Year Zero by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

During four terrible years the best of the French learned to kill, to assassinate, to sabotage, to derail trains, sometimes to pillage and always to disobey what they were told was the law . . . Who taught these Frenchmen, who gave them the order to assassinate? Who if not you, mon général?38

For the state to regain the monopoly of force, the first thing de Gaulle had to do was disarm the resistance. Since the maquisards, the underground fighters in the French resistance, had gained their weapons at great risk during the war, while de Gaulle had lived in the safety of the British capital, this was a delicate task. Communist resisters still had hopes of a second French Revolution for which they would need their guns. But this possibility was cut short, not only because the communists lacked enough support for such a radical venture in France, but also because Stalin made it clear that he would not back a revolution in the American sphere of influence. Stalin had other fish to fry. So he told the French communists to back off. And de Gaulle made a deal with the French communists. If they wanted permission for their leader Maurice Thorez, who had deserted the French army in 1939 and fled to Moscow, to come home without being tried for his treachery, they had to agree to disband their armed fighters. Many weapons were still carefully hidden in remote farms, under floorboards, or in warehouses. But the communists gave in, and little by little the state regained control.

Some token figures, who had been particularly egregious or conspicuous during the occupation years, were put on trial. Pétain himself was tried, but was deemed to be too old and too grand to be executed after being convicted for treason, so he was banished instead to a small island off the Atlantic coast. He died there, and was buried there, a demented old man stripped of his military honors, an ignominious fate which enraged some of his loyal followers. An attempt was made by loyalists in 1973 to rectify Pétain’s humiliation by disinterring his bones and transporting them to the mainland for a more glorious burial in the cemetery for the war dead. When the Maréchal’s bones were discovered in the garage of his lawyer, Maître Jacques Isorni, they were swiftly shipped back to the island where, as far as is known, they remain.

Pétain’s most powerful minister during the war, the unprepossessing and much loathed Pierre Laval, was less lucky, and his death sentence was carried out. He was shot in October 1945 after his attempt to take cyanide failed because the poison was too old to be effective.

There were other war crime trials too. But before they could be seen to be at all persuasive, the judiciary had to be purged. Since only one judge in wartime France had refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain, this was a problem. A purge commission of judges and former resisters had to decide whether magistrates had behaved as loyal Frenchmen.

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