Memory on Trial in Contemporary France: The Case of Maurice Papon
- Memory on Trial in Contemporary France: The Case of Maurice Papon
The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of the law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrosity.
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 17 August 19461
After a trial lasting six months, the longest in French legal history, Maurice Papon, former secretary general of the Gironde prefecture during the Occupation, was convicted on 2 April 1998 of complicity in crimes against humanity. Essentially, Papon had been accused of lending active assistance (concours actif) to arrests, internments, deportations and murders or attempted murders during the German implementation of the Final Solution on French soil. Close to 1,600 Jews had been deported in ten convoys from the Bordeaux region to Drancy and on to Auschwitz, and the charges against Papon implicated him in eight of these. The civil plaintiffs represented 72 victims who had been rounded up and deported in these operations.
At the trial’s outset, the prosecution case rested on several central claims: (1) that Papon, in complying with the anti-Jewish dictates of the Germans, had personally ordered actions—particularly arrests and imprisonments—that confirmed his individual responsibility for these crimes; (2) that he had acted with knowledge of the eventual fate of those who were apprehended and deported; (3) that he had had [End Page 41] authority over the administrative bodies—especially the local Service des questions juives—that had aided the Nazis in compiling lists and carrying out roundups of local Jews; (4) that constraints on functionaries like him had not been so overwhelming as to abolish a certain liberty of action on his part.
The trial was a mass-mediated event of an unprecedented scale in France, enjoying daily newspaper coverage and regular television, radio and magazine commentary. For the more voracious consumer, a glut of information related to the trial could be accessed through hundreds of sites on the World Wide Web. At one point a tally noted that 146 accredited journalists had attended the trial; 1,413 scholars had abandoned lessons or libraries to witness History-in-the making, and 8,827 members of the general public had been admitted. 2 With this kind of saturated media and public attention, there was the attendant expectation that Maurice Papon’s trial would yield lessons of a pedagogic, historical and symbolic nature for French society as a whole.
The trial also began in a public climate that confidently anticipated that Maurice Papon would be found guilty of crimes against humanity and that the courtroom would merely provide the setting for the juridical mise-en-scène of his culpability, and by extension the culpability of the entire Vichy administration. At the time of the trial’s commencement, Le Monde writer Laurent Greilsamer summed up the prosecution’s case against Papon in the following manner: “He signed what he shouldn’t have signed, carried out what he shouldn’t have carried out, organized what above all he shouldn’t have organized.” 3 Greilsamer also observed that while political will and public pressure had combined to bring Papon to trial, the evidence in departmental archives would prove more decisive to the prosecution’s case.
But as this juridical drama moved toward a conclusion, the verdict was no longer a foregone conclusion. The evidence that the civil parties claimed to be in possession of, which would link Papon directly to acts of complicity in arrests, internments and deportations, was sparse and controvertible. 4 The risk of an acquittal was mooted, and the civil parties were divided amongst themselves as to both the nature and degree of Papon’s complicity in crimes against humanity, and the appropriate punishment for these. [End Page 42]
In the event, Papon was convicted of complicity in arrests and internments—but not complicity in murder—and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. The verdict was greeted with general acclaim. The civil plaintiffs, though unhappy that Papon was not also found guilty of complicity in murder, expressed their satisfaction that he had been held individually responsible for the tragic fate of their families and loved ones. Others saw in the verdict a wider and contemporary symbolic significance. By...
