BOOKS

Purged by terror

Colin Welch

THE PEOPLE'S ANGER: JUSTICE AND REVENGE IN POST- LIBERATION FRANCE by Herbert R. Lottman

Hutchinson, £12.95

Two photographs on the dust-jacket of this excellent book epitomise the French post-liberation purge in 1944 as I saw it and remember it. On the front a young woman is walking, carrying her little baby. You can see she is pretty, though she is forlorn, probably ashamed and terrified, and her head is shaved bare. She is closely escorted by a dwarfish runt in some sort of dark uniform — police? — with fag, Sam Browne belt and a black shiny tin hat like an air-raid warden's. He is addressing her in no friendly manner, his face thrust offensively towards hers. A little girl near by seems about to spit at her. A sneering mocking, cat-calling crowd, nearly all women, follows its disgraced sister.

On the back of the jacket a shabby man is kneeling. What you can see of his face is puffy and ignoble. The upper part is hidden by his hands, raised to ward off a vicious blow from a ferocious looking man with beret and fag. Behind the victim stands a younger man, his ill-fitting clothes stained — with blood? His forehead is heavily bandaged, covering his nearer eye. He wears, I think, some sort of armband and has a revolver pointing at the victim's shoulder. Another young man is poised, eager to get into the brutal act.

Another photograph in the text shows two women 'collaborators', perhaps thought to be of the `horizontal' sort, though one is not young nor any sort of oil painting, as they say. They are being led through Paris barefoot, heads shaved, swastikas daubed on their faces, by grin- ning armed youths, followed by another jeering mob. -No pity is to be seen on any face, though that and shame may have come later.

This picture brought back to me a like scene somewhere on the banks of the Seine. Armed young Frenchmen were parading shaved women through the streets. Ordinary soldiers of the Royal Warwickshire and other regiments, dis- gusted, threw the escorts into the river. The soliders were not punished, though intervention in French affairs was not encouraged. I think most of us shared their disgust, and share it still, perhaps even, as Mr Lottman suggests, to an inordinate extent.

To witness any punishment, particularly a cruel and degrading one, is disturbing. It is particularly so if it follows no obvious nor careful trial, particularly so when we, the witnesses, are quite ignorant of what- ever crimes may have provoked it, and which happened, if at all, before we arrived. Not all these insulted ladies had just slept with Germans; some had de- Laval nounced French people and Jews to them, or done even worse.

A Martian arriving on this planet late in the second world war might well have been horrified by the destruction of Dresden and other German cities and by the expul- sion of Germans from homes theirs for centuries. A knowledge of what had gone before would not necessarily excuse such crimes, but it would help to explain and put them into perspective. Come to think of it, some revisionist historians do write today just as that Martian might have written, as if the Germans were the astonished and innocent victims of an absolutely un- provoked assault.

It is Mr Lottman's honourable concern first to tell the truth, the whole and nothing but. If he is a revisionist at all, he is of the best sort, tireless in dispelling myth, error and exaggeration and substituting for them, wherever he can dig it out, what actually happened.

In his task he relies too much, to my mind, on the documentary record. An American, he now lives and works in Paris. Was he in France at the time? Modest and admirably self-effacing, he does not say, unless I missed it. If he had been there, or was there, he would or must have wit- nessed scenes which could not possibly have been recorded. People intoxicated by rage, hatred or desire for revenge, or even by Cognac 'liberated from collaborators', are not likely to submit detailed reports of whatever they did in that demented state. Nor were the police working normally. Bodies turned up all over the place. Who had killed them was often obscure: the Resistance? Bearers of some private grudge? Robbers? The retreating Ger- mans? Us, by mistake? With such slight reservations, I accept Mr Lottman's scrupulously careful revisions, which are mostly in the direction of less sensational- ism than has hitherto prevailed.

Some might think that Mr Lottman has an axe to grind. It would be fairer perhaps to say that he came across the axe quite legitimately, in the course of his arduous research, and that what he grinds now is the truth as it has been revealed to him.

His axe or truth is roughly that the purge in post-liberation France was far less exten- sive, severe, wild and arbitrary than its victims and their friends have with some success claimed. The number of killings, of `summary executions' in particular, has been exaggerated ten-fold, from a 'true' figure of 10,842 to wild but widely credited estimates of some 112,000; that prison sentences and other punishments were relatively rare, often shortened by pardon or amnesty; that other liberated countries, including even Denmark, were harsher; that the undeniable abuses, the judicial errors which Mr Lottman candidly notes, were, 'most of them, the honest errors of very ordinary men and women in the villages and towns of France, even if some of these ordinary people were commun- ists'; that in sum 'the French need not be ashamed of their purge', though they often seem to be, even today.

Persuaded by Mr Lottman, I grant that all this may be in general true or likely, though the figure 10,842 seems to me suspiciously precise in view of the chaos then prevailing, and a doubt arises in my mind as to whether genuine communists can ever safely be regarded as ordinary people. Mr Lottman seems a bit over- inclined so to regard them, even to respect them as the most orderly and correct of the purgers. He explains that they had been ordered from on high not to expect or foment a revolution during the liberation. I wonder if that message got through to all the comrades and was respected in all the frenzy of the time. You could then smell both revolution and liberation in the French air. Was it, as it seemed, touch and go as to which prevailed? Had Roosevelt been able to give effect to his infamous and almost unbelievable intent to 'eliminate' de Gaulle, might not the outcome have been dreadful? Communists are not so dogma- bound as to reject unexpected opportun- ities when they occur: the history of Russia testifies to that.

Mr Lottman himself gives many exam- ples of communist excesses, though he doesn't seem to think them as significant as I do. The Nimes court-martial, for in- stance, described not by an accused col- laborator but by a witness against such people: the young communist 'chief jus- tice', three (other?) Free French judges, all Impostors, one, like Stalin, a bank robber, another supposed collaborator himself, all three under orders from the Party to execute named 'class enemies', at least one per session; the court crammed with agi- tated spectators, smoking, eating, shout- ing, exchanging comments: 'the tumult never died down'. Such horrible proceed- ings recall all too vividly the tribunals of an earlier terror.

Mr Lottman also cites many disting- uished Frenchmen who noted with alarm and regret how the communists penetrated and took over one after another of the new institutions of liberated France and ex- ploited the purge wrongfully for their own ends. Ordinary people would not have sought or known how to achieve all this.

Most impressive on the other hand is Mr Lottman's repeated testimony to the mod- eration and decency, the magnanimity and Vigour of de Gaulle and his subordinates in the judicial field. They profoundly valued both law and order, each valueless without the other. They had made careful plans for the inevitable purge and put them into effect on arrival in France (even before!) with exemplary speed. Their purpose was not to ensure a blood-bath, but to prevent One. 'The people's anger' was to be, so far as possible, controlled, limited, expressed In an orderly way, channelled through hastily but regularly reconstituted legal processes.

No new crimes were created, save Perhaps one: obedience to the orders of the Vichy regime, orders and a govern- ment which at some mysterious point at the turn of 1943-44 ceased to be legitimate. Difficulties arose here. They were not removed by de Gaulle's declaration, in Normandy in 1944, that 'France needs 'all her children, even if at times some of them made mistakes'. It is hard wholly to square this noble sentiment with the subsequent trial of Pertain or even of Laval. Of these trials Mr Lottman gives only cursory accounts, robbing his book of what might have been dramatic high points. Admitted- ly, he has written a whole book, Pertain: Hero or Traitor. Petain's trial may be fully covered there, but what about Laval's? For instance, did Laval, asked if he objected to a certain judge, reply that on the contrary he was pleased: surely the judge would recall how, during the occupation, he had come to beg Laval for a post and had been civilly received (uproar in court)? I rely on memory; I may be quite wrong. If not, surely this and other revealing remarks and exchanges deserved some space in Mr Lottman's pages?

Mr Lottman, author also of books about Camus and the Left Bank, is very strong on the writers accused of collaboration. Fran- cois Mauriac, never so accused — au contraire! — emerges here, most movingly though not unexpectedly, as a consistent, honourable and courageous advocate of clemency. Camus by contrast was surp- risingly blood-thirsty, of which he later repented. He urged punishment in words which contain hints of an awareness, even then, of guilt. There are times, he cried (he meant under the occupation), when 'error is nothing but a crime'. There are other times (he meant after liberation) 'when one must be able to overcome one's feelings and at the same time sacrifice peace of mind'. Do not people always talk thus when their conscience troubles them?

The most fascinating issues arise con- tinually from Mr Lottman's literary sec- tion, though they are not settled, perhaps cannot be. The idea of executing a writer because of his opinions is repugnant, agreed. Is it more repugnant if he is talented, or less so? Can talent excuse? Lack of talent can certainly ward off dangers. The opinions of the totally un- talented find no publisher, are unrecorded. Wrong or wicked opinions can be insulting- ly defended as mere words, hot air, froth, without effect, breaking no bones. But no one can really advance such a defence unless he thinks all the opinions and writings of writers uniformly worthless, ineffectual, of no importance; or unless he thinks that writers are in some way, like children or lunatics, not responsible for what they say. To prosecute a writer for his opinions is to pay him a compliment of a sort; to pardon him later is to suggest that that compliment was not deserved: it was only old Celine, after all, and everyone knows he's barmy.

The effect of words is indeed hard to judge. In many modern writers even the intent is obscure. But certainly, if I had been a Jew in occupied France, and if I had heard that Celine had declared that the Germans were not killing enough Jews, well, I wouldn't exactly have slept better of nights.