Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [205]
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 subject of politically engaged intellectuals in France – whether Drieu, Brasillach, Malraux or Sartre – Professor Judt has observed that their fascination with violence contained a ‘quasi-erotic charge’. It underlines the fact that while it has long been easy to mock Hemingway, the posturing of French intellectuals, although more sophisticated, demonstrated an arrogant irresponsibility which was far more dangerous and dishonest. Sartre tried to reconcile existentialism with his new phase of revolutionary commitment, but predictably it failed to be anything more than an exercise in verbose sophistry. By the end of his life he even began to justify terrorist action.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s to be a breeding ground of isms. The nouveau roman movement, with the novels of Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet, even produced chosisme or ‘thingism’: the exhaustive description of inanimate objects, to emphasize how depersonalized the modern world had become. But the materialistic enemy was already within the gates. The Deux Magots sold itself to the tourist trade as the ‘rendez-vous des intellectuels’. Cheap fashion shops and hamburger