1 the Liberation : Myths and History Perhaps More Than Any Other

L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 1 The Liberation : myths and history Perhaps more than any other aspect of the Second World War, the Libération was the subject of myth-making, at the time and subsequently. This should not surprise us. Contemoraries were conscious of living an historic moment, one that seemed like the reversal of the verdict of 1940. For those in the Resistance or the Free French, it was an apotheosis. For their antagonists, collaborating directly with the Germans (the French fascists) or supporters of Vichy, it was a nemesis. For everyone, it raised the alternatives of whether this was the end of a bitterly divisive parenthesis and a return to normality or the start of a radically new phase in French history, perhaps even a revolution of sorts. Wherever one stood, the stakes could not have been higher. So it is no wonder that historical meaning was imparted to the Libération at the time and afterwards by politicians and others. The question for us is what sense have historians made of the Libération, whether as part of this broader ascription of meaning to the end of the Occupation or independently of it. The more or less instantaneous myth-making is evidenced by de Gaulle’s speech with which we began course, suggesting central idea of ‘self-liberation’, and also the PCF emerging from clandestinity with image of the FFI as a kind of popular unrising, incarnating justice against the collaborators. Chronologically, the Libération was spread over ten months, from June 1944 to May 1945. But the epicentre was July-August 1944, once the Allies broke out of the Normandy beacheads and also landed in Provence. Symbolized by Paris. Cf. images in contemporary text, Pierre Maudru, Les Six Glorieuses de Paris (1944). See document package. L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 2 1. The épuration (purges). Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the Libération for contemporaries and for the subsequent myth-histories was the purges - l’épuration. This covers a variety of phenomena - summary justice against presumed collaborators, popular and then (very quickly) formally instated tribunals, the high profile trials of Pétain and Laval in 1945 (with the latter’s execution), and the purging of various aspects of French life, including the state administration, the press, intellectuals and the world of business. It was at this point that Renault was nationalized, not through economic doctrine but because of Louis Renault’s willing cooperation with the German armaments effort. The épuration was important ultimately because it went to the heart of the judgements made at the time about the complicity of French men and women (as well as of the Vichy regime) with the German occupation - and as such it had both a moral and a judicial dimension. As an integral component of the Libération, it posed the issue of how to judge the entire episode since 1940 which subsequently lay at the heart of the historical verdicts delivered by professional historians and many others on the same question. It is this dimension that I want to discuss in this lecture - the Libération not just as an epic narrative (told in different ways) - though that is part of it - but also as a moral and legal verdict on what had preceded it. Precisely because the épuration was a kind of judgement, it was almost immediately the subject of wildly differing appreciations. In fact, there was consensus among all the groups represented in the Provisional Government (issued from the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN)) on the need for restraint in the purges, including trials and death sentences. The consensus extended to the Communists. De Gaulle in particular argued in speech on 8 October 1944 that leniency L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 3 was required in order to reassure Allies, help get the country working on reconstruction, and mount a national war effort. This consensus was not necessarily shared by Resistance groups locally - who were frequently appalled to see so many of those accused pardoned or let off with light sentences.1 Of course, to those likely to find themselves before a court, it might seem too harsh by far. In particular, the fear by many Vichyistes and some currents of Allied opinion that the Communists represented a revolutionary threat (which they did not, owing to orders from Moscow apart from anything else), and that they were using the situation to conduct class warfare, resulted in the myth of a savage épuration. The Nazi press claimed in September 1944 that 9,000 executions had been carried out in Paris alone. In 1946, with the PCF now in government, a conservative American paper, the American Mercury, reported that the Communists had executed 50,000 people just in the south-east. These accounts equated the épuration to a revolutionary terror, expressing a counter-revolutionary fear nourished by a long tradition of vilifying the left as bloody barbarians (the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution). As we have seen, Robert Aron, who was both ultra-supportive of de Gaulle but also relatively indulgent towards Pétain, presented the Communists and revolutionary civil war as the real menace in his Histoire de la Libération (1959). He claimed that 30 - 40,000 executions had been carried out - a figure he maintained in his Histoire de l’Epuration (1967). We saw that de Gaulle felt obliged to correct him on this point with a figure of 10,842 in vol. 3 of his War Memoirs (1959). Careful work by an American contemporary of Paxton, Peter Novick (1968), confirmed the accuracy of official inquires conducted just after the war on which de Gaulle had based his total. In reality, between 9 and 10,000 executions occurred, but L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 4 over half of these took place before the Allied landings i.e. under the Occupation. Between 3,700 and 4,500 is the true figure of executions at the Libération, about 3/4 of them summary and 1/4 after due process.2 The actual level of retribution by execution was relatively low, and for many had not gone nearly far enough. 2. The status of the Liberation as a legal judgement on Collaboration. The épuration was thus limited at least as far as the death sentence is concerned. In other regards, the purges were quite substantial (e.g. a large proportion of prefects were eliminated from office). However, from the late 1940s, with the PCF now in the political wilderness and conservatives increasingly rehabilitated in the context of the Cold War, many of those purged, imprisoned or stripped of their civic rights found themselves reinstated, released from prison and restored to their full status as citizens. This was the beginning of process of retrospective simplification and amnesia over which the myth histories of Gaullism and Communism presided. Nonetheless, as Henry Rousso argued in The Vichy Syndrome, the earlier period, from the Libération to the early 1950s, was not one in which the complexities of Vichy and the Occupation were ignored. How could they be, in what he rightly terms a period of ‘uncompleted mourning’? What did the Provisional Government and restored legitimacy of the Republic actually do at the Libération to condemn the Vichy regime, its works and its relationship with the Germans? In addition to taking over and moderating the épuration, the Provisional Government, even before arriving in Paris, issued two fundamental decrees on 9 August 1944. The first declared that: ‘The form of government in France is, and remains, the Republic. Legally, the latter has never ceased to exist’. The second declared all constitutional, legislative and administrative acts of Vichy to be null and void because the latter, supplanting the Republic, was L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 5 illegitimate. It was by virtue of this doctrine that de Gaulle declined to declare the Republic in Paris on 26 August 1944, observing that it had never ceased to exist. The legal and constitiutional repudiation of Vichy could not be clearer. However, once the myth-histories disintegrated as a result of their own inabiliity to deal with the complexity and above all the diversity of experiences during the Occupation, new histories emerged clamouring for recognition and projecting doubt, anxiety and national introspection where once there had been relative clarity. Inevitably, the question arose of whether the moral and legal judgement on Vichy reached during the Libération was now adequate, or whether it needed to be re-done - and differently. The trials and retrials in the 1990s of individuals who had held positions of authority in Vichy (Bousquet, Touvier, Papon) can be seen as just this - a second wave of legal process, fifty years later, made possible by the 1964 law ending the statute of limitations on ‘crimes against humanity’. And as we have seen, it was the specificity of Jewish experience in France (as elsewhere) - a specificity that had simply been swept under the consensual carpet in 1944-45 and by the Gaullist and Communist myth histories - which was at the heart of this drive to judge the past differently. The issue surfaced with particular force in the celebrated demand for an official commemoration of the round-up of the Vél. d’Hiv. As you will recall, this concerned the mass arrest on 16- 17 July 1942 of 13,152 Jews (3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children) by the French police as a result of the Bousquet-Oberg accords (Bousquet as Vichy chief of police, Karl Oberg as head of the SS and German police for Occupied France). Virtually all those arrested - whole families among them - perished in the Holocaust.

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