Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

clamour for vengeance was at its peak.
    On 29 December, however, when Henri Béraud, the editor of
Grin-goire,
was condemned to death, people were shocked. Béraud was right-wing, anti-Semitic and hated the British, but he had never written in favour of the Germans. Many suspected that jealousy had played a part. Béraud had been the best-paid journalist in France, earning 600,000 francs a year. And when the secretary of Jean Hérold-Paquis (the announcer of Radio-Paris, who had been executed in October) wascondemned to forced labour for life, even the Resistance press was outraged.
    Two days later, on 4 January, François Mauriac published his article, ‘About a Verdict’, in
Le Figaro
. There were no grounds for condemning Béraud for intelligence with the enemy, he argued.
    This intervention almost certainly persuaded de Gaulle to commute the sentence. In his campaign in
Le Figaro
against the imbalances of the
épuration,
Mauriac even went so far as to say that people should be allowed to have made the wrong political choice – a brave position to hold at the time, and one that made him many enemies. The satirical weekly
Le Canard enchaîné
baptized this outspoken Catholic writer ‘
Saint-François des assises
’ – St Francis of the assizes. Camus argued in
Combat
that mercy for killers removed their victims’ right to justice, and that the crimes of fascism must be discouraged for ever. Mauriac replied in
Le Figaro
; and so began a great tennis match of moral argument.
    Even before it opened on 19 January 1945, there was a feeling that the trial of Robert Brasillach, the fascist editor of the magazine
Je suis partout,
was going to be the apogee of the intellectual purge. François Mauriac and Paul Valéry both provided submissions on his behalf.
    The morning of the trial was intensely cold. Paris had been under snow for sixteen days. There was no fuel for heating since coal barges were ice-locked on canals. In the ill-lit courtroom, the breath of a speaker condensed in the freezing air.
    The issues, apparently clear at first, were hammered in and out of shape by both sides. Brasillach’s counsel, Maître Jacques Isorni, who became famous as Marshal Pétain’s most eloquent defender seven months later, claimed that an error of political judgement did not constitute treason. If Brasillach had supported the Germans, it was his way of wanting a stronger France. The climax of his defence was when, having elevated Brasillach to the status of a poet of national stature, he lifted his arms and cried out, ‘Do civilized people shoot their poets?’ This dramatic question tapped into the feeling which had swept Europe in 1936, when the Nationalists executed Federico García Lorca. Isorni ignored the fact that Brasillach was on trial not for his literature but for his denunciatory journalism.
    The crucial evidence lay in his articles in
Je suis partout
. Here Isorniwas on more difficult ground. Brasillach’s words were there on the page, and what Isorni called his ‘
erreurs tragiques
’ went beyond most people’s idea of collaboration. He had supported the German invasion of the unoccupied zone in November 1942 on the grounds that it reunited France. He had called for the death of politicians such as Georges Mandel, Reynaud’s Minister of the Interior in 1940, who was murdered by
miliciens
shortly before the liberation of Paris. Although he had not denounced anybody to the authorities, he had denounced people in print. Brasillach, like Drieu, had signed the call in the summer of 1944 for the summary execution of all members of the Resistance. But perhaps the most chilling statement was: ‘We must separate ourselves from the Jews
en bloc
and not keep the children.’ Brasillach claimed that, although anti-Semitic, he had never advocated collective violence against the Jews. Probably he did not know about the death camps when he wrote those words; yet even if he was thinking of mass resettlement in Eastern Europe, his statement is still horrifying.
    Despite the weight of the case against him, Brasillach confidently dissected the prosecution case in the interests of historical accuracy. He defended himself ‘with eloquence and skill’, wrote the apprentice film director Alexandre Astruc, reporting the case for
Combat
. The jury, however, took only twenty minutes to reach their verdict. ‘
C’est un honneur
’ was Brasillach’s only comment on the death sentence, after some of his supporters had cried