Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [85]
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 the Liberation. 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 French.’ The mood of the populace was not the only obstacle to a fair trial for those accused of collaboration at that time. The Cours de Justice set up by the provisional government were, in a sadly ironic way, a new form of the Cours Spéciales of Vichy. The problem was that nobody had ever envisaged one version of France putting another version on trial for treason, so the principal law used against collaborators was Article 75 of the Penal Code, which covered ‘intelligence with the enemy’.
In the eyes of the provisional government, it was better to have juridical imperfections than no courts at all. As one of de Gaulle’s entourage put it, ‘it was not possible to administer justice serenely’ in the situation which existed after the Liberation. If collaborators were not judged and sentenced, people would simply take the law into their own hands, with revolutionary tribunals and lynchings. But the Minister of Justice should never have permitted a jury system in which the jurors were members of the Resistance and relatives of those who had been in camps in Germany.
The trials of journalists and writers had shown that timing, just as much as the evidence, could play a decisive part in a prisoner’s fate. The lack of chronological logic in the trials of senior Vichy officials was even more flagrant. ‘One sees more and more,’ wrote Pastor Boegner