the ‘fight against the patriotic forces of the Resistance receives only feeble backing from the French Police’, and drew the conclusion that ‘today, we should count less than ever in the case of an emergency on the French Police to intervene in whatever measure to defend German interests’.10 SS chief Himmler noted that ‘The French Police can be used, up to a point, in work against Com- munists. It is unreliable in the repression of activity conducted under the ban- ner of French patriotism’.11 In August 1943, Oberg, the supreme head of the SS in France, claimed to Schleier of the German Embassy that ‘in the whole of the French police he could see only a few individuals who were completely honest in their collaboration [with the Germans]’.12 Collaborationist parties were also on their guard. The far-right Franciste party issued instructions to its members ‘to distrust the Police’.13 The neo- socialist Marcel Déat claimed that ‘the regular Police forces of the State are not reliable’.14 Drawing on these remarks he underlined the necessity of giving increased powers to the Milice. The Milice, for their part, accused the Police of complicity with the Resistance.15 As for the PPF, the Renseignements Géné raux reported that ‘the leaders of the PPF and many of its militants maintain within the party an unfavourable view of the Police’.16 In Marseille Sabiani complained that Police officers were unwilling to help the government and that ‘apart from a few Gendarmes, rare were the Police officers who had been

8 AN F7 14890 [101], le commandant en chef des SS en France à M. le Président Laval, 18 October 1943. 9 AN F7 14890 [A101], le commandant en chef ouest (Rundstedt) à M. le Maréchal Pétain, 11 November 1943. 10 AN F1a 3848, Internal memo of Dr Knochen, 19 August1943, intercepted and translated by the Commissariat National à l’Intérieur. 11 Jean Elleinstein (et al), Histoire de la France Contemporaine, 1789-1940, Vol. VI ‘1940-1947’, Paris, 1980, p 170. 12 AN 3W 89, Schleier to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Berlin, 3 August 1943. 13 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 6-12 December 1943. 14 Marcel Déat, “la tâche civique des Miliciens”, L’oeuvre, 16 July 1943. 15 AD BDR M6 11077, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 6-12 September 1943. 16 AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 17-23 April 1943. 166 Chapter 8 victims of the terrorists’.17 PPF leaders drew up a list of politically suspect Police officers to be arrested in the event of an allied landing and demanded a thorough purge of the institution.18 The Resistance, for their part, made a distinction between the hierarchy and the grass roots:

as regards the attitude of the French Police towards the policy of collaboration practised by the Vichy government, a distinction must be made between the senior hierarchy and the junior ranks. The former: directeurs, sous-directeurs, Intendants Régionaux and Contrôleurs Généraux (with a few rare exceptions in this last category) have, from the beginning, followed the government and continue to do so. The latter: Com- missaires, Inspecteurs and Gardiens have, in a very large proportion, behaved well.19

Roger Chevrier broadcasting on the BBC on 16 June 1943 in the series ‘Les Français parlent aux Français’ stated that: ‘when we refer to the “Vichy Police”, it goes without saying that we are not speaking of the whole of the French Police of which, we know, the majority are behaving as good patriots, but rather of the minority of sad individuals who have deliberately put themselves in the service of the enemy.’20 As for the British, they claimed that: ‘the increase of organised Resistance combined with the action of refugees in the Maquis has proved too great a task for the French Police to handle, particularly as many of its members are anti- German and their sympathies are with the resisting element of the population’. They insisted that, in the event of the replacement of the Vichy regime by one recognised by the French people, ‘there is no reason to doubt that the Police will fulfil its function loyally and efficiently’.21

17 AN F60 1668, réunion des dirigeants du PPF, 24 October 1943. 18 AD BDR M6 11077, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 13-19 September 1943. 19 AN F1a 3729, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur, “Note pour M. Boris”, London, 28 Octo- ber 1943. 20 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les voix de la Liberté, Paris, 1975, Vol. 3, p 183. In other BBC Resistance programs similar statements are made by Maurice Schumann in the ‘Honneur et Patrie’ broadcasts of 22 March and 5 April 1943, Idem, p 118 & 129. 21 Foreign Office, France Basic Handbook, part III: France since June 1940, London, 1944, p 61-62. The information in this handbook was dated November 1943. Disaffection And Unreliability 167

Even many Vichy sources acknowledged this situation.22 By the end of 1943, Vichy’s feeling that the Police was politically untrustworthy even affected certain branches which had hitherto been judged relatively loyal. Thus, Bousquet complained in November 1943 that:

Unfortunately it has been noted that many attacks on GMR stations by [Resistance] groups of varying size who sometimes are unarmed or virtually unarmed, lead to the disarming of our Police officers without them even putting up a fight. Everyone hides behind statements which refer to masked men with machine guns. If such an attitude continues it will seriously hinder our activities, and cast a doubt on the loyalty of our men.23

At the local level, senior administrators were even more convinced that the Police were unreliable. In May 1943, Regional Prefect Lemoine wrote to Pierre Laval concerning the Marseille Police in the following terms:

The attitude of the Police is similar, at the grass roots level, to that of the population more generally. Results are only obtained by constant badger- ing from hierarchical superiors... It seems appropriate therefore to consider a systematic plan for the transfer of the entire Marseille Police force ….24

Why had the Police become so unreliable and disaffected with their lot? Prefect Lemoine’s acknowledgement that the Police were offering so little satisfaction to Vichy that the entire Marseille Police should be transferred was couched in tones suggesting that this was partly a question of poor organisation of services and of the corruption of its civil servants.25 Lemoine underlined that, owing to the fact that most Inspecteurs and Commissaires had been

22 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 35. 23 AN F1a 3766, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM. les Commandants des GMR, n° 499-3711 Pol GMR C.B., 25 November 1943, intercepted by the Commissariat National à l’Intérieur. This letter also features in the Police circulars in AN F7 14909. 24 Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau] MI 26205, 860679, art 4; le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, n° 00347, 22 May 1943 25 There were numerous examples of accusations of corruption within the administration generally and the Police in particular. See for example: AD BDR M6 11074, Rapport journalier des RG, 11 June 1943; AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 5-11 July 1943; AD BDR, M6 11078 RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 September-3 October 1943; AD BDR, 168 Chapter 8 in the city for a number of years, habits had been formed ‘whose main draw- back is that they give priority to individual interests above the requirement to serve’. This was accompanied by complaints that hierarchical control was poor with Commissaires preoccupied by their administrative functions and that the organisation of this Police for a city of 800,000 inhabitants was based on the model proposed for towns of 50,000. There was nothing new in such allegations and they were certainly not entirely invalid. Many instances of corruption continued within he Police. A Police auxiliary in the Intendant’s office was eventually dismissed when it was learnt that he was making apartments available to his friends which he had officially requisitioned for the needs of the administration.26 When the press published details of a law forbidding Police officers from receiving any hand-outs in the course of their duty, Police officers complained that it cast aspersions on their moral integrity. The public, for their part, were said to have commented that if the government had taken such a measure it clearly had reasons for doing so: ‘The numerous comments overheard on this theme give the impression that public servants are treated with suspicion and in particular Police officers who are far from being liked at the moment’.27 The RG quoted a member of the public as saying: ‘The Popular Front was never as corrupt or as despicable as the current State’.28 The Police were also clearly dissatisfied with both the rewards they could take from their job and the equipment with which they were expected to work. Vichy had promised that France would have ‘a Police force worthy of her’ and this had led to an expectation of an influx of resources into the Police. These promises had either been reneged on or any input of resources had been accompanied by a massive increase in demands on the Police.29 The question of Police wages was a subject of huge discontent.The RG reporting on opinion within Police ranks suggested that the question of wages should not be seen just on a material level but also on a moral level because it was poor remuneration which opened up the Police to the temptations of corruption and the frequent bribes they were offered. The report underlined that ‘It would seem that it is too often forgotten that an Inspecteur earning

55W 162, rapport de la résistance, Polygone CE, RJ 973, dated 15 August 1944 but referring to events which took place at the end of 1943. 26 AD BDR 55W 162, Report on activity of Félix Roche, 15 August 1944. 27 AD M6 11074, Rapport Journalier des RG, 11 June 1943, 28 AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 5-11 July 1943. 29 AN F1A 4539, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs, ‘Répartition des attribu- tions et effectifs’, 1941; AN F1A 4539, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs (signé M. Breton), Objet: fonctionnement des Services Régionaux de Police, Vichy, le 20 September 1943; AN AJ41 626, Effectifs de la Police de la Région de Marseille, 18 June 1942. Disaffection And Unreliability 169

2500 francs a month or a young Commissaire on 3000 have daily contact with traffickers who amass fortunes and often spend more in a day than a Police officer earns in a month’, before citing the case of a Commissaire who had recently found himself alone in a hotel room with a trafficker of gold who offered him 400 000 francs in return for the Police officer closing his eyes to his illegal activity.30 At the end of 1943 the government made concessions to the desire to see a wage increase. However, this improvement had the opposite effect to that desired. Believing that it was the Gardiens de la Paix and the Inspecteurs de la Police Nationale who were most in need of a pay rise, Vichy increased their income without offering similar advantages to their colleagues. The Rensei- gnements Généraux reported that ‘the plain clothed personnel- especially the Secrétaires de Police and Inspecteurs rightly consider themselves disadvan- taged compared to the uniformed personnel’ stressing that these plain-clothed Police officers ‘feel humiliated’, ‘consider themselves the “outcasts” of the Police family’ and that ‘the loyalty of this personnel towards the government appears greatly compromised’.31 To make matters worse this improvement in the wages of uniformed officers was followed by the allocation of an accommodation subsidy which was not applicable to Commissaires, Inspecteurs (either of the Police Nationale or the Police Régionale d’Etat) or Secrétaires de Police. Bachelors amongst the Gardiens de la Paix were also exempt from its benefits.32 Besides hostility to Vichy, these wage rises also increased friction between different branches of the institution: ‘at present a veiled hostility can be detected between the Secrétaires and Inspecteurs of the Police Régionale d’Etat on the one hand and the Inspecteurs of the Police Nationale and the Gardiens de la Paix on the other’.33 In the private domain accommodation posed a growing problem, particularly as transfer was increasingly being used as a means of punishing unenthusiastic officers or on the other hand as a way of protecting those whose security could no longer be guaranteed in a particular locality because their zeal had ostracised them from the greater part of the locals.34 One Commissaire who was moved from Nîmes to Marseille in 1941 and from Marseille to Arles at the

30 AD BDR M6 11078, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 September to 3 October 1943. 31 AD BDR M6 11079 RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 2-10 January 1944, 10-16 January 1944 & 17-23 January 1944. 32 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 January 1944. 33 AD BDR M6 11079 RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 2-10 January 1944. 34 AN F7 14909 [986], Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 515 Pol 4 Circ, 10 December 1943. 170 Chapter 8 beginning of 1943 found himself sleeping on a camp bed in his office at the end of that year when he was transferred back to Marseille. His sick wife and children remained in Nîmes throughout. The importance of this question of transfer of personnel is highlighted by the situation in the 2nd district (‘arron dissement’) of Marseille which had been controlled by four Commissaires in the twenty years prior to Vichy but where eight different Commissaires occupied this post between 1941 and 1944.35 From late 1943 instructions began to be issued nationally to limit the use of transfers for disciplinary reasons. Govern- ment officials had started to take note of the disruption caused by excessive use of this punishment, in particular since transport problems seriously limited their possibilities of moving furniture and a housing crisis made it increasingly difficult for them to find accommodation on their modest incomes.36 Marseille was also experiencing severe shortages of food and supplies which provides an obvious explanation why mortality rates in the city rose by 57% during the period 1940-44 and only 50% of new babies born in the city in 1942 survived their first few months.37 Police officers were not immune from these shortages. Some Police officers do seem to have taken advanatage of their authority to gain access to supplies of food. A public complaint was made against the Commissaire in the 17th arrondissement who was said to be using his status to receive under the counter supplies in the back room of local shops. The complaint from local residents was passed by the Commissariat Central on to the Commissaire of the 17th arrondissement himself for investigation.38 Members of the mobile branches of the police were at an advantage with regards to obtaining food: the Brigades Régionales de Police de Sûreté and the GMR could use their mobility to stock up with supplies in the rural areas that their professional duties allowed them to visit. In the case of the GMR, the wearing of a uniform could often serve as a protection for this sort of illicit activity. Joseph Bronzini of the GMR Mistral remembered the situation as follows: ‘I often used to head off to the Tarn département to stock up with food. Because I was wearing a uniform, I was able to pass through Police controls without being checked and I managed to feed the whole family’.39 This branch

35 Fontainebleau 860679, art 4, Contrôle des Commissariats d’arrondissements de la ville de Marseille, rapport n° 164, 31 March 1944. 36 AN F7 14909 (1128), Directeur de la Police National à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 53 pol 4 circ, 14 February 1944; AN F7 14909 (1320), Directeur de la Police National à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 274 Pol 2 circ, 19 June 1944. 37 Paul Sanders, Histoire du marché noir, 1940-1946, Paris, 2001, pp 158-159. 38 AD BDR 56W 106, P.-V. Auguste Santoni, Gardien Auxiliaire, 13 February 1945. 39 Oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, 10 May 93. Disaffection And Unreliability 171 also benefited from free lunches during periods of service.40 For other branches food shortages were aggravated by the poor wages offered to civil servants which limited their access to expensive black market supplies. Many Police officers griped about the difficulties of access to food in a time of hardship. The suppression of the holidays of civil servants beginning in July 1943 prevented Police officers from spending extended periods with relatives in country areas where they would have been able to purchase food supplies directly from their source.41 Lack of holidays, lack of food and poor morale resulting from insufficient wages undermined their capacity to carry out their professional tasks. In this domain, many Police officers were being called upon to work between 16 and 18 hours a day owing to the fact that Police manpower had not increased as rapidly as the services demanded of them leaving the personnel exhausted and their morale at a new ebb.42 Police stations were said to be in a deplorable state. Of course this had already been a complaint before the war, but the situation had been worsened by Vichy’s general indifference to the working conditions of its employees. The extension of the number of Police services, required the requisition of new buildings which were often not suitable for their current use, and in many cases no attempt had been made to adapt them to this use. Writing in March 1944, the Inspection des Commissariats was highly critical of the state of Mar- seille Police stations. Hanging above the entrance to the Commissariat in the 1st arrondissement there was still a sign with the name of the bar that had previously occupied the building. The Inspection recommended strongly that this should be replaced by a sign indicating the presence of a Police station. The 16th arrondissement station came in for heavy criticism:

This Police station gives a wretched impression. It has been installed in a disused butcher’s shop and the hooks are still visible on the ceiling! The premises are badly laid out, the walls decrepit; the Commissaire’s office looks more like a guardroom. Furniture is non-existent. For the dignity of the Police officers, new premises must be found urgently. There isn’t even a type writer.

The 22nd arrondissement was no better equipped:

40 AD BDR M6 11078, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 September-3 October 1943. 41 AD BDR M6 11081, RG Rapport Journalier, 28 July 1943. 42 AN F7 14909 [993] Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 537-4551 POL/GMR/P, 28 December 1943. 172 Chapter 8

Completely ridiculous premises, 2 dirty rooms and a badly laid out corri- dor. No furniture apart from the chairs! Abandoned by the post office because it was too narrow and awkward, it was then passed on to the Police! As a matter of urgency, this station should be transferred elsewhere, be properly furnished and equipped with at least one type writer.43

The age old question of the arming of the Police also re-emerged with renewed vigour. As a monopoly on the authorised use of force is recognised by specialists of the institution as a key component of policing, it is not surprising that the sense of being disarmed should be such a sensitive issue for Police officers. This feeling was encouraged by a number of factors: Nazi reluctance to agree to French demands for better arming of its Police services as a result both of Ger- man mistrust of Police personnel and the fear that these arms would fall into the hands of the Resistance; Resistance attacks against Police officers which reinforced the idea that their Brownings were insufficient in comparison to the Colts of their attackers; the fact that owing to staff shortages training in the use of arms was inadequate. This was a point that Bousquet particularly underlined claiming that: ‘at the moment the majority of the French Police has never been given the possibility to learn how to handle the weapons they might be called upon to use’.44 The Police were having to refuse a number of the tasks demanded of them as the personnel was increasingly absorbed in static guard duties protecting public buildings, particularly those occupied by the Germans, from Resistance attacks.45 In September 1943, Bousquet drew up a list of the percentage of the Police Urbaine given over to this type of activity. The percentages varied greatly from one city to the next, with only 10% of the Police in Toulouse being used for this activity compared to 52.5% in Paris. In two cities, Châteauroux and Marseille, 100% of the Police Urbaine was confined to static guard duties. To compensate for this the Prefect drafted in the GMR to make available some officers from the Corps Urbain for regular Police duty. Bousquet complained of this practice arguing that it gave the GMR too much direct contact with the public and that it undermined their training programmes and threatened their

43 Fontainebleau 860679, art 4, Contrôle des Commissariats d’arrondissements de la ville de Marseille, rapport n° 164, 31 March 1944. 44 AN F7 14907, PN cab A n° 1304/3, 21 September 1943. 45 AN F7 14908 [849], Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, n° 335 Pol 8 Circ, 29 July 1943; AN F7 14909, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 477 SG- Pol Circ STMO, 12 November 1943. Disaffection And Unreliability 173 cohesion.46 Moreover regular Police duties were increasingly consisting of tasks that Police officers generally find uninteresting and unconnected with the duties they expected in this profession, such as the delivery of summons for the STO or the guarding of railway lines.47 Overall, the Police had the feeling of being badly equipped to deal with the demands of their job. This sentiment was aggravated by a sense that the work they were being asked to do often fell outside the scope of what they considered proper Police work or raised concerns about whether it was really in the national interest. This was especially the case with regard to the application of the ‘Oberg- Bousquet agreements’ which ordered that anyone suspected of indulging in activity aimed directly at the German authorities would be handed over by the French to the Nazis for judgement. These agreements had come into effect in the Southern zone on 18 April 1943 and were to receive their first application with the arrest in Marseille of the communist Jacques Cassone. In March 1943 Cassone and his group of Franc-Tireurs et Partisans had planted explosives on the railway line 400 metres from the Le Canet station with a view to derailing a train full of German soldiers which was due to pass at that time. Three house- wives who lived in the vicinity became suspicious of their activity and promptly rang the station-master who contacted the Gendarmerie. Aware that their activity was being watched, the saboteurs made a botch job and the explosives detonated after the passage of the train, causing minor damage to the track but inflicting no casualties. Cassone was later caught and charged with illegal possession of a pistol. A violent interrogation by the specialist anti-Resistance branch, the Section des Affaires Politiques, followed and Cassone admitted his involvement in the attack on the railway line. He was handed over to the French courts who opened a procedure against him for communist activity. In June the German authorities became interested in the case and demanded that the courts give up the suspect to a German tribunal. At first the French authorities stalled claiming that they were awaiting the results of medical tests on the suspect and arguing that Cassone’s activity was not aimed at the Ger- man soldiers on the train, but rather at the French railway line. Vichy quickly backed down and agreed to give up Cassone to the Occupation authorities.

46 AN 3W 89, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 333 SG/Pol Circ/ SMO, 27 July 1943. Cf also AN F7 14894, le délégué du Secrétaire Général au Maintien de l’Ordre à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 26 January 1944. 47 Fontainebleau 860679, art 4, Contrôle des Commissariats d’arrondissements de la ville de Marseille, rapport n° 164, 31 March 1944. 174 Chapter 8

When informed that Cassone had been handed over the Police began to protest. At the meeting of Commissaires Divisionnaires in Vichy on 4 and 5 August, the head of the Police de Sûreté in Marseille informed his counterparts and Pierre Laval that some of his subordinates were threatening to resign if Vichy continued to hand over to the Germans individuals whom they had arrested.48 Two days later Commissaire Elie Tudesq put this threat into practice. The resignation letter, which he addressed to Bousquet, justified his decision in the following manner:

The handing over to the Gestapo of Frenchmen arrested and interrogated by us transforms French Policemen into suppliers for German firing squads. I cannot accept that. On this question I am totally convinced that the French Police, with the exception of a few stray sheep, share my feelings. I am therefore writing to let you know that, with immediate effect, I am resigning from my role as director of the 9th Brigade of the Police de Sûreté.49

A month after his resignation, Commissaire Tudesq, on mission for the Ajax Resistance network, was shot and very seriously wounded by German soldiers in the station in Orange; an attack which showed every sign of having been carefully organised and appeared to be connected with this resignation.50 On the day that Tudesq resigned from the Police a report written by Commissaire Robert Matteï of the Section des Affaires Politiques concerning another case began with the following phrase:

I am writing to inform you of the results of the investigation which I carried out according to your instructions and after having received the assurance from the Regional Intendant de Police that in no circumstances would the individuals implicated in this case be handed over to them [the Germans].51

48 Le Franc-Tireur, n° 22, 25 August 1943. 49 AN 3W 88, le Commissaire Principal Tudesq à M. le Secrétaire Général à la Police., 7 August 1943. 50 AD BDR M6 11077, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 6-12 September 1943; AN 3W 88 [84] evidence from Elie Tudesq, 20 April 1945. On this question also see: http://www.aassdn.org/ xldd11122.htm. 51 Archives des Groupes-Francs de Marseille, Le Commissaire de Police de Sûreté Robert Matteï de la SAP à M. le CD, Police de Sûreté, n° 2179 SAP, 7 August 1943. I am grateful to Madeleine Baudoin for making this document available to me. For further information on this case see the evidence presented by the individual arrested Madeleine Baudoin, Disaffection And Unreliability 175

That the officer concerned with this case had sought this assurance of the Intendant de Police before completing his inquiry cannot be ascribed to simple opportunism. It is true that this report does contain certain phrases which might suggest that its author is trying to pre-empt a post-Liberation purge by displaying a favourable attitude to victims of Nazism (the report underlines in particular the idea that Jews are ‘victims’ of the events of the war) but it should be remembered that the subject of this investigation was an anarchist and that no one expected the anarchists to occupy important functions in the post-liberation authorities. Moreover, Commissaire Matteï insisted that this individual was dangerous but in a different way than the Gaullists or the communists were dangerous, expressions which were unlikely to endear him to a potential purger. This same Commissaire later published his memoirs in which he made no secret of his belief that the position of the Police under Vichy necessitated an accommodation to the circumstances of Nazi Occupation and the compromises that implied.52 Whether they adopted a position favourable to the Resistance, like Commis- saire Tudesq, or the more neutral stance, favoured by Commissaire Matteï, there can be no doubting that many Police officers were profoundly shocked by the handing over to the Germans of those they had arrested. Indeed the thought that Police officers might lose the notion of working in their national interest if too many people were handed over to the Nazis had been one of the ideas Bousquet himself had raised during the negotiations of the ‘Oberg-Bous- quet agreements’. The feeling of having been manipulated and used against the national interest was one which embittered a number of Police officers such as the Commissaire of Aubagne, of solid Resistance credentials, who later claimed:

Everyone who was in the Police knows how much Vichy gave us the formal assurance that in no circumstances would those pursued for crimes against French law be handed over to the Nazis. Certainly, we rapidly realised that the government was not keeping its word (...). We Police officers have experienced four particularly hard and difficult years. Vichy took advantage of the professional conscience of civil servants.53

‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Doctoral Thesis (History), Université de Provence, 1977, pp 189-202. 52 Robert Matteï, Le Florentin, Paris, 1979. 53 AD BDR 56W 79, le Commissaire de Police d’Aubagne à M le Président du Comité d’Epuration d’Aubagne, 10 September 1944. 176 Chapter 8

This reluctance to hand over Resisters to the Germans is probably the major reason for the dramatic decline in the activity of the SAP, the anti-Resistance branch of the Police. Between the beginning of December 1942 and the end of May 1943, the Marseille SAP arrested 135 individuals for political activity (68 communists, 16 Gaullists and 51 where the affiliation was not specified). For the 6 months from the beginning of June to the end of November there were only 53 arrests (19 communists, 1 Gaullist and 33 unspecified). This decline in efficiency is particularly marked in the period from the beginning of August after which only 1 communist and no Gaullists were arrested and 15 individuals who the SAP refused to categorise under either one of these labels. That they refused to categorise these cases is in itself significant because it suggests either that they were having difficulty deciding who was communist and who was Gaullist or more likely that, as the Communists and the Gaullists drew closer together and their tactics became more similar, these disctinctions became less important. And if the distinctions became less important it became more difficult for the institution to mobilise the anti-Communist feelings of the Police as an incentive for professional zeal. This example of a massive decline in efficiency highlights that there was also a directly political dimension to the unreliability of the Police. In his May 1943 report Prefect Lemoine had underlined:

Public order cannot be maintained when Senior Administrators are confronted with a tendency for feet-dragging from their subordinates and a marked trend towards indiscipline on the political level.54

Of course, this reference should be put in its context. The idea that the Police might defect in questions of public order shows that a ‘syndrome of 14 July 1942’ was deeply entrenched in the senior administration following on from Police failure to crack down on Resistance demonstrations on that Bastille day. Moreover, this syndrome had been reinforced by the arrest of a Police chauffeur by the SAP in February 1943 and that of 6 Police officers by the Gestapo in April and May for acts of Resistance.55 But Lemoine’s belief that his Police was

54 Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau] MI 26205, 860679, art 4; le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, n° 00347, 22 May 1943 55 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 2-8 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11078bis, intercepted documents of the Noyautage des Administrations Publiques, 18 February 1943; Maurice Chevance-Bertin, Vingt mille heures d’angoisses, 1940-45, Paris, 1990, pp 118- 126. Disaffection And Unreliability 177 won over to the Gaullists was more than just a passing notion. In September 1943, the Inspecteur responsible for the protection of this senior administrator organised a meeting between the Prefect and Horace Manicacci, the head of the underground socialist party in Marseille, during which the Prefect confessed his belief that Manicacci controlled the loyalty of 90% of Marseille Police officers, thereby suggesting that the Police were once again being influenced partly by ‘alternative hierarchies’ from outside the institution.56 Lemoine declared it probable that the Police would defect to the Resistance in the event of an Allied landing.57 The reference to the socialist party here reminds us of the importance of pre-war networks in encouraging Police opposition. In the 1930s the majority of Marseille Police personnel had belonged to professional associations which were dominated by socialists and Free-Masons. Given that, in 1938, 16% of the Marseille Police were born in Corsica it should not be totally surprising to learn that often these socialists and Free-Masons were, like Manicacci, of Corsican descent. It is significant that the rapprochement between Police and Resist ance in Marseille materialised when the underground socialist party started to hold an increasingly prominent position within the local Gaullist movement.58 The socialist party had not only been the dominant political influence on the Marseille Police at the end of the 1930s, but socialists had continued to try to reorganise structures for personnel within the institution under Vichy. Thus, the socialist Secrétaire de Police, Xavier Culioli, born in the Corsican village of Sotta, had attempted to re-establish a Police trade union in April 1941 and towards the end of 1942 had drawn up lists on behalf of the underground socialist party of those who should be allowed to stay in the institution at the Liberation.59 Pre-existing ‘circles of influence’ could affect the attitude and behaviour of Police officers by forming ‘alternative hierarchies’, but it was obvious that the Police were also subjected to great pressure from Resistance groups who directed leaflets at them insisting on their ‘duty to disobey’60 and suggesting

56 AN 3W 236 [21 RB], evidence from Horace Manicacci, Director of “Le Provençal”, 22 May 1945. 57 AN 3W 236 [21 RB], evidence from Horace Manicacci, Director of “Le Provençal”, 22 May 1945. 58 Maurice Chevance-Bertin, Vingt mille heures, Paris, 1990, p 111. 59 Gabriel Xavier Culioli, La Terre des Seigneurs, un siècle de la vie d’une famille corse, Paris, 1986. 60 AN F7 14888, Resistance tract “La voix de la France”, 1943 but exact date not indicated. This tract is inspired by a speech by the communist Fernand Grenier to the Comité Français de Libération. 178 Chapter 8 that ‘you will be personally and fully accountable in the peoples’ courts in liberated France’.61 The Police undoubtedly had more access to Resistance propaganda than any other sector of society. Not only were specific tracts being aimed to them but they were charged with removing propaganda from public places and analysing documentation seized in the houses of Resisters.62 Such an onslaught of information could scarcely go without influencing some members of the forces of order. If guidance could come from extra-administrative forces such as the Resist- ance or underground political parties, some junior Police officers could find themselves pushed towards Resistance by their hierarchical superiors, if these latter were that way disposed. Between February 1943 and January 1944 the Intendant de Police in Marseille was Robert Andrieu. Born in the Tarn in 1908, Andrieu was a law graduate who had risen to the rank of Sub-Prefect before this posting in Marseille.63 He was himself a member of the Sécurité Militaire Clandestine network and in this capacity offered important services to the Resistance. He was respected by his personnel and his activity during his period as Intendant served as a reference point in the post-war trials of other senior Police officials. But his influence in this respect on junior personnel outside of his immediate sphere of influence should not be exaggerated. Unlike his predecessor, Andrieu did not attempt to run the entire Marseille Police single-handed and re-delegated responsibilities to the Commissaires Division- naires, who were officially responsible for the various services of the Police. Moreover, his occupation of the post of Intendant coincided with a period when the Germans directly occupied the region, where their demands were particular heavy and where Vichy was especially keen to satisfy these demands and attempted to tighten its control over the Intendants. The Intendant found himself subjected to the constraints of Vichy but also complained that his services were under constant supervision from the ‘Gestapo’. In these circumstances, the contact most rank and file officers had with the Intendant were through the circulars sent down from his services, which were in turn copied off circulars issued by Vichy. The rank and file were much more directly subjected to the influence of the junior hierarchy, brigadiers and Inspecteurs-chefs, and in some cases to that of the Commissaires. One particular case, worth highlighting was that of

61 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 51. 62 AN F60 1689, CNI, “tracts adressés à la Police”, February 1943. 63 Anonymous, Dictionnaire Biographique Francais Contemporain, Paris, Second Edition, 1954. Disaffection And Unreliability 179

Commissaire Auguste Clary, appointed Sous-Chef de la Sûreté in 1940. In this capacity, and in an informal manner through lessons he gave to his subordinates, he was able to offer guidance to his underlings.64 But Clary was also a contact of the Gaullist group Combat and offered it services.65 In particular, he organised the escape of the head of Combat’s intelligence service, Jean Gemäh- ling, from the Prison Chave at the beginning of 1943. For this operation he solicited the help of one of his Inspecteurs, Raymond Berg, who was absent on sick-leave.66 Berg presented himself at the prison on the appointed day, complete with an authorisation for the transfer of Gemähling. After Berg had handed over Gemähling to Clary and the heads of Combat, he was told to take the precaution of finding refuge with a Gardien de la Paix friend in Grasse until the end of April, when Clary informed him that he could come back to Mar- seille. Amongst the established movements of Resistance ‘Combat’ was undoubtedly the one which attracted the most Police officers in Marseille. Indeed some Resisters complained that there were too many Police officers within this movement.67 Such was the influence of the Police within ‘Combat’ that when the Sicherheitsdienst investigated the movement in mid-1943, 5% of all those identified in the resultant ‘Flora report’ were Policemen. From October 1942, following a suggestion from Claude Bourdet, a special administrative branch of ‘Combat’ was founded. Known as the ‘NAP’ or ‘Noyautage des Administra- tions Publiques’ (‘Infiltration of Public Administrations’) the aim of this organisation, which had sub-branches in specialist administrations like the Police, was to subvert the civil service from within.68 ‘NAP-Police’ was given the task of drawing up a list of Police officers based on their political reliability for the Resistance. This served the double purpose of establishing who could be trusted in the short-term and deciding who should be eliminated from the Police at the Liberation. Bourdet decided that the ‘NAP’ should aim for quality rather than quantity, so deliberately limited recruitment to the group.69 Auguste Clary was put in charge of the ‘NAP-Police’ in Marseille.

64 Oral evidence from former Inspecteur Robert Picq, 65 Oral evidence from Francis Crémieux (Paris, 5 March 1993) and from Jean Gemähling (Paris, 2 February 1993), both of the Combat network. 66 56W 14, testimonies of Raymond Berg, Jean Gemähling, Auguste Clary & Francis Crémieux. 67 AN 3AG/2/333, BCRA Interrogatoire de Claude Zimmern, London, 4 May 1943. 68 Henri Michel, La Guerre de l’Ombre, La Résistance en Europe, Paris, 1970, p 224; Henri Michel, Les Courants de Pensée de la Résistance, Paris, 1962, p 304. 69 Claude Bourdet, L’aventure incertaine, Paris, 1975; AN 72 AJ 66, Historique du NAP par Claude Bourdet; Henri Michel, Les courants de pensée de la Résistance, Paris, 1962, 302; 180 Chapter 8

The German net was beginning to tighten around ‘Combat’. Not long after the return of Berg to Marseille the situation of the movement became drastic. Following a denunciation by Lunel, the secretary of the regional head of this movement, Maurice Chevance-Bertin, the whole movement began to fall into the hands of the Germans. Chevance-Bertin, himself, was arrested on 27 April but managed to escape from the dreaded Dunker-Delage, the local chief torturer of the German Police, as Dunker searched the Resistance leader’s flat with three agents. In his flight, Chevance crashed into an obstacle in the street and injured himself. At the sight of a bicycle cop, Marcel Koch, who had been attracted by the noise of the German gunshots, Chevance threw himself at the Policeman with the words: ‘save me, I am a friend of Clary’s. It’s the Gestapo who are shooting at me’.70 As luck would have it, this Gardien was Clary’s former chauffeur and he transported Chevance on his bike back to the Police station. Together with two colleagues, they then carried him to a hide-out in the rue Jean Mermoz. Koch got word to a number of Chevance’s contacts that the Resistance leader had narrowly escaped from the ‘Gestapo’.71 On 11 May, three German security Police agents, accompanied by another bicycle cop, arrested Koch at his house, 27 bd de la Concorde, Mazargues.72 In the meantime, Berg together with two other Inspecteurs, the Resister Dr Beltrami and Francis Crémieux, son of the writer Benjamin Crémieux who was the national head of the ‘NAP’, began to move the ‘NAP’ archives, fearing rightly that the unscheduled disappearance of B. Crémieux indicated that he had been arrested by the Germans. During the transfer of these documents, Berg wrongly became suspicious that Beltrami, who was leading the car he occupied with F. Crémieux and the two other Inspecteurs to a hideout, was driving them towards the ‘Gestapo’ headquarters, 425 rue Paradis. They decided to part company with Beltrami and to head off in a different direction.73 Having nowhere else to hide the documents, the four Resisters left them in Berg’s apartment, 9 rue St Etienne. But the Germans were closing in. Clary was arrested on 12 May.74 Berg, under pressure from one of the Inspecteurs and deprived of the

John F. Sweets, The politics of Resistance in France, 1940-44, Dekalb, 1976, p 37; Alban Vistel, La nuit sans ombre, Paris, 1970, p 209. 70 Maurice Chevance-Bertin, Vingt mille heures, Paris, 1990, p 122. 71 Maurice Chevance-Bertin, Vingt mille heures, Paris, 1990, pp 118-126. 72 AD BDR 56W 14, p-v de Mme Koch, 6 March 1945; déposition de Ernst Dunker, 17 July 1946. 73 AD BDR 56W 14, dépositions de Francis Crémieux, 20 March 1946, Raymond Berg 23 March 1945 & Louis Barbier, 26 July 1946. 74 AD BDR 58W 20. Disaffection And Unreliability 181 guidance of Clary, decided to hand the documentation over to the Gestapo, in return for his own freedom.75 The security problems of ‘Combat’ and the Police section of the ‘Noyautage des Administrations Publiques’ encouraged the creation of a specialist Police Resistance network, called the Réseau Ajax. This was formed in August 1943 by a Nice-based Policeman, Commissaire Achille Peretti. The missions of ‘Ajax’ were in many respects similar to those of ‘NAP-Police’ aiming to sabotage anti- Resistance policing, to gather intelligence and to prepare the Police for the Lib- eration. The similarity of these objectives and the fact that ‘Ajax’ managed to recruit some Policemen who had previously belonged to the ‘NAP’ led to local tensions. But ‘NAP’, partially dismantled by the Germans, had difficulty competing with a network whose financial and material means were much greater than its own. ‘Ajax’ viewed recruitment from a different perspective than the ‘NAP’ did, believing that the Police was a large enough institution to be able to combine quality and quantity. Recruiting Police Resisters began in the milieus to which Peretti belonged: Corsican, Police trade unionist and Free Masons. The Marseille regional branch of this network had nearly 200 members, almost exclusively Policemen. Its members received small payments which could supplement their Police salaries and were formally registered on lists sent to Lon- don. They were advised not to maintain contacts with other Resistance movements in France.76 One of the characteristics of Police Resistance is that Policemen often worked more closely with networks than with movements. Another was that many Police officers helped the Resistance on a casual basis without being formal members of a grouping.77 The range of help offered by the Police to the Resistance was genuinely diverse. Police officers provided administrative stamps to help falsify identity documents. Weapons handed in at Police stations were sometimes redistributed to Resisters and Commissaire Theus did likewise with radio transmitters he stole from Police headquarters. The ‘NAP- Police’ and ‘Ajax’ transmitted intelligence information to London. Thus, administrative reports found their way into Allied and Free-French hands, hence why René Bousquet sent round a December 1943 circular to administrations pro- testing about the practise of taking official documents home with them.78 The

75 Oral evidence from Francis Crémieux, Paris, 5 March 1993. 76 AN 72AJ 35, Note du 27 novembre 1943 sur l’organisation Ajax communiquée par M. J. Gemahling; AN 3AG/2/53, liste d’adhérents du réseau Ajax, “Secteur 9, Marseille”. 77 Dominique Veillon, Le Franc-Tireur, Paris, 1977, p 253. 78 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat, Paris, 1997, p 553. AN F7 14909, Bousquet to Prefects, 28 December 1943. 182 Chapter 8 names of members of coloured-shirted organisations such as the Milice and the PPF were recorded in Police stations, as were the identities of authors of denunciations. Resisters received tip-offs from Police officers about on-going investigations and likely raids. Information about Resisters arrested was passed on, so that clandestine organisations would know what happened to their members and how much these had revealed in interrogations. Some arrested Resisters received advice on how to behave during their interrogations in order to limit the damage their statements might make.79 Undoubtedly Resistance was in fact much more frequent within the Police than in most socio-professional categories. Almost 2% of serving Policemen were deported by the Ger- mans for political activity.80 The Resistance specialist Jean-Marie Guillon is one of the few to explicitly recognise that the Police had an above average role in anti-German activity. In a comparison of Police involvement in the Resist- ance and that of teachers he concludes that the former were far more often involved.81 Indeed, Police Resistance will always be under-estimated because one means to resist was to destroy administrative reports from Police files and this activity, by its very nature, leaves no tangible trace. It would be fair to say that the Police were, like railway workers, amongst the categories most involved simultaneously in both Resistance and Collabora- tion. These ‘Resisto-collaborator’ milieus were, because of their professional obligations, at the forefront of measures of collaboration. Railway workers helped transport arrested Resisters, Jews, forced labourers. The Police were expected to arrest the individuals who made up the train convoys. Because of these milieus’ position as spearheads of collaboration they had, by the same token, more opportunity to resist and were under greater pressure to do so. Their position within an institution which was increasingly being used as a tool of collaboration caused a number of them to seek an engagement in the opposite direction, to save not only their own reputation but also that of their institution. Having noted the scope of Police Resistance it is now necessary to underline its limitations. As has been noted, not all the difficulties of Vichy or the

79 AN 72AJ 35 [Ajax], doc n° 6, Tém. de Léon Théus, 6 May 1947; Alban Vistel, La nuit sans ombre, Paris, 1970, p 239; AD BDR 23J3, Rapport sur l’activité résistante du Commissaire Mercuri; AD BDR 56W 104, document presented by Marcel Pauleau (Communist head of the Front National in the Northern sector of the Bouches-du-Rhône), undated but post- Liberation. 80 Simon Kitson, ‘From enthusiasm to disenchantment. The French Police and the Vichy regime’, Contemporary European History, Volume 11, Issue number 3, August 2002, p 384. 81 Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 215. Disaffection And Unreliability 183

Germans within the institution were imputable to Resistance. Moreover, help offered by Police Resistance was never distributed evenly. Gaullists were far more likely to benefit from the complicity of a Policeman than was a communist.82 Jews were much less likely to be offered a helping hand than those seeking to evade the forced labour draft.83 The ambiguity of maintaining a position within the institution often meant that in order to carry out an act of Resist- ance or to engage in complicity with the Resistance frequently involved compensating for this with an ostensible display of zeal in another domain as a cover up. This problem even affected those who were the most active Resisters within the force.84 The end result of these ambiguities was that few Police officers had absolutely nothing to reproach themselves with at the Liberation. Many others could point to an act which could be passed off as an act of Resist- ance before a tribunal as a counterweight to the rest of their activity.85 Police Resistance was not only ambiguous but it was also conditioned by a professional culture where traditions of obedience and autonomy co-existed.86 A cult of obedience was one of the fundamental values within the institution. The State made frequent reference to this concept in order to encourage a passive acceptance of its instructions. Individual Police officers could shelter behind the notion of obedience to deny any personal responsibility for their

82 Oral evidence from the Resisters Francis Crémieux (Paris, 5 March 1993) and from Jean Gemähling (Paris, 2 February 1993), both of the Combat network. AN F1A 4565, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs (signé Jean Ginolhac), Rapport à M le Chef du Gou- vernement, Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, ‘Evasion du Capitaine Fourcaud de l’hôtel-Dieu de Clermont-Ferrand’, Vichy, 14 August 1942; AN 3W 92, déposition de Karl Oberg, 16 April 1947; Henri Longuechaud, Conformément à l’ordre de nos chefs. Le drame des forces de l’ordre sous l’Occupation, 1940-1944, Paris, 1985, p 204; Denis Peschanski, ‘Exclusion, persécution, répression’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida [eds], Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, p 225; Franck Liaigre in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 103. 83 AN F1a 4516, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, Vichy, 2 March 1943; Simon Kitson, ‘L’évolution de la Résistance dans la Police marseillaise’, in Jean-Marie Guillon & Robert Menchérini (eds), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud, Paris, 2000, p 252. 84 AN F1a 3729, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur, ‘Note pour M. Boris’, London, 28 October 1943. 85 Pascal Maysouane, ‘La répression dans le Limousin: une affaire trop sérieuse pour l’abandonner à la seule Police française’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 152-153. 86 Simon Kitson, ‘Marseille: à l’épreuve du politique, 1936-38’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 43. 184 Chapter 8 actions.87 How far the institution’s cult of obedience developed into a genuine culture of obedience where instructions were unthinkingly obeyed was subject to a number of considerations and varied between different branches within the Police as well as according to the type of mission being carried out. Some branches of the Police had particularly tight hierarchical control thereby helping to secure obedience. This was the case in the Police Mobile where officers were directly accountable to both the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice and where Inspecteurs would very often be accompanied by Com- missaires in their missions. On the other hand, Gardiens de la Paix, who accounted for the vast majority of the personnel, enjoyed a degree of autonomy in their everyday activity. The laws which they were expected to enforce were often written in very vague and general terms leaving considerable scope for interpretation. Walkie-talkies were yet to come into effect and Gardiens could use their initiative in unexpected circumstances encountered on their beat. Of course, controls did exist. Officiers de la Paix would carry out impromptu checks on the beats of their subordinates but, given their own limited numbers, these were infrequent. Gardiens would often operate in pairs or groups making their autonomy subject to colleagues’ assent. The wearing of a uniform made them subject to public scrutiny. However, Vichy’s constant efforts to tighten and reinforce these controls or to offer incentives for successful completion of a mission demonstrate an awareness that obedience was not always automatic and was subject to constant negotiation between the different actors.88 But, the institution never did function by orders alone. There remained margins of autonomy and initiative. Rank and file officers had their own input into the repressive process. Indeed, sometimes it was only their initiative and personal observation which brought cases to the attention of the senior hierarchy in the first place. Often the way they wrote their reports could have considerable bearing on a case. Although each rung of the administrative ladder would subsequently paraphrase these into their own words the fundamental essence of the report usually remained faithful to their initial author. Where Gaullist influence on the Police was generally successful was in under-

87 AN 56W 47, déposition du Commissaire Etienne, 7 February 1945. 88 AN F7 14908 [632], le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 1136 SG Pol., 19 August 1942; AN F7 14907 [556], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 443 SG Circ., 27 July 1942; AN F7 14907 [484], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 390 Pol. I Circ., 20 June 1942; AN F7 14907 [538], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 1er Bureau n° 419, Pol. I Circ., 9 July 1942; AN F7 14908 [734], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M. Le Préfet Régional, 19 February 1943. AN F1a 3729, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur, “Note pour M. Boris”, London, 28 October 1943. AN F7 14907, PN Cab A n° 1304/3, 21 September 1943. Disaffection And Unreliability 185 mining their enthusiasm to serve Vichy. This undermined the institution in those areas dependant on initiative from below or where subordinate officers could exploit a degree of autonomy. However, Vichy could still hope to ensure the obedience of its civil servants in situations where close hierarchical supervision could be followed by severe punishment. Few open rebellions occurred in closely monitored operations with the result that in situations where more senior officers were present, Police behaviour was often dictated by the attitude of the hierarchical superior on hand, although in many cases even their support for Vichy had become problematic.89

89 Oral evidence from former Inspecteur Robert Picq. AN F1a 3021, CNI, copie intégrale du télégramme secret et confidentiel, n° 00122 de M l’Intendant de Police, Marseille. AN F7 14890 [A101], le commandant en chef ouest (Rundstedt) à M. le Maréchal Pétain, 11 November 1943. 186 Chapter 9

Chapter 9 The New Slave Trade

Nowhere was the unreliability of the French Police shown as acutely as in the application of the Forced Labour Draft which was central to Germany’s attempts to exploit France. From 1942 Germany became increasingly desperate for resources as its war in the east took a mounting toll. It needed ever-greater manpower for its factories to replace those mobilised at the front. Pressure was applied by Vichy to supply workers to supplement those conscripted in other occupied countries. Between October 1942 and July 1944, around 640,000 individuals in France were drafted for forced labour schemes, in particular the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), and sent to work in Germany.1 The continual widening of age and social categories to which these schemes were applied testify to their relative failure since they constantly fell short of the numbers the Germans hoped for. In spite of their disappointing yields, however, forced labour schemes ended up affecting huge numbers of French people: those actually drafted, those threatened with conscription, those who found any means possible to escape the draft, those left worrying about the loved ones sent to Germany, the myriad of people who sheltered draft-dodgers and the institutions responsible for ensuring that the schemes were put into effect. The number of people affected and the public reaction to forced labour schemes ensure that they occupy a central position in French wartime experi- ences. The historian Yves Durand wrote: ‘The problem of STO affected the whole population and assumed an important place in the existence and the representations of the war and Occupation of the French’.2 Richard Vinen has referred to it as ‘the most important single Vichy policy’, not only because it caused widespread distress but also because it made a mockery of Vichy’s claim to be protecting the French population.3 The imposition of the law creating the STO further undermined the control the Vichy government had over its own administrations and thereby raised questions about how far Vichy could still be useful to the Germans. It highlighted how even in services such as the Police, where a cult of obedience to

1 Jean-Pierre Harbulot, ‘Service du travail obligatoire (STO)’ in Michèle and Jean-Paul Cointet (eds), Dictionnaire historique de la France sous l’Occupation, (Paris, 2000) p 645. 2 Yves Durand quoted in Richard Vinen, The unfree French, London, 2006, p 249. 3 Richard Vinen, The unfree French, London, 2006, p 247.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_011 The New Slave Trade 187 the State was a professional reference point, divergences between professional and patriotic duties engendered a spirit of disobedience. Through their position as a central instrument in the application of the forced labour draft the Police were expected to be at the forefront of Franco-German collaboration on this issue. Through their widespread defiance in its application they became a spearhead of opposition. There were 4 ways in which the law affected the Police. Firstly, in their role as French citizens, Police officers formed an opinion of the scheme. The damaging effects of this unpopular law on French society were visible to everyone and it seems most French citizens, including most Policemen, viewed it negatively. Secondly, through their professional obligations, the Police were given the task of delivering call-up papers for the STO and thereafter of arresting any draft dodgers. Defiance in performing this mission was widespread and undermined the degree to which the government could rely on the institution. Thirdly, the social make-up of the Police was changed by the law as large numbers of Frenchmen to whom it would not have occurred in other circumstances to become Policemen suddenly discovered this vocation believing the Police was protected from the STO. Individuals who had entered the force simply to avoid labour conscription accounted for roughly one third of all Marseille Policemen by the spring of 1943. Finally, contrary to received wisdom, the Police did not entirely escape the law’s application as a number of Police officers were compelled to go to work in Germany. The Service du Travail Obligatoire came into being as a result of the failure of previous labour schemes. Germany had initially focused on recruiting volunteer labour from France. They promised such workers generous wages and good working conditions and accommodation. But these attempts to attract volunteers were never very successful. Up until the summer of 1942 they had managed to recruit a total of around 150,000 French volunteer workers, al though there were never more than around 75,000 in Germany at any one time and it was only in June of that year that Vichy allowed the Germans to recruit volunteers in the unoccupied zone when recruitment bureaux were set up in Lyon, Marseille and Toulouse.4 Such figures were insufficient when the de mands of the war, particularly the bloody campaign in the east were draining

4 J. Jackson, France, the Dark Years, Oxford, 2001, p 297. AN AJ41 491, L’Inspecteur Rapenne à M le Commissaire Spécial, chef de service à Montluçon, n° 4160, Objet: ‘activité Commission Allemande de la Croix-Rouge’, 9 June 1941; AN AJ41 1680 [21-07], Le Général de corps d’armée Doyen, Président de la Délégation Française auprès de la Commission Allemande d’Armistice à M le Général Huntziger, Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à la guerre (DSA), n° 12489/AE, ‘ Objet: Délégués allemands en zone libre’, 1 February 1941. 188 Chapter 9 resources so rapidly. Germany needed manpower both to increase production and to replace workers sent to the front. Consequently, it was decided to impose forced labour on France but Premier Pierre Laval offered a compro- mise plan. Known as the ‘Relève’ (literally ‘relief’) scheme, the idea was that for every three volunteer specialist French workers who left for Germany one POW would return home. POWs were Vichy’s obsession since over a million of the 1.6 million Frenchmen taken prisoner in 1940 continued to be held in ‘sta- lags’ and ‘oflags’ in Germany throughout the war and it is clear that the plight of French POWs remained a concern within France. In launching the ‘Relève’, Laval set it in the context of his publicly declared wish for a German victory in Europe to avoid a Bolshevik take-over in Europe.5 For several weeks after the introduction of the scheme pro-Relève propaganda filled the newspapers, always occupying at least 2 columns.6 Initially the scheme offered a glimmer of hope to the families of POWs, who were led to expect the imminent return of their loved ones.7 Rapidly, however, widespread scepticism smothered such hopes. Propaganda posters proclaimed to workers ‘you have the key to the [Prisoner of War] camps’; in Marseille they were defaced with a five letter graffiti: ‘merde’.8 The scheme failed because many French people had little faith that the Germans would stick to their side of the bargain. Besides the terms of the exchange, 3 specialist workers for each POW, hardly seemed fair. It was scarcely surprising then that so few volunteered: nationally the Germans had expected 250,000 but found only 35,000.9 Faced with such failure, the voluntary Relève was rapidly replaced by a new law which instigated what became known as the ‘Relève-obligatoire’ or ‘obligatory relief’ plan on 4 September 1942. This provided that, in return for the repatriation of POWs, specialist workers would be compelled to leave for Germany. The selected workers were to be men in the 18 to 50 year old age bracket and women between 21 and 35 and companies would be asked to designate employees who might be sent. The 4 September law was greeted with huge hostility and once again failed to recruit sufficient workers. For example, in December 1942, out of 125 workers designated from the Coder metal-works in Marseille,

5 H.R. Kedward, In search of the Maquis, Oxford, 1993, p 2. 6 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 174. 7 AD BDR (Archives Départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône) M6 11057, Le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M le Secrétaire Général à la Police, synthèse du Contrôle Technique, 1 September 1942. 8 AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG (Renseignements Généraux) à M le CD, RG, 30 March 1943. 9 J. Jackson, France, the Dark Years, Oxford, 2001, p 297. The New Slave Trade 189 only 50 turned up at the German recruitment office (Office de Placement Alle- mand); 8 of these were declared unfit and the other 42 refused to sign the contract presented to them.10 Statistics established by the Renseignements Généraux underlined how generalised this refusal was: in the week between 7 and 13 December only 1.7% of designated workers in Marseille signed their contract.11 In February 1943 the Germans forced Vichy to introduce the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Henceforth most Frenchmen born between 1920 and 1922, with the exception of certain categories like railway workers or min- ers, were expected to leave for the labour draft for a period of 2 years’ service.12 According to Police sources, public reaction to the STO was almost unani- mously hostile with most Frenchmen feeling it a ‘national duty’ to avoid the draft.13 Indeed, its unpopularity surpassed that of all previous schemes. Henceforth, Prisoners-of-war were not to be repatriated in exchange for those sent and the net was being cast much wider. Forced labour was no longer limited only to specialist workers but instead was a draft applicable, barring certain exemptions, to all young men in their early twenties. Moreover, its impact was ever widening as the categories to which it could apply were subsequently expanded. Such a perpetual expansion of labour recruitment measures led many to conclude that ‘we’ll all end up going’.14 Most people knew someone targeted or likely to be targeted by the draft and this raised fears over their welfare.15 The Germans’ November 1942 Occupation of the previously unoccupied Southern zone increased hostility to them, thereby furthering reluctance to help their war effort. W.D. Halls has also rightly stressed that, with the war turning decisively in favour of the Allies, those leaving to work in Germany might find themselves ‘morally and physically on the wrong side of the Allied lines’.16 The Reich’s disastrous military situation following defeat at Stalingrad (2 February 1943) increased reluctance to accept the STO call-up by increasing the risks of those departing for Germany. They were increasingly likely to be victims of the intensive Allied bombing against German towns and it was

10 AD BDR M6 11071, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 30 November-6 December 1942. 11 AD BDR M6 11071, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 7-13 December 1942. 12 W.D. Halls, ‘Young people in Vichy France and Forced Labour in Germany’, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 4, No 3, 1978, p 297. 13 AD BDR M6 11076, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 23-27 August 1943. 14 AD BDR M6 11073, Synthèse Hebdomadaire de l’Inspection Régionale des Contrôles Tech- niques de Marseille, 3 April 1943. 15 AD BDR M6 11073, Synthèse Hebdomadaire de l’Inspection Régionale des Contrôles Tech- niques de Marseille, 27 March 1943. 16 W.D. Halls, ‘Young people in Vichy France and Forced Labour in Germany’, Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 4, No 3, 1978, p 303. 190 Chapter 9 suggested that they might be forcefully conscripted into the Wehrmacht or transformed into potential hostages in the event of an Allied landing in France.17 These fears were reinforced by communist tracts warning: ‘French people, if you go to Germany you are likely to die’.18 Such exemptions as were granted to the labour draft merely added a sense of injustice as another reason for hostility to the scheme. Complaints abounded that these were given to the wrong people, as many sought to hide themselves in a protected industry or movement.19 The belief that members of pro-Nazi collaborationist groups were protected from the draft made many people’s blood boil.20 Others were criticised for allegedly having usurped themselves into a category benefitting from an exemption. In such a vein, the Prefect received a furious letter from a group of angry mothers complaining of those who now passed themselves off as agricultural workers.21 Exemptions granted to the Police were also criticised. Some of this particular criticism came from those with a vested interest: the wives of Policemen held prisoner in Germany sent missives to Laval expressing their disgust that the Police were recruiting new members rather than securing the repatriation of their POW husbands.22 One asked if the ‘Relève’ (‘relief’) actually amounted to anything more than relieving their husbands of their jobs and replacing them by the ‘1800 young people who have come to have a medical examination in the central Police station’ in the previous few days and who were accepted into the Police within 48 hours. That rank and file Police officers shared public concerns about first the ‘Relève’ then the STO is evident from government circulars. Rather than just transmitting instructions and expecting them to be implemented, Vichy Police

17 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 16-23 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11076, Bul- letin Hebdomadaire des RG, 26 July-1 August 1943. Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Fran- çais devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942-1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, pp 622-623. 18 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 2-9 May 1943. See also: AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, n° 3912/M, 7 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Synthèse Hebdomadaire de l’Inspection Régionale des Contrôles Techniques de Marseille, 27 March 1943. 19 AD BDR M6 11094, Note pour M le Préfet Régional, le 9 April 1943. 20 AD BDR M6 11073, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, n° 2569/M, 31 March 1943. 21 AD BDR M6 10988, ‘Des Mères de famille de St. Julien indignées’ à M le Préfet des BDR, 12 March 1943. 22 AN F9 2266, Mme Graveille & Mme Jousserand à M Le Chef du Gouvernement, 1 March 1943. For public reactions to Police exemptions: AN F60 1668, Police Nationale, Bulletin Hebdomadaire de Renseignements, n° 11, 18 March 1943. The New Slave Trade 191 chief René Bousquet ordered Prefects to convince Policemen that they were serving patriotic interests when rounding-up those failing to report for the drafts: ‘all services must be made to understand that the difficult and often thankless task that they are being asked to perform is nonetheless a necessary task’, he wrote on 28 May 1943. Bousquet wanted to persuade his subordinates that draft dodgers were acting selfishly and that the country had no way of avoiding its obligations on this question.23 That the persuasive approach had not been crowned by total success was implicit in its rapid abolition in favour of more punitive measures, such as a circular in September which threatened Police officers caught helping draft dodgers with fines of up to 20,000 francs.24 It was this unpopular law which Policemen were expected to enforce. The Germans were keen that the application of the law should be carried out by French administrations in order to save their own resources and cause the unpopularity of the law to be directed more against the French authorities than the Germans. Vichy wanted its Police to apply the law in the expectation that Police officers would be less brutal than the Germans but also because it had become obsessed by the idea of preserving administrative sovereignty, even if this meant doing the Germans’ dirty work for them. Enforcing this law greatly increased Police workload. Not only were the Police expected to issue summons to those conscripted and to round-up those who failed to present themselves,25 but they were also required to keep order in railway stations during the often rowdy departures of STO convoys. Workers leaving for the STO crossed their wrists, as if they were handcuffed, holding their hands up in the air to symbolise that they were being forced to leave, as a contradiction to official propaganda insisting on their volunteer status.26 On 13 March 1943, the train containing STO draftees left Marseille’s St Charles station with 55 minutes delay because the left-wing anthem the ‘Internationale’ had been chanted by those departing, graffiti had been written in chalk in the last two carriages of the convoy featuring slogans ranging from ‘long live Stalin’ and ‘death to Laval’ to the rhetorical question ‘do you believe in the ‘Relève’?’ and the communication cord had been pulled some 15 times. The Police had failed

23 AN 3W 89, Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, pol. cab. A n° 259, 28 May 1943. 24 AD BDR M6 11077, L’Intendant de Police à M Le Préfet, Rapport Mensuel d’Informations, 6 September 1943. 25 AD BDR M6 11094, Le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets, 23 February 1943; AN 3W 90, Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, zone sud, n° 289 pol. cab. circ., 1 July 1943. 26 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 245. 192 Chapter 9 to prevent such disorder. Indeed it was only the direct intervention of 6 Ger- man soldiers that allowed the convoy to get under way at all.27 A professional obligation to keep order on such occasions brought Police officers into conflict with the public. Although some of the population believed that it was better that the French Police carry out these operations than the German, overall Police participation in activities concerned with first the ‘Relève’ and then the STO was viewed with considerable hostility by the majority of the population.28 Of course, that convoys of workers departed to Germany at all suggests that Police participation was not always a failure. In reality, however, not all those who left were actually forced to do so by the Police. In fact there were three categories of workers sent off in these convoys. The first were volunteers. The trains which left Marseille for Germany on 4 and 6 May 1943 contained 275 individuals- of these 171 were volunteers and a further 41 were individuals who had already worked in Germany and who were returning from leave.29 Given what has already been noted about the increased dangers of working in Ger- many and widespread hostility to the STO, it might seem surprising that early 1943 saw an increase in the number of volunteers. This was largely owing to the rise in unemployment in Marseille’s docks as a result of the reduction in maritime trade following the Allied landing in North Africa. Going as a ‘volunteer’ worker still also meant receiving better wages than those officially conscripted, so it was preferable from a material point of view to be categorised as a ‘volunteer’. Beyond the genuine volunteers, there was a second category comprising those who, having received their call-up, felt constrained to report for the labour draft without any direct Police intervention. They felt obliged by the threats which had accompanied the written call-ups received through the post. These threats included their possible arrest by the Police or suggested that members of their family would be taken in their stead or indeed that those helping them escape would be fined. A large number resigned themselves to departure, believing that the ostentatious displays of Police activity were for real and signified the inevitability of capture. Potential draft dodgers faced a dilemma summed up by STO worker Maurice Georges: ‘If you go, well you go; but if you don’t go you’ll go anyway because the gendarmes will come and get

27 AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, 16 March 1943. 28 AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, 4 January 1943 & ibid 11 January 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Synthèse Hebdomadaire de l’Inspection Régionale des Contrôles Techniques de Marseille, 27 March 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdoma- daire des RG, 24-30 May 1943. 29 AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, 7 May 1943. The New Slave Trade 193 you! In such circumstances, should one have become an outlaw, without work, homeless and with no ration ticket?’30 Finally, the third category on these trains comprised of those who were physically compelled to go by the Police or other agencies. During the closing stages of the ‘Relève obligatoire’ and the first days of the STO exemplary raids on factories were carried out by the Police to force the workers’ hand.31 Even after that there is evidence that some Police officers faithfully carried out orders with regard to the STO. The Resister Jean Comte remembered that on 10 September 1943, he was apprehended by a Police officer who insisted, despite Comte’s protests, on taking him along to the STO office in the rue Honnorat. Comte managed to escape but was captured by a second Policeman. Ultimately he avoided going off to Germany for the STO thanks to a false medical certificate.32 In a letter written in 1993 to this author, Emmanuel Sanchez, one of those sent off to Germany for the forced labour draft, presented his recollec- tions of his transfer for the STO. He recalled ‘I had the impression that the French Police had no difficulty working for the German authorities’.33 It should also be noted that beyond those who were compelled by the Police to go were those who were those who were obliged by groups of PPF militants or directly by the Germans themselves. Indeed in Marseille the PPF even rounded up some 16 year-olds for the labour draft.34 There are some cases of employers co- operating in the application of the forced labour draft. The managers of the Marseille branch of the Aciéries du Nord metal-works regularly denounced to the Germans their employees who were not conforming to the STO laws.35 But such cases were rare as it was not in the economic interest of bosses to comply in this way. From 20 April 1943 Vichy obliged men aged between 18 and 50 to carry a certificate of employment and after July checks were made on conformity to employment laws when workers renewed their ration tickets, meaning that administrations beyond the Police were also likely to detect those whose status could make them eligible to requisition. It should be noted that

30 M. Georges, Le temps des armes sans arme, Paris, 1990, p 48. 31 AD BDR M6 11078bis, l’Inspecteur Divisionnaire du Travail à M le Préfet des BDR 10 Febru- ary 1943. 32 Témoignage de Jean Comte, alias Lévis, responsable départemental des groupes francs de Marseille in Madeleine Baudoin, ‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Thèse, Histoire, (Université de Provence), Vol. i, p 278. 33 Written evidence from Emmanuel Sanchez, 15 August 1993. 34 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 488. 35 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 641. 194 Chapter 9 not all of those compelled to go for the STO were French. After Italy changed sides in the war in 1943, those sent included Italian citizens living in Marseille. The STO train which left Marseille at one in the morning of 28 October had only one French worker on-board and 60 Italians.36 Some Police officers certainly took their official responsibilities towards the STO seriously. One such was the Commandant André Crezonnet. In his post- Liberation testimony in March 1945 he admitted that he was incapable of being negligent in his duties and went on to explain that for this reason he had tried to arrest the maximum number of draft-dodgers. He contrasted his own position with that of the majority of his colleagues who were indulgent towards these same individuals.37 In an extraordinary document presented in his defence he claimed that these colleagues had been ‘veritable parasites on the administration and the French budget’ because they lacked all ‘professional conscience’.38 In March 1944 he had taken his sense of duty so far as to denounce the Gardien Georges Dauphin who had helped many escape from the forced labour draft. Crezonnet asked his superiors to sack Dauphin from the Police and put him on a train for the STO.39 Dauphin was duly sacked and designated for the labour draft but a fellow Police officer intervened to have him posted to a protected job in France.40 Officers like Crezonnet, however, would appear as a minority on this issue. Widespread Police defiance greeted the forced labour draft. From the very start, the Police took much greater initiative in undermining the obligations imposed by the STO than, for example, they had in measures against the Jews in summer 1942. One reason for this was that there was less ambivalence both in the opinion of the public and that of the Police regarding the targets of the STO than measures aimed against Jews. This meant effectively that Police officers’ fear of denunciation by members of the public for acts of leniency was reduced (but not entirely overcome), whilst the Police desire to oppose the measure was greater. Additional considerations reinforced Police willingness to undermine the STO. Operations against the STO were organised significantly differently from the way anti-Semitic round-ups had been. In the first six months of the STO,

36 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 436. 37 AD BDR 56W 73, Déclarations de Crezonnet, 14 March 1945. 38 AD BDR 56W 73, Mémoire d’André Crezonnet, 1945. 39 AD BDR 56W 73, Le Commandant André Crezonnet, Cdt le 2e Secteur à M le Commissaire Principal, chef du Service des Gardiens de la Paix, 14 March 1944. 40 AD BDR 56W 73, Confrontation Feuilladieu-Crezonnet, 20 March 1945. The New Slave Trade 195 the delivery of the summons lacked the general urgency associated with the anti-Semitic operations. Police officers would deliver call-ups to individuals telling them to appear within a few days at the assembly point in the rue Hon- norat. Only once this delay had expired were instructions issued to bring that individual in forcibly. Gardiens assigned to the task would often make an ostentatious display of their presence thereby reinforcing the possibility for escape by alerting them of an impending arrest. In other cases they simply told the individual to escape or regretted that they had not taken advantage of the possibilities offered. For the Police hierarchy, supervising the implementation of this policy was extremely difficult. Effective control was virtually impossible given the large number of people targeted. At the same time, unlike in the operations against the Jews, the Police were grouped with other officers from their own branch and not with unknown colleagues from other units. Beyond the practical difficulties of this control, there was also the fact that on the issue of the STO the hierarchy itself was often torn between professional responsibility and patriotic duty which made them unsure whether to enforce these measures. Such ambivalence reached right to the top of the local Police. In early 1943, a drafter dodger called Blaise Andrieu found himself recruited to work in the offices of the Intendant de Police Robert Andrieu (no relation). This hierarchical superior was fully aware of the irregularity of his status. After a few days, the Intendant took him to one side and explained that his offices were subject to too much surveillance to allow the young man to remain employed there. Rather than compelling him to fulfil his duties for the STO, Robert Andrieu told his namesake that he should go into hiding and wished him luck.41 If there were few cases of Police defiance reported once conscripts arrived in the train stations, the same could not be said of the house visits they conducted to arrest those failing to heed their call-up. In written evidence to this author, Francis Audiffren remembered that 2 Police officers called at his address to bring him in for the STO. After expressing disappointment at finding Audiffren at home they offered him the possibility to escape. Audiffren refused before accompanying the two officers to the STO assembly point. Instinctively he put himself between the two as one does when being taken off by the Police. They said ‘No, don’t put yourself in the middle, it’ll look like we’re bringing in a criminal’. Upon his arrival at the STO office another Policeman apparently reproached him for having been at home. Audiffren had refused the officers’ recommendations to escape because he had a ‘secret weapon’ and that was his ability to feign an attack of emphysema which he duly did during his medical

41 Written evidence from Blaise Andrieu, 1 April 1993. 196 Chapter 9 visit allowing him a long-term dispensation from the STO.42 Another example, amongst many, of Police defiance on this issue is provided by a barman in the Impasse de la Thèse. He made the following statement about the delivery of his summons for the STO by two Policemen: ‘after agreement with the Police officers it was decided that I would disappear for a while and that they would say in their report that they had not found me’.43 Pierre Picart, who became liable to be drafted for the STO in September 1943, testified in 1945 that a Police Inspecteur Delaville had organised the destruction of his administrative file and that therefore he was free from his obligation.44 Gardiens instructed to issue summons to conscripts often reported back that the individuals in question were unknown at that address or had moved on. The fact that in some cases this was true lent credibility to those instances where the Police were being economical with the truth. This, and the frequency with which Police officers used this excuse, made it difficult for the hierarchy to check up on all these cases. One Commissaire responsible for Police operations in Marseille at the beginning of 1943, later summed up the situation as follows: ‘I received requests for investigations concerning young people who had not turned up at the STO office. These lists, which sometimes contained up to 10 000 names, were returned with the time-honoured formula: “enquiries have drawn a blank” ’.45 Henri Aquilo, the head of the specialist STO Brigade in the Marseille Police in 1944, claimed that he was fully aware of how his subordinates carried out operations against the draft dodgers. He stated that: ‘the reports of my Detectives were in general always the same: “left without leaving a forwarding address”, or “disappeared from Marseille”- “unknown in the district”, “never lived in this building”, etc’.46 The information contained in the weekly Police reports written by the Ren- seignements Généraux about the application of these measures is very significant in this respect and reveal how quickly the Police developed tactics for undermining the application of the STO. In the last week of March 1943 the Police had taken 153 individuals to the assembly point in the rue Honnorat. This was, however, the last major operation in 1943 to actually bring in significant numbers of workers. Thereafter, huge, ostentatious Police operations were organised in the street involving large numbers of identity checks but little by way of actual results. For instance, in the last week of April, 2546 indi-

42 Written evidence from Francis Audiffren, Marseille, 9 May 1994. 43 AD BDR 56W 2, procès-verbal d’Alexandre Veillet, 21 December 1944. 44 AD BDR 56w 4, Procès-verbal de Pierre Picart, 4 August 1945. 45 AD BDR 56W 47, Interrogatoire du Commissaire Etienne, 7 February 1945. 46 AD BDR 56W 4, interrogatoire d’Henri Aquilo, 8 August 1944. The New Slave Trade 197 viduals were checked with regard to their STO status. Of these, 1401 were taken to Police stations for further verification but only 4 were brought to the assembly point. Likewise a massive operation at the beginning of June saw 2600 identity checks leading to 249 individuals brought to Police stations for further questioning but only 7 were subsequently taken on to the STO assembly point. The fact that these results were being reported in documents specifically dedi- cated to the STO suggested that the issue was a high priority for the Police. In view of the meagre results of these operations, it must be asked whether their targets were genuinely draft dodgers or whether these operations did not actually just disguise more general Police measures.47 The Commissaire accused of having organised such round-ups for the STO claimed in his defence that these round-ups were principally aimed at black marketeers, pimps and prostitutes. Although such a claim was easy to make in 1945, contemporary documents tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.48 Similarly ostentatious was the activity of the Brigade Spéciale-STO. Presenting the results of this brigade in the Marseille region the Intendant de Police Robert Andrieu announced that, up until the month of May 1943, 3364 of its 6000 enquiries had been successful. A more careful reading of this report reveals that the vast majority of these successful enquiries concerned workers already in Germany or those employed by German companies in France. In other words where these investigations were achieving results was in confirming exemptions rather than finding draft dodgers.49 By 1944 it had become more difficult to simply not produce results and another tactic was adopted. The Police began to bring in large numbers of individuals who were actually exempt, whilst releasing the majority of those who were eligible. The documentation suggests that this procedure was widespread in Marseille. Henri Aquilo, head of the special STO-Brigade, claimed in his post-war trial that he had known of such procedures going on amongst his subordinates: ‘I was aware that the only people my Inspecteurs took along to the rue Honnorat assembly point were those who had a certificate or a reason to be exempted from the draft’.50 Such a claim is, of course, easy to make after the event. However, contemporary sources confirm the existence of this practice. Surprisingly a Police report made explicit reference to such a practice in early 1944: ‘The distribution of numerous call-ups for the STO in the region to all types of men and women has provoked new fears, even if in reality these

47 Reports in box AD BDR M6 11073. 48 AD BDR 56W 47, Interrogatoire du Commissaire Etienne, 7 February 1945. 49 AD BDR M6 11094, L’Intendant de Police à M le Préfet Régional, 25 May 1943. 50 AD BDR 56W4, interrogatoire d’Henri Aquilo, 8 August 1944. 198 Chapter 9 summons are generally only addressed to those who are totally exempt’.51 In March 1944 the Gaullist secret services acknowledged the existence of such a tactic in the Marseille Police.52 The historian John F. Sweets found similar evidence for other parts of France. He unearthed an American Secret Service document from March 1944 to this effect and a Gaullist Resistance report from early May stating that the Police ‘arrest mostly those whose papers are in order and who will be released several days afterwards’. This same Gaullist source, Yvon Morandat, reported that Resisters caught in the STO trap were helped by sympathisers in the Police: ‘I have been told of numerous cases where our com- rades had been released immediately, when the Police realised they were in the Resistance’.53 One of the dangers of Police methods with regard to the STO was that they irritated public opinion by giving the impression of genuine Police zeal and might therefore encourage them to answer the call-up for fear that they would in any event be taken. But much more importantly they supposed that the Ger- man vetting commissions would actually apply exemptions to the letter. This danger was underlined on 3 and 8 March 1944 in a couple of internal memos to the Intendant de Police Mathieu who replaced Andrieu in early 1944. These memos concerned the situation of former prisoners-of-war who the Police were arresting for the STO. The reason the Police were arresting them was clearly one of a theatrical zeal because the agreements with the Germans were that any repatriated prisoner-of-war should be exempt from the STO. These individuals were therefore being released by the Germans who, the Police noted, were ‘perfectly aware that they were entitled to exemption’ but the prisoners were worried lest the Germans decided to ignore this exemption.54 Ironically the Police were criticised when they were considered to be genuinely pursuing draft-dodgers but they were also criticised for these false displays of zeal. A Police report on public opinion for April 1944 claimed that ‘the Police operations carried out in Marseille on the morning of 28 March were very badly seen by the population which accuses the local heads of the Police of wanting to carry out operations “for show” and to “bother the working population without producing any results” ’.55

51 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 28 February-5 March 1944. 52 AN F41 343, ‘Réquisition de main d’œuvre à Marseille’, Direction Générale des Services Secrets document n° 18734, Algiers, March 1944. 53 John F. Sweets, The politics of Resistance in France, 1940-44, Dekalb, 1976, p 28. 54 AD BDR M6 10994 note d’information, 3 March 1944 & 8 March 1944. 55 AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 March-2 April 1944. The New Slave Trade 199

German and collaborationist sources referred to the results of the STO as utterly inadequate and pointed to the wide divergences between the number of workers promised by the government and the actual number handed over. On 21 May 1943 the German recruitment office (Office de Placement Allemand) even used the word ‘catastrophic’ to describe the contribution of the French administration towards reaching these targets, claiming that on a regional level 90% of conscripts were effectively not being drafted.56 For the city of Marseille itself the Germans gave the example of the train which left on 1 May and for which 650 workers had been summoned- but on which only 48 (just over 7%) had actually departed. This figure was said to be representative of the average shortfall on these convoys, although by the late summer the percentage of draft dodgers had been reduced to around 70%.57 On a national level, Laval admitted to Schleier of the German Embassy in July 1943 that if better results could not be obtained for the STO it was because ‘he could not rely upon the co-operation of the Police and the lower ranks of the administration as much as he wished’.58 On 9 August 1943, the Nazi Labour Minister Fritz Sauckel complained to Hitler that Laval did not have sufficient authority over the traditional administrations, and in particular the Police, to ensure their cooperation.59 More than any other issue, the failure of the STO called into question the reliability of the traditional State administrations, both locally and nationally. Rod Kedward has described how the STO became ‘a dissolvent of Vichy authority’.60 It had turned law-abiding citizens into outlaws.61 It had created opposition to the Germans and had encouraged administrations to undermine laws that they were supposed to apply. It was such considerations which encouraged the Germans to make use of extremist organizations like Vichy’s Milice or the Collaborationist Parti Populaire Français to organize bounty hunting of individuals who refused the labour draft. Such an option had pre viously been avoided at all costs through calculations about the negative effects it might have on public opinion. By the beginning of 1944, however, the Germans reckoned that they had no choice.

56 AD BDR M6 10989, Office de Placement Allemand à Monsieur le Préfet Régional, Mar- seille, 21 mai 1943. 57 AD BDR M6 11076, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 26 July-1 August 1943. 58 GFM/170/83556-69, 242/158328-9, 158402-7, Schleier to Foreign Ministry, 23 July 1943 quoted in Geoffrey Warner, The eclipse of France, New York & London, 1968, p 372. 59 Jacques Baraduc, Les archives secrètes du Reich, Paris, 1949, p 157. 60 H.R. Kedward, In search of the Maquis, Oxford, 1993, p 41. 61 J. Jackson, France, the Dark Years, Oxford, 2001, p 480. 200 Chapter 9

The STO did not just affect the tasks the Police were expected to fulfil or their interaction with the public. It had an effect on the social composition of the Police itself, as many people came to see joining the Police as a means to exemption from the forced labour draft. In fact the exemption for members of the Police officially extended only to those who had applied to the institution before 16 February 1943, date of the law creating the STO.62 However, the day after passing this law, Pierre Laval sent out instructions to Prefects to accelerate recruitment ‘by all possible means’.63 Instructions dating from 7 July 1941 had tightened procedures and background checks for the recruitment of grass root Police officers. These were now suddenly waived allowing the incorporation of any candidates who seemed to offer the necessary guarantees if they agreed to sign a paper stating that they fulfilled the admission requirements. The Police Inspectorate (Inspec- tion Générale des Services), sent to investigate the scale of this rapid enrol- ment in Marseille, noted that ‘the news of a massive recruitment of Gardiens de la Paix had spread rapidly. In Marseille it spread like wildfire’.64 In the immediate aftermath of the creation of the STO, 3146 candidates applied in Marseille, 2499 of these were for the Municipal uniformed branch, (the Corps Urbain), whilst the other 647 were for the crowd control Police, (the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve or GMR). 1650 of these applicants were accepted. To put this into perspective it should be noted that recruitment examinations had attracted only 529 candidates in October and 294 in December 1942. In the words of the Police Inspectorate ‘in the space of a few weeks, applications have gone from a few hundred to several thousand’.65 The Police Inspectorate claimed that the desire to avoid going off to Ger- many for the STO was the only viable interpretation of the phenomenon: ‘the interviews I conducted during my inspection leave me in no doubt about the intentions of the applicants’. The Inspectorate’s report underlined that the law on the STO ‘pushed them to seeking a “refuge” in the Police’.66

62 Although gendarmes were exempt until 1 August 1943: AD BDR M6 11094, Le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 1-M-1, 21 July 1943. 63 AD BDR M6 10988, télégramme, 17 February 1943, Intérieur à Préfets Régionaux, Cler- mont, Marseille, Montpellier, Toulouse, Lyon, Limoges. AN F1a 4526, IGSA, rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 64 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 65 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 66 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. The Police were still said to be inundated with applications from those wishing to avoid the STO towards the beginning of 1944: AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 Janu- ary 1944. The New Slave Trade 201

There is little doubt that Laval was conscious that this would be the effect of his telegram of 17 February. Laval’s biographer Fred Kupferman believes that he was taking with one hand what he had just given with the other.67 If this analysis mirrors a basic truth, it must nonetheless be nuanced. The refuge that public administrations were offering was never meant to be generalised. Can- didates were expected to sign a paper stating that they were neither Jewish nor Free-Masons, that they were French by origin and did not have a criminal record. Checks were to be carried out by the Renseignements Généraux to ensure that they were not politically suspect (and in particular not communist) whilst the services of the criminal Police, Police de Sûreté, were to check that no common law prisoners entered the force. It is possible to infer from this that candidates were being divided into an ‘in-group’ (comprising those of long-established French, non-Jewish and non-communist families) and an ‘out-group’ containing those who were not to benefit from any protection. Moreover, the massive recruitment responded to a basic need to plug holes in Police manpower. Laval’s aim must therefore be seen not only from the perspective of a protection of ‘in-groups’ but also in terms of strengthening the Police for a more active campaign against the ‘out-groups’. It is open to question how far this policy of segregation of ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ was successful and to what extent Vichy could expect a reliable Police force to emerge from those recruited to avoid conforming to Vichy’s law on the STO.68 The Police Inspectorate believed that this recruitment was of better quality than previous ones. However, they did note difficulties in checking the real credentials of candidates and in particular in verifying the professional history of new recruits as a result of the rapidity of this wave of recruitment.69 Difficulties of vetting emerge in documents contained in the Departmental Archives, especially regarding the national and racial characteristics of those from other regions as a result of poor inter-regional communications. This factor goes some way to explaining why a number of sources indicate that some Jews joined the Police during this time, presumably seeking a refuge.70 Beyond these practical obstacles in cross-checking, the Police Inspectorate noted a number of examples of sloppiness in vetting procedures.

67 Fred Kupferman, Laval, 1883-1945, Paris, 1983, p 403. 68 Particularly since Resistance groups were calling for their members to infiltrate the Police as much as possible: Combat, n° 43, April 1943. 69 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 70 Oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, 10 May 93; C. Oppetit, Marseille, Vichy et les Nazis, (Marseille, 1993); see the collection of interviews with retired Police officers carried out by the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Sécurité Intérieure and in particular the comments of Jean Canard, gardien de la paix in Paris. 202 Chapter 9

He pointed to the admission of a candidate who had a previous conviction for assault and battery. He also underlined that the marking of a dictation, which new recruits had undergone following their incorporation, showed signs of ‘a really excessive indulgence’. The deficiencies he uncovered were undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg. In dossiers in the Departmental Archives, in response to the question of candidates’ political loyalty to Vichy the terms most widely used by the Commissaires filling out the forms were ‘he appears’, ‘he seems’, suggesting a vagueness underlining the difficulty of establishing these facts with any certainty but also indicating that in reality the checks were not all that thorough.71 It is probable that many of those who joined were at ideological loggerheads with Vichy. National Police chief, René Bousquet, even claimed that a large number of communists, obeying the orders of their party, came into the Police at this moment.72 Georges Vidal, himself a communist who joined the Police as a refuge from the STO in early 1943, also suggested to this author that a number of communists entered the administration at that time.73 The Resist- ance intercepted a Vichy report claiming that the Police in the South East of France was increasingly becoming a refuge for those wishing to avoid the forced labour draft and that around 80% of its personnel were sympathetic to the Gaullists.74 All the more so since huge numbers of new recruits were suddenly drafted into the institution from those seeking to avoid this very measure, which furthered a tendency of the moment for the Police to become a haven for those with a gripe against the regime.75 The Resistance helped fan

71 AD BDR M6 12084. 72 AN F7 14908 [document n° 808], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Région- aux, n° 248 pol. cab. circ., ‘objet- introduction d’éléments douteux dans la Police’, 2 June 1943. See also AD BDR M6 11082, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 2 May- 9 May 1944 for PPF complaints of communists in the GMR. 73 Oral evidence from Georges Vidal, 1993. 74 AN F60 1689, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur: ‘Bulletin de renseignements n° 100 à date du 27 mai 1943’. 75 Written evidence from Blaise Andrieu, 1 April 1993. Oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, 10 May 1993. Oral evidence from Marcel Parodi, 24 September 1993. AN F9 2266, Mme Graveille & Mme Jousserand à M Le Chef du Gouvernement, 1 March 1943; AN 3W 89, Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, pol. cab. A n° 259, 28 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11094, Le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets, 23 February 1943; AN 3W 90, Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, zone sud, n° 289 pol. cab. circ., 1 July 1943; AN AJ40 1260, Secrétaire Général à la Police à M le Général Commandant Supérieur des SS, Cab A n° 795, 4 March 1943; AN F7 14908 [document n° 741], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Intendants de Police, n° 91 pol. cab. circ., 4 March 1943; AN F1a 4526, IGSA, rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. AN F60 1668, Police Nationale, The New Slave Trade 203 these flames of discontent and began an active campaign of encouraging Gaullist sympathisers to take advantage of the recruitment shortages of the institution to join up and use the possibilities thereby offered to undermine from the inside.76 In some cases, candidates to the Police made no attempt to disguise the fact that their political view was not in line with the current government. Roger Viale, a candidate who was accepted into the GMR Camargue let it be known that he would prefer a parliamentary democracy, thereby offering an implicit challenge to Vichy’s authoritarianism. He was described as a good recruit by the Commissaire filling out his form, despite the fact that his hobbies consisted of peculiarly solitary activities for someone being incorporated into the sociable atmosphere of a Groupe Mobile de Réserve, that his poor state of health was in apparent contradiction with the demands of this function and that there was no way of checking whether his grandfather in Corsica was Jewish.77 The Inspecteur Général underlined that 95% of these recruits were not of bourgeois origin.78 The working classes from which most emanated were the exact circles most noted for their opposition to Vichy. The working classes in Marseille were in their majority constituted around three political orientations: the Socialists, the communists and the Parti Populaire Français (PPF). Communists were by this stage particularly keen not to add to the work force available in Germany as it could undermine the war effort of the Soviet Union.79 The PPF had its own potential refuge in 1943 within the ranks of Sabiani’s collaborating organisation and if PPF sympathisers esteemed that working for Sabiani did not offer sufficient protection from the STO, then the emerging fascist-orientated Milice Française could offer the prospects of both ideological proximity and the necessary security. The Milice also offered refuge

Bulletin Hebdomadaire de Renseignements, n° 11, 18 March 1943. AN F7 14986, Note de M Augustin, 17 July 1944. Fred Kupferman, Laval, Paris, 1983, p 403; M Georges, Le temps des armes sans arme, Paris, 1990, p 48; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 206. 76 Combat, n° 43, April 1943. Police chief René Bousquet even claimed that a large number of communists, obeying the orders of their party, entered the Police at this moment: AN F7 14908 [document n° 808], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 248 pol. cab. circ., ‘objet- introduction d’éléments douteux dans la Police’, 2 June 1943. Bousquet was keen to prevent any such opponents taking advantage of such recruitment possibilities: Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 394; Pascale Froment, René Bousquet, Paris, 1994, p 219. 77 AD BDR M6 12084, dossier Roger Viale. 78 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 79 Raphael Spina, ‘La France et les Français devant le Service du Travail Obligatoire (1942- 1945)’, Doctoral thesis, ENS-Cachan, 2012, p 177. 204 Chapter 9 from the STO. 240 places were set aside in this coloured-shirted formation for those from the age-groups targeted by the law of 16 February, but despite this incentive the local movement was unable to fill more than 209 of these.80 In other parts of France, some of the individuals who sought protection in the Police may have opted to head off to the rural Resistance known as the Maquis.81 But the département of the Bouches-du-Rhône of which Marseille is the capital was unsuited to Maquis activity. The bare white rock of its hills offered inadequate cover and there was little agriculture for those hiding out to live off. Trying to reach a Maquis in another département was hazardous, because it meant exposing oneself to identity checks in train or bus stations, and in any event supposed knowing where to go. Hiding out with relations in the city was difficult because of food shortages, but some tried it anyway. For many young men targeted by the STO, the Police with all its dangers appeared relatively secure whilst waiting for the war to end, with many grasping at the idea, that in the wake of Stalingrad, this would be imminent. In spite of the potential opposition to Vichy held by many of the new recruits, the Police Inspectorate initially declared its confidence in this intake, attributing this to two factors: the youth of the candidates made their manipulation possible; their quality of refugees from the STO gave the institution a potential weapon to brandish in order to assure their obedience, because losing their post made them susceptible to immediate departure for Germany.82 If the analysis of the Police Inspectorate is probably a true reflection of the position within the GMR where hierarchical control was tight rendering punishment easy, the comparative autonomy of the Corps Urbains made it more difficult to monitor the daily activity of new recruits there. An internal report on Police morale in Marseille dating from the spring of 1944 was much more pessimistic about the reliability of STO-recruits within the institution. It stated that ‘the majority of newly recruited Police officers joined up solely with the intention of avoiding their STO obligations. Not wanting to pursue a Police

80 AD BDR M6 11041, Le Préfet à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 11 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 26 April-3 May 1943. As with the Police, those Miliciens who belonged to the classe 1942 were obliged to leave for Germany in June: AD BDR M6 11041, télégramme n° 007297, Intérieur, le Secrétaire Général à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 4 June 1943. 81 Oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, 10 May 1993. 82 ‘La crainte du licenciement constitue un facteur d’émulation’ AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. The obligation to send off Police officers who were dismissed or resigned from the Police forms the subject of a letter from the head of government to Regional Prefects: AN 3W 88 [pièce 359] Le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 224 pol. cab. circ., undated. The New Slave Trade 205 career, they have no belief in what they are doing and are little interested in gaining promotion’.83 Vichy Police chief Bousquet was also dubious about the quality of recruits who joined up to avoid the STO. In a 4 March 1943 correspondence with Gen- eral Oberg, commander of the S.S. in France, Bousquet spelled out his position underlining the effects of previous shortfalls in Police recruitment:

Indeed the difficulties of recruitment which arise for various reasons present the government with the following choice: – either to recruit by any means, with no serious control on the quality of those accepted and run the risk of undermining the economy of the country, – or on the contrary, make do with a smaller manpower of more reliable and well trained individuals. Without the slightest hesitation it is this second solution which I personally favour84

The letter also contained a strong hint that in return for this strict application of the law of 16 February on the STO, Bousquet expected a review of the question of Police weaponry. He made his position equally clear to his subordinates. This same 4 March, he wrote to the Regional Prefects referring to the STO as the ‘Obligatory National Service’ and outlining his perception of the situation as follows:

The drafting of labour for Germany and the organisation of the Obliga- tory National Service are pushing many young people to seek jobs in the Police. On the other hand, manpower shortages might lead some service chiefs within the National Police to encourage or accept the applications of those looking to get out of the obligations decided by the government. A Police containing such individuals can offer no guarantee of security.85

He threatened to hold his Intendants de Police personally responsible for any violation of the principle that no exemption should be made for those who had

83 AN F7 14909 [document nO 1265]. 84 AN AJ40 1260, Secrétaire Général à la Police à M le Général Commandant Supérieur des SS, Cab A n° 795, 4 March 1943. 85 AN F7 14908 [document n° 741], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Intendants de Police, n° 91 pol. cab. circ., 4 March 1943; M6 11052, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 4 March 1943. 206 Chapter 9 joined the Police after 16 February. The local authorities in Marseille responded by back-dating the documents corresponding to this recruitment to make it look like candidates had entered the Police before the exemption ceased.86 But pressure on this question did not only come from Vichy. It was inconceivable that the Germans should remain ignorant of such a massive recruitment.87 The Intendant de Police was forced to negotiate. By stressing the deficiencies in Police numbers at a time when the Germans were demanding increasing guard duties from the French Police he was able to gain a major concession: only half of those incorporated would be sent to work in Germany, the others would remain in the Police. It was from the Fernand Bouisson football stadium that the first stage of these departures was to come into effect. On 11 March 1943, the stadium was the scene of a dramatic event. During the previous few days a crash-course in Police training had been provided there for new recruits. On the afternoon of the 11th, the stadium was surrounded by German troops who, machine-guns in hand, proceeded to round up the trainee Police- men. Two of the latter later explained how they escaped this round-up by jumping into the Huveaune river.88 The Germans loaded 250 of the other trainee Police officers into trucks and drove them off to the rue Honnorat. The public, including members of their families, began to demonstrate outside this assembly centre with chants of ‘let them go’. The intervention of the Intendant de Police postponed their departure until the following Saturday but he insisted to those scheduled to leave that they should not use this delay to escape.89 The 250 gardiens taken during this incident were not the last to be sent off to Ger- many in the first six months of 1943. Individual Police officers were arrested by the Germans as they carried out their duties and obliged to go off for forced labour. Moreover, in accordance with German pressure, the Intendant de Police issued instructions that all those of the ‘classe 1942’ were to lose their right to exemption in the Police.90 In all, 687 Gardiens de la Paix from Marseille

86 AD BDR 1M 713, lettre de M Souc, chef de division à la Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 11 July 1945. 87 AN F1a 4526, IGSA, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 26 March 1943. 88 Written evidence from Blaise Andrieu, 1April 1993, written evidence from Roger Ramonda, 2 April 1993 & 13 May 1994. 89 AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, n° 2320/M, 13 March 1943; AD BDR M6 11072, Le Commissaire Principal, RG à M le CD, RG, 16 March 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Synthèse Hebdomadaire de l’Inspection Régionale des Contrôles Techniques de Marseille, 27 March 1943; AD BDR 1M 713, lettre de M Souc, chef de division à la Préfecture des Bouches-du-Rhône à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 11 July 1945. 90 AD BDR M6 11094, l’Intendant de Police à MM les Commissaires Divisionnaires, n° 6991/43/Pol Adm/1, 2 June 1943. The New Slave Trade 207 had been sent off for the STO by the end of May 1943.91 Marcel Parodi, a Gard- ien in the GMR Camargue, remembers that there was considerable pressure exerted and in particular he was told that if he did not leave it would be his brother who was taken in his place. Parodi left for Germany that summer, but when he came back on leave he was allowed to re-enter the Police rather than going back across the Rhine.92 There were constant rumours of further application of the STO to the Police. For example, in December 1943 the rumour was going around in Marseille that all civil servants, including Police officers up to the age of 35, would be obliged to leave for the STO.93 If, in spite of these massive departures, young men still presented applications to the Police (and in many cases continued to be accepted),94 it is a sign of the desperation of those trying to avoid departure. The STO seemed to fly in the face of Vichy philosophy. Not only was it in complete contradiction with the basic notions of Vichy’s slogan of ‘travail, famille, patrie’ (‘work, family, fatherland’) but it also went against the basic principles of the shield theory. This was the theory by which Vichy established a hierarchy of those who were worthy of French protection and those such as Jews, communists, foreigners, etc.. who were to be sacrificed to ensure this protection. The STO cut across this by imposing the deportation of young men thought to be worthy of protection. In order to adapt the shield philosophy to the new circumstances, hierarchies were constituted whereby those to be taken were drawn more readily from amongst foreigners and the unemployed, whilst those considered to be of interest were to be incorporated into protected industries or services benefiting from exemption. Local Police chiefs had a dual interest in encouraging ‘worthy’ young men to join their services: on the one hand this would help overcome a crisis in Police numbers but on the other it would protect members of the ‘in-group’ from being sent off to work in Germany. As Bousquet feared, the recruitment of these individuals probably did undermine the reliability of the Police to Vichy, which had already begun to be manifest in the summer of 1942 in its failure to crack down on pro-Repub- lican celebrations on 14 July. Almost certainly this recruitment helped foster a desire within the institution to limit the application of the forced labour draft. This desire was often enacted through theatrical acts of zeal which gave the

91 AD BDR M6 11094, l’Intendant de Police à M. le Secrétaire Général à la Police, 25 May 1943. 92 Oral evidence from Marcel Parodi, 24 September 1993. 93 AD BDR M6 11079, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 27 Dececember 1943-2 January 1944. 94 In spite of the opposition of the services responsible for the STO: M6 12064, L’Intendant de Police à M le Directeur Régional du Service du Travail Obligatoire, Marseille, n° 9069/43 Pol Adm 1, 17 July 1943. 208 Chapter 9 appearance that the Police were chasing draft-dodgers without actually doing so. This meant that, although there was widespread defiance within the Police on this measure, Police activity on this issue could still antagonise the wider population. In reality though, the Marseille Police were far from zealous in their application of the German forced labour draft. New Rivals 209

Chapter 10 New Rivals

Police services generally like to have a monopoly on policing. So what effect would the Occupation of Marseille have on the Police? The arrival of the Ger- mans in the Southern zone had brought with it new rivals in the Police domain. None were more dreaded than the security service which took over the spacious villa at 425 rue Paradis and its pleasant garden, in the process ousting the Jewish aid agency HICEM from the premises.1 So-called ‘Paradise Street’ was amongst Marseille’s most sought-after real estate but after November 1942 this address sent shivers down the spine. Known popularly as the ‘Gestapo’, the ominous presence of this service is referred to in almost all the memoirs relative to the Second World War in France. Technically speaking what is wrongly referred to as the ‘Gestapo’ was in fact just one branch within the German security Police or Sipo-SD (Sicherheitspolizei-Sicherheitsdienst). But the methods of the organism now installed in the rue Paradis mirrored too closely the tactics used by the real Gestapo in Germany in the 1930’s for many French people to pay heed to such technical distinctions.2 One of 6 SD Einsatzkommandos (‘special units’) in the newly occupied zone, the Marseille office also controlled Sipo-SD stations in Avignon, Digne, Gap, Nimes and Nice. For much of the Occupation it was commanded by SS- Stürmführer Rolf Mühler, a broad-shouldered potbellied man in his late thirties. He had been a Professor of French literature in civilian life and, before arriving in Marseille, had previously been a member of the German Police delegation in Vichy and had presided over the SD in the Normandy town of Rouen. Five sections existed within the Marseille bureau but it was section IV, the ‘Gestapo’, which became the most important. This section organised arrests, interrogations and general security operations, targeting particularly Jews, Resisters and German deserters. It was here that the infamous Ernst Dunker- Delage earned himself a reputation as Marseille’s equivalent to ‘the butcher of Lyon’, Klaus Barbie.3

1 Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 178. 2 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 93 & 204; ADBDR M6 11073, Rapport du Capitaine Gerardin, commandant provisoirement la compagnie de Gendarmerie des Bouches-du-Rhône, May 1943. 3 AD BDR 58W 20, Note de Renseignementd, Surveillance du Teritoire, 30 July 1945; Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 105-106; Madeleine Baudoin,

Born in Halle in 1912, Dunker came to Marseille in February 1943, initially as an interpreter. A well-travelled man before the war he had worked in bars in St Raphael and New York and been employed as a ship’s steward, offering him the opportunity to speak English, French and Italian fluently.4 His French was said to be near perfect. He arrived in Marseille under something of a cloud. He had been stripped of his previous assignment at SD headquarters in the rue des Saussaies in Paris when an involvement in the black market for his own enrichment earned him the second prison sentence of his 31 year existence. Dunker was now keen to impress his bosses. His gift for languages helped him in this respect as it made him useful in interrogations. His ambition, unscrupu- lousness and resourcefulness did the rest and it was not long before he himself was organising the arrest and torture of Resisters with his own network of collaborators.5 The 50 or 60 German officials within the local Sipo-SD would have been insufficient without the support of several hundred French auxiliaries and Dunker was no exception in making use of the indigenous help available. The most casual of these auxiliaries were the informers who denounced their compatriots. They informed on complete strangers; they informed on business associates; they informed on friends and members of their families. Those denounced were accused of listening to illegal BBC radio broadcasts, expressing pro-Resistance sentiments, harbouring outcasts, criticising the Germans or participating in various anti-social or illegal activities. The denouncers’ actions were inspired by malice, greed, jealousy or zealotry. Some of the most chilling cases concerned those who acted in the heat of a family dispute. In the Eastern suburb of La Valentine, a 21 year old barmaid denounced her Father to the SD. He had reproached her for having turned his bar into a brothel for German soldiers. He never returned from the deportation which resulted from her accusations against him. Although denunciations were probably less widespread than some would have us believe, the threat of turning someone in was nevertheless a very real weapon. Shortly after joining the fascistic movement the PPF, a former prostitute threatened to denounce to the Germans anyone in

‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Thèse, Histoire, Université de Provence, Vol. i, pp 60-61; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, p 281. 4 C.L. Flavian, Ils furent des hommes, Paris, 1948, p 278. 5 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 105-106; Madeleine Baudoin, ‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Doctoral Thesis (History), Université de Provence, 1977, Vol. iii, pp 793-794; Philippe Aziz, Au service de l’ennemi, la gestapo française en province, 1940-1944, Paris, 1972, pp 109-186; AN 72AJ82, message du Capitaine Morange, undated (but May 44). New Rivals 211 her neighbourhood who annoyed her. Not all the denunciations were taken seriously by the Sipo-SD. But it is certain that without the help of this very active group of denouncers the Germans would have found information more difficult to come by.6 The financial rewards available to those giving useful information on a casual basis, were paltry compared to the gains for agents helping the Sipo-SD on a more permanent basis. The agents working directly with Dunker were to become particularly renowned, especially for the brutality of their interrogations which involved threats, kickings, beatings and the infamous bathtub treatment where the suspect’s head was repeatedly dunked into a cold bath, each time for a little longer, until they were convinced that they would be drowned. Antoine Tortora, a one-time prize fighter in his early forties, put his boxing skills to use on arrested Resisters until he met his end in a shootout with the Resistance in Aix in July 1944. Another torturer was Gaston Daveau, a former mechanic with a hefty criminal record. Like Tortora he had joined the PPF during the Popular Front period. Daveau became uncontrollable when his mistress, Marguerite Magno, another one of Dunker’s direct assistants, started a liaison with a German sergeant. Eventually Daveau shot at her in a café in the rue Paradis in a jealous rage and found himself deported to Sachsenhausen.7 Amongst Dunker’s direct collaborators were at least seven former Resisters, six of whom had been ‘turned’ during their interrogations. His ‘turning’ of Jean Multon, alias Lunel, was of particular significance owing to Multon’s strategic role within the ‘Combat’ Resistance network. At the time of his arrest on 28 April 1943 Multon was secretary to regional ‘Combat’ leader Maurice Chevance-Bertin. More than 30 Resisters were to be uncovered as a result of Multon’s treason. After aiding Dunker’s men to make a botched attempt to arrest Chevance-Bertin, Multon led them directly to René Hardy of the Résist- ance-Fer movement. Hardy’s arrest was the prelude to the capture of De Gaulle’s representative in France, the former Prefect Jean Moulin. Other Resist- ers who changed sides during interrogations included the 24 year old Blanche di Meglio who was arrested in April 1943. She gave away her former colleagues of the Franc-Tireur movement and then became Dunker’s secretary and mis-

6 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 133-134; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, p 282. 7 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 107; Madeleine Baudoin, ‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Doctoral Thesis (History), Université de Provence, 1977, Vol. iii, pp 793-804. 212 Chapter 10 tress. Eventually she tired of him but her clumsy plot to have him assassinated simply earned her a place in Ravensbruck concentration camp.8 But did new rivals in the Police domain come purely from the German side? The radicalisation of the situation in southern France as a result of direct Occupation did not merely manifest itself through new constraints, but also through the creation of new parallel Police movements. Created on 30 January 1943, (ten years to the day after Hitler’s investiture in Germany) the Milice Française was born from the remnants of the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire (SOL). Organised along paramilitary lines, it was sub-divided into ‘centaines’, ‘trentaines’ and ‘dizaines’. Its hierarchy consisted of those with a proven military record: its first Marseille leader Max Knipping was, like his national boss Joseph Darnand, a war hero and former member of the ‘Cagoule’, a right-wing anti-Republican conspiracy of the late 1930s. The Milice operated from a number of bases throughout the city. Its head-quarters were in the Lycée Thiers whilst its crack units, the Francs-Gardes, worked from a fortified barracks in the Northern suburb of Château Gombert. The brutal and alcoholic Charles Ringo ran an auxiliary service of Miliciens from the Hôtel Californie, tracking down STO draft-dodgers for bounty. More informally the black uniforms of the Milice could also frequently be found in Maxim’s bar in the rue Beauvau. From its very beginnings, it was even more radical than its ancestor the SOL, and showed little hesitation in using openly fascist discourse. Its self-appointed task was saving the country from communism.9 In order to overcome this Bolshevik threat, it relied on a combination of propaganda and a pseudo- Police mission, rejecting the prefect’s attempts to reduce it to a role of guarding railway lines.10 Redistributing food supplies seized on the black market was central to its attempt to give itself a social image.11 However, although the population was starving they did not always accept free food hand outs. The Belle-de-Mai district of Marseille was one which the Milice were keen to win over with a display of their generosity. This district was one of the most working class in Marseille. Rumour had it that the Socialist leader Léon Blum had thought of contesting

8 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 107-108; AN 72AJ82, message du Capitaine Morange, 10 May 1944. 9 AD BDR M6 11078b, document entitled: Message adressé aux Français le mardi 16 février 1943 par le chef Darnand, Secrétaire Général de la Milice Française. 10 AD BDR M6 11041, Le Chef départemental de la Milice Française à M le Préfet des BDR, 27 March 1943. Collaborationnist newspapers insisted on its Police role, eg: France Social- iste, “la Milice est bien une Police”, 2 March 1943; Marcel Déat in L’Oeuvre, “la tâche civique des miliciens”, 16 July 1943. 11 AD BDR M6 11041, le Chef départemental de la Milice à M le Préfet Régional, 20 July 1943. New Rivals 213 the constituency himself in the 1936 elections but the future prime minister had withdrawn for the sake of his health when he was informed that to win the seat you had to be able to consume fifty Pastis a day.12 Finally, the district was lost by the Socialists to the Communists in 1936. When the Milice tried to dis- tribute 300 grams of free beef per person in the Belle-de-Mai in July 1943, the Police noted that many of the locals ‘would rather die than have recourse to these people’.13 Following the failure of such humanitarian gestures, the Pre- fect tried to offer the Milice a social role as reinforcements to the local fire brigade. This partnership was to be very short-lived as the firemen persistently chanted the left-wing working-class anthem, l’Internationale, to irritate their makeshift colleagues.14 But it was increasingly the Police mission which was to dominate. This was a reflection of the fact that Vichy realised it could not rely on its traditional Police force but also that the political situation itself had become more polarised and, with the STO in particular, the demands on Police services multiplied.15 From late in 1943 the Milice were supplied with machine guns by the Germans. France seemed to be drifting towards a civil war. Miliciens arrested and tortured Resisters. Miliciens policed the city carrying out random identity checks in the street. From early 1944, armed squads of Miliciens were sent off from Marseille to hunt down the rural Resisters known as Maquisards. These squads burnt houses and farms, searched villages for arms caches and checked the identity of villagers. In two cases their anti-Resistance forays resulted in deaths. Near Aups in the Var in June, Miliciens executed without trial the gendarme Duchatel and the Maquisard Millet.16 Later the same month Dr Wedwedowsky and the Maquis leader Jean Verrier from the Tour d’Aigues in the Vaucluse were killed. The increasing importance of the Milice in policing matters was given official recognition when at the end of 1943 the Milice’s national leader Joseph Darnand was made head of the Police in France shortly

12 P. Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 7, Jean-Baptiste Nicolai, Simon Sabiani, un ‘Chef ’ à Marseille, 1919-1944, Paris, 1991, p 154. 13 AD BDR M6 11081, Note d’information, “activité de la Milice en matière de marché noir”, 10 July 1943. 14 AD BDR M6 11041, le Préfet Régional à M le chef Régional de la Milice, 26 August 1943; John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1994, p 94; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résis- tance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, p 240. 15 John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1994, p 32. 16 Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, pp 649-650. 214 Chapter 10 after he had sworn an oath of allegiance to Hitler and enrolled himself in the Waffen-SS. Radicalisation seriously limited recruitment possibilities, particularly once elite units known as Francs-Gardes were formed within it from the summer of 1943. The Milice was to remain smaller than either the Légion or the SOL. Con- temporaneous documents give an idea of numbers of Miliciens within the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône. A missive from the RG to the Prefect indicated that on 25 July 1943, there were 1300 Francs-Gardes; 139 trainee Francs-Gardes; 147 certified Miliciens; 107 trainee Miliciens and 78 trainee women Miliciennes. These figures were said to represent a fall of 519 Miliciens since June owing to the widespread resignations of those disheartened by direct collusion with the Nazis. According to Jankowski the number of Mili- ciens in Marseille itself fluctuated between 500 and 1000 members.17 Only about one fifth of those in the Milice had belonged to the SOL.18 This limited osmosis can be explained both by the Milice’s sentiment that its predecessor had been too tame and by the large-scale defections from the parent SOL faced with the ferocity of this new movement. Jankowski believes that the Milice was much closer to the Ppf in its sociological composition than the SOL had been. He claims that 25% of the Miliciens in Marseille were drawn from the working class, roughly one third from the lower middle class and one eighth from the upper middle class. The major difference was that the unemployed accounted for only 11% of the Milice, compared with 25% in the PPF.19 Reasons for joining varied. Undoubtedly many joined out of political conviction. But for others it would appear the motives were less clear cut. One youngster implied that his affiliation was motivated by a mixture of a love of uniforms and a teenage rebellion against his father, a Resistance-sympathiser.20 The Milice also offered refuge from the STO. 240 places were set aside for those from the age-groups targeted by the law of 16 February, but despite this

17 P. Jankowski, Communism & Collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 124. AD BDR, M6 11081, note d’information, “objet: au sujet des effectifs de la Milice Française”, 26 July 1943. The figures presented by Bertram Gordon are in the region of 8100 Miliciens and 2100 Franc- Gardes in the Bouches-du-Rhône on 30 June 1943: B.M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, Ithaca, 1980, p 355. 18 P. Jankowski, Communism & Collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 124. 19 P. Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 124; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, p 239. 20 AD BDR 55W 86, dosssier d’instruction contre Pierre Vin... New Rivals 215 incentive the local movement was unable to fill more than 209 of these.21 Such STO-refugees could not reasonably claim ignorance about the political meaning of their engagement. It is unlikely that many joined the organisation as a response to the instructions of the Resistance newspaper ‘Combat’ which pub- lically recommended in April 1943 that Resistance activists should join up to sabotage the organisation from within.22 On the extreme-right the Milice had a rival in the shape of the Parti Popu- laire Français which also became increasingly involved in parallel policing operations. From February 1944, around 200 PPF militants were used as bounty hunters to hunt down STO réfractaires. Under the command of the energetic Battesti, the unit operated alongside Ringo’s Miliciens from the Hôtel Cali- fornie, a narrow three storey building in the Arab quarter, the Cours Belsunce. About one third of Battesti’s men had a criminal record when they arrived at the Hôtel Californie and few showed many moral scruples in this service. Their motivation was largely financial. In addition to a monthly salary they were given 100 francs per réfractaire they bought in and they were expected to bring in at least 3 a day. Wages of 12000 francs a month were not uncommon here (by way of comparison an unskilled labourer would usually earn around 1500 francs per month). From early 1944, PPF militants could also find work tracking down Jews. This operation was organised by the greedy and unscrupulous Charles Palmieri, an associate of Jo Renucci and former PPF member, who was operating under instructions from Bauer of the Jewish affairs section (IVB) of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst). Alongside Charles Palmieri in these activities were his wife Jacky and his brothers, the hunchback dwarf Victor and the chain- smoking alcoholic Alfred. During post-war investigation of his activities Palm- ieri suggested that his team were responsible for the arrest of around 200 Jews. In addition to the 1000 franc bounty that he received for each Jew arrested, Palmieri also made the following post-war confession about supplementing his earnings through extortion and theft: ‘sometimes in a raid some Jews would give us money (100000 or 200000 francs) and we would set them free; of course we kept the money. Once in a while, we could find jewelry belonging to Jews’. Palmieri combined this mission with the operations of the ‘Bureau Merle’, a black market network based at number 8 rue Paradis. These activities were

21 AD BDR M6 11041, Le Préfet à M le Chef du Gouvernement, 11 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 26 April-3 May 1943. As with the Police, those Miliciens who belonged to the classe 1942 were obliged to leave for Germany in June: AD BDR M6 11041, télégramme n° 007297, Intérieur, le Secrétaire Général à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 4 June 1943. 22 Combat, April 1943. 216 Chapter 10 used to fund his lavish lifestyle which included a love of nightclubs and expensive clothes. Besides working for these outfits a number of PPF militants worked directly in the Sipo-SD offices, profiting from the pecuniary rewards offered there.23 How did the Police react to these parallel movements? They seem to have delighted in reporting their unpopularity. It would be an understatement to claim that the public did not like the parallel Police movements which emerged after the direct Occupation of the Southern zone. These movements were spurned by the public at large.24 The Milice was the subject of especially strong resentment. The Police claimed that the population saw it is as ‘the most unpopular movement that could exist’.25 The tone of Police reports suggested that they shared public hostility to these organisations. Writing with regard to the Milice in September 1943, a senior RG official noted: ‘to the most sensible and the most calm, the Milice certainly appears as an instrument of division; there can be no forgiving French people who hand over their compatriots to those who hold our prisoners, deport our youth and exploit our poor country until it starves’.26 If taken literally, this report could also serve as a damning condemnation of the Police themselves, but this irony should not allow us to overlook the personal tone creeping in and the very real sense of anger invested in what should be an ‘objective’ report. Police reaction to the Resistance campaign of assassinations of members of the ‘partis nationaux’, which began in France with the shooting of the assistant leader of the Bouches-du-Rhône Milice, Paul de Gassowski, in the boulevard Perrier on 24 April 1943 was also highly significant.27 The Police

23 Paul Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, pp 93-120; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique’, Doctoral Thesis (HIstory), Université de Provence, 1989, Vol. i, pp 280-281; Donna Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 203; Isaac Levendel, Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for the Truth of Vichy, Chicago, 2000, p 292-293. 24 For a good account of public opinion towards the Milice see Pierre Laborie’s departmental study on the Lot: P. Laborie, Résistants, vichyssois et autres, l’évolution de l’opinion et des comportements dans le Lot de 1939 à 1945, Paris, 1980, pp 271-279; with regard to the milice itself see Jean-Pierre Azéma, “La Milice”, Vingtième Siècle, n° 28, 1990, pp 83-105. 25 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 2-9 May 1943; AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 19-25 July 1943. 26 AD BDR M6 11077, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 19-26 September 1943. 27 Members of the SOL had been threatened by the Resistance: AD BDR M6 11071, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 14-20 December 1942. These threats were never put into action although a bomb had been thrown at participants of the SOL rally in Marseille in October 1942. J.-P. Azéma, “La Milice”, p 93; B.M. Gordon, Collaborationism in France during the Sec- ond World War, Ithaca, 1980, p 181. New Rivals 217 gloated that ‘all acts of terrorism directed against the Milice are greeted with almost unanimous approval’.28 Then in March 1944 Vichy had to send instructions to remind its Police officers that investigations of assassination attempts against members of these organisations were to be carried out with the utmost rigour, an implicit criticism of a previous absence of zeal in this respect.29 When Joseph Darnand was appointed to the role of Secrétaire Général au Maintien de l’Ordre, in which capacity he was given national control of all French Police forces, the Police greeted the news with the same anguish as the rest of the population. Darnand later claimed that he was called into Laval’s office shortly before his appointment was made official where the head of government warned him that the political overtones of his appointment were such that he could expect terrible difficulties with the rank and file of the Police.30 Why such hostility from Police ranks? The existence of parallel formations with pseudo-Police functions annoyed many Police officers. Their expansion necessitated the provision of more equipment, including arms,31 and the requisition of buildings, such as the clinique Ste Anne and bedding for Miliciens to sleep on.32 All of this came at a time when these resources were scarce and already formed the object of fierce competition between other administrations, some of whom tried in their turn to requisition equipment from the Milice.33 It also raised questions as to what the exact role of the Milice was and how its position should be defined in relation to the administration. These organisations undermined Police status by intruding on their professional territory. The Milice, the PPF and the Sipo-SD all attempted to ride roughshod over the traditional administration, questioning the Police right to arrest members of their organisations and attempting to undermine the authority of the forces of order. The Police resented their attempts to push them into subservience. On 16 March 1944, a ceremony to mark the raising of a

28 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 29 November-5 December 1943; Pierre Limagne, Ephémérides de quatre années tragiques, Ed de Candide, Paris, 1987, T.ii, p 1163. 29 AN F1a 3848, CNI, 6590, “Information concernant les organismes du maintien de l’ordre”, 8 March 1944. 30 AN 3W 88 [464], declarations of Joseph Darnand, 6 August 1945. 31 In the event its arms came both from the Germans and stocks taken from the Police: AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 6-12 December 1943. 32 AD BDR M6 11041, le Chef Régional de la Milice à M le Préfet Régional, 5 November 1943; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 13-19 December 1943. 33 For example the Service des Pneumatiques de la Préfecture attempted to requisition the tyres of vehicles used by the Milice, much to the Milice’s displeasure: AD BDR M6 11041, le Chef Régional de la Milice à M le Préfet Régional, 24 November 1943. 218 Chapter 10 flag outside the PPF headquarters on the Canebière illustrates how easily serious incidents could flare up.34 A Gardien de la Paix, who was busy giving information to a member of the public, was violently set upon when he failed to salute the raising of the flag. Two Inspecteurs and three other gardiens attempted to free their colleague from the grasps of the twenty or so PPF activists who were manhandling him. The PPF began to fire on the crowd of specta- tors who gathered to watch the goings-on, injuring a woman bystander, before they managed to drag two of the Police officers off to their headquarters for ‘interrogation’. The reports of one of the Gardiens and one of the Inspecteurs involved in this episode leave little doubt of how they viewed this incident, the former writing ‘I wish to add that such things are unacceptable and extremely damaging to the French Police’, the latter that ‘such behaviour towards the French Police leaves me speechless’.35 Being arrested or threatened with arrest by a parallel Police force was a humiliating experience for regular Police officers further undermining their sense of authority. 6 Police officers were arrested by the Sipo-SD in a seemingly arbitrary fashion in January 1943 and were used as bargaining counters in the Franco-German negotiations concerning the destruction of the Vieux Port district. In April 1944, after an incident involving a PPF militant who was apprehended for having tried to force his way through a Police roadblock claiming to be on a mission for the German Police, a couple of PPF activists barged their way into the duty office of the 2nd Company of Gardiens de la Paix and attempted forcibly to drag two Gardiens away to the rue Paradis. An Officier de la Paix intervened and the Police managed to disarm the two Sabianists, but not before the incident had threatened to descend to the level of a fist fight. Not all incidents opposing the Police and these parallel Police forces took place during working hours. Political discussions in their private lives could often have unfortunate repercussions. On 18 May 1944, the Gardien René Roman was arrested by his own cousin, a ‘Gestapo’ auxiliary, as the result of a violent discussion he had had with a PPF activist in his neighbourhood, during which he had threatened the activist with his gun. Roman was taken to the rue Honnorat to be sent off for the STO.36

34 For accounts of this incident see: AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 13-19 March 1944 and the collection of reports in AD BDR M6 11081. 35 AD BDR M6 11081, le Gardien n° 289 à M le Commissaire du 6e groupe, 16 March 1944; AD BDR M6 11081, l’Inspecteur de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Chef de la Brigade Spéci- ale, Marseille, n° 73, 16 March 1944. 36 AD BDR M6 11084b, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 15-21 May 1944. New Rivals 219

Even in the regular exercise of their duty Police officers were not immune from invoking the wrath of PPF militants. On the evening of 10 March 1944 a group of Gardiens had had the misfortune to stop the car of PPF leader Simon Sabiani in the rue de la République. Sabiani, enraged not only that the Police had dared to stop him but also that the Gardiens involved had failed to recognise him, shouted at the top of his voice: ‘I am Simon Sabiani, I don’t need to be stopped and I shall not tolerate it’, waking a good number of the inhabitants of the district in the process. In accordance with the instructions they had received, the officers insisted on frisking Sabiani and his entourage before checking their identity which only served to enrage Sabiani further. As the PPF members began to threaten the Police with their revolvers, Sabiani railed:

Even wearing a Police helmet you don’t frighten me. (...). The entire Police force can go and get stuffed and I’ll put a pistol up your arse. (...). We’ve got pistols too and more bullets than you. If you are real men step back ten meters and we’ll show you how a pistol is used.37

It took more than half an hour to calm him down. Extreme-right discourse often stresses the notion of public order. However, in practice the militants of this political current are often little more than undisciplined thugs. This was certainly the case by 1944 by which time they had become runaway trains largely escaping the attempts of their hierarchy to control them. The Germans and their auxiliaries perpetrated numerous acts of indiscipline. The RG reported that the Marseille public were disgusted by the attitude of certain Gestapo auxiliaries who were arrogant and aggressive, threatening passers-by with handcuffs and revolvers.38 Numerous incidents opposed Police officers and the members of these movements. On 28 Decem- ber, 1943, two individuals presented themselves at the Hôpital de la Concep- tion and after announcing that they were from the German Police began pointing their pistols at the Gardien guarding the political prisoners.39 During the night of 9 March, 1944, the German Police tried to force their way into the RG headquarters, in the rue de l’Obélisque, and even fired a number of shots into the door.40 On 24 April, a drunken German sailor tried to gain access to the Police mess in the rue des Recollettes and began firing on the Police officers

37 AD BDR M6 11080, le Commissaire Central à M l’Intendant de Police, 11 March 1944. 38 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 December 1943-2 January 1944. 39 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 December 1943-2 January 1944. 40 AD BDR M6 11081, Rapport Mensuel de l’Intendant Régional de Police, March 1944. 220 Chapter 10 who prevented him from doing so.41 In many cases, Police officers, unsup- ported by their hierarchy, had to accommodate themselves to these situations and to the provocation of those who considered themselves protected by the presence of the Germans, such as the landlord of the Bar du Gard in the rue Cavaignac. This bar served as a brothel for Occupation troops and its Italian owner openly flaunted the fact and warned the Police of the consequences of any intervention on their part.42 The criminal element was never far from the surface and encouraged confrontation with the Police.43 The PPF in particular attracted a criminal fringe. In 530 files of PPF members examined by Paul Jankowski, 90 (or 17%) had criminal records when they joined the organisation.44 Illegality brought conflict between the Police and the ‘partis nationaux’, as Police officers were finding that the perpetrators of crimes were not infrequently Miliciens or members of the PPF and that they recognised many of those in these organisations, having arrested them in the past.45 At least until the end of January 1944, the Police maintained the upper hand in this respect and could normally pursue Miliciens for criminal offences, particularly as, up until that moment, there were Miliciens who wanted to see the criminal fringe weeded out of their organisation.46 How much did Police officers work with these parallel movements? Given the mutual hostility between Police and parallel Police organisations it should come as no surprise to discover that very few serving Police officers engaged themselves in these movements.47 Lists established at the Liberation show that only one serving Police officer had joined the Milice in Marseille, although even he claimed that this was at the request of the Resistance.48 Similarly membership of the PPF was rarely an accusation levelled against Police offic-

41 AD BDR M6 11083, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 April 1944. 42 AD BDR M6 11081, Note d’information, 7 July 1943. 43 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 548. 44 P. Jankowski, Communism and collaboration, New Haven, 1989, p 213 (note 17). 45 AD BDR M6 11081, note d’information: “objet- Milice Française”, 26 July 1943; AD BDR M6 11041, le Chef départemental de la Milice à M le Préfet du Rhône, Lyon, 12 August 1943; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 3-9 January 1944; Ibid, 17-23 January 1944. 46 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 20-27 December 1943. 47 Cf the table drawn up by Philippe Burrin in La France à l’heure allemande, Paris, 1995, pp 546-547. 48 AD BDR 56W 87. The commission d’épuration de la Police viewed his adhesion with some scepticism, whilst one of the heads of the local Resistance backed up this Commissaire’s claim, saying that his adhesion to the Milice was at his request, as a means of gathering information. It should be noted that a Resistance report of February 1943 had this civil New Rivals 221 ers in post-liberation Marseille. Dunker-Delage named only a handful of Police officers who had co-operated with him directly during the Occupation. One of these was required to help in hunting down deserters from the Sipo-SD. Three others figured amongst the Resistance agents whom Dunker had ‘turned’ during his dealings with them. Raymond Berg and Henri Lanot were two Police Resisters who had agreed to hand over a substantial cache of Resistance documentation in return for a guarantee of their own safety. In May 1944, another Police Resister was to turn traitor and offer his help to the Sipo-SD, after having been arrested in a bar whilst on a mission for the Resistance.49 There was probably a small handful of Police officers sympathetic to the Milice.50 Evidence is lacking to prove that the Milice had already begun a campaign of infiltration into the Police in the first semester of 1943.51 Never- theless, it is certain that they attempted to influence the decision of the Prefect regarding the nomination in Marseille of officers serving in other regions who were judged sympathetic to their cause. This was the case of a Commissaire Principal who had been in function in Corsica for 18 months in June 1943. The Regional head of the Milice assured the Prefect that this individual was ‘particularly reliable’, and recommended his appointment to Marseille, although he acknowledged the opposition of the Marseille Police to this particular transfer.52 Links between the Police and extreme right-wing para-Police organisations could also have a more institutionalised nature. The Section des Affaires Poli- tiques (SAP), established within the framework of the Police de Sûreté in June 1942, was a prime example of such links between Police and Milice. This latter organisation, still lacking the official power of arrest, handed over to the SAP three individuals it had apprehended in April 1943 for Gaullist activity.53 In his memoirs, Robert Mattei remembers that as a newly appointed member of the Section des Affaires Politiques he was given the unenviable task of co-ordinating links with the Sipo-SD in affairs concerning individuals using German Police identity cards to carry out thefts. The vast majority of Police officers involved in parallel Police movements had left or been expelled from the force before joining the parallel

servant marked down as a collaborator: AN F1a 3922, Rapport n° R III n° 9, Mazur 1 Ax. 03. 3/14, Information 1 February 1943. 49 AD BDR 58W 20. 50 AN F1a 3729, n° 2505/d/BCRA/NM, note pour M Boris, 16 May 1943. 51 Although at least three members of the cabinet of the Prefect were recruited in this way: AN 3W 236 [pièces 14 rb; 15 rb]. 52 AD BDR M6 11041, Le Chef Régional de la Milice à M le Préfet Régional, 28 June 1943. 53 AD BDR M6 11073, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 11-17 April 1943. 222 Chapter 10 organisation. Parallel Police organisations could provide opportunities to make use of techniques and information gathered during a Police career, whilst ensuring the ex-Police officer immunity from the STO and poverty.54 Dunker’s chauffeur was a former Inspecteur of the Sûreté who at the age of 24 had been expelled from the Police in August 1940 for professional incompetence. An Inspecteur of the Sûreté Marseillaise who had been promoted to the Section des Affaires Politiques in Nîmes in July 1942 found himself without a job at the end of that year. His sympathy with the communist movement in that city had not been appreciated by his superiors. Unbeknown to his bosses, he had also been engaged in an escape network for stranded British pilots in Marseille, the réseau Pat O’Leary, which he had used partly to supplement his Police salary.55 Faced with the refusal of his Resistance chiefs to his demands for more money to compensate the cessation of his salary, this Inspecteur denounced the network to the ‘Gestapo’ in Marseille at the beginning of 1943 and began working directly for them.56 Another Inspecteur, forced to leave the Police for having divulged professional secrets, put himself at the service first of the PPF and then of the Gestapo.57 Of the French parallel Police forces it was the Milice who were the most seriously to challenge Police mastery of the street. Official recognition of the increasing influence of the Milice came on 31 December 1943, when its national leader, the former Cagoulard Joseph Darnand, was appointed to the national chief of Police post previously occupied by René Bousquet, which now changed title from Secrétaire Général à la Police to become Secrétaire Général au Main- tien de l’Ordre highlighting the increasing place that public order was to hold in policing.58 The public were shocked by this appointment and feared its possible consequences. The Renseignements Généraux noted the public’s fear of ‘a relentless struggle against the Gaullist organisations which have the support of a large majority of the population’ and claimed that Darnand ‘has the

54 See also the case of a former Commissaire de la Police Mobile, who after resigning his post took up the more lucrative function of impersonating Police officers, in the company of Gestapo auxilaries. He was arrested at the end of 1943 for this activity and deported to Germany: AD BDR M6 11079, Bulletin Hebdomadaire des RG, 3-9 January 1944. 55 There were divergences regarding the sum of payments given him by the Resistance. Pat O’Leary claimed that he was given 1000 frs a month, whilst the former-Inspecteur claimed that the figure was nearer 2500 frs: AD BDR 55W 119, pièces 49, 50, 52. On the réseau Pat see: Donald Caskie, The Tartan pimpernel, London, 1969. 56 AD BDR 55W 119, pièce 31. 57 AD BDR 55W 46. 58 The Times, “France under the Gestapo – Darnand as agent of Vichy terrorism”, 24 February 1944. New Rivals 223 immense majority of French people against him’.59 The references to the new government team in the intercepted private correspondence of Marseillais confirmed this impression: ‘a fine band of pains in the arse, watch out for the abuses of power’; ‘It’s the start of a civil war!’; ‘...with this government we’ve sunk into Hilterism’.60 The Police were no happier with the nomination of Darnand than were the population at large. Writing shortly after the Liberation the new head of the Police in Marseille was to claim that the vast majority of the Marseille force had viewed the arrival of Darnand in the Vichy government with alarm and anguish. Darnand himself claimed that he was called into Laval’s office shortly before his appointment was made official where the head of government told him that his assumption of this post ‘would take on such political significance that I would have the worst types of difficulties with Police’.61 Marcel Bucard, the leader of the fascist Franciste party, talking of Darnand’s appointment was reported to have said: ‘He [Darnand] is vomited up by the Police. I have recently seen senior Police officers on the point of crying at this news …’.62 Police reports still betrayed the sentiments of their authors towards the Milice and other parallel movements, referring to the ‘so-called “national” parties’, when it would have been easier and more acceptable to their hierarchy to leave out both the words ‘so-called’ and the inverted commas around “national”.63 Vichy continued to send instructions to its Police officers to pursue the perpetrators of attacks on the extremist parties as rigorously as they did when the victim was a German.64 The month of January 1944 was marked by a power struggle in Marseille between the Milice and the existing Police authorities. The Intendant de Police, Robert Andrieu, continued to support his subordinates when they arrested Miliciens for common law crimes. On 12 January 1944, a farm in the quartier de la Rose had been surrounded by seven Miliciens. The farmer was arrested by the Miliciens on suspicion of Gaullist activity. Informed that seven suspect

59 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 3-9 January 1944 & 10-16 January 1944. 60 AN F7 14931 Service Des Controles Techniques, Inspection Regionale De Marseille, Month of January 1944; AN F7 14928, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale De Marseille, Rapport Statistique Hebdomadaire, 15 January 1944; AN F7 14928, Service Des Controles Techniques, Inspection Regionale De Marseille, Rapport Statistique Hebdoma- daire, 29 January 1944. 61 AN 3W 88 [464], declarations of Joseph Darnand, 6 August 1945. 62 CAC, 830594, art. 14 (MI 25306), Note d’information, no source indicated, 14 January 1944. 63 AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27 December 1943-2 January 1944. 64 AN F1a 3848, CNI, 6590, “Information concernant les organismes du maintien de l’ordre”, 8 March 1944. 224 Chapter 10 individuals were carrying arms in the vicinity of this farm, a section of the GMR La Crau was sent to investigate. They apprehended the Miliciens who insisted on bringing the farmer with them. The Intendant de Police confirmed the arrest of the Miliciens, charged with carrying out illegal searches, whilst the individual suspected of Gaullist activity was immediately released.65 This attitude ran into the hostility of the Milice leadership, who believed the Police were favouring the Resistance to the detriment of the Milice. It was at the end of that month that this struggle was to reach its climax in a question concerned with the most elementary human rights. Inspired by Pétain himself, a new law was announced on 20 January, creating a completely arbitrary form of justice, the Cours Martiales (literally ‘courts-martial’), military style courts which were to pass judgement on Resisters caught red-handed in acts of terrorism.66 The public was overwhelmingly hostile to this law,67 as this court bypassed the usual channels of justice and indeed that the suspect was given no possibility of access to defence lawyers. Moreover, these Cours Martiales offered a particularly severe form of punishment: execution within 24 hours. The first application of this jurisdiction in Marseille was in the case of the communist Lucien Vivaldi. Vivaldi had been stopped by a Police roadblock on 21 January and after having declared “Resistance! Let me through!” had opened fire on the Gardiens de la Paix carrying out the control. Arrested, he was to confess, during a brutal interrogation, that he had participated in the attacks on Verdun, (President of the Cour d’Appel in Aix), Kupfer, (the Directeur of the STO in Marseille) and Phialy, (Editor of the newspaper Gringoire).68 Vivaldi’s last letter gives his perception of his passage before the Cour Martiale: ‘At 6pm I appeared before the Cour Martiale. It was over very quickly. There were 5 people on the podium and they all had “boche-heads”. These dirty boche condemned me to be shot. I regret only one thing and that is not having done enough for my country’.69 The Cour Martiale had been presided over by the

65 AD BDR 56W 73, procès-verbal, 12 January 1944. 66 AN 3W 269 [710] Pétain à Laval, 27 December 1943; Journal Officiel, 21January 1944, p 238. 67 The RG reported that: “la création des cours martiales avait été accueillie avec beau- coup de méfiance et de crainte”, AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 January 1944. 68 AN F60 1703, “répression à Marseille”, January 1944; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Heb- domadaire, 17-23 January 1944; AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 Janu- ary 1944. 69 AN F60 1702, “Dernière lettre de Lucien Vivaldi” (addressed to his parents), Marseille, 24 January 1944, 7 pm. New Rivals 225

Intendant de Police70 who according to the underground newspaper, Le Palais Libre, published by the communist-inspired movement the Front National des Juristes had been ‘obliged to associate himself with this dreadful parody of justice’ by the threats of the Milice.71 Andrieu offered his resignation immediately after the sitting of the court, stating in his resignation telegram that it was a question of conscience and that he could not accept the responsibilities in the application of the measures:

I believe this mission is incompatible with the functions of Intendant de Police (…) the law of 20 January 1944 offers defendants no legal guarantees which even a military tribunal grants (...) In these conditions, having fulfilled my duty as a civil servant conscientiously, I deem that I can no longer fill the role of Intendant de Police in Marseille (...) In my soul and my conscience I cannot conceive repeating such an experience and I ask you to see to my immediate replacement and to give to my administrative career whatever outcome you see fit.72

Having been informed by Commissaire Mercuri of the Police de Sûreté that Darnand had sent a senior Police official to Marseille to arrest him, the Intend- ant de Police set off for Vichy where he arranged a meeting with the Secrétaire Général au Maintien de l’Ordre to explain his objections to the law of 20 Janu- ary. He was arrested in Darnand’s office and interned in the department of the Creuse.73 The repercussions of Andrieu’s resignation and internment were manifold. For Darnand it was a further proof that the Intendants were not on the same wavelength as him. He ordered a modification of the law of 20 January stipulat- ing that the judgement of these courts would be taken out of the hands of the Intendants and given directly to the Secrétaire Général au Maintien de l’Ordre.74 For the Marseille public it confirmed the idea that Vichy was col lapsing.75 The Police regretted the departure of Andrieu. The postal censor,

70 Assisted by the Commissaires Divisionnaires of the three branches of the Marseille Police and a Colonel of the Gendarmerie. 71 Le Palais Libre (Organe du Front National des Juristes), n° 8, May 1944. 72 AN F1a 3021, CNI, copie intégrale du télégramme secret et confidentiel, n° 00122 de M l’Intendant de Police, Marseille. 73 AN F1a 3766, CNI, SCDD March 1936.808, 3 February 1944. 74 It was modified by the law of 11 February, see Journal Officiel, 13 January 1944, p 475; AN F7 14892 [A 204], SGMO à M le Général Oberg, PN Cab n° 1868/204 A; Le Palais Libre (Organe du Front National des Juristes), n° 8, May 1944. 75 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 January 1944. 226 Chapter 10 the Contrôle Technique, assessed from intercepted letters that: ‘All those around him are devastated, and no longer know which way to turn’ adding that ‘he was adored by his subordinates’.76 The RG confirmed this idea recognising in Andrieu, ‘a leader surrounded with unanimous respect who enjoyed the affectionate respect of all those who worked with him’ and adding an implicit warning about the possible effects on the personnel:

It is common knowledge that Monsieur Andrieu believed he had to resign after a difficult problem of conscience. Everyone knows that the measures taken against him are a punishment for his disowning the law of 20 January 1944. It is easy to imagine all of the consequences his departure will have on the state of mind of public servants.77

The most immediate physical effect of Andrieu’s resignation was the appointment of a new Intendant, Albert Mathieu, the former sous-chef of the Section des Affaires Politiques in Vichy. This appointment was further evidence that the Milice was winning the power struggle. Mathieu was a former school teacher, who had entered the Police in 1925. He had come to the attention of Darnand in Nice where he had served as a Commissaire before his appointment to Vichy and where the leader of the Milice had been one of the most vigorous members first of the Légion des Anciens Combattants and then of the Service d’Ordre Légionnaire.78 Further Milice-inspired appointments were to follow and in particular, the nomination in April to the post of Intendant- Adjoint (Deputy Intendant) in Marseille of Eugène Paneboeuf, the former head of the Milice in Lyon.79 This movement was accompanied by a purge of Police personnel.80 The physical penetration of the Milice into the senior hierarchy of the Police and the replacement of some junior personnel increased their influence still further. Both the new Intendant and his deputy enjoyed excellent personal relations with local Milice leader Dr Paul Durandy.81 The

76 AN F7 14928, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique Hebdomadaire, 5 February 1944. 77 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 24-30 January 1944. 78 AD BDR 58W21, le Commissaire du Gouvernement près la cour régionale de justice à M le Garde des Sceaux, Ministre de la Justice, 3 March 1945. 79 AD BDR 58W21, le Commissaire du Gouvernement près la cour régionale de justice à M le Garde des Sceaux, Ministre de la Justice, 3 March 1945. 80 The Times, “France under the Gestapo – Darnand as agent of Vichy terrorism”, 24 February 1944. 81 AD BDR 58W21, le Commissaire du Gouvernement près la cour régionale de justice à M le Garde des Sceaux, Ministre de la Justice, 3 March 1945. New Rivals 227

Police were increasingly asked to carry out operations in cooperation with the Milice and to regularise the arrests made by this movement.82 This cooperation was for the most part unsuccessful. The Police were not keen to be seen in public with people they considered as little more than criminals. The Milice were reluctant to be seen with the Police, for fear that it might look like they had been arrested. A large number of incidents continued between the Police and the Milice, but now Police officers tended to find their superiors taking the Milice point of view or protecting Miliciens accused of common law crimes. For example in March 1944, the Police were told by their Intendant to drop their enquiries concerning 5 Miliciens who, on the orders of the head of the 2nd Bureau of the Milice, had stolen 120,000 francs.83 The Milice was a double-edged sword for Vichy. Sometimes parallel movements canalised Police activity. Keen to preserve their professional status or to protect a population open to the abuses of fanatical movements, the Police might upgrade their activity within the sphere threatened by the semi-official organisation. These organisations could, however, also discourage Police activity in certain domains by giving Police officers the impression that a particular mission could be left to the parallel Police. Such a reaction was to be envisaged where the semi-official organisation brought discredit on the official institution and where Police officers deliberately chose to distance themselves by dis- sociating themselves from a particular activity. The existence of these parallel movements was used to justify the tactics of the Police by illustrating what the Police were trying to save the population from, making them appear mild in comparison, and hopefully helping to forget the abuses committed by Police officers. These movements were seen as a competitor for both resources and authority whose criminal fringe confirmed the illegitimacy of Vichy by underlining that law was not necessarily on the side of the State. This last argument was highlighted by the fact that due to the precarious situation of their manpower, from June 1944 the Police themselves were being allowed to recruit from those with a criminal past.84 The progressive take-over of the Police by the Milice confirmed the idea that Vichy was in league with, or at the very least

82 AN F60 1675, CNI, n° 4558, B 2755/1, 13 January 1944; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Heb- domadaire, 17-23 January 1944; AN F7 14909 [1105], le Directeur de la Police de Sûreté à MM les Commissaires Divisionnaires, chefs des Services Régionaux de Police de Sûreté, 23 February 1944;AD BDR M611052 & AN F7 14909 [1160], le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, PG/LP, 18 March 1944. 83 AD BDR 58W21, le Commissaire du Gouvernement près la cour régionale de justice à M le Garde des Sceaux, Ministre de la Justice, 3 March 1945. 84 AN F7 14909 [1318], le Directeur Général de la Police Nationale à MM les Préfets Régio naux, n° 273 Pol 2 circ, 19 June 1944. 228 Chapter 10 at the mercy, of the Germans. After all Darnand had engaged in the Waffen SS and had sworn an oath of loyalty to Hitler. The fact that the ‘partis nationaux’ against whom the Police were in frequent conflict were receiving official protection against the Police furthered the feeling of insecurity running through the Police. Towards Liberation 229

Chapter 11 Towards Liberation

It is often suggested by historians that with the approach of the Liberation civil servants began to change their behaviour with a view to avoiding punishment at the hands of a Resistance government in post-war France.1 Such thinking certainly did exist but to reduce individuals’ motives in the approach to the Liberation simply to calculations about a post-war purge is a massive over-simplification as it ignores that the future was only one factor amongst in civil servants’ reckoning. It was not just the post-Liberation that was uncertain; it was also the present. Police officers had to weigh up the range of threats with which they were confronted, of which post-war punishment was only one. Also whilst there were reasons to dread the future, for other civil servants there were also positive visions for the post-war. What was the state of mind of the Police in the run-up to Liberation? Insecurity was rife within Police ranks in 1944 and insecurity is a complex and multifaceted concept. It often originates with events in the present but is frequently amplified by apprehension that present events are going to escalate in the future or that new phenomena will add further danger to existing ones. It can take the form of professional insecurity whereby the concern is with the safeguard of one’s job or personal insecurity where the danger directly threat- ens personal safety. The situation is even more confusing where a number of different factors are causing the insecurity and the decision as to what preven- tive action to take therefore needs to balance out the level of danger represented by each. The spectre of a future Liberation was certainly very real and deliberately kept alive by both the Resistance and the Allies. In an October 1940 speech to the French people, Churchill had promised that one day ‘the dawn [of Libera- tion] would come’ to free them from the dark night of Occupation.2 The following month leaflets dropped from the air by the RAF in Marseille and Toulouse had warned the population to expect an imminent Allied landing.3

1 Jean-Marie Guillon, La Résistance dans le Var: essai d’histoire politique, Thèse, Université de Provence, 1989, p 300; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 37. 2 http://www.ina.fr/fresques/jalons/notice/InaEdu00281/discours-de-churchill--hommage-a-la- france-21-octobre-1940. 3 AN AJ41 25, Contrôle Technique, weekly synthesis, 5-11 November 1940.

BBC broadcasts into France explicitly and intentionally maintained hopes of a future deliverance.4 Indeed the persistent Allied rhetoric about a future Lib- eration had at times become a source of real frustration and sometimes scepticism. A letter sent from a Resistance sympathiser in France to the BBC underlined the growing restlessness: ‘For over two years you have been telling us to expect a landing of Allied troops on the European continent and in the last year you have led us to hope that this would be imminent …. Now, I must tell you we are starting to despair’.5 But the rumours would not disappear and Allied actions seemed to confirm that something was afoot. The Allies had landed troops in French North Africa in November 1942, then in Corsica and Italy in 1943. In early 1944 news that the Allies had appointed special Generals to oversee a future invasion leaked into France and fuelled expectations.6 If the Allies deliberately kept hopes of an invasion alive, the Germans and Vichy inadvertently reinforced these through their own actions. Administra- tive correspondence concerning the possibility of an Allied landing reinforced the perspective of an impending Liberation, with all the repercussions that such a possibility could entail. Instructions sent to regional services in the spring of 1944 divided the city of Marseille into a number of ‘sectors’ and ‘sub- sectors’ in which an appointed Commissaire would be responsible for defending Vichy institutions, and if necessary to lend a hand to the Germans.7 This perspective of invasion was underlined by the fortifications erected by the Ger- mans along the Mediterranean coast as the Prefect made clear in March: ‘In the coastal departments of the Marseille region there is a real sense of being on a battlefront, as everything is being prepared on the German side as if an Allied landing were imminent.’8 Rumours concerning the evacuation of Police personnel went in much the same direction and the veracity of these rumours seemed confirmed by the withdrawal of the GMR from the Mediterranean coast in June. For those in the GMR, this withdrawal had sinister ramifications as its objectives were shrouded in mystery but left room to speculate that they were to be deployed against the Maquis in the mountainous regions within France. The letters of the GMR to their loved ones prior to this withdrawal could not disguise a certain anxiety: ‘bad news is circulating … within our GMR there is talk of a possible with-

4 AN AJ41 25, Contrôle Technique, monthly synthesis, 10 June–10 July 1942. 5 AN F60 1690, Letter from France to the BBC, 5 April 1943. 6 AN AJ41 380, Prefect’s monthly report, Meuse, 4 January 1944. 7 AN F1a 3768, le Commissaire de Police 18e arrondissement à M le Commissaire Central, 4 April 1944. 8 AN F60 640, Le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M. Le Ministre du Travail, 26 March 1944. Towards Liberation 231 drawal to St Pierre de Rumilly and the thought is depressing us’.9 These letters generally attempted to play down the danger involved in any potential mission as, after noting that their GMR was being sent further north in preparation for a potential Allied landing, one recorded ‘we don’t know what we’ll do up there, but I don’t think that it will be as dangerous as [the anti-Maquis operations] in the Savoie’10 but this was undoubtedly considered the best way of calming the anxiety of their families. For the moment, in these groups, subjected to close hierarchical supervision, the insecurity of the present outweighed that of the future even if members of their family sought to remind them of the recrimi- nations they faced at the Liberation: ‘One of Dad’s buddies said that after the war, the GMR would get what’s coming to them, I’m afraid for you, take off your uniform.’11 Concern about the possibility of a future Resistance government sacking civil servants who had shown too much loyalty to Vichy undoubtedly added its weight to this argument but this should not be exaggerated. Although many career Police officers had joined the force because of the professional security it offered, and had invested a great deal in this profession making it difficult for them to envisage pursuing another job, a large number of the new recruits to the force had joined simply to escape the labour draft and had absolutely no intention of remaining there after the Liberation. This was an argument the Commissaire Divisionnaire of the Sécurité Publique in Marseille particularly underlined: ‘If the long serving Police officers are doing their job correctly, but without enthusiasm, it should be noted that the majority of new recruits only signed up to get out of the STO. Since they have no intention of staying in the Police they feel no vocation and are little interested in promotion prospects.’12 He added that the Police could only be counted on for ‘pure Police operations’, in other words non-political policing, and that large scale defections were to be expected in the event of internal troubles. It is clear that no one anticipated post-war employment being determined by the current government. Whilst Pétain’s regime liked to refer to itself as the ‘French government’, the Resistance systematically designated it the ‘Vichy regime’ as a way of underlining its provisional nature since any permanent

9 F7 14931 Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rapport Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, May 1944. 10 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, May 1944. 11 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, July 1944. 12 AN F7 14909 [1265]. 232 Chapter 11 government must be based in Paris, not the provinces. Vichy did itself no favours with respect to giving itself an air of permanence. The continual reforms of the structure of the Police carried out by Laval’s government reinforced fears regarding future professional security. In specific reference to changes in Police structure it was noted in February 1944 that ‘these incessant restructurings, these constant reforms are not viewed favourably by public servants who readily make fun of the instability of measures introduced since 1940’.13 The RG drew attention to such an analysis of restructuring amongst the rank-and-file: ‘These continual reorganisations easily give the impression that everything is unsettled on the one hand and on the other they disrupt working practices because they suppose a period of adaptation which requires a period of time to pass and for errors to be made’.14 Reforming and counter- reforming underlined not only a lack of direction in Vichy’s policies but also highlighted the instability of Vichy’s position, raising questions about its long- term survival. With many Police officers not wishing to pursue a Police career in the post- war, it was not so much professional security, as in the sense of maintaining one’s post after regime change, as a concern for one’s own personal safety that mattered. The Police certainly did fear future reprisals, having been warned on numerous occasions by Resistance leaflets and BBC broadcasts that as ‘Com- bat’ put it: ‘nothing would be forgotten in the wake of victory, neither the services rendered not the brutalities practised’.15 In the Breton département of Morbihan in February 1943 the Commissaire Central wrote to his superiors expressing his dread that an Allied landing would be accompanied by harsh reprisals against cops who had been too zealous against the communists.16 His letter was just an especially explicit expression of an anxiety which many Police officers throughout France would have been feeling, an anxiety which generally encouraged a reluctance to pursue cases against the Resistance too rigorously. To consider fears about post-war retribution as the sole determinant of Police behaviour in 1944 would be too reductive. Anxiety over the future had to be offset against very real fears in the present. In the present, the usual dangers associated with the job were magnified as the public became more desperate

13 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 21-27 February 1944. This same report figures in AN F60 1689, CNI, l’opinion publique en France d’après les rapports officiels de Vichy, January to March 1944. 14 AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 17-23 April 1944. 15 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 552. 16 AN AJ41 381, Prefect’s report, Morbihan, 31 March 1943. Towards Liberation 233 as a result of the shortages or simply more aggressive as a result of the large profits available to those willing to exploit circumstance: an armed break-in at an office in the rue Sainte-Cécile issuing ration books left one uniformed Police officer dead and three other people injured.17 Personal insecurity was also provoked by the various belligerents in the war: not only by the Resistance (who killed 6 Marseille Police officers in 1943 and 1944) but also by the Ger- mans (who deported 8) and the Milice (who sent out warnings that they had arrested a number of senior Police officers in France).18 Engaging in Resist- ance in order to save oneself after the Liberation exposed one to real dangers that one might be interned, and possibly executed, long before that. In May 1944, the Ajax network was seriously undermined by the arrest of one of its members, an Inspecteur of the Surveillance du Territoire. He was apprehended in a café in the company of two members of the army intelligence branch, the Second Bureau, by a group of agents of the German Police. The ‘Sipo-SD’ took his wife prisoner and threatened that if he did not talk she would have to face the consequences. He duly denounced more than forty members of the network during a series of interrogations and gave Dunker-Delage indications of the best way of capturing them. Overcome by remorse, he made a confession to the Bishop of Marseille and subsequently to the Police Inspecteur who served as a chauffeur to the bishop. The latter got word to those threatened who promptly took to the Maquis, thereby foiling the Sipo-SD.19 It was not only the arrest or attempted arrest of Police officers that was at the base of Police anxiety. Members of the force also felt an affinity to civil servants from other categories taken prisoner by the Germans. When the Regional Prefect in Marseille, Jacques-Félix Bussières, was arrested in May, this spread consternation amongst civil servants generally.20 They feared for their safety. The Prefect had only been in post since February and was known as an ally of the Prime Minister, Pierre Laval. It was therefore thought to be less this particularly Prefect who had been targeted than his function. Civil servants feared the same logic may apply to them or that they would be interned following an unfounded denunciation: ‘the arrest of civil servants has caused serious fears within State administrations and many fear being arrested on a simple

17 Paul Sanders, Histoire du marché noir, 1940-1946, Paris, 2001, p 100. 18 AN F7 14909 [1302], Note du SGMO, 4 June 1944; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdoma- daire, 29 November-5 December 1943; AD BDR M6 11083, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 8-14 May 1944; AD BDR M6 11084b, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 15-21 May 1944. 19 AD BDR 55W 56. 20 AN AJ40 541, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, reports, 16 May 1944, 26 May 1944, 27 May 1944; Donna Ryan, The holocaust and the Jews of Marseille, Chicago, 1996, p 204. 234 Chapter 11 denunciation’.21 The fact that civil servants believed they could become the victims of an arrest by the Germans on the grounds of a flimsy denunciation reveals a basic mistrust of Nazi justice. For this reason, the threat although real, was unlikely to produce a general zeal in the work of civil servants, who believed that, in any event, such arrests were arbitrary. On the other hand it could ensure obedience in operations subject to close hierarchical supervision. At the same time Vichy added its own contribution to the insecurity of its employees. In January and February 1944, it announced still harsher measures for negligent civil servants and in particular Police officers who let themselves be disarmed by the Resistance. Such dereliction of duty was now to be punished by internment. Civil servants’ reactions were much the same as those noted above regarding arrest by the Nazis. The RG reported that ‘civil servants were very moved by the announcement of punishments for failing to obey government orders’ and that ‘a feeling of insecurity is prevalent amongst civil servants’. Three reasons were given for this reaction: ‘they believe that the new laws leave lots of room for arbitrary measures’; ‘they fear that they will be the victims of errors of appreciation or judgement by their superiors or those given the task of assessing them’ and ‘they fear being subjected to personal or political vendettas’.22 Still harsher measures were announced in June. A long list of offences committed by civil servants were to be punished by the death penalty. Again, the justice likely to be meted out by these tribunals formed the principal concern: ‘many are worried about the objectivity of any verdicts these courts might pass’.23 Here also, the arbitrariness of the proposed punishment might undermine its effectiveness, as one could reach the conclusion that it might be imposed regardless of whether one were guilty. But it was not only the danger of falling victim to Vichy’s arbitrary justice which Police officers could decode in instructions sent down from the temporary capital. Vichy circulars inadvertently underlined that the strict application of this government’s orders was fraught with danger. Measures such as the creation of a special fund for Police officers who died on duty, the opening of a convalescent home for officers injured in service and instructions on what course of action to pursue in the event of an allied landing could hardly be expected to make the Police feel comfortable regarding their personal safety, either in the present or the future and this at a moment when their belief that

21 AD BDR M6 11084b, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 15-21 May 1944. 22 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 31 January-6 February 1944. 23 AD BDR M6 11084b, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 19-25 June 1944. Towards Liberation 235

Vichy was a regime worth defending was at its lowest point.24 Complying too zealously with the instructions of the current government did not just expose one to post-war reprisals. One might actually be executed by the Resistance before Liberation arrived and ‘dying for Vichy’ was less than ever a sacrifice which civil servants were prepared to make. The Police were therefore left treading a difficult tightrope between their sense of professional obligations, of patriotic duty and the very real threats coming at them from both the Resistance and German/Vichy sides. Whilst increasing numbers of Policemen offered help to the Resistance, many tried their best just to survive both in the present and in the future. In the meantime both Vichy and the Resistance tried to offer more positive incentives. Not all Police officers would have viewed the prospect of National Libera- tion negatively, merely as a time when scores would be settled against them. On an individual level, it was also looked forward to with hope by many. When considering the motives of Policemen joining the Ajax network a rival Resist- ance grouping cynically underlined the material benefits available for members of this network, which included the certainty that their names were registered by London, that they would be recognised and possibly promoted by a future de Gaulle government, that they received payment for any information transmitted and that their wives would be considered war widows should anything happen to them, entitling them to a range of benefits.25 Attachment to the réseau Ajax often had much more positive motivations than this report would suggest. The choice of Resistance pseudonyms hints that members of this network were not interested simply in the financial aspects but also in making a statement. Some simply adopted humorous ‘noms de guerre’ such as Inspecteur Terrier who adopted the pseudonym ‘Fox’. But many chose names with more political undertones. Some were patriotic in inspiration: for example ‘Cocorico’, an allusion to the sound the French think their national bird, the Gallic cock, makes, or ‘Tricolore’ in reference to the national flag. Others made explicit mention of purity, such as ‘l’incorruptible’ (‘the incorruptible’) or ‘le pur’ (‘the pure’), suggesting a reaction against the corrupt image of the Mar-

24 AN F7 14908 [852], booklet entitled: “Instruction relative au Fonds National d’Aide aux Vic- times du devoir”, n° 322 Pol 6 Circ, 23 July 1943; AN F7 14909 [1174], Directeur Général de la Police Nationale à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 20 March 1944; AN F7 14909 [1201], Directeur Général de la Police Nationale à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 172 Pol Cab Circ, 27 April 1944; AN F1a 3768, le Commissaire de Police 18e arrondissement à M le Commissaire Cen- tral, Marseille, 4 April 1944. 25 AN 72AJ 35, Note du 27/11/43 sur l’organisation Ajax communiqué par M.J. Gemähling. 236 Chapter 11 seille Police in 1930s and the hope that out of Resistance would come a new clean Police force.26 The persuasive powers of the Resistance for Police officers must not be measured merely negatively in terms of the threats they could make. The Resistance also raised aspirations of a better society; better working conditions and, for a limited number, advantages regarding promotion. In January 1944, the Free French in Algiers sent instructions for the nomination of the future Secrétaire Général for the Police in each region. In Marseille, the officer chosen was Etienne Mercuri, who had been promoted to head of the Police de Sûreté in the region by Vichy. His nomination was put forward by the Underground Socialist party and accepted by the Réseau Ajax to which he belonged. His nominated second in command was the Secrétaire de Police Xavier Culioli, a long-time member of the socialist party and an active Police trade unionist.27 Beyond these two posts, lists of Police officers to be promoted in the event of Liberation had also been drawn up. The Police could also anticipate a better representation; the reinstatement of their trades unions had been ordained by post-war planners in September 1943, and Resistance tracts did not hesitate to point out to civil servants that they would be better represented under a Republic.28 But, besides questions of personal gain, the Resistance was seen to represent the best future for France. The Renseignements Généraux made it clear that only a tiny minority of the population still believed that there was something to be gained from collaboration with Germany, although this did not rule out the possibility of accommodations to their presence. Vichy was aware that it was losing the battle in the appeal to the patriotic sentiment of its employees. A member of Darnand’s cabinet complained of the success of the Resist- ance’s campaign in this respect within Police circles: ‘The calls for them to support “dissidence” which are aimed at them from London or from elsewhere, are expressed in a “patriotic” tone which is easy for them to grasp, because they recycle the over-arching themes of the nationalist propaganda after the 1870 defeat and in the 1914 and 1940 wars.’29

26 AN 3AG/2/53, list of members of Ajax, “Secteur 9, Marseille”. 27 AN F1a 3729, Note pour M le Commissaire à l’Intérieur, Alger, 11 January 1944. On this question see also the private papers of Etienne Mercuri, held in the departmental archives in Marseille. 28 AN F60 245, “Ordonnance du 2/9/43 portant abrogation des actes dits ‘loi du 15/10/40’ et ‘loi du 14/9/41 (titre VIII)’ sur les associations professionnelles de fonctionnaires”. 29 AN F7 14986, Note de M Augustin, 17 July 1944. Towards Liberation 237

This point is illustrated in the intercepted private correspondence of members of GMR formations sent to fight the Maquis. In letters, which made little secret of the fact that they had no belief in the work they were doing, they undermined the portrait propaganda minister Philippe Henriot painted of the Maquisards as foreign terrorists: ‘They are not bandits nor terrorists, they are French people like us, with perhaps a more beautiful set of ideals than ours.’30 The appeal of the Resistance, therefore, was not just determined by a fear of what the Resistance might do to Police officers in the event of Liberation. It is clear that the Resistance had much to offer individual Police officers and that many Policemen recognised the patriotic arguments advanced by it. Could Vichy still appeal to the rank and file? There was concern in Police ranks that Vichy had moved away from being a government likely to promote public order. This change occurred as a result of the regime’s radicalisation. The regime’s public order policies were ever more desperate and showed every sign of having been inspired by panic. The desperate radicalisation of Vichy’s policy was shown clearly in the new structures established that summer. The Délégation Régionale des Renseignements Généraux was a provincial version of the notorious Brigades Spéciales in Paris which used torture systematically in interrogations. Radicalisation was also present in the measures envisaged against the Maquis with the operations in the Haute Savoie in February followed by excursions carried out largely by the Milice in June. The Police continued to question the patriotic nature of this radicalisation and the role they were expected to play within it. By 1944, the word “discipline” in Police reports was used almost exclusively to describe the way Resistance movements were run. In obvious contrast was the behaviour of Vichy, the Milice, the PPF and the Germans, all of whom were engaging in increasingly thuggish behaviour. The vocabulary used to describe incidents with these forces was highly significant. As has already been noted, following an incident with the PPF in March 1944, two Police officers wrote of their disgust with regard to the attack on them by the PPF militants. One reported that ‘such episodes are unacceptable and extremely prejudicial to the French Police’, the other that ‘I am left speechless by such acts against the French Police’.31 The use of the expression “French Police” in Police reports, particularly in docu-

30 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, February 1944. 31 AD BDR M6 11081, le Gardien n° 289 à M le Commissaire du 6e groupe, 16 March 1944; AD BDR M6 11081, l’Inspecteur de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire Chef de la Brigade Spéci- ale, Marseille, n° 73, 16 March 1944. 238 Chapter 11 ments referring to acts of indiscipline committed by fascist movements, became very widespread from the summer of 1943. This stressing of their Frenchness was a means of asserting national identity and underlining the gulf which distinguished the traditional Police from the rabble to which Vichy and the Germans had given Police powers. Struggling for patriotic arguments and associated with thuggery, Vichy groped around desperately for means of encouraging enthusiasm from its Police officers. The idea of serving the State did not seem a sufficient incentive to align themselves with Vichy, particularly as many no longer recognised the legitimacy of Pétain’s government. A member of Darnand’s cabinet pointed to another weakness of this argument: ‘Telling them [Police officers] to serve the State, is all well and good, but the expression is too abstract to fill them with zeal for their missions and to, for instance, make them fight against those who, under cover of “patriotism”, attack them and disarm them’. He concluded that it was necessary to give them an attachment to a person, and that person was Joseph Darnand, the heroic soldier of the First World War.32 In 1940, it had been possible to persuade a large number of French people (including many Police officers) to rally round the person of Marshal Pétain. Pétain had declined into irrelevance by 1944 and there was no way that Darnand could realistically hope to fill his shoes. He had been massively rejected by Police officers on his nomination and he had done nothing since then to endear himself to his subordinates. A number of incidents revealed that the Marseille Police were unable or unwilling to offer the guarantees that Vichy was looking for. In May 1944, the inability of the Police to break up a demonstration of women calling for better rations was symptomatic of this state of affairs. This failure was undoubtedly partly inspired by the Police’s lack of resources, but it also resulted from sympathy of the Police for the demonstrators. After all, the Police were experiencing similar difficulties to the public in this domain, as the intercepted letter of a Gardien writing just days after this demonstration makes clear: ‘Our working conditions are poor, currently we are at work practically night and day. The rank and file have protested to the Intendant de Police asking for bread, a salary increase and a reduction of working hours.’33 It was not the Police but the Allied bombing of Marseille which was to put an end to this strike movement,

32 AN F7 14986, Note de M Augustin, 17 July 1944. 33 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, June 1944. Towards Liberation 239 a bombing which was generally seen to have targeted the civilian population and in which 19 Police officers were killed.34 Indeed it is fair to say that by 1944 this was an institution on the point of collapse. There is no doubt the public saw the French government as a Police State. Uniforms abounded and propaganda posters had promised the expansion of Police services. Pétain’s regime had instigated a whole raft of laws which facilitated arbitrary arrest on the flimsiest of pretexts. The State maintained the right to intercept and read the private correspondence of individual citizens. To be ‘in order’ with the authorities, the average Frenchman or woman now had to carry a massive array of identity papers. Indeed popular belief that France had become a Police State was highlighted by rumours circulating in Marseille at the beginning of 1944. Many of the identity papers delivered at that time contained anomalies with regard to the way in which the card-holder’s photo was cut and glued back onto the card, resulting in the loss of corners of the photos. Rumour had it that the particular part of the photo missing indicated what the authorities believed to be the political opinion of the card- holder: neutral if the photo was intact, socialist if the upper left hand corner were missing, Gaullist if the bottom left hand corner were absent, reactionary if the upper right hand corner had been chopped off, national socialist for the two upper corners and communist if one were left with no corners at all.35 Paradoxically, though, Vichy had ultimately developed into a Police State without an effective Police force. The Germans had to intervene directly in matters of public order ever more frequently.36 Nationally, of 44000 arrests carried out for political activity in 1943 only 10000 had been the work of the French Police. The rest were carried out directly by the Germans.37 From the beginning of 1944, the occupiers were forced to give overall control of policing to the fanatical militia, the Milice française, a policy they had consistently wished to avoid up to that point through fear of the effect this might have on public opinion. At the same time, political extremists like the PPF were being given an ever greater Police role. This change in tactic was directly

34 Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France, Palgrave, 2004, p 101. 35 AD BDR M6 11081, RG weekly bulletin, 10-16 April 1944. 36 Jean-Henri Calmon & Roger Picard, ‘La Vienne’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 159; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 210; Denis Peschan- ski, ‘Dans la tourmente’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police fran- çaise, Paris, 2000, p 73. 37 Michael Marrus & Robert O. Paxton, Vichy et les Juifs, Paris, 1981, p 450; Hans Umbreit, Der MBF in Frankreich, 1940-44, Boppard-am-Rhein, 1968, p 143; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 152. 240 Chapter 11 inspired by the unreliability of the regular Police. It seems some Police officers welcomed their replacement by other administrations. Despite the material advantages they were given, members of the GMR were increasingly asking to be transferred into the Corps Urbains or were expressing relief when they saw the Milice relieving them of the operations against the Maquis: ‘There’s talk of replacing us which would be good news, because I’m getting thoroughly fed up’.38 Only closely supervised obedience and the remnants of anti-communism seemed to offer much hope of ensuring loyalty. In most cases the success or failure of operations of GMR against the Maquis was largely determined by the behaviour of their officers who kept their gardiens under close scrutiny. The execution of three Maquisards, Odelin, Loiseau and Baby, in the courtyard of the prison des Baumettes in July 1944, illustrates this point. These three Maquisards had been taken prisoner in the Gard département after shooting down a gendarme during a Police roadblock near the village of Lasalle.39 The Gendarmerie of Nîmes refused to carry out the execution ordered by the Cours Martiales in the town with the result that 22 gendarmes were arrested. The Maquisard prisoners were transferred to Marseille where the Deputy Intend- ant made preparations for the application of the sentence decreed against them. A group of GMR, resting in Aix were specially requisitioned for the execution. As the prisoners were tied up they received words of comfort from gardiens of the Corps Urbain present. The GMR for their part hesitated but faced with the threats of the Commissaire Central gave into the pressure. The families of the three young Maquisards were left to regret that despite the hesitation and despite the words of comfort there had been no mass rebellion of the Police officers present and the three young men died under the bullets of the GMR. Indeed no spontaneous mass rebellions in closely supervised operations occurred. Just as Vichy could hope to ensure itself the obedience of its civil servants through close supervision, followed by severe punishment for negligence, so the Resistance could hope to influence the decisions of many Police officers in those actions less closely scrutinised. Vichy could maintain a degree of control over the activity of Police officers in those operations which may be described

38 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, February 1944. For demands for transfer out of the Police see: AN F7 14909 [1108], Directeur Général de la Police Nationale à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 81, Pol 2 Circ, February 1944. 39 AD BDR 56W 73, le Commissaire Principal Becq à M le Commissaire Central, 6 September 1944. Towards Liberation 241 as “reactive”, that is to say carried out in reaction to a direct demand from the public or a strict order from above, accompanied by supervision of their application. This control was diluted where either the hierarchy failed to apply their control or where Police officers felt they could rely on a degree of public discretion. Where the Police were failing Vichy was in the “proactive” domain; in other words actions which began with initiative from rank and file Police officers. Given that reports on Police attitude had consistently been indicating considerable disaffection with Vichy and widespread sympathy with the Resist- ance since the second half of 1942, it should come as no surprise to learn that the Police did nothing to protect the Germans or Vichy during the insurrection which was launched in Marseille on 21 August 1944. Instructions from the fascist Minister of the Interior, Joseph Darnand, ordering the forces of order to establish ‘pockets of Resistance’ (“îlots de résistance”) to protect the State from those who would overthrow it went unheeded.40 The Liberation offered the chance to prove categorically not only that the Police were not loyal to Vichy but also to demonstrate that they were firmly in the Resistance camp. This would have facilitated the progress from institutional collapse to institutional resurrection and help lay the foundations for a new spirit of policing for the post-Liberation. However, the opportunity of engaging in a highly visible and organised Police action which would have helped facilitate such an institutional resurrection was not fully seized upon. That summer, reaction to the Allied landings in Normandy in June and Pro- vence in August was marked not by an armed overthrow of their superior officers, but rather through a failure to show up for work, with many Police officers pretending to be sick. Police involvement in the armed insurrection was ultimately limited. Those Police officers who took part in the combats did so spontaneously and not according to any organised and coherent plan for their role in the Liberation. Different estimates reveal that between 20 and 30 members of the forces of order were killed fighting for the combats for the Liberation, accounting for between one third and one fifth of all the casualties the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (FFI) suffered.41 Others, however, were disarmed by Resistance groups who thought they could make better use of the weapons.

40 For Darnand’s instructions: H.R. Kedward, In search of the Maquis, Oxford, 1993, p 198; AD BDR M6 11084b. 41 Combattre, hebdomadaire illustré des amis des FTPF, special issue “L’insurrection de Mar- seille, août 1944”, undated but probably November 1944; Rouge-Midi, “La Police avec nous”, 26 August 1944; Maurice Agulhon & Fernand Barrat, CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 91. 242 Chapter 11

Thus, the Francs Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) group Attila disarmed the Police stations of the Chartreux and the Belle-de-Mai districts on 19 August. For the Marseille-based GMR, participation in the Resistance took place away from the city itself. Between June and August 1944, the ‘groupe Camargue’ attached themselves to the Maquis of Louhans (Saône-et-Loire),42 the ‘groupe Mistral’ did likewise with the Resistance at Albi in the Tarn,43 whilst the ‘groupe Pro- vence’ associated itself with the Maquisards of the Allier, the département containing Vichy.44 But these dissensions could not entirely erase the previous use of GMR units as hunters of the Maquis and, in any event, took place at a considerable distance from Marseille.45 The insurrectionary period in Marseille, which covered nine days of bitter fighting, was not marked by the same union of Police and Resistance that was to be seen in Paris.46 The Resister Raymond Aubrac, who would be intricately involved in Marseille politics after the Liberation, has stressed that the Parisian Police ‘gained public confidence on the barricades’ of the city whereas no similar occurrence happened in Marseille.47 In the photographic record of the bat- tles for the Liberation the Police took centre stage in Paris whereas in Marseille they are largely absent in the images taken by photographers such as Julia Pirotte.48 In Paris the Police had been given the responsibility of defending

42 Oral evidence from Georges Vidal and Marcel Parodi. 43 Revue du Tarn, n° 134, summer 1989, pp 297-309; AN 72AJ 198, Redon, Souvenirs de la Résis- tance dans le département du Tarn, 1944; oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, presented in appendices. 44 AD BDR 56W 39; “Bulletin d’information du Comité Départemental de Libération de Rumilly”, l’Agriculteur Savoyard, 16 September 1944. 45 André Négis, Marseille sous l’Occupation, Marseille, 1947, p 132; Alban Vistel, La nuit sans ombre, Paris, 1970, p 240; AD BDR 23J3, Rapport sur l’activité résistante du Commissaire Mercuri; AD BDR 55W 26, [doc 126], procès-verbal de confrontation de témoins, 23 May 1945; H.R. Kedward, In search of the Maquis, Oxford, 1993, p 187; oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini, Georges Vidal and Marcel Parodi, presented in appendices of my thesis: Simon Kitson, “The Marseille Police in their context from Popular Front to the Liberation”, D. Phil., Sussex, 1996; Revue du Tarn, n° 134, summer 1989, pp 297-309; AN 72AJ 198, Redon, Souvenirs de la Résistance dans le département du Tarn, 1944; AD BDR 56W 39; “Bulletin d’information du Comité Départemental de Libération de Rumilly”, l’Agriculteur Savo- yard, 16 September 1944. 46 Simon Kitson, ‘The Police in the Liberation of Paris’ in H.R. Kedward, & Nancy Wood (eds), The Liberation of France. Image and Event, Oxford, 1995, pp 43-57. 47 Raymond Aubrac, Où la mémoire s’attarde, Paris, 1996, p 131. 48 Hanna Diamond & Claire Gorrara, ‘Reframing war: Histories and memories of the Second World War in the photography of Julia Pirotte’, Modern and Contemporary France, 20:4, 2012, pp 453-471. Towards Liberation 243 their headquarters, the Préfecture de Police.49 In Marseille they were given no such role which would have easily established their participation in the minds of the public.50 This may be attributed to the Police lacking the courage of their convictions, but it was also partly due to the fact that the Police in Mar- seille had not been solicited to take a prominent part in the insurrection with Resistance leaders wishing to give a more “popular” facade to this uprising. The Communist newspaper Rouge-Midi did nevertheless insist that the behaviour of the vast majority of the Marseille Police during the insurrection was beyond the slightest reproach.51 But this information was contained in a small article lost amongst others praising the activity of a number of other professional groupings, particularly the postmen, and in any case was rapidly contradicted by less flattering assessments of Police participation in the insurrection. The inability to establish similar insurrectionary credentials to their Parisian counterparts made it more difficult for the Marseille Police to improve their image at the Liberation and would hence affect their ability to impose their authority.

49 About the Parisian Police in the insurrection see: Georges Cogniot, “Pour l’ordre public”, l’Humanité, 30 August 1944, p 1; Marcel Cachin, “L’épopée de Paris”, l’Humanité, 30 August 1944, p 1; declarations of Georges Bidault, “la première manifestation officielle de la libéra- tion”, Combat, 24 August 1944, p 2; “Communiqué- le CNR félicite les défenseurs de la Pré- fecture de Police”, l’Humanité, 24 August 1944; Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy, The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France, New York, 1968, pp 83-84; Claude Angeli & Paul Gillet, La Police dans la politique, 1944-54, Paris, 1967, p 139; Simon Kitson, “The Police in the Liberation of Paris” in H.R. Kedward & Nancy Wood (ed), The Liberation of France, image and event, Oxford, 1995, pp 43-57. 50 For accounts of Police activity during the insurrection: Combattre, hebdomadaire illustré des amis des FTPF, special issue “L’insurrection de Marseille, août 1944”, undated but probably November 1944; Rouge-Midi, « La Police avec nous », 26 August 1944; the assessment of Communist deputy Jean Cristofol at a meeting on 31 January 1945 in Maurice Agulhon & Fernand Barrat, CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 91. 131. 51 Rouge-Midi, “La Police avec nous”, 26 August 1944. 244 Chapter 12

Chapter 12 A New Police for a New France?

The poor image of the Police in provincial France at the Liberation was partly derived from traditional hostility to these institutions. On the one hand there was a widely held belief that the Police in general were corrupt and self-interested. It is significant that Resistance documents concerning Police involvement with their organisations frequently showed scepticism as to the honesty of motives behind Police Resistance. On the other hand, hostility existed to the way in which the State had traditionally used its Police force as an instrument of political oppression. It was no coincidence that it was the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the branch specialising in political policing, and the Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (GMR), specialising in the maintenance of public order, who were the most singled out for criticism. During the years 1940-44, abuses of Police power were seen to have attained unprecedented levels. Firstly, the Occupation had offered new possibilities for corruption. Secondly, political oppression by the State had reached new heights. Both Vichy and the Germans had asked Police forces to perform a political role: chasing Jews, rounding up those required for the labour draft or arresting Resisters. Many Police officers had sought to undermine these orders, but Police Resistance often took the form of exaggerated displays of zeal. This was particularly the case with regard to the round-up of recruits for the labour draft, where Police patrols would go to great lengths to make their presence in a particular zone known to allow potential targets to escape. Where arrests of workers did occur it was not infrequently amongst those who the Police knew were actually exempt from the labour draft and who were subsequently released. This both relieved hierarchical pressure on Policemen by producing results, however illusory, and satisfied their desire to have nothing to do with political measures of this nature. But the side-effect was to further undermine the image of an already tainted Police. The general euphoria surrounding the Liberation, encouraged the belief that it was possible to start afresh and to establish services genuinely preoccupied with the interests of the public.1

1 La Marseillaise, quotidien d’information du Front National, « Les dissous », 19 October 1944; H. Buisson, La Police, son histoire, Paris, 1958, p 265. M. Baudoin, Histoire des Groupes Francs (MUR) des Bouches-du-Rhône, Paris, 1962, p 45. For a further discussion of this question see Simon Kitson, « La reconstitution de la Police à Marseille (août 1944-février 1945) », Provence Historique, n° 178, October 1994, pp 498-500. As concerns the optimism of the population see:

Beyond their tarnished reputation, the Police were also physically unable to assure all the tasks which the authorities were asking them to fulfil. Nothing had been done since the Liberation to remedy the ramshackle state of many Police stations. In fact the condition of Police buildings had deteriorated yet further.2 The greater part of the Central Police station had been engulfed in the flames of a mysterious fire during the battle for Marseille.3 The Police were also lacking means of communication and locomotion.4 Telegraphs and telephones were out of action in the first few weeks of September. The Police Secours service, which was expected to intervene in the event of accidents, possessed only one vehicle. Moreover, the instruments which Police officers consider as forming the basis of their authority, that is to say uniforms and weapons, were in even shorter supply than they had been before the war. The departmental Prefect announced in January 1945 that almost 600 Police officers who had been disarmed by the Germans or the FFI still lacked the arms necessary to their function. As late as September 1945, newspapers were complaining that around 30 Police officers were still unarmed. A number of Gardi- ens de la Paix were still waiting for a uniform a year after the Liberation.5 Police manpower was also a serious difficulty. In October 1944 and again in February 1945 the local authorities complained that manpower had considerably decreased since the Liberation. This shortage occurred because a large number of Police officers had left the force. There were those who had been suspended or removed on the accusation of Collaboration. Police Stations in the 5th, 13th, 15th, 24th arrondissements found themselves without Commis- saires in November owing to the removal from office of their incumbents. Oth-

Pierre Laborie, « Opinion et représentations- la Libération et l’image de la Résistance », Revue d’Histoire de la 2e guerre mondiale et des conflits contemporains, n° 131, July 1983, pp 65-91; Alain Pinel, Une Police de Vichy – Les Groupes Mobiles de Réserve, (1941-1944), L’Harmattan, 2004; Alain Pinel, Histoire de la Police, du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Robert Laffont, 2005, pp 703–707. 2 For the development of the question of Police buildings see: L’Etatiste, n° 122, June 1939, p 1, « la réorganisation à Marseille »; Centre d’Archives Contemporaines (CAC) 860679, art 4, Contrôle des Commissariats d’arrondissements de la ville de Marseille, rapport n° 164, 31 March 1944; AD BDR 23J3, Le Secrétaire Général pour la Police au Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale, « situation des fonctionnaires de Police », undated (September 1945?). 3 AD BDR M6 11560, Secrétaire Général à la Police à M. le Commissaire Régional de la République, n° 25 Pol, 29 August 1944. 4 For problems of communication and locomotion: Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 172; Le Provençal, « un problème urgent: il nous faut une Police », 6 February 1945. 5 For weapons and uniforms: AN F1C III 1210, Rapport mensuel du Préfet, 15/1-15 February 1945; Le Provençal, « un problème urgent: il nous faut une Police », 6 February 1945; Le Provençal, « la grande pitié de la Police », 24/9/45. 246 Chapter 12 ers left the force because they had joined it in 1943 or 1944 simply to escape the forced labour draft and now had no desire to pursue a Police career. Owing to poor working conditions, many of the best elements of the Police sought more lucrative industrial or commercial posts. Attempts were made to limit this desertion by refusing to authorize resignations. But these backfired. Those who could not resign had little choice but to make sure that their presence was so undesirable that they would be sacked and so set about taking unauthorized leave of absence, or sinning by scruffy appearance or general disobedience. Departures were generally not compensated by recruitment. A press campaign in October 1944 inviting applications to the force produced only 5 candidates. In December, there were 51 new recruits against 84 resignations. The authorities explained the lack of response to the recruitment drive by the insufficiency of their salary compared to the cost of living and the efforts demanded. To this reason must be added the poor public image of the force and uncertainty over its future. The resultant shortages of manpower were said to be such that the Marseille Police needed some 2000 new officers. To make matters worse a proportion of the existing manpower was still diverted away from Police tasks by more administrative duties.6 These shortages were all the more noticeable owing to the wide-range of demands on Police services. The period following the Liberation did nothing to ease the traditional difficulties associated with policing a port city and indeed added new difficulties for the Police. Following the Liberation the Police were confronted with a particularly high level of common law crimes. Armed robberies against shops and warehouses became daily occurrences. Muggings were commonplace. This was usually attributed to the lowering of morality associated with wars, but other factors such as poverty, the severe shortages, the ready availability of guns and problems of street-lighting also played a role. In this last repect it was reported that railway workers who finished their shift at 4 am would wait until it got light near 6 am to leave their place of work in order to avoid being mugged. This high crime rate necessitated greater resources to be poured into crime solving but also into crime prevention in the form of guard duties and foot patrols. To make matters worse many Police

6 AN F1C III 1210, Rapport mensuel du Préfet, 15 January–15 February 1945; AN F1a 4023, Rapport de l’IGSA, “débats sur la Police”, 15 October 1944; AD BDR M6 14621, CD RG à M le Chef Service Régional des RG, 23 November 1944; AD BDR 23J3, Le Secrétaire Général pour la Police au Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale, « situation des fonctionnaires de Police », undated (September 1945?); Le Provençal, « un problème urgent: il nous faut une Police », 6 February 1945; La liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est, « les policiers feront-ils grève? », 8/9/45; Jean Cristofol at a meeting on 31 January 1945 in Maurice Agulhon & Fernand Barrat, CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 91. A New Police For A New France? 247 records on criminals had been destroyed during the chaos of the Liberation. In spite of the difficulties, the Marseille Police did see a fall in the murder rate from 1 a day in 1945 to 1 every three days in 1947 but at the same time the robbery rate had increased to 1 every two hours. Life Magazine suggested that ‘while the average Marseillais has a better chance of living to see tomorrow’s sunrise, he also has a better chance of waking up to find his wallet missing’.7 Besides coping with alarming trends in criminality, there was the question of maintaining public order and assuring a range of sensitive political duties. Some form of purge among the population was inevitable. The fierce repression of the Occupation period had fostered a desire for revenge against the Germans and their accomplices. When Nazi atrocities such as the 18 July 1944 shooting of 38 important local Resistance figures and their burial in a mass grave at Signes (Var) came to light after the Liberation this served to pour oil on these flames. Vichy had divided the French, thereby magnifying the phobia of an ‘enemy within’. This phobia was coupled with the need to be vigilant for reasons of national security because although Marseille was liberated in August 1944, the war dragged on into May 1945.8 It was certain that many of those who had collaborated with the Germans had simply gone into hiding in the region or had joined the FFI, either hoping to regain lost credit by last minute Resistance activity or to undermine these organisations from within. The danger represented by such elements was highlighted by those members of the Parti Populaire Français who took to the roofs that summer and operated as snipers against crowds celebrating the Liberation. It was not until 6 September that the last one of these sharp-shooters was shot down from a roof

7 AD BDR 22J 2 Le Secretaire General pour la Police à Monsieur le Directeur General de la SN, 2 March 1946; Le Provençal, « Pourquoi ne pas rééclairer toutes les rues de la cité », 7 January 1945; Le Provençal, « un problème urgent: il nous faut une Police », 6 February 1945; Le Provençal, « la grande pitié de la Police », 24/9/45; Le Monde, « Crimes, vols et délits sont en province en progression constante depuis 1939 », 27/9/46; Life Magazine, ‘Toughest City West of Suez’, 8 September 1947, p 103. 8 For need for purge and fear for national security: AD BDR M6 11560, le Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale à M le Secrétaire Général à la Police, 29 November 1944; AN FIC III 1210, Rapport mensuel du Préfet Départemental, 15 January-15 February 1945. Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 139. AN F1a 3347, Valabrègue, « Mémoire sur la reconstitution de la Police », note adressée à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 29 November 1944; Marcel Cachin, « Pour une épuration complète », l’Humanité, 8 October 1944, p 1. Rouge-Midi, « Epuration jusqu’au bout », 31 August 1944; Rouge-Midi, « Où on est l’épuration », 4 September 1944. Philippe Buton, « l’état restauré », p 424; Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974; Philippe Bourdrel, L’épuration sauvage, 1944-45, Paris, Vol. 1, 1988, pp 109-216; Pierre Ricci, Vision et Sensibilité, p 91. 248 Chapter 12 in the Oddo district and set on fire to the jubilant cheers of the crowd. Other collaborators had fled to neighbouring fascist countries in the summer. Some of these had enrolled in espionage training schools in Germany and para- chuted back into France in December feeding public rumour and the fear of the Fifth Column.9 Given the multiplicity and complexity of such tasks and the general weakness of the Police it is not surprising that the Police were not automatically given a monopoly over policing. No one was contesting the Police power to assure criminal policing. But in the domains of political policing, purging the population and assuring public order other contenders existed. One possibility would have been to make use of military forces to assure public order. The French army had moved north to continue the fight against the Germans and could not therefore assume this role, but a continual flow of American soldiers was always on hand in Marseille. Raymond Aubrac, the first Commissaire de la République, was keen to avoid the use of Allied armies for this task. De Gaulle had warned him to avoid conceding any sovereignty to the Americans. Moreo- ver, Aubrac was aware that American soldiers were proving to be as much a source of disorder as a potential force of order and he was afraid that asking them to intervene might indispose the population. In fact the Americans themselves were keen to avoid having this responsibility fall on them. As one Civil Affairs officer put it: ‘If the French had failed to take over their responsibilities, we would have been in the soup.’10 Beyond military units there were also the parallel-Police organisations established by the Resistance. Even before the Germans had left, Resistance structures, imbued with the notion of serving the population, had begun to emerge. The Milices Patriotiques, combining a Police function with the notion of grouping popular reserves for the insurrection, represented such a structure.

9 For activity of collaborators against the Liberation: AD BDR M6 11560, le Commissaire Régional de la République à MM les Préfets Départementaux, n° 406XA, 27 December 1944; AN F1a 3349, dossier XV D3, le M le Directeur de la Surveillance du Territoire à M le Directeur Général de la Sûreté Nationale, n° D 1776/15/STA, 20 December 1944; Adrien Tixier’s comments quoted in: Claude Angeli & Paul Gillet, La Police dans la politique, (1944-1954), Paris, 1967, pp 121-122; Paul Jankowski, Communism & collaboration, Simon Sabiani & Politics in Marseille, 1919-44, New Haven, 1989, pp 137-142; Jean-André Vaucouret, Un homme politique contesté, Thèse, Aix, 1978, p 584. 10 For the question of the military authorities: Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 111; Maurice Agulhon & Fernand Barrat, Les CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 45; Charles-Louis Foulon, Le pouvoir en province à la Libération, Paris, 1975, p 207; Herbert R. Lottman, The Purge, New York, 1986, p 126. Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France, Palgrave, 2004, p 98. A New Police For A New France? 249

The project for these Milices was launched from Moscow in August 1943, by the leader of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez. The first Milices Patri- otiques came into being the following spring with missions, including maintaining public order and defending the life and property of French people against terror. Pierre Tissier, advisor to the first Commissaire de la République in Marseille, underlined retrospectively that during the insurrection it was inevitable that parallel Police units of this sort should conduct numerous arrests without reference to legal procedure. He justified this conclusion by the exceptional circumstances. But the actions of the Milices Patriotiques and other para-Police formations continued after the Liberation. For Tissier even this continuation was normal, because the State authorities were not ready to assume the role themselves. The communists, who demanded a permanent status for these Militias, justified their continued activity by the need to set an example to the official justice system and to allow the public themselves to have a role in the purge procedure.11 The Police argued that the existence of such parallel movements weakened their position still further by undermining their authority. The continuation of irregular arrests after the re-establishment of the regular State institutions had begun called into question their ability to perform the tasks traditionally attributed to them. A Police report dated 27 September 1944 concerning the kidnapping (and supposed execution) by the Marseille Milices Patriotiques of Robert Guérin, the head of the FFI in Marignane (suspected of having pre viously belonged to the Milice Française), makes explicit the frustration of one officer in such a case. Commissaire Robert Mattei who wrote it claimed

11 Milices Patriotiques and FFI: AN F1a 3348 Milices Patriotiques; AN F1a 3349, Rapport de Pierre Tissier, 8 February 1945; AD BDR 23J3, undated Police report entitled: « Difficultés rencontrées par la Police dans l’accomplissement journalier de sa tâche depuis la Libéra- tion »; Marcel Cachin, “Pour une épuration complète”, l’Humanité, 8 October 1944, p 1; M. Agulhon & F. Barrat, Les CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 23; Georges Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XXe siècle, Paris, 1990, pp 192-194; Grégoire Madjarian, Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération, Paris, 1980, pp 145-164; Jean-Paul Scot, « Les pouvoirs d’Etat et l’action des communistes pour la ‘démocratie agissante’ », Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez, n° 8-9, 1974, p 109; De Gaulle quoted in Henri Amouroux, Les règlements de comptes, Paris, 1991, p 148; Madeleine Baudoin, ‘Témoins de la Résistance en région 2’, Doctoral Thesis (History), Université de Provence, 1977, p 627; Philippe Buton, La France et les Français de la Libération, vers une France nouvelle?, Paris, 1984, p 56; Philippe Buton, Les lendemains qui déchantent, Le Parti Communiste à la Libéra- tion, Paris, 1993, pp 138-141; Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, Cambridge, pp 47-48. Rivière-Chalan [pseudo Vincent Raymond], Policier du pouvoir et marxisme, 1936-70, Paris, 1989; Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France, Palgrave, 2004, p 98. 250 Chapter 12 explicitly that, although the Police were in a position to establish who had carried out this execution, they had been pressured by more powerful forces into turning a blind eye to this abuse. He concluded that ‘It is my conviction that only our hierarchical superiors are in a position to establish contact with these people whose power is much more extensive than ours’. Other types of direct attacks on Police authority were registered. Policemen received tracts questioning their patriotism and instructing them to engage in the army. Officers walking the beat were insulted by Resisters. Thus, a Gardien de la Paix who intervened in an incident between an officer of the FFI and an employee of the tramways found himself subject to the insults of the FFI officer who calculated that for the attribution of the award for the dirtiest race in existence the Police were second only to toads. Other Gardiens complained of unprovoked attacks on them by Miliciens Patriotiques. The ultimate humiliation for Police officers was their arrest by members of these popular movements. Besides the effect these movements were having on their authority the Police doubted the efficiency, the objectivity and the motivation of these forces in the tasks they had been assigned. It was claimed that many of the members of these organisations had a criminal record, had poor Resistance credentials, lacked discipline, and were simply satisfying violent instincts or a desire for revenge against personal, political or class enemies. Their assessment in this respect was rapidly shared by both the public and a large contingent of the local Resistance.12 By criticising Resistance formations, the public was able to undermine their moral superiority and to divert attention away from the fact that, despite massive hostility for Vichy and various acts of complicity with the Resistance, the majority of the population had not actively engaged in Resistance activity in any committed sense. This is not to say that Resistance hopes of creating a better society and a Police in the service of the population were not supported by

12 AN F1a 4023, Rapport de l’IGSA, « débats sur la Police », 15 October 1944; AD BDR M6 11560, Commissaire de Police Mobile à M le Commissaire Principal de la 9e Brigade, n° 18099 BR/REG, 27 September 1944; AD BDR M6 11560, tract du Comité Départementale des Forces Unies de la Jeunesse Patriotique, undated but just after Liberation; AD BDR M6 11560, rapport du Commissaire du 21e arrondissement au Secrétaire Général à la Police, 6 November 1944; AD BDR, M611560, Le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M Le Commis- saire Régional de la République, Marseille, “La situation de la Police (rapport demandé par M Juvenal, président du CDL)”, n° 1200, 30 September 1944; AD BDR M6 11560, Gardien de la Paix Henri Roche à l’Officier commandant la 11e Compagnie, Corps Urbain de Mar- seille, 6 December 1944; AD BDR 23J3, undated Police report entitled: « Difficultés ren- contrées par la Police dans l’accomplissement journalier de sa tâche depuis la Libération »; Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 113; Jean-André Vaucouret, Un homme politique contesté, Thèse, Aix, 1978, p 584. A New Police For A New France? 251 the public. In the heady days of August 1944, nothing had seemed impossible. Public optimism had been widespread. Opinion polls revealed that the population believed the war would be over by Christmas. The march towards a better society seemed to be under way. However, the continuation of the war well into the next year, and the problems posed by rumours of the 5th column and the parachuting of German agents into France raised the question of French security. These security problems caused the focus to switch once again towards the Police, who had the experience of countering such threats. The non-return of plenty increased the daily reliance of the population on the black market, which became more or less accepted by the State authorities as the means of survival for many families, but which the Milices Patriotiques attempted to interfere with. The population criticised the attempts of these organisations to prevent them from buying black market cigarettes or food. Rumours concerning the participation of the Milices Patriotiques in thefts and killings, which resembled acts of personal vengeance more than a means of protecting the population, became widespread. The growth and manipulation of these rumours undermined the image of purity of the Resistance movements.13 The attitude of Resisters to the popular movements which they had spawned varied considerably. Some doubted the true credentials of their members, pointing to their recent adhesion to the Resistance or their ostentatious attitudes. The Resister Madeleine Baudoin criticised the love of military insignia amongst leaders of these movements. In her diary she made the following entry in October 1944 with implicit reference to Vichy leaders Marshal Pétain and Admiral Darlan: ‘I hope we’re not going to become so ridiculous as to create a title of FFI Marshal or the rank of FTP Admiral of the Fleet’.14 For the non-Stalinist extreme left, the Milices Patriotiques became suspect, in the same way as the Police, once they developed into permanent para-Police organisations.15 The Trotskiste newspaper La Vérité complained that by be-

13 AD BDR M6 11560, Inspecteur de la Sûreté à M le Commissaire de Police, 5 November 1944; IFOP opinion poll published in Libération, 7 September 1944, p 1; G. Madajarian, Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération, p 151; Pierre Laborie, “Opinion et représentations- la Libération et l’image de la Résistance”, Revue d’Histoire de la 2e guerre mondiale et des conflits contemporains, n° 131, July 1983, pp 65-91; Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy, p 34; Jean-André Vaucouret, Un homme politique contesté, Thèse, Aix, 1978, p 585; Paul Jankowski, Communism & collaboration, Simon Sabiani & Politics in Marseille, 1919-44, New Haven, 1989, p 143. 14 Madeleine Baudoin, Histoire des Groupes-Francs (MUR) des Bouches-du-Rhône de Septem- bre 1943 à la Libération, Paris, 1962, p 187. 15 Yvan Craipeau, La Libération confisquée, Paris, 1978, pp 58-59. 252 Chapter 12 coming permanent these popular militias had become ‘an auxiliary Police force complying with the orders of the regular Police and the company bosses’.16 The communists and the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) were the initial defenders of the Milices Patriotiques.17 When the minister of the Interior, the socialist Adrien Tixier, announced on 29 October that no non- State Police forces would be tolerated, the CNR, with communist support, protested that such a decision was impractical.18 Rather than dismantling the Milices they simply changed their name to Gardes Civiques Republicaines. By January 1945, however, the communists had taken a different stand, with their leader Maurice Thorez declaring explicitly that ‘public security must be the responsibility of the regular forces of Police’ and hence that the Milices Patri- otiques should be dissolved.19 The communists were undoubtedly acting on instructions from Moscow not to undermine French national unity whilst the war continued. At the same time, like other political parties, they were vying to win as much power as possible, which ultimately meant trying to infiltrate existing State structures rather than maintaining parallel forces which the public’s demand for normalisation were rendering superfluous. Ultimately, the abolition of these parallel Police movements was carried out with the consent of the greater part of the Resistance in conformity with the wishes of the population. Eliminating potential rivals was one step towards rehabilitation, but full rehabilitation was dependent on building Police structures which inspired confidence, an especially important consideration in a democracy. As early as 22 August 1944, Raymond Aubrac as Commissaire de la République tried to create a popular Police force, the Forces Républicaines de Sécurité (FRS), under the control of the local State administration but derived from the armed elements of the internal Resistance. Recruiting their members from organisations such as the Milices Patriotiques, these units established themselves slowly during the month of September, reaching a peak of 3000 men. This idea had a triple objective. It was to be hoped that they would put an end to some

16 La Vérité, 15 November 1944. 17 G. Madjarian, Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération, p 148; G. Dupeux, La France de 1945 à 1965, Paris, 1969, p 75. 18 AN F1a 3347, Valabrègue, “Mémoire sur la reconstitution de la Police”, note adressée à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 29 November 1944. For the text of the communiqué of 28 October 1944 see: G. Dupeux, La France de 1945 à 1965, Paris, 1969, p 75. These calls of the Minister of the Interior echoed de Gaulle’s concern about these movements, a concern made public in speeches of 14 and 25 October 1944: G. Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XXe Siècle, Paris, 1990, p 213. 19 AN F1a 3291 IV J-1, Rapport du Commissaire Régional, Marseille, 15 December 1944. A New Police For A New France? 253 of the abuses committed by the Militias. If successful in their mission they could project an image of the Resistance as restorers of order and hence dispel the outlaw image of movements which had been forced to live clandestinely for the previous four years. At the same time they would assure the local authorities a pseudo-Police organisation benefiting from sufficient credibility with Resistance movements to be unimpeded in the execution of delicate political missions. There was, however, no question of these forces replacing the regular Police. Rather they were to be subordinated to the regular forces, their members being, in theory at least, placed directly under the orders of a Commissaire de Police. Moreover, it was specified that they were to be temporary, set up to help the Police in the search for collaborators and the repression of the black market. By the end of December these units had proceeded to 1740 arrests. However, they cannot be considered a wholehearted success. They failed to put an end either to the Militias, or to their autonomous Police activities. There was some doubt about the credentials of some of those who infiltrated these structures and they had to undergo purges within their own ranks of politically suspect elements. Collaboration with Police services was far from perfect. The crimes committed by a fraction of the FRS in the operation of their duties, enabled Police officers to attach a criminal label to the entirety of these forces and to argue that the place for the FRS was in the Baumettes prison.20 A number of changes in more traditional Police structures occurred after August 1944. The institutions directly inspired by Vichy were purely and simply scrapped at the Liberation. However, new institutions were often basically superficial transformations of the old: thus the Police Nationale superstructure introduced by Vichy, itself based on reforms suggested in the 1930s, was maintained but saw its name revert back to the more Republican Sûreté Nationale (before de Gaulle changed it back to Police Nationale in 1966).21 In other cases new structures were a synthesis of tradition and renewal. This was the case with the creation of the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), which

20 AD BDR M6 11557, L’officier de la paix de la 151 CRS à M le Secrétaire Général à la Police, 3 April 1945; AN F1C III 1210, Rapport Mensuel du Préfet Départemental, September 1944; AN F1a 3349, Rapport de Pierre Tissier, 8 February 1945; Rouge-Midi, « Création des FRS pour la région de Marseille », 4 September 1944; Charles-Louis Foulon, Le pouvoir en province à la Libération, Paris, 1975, p 233; G. Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XXe Siècle, pp 217-218. There were said to be 20000 members of these Milices patriotiques in the Bouches-du-Rhône as late as February 1945: Grégoire Madjarian, Conflits, pouvoirs et société à la Libération, Paris, 1980, p 147. Raymond Aubrac, Où la mémoire s’attarde, Paris, 1996, p 131. 21 Cécile Desprairies, L’Héritage de Vichy, Paris, 2012, pp 158-162. 254 Chapter 12 replaced the FRS and the GMR, but adopted the statutes of the GMR. The new institution was to be traditional in its role and organisation to encourage recruitment by giving potential recruits the security that they were joining a stable institution. But this traditional institution should be regenerated by a new recruitment which would offer guarantees regarding the political and patriotic loyalty of their members. The recruitment of these CRS came from both the GMR and the auxiliary pseudo-Police movements born of the Resist- ance, after a purge within both categories. The creation of the CRS was decided with particular celerity. The original proposition, put forward by M. Valabrègue of the Ministère de l’Intérieur was dated 29 November 1944. The decrees abol- ishing the GMR and establishing the CRS were published on 8 December. The Ministre de l’Intérieur, the one-armed socialist Adrien Tixier, had written that he wanted to act quickly so as to prevent any new discussion within the government or elsewhere. De Gaulle himself, who was on a visit to the Soviet Union, was not informed of this important decision until after its publication. The rapidity of this decision highlights the desire of the central government to control outlying regions and to be able to impose its authority on popular Resistance movements.22 Creating a new Police force also supposed weeding out suspicious elements. Those who had openly expressed collaborationist sentiments, who had had personal contacts with the Germans, who had served Vichy too zealously or who had acted against the Resistance had reason to be fearful. Indeed in some cases even having been demonstrably anti-German was not considered enough to offset obedience to Vichy in the arrest of Gaullist agents. Thus, the purge report on Commissaire Leonard of the Surveillance du Territoire stated: ‘although extremely anti-German this civil servant did however obey Vichy orders and gave instructions for arrests by the ST in Marseille’.23 This idea that the police should be punished for serving the obeying instructions was clearly problematic in view of the cult of obedience within the professional

22 AN F1a 3347, Valabrègue, “Mémoire sur la reconstitution de la Police”, note adressée à M le Ministre de l’Intérieur, 29 November 1944; AN F1a 3347 XVA7, Note de Service de M Tixier, Ministre de l’Intérieur, 3 December 1944; AN F1a 3347, Ministre des Finances à M le Min- istre de l’Intérieur, n° 300, 13 January 1945; AN F1a 3291, dossier IV, J-1, Rapport de Ray- mond Aubrac, 15 December 1944; AN F1a 3349, Rapport de Pierre Tissier, 8 February 1945; Henry Buisson, La Police, son histoire, p 282; G. Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XXe Siècle, Paris, 1990, p 221. Of 10913 Gardiens and 313 Officers of the GMR in service on 1 August 1944, 5500 Gardiens (50.4%) and 120 Officers (38.4%) figured on the payrolls of the CRS on 15 January 1945: G. Carrot, Le Maintien de l’Ordre en France au XXe Siècle, Paris, 1990, p 219. 23 AN F1a 3341, P.V. Sous-Commission d’épuration, 7 April 1945. A New Police For A New France? 255 sub-culture. The anti-Semitic role of Vichy Police officers was largely overlooked by purge committees. Pressure for a purge came both from external political forces but also from forces within the Police. Externally, it was the communists who were the fierc- est critics of the Police, as a result both of the extent to which they had suffered from Police repression under Vichy and a more long-term hostility, but the general public were also keen to find scape-goats that might distract attention away from their own passivity.24 Internally pressure came particularly from the re-emerging Police trade unions. Local Police chiefs and senior members of the Resistance administration authorities underlined both the necessity of a purge and the urgency with which this filtering should take place. It was underlined that since the Police represented authority it was important that they should set an example, although there was also a desire on the part of the authorities to be able to retain enough experienced Police officers to confront the policing difficulties of the day. Performing this operation quickly would allow the institution to return to its normal tasks as soon as possible and facilitate a rapid restoration of the authority of the State. It would also give the officers remaining a feeling of professional security by letting them know that their jobs were now safe and that they could devote themselves entirely to the tasks in hand. In addition, a speedy purge would help to limit the extent to which an unofficial purge would be enforced on the Police from outside. In the event, the purge of the Marseille Police was carried out extremely rapidly. Since 1942 lists had begun to be drawn up by Resisters of those who should be allowed to stay in the post-Liberation administration. As soon as the insurrection was launched, Police officers began arresting suspect colleagues. A purge committee, comprising both representatives of local political movements and members of the Police began to convene as soon as the Liberation was complete and examined dossiers according to the dispositions of a decree of June 1944.25

24 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, pp 51 & 53. 25 Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau], 790207, art. 1, le secrétaire général pour la Police à m. le directeur général de la sûreté nationale, n° 4693-xa, 20 May 1945; AN F1a 4023, IGSA, “débats sur la Police”, 15 October 1944; AD BDR M6 11560, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Commissaire Régional, 30 September 1944; Raymond Aubrac in Le Provençal, 4 September 1944; La Marseillaise, quotidien d’information du Front National, « M. Raymond Aubrac donne le bilan de quatre semaines d’épuration », 1 Octo- ber 1944; Amicale des Anciens Fonctionnaires de la Police Française, La vérité sur l’épuration de la Police, Paris, np, nd, p 9; Philippe Randa, Dossier complet sur la Police, Paris, 1988, pp 24-25; Claude Angeli & Paul Gillet, La Police dans la politique, 1944-54, B. Grasset, Paris, 1967, p 26; Herbert R Lottman, The Purge, New York, 1986, p 29; Philippe 256 Chapter 12

The rapidity of the purge did not prevent it from being more severe than that carried out in other State institutions and indeed it has, rightly, been claimed as the biggest purge in the history of the French Police.26 The purges carried out by the Third Republic, the Popular Front and, even, Vichy were mild in comparison. Out of 217 Marseille Police officers whose activity was thought worthy of investigation between the Liberation and January 1945, there were 90 sackings; 16 obligatory retirements; 77 suspensions; 96 imprison- ments and 26 referrals to the court of Justice.27 The new chief of Police in Mar- seille asserted that in no other administration had a purge been carried out as rapidly or as thoroughly.28 The authorities underlined the fact that the punishments affected particularly the higher ranks of the Police. The decrees of the Commissaire de la République leave little doubt on this point. Special editions of the Bulletin Officiel du Commissariat Régional de la République present recapitulations of the punishments meted out from where it can be calculated that only 7% of the decrees concerned Gardiens de la Paix who were numeri- cally by far and away the biggest component of the Police. Of the three officials to have occupied the post of Intendant de Police in Marseille, the most senior local Police post, only Robert Andrieu, an important member of a Resistance network, kept a position in the administration after the war. On this question, even the publication La vérité sur l’épuration de la Police, which is critical in most respects of the justice at the Liberation, admitted that the administrative purge hit the “decision makers” much harder than the “order takers”. According to the figures it quotes for the purge in France, 90% of the senior hierarchy of the Police, 50% of the intermediary hierarchy and 25% of junior Police officers were removed.29

Bourdrel, L’épuration sauvage, 1944-45, Paris, Vol. 1, 1988, pp 118; Charles-Louis Foulon, Le pouvoir en province à la Libération, Paris, 1975, pp 162-163; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 44. 26 Thomas R. Christofferson and Michael S. Christofferson, France during World War II, New York, 2006, p 189. 27 AN F1a 3349, Rapport de Pierre Tissier, 8 February 1945. 28 AD BDR M6 11560, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Commissaire Régional, 30 September 1944. Most historians agree with him on this point: Pascal Ory, “Mythe et réalité de l’épuration”, Histoire, n° 144, May 1991, p 67; Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 141. In a study of the situation in the Languedoc, Jacques-Augustin Bailly makes a contrast between the Police where the purge was extremely severe and the Gen- darmerie where professional solidarity was such that it limited the scope in this corps: J.-A. Bailly, La Libération confisquée, le Languedoc, 1944-45, Paris, 1993, pp 295-304. 29 AD BDR M6 11560, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Commissaire Régio- nal, 30 September 1944; Bulletin officiel du Commissariat régional de la république, A New Police For A New France? 257

The removal of members of the hierarchy made vacancies for those who had participated in the Resistance. Etienne Mercuri, was appointed as the new local Police chief on 23 August 1944 and given the title Secrétaire Général pour la Police. Originally this post should have been filled by the Commissaire Auguste Clary, but he was arrested in May 1943 and did not return from deportation until the summer of 1945. The second choice, Commissaire Elie Tudesq had resigned from the Police in August 1943 in protest against the handing over of political prisoners to the Gestapo. A week after his resignation he was shot and very seriously wounded in Orange station by a German soldier whilst on a mission for the Resistance. It was only then that Mercuri was proposed for this position. Born in Marseille in 1897, it was in April 1920 that he entered the Police. His Resistance activity included helping the departure of Polish soldiers for England, fabricating false identity cards, sabotaging political missions and acting as an agent for information gathering. His formal engagement in the Resistance dated from December 1942, when he joined the Alliance network. From July 1943 he also belonged to the Police Resistance network the réseau Ajax. His nomination to his post-Liberation functions was proposed by both the local underground Socialist party and the réseau Ajax. To the post of his deputy was appointed the charismatic figure of Xavier Culioli. Culioli had grown up in the Corsican village of Chéra and as a child he had dreamt of becoming the King of the Bandits. He entered the Police in the 1920s with the active support of a Socialist deputy in Marseille and, during the Occupation, had maintained his socialist links, had attempted to reconstitute the trade unions which Vichy had dissolved and had set about recruiting Police Resisters for local Socialist militias. Further down the Police hierarchy many Police Resisters were also discovering promotional rewards for their recent activity.30

28 February 1945; Amicale des Anciens Fonctionnaires de la Police Française, La vérité sur l’épuration de la Police, Paris, np, nd, p 9. For the judicial purge which followed the administrative purge see: AD BDR 56W73; Antoinette Vivaldi & Claude Coiffard, Contribution à l’histoire de l’épuration à Marseille, 1944-45, Mémoire de Maîtrise, Aix-en-Provence, 1973- 74, pp 84-85. 30 AD BDR M6 11636, Le chargé de mission du Commissaire de la République à M le Com- missaire de la République, n° 2561, 6 October 1944; AD BDR 23J3, Attestation de Xavier Culioli, 18 December 1945; AD BDR 23J3, Attestation de Horace Manicacci, Délégué Régional du Parti Socialiste SFIO, 20 December 1945; AD BDR 23J3, undated document concerning the Professional and Resistance activity of Etienne Mercuri; AD BDR 23J3 Attestation de Xavier Culioli, 18 December 1945; Gabriel-Xavier Culioli, La terre des seigneurs, un siècle de la vie d’une famille corse, Lieu Common, Paris, 1986; Simon Kitson, « The Marseille Police in their context from Popular Front to the Liberation », D. Phil., 258 Chapter 12

There is little doubt that, drawn from the Resistance, this new hierarchy was able to address the difficulties of the period with greater assurance and indeed to give a more favorable presentation of the Police’s recent past. In September 1944, at the request of the socialist head of the Comité Départemental de Libération in Marseille, the new Secrétaire Général pour la Police wrote a long report concerning the activity and attitude of the Police during the Occupa- tion. He presented an institution which had remained fundamentally Republi- can and stressed that the Occupation had been an extremely difficult period for Police officers, that the Police counted a number of victims in its ranks and that Policemen had played an active role in the Liberation. The Police he claimed had been faced with the troubling question of whether to stay in their posts or resign and if they had decided on the former it was in accordance with Resistance instructions to stay in their post to be able to undermine Vichy from within. Much of what is said in this letter mirrors basic truths. The Resistance had insisted that Police officers should stay in their posts; Republicanism had not been extinguished in Police ranks, despite Vichy, and the Police had indeed resented the fascist take-over of 1944. Nevertheless this letter plays down the repressive role of the Police, particularly through the lack of reference to the arrest of Jews and Communists. The image of the Police as a victim of the Occupation and an actor in the Resistance was reinforced by the renaming of Marseille streets at the Liberation, 7 of which took the names of Police Resist- ers, or by the setting up of Police Resistance societies such as the Amicale des Anciens Résistants de la Police, established in the city on 26 April 1947.31 Although the Police as an institution was rehabilitated fairly quickly, there remained a number of areas of frustration. The removal of parallel Police movements such as the Milices Patriotiques had not solved all the problems of policing. For one thing post-Liberation Marseille was short of food and supplies, or as one Allied report noted there was ‘malnutrition among children and actual starvation among some old people’.32 Those who had hoped that the Liberation would bring instant prosperity were quickly disillusioned as supplies of basic commodities and food stuffs remained disastrous well into 1946. Few French cities suffered as severely as Marseille in this respect. The city had no agricultural hinterland to provide adequate supplies of vegetables or

Sussex, 1996; Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occu pation, Paris, 2001, p 55. 31 AD BDR M6 11560, le Secrétaire Général pour la Police à M le Commissaire Régional, 30 September 1944; AD BDR 143W 36, Amicale des Anciens Résistants de la Police; Adrien Blès, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Marseille, Jeanne Laffitte, Marseille, 1989. 32 PRO WO 220 69 AFHQ CA, Report Southern France, 23-30 1944. A New Police For A New France? 259 meat and the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean were not particularly fertile fishing grounds obliging the city to import even much of its fish stock from Atlantic ports. The availability of food thus became dependent on the efficiency of transport systems. These systems were virtually at a standstill. Much of the French railway network had been destroyed during the fighting of August 1944. Rolling stock was inadequate and in September 1944 only 2875 steam locomotives were usable, compared to the 17058 in service in August 1939. The Gare St Charles train station was out of action in the immediate post- Liberation. France had also lost 70% of her port capacity compared with 1939. The port of Marseille lay in ruins. Much of the damage done by the Italian bombings of its installations in June 1940 and by successive American bombings in 1943 and 1944 was yet to be repaired. To make matters worse the Ger- mans had attempted a systematic destruction of surviving port installations in the run up to Liberation and the remains of the Transbordeur bridge, which the Germans had destroyed, served as an obstacle to the entrance to the port. Overall, 50000 M2 of warehouses had been destroyed; 257 cranes had collapsed; out of 16 miles of quayage, only 1000 feet was left intact; Marseille had lost 173 of its fleet of ships. Although reconstruction began extremely rapidly, much of the port’s capacity was used for military transports, paying little attention to civilian needs. American Liberty ships were unable to provide enough food for the population. At the end of December 1944, an administrative report sum- marizing the situation claimed that of a list of essential foodstuffs, it was only with regard to butterfat and wine that ration tickets were honoured. A year later the population was still out in the streets demonstrating against lack of food provision.33 The inadequacies of official food distribution forced the population to have recourse to an expensive black market system which had developed in the city since the pre-war period. During the 1930s, local gangsters Carbone and Spirito had taken advantage of the economic blockade against Italy following her intervention in Abyssinia, to supply Parmesan cheese at exorbitant prices to

33 AD BDR 28J 215, Discours de Jean Cristofol, lors de la visite de Vincent Auriol, 21/9/47; AD BDR 6S/474, Note de l’Ingénieur du 3e arrondissement, « Destructions causées par bombardements aériens et par les troupes allemandes », 24 April 1945; AD BDR M6 13300, Service départemental des RG, rapport du 26/9/44; AN F1A 4023, Rapports du Commis- saire Régional de la République, March 1945, June 1945, September 1945; AN FIC III 1210, Rapport du Préfet des BDR, 2 December 1944 & 15 February 1945; AN F1A 4023, Rapport du Commissaire Régional de la République au Ministre du Ravitaillement, 14 January 1945; AD BDR M14 5768, Rapport de l’Inspection du Travail, 5 December 1944; AN F1A 4023, Rapport anonyme, 26 December 1944; Robert Menchérini, ‘L’union départementale CGT des Bouches-du-Rhône de la Libération à la Scission’, Thèse, Aix, 1984, pp 112-114 & 154. 260 Chapter 12

Italian immigrants desperate to season their pasta. The war had encouraged the flourishing of unofficial food networks and now the arrival of American troops added an extra dimension. The Americans were massively engaged in the local black market, selling tins of food, coffee and bars of chocolate to the highest bidders. One Allied report suggested that ‘An estimated 20% of supplies landed at Marseille was stolen and sold by members of the armed forces and their followers’. The black market represented a considerable headache for local Police authorities, expected to both arrest profiteers whilst at the same time allow the commodities which they supplied to filter down to the population. The Police remained largely impotent in the face of the black market problem and were particularly reluctant to intervene when those engaging in illicit sales were GI’s.34 American troops were also held largely responsible for the massive growth in prostitution at the Liberation. To those earning their living from this profession the stationing of 180,000 GIs in the city and its surroundings now represented something of a godsend. The American military brought with them double standards with regard to soldiers’ interaction with prostitutes. Despite the attempts of official military handbooks to discourage the conviction amongst soldiers that French women would be easy conquests, it seems that the Americans brought with them low expectations of the morality of French women.35 Joe Weston of Life Magazine summarised the general belief amongst the invading forces: ‘France was a tremendous brothel inhabited by 40,000.000 hedonists who spent all their time eating, drinking [and] making love’.36 Com- manding officers suggested that trying to control soldiers’ sexual activity in a ‘place like France’ was like asking them to eat carrots in a steakhouse.37 Even in the upper echelons of the army many accepted that access to prostitutes was

34 Robert Aron, France reborn, the history of the Libération, June 1944–May 1945, New York, 1964, p 343; Pierre & Marthe Massenet, Journal d’une longue nuit, carnet de route de 2 Fran- çais moyens, 1939-44, Paris, 1971, p 277; André Kaspi, La Libération de la France, p 89; CHDGM, La guerre en Méditerranée, 1939-45, Paris, 1971, p 461; Jean-Pierre Azéma & Olivier Wiéviorka, Les Libérations de la France, Paris, 1993, p 181; P. Liquière, Restaurer, réformer, agir, p 97; Raymond Aubrac, Où la mémoire s’attarde, Paris, 1996, p 138; Hilary Footitt, War and Liberation in France, Palgrave, 2004, pp 95-121; Fabrice Grenard, La France du marché noir, Paris, 2008, p261. 35 U S Army, Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II, Chicago, 2008. 36 Mary Louise Roberts, ‘The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and the American Military in France, 1944-1946’, American Historical Review, Vol. 115 (4), p 1004. 37 Mary Louise Roberts, ‘The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and the American Military in France, 1944-1946’, American Historical Review, Vol. 115 (4), p 1016. A New Police For A New France? 261 desirable from a number of viewpoints, whether this be in order to reduce the number of rapes committed by soldiers or to maintain morale. Patten has been quoted as saying ‘if they don’t fuck, they don’t fight’.38 This standpoint co- existed with a concern about the spread of VD amongst the soldiery which was offset against an even more pressing moral agenda. For reasons of morality and a desire to avoid offending public opinion in the States, military commanders were reticent to officially acknowledge that their soldiers might use prostitutes and as a result to countenance the use of designated brothels. As Mary Louise Roberts has shown, this significant consideration played an important role in shaping the nature of prostitution in the cities in proximity to US military camps.39 The problem from a Police point of view was not just that there was a growth of prostitution as a result of American custom, but also that it was the wrong type of prostitution. The Police divided prostitutes into three groups. The first were those who worked in officially tolerated brothels which were a logical development of the 1863 decision to restrict prostitution to certain arrondissements of the city. This type of prostitution was in decline. In 1939 there had been 31 officially tolerated brothels. By the Liberation this number had fallen to 24, largely because 6 had been destroyed by the Germans when they razed the old quarters of Marseille in 1943 and a Vichy law of June 1942 had forbidden the creation of new brothels or their transfer to other sites. The second group were known as « filles en carte » (‘registered girls’): isolated prostitutes who, since 1821, were registered and expected to undergo bi-weekly medical examinations. Finally there were the « clandestines »: those who were not registered or controlled medically. 706 clandestine prostitutes had been arrested in 1937; 871 in 1943 and 4754 in 1945.40 The more than 670% increase in the number of clandestine prostitutes being arrested in Marseille between 1937 and 1945 was in large part due to the fact that the American authorities were so reluctant to sanction authorised brothels for soldiers. If the Police disapproved of the decline of officially tolerated brothels and the rise of clandestine prostitution, at least four reasons must be evoked. Firstly, they relied on the information

38 Mary Louise Roberts, ‘The Price of Discretion: Prostitution, Venereal Disease and the American Military in France, 1944-1946’, American Historical Review, Vol. 115 (4), p 1004. 39 Mary Louise Roberts, “The Silver Foxhole: The GIs and Prostitution in Paris, 1944-1945”, French Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No 1, Winter 2010, p 107. Mary Louise Roberts, What Sol- diers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, Chicago, 2013. 40 For the Post-Liberation situation see: AD BDR 23J3, Le Commissaire de Police, chef du service des recherches de la sécurité publique à M le Commissaire Central, n° 4321, GZ/ LA, 8 February 1946; Charles-Louis Foulon, Le pouvoir en province à la Libération, Paris, 1975, p 207. For the pre-war situation: J. Dorian, Belles de Lune,; Edmond Jaloux, Marseille, p 45; Jean Bazal, Marseille galante,; J.-M. Berlière, La Police des Moeurs, p 102. 262 Chapter 12 gathered in the brothels, which were after all important meeting places for criminals. Secondly, it was more difficult to control clandestine prostitution as the prostitutes were mobile and the Police did not have enough resources to crack down on it sufficiently. Thirdly, clandestine prostitutes would solicit openly in public places, raising the eye-brows of moralists, especially since it was not uncommon for sexual acts involving prostitutes to take place in public and in full view of even young children. There was considerable public pressure to clear prostitution off the streets. Finally, clandestine prostitutes presented a greater risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases. The figures are startling: a US army medical survey suggested that 5% of all GIs picked up venereal disease in brothels and a further 44% contracted it through recourse to clandestine prostitution.41 Operating outside the brothels made prostitutes themselves more vulnerable and they sought every which way of protecting themselves from violence, by operating in pairs, or from the Police by bribing officers with American cigarettes. On other occasions they sought protection against arrest by pretending to be the girlfriends of an American soldier. A prostitute in Marseille tried this tactic claiming that a GI was her boyfriend of two months only to see her defence fall apart when she could not remember his name. The prostitutes who frequented soldiers were referred to as “boniches”, a pejorative term for a “maid”, and according to Roberts, became something of a symbol of the increasing Americanisation of France. Closely related to the question of prostitution in Marseille was that of gangsterism which was also thriving during the immediate after-Liberation. It is usual to portray the mainly Corsican gangsters, who had earned the city the nickname of « Marseille-Chicago » in the 1930s, as dividing into two camps, according to their behaviour during the Occupation. On the one hand were those, like the infamous Carbone and Spirito, who put themselves at the service of the Nazi occupiers following the logic of their previous political support for Simon Sabiani, the local leader of the pseudo-fascist group the Parti Popu- laire Français (PPF). They ultimately lost their role within the local underworld as a result of the war, with Carbone dying on 16 December 1943 when the train in which he was travelling was derailed by a Resistance bomb and Spirito fleeing Marseille for Spain at the Liberation before later heading on to Latin Amer- ica. On the other, there were the Guérini brothers, who had been electoral agents of the socialist candidate Henri Tasso, and the Renucci brothers, who had supported the former socialist Fernand Bouisson in the 1930s, who

41 Mary Louise Roberts, “The Silver Foxhole: The GIs and Prostitution in Paris, 1944-1945”, French Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No 1, Winter 2010, p 107. Mary Louise Roberts, What Sol- diers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France, Chicago, 2013. A New Police For A New France? 263 served in the ranks of the Resistance. Such a division is undoubtedly an over- simplification. Many members of the crime syndicate had indeed adopted unambiguous collaborationist positions but many of those who now paraded under the flag of the Resistance had had a much less clear cut stance. The financial possibilities open to the underworld during the Occupation had been considerable. They could offer themselves as black-marketeers; as bounty-hunters, chasing Jews or those hiding from the labour draft; as requisitioners, taking over the property of those fleeing the Nazis; or they could cater for the entertainment needs of the occupiers, providing bars, night-clubs and prostitutes. Indeed, it has been suggested that even when the underworld helped the Resistance it was often in return for payment rather than simply out of patriotism. The Guérini brothers who experienced the most phenomenal rise to fame and glory after the Liberation, typify this ambiguity. The eldest brother, Antoine, had kept his bars and night-clubs open during the war, had entertained Ger- man and collaborationist clients generally carrying on business as usual although at the same time sheltering British airmen. Antoine was eventually assassinated in 1967 in a revenge attack for the murder of former Policeman turned gangster Robert Blémant but was also accused by the journalist Stephen Rivele of organising the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, however far-fetched that may seem. His more charismatic brother, Barthélémy, popularly known as Mémé, had attacked convoys of Miliciens, had liquidated Nazi spies for the French secret services, had sheltered Jewish children and even been rewarded with a Resistance medal. Those gangsters now benefitting from an image as ‘Resisters’ could not only cash in on the possibilities offered by the black market or prostitution, but they were also given the opportunity to buy bars and night clubs previously owned by ‘collaborationist’ mobsters. Moreo- ver, friendships made in the Resistance could frequently serve to strengthen the position of underworld leaders when faced with the administrative authorities. Antoine, Joseph and Lucien Guérini were initially interned after the Lib- eration before being rapidly released, presumably thanks to interventions from their new found friends. The Guérini clan were said to have benefitted from contacts developed during the war with the Resister and Socialist lawyer Gas- ton Defferre who would become Mayor of Marseille in 1947. In the immediate post-war the Guérini’s were allegedly also paid by the US secret services to smash strikes of dockers, in order that the port may continue to unload Amer- ican supplies unhindered.42

42 SHAT 1K 545 5, Interrogatoire du SS Hauptsturmführer Nosek, Roland, undated but probably 1945; AD BDR 5W 237, dossiers concerning internment of Guérini brothers, January 264 Chapter 12

The situation of the Renucci brothers also serves to underline how even mobsters with a dubious track record could benefit from having gained powerful contacts through Resistance activities. Jo Renucci was interned in the Camp St Pierre in November 1944 but released in February 1945. When the Prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône attempted to have the Renucci brothers banned from the département, he received letters pleading in their favour from two of the highest ranking officials in the French Police, who underlined their Resistance credentials despite the Prefect’s evidence that the Renucci brothers had entertained close relations with the PPF during the war. It was also belived that Jo had been involved in the theft of large quantities of saccharine in early 1943. Commissaire Robert Mattei expressed in an administrative report his frustration that Renucci should constantly benefit from indulgence from the authorities: ‘At the current time when France, wounded by several years of German occupation and soiled by the cowardice and dishonesty of some of her sons, is seeking to rediscover her past glory by a rational purge, it appears vital to me that she starts by eliminating those who, by the criminal past, should not now find a place in her bosom’.43 A number of Police officers had hoped that the post-Liberation Police would be able to withstand the temptations of corruption offered by the local underworld. It is significant that some Police Resisters had chosen noms de guerre making explicit reference to purity, such as “l’incorruptible” or “le pur”, suggesting a reaction against the corrupt image of the Marseille Police in 1930s and the hope that out of Resistance would come a new clean Police force. After the Liberation political forces within the Police continued to stress the need for purity. One of the principal demands of Police trade unions in May 1945 was to combat the criminality of the Police themselves. A communist grouping within the Police operated under the title: ‘group of Republican Police officers for a cleaned-up Marseille, free from all gangsters’. Needless to say such optimism proved somewhat idealistic as Police corruption proved widespread. Some officers on service in the fish market accepted food parcels in return for turning a blind-eye to more serious abuses. Others hired out their uniforms to bank robbers. Some took part in thefts or bribery. For both communists and Gaullists,

1945. Roger Colombani, Flics et Voyous, Editions de Radio Monte Carlo, 1985; Alain Bauer and Christophe Soullez, Une histoire criminelle de la France, Paris, 2013, pp 156-157; Laurence Montel, ‘Crime organisé et politique en France, aperçu historique’, Pouvoirs, 132, 2010, pp 24-25. 43 AD BDR M6 11557, Le Commissaire de Police Judiciaire à M le Commissaire Principal, Chef de la 9e Brigade régionale de Police Judiciaire, n° 386 Br Rég, 15 January 1946.; AD BDR 5W 249, Commissaire de Police Mobile Robert Mattei à M le Commissaire Principal, chef de la 9e Brigade de Police Mobile, 20 October 1944. A New Police For A New France? 265 two words were almost synonymous with corruption: one was ‘Corsican’ and the other ‘Socialist’. Since the Police hierarchy was firmly in the hands of representatives of both these groupings, it should come as little surprise that the origins of corruption should be traced back to them. In fact, Culioli had taken a hard line against the Marseille Socialists’ tolerance for corruption. But he was not totally above the spirit of the clan and no sooner was he installed in office than he was being asked to intervene on behalf of a Corsican relative who had shot a communist. Although, Mercuri was born in Marseille, he also had Corsi- can roots and serious, though probably exaggerated, doubts were cast with regard to his probity, especially when it was revealed that he had escaped the clutches of the ‘Gestapo’ in 1944 thanks to a tip-off from PPF gangster Charles Palmieri. To add to suspicions, the presidency of the Police purge commission was entrusted to the Corsican Socialist politician Horace Manicacci, who was married to the cousin of the Guérini brothers. The hierarchy themselves put the blame for corruption on the poor quality of recruitment and the inadequate level of wages. This was a baton the Socialist newspaper Le Provençal took up, claiming that given the appalling levels of pay afforded to the Police, what was surprising was not that there were corrupt Police officers but rather that there were honest ones. The Marseille socialist Gaston Defferre began campaigning with the national government for what Le Provençal would call ‘the defence of the just campaign of Policemen’ as the cycle of clientelism began over again.44 The question of wages was at the heart of Police frustrations in post-Libera- tion France. Le Provençal questioned how a society could expect a decent Police force if it failed to show its recognition. It underlined that there was a

44 For ‘noms de guerre’: AN 3AG/2/53, list of members of Ajax, “Secteur 9, Marseille”. For Police demands for purity: Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau], 790207, art. 1, le secrétaire général pour la Police à M le directeur général de la sûreté nationale, n° 4693-xa, 20 May 1945; Rouge-Midi, « Aide immédiate à Rouge-Midi », 20 October 1947. Regarding accusations and suspicions against the Police hierarchy: CGT archives 34J 52, Affaire Frégier; AN FIa 3349 dossier IVJ3, Rapport n° Jur/263/851.212, Pierre Tissier à Adrien Tixier, « La situation de la Région de Marseille », 8 February 1945; AD BDR 23J3; Gabriel-Xavier Culioli, La terre des seigneurs, un siècle de la vie d’une famille corse, Lieu Common, Paris, 1986, pp 299 & 335-341. See also Dunker-Delage’s comments on Mercuri’s interrogations by the Sipo-SD: AD BDR 58W 20, interrogation of Dunker 22 June 1945. For Manicacci, see: Georges Marion, Gaston Defferre, p 81; Marie-Christine Guérini, L’em preinte d’un nom, p 49; Maurice Agulhon & Fernand Barrat, CRS à Marseille, 1944-47, Paris, 1971, p 87. For position of Le Provençal: Le Provençal, « la grande pitié de la Police », 24/9/45; Isaac Levendel, Not the Germans Alone: A Son’s Search for the Truth of Vichy, Chi- cago, 2000, p 301. 266 Chapter 12 lack of parity between the wages of Inspecteurs in the Regional Police forces and those of the National Police branches: the Police Mobile and Renseigne- ments Généraux. Wage ladders were badly established. A Gardien de la Paix who had reached their promotional ceiling after 6 years was on the same salary as an Inspecteur with 20 years’ service. One of the consequences of this situation was that in order to earn a decent wage and meet the needs of their family many officers had taken a second job during their leisure or sleep hours. Many Policemen had found employment as concièrges in apartment blocks or bar- men. The increase tiredness this caused undermined their ability to do their Policework, to say nothing of the effect it had on public opinion. For categories of workers with no direct access to the food production process lack of wages made it particularly difficult to obtain essential foodstuffs. It was true that certain branches of the Police, such as the regional crime squads, had sufficient mobility to be able to stock up with products on visits to the farms in the Vau- cluse organised to coincide with their professional duties. It was also the case that certain branches were involved in the supervision of the distribution of food in markets or in restaurants. Hand-outs were a possibility. But for those not involved in these branches or with sufficient professional conscience to avoid these temptations, food represented a serious problem. Unable to afford to buy black market products, they became dependent on the rations in the Police canteens but these were far from sufficient. In the summer of 1945, the head of the Police social service conducted a survey with his counterparts in other regions. At his request they drew up a list of the menus in their Police canteens during a given week. The findings of the survey could not be published as the comparison with other regions, particularly Rennes was thought to be too depressing for Marseille Police officers. Lack of money also meant that the Police were frustrated in their hopes of seeing a better standard of living as regards housing and accommodation. Homelessness represented a huge problem in the population at large. 32,000 families were homeless in Marseille in 1945. Traditional difficulties of housing had been aggravated by wartime loss of buildings. 87,725 buildings had been registered in Marseille in 1939. Of these 3,603 were now totally destroyed and a further 10,053 were seriously damaged. To the Italian bombing of 1940 and the American bombings of 1943/44, the Nazis had added the callous destruction of the old arrondissement of the city at the beginning of 1943. Many of the homes which did exist carried on a pre-war tradition of being squalid and unhygienic. Only 19% of Marseille’s residential surface area was linked to a sewerage network. The Police were particularly affected by these difficulties. Many Police officers were shunted from one region to another at the Liberation. Those transferred to the Marseille region had considerable difficulty finding A New Police For A New France? 267 accommodation as most flats were beyond their meagre wages. There were numerous examples of Policemen renting so called ‘furnished’ accommodation which contained no windows, no sheets or blankets and little furniture. Others making health their priority tried to circumvent this problem by finding lodgings in distant suburbs, but this simply added to their problems through the fatigue of longer journeys on crowded tramways.45 The inevitable effect of overwork, poor diets and bad housing conditions was a sharp reduction in standards of health. For the population as a whole health was a serious problem. Hospitals were in a deplorable state. Doctors had little petrol to go out to patients and pharmacists lacked 85% of the basic medicines. Tuberculosis was particularly singled out as a problem. In 1938, it had accounted for 133 deaths for 100,000 inhabitants in the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône. By 1943, this figure had shot up to 231 and there was no reason to believe that it had disappeared since the Liberation. The Police were suffering badly from this illness. Mercuri claimed that it was spreading every day within the ranks of the Police. In the first six months of 1945 more than 50 Police officers were on long-term sick leave. Thus, at the Liberation the Police experienced both a fairly rapid rehabilitation, but also a series of frustrations. The rehabilitation of the Marseille Police was prepared by its minor structural alterations and the purge and renewal of a part of its personnel which gave the institution a new assurance. But ultimately, the return to an unrivalled Police system owed much to the political and social climate of the moment. The Police benefited from the general lack of enthusiasm for the preservation of alternative structures of order. These movements, born of the exceptional circumstances of the Occupation and claiming popular legitimacy, were doomed once the population began demanding a return to normality. The mistrust some Resisters felt towards the Milices Patriotiques combined with the desire of the Resistance parties to gain as much control as possible within existing State structures to make these alternative movements superfluous to their ambitions. This situation assured the rapid rehabilitation of the Police, but it failed to overcome the material difficulties Police officers confronted on a personal and a professional basis,

45 For damage to buidings & poor standards of hygiene: AD BDR 28J 215, Discours de Jean Cristofol, lors de la visite de Vincent Auriol, 21/9/47; Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille, Paris, 1974, p 112; Jean-Pierre Azéma & Olivier Wiéviorka, Les Libérations de la France, Paris, 1993, p 180; André Kaspi, Libération France, p 88. For the effect on the Police: AD BDR 23J3, Le Secrétaire Général pour la Police au Directeur Général de la Sûreté Natio- nale, « situation des fonctionnaires de Police », undated (September 1945?); La liberté de Nice et du Sud-Est, « les policiers feront-ils grève? », 8/9/45; Le Provençal, « la grande pitié de la Police », 24/9/45. 268 Chapter 12 thereby magnifying their sense of being the pariahs of society: a self-perception of victimization which gives continuity to Police attitudes throughout history. Moreover, the pragmatism of this rehabilitation frustrated any hopes for a radical change in the relationship between the Police and the population. ConclusionConclusion 269 Conclusion

When considering an historical period it is natural to reflect on questions of continuity and change within that period, in this case from the Popular Front and the Liberation. Throughout this time-span one can discern a number of constant themes within Police attitude. The Marseille force was marked by a sentiment of victimisation, characterised by a feeling of being unappreciated because of lack of public support, suffering poor material conditions and underpay, having to cope with a lack of manpower and resources which made policing inefficient and forced the Police to accommodate themselves to the local political climate. This accommodation did not rule out preferential treatment for certain political forces. The Police showed a clear preference for moderates or reformers who broadly respected the existing status quo over revolutionaries who attempt fundamental changes. In the political climate of Marseille, this translated into an attachment to the local socialist party, a consequent suspicion of both the Communists and, to a certain degree, the PPF in the 1930s and a refusal to align themselves with the Milice in 1943-44.1 Indeed, Vichy’s failure to hold on to Police affection in Marseille was partly a result of its inability to provoke a permanent rupture in the relations between this institution and the local socialist party, particularly once its own political direction shifted away from a declared apoliticism into an open extremism of the far right. The composition of the Police remained relatively stable through to the summer of 1942 with both the Popular Front and Vichy unable to carry out a vast purge of the institution. August and September 1942 saw the resignation of a number of long-serving officers, but this had more quantitative than qualita- tive effects on the make-up of the Police. From 1943 through to 1945, composition changed fundamentally. The STO brought a large number of individuals into the institution who would otherwise have had no inclination to join. In late 1943, women became a focus of interest for recruiters. In the aftermath of the Liberation, Communists began to see the attraction of a Police career, at least until 1947 when many were expelled from the institution as the cold war set in. Alongside the continuities, as will be underlined in this conclusion, there were numerous breaks with the past over our chosen time-frame. The Police force which operated in France’s oldest city in the second half of the 1930s was confronted with a particularly difficult climate: significant levels of crime, including organised crime, and a highly charged political atmosphere. The Police often felt they were ill-equipped to deal with all the demands

1 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 548.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004265233_015 270 Conclusion made of them and made concessions to local conditions. For instance, the Police found it difficult to crack down on the local underworld, as a result of the political support that mobsters received and the near impossibility of obtaining convictions when witnesses and victims fell silent due to intimida- tion. Some Police officers became accomplices of the crime syndicates: turning a blind eye to their activities, removing incriminating records against gangsters or their associates or giving tip-offs to members of the mob threatened with arrest. Thus, the official hierarchy of the Marseille Police force was frequently bypassed by external forces. The Police looked for outside aid to confront the demands of their institution. In the search for representatives who would help them obtain the resources to do their jobs and material advantages to improve their personal lot, the local Police opened itself up to a series of ‘alternative hierarchies’. The sizeable police trade unions were particularly beholding to the Mayor, Henri Tasso, and his influence within the institution challenged the control that the Prefect was supposed to maintain over the Police d’Etat. The Prefect found it hard to compete with Tasso who had a local mandate and could use the clientelistic practices of a recruitment which was carried out at the local level to influence the political leanings of Police personnel. Thanks in part to the efforts of Tasso, the Popular Front, with its emphasis on preserving public order and its seemingly genuine concern for the welfare of public sector workers including the Police, was welcomed within the Marseille force. If the local Police were generally well-disposed to the Popular Front, how would they respond to the arrival in power of a Vichy regime of differing political persuasion? The image of the Police in the collective memory of the Vichy years is built around a series of myths. A central pillar of this image is the idea of a Police which easily put itself at the disposition of both Vichy and the Nazis, a view expressed by Michel Wieviorka: ‘During the Second World War, the Police played an active role in the anti-Semitic practices of the Vichy regime. It collaborated massively with the occupier.’2 In this image the Police and their leaders are sometimes indistinguishable. Maurice Rajsfus even goes as far as to suggest that the photograph of René Bousquet elegantly dressed and smiling in the midst of Nazi officers during the negotiations for the destruction of the Vieux Port – a photo which Rajsfus sees as more valuable than a thousand archives- represents the best proof of the attitude of the Police to Nazi domi- nation. From this interpretation emerges the notion of a group of individuals who were the docile instruments of their government. This brings in another cornerstone of the myth, namely that the Police were basically cowards. This

2 Michel Wiéviorka, La France raciste, Paris, 1992, p 263. Conclusion 271 image is also suggested by their cinematic portrayal. Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano show a gendarme who is unprepared to intervene against a Lucien Lacombe trying to queue-jump in a line waiting outside a butcher’s shop once he learns that Lacombe is a ‘Gestapiste’. Marcel Aymé takes up the same baton in La Traversée de Paris, where we are shown the reluctance of two Police officers to intercept a couple of individuals transporting black market goods on the grounds that they are speaking German, or at least pretending to. The accusation returns in a different form in another Aymé inspired film, Uranus, where the Police at the Liberation are only prepared to intervene against a Commu- nist when they find out that he is no longer a card-carrying member. In this image there is little room for Police resistance. It is true that René Clément’s film Paris brûle-t-il? glorifies the role of the Police in the Parisian insurrection, whilst Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des Ombres portrays gendarmes who deliberately turn a blind eye to the transporting of clandestine radios, but these portrayals are exceptions.3 The last element of this representation portrays the Police during the Vichy years as a solid continuum- Bousquet’s Police- ignoring the periods when they were controlled by Rivalland or Darnand. In short, we are offered a Police which remained obedient to the end, except for the inevitable turning of the coats in 1944- a turning of the coats which, according to popular myth, allowed almost all Police officers to stay in post at the Liberation and to serve the Republic much as they had served Vichy. As with many myths, it contains some elements of truth. There is no doubt whatsoever that Vichy attempted to fit its Police into its general policy of collaboration, although at the same time trying to maintain some semblance of sovereignty.4 That 76000 Jews were deported from France, most of whom had been arrested by the French Police, shows that Police collaboration did bring results for the Nazis.5 However, the image of a Police happily accepting collaboration is an over-simplification and in many cases a mis-representation. Conscious collaboration was an idea which was persistently rejected by Mar-

3 Simon Kitson, ‘Army of the Shadows: reviewing Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic film’, Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin, Vol. 2, n° 1, October 2011. 4 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 365. 5 Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz. Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 volumes, Paris, 1983; Serge Klarsfeld, Le calendrier de la persécution des Juifs en France, 1940-44, Paris, 1993; Jacques Delarue, ‘La Police et l’administration’, in G. Wellers, A. Kaspi & S. Klarsfeld, La France et la question juive 1940-1944, Paris, 1981, pp 57-79; William Guéraiche, ‘Administration et répression sous l’occupation: les “affaires juives” de la préfecture de Charente-Inférieure (septembre 1940- juillet 1944’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, n° 45-2, April-June 1998, pp 480-503. 272 Conclusion seille Police officers as reaction to the ‘Oberg-Bousquet agreements’ showed.6 Nevertheless, the Police collaborated indirectly by co-operating with Vichy, a co-operation triggered by a range of different, but not mutually exclusive, considerations: enthusiasm, obedience, a sense of continuity, professional conscience and personal ambition. As regards the initial current of active enthusiastic support for Pétain’s government this was grouped around four poles. To begin with there were Vichy’s calculations about the result of the war. In the summer of 1940 few believed in any other outcome to the war than a German victory. Failure to adhere to this viewpoint was considered irrational or even dangerous and many deemed that support should be given to those who were likely to make the most out of this unhappy situation. However, this calculation rapidly lost some of its initial certainty. The failure of the Germans to win the Battle of Britain, Hitler’s invasion of Russia, where even Napoleon had failed, and the entry of the Americans into the war, bringing back memories of a turning point in the First World War, were largely responsible for undermining this initial certainty. It was a long time before the certainty that Germany had won the war was replaced by the conviction of an Allied victory, but in the interim the calculation of the French signatories of the armistice was shown to be less rational than it had once appeared. The second pole of enthusiasm concerned the personal charisma of France’s leaders. Pétain enjoyed a support in the French population way beyond that accorded to his Ministers and in Police circles this ‘Maréchalisme’ continued well into 1942. Both Bousquet and Darnand subsequently tried to charm Police officers in an affective manner, with varying degrees of success. Beyond this personal attachment there was a question of ideological overlapping. A number of Vichy’s enemies, such as foreigners or communists, were also preferred targets of the Police.7 Vichy’s campaign against these categories was initially well-supported by the Marseille Police. These ideological considerations were both questions of the personal orientation of Police officers and of their professional concerns. Other marriages of convenience occurred. By stressing order in its programme, Vichy could raise the expectations of those hoping for a greater input of resources into their administration or the devel-

6 Archives des Groupes-Francs de Marseille, Le Commissaire de Police de Sûreté Robert Matteï de la SAP à M. le CD, Police de Sûreté, n° 2179 SAP, 7 August 1943; AD BDR M6 11077, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 6-12 September 1943; AN 3W 88 [84] evidence from Elie Tudesq, 20 April 1945. On this question also see: http://www.aassdn.org/xldd11122.htm. Sweets notes a similar tendency in Police services elsewhere in France: John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France, Oxford, 1986, p 187. 7 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, p 169. Conclusion 273 opment of new techniques.8 These hopes were to be rapidly dashed and Vichy discourse stressing the need for a modern well-equipped Police force merely served to remind Police officers of how lacking in resources they were. The fourth and last pole of enthusiasm for Vichy was in the sphere of the personal material condition of Police officers. Expectations in this respect, emanating from the belief that this new government may make important concessions to win over sympathy, were short-lived, barely surviving the summer of 1941. The absence of lasting enthusiasm obliged Vichy to search for other ways of coaxing its personnel. Vichy tried to reinforce unquestioning obedience by transforming the institution into an increasingly military apparatus where orders were not to be questioned and by tightening the hierarchical structure so that greater supervision of personnel could be undertaken. Those wishing to challenge instructions were left with the difficult task of knowing which orders to challenge, given that Police officers were rarely informed of the political motivations of the arrests they were carrying out. In-house training and the scientific aspects of policing were encouraged by Vichy. These elements could be perverted by encouraging the notion that policing was not an art whereby each case should be treated according to its merits. Instead, they could suggest that Police dealings with the public could be fitted into a series of precon- ceived patterns in which the responses Police officers brought would be standardised according to ‘objective’ rules, which in reality discouraged personal initiative and encouraged the adoption of standardised responses instilled by the institution. Vichy could not only encourage obedience by tightening the punishments for those caught not obeying (ranging from suspension or sacking in 1942 to imprisonment or departure for the STO in late 1943, to the death penalty in June 1944), but they could also increase the chances of the Police officer being caught for non-execution of duty by encouraging a climate of denunciation and by sowing personal numbers on to the collars of uniformed officers, thereby making their identification easier following any complaint. This furthered a process of isolating the Police from the public; an isolation which Vichy deliberately encouraged in an effort to make its Police force more dependent on their employers. A cult of obedience was one of the fundamental values within the institution but historians too often make simplistic assumptions about the police being an institution built on automatic obedience and hierarchical discipline.

8 Denis Peschanski, ‘Du régime d’exception à l’assainissement national’, in J.-P. Rioux, Antoine Prost & J.-P. Azéma, Les Communistes français de Munich à Châteaubriant, Paris, 1987 p 155; J.-M. Guillon, ‘la philosophie politique de la Révolution nationale’, in J.-P. Azéma & François Bédarida, Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, pp 171-172. 274 Conclusion

The notion of obedience is far more complicated than that. The State made frequent reference to this concept in order to encourage a passive acceptance of its instructions. Individual Police officers could shelter behind the notion of obedience to deny any personal responsibility for their actions.9 How far the institution’s cult of obedience developed into a genuine culture of obedience where instructions were unthinkingly obeyed was subject to a number of considerations and varied between different branches within the Police. Some branches of the Police had particularly tight hierarchical control thereby helping to secure obedience. The GMR often operated under direct supervision from their commander. The hierarchical control over Gardiens within the urban Police was however much more problematic. Generally they depended more on supervision from their Brigadiers than from their theoretical superior the Commissaires- in other words that, to quote the Sociologist Jean-Jacques Gleizal, ‘two hierarchies were superimposed on each other, one of which was official and bureaucratic, the other was professional and functional’.10 These Brigadiers were too few in number to maintain a particularly tight vigil over their subordinates and, having been promoted from the ranks of the Gardiens, often found it difficult to gain sufficient authority over them.11 This highlights the peculiarity of the Police hierarchy referred to by Gleizal who suggests that when considering the organisation of the Police one needs to ignore the theoretical organograms established in the Ministry of the Interior: ‘one must move away from a pyramidal vision of Police structures’.12 Hierarchical control was difficult because of the movement of Police officers as they conducted their business.13 The degree of hierarchical control also varied with the type of mission being carried out. Everyday policing for the majority of Gardiens, for instance, might involve going out on their beat and reacting to on-going events. Since these events were not fully predictable (and since the hierarchy may often not become aware of them if the Gardiens does not act on them), there was a large degree of autonomy in this type of policing. Being told to go to a certain address and arrest a named person, on the other hand, put a direct pressure on the Police officer. Should that officer decide not to arrest that person they would usually have to lie and say they were not present: taking the

9 AN 56W 47, déposition du Commissaire Etienne, 7 February 1945. 10 Jean-Jacques Gleizal (et al), La Police: le Cas des Démocraties Occidentales, Paris, 1993, p 279. 11 Dominique Monjardet, Ce que fait la Police, Paris, 1996, p 67. 12 Jean-Jacques Gleizal, Le Désordre Policier, Paris, 1985, p 66. 13 J.-P. Brodeur, ‘La Police, Mythes et Realites’, Criminologie, Vol. XVII, 1984, no 1, p 31. Conclusion 275 risk to lie in order to save a person from arrest was not a decision which would come easily to Police officers. Vichy’s constant efforts to tighten and reinforce its control over junior Police personnel or to offer incentives for successful completion of a mission demonstrate an awareness that obedience was not always automatic and was subject to constant negotiation between the different actors.14 But it is vital to understand that the institution never did function by orders alone. There remained margins of autonomy and initiative. Rank and file officers had their own input into the repressive process. Indeed, sometimes it was only their initiative and personal observation which brought cases to the attention of the senior hierarchy in the first place. Often the way they wrote their reports could have considerable bearing on a case. Although each rung of the administrative ladder would subsequently paraphrase these into their own words the fundamental essence of the report usually remained faithful to their initial author. The important point to note is that the Police had a professional culture where traditions of obedience and autonomy co-existed.15 Beyond obedience to direct orders hierarchical superiors can try to motivate their subordinates and instil in them a sense of duty which hopefully would condition how they respond to events they encounter. But such conditioning pre-supposes that the hierarchical superior has time to pester his staff in this way or that sufficient training is available to make institutionally acceptable responses the norm for a Police officer goes about their business. Police training was still at its early stages by the 1940s and the hierarchy were often too swamped with administrative roles to be able to compensate for this. Vichy could still hope to ensure the obedience of its civil servants in situations where close hierarchical supervision could be followed by severe punishment. Few open rebellions occurred in closely monitored operations with the result that, in situations where more senior officers were present, Police behaviour was often dictated by the attitude of the hierarchical superior on hand,

14 AN F7 14908 [632], le Chef du Gouvernement à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 1136 SG Pol., 19 August 1942; AN F7 14907 [556], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 443 SG Circ., 27 July 1942; AN F7 14907 [484], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 390 Pol. I Circ., 20 June 1942; AN F7 14907 [538], le Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 1er Bureau n° 419, Pol. I Circ., 9 July 1942; AN F7 14908 [734], Le Secrétaire Général à la Police à M. Le Préfet Régional, 19/2/43. AN F1a 3729, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur, “Note pour M. Boris”, London, 28 October 1943. AN F7 14907, PN Cab A n° 1304/3, 21 September 1943. 15 Simon Kitson, ‘Marseille: à l’épreuve du politique, 1936-38’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 43. 276 Conclusion although in many cases even their support for Vichy became problematic.16 Where Gaullist influence on the Police could be successful was in further weakening their enthusiasm to serve Vichy. This undermined the institution in those areas dependant on initiative from below or where subordinate officers could exploit a degree of autonomy. In reality enthusiasm for and obedience to Vichy were both limited. Enthu- siasm in most domains lasted barely a year, whilst obedience became dependent on constant supervision, as programmes of indoctrination through training had to be abandoned for practical reasons: the inability to make instruc- tors available and shortages of personnel requiring that those who were recruited be integrated into active service as soon as possible. But beyond simple enthusiasm and obedience, a sense of professional continuity and conscience, coupled with personal ambition could at various moments also inspire co-operation. Jean-Marc Berlière has rightly underlined that to begin with there would have been a sense of ‘business as usual’ within the institution as not only were the Police targeting some of the same categories (foreigners and communists) but they were often doing so with reference to the same laws as under the Third Republic.17 In the institutional domain, this sense of continuity with the immediate past would have been reinforced by the limited scope of the purge of Police officers enacted by Vichy, which meant that Police officers would have been surrounded by the same colleagues. But we need to recognise that after the Summer of 1941 things progressively began to appear very different for Police officers. The administrative reform introduced then had profound repercussions on all Police forces outside of Paris.18 At a time when new recruits for the Police were difficult to come by the creation of new Police services merely syphoned off new blood from the existing services. Similarly, when resources for the Police were in short supply, the expansion of Police services made claims on already overstretched resources. A propaganda campaign surrounding the reform increased public hostility to the Police by making France appear as a Police State and the forces of order as imitations of their German

16 Oral evidence from former Inspecteur Robert Picq. AN F1a 3021, CNI, copie intégrale du télégramme secret et confidentiel, n° 00122 de M l’Intendant de Police, Marseille. AN F7 14890 [A101], le commandant en chef ouest (Rundstedt) à M le Maréchal Pétain, 11 Novem- ber 1943. 17 Jean-Marc Berlière, ‘L’impossible pérennité de la police républicaine sous l’Occupation’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, n° 94, Apr. – Jun., 2007, pp 183-198. 18 Marc Olivier Baruch, ‘Vichy ou l’heure de la réforme’, L’Histoire, n° 240, February 2000, p 54. AN 2AG 520 CC 104 A, Cabinet Civil du Maréchal Pétain, note sur la réorganisation de la Police, undated. Conclusion 277 counterparts. It is far from certain that all Police officers would have appreciated government departments declaring ‘France will have a Police force worthy of her’ because the implication was that existing Police officers were inadequate. Berlière has quoted Commissaire Marcel Sicot, who as an influential member of the Commissaire’s professional association in the 1930s helped draft a pre-war blueprint of what would become Vichy’s 1941 reform of the institution, to suggest that the Police were happy with the reform. Sicot was generally favourable but even he had some reservations about how Vichy implemented his recommendations.19 Contemporaneous documents suggest that there was actually internal opposition to these reforms.20 In any event, the Police became increasingly fed up with the constant reforming of their institution. Reporting on Police attitude, the RG observed in February 1944 that ‘these incessant restructurings, these constant reforms are not viewed favourably’ and suggested that Police officers ‘make fun of the instability of measures introduced since 1940’.21 In the political domain, the Police may have been targeting the same outcasts as in the 1930s but it would have eventually dawned on even the dimmest functionary that the nature of the measures taken against these categories was changed considerably. The speed at which Police officers recognised this varied depending on the personality, intelligence and political persuasion of the officer involved as well as the branch to which they belonged and the extent to which they were solicited in the domain of political policing. Police attitude became considerably more ambiguous in the case of foreigners with the horror of the deportations of foreign Jews in 1942 which shocked even many Police officers or in the case of communists once the latter began to develop closer contact and co-ordination with the Gaullists. In terms of professional continuity, there were certainly those who believed that they owed equal allegiance to whichever government they served, regardless of their own political beliefs. Such individuals could be easy prey for Vichy, rarely calling into question the motivation of the instructions they were given and trying to abandon their personal responsibility behind phrases such as ‘I was just following orders’. Whilst increasing numbers of Policemen offered

19 Marcel Sicot, Servitude et Grandeur policières, Paris, 1959, pp 239-240. 20 AN 2AG 520 CC 104 B, undated note. Jean-Louis Laubry, ‘Les régions de Limoges et d’Orléans’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 77 & 79. 21 AD BDR M6 11080, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 21-27 February 1944. This same report figures in AN F60 1689, CNI, l’opinion publique en France d’après les rapports officiels de Vichy, January to March 1944. 278 Conclusion help to the Resistance, many tried their best just to survive both in the present and in the future. Historical archives will probably underestimate the number of those who just tried their best to muddle through without compromising themselves too much in any direction. Throughout the Vichy period it should also be remembered that there were certain prosaic considerations which meant that materially there was an incentive for Policemen to continue to serve the government in spite of their feelings about it. Whether at the local or the national level the State paid Police officers’ wages and controlled access to promotions. One Marseille Gardien de la Paix, Georges Martin, was lucky enough to have scooped the 500 000 franc jackpot of the National Lottery in January 1940.22 With around 20 years’ salary won in an instant he might have considered retirement. His colleagues were not in such a position of good for- tune and had to work for a living. Their professional experience was linked to policing, as was their pension scheme. It is usually not easy for someone to walk away from a professional domain in which they have worked for years simply because the management and the nature of the job changes. Wanting to keep one’s job would always mean doing enough to stay out of significant trouble. However, if throughout the institution dragging one’s feet became the norm then it became much more difficult for the hierarchy to isolate an individual Police officer for lethargic performance. It seems that just such a culture may have set in within the Marseille Police by 1943. When explaining the reasons for Police unreliability, Prefect Lemoine lamented that: ‘Public order cannot be maintained when Senior Administrators are confronted with a tendency for feet-dragging from their subordinates and a marked trend towards indiscipline on the political level.’23 Professional conscience was another element which could initially encourage Police co-operation with their government. Some Police officers undoubtedly thought of themselves as the ‘thin blue line’, that is to say a vital instrument for preserving social order without whom chaos would break out.24 Police specialist Robert Reiner quotes a Police officer in a different context as saying ‘We’re responsible people who are not likely to turn round and jack the job in and leave the country open to anarchy’.25 This is one reason why Police services reacted with such hostility to rival organisations, such as the Police aux Ques-

22 Le Petit Provençal, ‘Un gardien cycliste qui a le sourire’, 10 January 1940, p 2. 23 Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau] MI 26205, 860679, art 4; le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, n° 00347, 22 May 1943 24 Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police, New York, 1992, p 112. 25 Robert Reiner, The Blue-Coated Worker, Cambridge, 1978, p 110. Conclusion 279 tions Juives, the Milice or PPF, impinging on their professional turf. Parallel Police forces were a double-edged weapon. They could stimulate Police zeal by encouraging the Police to out-do the activity of the parallel movement. Accel- erated Police zeal in this respect might reflect classic turf wars but sometimes it was justified with reference to a desire to protect the population from the excesses of a fanatical semi-official organisation. This was the policy of damage limitation which often proved so costly. Police officers would believe that if they carried out a task they would do so more humanely than the Germans or their auxiliaries. Such thinking often overlooked that the Germans lacked the manpower to conduct many of the Police activities without help from the regular French Police. From mid-1943 the Police showed an increasing reluctance to think in those terms. In the long run these parallel movements could also encourage the Police to withdraw from certain types of activity, if those activities were deemed to bring discredit onto the institution. Such a view was for instance expressed by a member of the GMR when it seemed the Milice would replace them in the hunt for Maquisards: ‘There’s talk of replacing us which would be good news, because I’m getting thoroughly fed up’.26 As the policing role became ever more political Police officers began to lose their sense of mission. In the 1930s newspapers frequently contained articles describing crimes solved. These articles often mentioned the names of Police officers responsible for the arrest of a criminal and sometimes even featured photos of the officer responsible. This lent a certain satisfaction to the job as a successful Policeman could enjoy a degree of local fame. During the Occupa- tion, the number of pages in an edition of a newspaper decreased due to paper shortages. This left less space to the reporting of crime solving, especially as the Germans and Vichy used so much of the available space for political com- muniqués. Police officers struggled to maintain a public service element to their work, hoping that solving crime would continue to be one of their missions. This attempt to focus on common law crimes was often hard to execute as it was difficult to distinguish between someone acting suspiciously for political reasons as opposed to someone acting suspiciously for criminal motives. In May 1944, Inspecteur Jacques Laporte was awoken by the noise of a car being parked outside his house in the rue Audimar.27 This was a quiet district

26 AN F7 14931, Service des Contrôles Techniques, Inspection Régionale de Marseille, Rap- port Statistique des Renseignements recueillis dans les Interceptions Postales, February 1944. For demands for transfer out of the Police see: AN F7 14909 [1108], Directeur Général de la Police Nationale à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 81, Pol 2 Circ, February 1944. 27 Archives des Groupes-Francs de Marseille, Procès-Verbal du Commissaire de Police Yves Piana, 24 May 1944. 280 Conclusion with few comings and goings and such nocturnal activity raised his suspicions. He believed that this vehicle might be stolen. He informed his colleagues and set up surveillance. This surveillance allowed them to catch the car thief but it turned out that the individual had stolen the car for the Resistance. What had begun as an investigation into criminal activity looked like spiralling out of control as a paper trail had been established concerning the case and the Police hierarchy were expecting the Resister’s accomplices to be investigated. In the end it was only because a Police Resister leaked information concerning the on-going investigation that the archives of this particular Resistance unit could be moved before any search took place. The desire to do a good job and to serve the public did not entirely disappear and as this case shows could lead Police officers into an unconscious form of collaboration where they thought they were engaging in one type of policing only to discover that they had mis- read its underlying significance. In spite of the weight of these elements of sub-culture what strikes the scholar most when analysing policing during the Occupation is the significant decline in Police efficiency after the end of 1942: 57% of the Jews arrested were arrested before that date and one cannot say that the Police were efficient in their application of laws on forced labour.28 By mid-1943, Vichy and German complaints of the unreliability of the French Police were becoming more frequent.29 The head of the SS in France, Karl Oberg, complained that ‘many Police and Gendarmerie services in France have unfortunately not lived up to my hopes as regards collaboration’ and criticised the ‘general political attitude of Police officers and Gendarmes who refuse to collaborate with the German Police in accordance with the agreements passed’.30 In Marseille the Prefect asked for the transfer of the entire Police force in May 1943.31 Renseignements Généraux reports concerning public opinion began systematically to include a section monitoring opinion within Police ranks: the institution was no longer just an instrument of repression but had itself become a subject of surveillance. Increasingly, unreliability also affected those corps hitherto seen as

28 Denis Peschanski, ‘Exclusion, persécution, répression’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida [eds], Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, p 226. 29 CDJC CCCLXIV-2, Procès Knochen-Oberg, 1954. M. Marrus & R.O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, New York, 1981, p 260. AN F1a 3848, Internal memo of Dr Knochen, 19 August 1943, intercepted by the Commissariat National à l’Intérieur; AN F7 14890 [A101], le commandant en chef ouest (Rundstedt) à M. le Maréchal Pétain, 11 November 1943. 30 AN F7 14890, Oberg to Laval, 18 October 1943. 31 Centre d’Archives Contemporaines [Fontainebleau] MI 26205, 860679, art 4; le Préfet Régional de Marseille à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, n° 00347, 22 May 1943 Conclusion 281

reliable like the GMR or the Section des Affaires Politiques.32 Progressively, Police officers were moved into more minor tasks, like guarding public buildings.33 The Germans had to intervene directly to an increasing extent and to lose their reticence about making use of parallel forces like the Milice or the PPF.34 Nationally, of 44000 arrests carried out for political activity in 1943 only 10000 were the work of the French Police. The rest were carried out directly by the Germans.35 After the summer of 1943, Vichy was ever less able to confi- dently offer the collaboration of Police services as a bargaining tool with the Germans. Reasons for Police disaffection with Vichy continued to multiply: insufficient wages; excessive workload; the hostility of the public; new constraints such as the STO; the calling into question of the patriotic nature of the missions they were being asked to perform; Vichy’s increased reliance on criminal elements and on extremist parallel Police movements of the sort so often rejected by Police officers, etc.36 By late 1942 the Marseille Police were once again opening themselves out to the extra-administrative forces that had influenced them in the late 1930s, such as the local socialist movement. The Mar- seille Prefect expressed his frustration that the underground Socialist party

32 AN F1a 3766, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM. les Commandants des GMR, n° 499-3711 Pol GMR C.B., 25 November 1943. AN F7 14908 [849], Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets, n° 335 Pol 8 Circ, 29 July 1943; AN F7 14909, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 477 SG-Pol Circ STMO, 12 November 1943. 33 AN 3W 89, Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 333 SG/Pol Circ/ SMO, 27 July 1943; AN F7 14894, le délégué du Secrétaire Général au Maintien de l’Ordre à MM les Préfets Régionaux, 26 January 1944. 34 Denis Peschanski, ‘Dans la tourmente’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 73; Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris, Oxford, 2008, pp 103-104; Julian Jackson, France: the dark years, Oxford, 2001, p 229. 35 Michael Marrus & Robert O. Paxton, Vichy et les Juifs, Paris, 1981, p 450; Hans Umbreit, Der MBF in Frankreich, 1940-44, Boppard-am-Rhein, 1968, p 143; Jean-Marc Berlière and Lau- rent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 152. 36 AN F1a 4516, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs, ‘Constations faites dans certains services de Police du ressort de l’intendance de Clermont-Ferrand’, Vichy, 13 December 1943; AN F7 14909 [993] Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 537-4551 POL/GMR/P, 28 December 1943. Jean-Louis Laubry, ‘Les régions de Limoges et d’Orléans’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police fran- çaise, Paris, 2000, p 84; Christian Bougeard, ‘Le Finistère’ in in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 90; Robert Zaretsky, Nîmes at war, Penn State UP, 1995, pp 169-170. 282 Conclusion seemed to have more influence within Police ranks than he did.37 They were also starting to show signs of sympathy with the Resistance. Where this sympathy was not spontaneous the Resistance could also apply pressure on Police officers.38 Henri Longuechaud has written that the Resistance spared no effort to make clear to the Police how they should behave and how they should prepare to participate in Liberation.39 Well into 1944 they were instructed to stay in their posts but to sabotage orders which were in contradiction with the interests of the nation.40 The Police were the principal recipient of Resistance propaganda, both through tracts and broadcasts aimed directly at its members and through Resistance documentation intercepted in the course of their duties.41 The cumulative effect of this propaganda was to remind Police officers of their duties in the present and to warn them of punishments they could expect in the present or future.42 But beyond such negative considerations, there was also a positive attachment to the aspirations and incentives of the Resistance. The Anglophobia of the immediate aftermath of Mers-El-Kébir rapidly gave way to an Anglophilia in Police ranks which was based less on a genuine liking of all that was British than on a realisation that it was only through an Allied victory that a Liberation from the hated Axis occupier could be achieved. A new Republic was looked upon as the best hope for an improvement in working conditions and remuneration because although the Front Populaire had had only limited success in improving their situation, at least it had tried. A new Front Populaire style government was expected to try again and if the problems of the flight of capital and inflation could be conquered, it might even succeed. The role the Police were being asked to play in collaboration encouraged some to seek actively to improve the image of their institution. Marie-Made- leine Fourcade, leader of the Alliance Resistance group, remembers that one of

37 AN 3W 236 [21 RB], evidence from Horace Manicacci, Director of “Le Provençal”, 22 May 1945. 38 Jean-Marc Berlière and Laurent Chabrun, Les Policiers Français sous l’Occupation, Paris, 2001, p 51. 39 Henri Longuechaud, Conformément à l’ordre de nos chefs, le drame des forces de l’ordre sous l’Occupation, Paris, 1985, p 315. 40 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac (ed), Les Voix de la Liberté, Paris, 1975, Volume 2, p 23. 41 AN F60 1689, CNI, ‘tracts adressés à la Police’, February 1943; AN FIA 3765, Note de Necker pour Maurice Sidobre, September 1943; AN F7 14888 [tracts 1943], La Voix de France, undated; AD BDR M6 11078, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 15-21 November 1943; AD BDR M6 11079, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 13-19 December 1943. 42 Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 552. Conclusion 283 the Policemen who joined her network had explained his motivation for doing so in exactly those terms.43 The pseudonyms adopted by Police Resisters in Marseille underline this same point since some took on noms de guerre such as ‘the incorruptible’ as a clear backlash against the largely negative and corrupt image of their force in the 1930’s and the hope that out of Resistance might come a new squeaky clean Police.44 Being at the spearhead of the repression and persecution of targeted groups meant that, by the same token, the Police were far more likely to be in a position to engage in acts of Resistance than the average citizen. For example, although Police circles were a favourable breed- ing ground for xenophobia some Police officers did feel a wave of compassion towards the victims of Jewish persecution and in some cases were prepared to take advantage of their professional dealings with Jews to translate this compassion into more active help.45 Of course, where Police officers did not seize such opportunities the results could be disastrous. In this respect the Police were similar to another category of ‘Resisto-Collaborators’: railway workers. The much vaunted Resistance of railway workers, typified in the film La Bataille du Rail, was only possible because these same workers were also being asked to collaborate extensively.46 Between the Police and Resistance sub-cultures there was both some overlapping and some extreme divergence which respectively made it easier or more difficult for Policemen to engage with anti-German networks and movements. The Resistance world view was built on optimism and idealism; often Police officers are dragged down into a cynicism through the exercise of their profession. A reference to legality was one of the guiding principles of the Police, even if widespread corruption meant that there were many examples of the breach of this principle. The essence of Resistance was a break with formal

43 France Soir, “souvenirs de l’agente secrète n° 1, ‘Marie Madeleine’”, 24/4/47. Marie-Made- leine Fourcade, “le réseau Alliance et les Policiers” in Association des Anciens Résistants et Combattants du Ministère de l’Intérieur, Pages d’Histoire, Paris, 1975, p 98. 44 AN 3AG/2/53, list of members of Ajax, ‘Secteur 9, Marseille’. 45 Oral evidence from Victor Algazi & Roxanne Algazi (born Matalon), Marseille, 18 Decem- ber 1992. Oral evidence from Ignace Doboin, Paris, 6 February 1993. Jean-Marie Muller, Désobéir à Vichy. La résistance civile des fonctionnaires de Police, Nancy, 1994; p 208; Jean- Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police fran- çaise, Paris, 2000, p 209; William Guéraiche, ‘Police, Préfecture et Autorités Allemandes en Charente-Inférieure’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 131; A. Cohen, Persécutions et sauvetages, Cerf, Paris, 1993, p 295. 46 On this theme, see the work of Ludivine Broch. Her forthcoming book Ordinary Workers, Vichy and the Holocaust: French railwaymen in the Second World War (Cambridge Uni- versity Press, c. 2015) is awaited with anticipation. 284 Conclusion legality. Clandestinity and secrecy were a feature of much Resistance work and, although the bulk of Policemen were uniformed and operated in plain view, there were certainly large sections of the Police where cloak and dagger operations were the norm. It should be noted, however, that the idea of betraying professional secrets, which Policemen were asked to do with the leaking of documents to pro-Allied intelligence services would have represented a serious rupture of professional codes. Both Resistance and policing were dangerous activities and both could involve the use of weapons. Patriotism was a central component of most freedom fighting movements and sections of the Police were officially charged with defending the nation against external threat. The Resistance just like the Police was hierarchically organised with an emphasis on the role of the leader. In the 1930s the official hierarchy of the Police was already being bypassed by alternative external hierarchies such as local politicians, professional associations and contact with the criminal world, so aligning oneself with orders from outside the institution would not have been quite the rupture that some Police scholars portray. Policemen were used to balancing between official and unofficial hierarchies. As suggested above, the Police culture of obeying orders is more complicated than sometimes suggested and was not a total barrier to Resistance. Overall, it would be fair to say that the Police were more involved in Resist- ance than most sectors of society.47 Nationally, 2% of serving Police officers were deported for Resistance.48 When the Sipo-SD investigated the Combat Resistance movement in mid-1943, 5% of those it identified as being involved with the movement were Policemen. Between one third and one fifth (depending on different estimates) of all those killed fighting for the Liberation of Mar- seille were Police officers.49 Generally, one of the peculiarities of Police Resistance was the particularly large number of Police officers who helped the Resistance without ever being fully-fledged members.50 That said, from the summer of 1943 Police Resistance shifted away from simply being the acts of

47 Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 215. 48 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des Polices en France, Brussels, 1996, p 199. 49 Combattre, hebdomadaire illustré des amis des FTPF, special issue ‘L’insurrection de Mar- seille, août 1944’, undated but probably November 1944. Revue du Tarn, n° 134, Summer 1989, pp 297-309; AN 72AJ 198, Redon, Souvenirs de la Résistance dans le département du Tarn, 1944; oral evidence from Joseph Bronzini. AD BDR 56W 39; ‘Bulletin d’information du Comité Départemental de Libération de Rumilly’, l’Agriculteur Savoyard, 16/9/44. Simon Kitson, ‘La reconstitution de la Police à Marseille: août 1944- février 1945’, Provence Historique, n° 178, October 1994, pp 497-509. 50 Dominique Veillon, Le Franc-Tireur, Flammarion, Paris, 1977, p 253. Conclusion 285 isolated individuals towards being a much more organised affair with its own specific structures such as the Réseau Ajax, Police et Patrie, Honneur de la Police, NAP-Police and Front National de la Police.51 Police officers participated on many levels in the Resistance. From the post- war testimony of Resisters it is clear that few Resistance structures did not benefit from the help of at least one sympathetic Policeman.52 The Resister Jean Gemähling offers an interesting eye-witness account concerning the scope of Police Resistance. He had dealings with the Police on numerous levels. An early left-wing opponent of the Vichy government, Gemähling was one of the key players of Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee which helped anti- Nazis and Jews escape from France. He subsequently became head of the ‘Kas- anga’ network, one of the main Gaullist information networks.53 Gemähling, who was arrested twice, has written that most Resistance organisations had friendly contacts within the Police and indeed that almost all Police stations contained some Resisters.54 The most common currency of Police Resistance consisted of losing a compromising report, sending information on to Resistance networks, supplying false identity cards, tipping off someone of an imminent arrest, dragging one’s feet when asked to perform a task and closing one’s eyes to acts of opposition.55

51 AN 72 AJ 66, Historique du NAP par Claude Bourdet; Claude Bourdet, L’aventure incertaine, Paris, 1975; Henri Michel, Les courants de pensée de la Résistance, Paris, 1962, 302; John F. Sweets, The politics of Resistance in France, 1940-44, Dekalb, 1976, p 37; Alban Vistel, La nuit sans ombre, Paris, 1970, p 209. 52 AD BDR 56W 104, testimony of Marcel Pouleau, head of the communist Front National in the northern sector of the Bouches-du-Rhône. 53 http://www.ordredelaliberation.fr/fr_compagnon/388.html. 54 Jean Gemähling, ‘Le réseau “Kasanga” et la Police’, in Pierre Millacet & Lucien Pissarelli (eds), Résistance, Libération: documents et témoignages, Paris, 1974, p 205. 55 AD BDR 56W 14, testimonies of Raymond Berg, Jean Gemähling, Auguste Clary & Francis Crémieux. Maurice Chevance-Bertin, Vingt mille heures d’angoisses, 1940-45, Paris, 1990, pp 118-126; Donald Caskie, Le Chardon d’Ecosse, un pasteur écossais dans la résistance, 1940- 44, Lausanne, 1969, pp 164-166. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, L’Arche de Noé, Paris, 1989, p 213 Jean Gemähling, ‘Le réseau “Kasanga’ et la Police’, in Pierre Millacet & Lucien Pis- sarelli (eds), Résistance, Libération: documents et témoignages, Paris, 1974, p 205. Laurent Douzou (ed), Souvenirs inédits d’Yvon Morandat, Cahiers de l’IHTP, n° 29, September 1994, pp 74-75. Oral evidence from Jean Gemähling, Paris, 2/2/93; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘Le Var’, in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 208; Pascal Maysounave, ‘La répression dans le Limousin: une affaire trop sérieuse pour l’abandonner à la seule Police française’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police fran- çaise, Paris, 2000, pp 152-153; Marc-Olivier Baruch, Servir l’Etat Français, Paris, 1997, p 491. M.R.D. Foot, S.O.E in France, London, 1966, p 120. 286 Conclusion

Resistance archives are rich with copies of administrative reports forwarded illicitly from Police services to the Free French movement in London and Algiers. The Police were significantly engaged in Resistance information-gathering exercises and were prepared to turn a blind eye to many Resistance acts and to participate actively in sabotage of the STO. They performed administrative resistance through the provision of false identity papers to Resisters or the losing of files on suspected Resisters. They provided tip offs to Resisters under threat of arrest. Marcel Pouleau, a regional head of the communist Front National movement, provided a long list of ways in which the Police had helped his movement, including providing summaries of the surveillance of Milice meetings and tips about Miliciens to target.56 Two methods of sabotaging instructions were particularly prevalent in the Police. The first was what one might call ‘Resistance by Proxy’. This was where a Police officer would want to undermine an order but was unwilling or unable to take the risk of doing so themselves. They would therefore seek a means of tipping off the potential victim using a third party. When charged with carrying out an operation against the Resistance, Police Resister Commissaire Theus was presented with a list which had been found on a train of 48 members of the Radio-Patrie Resistance network with their addresses and told to organise their arrest. He persuaded his boss that the arrests all needed to be conducted at the same time. This ruse allowed him to gather a large team, around 100 Inspecteurs, in a conference room, seemingly to give them instructions of the forthcoming operation but in reality acting in the knowledge that one of those present would probably find a way of tipping off the potential victims and that it would be difficult to trace exactly who had leaked the information.57 When carrying out operations against the Maquis local units of the GMR made sure they arrived in the area with as much fanfare as possible, expecting that a local Maquis sympathiser would get word to the Maquisards that the Police had arrived, in a hope that confrontation could be avoided. Another way in which Police officers could sabotage orders would be to engage in what might be called ‘Resistance by Zeal’. This was engaged in significantly with regard to the STO where the Police would pretend to act zealously by arresting individuals who they knew were exempt from this law in order to make it look like they were being zealous but without producing concrete results.

56 AD BDR 56W 104, testimony of Marcel Pouleau, head of the communist Front National in the northern sector of the Bouches-du-Rhône. 57 AN 72AJ 35, Témoignage de Léon Theus, 6 May 1947. Conclusion 287

Having noted the scope and motivations of Police Resistance it is now necessary to underline its limitations.58 It must be remembered that not all the difficulties of Vichy or the Germans within the institution are imputable to Resistance. As Pierre Laborie and Jacques Semelin have made clear in articles seeking to define the notion, for an action to be considered as Resistance there must be a clear intention to resist and a consciousness on the part of the per- petrator that that is indeed what they were doing.59 Just whinging about poor working conditions may have helped instil a climate of opposition but was not in itself an act of Resistance. Moreover disenchantment was not the only reason for a decline in Police efficiency. Frequent transfers of personnel and constant reform undoubtedly undermined efficiency in the last couple of years of the Occupation.60 The demands on Police manpower meant that simple overwork was sometimes a factor explaining the increasing difficulties of the personnel to fulfil all the tasks required of them. Another element undermining the total control exercised by central government was the question of corruption. This had already been a problem in Police circles in the 1930’s but the possibilities were now hugely increased owing to the removal of some of the democratic controls on policing.61 Moreover, help offered by Police Resistance was never distributed evenly. Gaullists were far more likely to benefit from the complicity of a Policeman than was a communist.62 Jews were much less likely to be offered a helping

58 Henri Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France, Volume 1, Paris, 1967, p 203. 59 Jacques Semelin, ‘Qu’est-ce que résister?’, Esprit, January 1994, pp 50-63; Pierre Laborie, ‘L’idée de Résistance, entre définition et sens, retour sur un questionnement’, Les Cahiers de l’IHTP, n° 37, December 1997, pp 15-28. 60 AN F7 14909 [986], Secrétaire Général à la Police à MM les Préfets Régionaux, n° 515 Pol 4 Circ, 10/12/43. AN F60 1689, CNI, l’opinion publique en France d’après les rapports officiels de Vichy, January to March 1944. AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 17-23/4/44. 61 There were numerous examples of accusations of corruption within the administration generally and the Police in particular. See for example: AD BDR M6 11074, Rapport journalier des RG, 11/6/43; AD BDR M6 11081, RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 5-11/7/43; AD BDR, M6 11078 RG Bulletin Hebdomadaire, 27/9-3/10/43; AD BDR, 55W 162, rapport de la résis- tance, Polygone CE, RJ 973, dated 15/8/44 but referring to events which took place at the end of 1943. 62 Oral evidence from the Resisters Francis Crémieux (Paris, 5 March 1993) and from Jean Gemähling (Paris, 2 February 1993), both of the Combat network. AN 72AJ 260, Exposé de Lucien Steinberg devant la Commission d’Histoire de la Collaboration, 11 May 1978; AN F1A 4565, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs (signé Jean Ginolhac), Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, ‘Evasion du Capit- aine Fourcaud de l’hôtel-Dieu de Clermont-Ferrand’, Vichy, 14/8/42; AN 3W 92, déposition de Karl Oberg, 16/4/47; Henri Longuechaud, Conformément à l’ordre de nos chefs. Le drame 288 Conclusion hand than those seeking to evade the forced labour draft.63 The ambiguity of maintaining a position within the institution often meant that in order to carry out an act of Resistance or to engage in complicity with the Resistance frequently involved compensating for this with an ostensible display of zeal in another domain as a cover up. This problem even affected those who were the most active Resisters within the force.64 The end result of these ambiguities was that few Police officers had absolutely nothing to reproach themselves with at the Liberation. Many others could point to an act which could be passed off as an act of Resistance before a tribunal as a counterweight to the rest of their activity.65 In spite of their above average participation in the Resistance, the Police initially struggled for legitimacy at the Liberation. The families and associates of victims of Police operations throughout the Occupation had not forgotten the damage such actions could cause. The fact that during the dark years some occurrences of Police sabotaging their orders, especially with regard to the STO, had been conducted under the guise of false zeal, likely to be misinter- preted, also gave the wrong impression. This compounded a traditional hostility to the Police, seen by many as class enemies or accused of corruption. Parallel Police forces, this time born from the Resistance, now challenged their professional monopoly. A significant purge of tainted elements within their own ranks coupled with the public’s desire for a return to normalcy ultimately allowed the Police to re-assert themselves but they still faced significant challenges. The German army had been replaced with the American army, which engaged extensively in black market activity and encouraged the flourishing of clandestine prostitution. At the same time, Liberation authorities and Allied forces found use in the local underworld, especially as strike-breakers. Gang- sters continued to benefit from political protection, frustrating the hopes of any Police officers looking to crack down on the mobsters. To accommodate

des forces de l’ordre sous l’occupation, 1940-1944, Paris, 1985, p 204; Denis Peschanski, ‘Exclu- sion, persécution, répression’ in Jean-Pierre Azéma & François Bédarida [eds], Vichy et les Français, Paris, 1992, p 225; Franck Liaigre in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, p 103. 63 AN F1a 4516, Inspection Générale des Services Administratifs, Rapport à M le Chef du Gouvernement, Ministre, Secrétaire d’Etat à l’Intérieur, Vichy, 2 March 1943; Simon Kit- son, ‘L’évolution de la Résistance dans la Police marseillaise’, in Jean-Marie Guillon & Rob- ert Mencherini (eds), La Résistance et les Européens du Sud, Paris, 2000, p 252. 64 AN F1a 3729, Commissariat National à l’Intérieur, ‘Note pour M. Boris’, London, 28/10/43. 65 Pascal Maysounave, ‘La répression dans le Limousin: une affaire trop sérieuse pour l’abandonner à la seule Police française’ in Jean-Marc Berlière & Denis Peschanski, (eds), La Police française, Paris, 2000, pp 152-153. Conclusion 289 themselves to these circumstances and to push for better material conditions the Police once again opened themselves up to external political forces. The cycle of clientelism returned. Tasso and Sabiani had gone; Defferre had arrived. As regards the Marseille force, the myth of a collaborating Police offering little opposition to the direction dictated by Vichy, whose members served indifferently Vichy or the Republic needs to be nuanced. This popular image is not entirely unfounded. There were areas where the Police effectively co-operated with their government, either through simple obedience or genuine enthusiasm. In most questions Police reaction was not entirely unambiguous, as Police officers calculated the risks involved in any form of opposition, weigh- ing them against their own prejudices or opinions on that question. Often, Police officers did not have the courage of their convictions, leaving a gap between the evolution of their opinion and the reactions they were prepared to offer. But, following a brief period of enthusiasm, the Marseille Police was in its overwhelming majority hostile to Vichy in most respects. The research I have conducted into policing during these years suggests that these conclu- sions are just as valid for the Marseille Police as they are for most of provincial France. Vichy ultimately failed in its attempt to create a reliable Police force. The historiography on the French Police during the Second World War frequently falls down because it is attempting to answer the wrong question. It starts from the premise that the Police remained efficient instruments of Col- laboration, and seeks to explain this by reference to the importance of a culture of obedience in professional sub-culture. In fact, with the obvious exception of anti-Semitic and anti-communist policing, what strikes the historian most is how little the government and the Germans could rely on the Police in other areas. Indeed the most remarkable thing about policing during the Vichy years is the rapid decline in efficiency after the last quarter of 1942, a decline which accelerated still further the following year. Although many communists continued to be tortured and handed over into 1944, in more general terms the bulk of the damage inflicted by the French Police was carried out before the end of 1942. Almost all the Gaullists arrested thereafter were captured directly by the Germans. More than half of the Jews deported had already been sent eastwards by the end of 1942. The forced labour schemes which began in September 1942 and were expanded in February 1943 brought new compromises for the institution but they also gave rise to imaginative new ways of sabotaging repression on a massive scale. The Police never entirely collapsed but the decline in efficiency was dramatic. Too frequently historians imagine that right up to the end Vichy had to do little more than issue an instruction for it to be automatically obeyed. In reality obedience was subject to a number of considerations: the degree of hierarchical control of a 290 Conclusion particular mission; Police perception of the potential victim of repression and the traditions of the particular branch of the Police. Scholars, and even more so the general public, also underestimate the extent of Police Resistance. Widespread acts of inertia and occasional collusion are not sufficiently recognised. Moreover the activity and the number of Policemen whose opposition was more active is generally overlooked. The Police were a pillar of the Vichy regime in its early years and the institution’s subsequent decline in efficiency was not just due to Resistance. 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Aboaf, Sarah 158 black market 4, 76, 109, 115, 116, 150, 171, Abwehr 127, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 148 197, 210, 212, 215, 251, 253, 259, 260, 263, 266, aerial bombing 4, 22, 65, 238-239, 259, 271, 288 266 Blanc, Charles 19 Aix-en-Provence xiv, 122, 138, 211, 224, 240 Blémant, Robert 131, 138, 139, 140, 263 d’Ales, Guy 128, 130 Blin, Louis 149 Alexander 1 of Yugoslavia 86, 149 Blum, Léon 9, 23, 24, 98, 212, Algazi, Victor 158 Bon, Léon 42 Andrieu, Blaise 195 Boris, Georges 93 Andrieu, Robert 156, 178, 195, 197, 198, 223, Bothorel, Simone 144 225, 226, 256 Boucher, Hubert 51 Anti-Communism in Police 15, 16, 73, Bouisson, Fernand 262 102-104, 105, 240 Bourdet, Claude 179 Anti-Semitism in Police 118, 119, 121, 122, Bousquet, René 72, 109, 110, 111, 139, 141, 159 151, 152, 154, 156, 158, 163, 167, 172, 173, 174, Aquilo, Henri 196, 197 175, 181, 191, 202, 205, 207, 222, 270, 271, 272 Arditti, Elie 160 Breitscheid, Rudolf 91-92 d’Astier, Emmanuel 89 Breton, André 86-87 Attard-Maraninchi, Marie-Françoise 38 de Brinon, Fernand 139 Aubrac, Raymond 242, 248, 252 Bucard, Marcel 223 Audiffren, Francis 195 Buffet, Jean-Félix 11 Auriol, Vincent 10 Bussières, Jacques-Félix 233 Auzanneau, Robert 76, 78, 117 Cado, Henri 76, 123 Aymé, Marcel 271 Cals, Pierre xv-xvi, 26, 45 Carbone, François 15, 39, 42 Barbie, Klaus 209 Carbone, Jean 39, 42 Barbier, Louis 136 Carbone, Paul ‘Venture’ 14, 38-40, 41, 42 Barcelona 6, 45 Caskie, Donald 90, 106 Baril, Louis 128 Cassone, Jacques 173-174 Barlès, Alexis 34 Castola Charles 8, 13, 16 bars 11-12, 26, 44, 96, 149, 263 Cattan, Aimée 155 Barthou, Louis 86 Cesana, Jacques 19 Bastille Day Celebrations 99-100, 110, 151, CGQJ 111 176, 207 Chand, Asoke 126 Bauret, Georges 95 Chapman, Herrick 10 Beaudouin, Eugène 150, 161 Chargois, Victor 29 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 39 Chevance-Bertin, Maurice 180, 211 Bénédite, Daniel 86, 87, 95 Chevrier, Roger 166 Beraha, Simone 158 Chiappe, Jean 9, 40 Berg, Raymond 179, 180, 221 Clary, Auguste 85, 179, 180, 181, 257 Berlière, Jean-Marc vi-vii, 7, 17, 276, 277 Clemenceau, Georges ‘Tiger’ xiv Bernolles, Jean 138 Clément, René 271 Billoux, François 14, 27, 53, 59 clientelism 13, 20, 22, 51, 60, 66, 265, 289

Collins, Michael 11 Desloges affair 141-143, 148 Commissaire xv, xvi-xvii destruction of Vieux Port 4, 149-162, 218, Communist Party (PCF-SFIC), 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 270 16, 17, 21, 25, 27, 35, 53, 58-61, 64, 69, 70, 75, Deutsch, Oscar 95 86, 92, 97, 101-106, 129, 136, 151, 162, 165, 173, Doboin, Ignace 117, 157 175-176, 183, 190, 201-203, 207, 213, 222, 224- Doriot, Jacques 14 225, 232, 239, 243, 249, 252, 255, 258, 264, Dormoy, Marx 25 269, 271, 272, 276, 277, 286, 287 Dreyfus Affair xiii, 116 Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) drug smuggling & narcotics xv, 5-6, 39, 253, 254 40, 41, 47 Compère-Morel, Jean-Jacques 10 Dubois, Léon 91 Comte, Jean 193 Dunker-Delage, Ernst 180, 209-211, 221, corruption xvi, 6, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 222, 233 53, 60, 77, 78, 103, 149, 167, 168, 244, 264, 265, Durand, Yves 74, 186 283, 287, 288 Durandy, Paul 226 Corsican immigration 4, 6, 13, 19, 21, 38, 51-52, 265 Ebert, Willy 128 Cottoni, Simon 144 étatisation xv, xvii, 51, 83 counter-espionage 125-148 Crémieux, Benjamin 180 Fary, Paul 105 Crémieux, Francis 180 Faye, Léon 144 Crezonnet, André 194 Ferri-Pisani Pierre 8, 42 crime and criminality xiv, xv, 29, 38, 42, Foot, M.R.D. 106 49, 50, 60, 68, 70, 71, 81, 103, 112, 220, 223, Forces Républicaines de Sécurité (FRS), 252, 227, 246, 253, 269, 279 253 Cristofol, Jean 59 Fort St Jean 6, 96 Croix-de-Feu 9, 17, 33, 84, 102 Fourcade, Marie-Madeleine 144 Culioli, (Jean-Baptiste) Xavier 19, 22, 42, Fraenkel, Hans 121 98, 177, 236, 257, 265 Fraissinet, Jean 84 Free-Masonry 17, 68, 76, 77, 98, 177, 201 Daladier, Edouard xv-xvi, 27, 53, 54, 63, Frégier, Séraphin 19, 20, 22 70, 85 Frenay, Henri 90, 131, 148 Daluege, Kurt 151 Fréron, Pierre-Marie-Stanislas 4 Dannecker, Theodore 109, 110, 113 Fry, Varian 86-87, 90-92, 95, 106, 285 Darlan, François 66, 84, 97, 133, 251 Darnand, Joseph 212, 213, 217, 222, 223, Galinier, Louis 15 225, 226, 228, 236, 238, 241, 271, 272 gangsters and organised crime 14, 15, 29, Dauphin, Georges 194 38-43, 46, 49, 94, 130, 131, 259, 262, 263, 264, Daveau, Gaston 211 265, 288 Déat, Marcel 165 Gardiens de la Paix xvii, 83 Defferre, Gaston 34, 98, 99, 263, 265, 289 Gare d’Arenc xiii, 14 Deighton, Len 70 Gare St Charles xiii, 14, 259 Delarue, Jacques 160 de Gassowski, Paul 216 Delay, Jean 114 de Gaulle, Charles 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, Delon, Alain 39 211, 235, 248, 253, 254 denunciations 68, 182, 210-211, 233-234, Gautier, Robert 146 273 Gellner, Ernest 51 Deray, Jacques 39 Gemähling, Jean 86, 87, 99, 179, 285 Index 305

Gendarmerie xi, 3, 26, 36, 105, 112, 122, 123, 131, Kennedy, John F 263 154, 160, 165, 173, 240, 280 Ketty, Rina 150 Georges, Maurice 192 Klarsfeld, Serge 154 Gerstl, Helene 137 Knipping, Max 212 Giraud, Henri 144 Knochen, Helmut 151 Gleizal, Jean-Jacques 274 Koch, Marcel 180 Goubil, Jean 143 Kupferman, Fred 201 Gouin, Félix 89 Grafeille, Albert 52 Laborie, Pierre 56, 287 Griese, Bernhard 154 Lambert, R.R. 118, 120, 121 Groupes Mobiles de Réserve (GMR), 81, 83, Langer, Karl 139 120, 121, 122, 143, 145, 154, 160, 161, 167, 170, Lanot, Henri 221 172, 200, 203, 204, 207, 224, 230-231, 237, 240, Laporte, Jacques 279 242, 244, 253, 254, 274, 279, 281, 286 Larue, Pierre 47-48 Groussard, Georges 74, 130 Laval, Pierre 12, 23, 66, 76, 87, 89, 92, 97, guerre des Polices xv-xvi, 53 99, 108, 109, 125, 131, 141, 144, 150, 151, 167, 174, Guérini brothers 40-41, 262-263, 265 188, 190, 191, 199, 200, 201, 217, 223, 232, 233 Guérini, Jean-François 19, 42 Leclerc, Arsène 53 Guibbal, Alexandre 78 Légion des Anciens Combattants 74, 88, Guillon, Jean-Marie 182 99, 214, 226 Lemoine, Marcel 152, 167, 176, 177, 278 Halls, W.D. 189 Léonard, Jean 101, 145, 147, 254 Hardy, René 211 Le Tullier, Pierre 146 Hennequin, Pierre 101 Levy, David 23 Henriot, Philippe 17, 237 Lewis, Mary Dewhurst 32-33 Hilferding, Rudolf 91-92 Luciano, Lucky 39 Himmler, Heinrich 150, 152, 165 Lyon xv, 4, 5, 7, 46, 52, 65, 82, 83, 126, 128, Hitler, Adolf 9, 33, 60, 65, 107, 199, 212, 142, 187, 209, 226 214, 228, 272 Hoffmann, Stanley 80 MacOrlan, Pierre 45, 55 Hutle, Guy 95 Malle, Louis 271 Manen, Henri 109, 118, 120, 121, 123 immigration 6, 31-33 Inspecteurs xvi-xvii Manicacci, Horace 19, 42, 98, 177, 265 Italian immigration 4, 6 Marignane xiii, 30, 137, 249 Marrus, Michael 122 Jacquemart, André 35 Martin, Georges 278 Jankowski, Paul 15, 214, 220 Martini, Jean 16, 47-48 jews x, 1, 57, 62, 68, 69, 86, 89, 90, 102, Matalon, Roxanne 157 107-124, 146, 149, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, Mathieu, Albert 198, 226 159, 160, 175, 182, 183, 194, 195, 201, 203, 207, Mattei, Robert 174, 175, 221, 249, 264 209, 215, 244, 258, 263, 271, 277, 280, 283, Matton, César 21, 35 285, 287, 289 di Meglio, Blanche 211 Jiremus, Irenee 95 Mehring, Walter 91 Johnson, Douglas 12 Melville, Jean-Pierre 271 Jordan, Neil 11 Mercuri, Etienne 91-92, 225, 236, 257, 265, 267 Kedward, Rod vi, 60, 199 Michel, Damien 61-62 306 Index

Milice 3, 74, 75, 164, 165, 182, 199, 203, Picq, Robert 43 212-215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, Pirotte, Julia 242 226, 227, 233, 237, 239, 240, 269, 279, 281, Poliakov, Léon 121 286, 290 Police brutality 47, 48, 58, 67, 105, 113, 118, Milices Patriotiques 3, 248-249, 251-252, 139-140 258, 267 Police Judiciaire xi, 81, 82, 104, 105 Milles internment camp 107, 118, 120, 121, Police Mobile xi, xiv, 53, 54, 72, 78, 80, 82, 122 91, 94, 112, 118, 184, 266 mobilisation 61-62, 65, 78, 103 Police Nationale xi, 80-81 Modiano, Patrick 271 Police reform (1941) 80-82, 84, 99, 232, Morandat, Yvon 198 253, 276-277 Morel, Jane 138 Police salary/wages 13, 15, 24, 48, 64, 97, Morine, Gabriel 99-100 162, 168-169, 171, 222, 238, 246, 265-266, 267, Moulin, Jean 101, 211 278, 281 Mühler, Rolf 209 Police Spéciale xi-xii, xiv, xv-xvi, xviii, 14, Multon, Jean 211 15, 30, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 77, 80, 93, 102, Mussolini, Benito 33 104, 112, 118, 119 Police trade unions x, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, Nîmes xiv, 169-170, 209, 222, 240 18-20, 21, 24, 26, 50, 51, 66, 78, 80, 97, 98, 177, Nouvelles-Galeries fire 53 181, 236, 255, 257, 264, 270 Pollet, Joseph 19 Oberg-Bousquet agreements 163, 173, 175, Ponsard, Henri 13 272 port xiii, 4, 5, 14 Oberg, Karl 150, 151, 152, 163, 165, 205, 280 Portal, Marcel 144 Olympique de Marseille 54 Postal Censor (Contrôle Technique) x, Osvald, Jean 131, 132 67-68, 113, 225-226 POWs 65, 78, 79, 188, 189 Pagnol, Marcel 49, 55 Préfecture de Police xi Paillole, Paul 101, 129, 131, 135, 138, 140, 146 prostitution & prostitutes 6, 39, 40, 41, Palmieri, Charles 215, 265 43-47, 48, 49, 50, 118, 159, 197, 210, 260-262, Paneboeuf, Eugène 226 263, 288 Parodi, Marcel 207 Pucheu, Pierre 82 Parti Populaire Français (PPF) 14-16, 33, 42, 75, 93, 100, 120, 165, 166, 182, 203, 210, 211, Quakers 107 214-220, 222, 237, 239, 262, 264, 265, 269, Quillici, Paul 32 279, 281, 290 Pascal, Louis 48 Rajsfus, Maurice 270 Paxton, Robert 1, 122 Ramstetter, Ernst 137, 140 Peretti, Achille 181 Rebatet, Lucien 17, 150 Peschanski, Denis vi, 7, 79 Reiner, Robert 278 Pétain, Philippe 10, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 75, Renseignements Généraux (RG) xi, 80-81, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 86-88, 89, 92, 94, 99, 103, 97, 98, 117, 120, 165, 169, 189, 198, 201, 222, 105, 108, 113, 125, 132, 133, 147, 155, 159, 224, 236, 237, 244, 266, 288 231, 238, 239, 251, 272 Renucci brothers 41, 42, 53, 130, 215, 262, Petit, Maurice 127 264 Peyrouton, Marcel 79, 88 resignations from Police 83, 123, 156, 174, Picart, Pierre 196 225-226, 246, 257, 258, 269 Pierrein, Louis 4 Resistance 1 Index 307

Revertégat, Louis 16 Stavisky affair 9 Riom 98 Ste Marthe camp 6 Rivalland, Joseph 151, 152, 271 Strasbourg xv, 7 Roberts, Mary Louise 261, 262 Suarès, André 30, 38, 44 de la Rocque, François 9, 33 Sûreté Nationale xi, xv, xvi, xviii, 80-81 de Rodellec du Porzic, Maurice 76, 77, 78, Sûreté Urbaine xvi 81, 90, 109, 110, 124, 130, 143, 147, 156 Surveillance du Territoire xi, xiii, xvi, Roman, René 218 xviii, 57, 89, 90, 91, 99, 101, 117, 130, 135, 137, Rossi, Tino 150 139, 141, 142, 143, 146, 233, 254 Roux, Victor 121 Sweets, John F. 198 Roze, Pierre 33 Tasso, Henri 10, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21-22, 24, 30, Sabiani, Simon 8, 13-17, 19, 21, 35, 40, 42, 42, 43, 51, 52, 66, 262, 270, 289 52, 53, 75, 88, 94, 99, 165, 203, 218, 219, 262, Theus, Léon 181, 286 289 Thorez, Maurice 249, 252 Salengro, Roger 9, 17, 24, 25, 35 Tissier, Pierre 249 Sallet, Emile xv-xvi, 15 Tixier, Adrien 252, 254 Salzer, Israël 120, 159 Tortora, Antoine 211 Sanchez, Emmanuel 193 traffic policing 8, 29-31 Sarraut, Albert 54, 56, 59 Tudesq, Elie 174, 175, 257 Sauckel, Fritz 199 Schor, Ralph 56, 62 Valat, Philippe 144 Schleier, Rudolf 79, 165, 199 Var xiv, 81, 154, 213, 247 Schmitt, Leona 139 Vaucluse xiv, 16, 81, 213, 266 Secrétaire de Police xvi-xvii Vaugier, Louis 157 Semelin, Jacques 287 Viale, Roger 203 Serge, Victor 86, 96 Vidal, Pierre 15 Service d’Ordre Légionnaire (SOL), 74, 212, Vieux, Suzanne 126 214, 226 Vincentelli, Alexandre 121 Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) 1, 186- Vinen, Richard 186 208, 212, 213, 214-215, 218 Vivaldi, Lucien 224 Sicot, Marcel 277 Voelkel, Francis 137, 140 Silbermann, Herbert 137 Sipo-SD 142 Weston, Joe 260 Socialist Party (SFIO) 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22-23, 25, 32, 34, 42, 52, 53, 60, 66, 78, xenophobia in Police 32, 57, 58, 69, 73, 89, 92, 98, 177, 203, 212-213, 236, 239, 252, 114, 117, 118, 124, 283 257, 258, 262, 263, 265, 269, 281 Spanish Civil War 35, 39, 56, 60, 103 YMCA 107 Spirito, François ‘Lydro’ 14, 38-40, 41, 42, 94, 259, 262 Zwingestein, François 15, 19 Spirito, Jean 39 308 Index