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The Expectation of Justice
France, 1944-1946
By Megan Koreman Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9837-0
CHAPTER 1
THREE TOWNS, THREE LIBERATIONS
Photojournalism and myth have created an image of the liberation of France as a day on which joyously tearful men and women crowded around an Allied tank or maquisard car, pressing wine and kisses on their liberators while Allied flags flew bravely in the background. Later that same day, the maquisards, bristling with submachine guns and the cross of Lorraine, shaved the heads of collaborationist women in a square filled with howling onlookers, perhaps also marking them with swastikas of tar and parading them through the streets. The stereotype makes a good story: the soldiers heroically free the people; the people gratefully thank their saviors; the patriots sternly punish the traitors. Any regrettably excessive emotions are understandable and limited to one overwhelming day. The good guys win; the bad guys are punished. Justice is served.
It is a nice story and it fits well with Gaullist myth, but it is not especially representative. France was not liberated on a single day in a single manner, but over the course of ten months and in as many ways as there are towns and villages in France. In parts of the north, liberation came with death and destruction on the heels of mechanized warfare. In large areas of the south, the Germans simply withdrew, while in other areas, particularly in the southeast, they retreated under maquisard fire. Neighboring towns could have had completely different experiences, one being torn apart by executions, deportations, and arson, while the other escaped untouched. Some towns faced severe food shortages; others held public feasts.
The emotional clichés of maquisards and head shavings further obscure the essential fact that the liberation was primarily a transfer of power between French regimes. Over the course of the previous 156 years, of course, the French had had considerable experience with not only rapid changes in governors but with profound alterations in forms of government and political ideologies. But although previous transfers of power had occurred during wars and revolutions, none had involved quite such complicated circumstances as the liberation. In 1944 the new regime came to France from exile to join mostly unknown colleagues in the metropole while two foreign armies battled out a world war on French soil. In a certain sense, the Gaullists' seizure of the apparatus of power from Vichy may have been the easiest task facing the GPRF at the liberation. Even before the Allies landed in Normandy, they infiltrated an embryonic administration into France through the metropolitan resistance networks so that during the liberation eighteen Commissaires régionaux de la République (Regional Commissioners of the Republic, CRRS), all proven resistants, exercised full and extraordinary powers up to that of granting pardons in their regions. They remained in their uneasy positions between the Resistants of the central government and the increasingly alienated local resistants in the provinces until the dissolution of the commissariat in March 1946.
As the representatives of the national Resistance and the GPRF in regions that would be cut off from Paris for an undetermined period, the CRRS governed through a dual bureaucracy. On the one hand, they installed resistants as prefects and mayors in the traditional offices of the highly centralized French state. On the other, they also worked with the new committees of liberation that had grown out of the Resistance itself and that represented the people of the grass-roots Resistance movement rather than the state. The density, composition, activity, and influence of liberation committees varied widely across the country, but every department had a Comité départemental de libération (CDL) representing Resistance networks, political parties, trade unions, and other groups such as women or POWS. Smaller areas had a Comité d'arrondissement de libération (CAL), Comité local de libération (CLL), or Comité cantonal (or communal) de libération (CCL). In the first days, even months, of an area's liberation, the liberation committees exercised considerably more influence there than the central government. But as the government regained its power and the means of asserting its authority, the liberation committees found themselves steadily excluded from real influence. Although resistants staffed both bureaucracies, it became increasingly clear that they represented different interests (national or local) and different visions of a Resistance France.
If every new regime must find some form of popular acceptance, the nature of the Resistance made the matter especially complicated at the liberation. On the one hand, all branches of the Resistance supported the return of the Republic, which implied elected rather than self-proclaimed representatives. If resistants could not win popular endorsement through elections, they would have to either step aside or betray their own ideals. On the other hand, other than Charles de Gaulle few resistants had a public reputation on which to build an electoral campaign. Resistants based their claims to postwar power on the moral qualities of their stand against the Nazis and their collaborators, yet those legitimating acts of resistance had had to be kept secret for fear of the Gestapo and the Milice. Resistants therefore had to prove their resistance all over again after the liberation. The contemporary wave of refashioning and whitewashing caused even more problems for authentic resistants; recruits rushed into the Resistance once the Allies had landed in Normandy, and even confirmed collaborators began touting themselves as undercover resistants (as some actually were).
The confusion created by the necessary secrecy of the authentic resistants and the need for elections meant that the political transfer of power extended over a much longer time period than the military liberation. In fact, the transfer of power showed even greater variations in its implementation than the military liberation because it operated on so many levels and because over the months the recipient of power, the Resistance, broke apart and, in some places, turned on itself. If on the national level the reins of power fell remarkably easily from Vichy to de Gaulle's Resistance GPRF, they got terribly tangled on the local level. Some towns were happy to see the Resistance take over the national government but did not want local resistants to take over the local government. In other towns local resistants joined the rest of the community in opposing the new Resistance government. And, of course, there were also towns that accepted and supported both the national and local Resistance and where the local resistants never objected to the policies of their Gaullist colleagues in Paris. It would indeed be far more accurate to speak of the liberations rather than the liberation of France.
Yet even with the inherent variation of the liberation, the French experiences of the transition from war to peace, from the Etat français to the Fourth Republic, did have enough similarities to bear reduction into broad patterns. Those patterns can best be represented through the experiences of communities of three to seven thousand inhabitants, which can be taken to speak for the France of 1944-45 for several reasons. First, in 1946 about half the French people lived in towns of similar size. Second, such towns often served as cultural, economic, and political centers for much larger areas, meaning that events and opinions that took place or were expressed there reflected the experiences and views of the farmers and villagers from the outlying areas as well as of the town dwellers. In less populated departments, a town of five thousand might house the courts, markets, and newspaper used by a much larger number of people scattered in the surrounding countryside. In more populated departments such a place might provide employment in small factories or shops to people living in nearby villages. Such towns served and therefore spoke for more than their own inhabitants. Third, because such towns were small enough to engage in community-wide disagreements but too large to do so merely by word of mouth, the divisions there took public form in newspapers, ceremonies, and elections.
Fourth, small market towns offered natural centers for local Resistance groups. The printing presses needed by the intellectual Resistance, for example, were found in towns large enough to support a newspaper. Similarly, the doctors who issued false medical certificates to maquisards often lived in towns and traveled to patients in the countryside and vice versa, again linking the small town with its hinterland. Although the resistance groups in such towns often belonged to the major Resistance networks, they remained small and obscure enough to represent a local resistance more than the national Resistance. Fifth, small towns drew only a moderate interest from the central government; the authorities cared enough to document events and opinions in such a place, but not enough to expend scarce resources on influencing them. Indeed, the breakdown of the communications network meant that during the après-libération such communities enjoyed even more autonomy than usual. This combination of local importance and national unimportance meant that small towns were big enough to develop coherent discussions and positions on contemporary events and small enough to be allowed to do so without much interference from the national authorities.
The fragmentation of the country by occupation zones and liberation battles, however, temporarily reshuffled the French into new groupings arranged according to war damage and food shortages rather than those traditionally defined by religious or political affiliations. Only a comparison of small towns from different occupation and liberation zones can speak for France of the après-libération. Saint-Flour (Cantal), Moûtiers (Savoie), and Rambervillers (Vosges) serve the purpose well because in normal circumstances they would have been very similar. They were all chefs-lieux of their districts, which were all predominantly rural, although Rambervillers and the Vosges were more industrialized than Cantal or Savoie. Furthermore, they shared the cultural cohesion of belonging to regions known for their Catholicism.
The geography of war, however, gave these otherwise similar towns wildly different experiences of the après-libération. As the capital of eastern Cantal in Auvergne in the Massif Central, Saint-Flour enjoyed the relative safety of the Vichy zone. Except for a few traumatic weeks in the summer of 1944, for the Sanflorains the war rumbled threateningly but distantly on the horizon. Moûtiers, on the other hand, endured three different occupation regimes as the capital of an Alpine valley close to the Italian border. For the Moutiérains, the war mostly took the form of a low-scale, guerrilla-style civil war between Vichy and the irregular Resistance army, the Forces françaises de l'intérieur (French Forces of the Interior, FFI), who liberated the area. In even greater contrast, Rambervillers, a market town in Lorraine, suffered one of the harshest occupation regimes in France, that of the reserved zone. The Rambûvetais experienced the war as the clash of mechanized armies, especially during the fall of 1944 when the German garrison gave way to American troops and the town huddled on the front line for a month. Because the war meant very different things to the Sanflorains, Moutiérains, and Rambûvetais, so did the liberation. Taken together, their experiences broadly represent the French transition from war to peace.
SAINT-FLOUR
Founded by a fourth-century bishop, Saint-Flour perches on a rocky outcropping of the old volcanic highlands of the Massif Central in Auvergne. On three sides the town ends abruptly in cliffs almost nine hundred meters high pointing over the River Ander. The ancient cathedral sits at the eastern point, while the rest of the old town crowds into narrow, crooked streets leading to the elongated square in front of the cathedral and the town hall. The subprefecture and a spacious, shady park lie across the western entrance. By the twentieth century, Saint-Flour had expanded beyond its natural fortress, both westward into the plateau and downward into the new town at the base of the cliffs. The railroad station sits in the new town, but the old town remains the heart of Saint-Flour: in front of the cathedral stands the First World War Monument aux Morts.
In 1945 the community of 5,590 inhabitants still preserved some of its honors as the traditional capital of Haute-Auvergne and eastern Cantal. As the seat of a bishopric, the subprefecture, and the Cour d'assises, it was more than just a regional market town. As the home of eastern Cantal's newspaper, it also served as an information center and cultural trendsetter. During the après-libération, transportation difficulties and severe freezes isolated the town and its region for weeks on end, further reinforcing Saint-Flour's importance.
Compared to other parts of France, Saint-Flour and the department of Cantal had a relatively uneventful war until the summer of 1944. Because Cantal lies south of Vichy, the department spent the first two years of occupation in the privileged free zone. Certainly, the Cantaliens suffered from shortages and economic hardship as much as, if not more than, people in other parts of the country. The volcanic heights are amenable to dairy cattle, sheep, and crops such as lentils but very little else. Yet if the terrain made it difficult to import goods, it also made the department unappealing to the Germans. Even after November 1942, when they occupied southern France, the Germans had little inducement to invest this sparsely populated region. A small unit garrisoned the departmental capital of Aurillac and, after July 1943, used Saint-Flour as a stopover, permanently renting some rooms and a garage. Resistants, on the other hand, recognized the hilly, wooded area's potential as a site for parachute drops, radio relays, and maquis units. By 1943 the arrondissement of Saint-Flour had its own maquisard unit of four to six hundred men, some of whom had come from more crowded places to hide in the hills of Auvergne. Other networks also operated in the area, including judges at the Cour d'assises who hid weapons in the courthouse. Nevertheless, according to the historian of the department during the war, Eugène Martres, Cantaliens on the whole supported Vichy's National Revolution.
The situation in Cantal changed abruptly with the Allied invasion on 6 June 1944, when the Resistance mobilized and an infamous German division began to make its bloody way from the south toward Normandy. The exact chain of events in the department remains confused and controversial today. As of 6-7 June, the Resistance controlled the region of Mauriac, northwest of Saint-Flour, although neither Vichy nor the Germans realized it for some time. By 8 June, 1,800 Cantaliens had left their homes to join the maquis in the FFI redoubts of Mont-Mouchet and La Truyère. Mont-Mouchet being only thirty-five kilometers from Saint-Flour, 150 men from the subprefecture and its northern arrondissement, including the entire gendarmerie brigade, reported there.
On 10 June, the Germans attacked the maquis camp at Mont-Mouchet from three sides, sparking off a month of guerrilla fighting throughout the department that left behind 350 French and 50 to 60 German victims. The Germans responded with a bloody trail of reprisals, including the deportation of 115 persons from the small commune of Murat, only 30 of whom survived the Nazi concentration camps, and the execution of 25 hostages at the Pont de Soubizergues two kilometers west of Saint-Flour.
The German forces in Cantal, which had increased from two hundred men in April to one thousand by 10 July, made Saint-Flour their headquarters for the repression of the maquisard uprising. In July the Kommandantur closed off the town to all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty and required anyone else to show a laissez-passer. Food began to run short in the besieged town; on 15 July the daily bread ration was reduced to two hundred grams. By 12 August the only Germans left in Cantal were the 300 to 350 camped in Saint-Flour and surrounded by FFI units, including some American parachutists. The German commander rejected an ultimatum on 20 August by raining machine-gun fire down from the old town, but in the smallest hours of the stormy night of 23-24 August the Germans retreated. Saint-Flour and Cantal were liberated.
That day the Sanflorains celebrated in the streets while the Resistance's "home guard," the Milice patriotique (MP), publicly shaved the heads of four or five women. Over the following days, the MP arrested about a dozen men and nine women for collaboration. The town officially celebrated its liberation three days later with an elaborate ceremony honoring the twenty-five men executed on 14 June at the Pont de Soubizergues. The other communities that had suffered in the Germans' June rampage also held memorial ceremonies soon after their liberations, setting a pattern in the region of associating the liberation with grief and the Resistance with the cult of the heroic, patriotic dead.
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Excerpted from The Expectation of Justice by Megan Koreman. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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