Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

not committed for trial, however, until 1989, when he was charged with crimes against humanity. The inquiry was still in progress when, on 8 June 1993, a fifty-year-old mental patient called Christian Didier gained entry to Bousquet’s flat and shot him dead.
    Paul Touvier, the head of the Vichy Milice in Lyons and a close associate of Klaus Barbie, was sentenced to death after the Liberation. He escaped, and traditionalist Catholic groups sheltered him for years. He received a pardon from President Pompidou in 1971, but went back into hiding in 1981 when it became clear that he could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. He was finally arrested in 1989, but prevarications in the judicial system continued to delay his trial and sentence of life imprisonment in April 1994. He died in prison in 1996.
    Information also emerged about Maurice Papon, who had been general secretary of the Gironde with special responsibility for Jewish Affairs from 1942 to 1944. On his orders, 1,690 Jews – including 130 children under thirteen – were sent to the detention centre of Drancy. By 1944, however, Papon realized that Vichy was doomed. He started passing information to the Resistance, which earned him a place among the Anciens Combattants de la Résistance.
    Papon suffered remarkably few problems after the Liberation. He became the Prefect of the Paris police soon after de Gaulle’s return to power, and in October 1961 he was in charge when 11,000 Algerianswere arrested for demonstrating in Paris. Some sixty of these prisoners were said to have been killed over the next few days, and most of the bodies were dumped in the Seine. Papon went on to become Minister of the Budget under President Giscard d’Estaing. His career came to a halt only in 1981, when
Le Canard enchaîné
published documents showing his responsibility for the deportation of the Jews.
    Such was the reluctance of the French establishment to see this case come to court that it took sixteen years of legal wrangling before Maurice Papon, then aged eighty-seven, stood trial in Bordeaux. He was the first high-ranking French official to stand trial for complicity in crimes against humanity, and in 1998 he was found guilty of complicity in the deportation but not murder of the Jews. Papon’s lawyers appealed, but in 1999 he was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in 2002 on health grounds.
    The civil war among historians is unlikely to end for some time. Older and more conservative writers, who have retained their respect for Marshal Pétain, refuse to accept that Vichy was a fascist regime. In the narrow sense of the term, it cannot be defined as fascist: it was too reactionary and Catholic, despite its lip service to a National Revolution. But in the broader sense, the personality cult of the Marshal, the anti-Jewish laws, the paramilitary organizations and the total lack of democratic rights could justify the label. This more forgiving school also feels that far too much has been made of the photographs of Pétain’s meeting with Hitler at Montoire in 1940. ‘Mitterrand,’ said one, ‘shook the hand of Milosevic – a war criminal – so why should Pétain not have shaken Hitler’s hand at Montoire?’ Their greatest regret is that Pétain did not protect his reputation by fleeing to North Africa in November 1942, when the Germans invaded the unoccupied zone.
    Those on the other side of the fence – mainly the younger historians grouped round the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, and the American historian of Vichy, Robert Paxton – are less preoccupied with the fact that Pétain continued to lend his prestige to collaboration after 1942 than with the responsibility of Vichy for deporting French and foreign Jews to their death. ‘The collaboration of the [Vichy] state was appalling,’ said Paxton in an interview the day after the assassination of Bousquet. ‘Because the orders came from the Ministry of the Interior, the prefects and all parts of the administration obeyed. Without exception.It was a formidable machine for the Nazis who as a result needed only a handful of men to carry out their plans.’
    The shame of Vichy – the shame of their parents’ generation – clearly played a part in perpetuating the appeal of revolutionary chic among the young, who had only changed their role models. They despised the advanced ossification of the Soviet system and instead admired guerrilla movements in Latin America.
    On the