4 Defeat in the Dock: the Riom Trial
The trial of political leaders for leading a country into national disaster was to be repeated twenty years after the Trial of the Six in Greece. The fame of the great Nuremberg trials has obscured historical memory of what was, in fact, the first major war crimes trial of World War II: the Riom trial of the leaders of the democratic Third Republic in France. Edouard Daladier and Léon Blum, both former prime ministers, General Gamelin, the former chief of staff, Guy La Chambre, the former minister of air, and Robert Jacomet, the former controller-general for the administration of the armed forces, were put on trial by Vichy France in 1942 for leading France into war and then losing it.
The regime known as Vichy France was born out of the ruins of France’s staggering defeat in May to June 1940, and it blamed the leaders of the Third Republic for that catastrophe. Like the Revolutionary Committee in Athens, Vichy needed a trial to bolster the legitimacy of its own ‘national revolution’ proclaimed by Marshal Pétain, a programme of national renewal based on the conservative and authoritarian principles of ‘work, family, country’ (travail, famille, patrie). The defeat had inflicted a terrible psychological blow on France, and an urgent need was felt for the re-establishment of solid reactionary principles after the parliamentary chaos of the inter-war years. Stunned by the suddenness of the Germans’ victory and the huge cost in lives – which had followed repeated reassurances given by military and political leaders that France was militarily prepared for war – the French therefore threw themselves at the feet of the most revered and popular man in the country, Philippe Pétain, the peasant’s son who had become Maréchal de France and who, as one of the men who had won World War I, was nicknamed ‘the victor of Verdun’. He seemed to be France’s providential saviour in her hour of need, and indeed he employed theologically resonant vocabulary when he said that he would make ‘a sacrifice of [his] own person’ by assuming power just when the country had suffered its worst defeat: Pétain did indeed ← 63 | 64 → exchange his glorious historical reputation as the man who had delivered victory in the Great War for the very opposite, and his name has now entered historical vocabulary as a byword for the ignominy of defeat and even treason.
The initial rationale for the decision to sign an armistice with the invading Germans was to stop the fighting which was killing people in their tens of thousands, causing over a million to be taken as prisoners of war and countless numbers to flee as refugees. An armistice which preserved the French government legally intact was, it was reasoned, better than direct rule by the Germans, such as they were to impose on Belgium and the Netherlands. But the defeat produced such a deep shock that there was also a widely held conviction that the very institutions of the state were at fault, and that they needed to be discarded and replaced by new ones. The armistice having been signed on 17 June 1940, on 10 July 1940 the French parliament, meeting in Vichy, voted by an overwhelming majority to dissolve itself and the Third Republic with it. Only eighty deputies and senators voted against handing les pleins pouvoirs (including power to legislate and to change the constitution) to the then president of the council (prime minister), Marshal Pétain. The parliamentary regime was abolished (at least provisionally) and a sort of personal dictatorship established. Gaullist constitutionalists immediately attacked the parliament for its vote, saying that it had no right to alienate national sovereignty in this way. Indeed, it was largely because of the experience of 1940 that de Gaulle became a sworn enemy of what he called ‘the regime of political parties’, which he successfully stemmed when he created his presidential Fifth Republic in 1958.
Pétain’s own analysis of the weakness of the parliamentary system was not dissimilar to de Gaulle’s. Both were military men – and former close friends. Pétain was godfather to de Gaulle’s first son, Philippe, named after the marshal. They had disagreed over military strategy: Pétain believed that the infantry and a war of attrition were the key to military success, while de Gaulle saw the potential of mechanized warfare, especially tanks. But both men inhabited a hierarchical world in which it was natural to give and obey orders. Neither of them was a fan of the impersonal political logic of parliamentarianism, still less of its Machiavellianism and corruption.
But whereas de Gaulle, the young rebel brigadier, acted with dashing audacity, Pétain brought a lugubrious and sombre mood to France. On the day of the armistice, he told the French people, ‘I was with you in the glorious days. I stay with you in the dark days. Remain at my side.’ He spent the rest of the war playing grandfather to a brutalized and disoriented nation. In his address of 11 October 1940, when he set out the main lines of his ← 64 | 65 → national policy shortly before the famous meeting with Hitler at Montoire (on 24 October), Pétain said, ‘If all avenues are closed to us, then we know how to wait and suffer.’ The political regime which he instigated was thus heavily impregnated with masochism and self-reproach. The marshal of France let it be known that, on rising every morning, like a sinner practising mortification, he repeated to himself, ‘We have been defeated.’
The air was also thick with the thirst for revenge. Pétain’s very first broadcast to the nation, on 17 June 1940, effectively laid out the case for what was to become the Riom trial. ‘The armistice has been inevitable since 13 June,’ he said.
This failure has surprised you. Remembering 1914 and 1918, you are seeking the reasons for it. I will give them to you. On 1 May 1917, we still had 3,280,000 men in our armed forces, in spite of three years of bloody combats. On the eve of the present battle, there were 500,000 fewer. In May 1918, we had 85 British divisions; in May 1940, there were only 10. In 1918, we had with us 58 Italian divisions and 42 American divisions.
He went on: ‘Too few sons, too few weapons, too few allies. There is our defeat.’
The desire to blame the previous regime for the defeat therefore formed the very ideological core of the Pétainist project. The Third Republic had to be ritually destroyed in order for Vichy France to live, just as Louis had had to die for the Republic. The Riom trial was therefore a paradigm of what is today called (favourably) ‘transitional justice’: it was a trial staged to ceremonialize the destruction of an old political system and its replacement by a new one. The minister of justice in 1940 was Raphael Alibert, a member of the extreme right-wing group, La Cagoule and the man whose name is forever associated with the anti-Semitic legislation he authored, by which Jews were excluded from public office and retrospectively stripped of their French citizenship. It was he who made the political goals of the trial explicit: ‘For a long time, we have been denouncing the defects of the Republic. If it were well done, a grand trial would establish the proof of it. Such a trial would be the touchstone of the new regime and of the new order.’1
On 11 July 1940, the day after he was invested with les pleins pouvoirs, Pétain promulgated three constitutional acts which were to form the basis of the Riom trial. They established the principle that ministers were henceforth responsible to him as head of state, and not to parliament which in any case had been dissolved. On 30 July 1940, i.e. within a fortnight, a fifth Constitutional Act was decreed which created the ‘Supreme Court of Justice’, whose role was to put the former ministers on trial. This Constitutional ← 65 | 66 → Act abrogated two articles in two previous laws (Article 9 of the law of 24 February 1875 and Article 12 of the law of 16 July 1875) which had provided that the Senate had the right to constitute itself as a court of justice to try the president of the Republic or government ministers; the new Supreme Court of Justice was henceforth to have this function instead. The Supreme Court of Justice was therefore a special tribunal, created in violation of the key principle of the rule of law that people should be tried only by ordinary courts. It was also based on retroactive legislation. Marshal Pétain, having determined that ministers were responsible to him alone as head of the French state, ruled that a new political crime henceforth existed, that of having ‘betrayed the duties of office’, and that it could be applied to ministers for acts committed before he had changed the law.
The new Supreme Court was by no means the only special jurisdiction Vichy created. There was a new court martial, special tribunals in each court of appeal, and a tribunal of state in Paris and Lyons. These courts could hand down various punishments including the death penalty. Vichy also had a policy of administrative internments under which people were imprisoned without their cases ever being referred to a judge at all,2 i.e. habeas corpus was suspended and retroactive legislation liberally introduced including for capital offences. The context in which the Riom trial operated was therefore effectively that of a police state and emergency powers. Military leadership and unquestioning deference to power were the order of the day.
There was a widespread view in the aftermath of the defeat that the Third Republic leaders were indeed guilty men. But there was disagreement as to what exactly the charges against them should be. Pierre Laval, Pétain’s more overtly pro-German prime minister, wanted the defendants at Riom to be tried for declaring war (the crime for which the Nazi leaders were eventually prosecuted at Nuremberg). Laval presumably thought that such a prosecution would please the Germans: France had, in fact, declared war against Germany, and the Germans insisted they had been forced into a war they had not sought.
Others warned against this, reasoning that if France convicted her own ministers of having started the war, then Germany would demand territorial concessions after it. Germany had already placed Alsace and Lorraine under direct German rule, and the fear was that she would formally annex them again, as she had done in 1871. The military men who were so powerful in the Vichy regime therefore said that the politicians’ crime was not that they had declared the war, but instead that they had lost it.
The defendants themselves did think that they were being tried on the orders of the Germans. But just as the anti-Semitic legislation introduced ← 66 | 67 → by Vichy was in fact enacted with no encouragement by the Germans,3 so Hitler did not press for the Riom trial to occur. To the extent that there was any German influence at all, it came from Otto Abetz, the powerful German ambassador in Paris.4 Abetz quickly understood the value of having the French blame each other for their misfortunes, just at the time when any nascent national unity against the occupying forces needed to be destroyed.
On 1 August 1940 Pétain issued a decree appointing the members of the newly created Supreme Court of Justice. Although the judges were appointed for life, and therefore not subject to the threat of being sacked for political reasons, and although they were all qualified jurists, the decree left no doubt about the political nature of the trial for which the court was summoned on 8 August:
To seek out and to try ministers, former ministers or their immediate civilian and military subordinates, accused of crimes or delicts in the exercise or on the occasion of their functions, or of having betrayed the duties of their office in acts which led to the passage from peace to war on 4 September 1939 and which subsequently aggravated the consequences of the situation which had been caused thereby.5
The phrasing about ‘the passage from peace to war’ was as close as the Prosecution came to blaming France for actually starting the war, while the actual trial in fact concentrated mainly on the military defeat for which the defendants were held responsible. From his exile in London, General de Gaulle lost no time in denouncing the procedure. That very day, he broadcast, ‘Those unfortunate men who have handed France over by capitulating, are now trying to deceive public opinion about their crime. They are hastening instead to prosecute others.’6 By 1943, i.e. one year after the trial had ended, de Gaulle wrote the preface to a book published in French in London by Pierre Tissier, in which the future president lam-basted the trial as ‘one of the worst abuses committed by Vichy’ and as ‘a parody of justice’.7
The key crime alleged, that of ‘having betrayed the duties of their office’ (d’avoir trahi les devoirs de leur charge), was completely undefined. It corresponded to no existing law. Although trahir implies treason itself, the defendants were not tried for treason, on which there was ample existing law. A further law, passed on 3 September 1940, provided for internment on the orders of the minister of the interior. It was on the basis of this law that the main defendants at Riom were imprisoned at the château de Chazeron: Daladier, Blum, Gamelin, La Chambre and Jacomet. ← 67 | 68 →
Paul Reynaud, Pétain’s predecessor as prime minister, and Georges Mandel, Reynaud’s minister of the interior, were also interned in the same château de Chazeron but they were not tried at Riom. Although the Germans hated both Reynaud, who had been prime minister when France declared war on Germany, and Mandel, because he was Jewish and fiercely anti-Nazi, it would have been politically impossible to put Reynaud on trial because it was he who had appointed Marshal Pétain to the government in the first place. His patriotic and even pro-war credentials were never in doubt.8 The selection of Léon Blum as a defendant, meanwhile, was clearly a piece of pure political persecution: he had not even been in government at the time of the outbreak of war. Camille Chautemps, who had been prime minister between Blum and Daladier, and who was deputy prime minister (vice-president of the council) under both Daladier and Reynaud, was never even mentioned in the indictment and was left quite alone by the Vichy authorities. We shall see in a moment how the question of Reynaud and Mandel was resolved.
Armed with these two decrees, the new Supreme Court of Justice set about preparing the case. It did so by violating one of the key principles of French judicial procedure, which is that there should be a clear distinction between the magistrate who examines a case for prosecution (le juge d’instruction) and the judge who adjudicates it. In contravention of this ancient French legal principle, which in any case reflects the principles of natural justice, the judges of the Riom bench themselves carried out the investigation, collecting documents and interviewing witnesses. They also gave interviews to journalists before the trial started, thereby additionally violating the principle than a judicial investigation remains secret until the allegations have been brought to court.9
The Riom judges worked slowly and methodically – too slowly, in fact, for the imperatives of politics. On 27 January 1941, therefore, Pétain promulgated Constitutional Act No. 7; authored by the Minister of Justice, Raphael Alibert, and recalling that ministers (including former ministers) were responsible to the head of state, it ruled that ministers could, on the say-so of the head of the French state, be convicted of ‘betraying the duties of their office’ and subject to various punishments including destitution (removal from office) and imprisonment.10 The powers laid out in this new Act were applied retroactively, as the Act’s reference, in its Article 5, to ‘former ministers’ explicitly admitted.
Even this measure, however, did not speed up matters quickly enough and things continued to drag on in Riom. On 12 August 1941, in an extraordinary broadcast read out during the interval of a performance of Boris Godunov at the opera house in Vichy, Marshal Pétain expressed his ← 68 | 69 → dismay that his regime was having difficulty enforcing its will. An ‘ill wind’ was blowing in the country, he said, and the authority of his government was being questioned. To combat this, a range of new measures would be introduced: the suspension of the activities of political parties, the suppression of parliamentary immunity, sanctions against Freemasons, reinforcement of the police force, and the creation of a new body, a ‘Council of Political Justice’ whose purpose was ‘to judge those responsible for our disaster’.11
The announcement was a bombshell. Pétain referred to Constitutional Act No. 7 of January 1941, in contradiction of the fact that the Supreme Court of Justice had already been constituted by decrees signed in 1940. He made this announcement without consulting the new justice minister, Joseph Barthélemy, who wrote in his diary that day of his shock at the judicial chaos which the new Council of Political Justice would create. The new Supreme Court of Justice was nearly ready to stage the trial, and yet Pétain had suddenly and unexpectedly brought into being a new jurisdiction to try the same defendants for the same alleged crimes. Worse, the Council of Political Justice was to report to the head of state: it represented nothing less than a personal system of justice.
A further decree the following month appointed eight members to this new Council, which was headed by Ambassador Peretti della Rocca, an old friend of the marshal. (Pétain had himself been French ambassador to Spain.) Only two of the members of the Council were jurists. Pétain gave the new Council a month to prepare its judgement on the Riom defendants, plus Georges Mandel and Paul Reynaud. None of the members of this Council went to Riom to examine the documents which the Supreme Court had been collecting for a year; instead, the Council members read only the half-finished indictment, which had not even been given to the defendants themselves by that stage. When in due course the Council submitted its verdict to Marshal Pétain, who duly announced it as his own to the French nation on 16 October 1941, it did so even though none of its members had met any of the defendants, and on the basis of charges of which the defendants themselves were unaware.
Of course the Supreme Court judges and Barthélemy himself should have protested at this point, perhaps by resigning. Instead, these senior jurists covered for the aged marshal and, by staying in their posts, lent a veneer of respectability to this gross act of political interference in the judicial process. But Barthélemy, who had initially welcomed the Riom trial, on the basis that it would be ‘the grand trial of a defunct regime’,12 soon began to realize that all possible outcomes were going to be negative. It would prove impossible to separate the new regime from the old, ← 69 | 70 → since Pétain himself had been minister of defence in 1934; it was politically costly to exonerate the defendants, because that would imply a judicial condemnation of Germany; and conviction of the defendants would damage relations with Britain.
Pétain went on air on 16 October 1941,13 the day after the Council of Political Justice had reported back to him, to announce that he had found all five Riom defendants guilty. He eulogized the members of the Council, saying that they were ‘distinguished servants of the state’ who had provided a ‘clear and well-founded opinion’. After having thus convicted the defendants, Pétain announced their various prison sentences (life imprisonment in a fortress for Blum, Daladier, and Gamelin, lesser forms of imprisonment for Guy la Chambre and Jacomet, continued detention for Reynaud and Mandel) and then drifted into complete incoherence, saying that French law required separation between the executive and the judicial branches and that therefore the Riom court would now try the men … whom he had just proclaimed to be guilty and sentenced! He made matters worse by adding that the court had to act quickly, since the gravity of the men’s crimes meant that sanctions he had announced against them (various forms of imprisonment) would be quite inadequate.
Pétain concluded his message by leaving no one in any doubt that the trial was the trial of the Third Republic as a regime. The sentence, he said, ‘will condemn individuals but also the methods, the morals, the regime. The decision will be final; it will not be open for further discussion. It will mark the final point in one of the saddest periods in the life of France.’ He also said that the trial was intended to provide a definitive historical account of what had allegedly gone wrong in 1940: the French, he said, had been ‘betrayed’ but now they would no longer be deceived.14
The Council for Political Justice performed one extra political act during its short and ignominious existence. As a result of pressure from the Nazis, and in spite of the fact that two of its members resigned in protest at this blatant political interference, the rump Council reached new heights of hypocrisy when it convicted Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel – two men whom the Germans hated as warmongers but whom the Supreme Court of Justice saw no reason to prosecute – for conspiring to place France under the control of a foreign power, namely England.15
Although the interference of the Germans in the conviction of Reynaud and Mandel was egregious (there was no trial), they tried to interfere with the running of the Riom trial as well. As preparations got under way, the Germans demanded that all the files be sent to them, and that they be allowed to search the lawyers crossing the demarcation line between the occupied zone and the free zone in the south, where Riom was situated. ← 70 | 71 → The Vichy authorities protested, and eventually the matter was settled in negotiations with Abetz, who concluded that the Germans had an interest in allowing the trial to go ahead unimpeded.
The trial eventually opened on 19 February 1942. The indictment was 169 pages long and included such vague allegations as that the defendants had encouraged the illusion that victory would be easy.16 The Prosecution made overtly political allegations, alleging that the policies of the Front populaire were the direct cause of the country’s lack of preparation for war, for instance because the introduction of the forty-hour week, a social measure introduced by the left-wing government, had reduced industrial production. The other alleged crimes of the ministers (‘betrayal of the duties of office’) were nowhere formulated in law, and so the proceedings of the trial involved a lengthy, detailed, and largely technical discussion about the minutiae of France’s defence policy in the latter half of the 1930s. The discussions were conducted with no reference to the context in which governmental decisions were taken, in this case the economic crisis into which the whole of Europe was plunged after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the collapse of the gold standard after 1933. That crisis had caused huge political upheavals in France, most notably the right-wing riots of 6 February 1934 and the election of the socialist Front populaire government in 1936. More importantly, the very premise, namely that the outcome of the war was the result of mechanistic determinism – the simple product of a balance-sheet of military force – did not, in fact, correspond to military reality; in the summer of 1940, after the initial decision to hold the trial, the Royal Air Force had defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, even though the Germans vastly outnumbered the British in terms of aircraft.
The authorities issued detailed instructions to the press on 18 February 1942, shortly before the trial commenced, on what journalists were allowed to report and what points they were supposed to emphasize. Reporters were told ‘not to forget that the trial is limited to the lack of preparation for the war, in France, between 1936 and 1940’, and the censor worked hard to ensure that party line was followed. But these measures quickly backfired. André Le Troquer, who had been Léon Blum’s minister of defence, appeared at Riom as Blum’s defence counsel. (He went on to become a staunch Gaullist but his political career ended in ignominy when in 1960, aged seventy-six, he was convicted of organizing and attending erotic dances involving underage girls, an accusation he denounced as politically motivated.) Le Troquer caused a sensation when he revealed that he was in possession of these censorship instructions. He read them out in court, stupefying and embarrassing the judges.17 His revelation made a nonsense of Pétain’s claim that the trial would ensure that henceforth the ← 71 | 72 → French people would no longer be deceived. Observers were also shocked when the presiding judge, Pierre Caous, decided to hold certain sessions in camera.18 Such shock is unfortunately not expressed in our own day when international criminal tribunals do exactly the same thing, as we shall see in chapters 16 and 17 dealing with the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia: both these tribunals make widespread use of such secret in camera sessions.
But Vichy could not censor the foreign press, who were present. The BBC received regular transcripts from the trial, which it was happy to read out on the radio. The collaborationist press in Paris was critical too; the anti-Vichy fascist leader, Marcel Déat, demanded in various articles that the Riom defendants be simply taken out and shot, and he regarded the trial as proof of Vichy’s pusillanimity.19 On Goebbels’s instructions, the German press also attacked the perfidious French for trying to put the blame for the war on a few men, when in fact the whole nation was guilty.
In this context of political control over the whole of the French national press – whether by the Vichy censors or by Otto Abetz’s deep pockets in Paris – the Riom trial paradoxically created a little island of relatively free speech. As soon as the trial opened, General Gamelin announced that he would refuse to say anything during the proceedings. (The same strategy was to be adopted by Marshal Pétain himself when he ended up in the dock three years later.) Gamelin’s decision infuriated the other defendants, especially Léon Blum, who told the judges that it rendered the whole trial absurd. ‘What is this trial about if not a military defeat?’ asked Blum.20 Le Troquer, Blum’s counsel, then argued that the court itself did not have a legal foundation since the constitutional order on which the whole of the Vichy government was based had not been ratified by the Assemblies, as the original law of 10 July 1940 required that it should be. He argued that the 1875 constitution provided for the Senate to try ministers, and that it remained in force; he said that that it was morally wrong to conduct such a trial while France was occupied by enemy forces, since the country was clearly not at liberty; he berated Vichy for its attack on civil liberties; and he drew attention to the retroactive effect of the law of 10 July 1940.
Daladier’s lawyer, Maurice Ribet (whose presence in court must have been impressive if he spoke as well as he wrote), argued similarly that the trial was illegal because the Constitutional Act No. 5 of 30 July 1940, which created the court, had invented a new crime, that of betraying the duties of one’s office, and that it had then applied sanction for this crime retroactively. He attacked the judges for both conducting the investigation and adjudicating the case. Ribet then attacked the Prosecution for fixing the beginning of the period under consideration at 1936 for political reasons. ← 72 | 73 → The Prosecution maintained that this was the year of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, and that it was then that it became obvious that Hitler was intending to overthrow the Versailles settlement and rearm Germany, but Ribet retorted passionately, as did Léon Blum after him, that there were plenty of other dates one could have chosen: the Nazis were elected in 1933; Germany left the League of Nations in 1933; conscription was introduced in Germany in 1935, and so on. Blum said that a proper court of law would have fixed the date using the legal statute of limitations, not on the basis of a political or even a historical assessment.21 The date 1936 had instead been chosen, he said, to incriminate the socialist Front populaire government, elected that year,22 and to obscure the fact that Marshal Pétain had himself been minister of war in 1934.
However, the main defendants, especially Daladier and Blum, had no desire to hide behind technical arguments about legal legitimacy. These were seasoned parliamentarians who wanted to address the wider public outside the courtroom – a reflex which was to motivate many subsequent former heads of state and government on trial, from Vidkun Quisling to Slobodan Milošević. Ribet wrote later, ‘We had to take advantage of the hearings – if they had the courage to commence them – to transform the witness box into a political tribune.’23 Unlike the strategy adopted by Louis XVI, therefore, the Riom Defence consisted in refusing to accept the terms laid down against the defendants by the Prosecution, and in trying dramatically to turn the tables on their accusers instead. Blum and Daladier were therefore both on their feet during the very first hearing, on 19 February, eager to speak in public after seventeen months of captivity. Daladier protested vehemently at the fact that he and the other defendants had already been proclaimed guilty by Marshal Pétain and the press, and he protested that he was a patriot who had rearmed France.24 Blum gave a magnificent speech, alleging that the trial had been rigged to target specifically political enemies but to exonerate the army. ‘The trial which is opening,’ Blum declared, ‘is a political trial, a trial of reprisal against the government of the Front populaire.’ He also insisted that the purpose of the trial was to discredit the Republic and the democratic system of government.
While many of the hearings were taken up with technical discussions about how many aircraft had been ordered, the only purportedly legal part of the indictment was the charge that the defendants had declared war without the consent of the two houses of parliament, as the constitution required. This accusation was a halfway house between the Vichyite position that the defendants had not prepared France sufficiently for war, and the German position that they had been guilty of starting the war in the ← 73 | 74 → first place. However, the accusation was ill grounded, since the defendants’ position – that the declaration of war had in fact been triggered automatically when Germany invaded Poland, and in virtue of the undertaking given to Poland on 31 March 1939, which the French parliament had supported – had been argued persuasively in a learned law journal by none other than Joseph Barthélemy himself, by now Vichy’s minister of justice.
The trial struggled to come to terms with the vast questions of world politics and military strategy at stake in 1940. By ignoring the true context, the indictment seemed to accept the Vichyite analysis of the war as a Franco-German conflict and not a world one. Ironically, moreover, the trial emphasized that the defendants shared the same defensive attitude to warfare as Marshal Pétain had done: huge sums had been built constructing the ultimately useless Maginot line on the Franco-German border, which the Germans had simply bypassed by invading through the Low Countries instead. And what about events beyond France’s control, especially the attitude of Belgium? Belgian neutrality presented France with an intractable problem: to build a defensive barrier on the border with Belgium as well as the Maginot line would have implied that France would never ally with Belgium, or help her in case of attack, but Belgium’s neutrality also made it impossible for France pre-emptively to move her forces into Belgian territory. Such a move would have been precisely what Germany had done in 1914. The result was that the land was left unprotected, and over it the Germans eventually drove their tanks into France.
There are grounds for saying that France and Britain should have attacked Germany when she invaded Poland in September 1939: Hitler had sent nearly the entire German army east, leaving Germany effectively undefended in the west. German senior staff regarded with horror the prospect that France might detect this weakness and take advantage of it, but she never did. But such a charge could never have been included in the prosecution because the Germans would not have allowed it. In any case, such huge questions of state policy simply cannot be subsumed within the framework of the criminal law.
In fact, the hearings demonstrated that the indictments were unfounded and that the various Third Republic administrations had, in fact, rearmed France: France did have plenty of tanks, and German superiority lay instead in communications, guns, and training.25 The defendants succeeded in their strategy of exploiting their time in the dock to attack their accusers. Already imprisoned and convicted on Pétain’s say-so, they had nothing to lose by deriding him and other pillars of the Vichyite order, whose reputations as irreproachable men suffered concomitantly. ← 74 | 75 →
If anyone in Vichy had thought the trial would improve relations with the Germans, they were proved wrong. The Germans wanted what the Allies were to obtain at Nuremberg, a condemnation of the opposing side (in this case, France) for starting the war; Vichy France, by contrast, wanted a condemnation of the defeat. Otto Abetz had persuaded his masters that the trial would help lever France into joining the new European order, but leading Germans started to fear that the trial would lead to an acquittal, and many regarded Abetz as an untrustworthy Francophile.
Worse still, from the German point of view, was that anti-German feeling ran very high in the courtroom, as the defendants put up their robust show. One witness (the exquisitely named Marquis de Moustiers) shouted out at the German journalists in the courtroom, ‘I killed a Kraut!’ (J’ai tué un Boche!). Far from silencing him, the presiding judge said that it was comforting to know that there were still Frenchmen like him around.26 Daladier and the other defendants called openly in court for an Allied victory. Léon Blum’s speeches, reported by the foreign press, earned him a telegram on his birthday in 1942 (9 April) from Eleanor Roosevelt. The German military commander in France even reported that a rise in Resistance actions against Vichy was due to the Riom trial.27 The war in the east was beginning to turn against Nazi Germany at this stage, and the German generals resented the implication contained in the indictment that their victory against France had been anything less than a brilliant military achievement; they did not want the court to show that France had been hopelessly unprepared, or that the fall of France was therefore a foregone conclusion.
Matters came to a head when Hitler attacked Vichy and the Riom trial explicitly in a speech in Berlin on 15 March 1942. He said,
A trial is taking place these days in France, whose main characteristic is that not a word is spoken about the guilt of those responsible for this war. Only a lack of preparation for war is being discussed. We are here looking at a mentality which is incomprehensible to us but which is perhaps better suited than any other to reveal the causes of this new war.
The French authorities were shocked by this public attack. Pétain ordered the trial to be suspended on the pretext that all responsibilities should be examined and not just those currently being debated. The pretence was that the trial would reopen once the indictment had been reformulated, but this was just a diplomatic euphemism to hide the fact that the political desires of the Germans and the French were fatally opposed. The press was told to publish the indictments again, which it did, and the impression was given that the facts alleged in them had been proved. They had not. ← 75 | 76 → The defendants were deported to Germany where they were imprisoned until the end of the war. As Maurice Ribet harshly put it, the old marshal had capitulated once again. Vichy had both lost face in public and irritated the Germans. A trial of politicians which had started for reasons of pure political expediency was closed for precisely the same reason. It was, as Henri Michel says, a combination of opera buffa and tragedy – rather like the Vichy experiment itself.