The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (80 page)

410 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

Danes, Belgians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen to defend his bunker.

They bought Hitler time to kill himself, and few survived to see the

formal German surrender on May 8, 1945.

The Charlemagne Battalion’s suicidal defense of Berlin seems

nonsensical. At best the Nazis exploited the collaborationists; at

worst they despised them. At least some of the French SS men had

to have understood this. While their decision to stand with the Third

Reich to the bitter end was born in part of their extremist right-wing

ideology, it also refl ected the desperation that came from having bet

incorrectly that Nazi rule in France would stand. Although historical

hindsight makes it easy to see that Hitler’s imperial enterprise was

doomed from the start, the seeming fi nality of the German victory in

1940 made the prospect of a permanent Nazi European empire seem

plausible. Its collapse in 1945 put the collaborationists in the unusual

position of having to answer for their decision to cooperate with a

conquering imperial regime.

It is impossible to know what would have happened to the nobleman Theodemir if Roderic’s heirs had reclaimed the Visigothic throne

from the Umayyads. The fate of chiefs such as Mumia and Koitalel’s

son Lelimo if the British Empire did not hold the Kenya highlands is

similarly unforeseeable. Indeed, there are very few documented cases

of imperial clients or auxiliaries ever having to answer for throwing in with foreign empire builders. Some of the Vichyites gambled

that they could reach some sort of accord with de Gaulle, but the

willingness of the most extreme collaborationists to go down fi ghting for a lost cause testifi es to the diffi culty that conquered peoples

faced in trying to come to terms with their subjecthood. Choosing

the right sponsor paid enormous rewards, but prematurely choosing

sides could be disastrous if the new order failed to stand.

De Gaulle and his allies faced the equally unprecedented question

of how to undo an imperial conquest. Should they try to revive the

Third Republic by turning the clock back to 1939, or should they

emulate Pétain by using the liberation as an opportunity to create a

new France? Both options were risky. The disaster of 1940 infl amed

the bitter ideological and social tensions that had so deeply divided the

nation in the interwar era. During the Nazi occupation thousands of

Frenchmen died as a result of the unacknowledged civil war between

the Vichyites and the communists and Gaullists. The Allied victory

restored France to the French, but it also raised the diffi cult question

France under the Nazis 411

of what to do with the people who had been somehow involved in

sustaining the vanquished Nazi imperial regime. While the prospect

of vengeance was tempting, criminalizing collaboration threatened to

keep France weak and divided in the perilous postwar world.

Depicting the liberation as a restoration rather than a revolution,

de Gaulle opted for unity by pretending that only a few extremist traitors had really collaborated and that most Frenchmen had

backed the resistance. According to de Gaulle’s idealized nationalistic

narrative, the French majority waged a heroic struggle against the

Nazis throughout the entire occupation and the Free French forces

restored France’s honor by spearheading the liberation without foreign help. Not only would this useful fi ction reunite France, it also

conveniently reinforced the general’s claim to power by downplaying the role of the communists,
maquisards
, and Allied armies in

driving out the Nazis.

With Allied forces still fi ghting in Germany, de Gaulle sought

to restore order quickly to make this the offi cial version of French

history. Recognizing that allowing the civil war to continue would

open the way for an American military government to play the role

of peacekeeper, he appointed handpicked prefects with the authority

to make or repeal laws, dismiss local offi cials, freeze bank accounts,

and order summary executions. He gave independent-minded resistance fi ghters and
maquisards
the choice of disarming or joining

the French army, but the communists were more diffi cult to rein in.

With an armed following numbering in the tens of thousands, many

French communist leaders wanted to use the liberation to launch a

Marxist-Leninist revolution. However, Stalin held them back because

he needed American lend-lease aid and did not want to provoke the

western powers into allying with the Nazis. Lacking direction and

foreign patronage, the communist partisans had little choice but to

disarm.

Without question, the most ticklish question facing the new regime

was what to do with the Vichyites. While collaboration seemed a valid

choice during the fi rst two years of the occupation, the brutal German

crackdown after Operation Torch and the occupation of the Vichy

zone had undermined its legitimacy substantially. In 1942, a threeman legal commission operating in secret in occupied Lyon ruled that

any Frenchman cooperating with the Nazi regime was guilty of treason because a state of war still existed under the armistice. As Vichy

412 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

and German authority collapsed in 1944, resistance leaders put this

ruling into practice by court-martialing captured collaborators. They

summarily executed French Gestapo offi cers, SS men,
miliciens
, and

any other Frenchman in a German uniform, and their impromptu

courts tried as many as nine thousand of the more passive supporters

and enablers of the Nazi regime for treason.

The popular sentiment driving these improvised trials refl ected

a widespread shift in French public opinion favoring the resistance

in the fi nal year of the war. Predictably, people who had spent much

of the Nazi era sitting on the fence turned conclusively against the

discredited Vichy regime as it became clear that its Nazi sponsors

would lose. Prosecution of the Vichy leaders would have to wait for

the full restoration of French sovereignty after the war, but in the

meantime resistance commanders and local communities throughout

France took the law into their own hands. Long-festering grievances

and animosities came to the fore as mobs turned on people whom

they accused of prospering from the occupation. The social order that

appeared to have collapsed with the Nazi victory was now reborn, or

at least reimagined, thereby making the people who had accepted the

new imperial regime accountable for their conduct under Nazi rule.

More often than not, French women were the primary targets of

this vigilante justice. As in earlier empires, women were most able to

cross the boundary between citizen and subject by forming conjugal

relationships with male empire builders. To be sure, Nazi offi cials,

German soldiers, and
miliciens
were often guilty of rape and other

forms of sexual abuse, but other French women entered into these

relationships willingly. In 1943, the MFB received more than eighty

thousand claims for domestic benefi ts from the French mothers of

children sired by its troops even though regulations barred German

soldiers from marrying subject women.52 While some of these women

were probably in love, the ability of German men to provide material

benefi ts and physical protection during the harsh occupation years

was also a driving force behind these relationships.

In the eyes of many French men, however, any intimate association with the German occupiers was treasonous. Stung by the humiliation of the Nazi victory, they felt deeply threatened by the disloyalty

of their women. The contempt that a French teenager recorded in

her diary captured these emasculating consequences of becoming an

imperial subject.

France under the Nazis 413

I have reached the point when I fi nd the French no longer are men:

I am renouncing my country. I no longer want to be French! When

you see now how one and all have become collaborationist and are

licking the boots of the Germans out of fear and cowardice, even in

my own family!53

The Inkan nobleman Don Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, who

complained that Andean women became “big whores” in preferring

Spaniards to Indians, would have recognized these sentiments. This

made sex one of the riskiest forms of collaboration. Those who slept

with Nazi or Vichy men might betray secrets about resistance or

black market activities, while the wives of French POWs in Germany

who committed adultery with German lovers betrayed the French

nation as well as their husbands.

The Allied victory thus brought masculine redemption as well as

national liberation. While French men might have been divided politically during the occupation, they bridged their differences by sharing

in the punishment of disloyal French women. In one case, Free French

interrogators slapped and humiliated such a woman into using a ruler

to show the size of her German lover’s penis. More commonly, however, vigilantes punished sexual collaborators by shaving their heads,

but there was actually no French law that explicitly banned sex with

foreign men. Neighbors, policemen, local courts, and rank-and-fi le

resistance men essentially took the law into their own hands in shaving the approximately twenty thousand women who suffered this

fate between 1943 and 1946. Recognized prostitutes often escaped

similar sanction due to their professional status, but resistance men

were inclined to view any female who had close contact with members of the former imperial regime as suspect and contaminated.

De Gaulle recognized that this sexual vigilantism complicated his

efforts to reunite France. Concerned primarily with punishing high

Vichy offi cials and purging all remaining traces of collaboration from

French society, he used his authority as president of the Cours de

Justice de la Liberation (Liberation Courts) to pardon women, youths

under twenty-one, and those who worked with the Nazis under actual

duress. All told, these courts, which ran from 1944 to 1951, investigated some 300,000 cases of collaboration. A little more than 124,000

went to trial and resulted in roughly 45,000 dismissals, 28,000 acquittals, and 23,000 guilty verdicts. In keeping with the general trend

toward amnesty, the vast majority of convicted collaborators served

414 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

relatively short prison terms, and the courts handed down only 2,173

life sentences and 6,763 death sentences. Ultimately, the French executed just 767 people for their role in the occupation, and most of

these were Milice and French Gestapo members. Even French SS men

tended to receive pardons if they never actually fought in France.54

Collaborationists who did not violate a specifi c law stood trial in

chambres civiques
, civil courts that had the authority to impose the

indignité nationale
(national indignity) on those whose actions had

dishonored the nation. These transgressors included profi teers, minor

offi cials, and women who had sexual relationships with the Germans.

The civil courts examined approximately two hundred and fi fty thousand cases and imposed the
indignité nationale
a little less than fi fty

thousand times. Those convicted lost the right to vote, medical coverage, state pensions, and other benefi ts of citizenship.55 The 569 Third

Republic senators and deputies who voted to give Pétain full executive and legislative powers correspondingly lost the right to stand for

elected offi ce, and prefects and senior magistrates had to prove they

had cooperated with the resistance to keep their jobs. These punishments were not permanent, and many people regained their rights

and positions after a relatively brief period.

Businessmen and bankers faced the Committee for the Confi scation of Illicit Profi ts, which sat in judgment on companies and individuals accused of enriching themselves through the black market or

illicit commerce with the imperial regime. While convicted profi teers

faced fi nes and the nationalization of their businesses, most major

industrialists escaped censure by arguing that they had to do business

with the Nazis to protect their factories and workers from confi scation

and conscription. The French authorities spared these men the indignities visited on suspect French women because they were unwilling

to jeopardize France’s postwar reconstruction and economic recovery

by delving too deeply into the high economics of collaboration.

Vengeance-minded Frenchmen criticized the Liberation Courts

for being too slow and lenient, but de Gaulle’s strategy was to hold

the Vichy leadership responsible for all the crimes of the occupation.

His aim was to spare the French people from having to account for

their conduct during their brief experience of imperial subjecthood.

De Gaulle’s preference was to put the entire Vichy regime in the dock

as a single institution, but the resistance’s legal experts ruled that

there had to be individual trials. Most of the Paris-based fascists and

France under the Nazis 415

extremists died in the war, and the provisional French government