Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

by a Communist resistant called Arthur Airaud, who had been tortured by the police Special Brigades in March 1944. Airaud was a ruthless operator who wanted not only revenge but also as many fellow Communists in the police force as possible. By 5 October, Luizet was obliged to sign an order suspending 700 officials and administrators working in the police and justice departments. Within the following year, the list of those suspended and brought before the police purge committees ran to over 3,000 names.
    The provisional government’s efforts to put a skeleton administration into place to restore law and order were impressive, but a new Commissioner of the Republic could not hope to exert authority from the first moment. However much the Gaullists wished to maintain the fiction that they were simply reintroducing ‘Republican legality’, the system, in many places, had to be rebuilt almost from nothing. Often, the local liberation committees simply ignored the authority of representatives of the provisional government.
    On 26 August, the day that General de Gaulle marched down the Champs-Élysées, a group of FFI arrested the consul-general of the Republic of San Marino at his house and took him off, without any explanation, to their improvised headquarters at the Lycée Buffon. It is possible that the FFI militiamen had confused the ancient Republic of San Marino with Mussolini’s puppet republic of Salo. In any case, they took the consul-general’s money, jewels and car. He was then transferred to Fresnes prison and released on 7 November without any charges having been brought against him.
    Malcolm Muggeridge was invited by an FFI group to accompany them on their nightly purges. They were ‘very young, with that curious hunted animal look that street-life gives’. He was taken to their base, an apartment on the Avenue Foch which had been occupied by the Gestapo, as the ‘empty champagne bottles and discarded erotica’ showed.
    They boasted about their executions, took cigarette cases, jewels and money, which were recorded and locked up in a strong box to be handed over later. But what became of the booty afterwards was never revealed. ‘Considering their youth,’ wrote Muggeridge, ‘they behaved with horrifying callousness, arrogance and brutality.’ He was not surprised to hearlater that their leader had been arrested and found to have a record of collaboration.
    The most notorious false resistant was Dr Marcel Pétiot. Between 1942 and 1944, Pétiot set up his own escape line. Jews, members of the Resistance, even gangsters being hunted by the police, were directed to the doctor, who said he could arrange safe passages to Argentina. On the pretext that the Argentinian authorities demanded inoculations, he gave his clients a lethal injection of cyanide, then watched them die in agony. Pétiot disposed of the bodies efficiently, at least at the start of his grisly career: they were dissolved in quicklime, and what was left was incinerated. Towards the end, however, the sheer quantity of corpses gave him away. On 11 March 1944, noxious smoke and a hideous stench prompted neighbours to call the fire brigade to 21 rue Lesueur. On breaking in, they found dismembered trunks, arms and legs, scalped heads with flayed faces, all waiting to be burnt in a coal-fired stove already overflowing with human remains.
    What happened next gives some idea of the tortuously difficult position of the Paris police in the months leading up to the Liberation. The man put in charge of the case was one of the most famous police inspectors in Paris: Georges-Victor Massu, who (with his predecessor) was the inspiration for Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret. Massu soon established that the author of these crimes was Dr Pétiot. What he did not know was whether Pétiot was killing to order.
    Very early on in the investigation, Pétiot himself had appeared at the scene of the crime, on a bicycle. Posing as the leader of a Resistance network, he had told two of Massu’s subordinates that the bodies were those of ‘Boches’ and ‘collabos’ executed on Resistance orders. He had then vanished into the crowd – the police, who did not want to be in trouble at the Liberation, had let him go.
    Yet the proximity of the charnel-house to the rue Lauriston, where the Gestapo’s henchmen tortured and killed their victims, had raised the possibility that Pétiot might be working for them. It was not until he had ascertained that the