Dozens of human beings were butchered in the picturesque heart of ‘the City of Love’. Their bodies were being washed up along the banks of the Seine for weeks afterwards. To this day it is not known exactly how many were killed – estimates by historians suggest between one hundred and two hundred people were murdered by the police that night. I had never heard about this state massacre; my French friends had never mentioned it to me. At the end of the documentary the reason for this became clearer, as the narrator explained how France had attempted to eradicate all traces of the murders by imposing a news blackout and making sure that no images made it into the media. And this state of ‘organised forgetting’ continued for the next thirty years.
But it would be a mistake to think of this determination to forget as wholly a product of government or establishment forces. To their eternal shame, the left in France – including the then influential Communist Party – colluded in this act of collective amnesia by not organising a single strike or demonstration against this appalling crime. They feared being associated with ‘the enemy’. But four months later, in February 1962, when nine French Communist Party supporters were killed by police at a demonstration in Charonne, Paris subsequently ground to a halt as the organised left called out more than half a million mourners to the funerals, led by the familiar figures of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Yet nothing just a few months before for the possibly hundreds of murdered French Algerians. France seemed to be saying: ‘This did not happen.’
A mantra that the country also used with regard to its pre-war engagement with fascism and then its wartime marriage with Nazi Germany. I have always been suspicious about a certain French national narrative with regard to the Second World War – particularly the enormous amount of weight given to the activities of the French Resistance. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the exceptional courage of the women and men who did take part in anti-Nazi actions – just that they were not only a minority of the population, but, in most areas of France, a tiny minority. And yet, to hear many post-war French politicians and intellectuals talk, you would imagine that half the country had been active in the Resistance. (I’ve often wondered, wryly, if this was been the case, how it had ever been possible for the Germans to occupy France for four and a half days, let alone four and a half years?)
But my suspicion had always been an instinctive one – that is, until recently, when I discovered more about the reality of France’s co-operation with fascism. No, ‘co-operation’ is not quite accurate, because it suggests that the fascism was not home-grown, when in fact it was. In the wake of the Dreyfus case, in the first decades of the twentieth century fascist and viciously antisemitic publications thrived. Catholic newspapers with huge circulations like La Croix and Le Pèlerin prided themselves on being in the vanguard of the fight against ‘the perfidious Jew’. Edouard Drumont and Alphonse Daudet had published their bestseller La France Juive in 1886, but Charles Maurras, a philosopher and propagandist, took matters to a new level of fanaticism in 1908 with the publication of Action Française – a national daily newspaper named after the influential political movement of the same title which had been founded nine years before. Maurras and his associate Maurice Pujo composed this piece of popular doggerel as its anthem:
The Jew having taken all,
Having robbed Paris of all she owns,
Now says to France:
‘You belong to us alone:
Obey! Down on your knees, all of you!’
Insolent Jew, hold your tongue …
Back to where you belong, Jew.fn5
And its influence continued to grow, just as antisemitism grew after the First World War, and throughout the 1920s and 30s. By 1920, even supposed intellectuals such as Proust, Gide, Rodin and T. S. Eliot were regular readers. Other ultra-conservative movements followed in its wake: Croix-de-Feu, a black-leather-jacketed paramilitary organisation, founded in 1928 (which by 1937 had more members than the combined Communist and Socialist parties – 750,000 – including a young François Mitterrand); Pierre-Charles Taittinger, later to establish the champagne dynasty, founded Jeunesses Patriotes in 1924, an extremely xenophobic league of Catholic youth. Hardly surprising when the founding father admired Hitler and Mussolini so much, praising the former for ‘the constant development of racism in all classes of Germans … [He] makes their heart beat under their brown shirts’. There was also extensive financial backing for these fascist movements from the businessmen of the day, including not only Taittinger, but also Jean Hennessy (of the cognac dynasty) and Eugène Schueller (founder of L’Oréal).
So threatening had this plethora of leagues and movements become – sixteen of them consolidating in 1934 to form the Front National (sadly, still thriving today) – that in 1936 the government dissolved the paramilitary leagues. But they simply renamed themselves and formed new parties.fn6 In 1936 Jacques Doriot founded the fascist Parti Populaire Français, and styled himself the ‘French Führer’. In 1937, the Rassemblement Anti-Juif de France (the Anti-Jewish Rally) was established, together with its weekly newspaper, L’Antijuif, with Louis Darquier as its president, soon openly funded by the Nazi government in Germany. By now all of these organisations, and others such as Propagande Nationale, and the Mouvement Anti-Juif Continentale, had large and well-funded headquarters in Paris, and were becoming more and more powerful with each month that passed.
As successive governments fell, the shift to the far right now moved to parliament and the national assembly. Hatred of ‘the foreigner’ and Jews in particular gathered pace at a terrifying rate. In the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938 came one of the most shocking moments in modern French history – the French government, two years before Nazi occupation, in April and May 1938, passed a series of decrees against ‘aliens’ (code for Jewish refugees), which, in their effect, replicated aspects of the infamous Nuremberg Laws established by the Nazis in 1935. These new laws in France banned ‘aliens’ from opening businesses and working in particular trades and professions. The laws also demanded the immediate repatriation of unregistered ‘aliens’ and those without valid work permits (i.e. thousands of Jewish refugees); 20,000 Jews in France were affected by these decrees, many were jailed, and a significant number chose suicide rather than forced expulsion back to Nazi Germany. Many, such as Walter Benjamin and the young Hannah Arendt (already living in exile in Paris having fled from Nazi Germany), began to see the writing on the wall – particularly when even Jewish organisations themselves didn’t want to oppose such developments, fearing this would only create a backlash and increase antisemitism further.
So, given all of this, it really should come as no surprise that, three years later, Darquier’s office at the Commisariat Général aux Questions Juives was issuing certificates to prove pure, Aryan blood. Or that the CGQJ had a whole department of archetypal desk killers – an entire office of accountants, insurance clerks, lawyers, brokers, bank clerks, currency dealers – to organise the supposedly ‘legal’ plundering of Jewish property and assets. Or that Darquier and company met Heydrich in Paris in spring 1942 to discuss how the deportations of the Jews in France should begin. Or that it was the French police, not the SS, who would co-ordinate the round-ups and make sure the trains that left for Auschwitz were as full as possible. Or that, between 27 March 1942 and 11 August 1944, at least 75,721 Jewish men, women and children were deported by the Vichy government to Auschwitz and Sobibor, on trains provided by the French state railways and staffed by French guards.fn7