Monitoring People: Dynamics and Hazards of Record Management in France, 1935-1944

Monitoring people by use of punched cards was a tool for governments to exploit the potentials of modern mass society, which they started to develop in the 1930s. In France, Rene Carmille promoted this possibility. He worked to mechanise the army's conscript and mobilisation administration, which was only implemented by the autocratic French regime after the country had been conquered by Germany in 1940. For this end a national register of people was established by use of punched cards. However, this register also improved the possibilities to control and locate individuals, for example Jews, which Carmille only gradually realised. This predicament added to Carmille's dilemma between his loyalty to the French government and his detestation of the German Nazis. After the German occupation of the last part of France in late 1942, he rebelled against the French collaborative regime, was arrested by the Germans and died in a concentration camp.