Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

The Duke asked himwhether he should pay calls on General de Gaulle and Bidault. Duff Cooper found it sad that he still hankered after public life.
    The Duke’s next preoccupation, however, was the Communist menace in France. It does not seem to have occurred to him that events like his meeting with Hitler offered perfect material to promote Communist Party propaganda. But the Communists evidently felt they had better targets. They pointed ceaselessly to the extermination camps, with the argument that only an international Communist order could prevent such horrors happening again.

14
    The Great Trials
    Early in 1945, with Nazi Germany disintegrating, France knew that it could not face the post-war world until accounts had been settled with Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval; but both men were still in Germany.
    In the meantime, the trial of traitors who had betrayed the Resistance provided a false assurance that the basic issues were clear. Most of the public eagerly followed court proceedings in the press. The trial that preoccupied everyone for the first eleven days of December 1944 was that of the notorious Bonny–Lafont gang, otherwise known as the ‘Gestapo Française’.
    Lafont was one of several criminals serving prison sentences who were released by the Germans, who had a use for their talents. In return for cars, petrol, guns and false identity papers, they kept the Gestapo and the Abwehr well informed and did much of their dirty work. Lafont became a member of the Gestapo and took German nationality in 1941. His right-hand man was an ex-policeman called Bonny, who had been involved in several pre-war scandals. With their henchmen, they formed one of the most hated gangs in Paris. Protected by the Gestapo, they rounded up and denounced hundreds of people and grew rich on blackmail, robbery, racketeering and terror. In their headquarters in the rue Lauriston, they tortured and sometimes killed their victims.
    In the murky society of collaborationist Paris, Lafont became a person of some consequence. He acquired a town house in Neuilly, where he entertained his well-connected friends and mistresses, and among his guests was Bussières, the Prefect of Police whom Luizet replaced at theLiberation. He mixed with the journalist Georges Suarez and Jean Luchaire, the press baron and later ‘Minister of Information’ at Sigmaringen. Maurice Chevalier was said to have been another friend, but Chevalier quickly issued a statement saying he had met him only once. Lafont even boasted that he had acted as intermediary between Laval and Otto Abetz.
    He was betrayed at the Liberation by one of his own followers, a certain Joanovici, who joined the Resistance at the eleventh hour to save himself, even providing weapons for the police defending the Prefecture on the Île de la Cité. Joanovici, who allied himself with the new Communist element in the Paris police, was to cause their undoing two years later, when the government fought back against their encroachment.
    The twelve principal members of the ‘Gestapo Française’ were tried simultaneously. The charges against them ran to 164 pages and took three hours to read. At one point during the trial, Lafont complained about being beaten up in custody, which earned the police a rousing cheer from the courtroom. All but two of the gang were sentenced to death. Muggeridge, who had interviewed him, fantasized about the guillotine slicing off ‘his neat, sallow head with the blunt Mediterranean back to it’ like a thistle’s. In fact Lafont faced a firing squad on 26 December, watched by his defending counsel and arrogant to the end.
    Of the other traitors brought to trial, their motives varied, but not very widely. Jacques Desoubrie, a fanatical Nazi-sympathizer who betrayed the ‘Comet’ network in Paris in June 1943, proclaimed his belief in National Socialism at the Court of Justice in Lille and was executed. But most traitors did not have the courage of any conviction. Prosper Desitter, the German-recruited spy known as ‘the man with the missing finger’, and his mistress Flore Dings were also sentenced to death for helping the Gestapo destroy the ‘Comet’ network. The night before his execution, Desitter was said to have howled with terror in his cell.
    ‘The purge trials preoccupied us all that year,’ wrote Susan Mary Patten, ‘and the incoherence with which justice was meted out did much to cause the
crise morale,
or crisis of conscience, among the