Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [44]
A number of Resistance leaders tried to stop the head-shaving. The Communist military commander, Colonel Rol-Tanguy, had posters run off and pasted up which warned of reprisals against the perpetrators of any further incidents. Another leader, René Porte, respected in his quartier not least for his strength, bashed together the heads of a group of youths he found shaving a woman’s head. One woman is said to have shouted at her shearers, ‘My ass is international, but my heart is French.’
A volatile mixture – moral outrage, suppressed fear, jealousy and guilt – seems to have produced a hysteria which was quickly spent. In too many cases the women were made scapegoats for the whole community. Whether men who had collaborated escaped more lightly as a result remains a difficult question to answer.
Most Allied soldiers seem to have been shocked or sickened by incidents of head-shaving, but in the battle zone the execution without trial of traitors provoked far fewer objections. There was a strong feeling among American, British and Canadian forces that, not having suffered the trauma of defeat and occupation, they had no right to sit in judgement on France’s private agony.
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Political passion rejects shades of grey, yet during the four years of occupation France had witnessed every paradox imaginable, from antiSemites who saved Jews to bien-pensant anti-fascists who betrayed them, from black-marketeers who helped the Resistance to Resistance heroes who pocketed ‘expropriations’. Curiously, many who were Dreyfusards in their youth became passionately pro-Pétain. There were also examples of saintly self-sacrifice, as well as cases of the blackest evil, but these two extremes represented tiny minorities and were seized upon by political fanatics to demonstrate their point.
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who visited France many times during the immediate post-war period, came up with an informal but useful definition of acceptable conduct during the Occupation. To survive, you might have needed to do business with the Germans, whether as a waiter, a shoemaker, a writer or an actor, but ‘you did not have to be cosy with them’.
For many there was no such thing as a good German, and, for the Communist Party especially, the notion of a good Pétainist was treason in itself. All the crimes of the Germans in France were heaped upon Vichy, clouding an already complicated issue still further. The Communists’ anger was both genuine and artificial. Their strength of feeling over Vichy’s selection of Communist hostages for execution, or over its close cooperation with the Gestapo and the dispatch of French workers to slave labour in Germany, cannot be doubted. Yet there was a deliberate political purpose behind their condemnation of Vichy. The greater the purge of every part of the administration which had continued to work under Vichy, from the police to the post office, the greater the opportunity for Communist control after the war.
One can define acceptable and unacceptable behaviour under enemy occupation, but to decide degrees of guilt or fitting punishment in the strong emotions of the period is difficult. However, it seems to have been generally agreed that the denunciation of fellow French men and women to the Germans was a shooting offence.
News of last-minute massacres of political prisoners carried out by German forces just before they retreated and details of barbaric Gestapo tortures filled the Resistance press and fuelled the strong desire for vengeance.
Moreover, the Resistance did attract ill-educated youths who were prepared to join any group, no matter what its ideology, as long as it gave them a gun. It also attracted many