Papon’s
Paper Trail

Bordeaux is the town where France goes to give up. It was where the French government retreated from Paris under fire from the Prussians in 1870, and again from the kaiser’s armies in 1914, and where, in June 1940, the French government fled in the face of the German advance and soon afterward met not just the fact of defeat but the utter depth of France’s demoralization. A. J. Liebling wrote of those days that “there was a climate of death in Bordeaux, heavy and unhealthy like the smell of tuberoses.” He recalled the wealthy men in the famous restaurants like the Chapon Fin, “heavy-jowled, waxy-faced, wearing an odd expression of relief from fear.” Though the bad peace was ruled from the spa town of Vichy, Bordeaux is the place that gave the surrender its strange, bitter, bourgeois character: a nation retreating from cosmopolitan Paris back to la France profonde.

Bordeaux has always been a trench coat–and–train station, 1940s kind of town, and despite the mediocre, concrete modern architecture it shares with nearly all French provincial capitals, it remains one. The Chapon Fin is still in business, but it is not deathlike—merely nervous and overwrought, in the way of French provincial restaurants since the capitalists trimmed down and the only market left was German tourists.

In the spring of 1998, Bordeaux was invaded again, this time by battalions of lawyers, broadcasters, historians, and journalists, who had come to attend or participate in the trial of Maurice Papon—the former secretary-general of the Gironde, of which Bordeaux is the capital—for complicity in crimes against humanity fifty-five years ago, during the occupation. The Papon trial was the central, binding event of the past year in France, a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove. It was the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history.

On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, April 1, the invasion of the media became an occupation; what seemed like every European journalist resident in France, and a lot of Americans too, descended on the little square outside the Palais de Justice. The convenience of having La Concorde, a stage-set grand café right across from the Palais (doors open to the spring weather, bottles of good wine lined up on the wall), gave the end of the trial a strangely hilarious, high-hearted, yet self-subduing party spirit—a combination of Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party and the Nuremberg trials.

Despite the mob, the national allegiance of every journalist was instantly recognizable. French journalists wear handsomely tailored jackets and share with English rock guitarists the secret of eternal hair: It piles up. Americans, rumpled and exhausted before the day begins, seem to be still longing for Vietnam. Even walking up and down the steps of the Palais, they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible dog tags. What really depressed them was the knowledge that their stories about the procès Papon would sneak into the paper only “between blow jobs,” as one said bitterly. The British alone were exhilarated, bouncing around in bad suits. They all speak French, they all knew they would be on the front page, and secretly they knew too that their readers would not be completely unhappy with a story whose basic point was that all foreigners were like that.

The great Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld waited outside the courthouse too. He is in his sixties, spreading at the middle, and was dressed in a black jacket and cloth cap. “If Papon is found guilty, then the appareil of the state will be held responsible,” he was saying to another journalist. “The French people will be saying that there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures.” Behind him, members of his group, the Association of Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France, were reading out the names of Jewish children whom Papon was charged with having sent to their deaths.

A few moments later three British journalists rushed into La Concorde, having just heard the accused man’s last speech. Like all of Papon’s interventions during the trial, this one was sonorous, unremorseful, and full of literary and artistic reference. As soon as he finished, the three judges and nine jurors had gone to deliberate 764 questions of guilt or innocence, with a tray of sandwiches to see them through the night. The three Brits now sat down and ordered wine and roast chicken, and one began reading his translation of the speech as the others ate: “He said that it was a double scandal, something about Camus in here. Oh, yes, his wife’s favorite writer was Camus.” The reporter looked down at his notes and deciphered. “They killed his wife . . . I think.” Papon’s wife of sixty-six years had died, at the age of eighty-eight, the week before the trial was to end. “ ‘In their desperate . . . desperate search,’ I think you’d put it, ‘for a crime, they have killed her with . . . petits esprits.’ What would you say? Small guns? Small steps? Little blows? Little blows. De Gaulle gave her a Légion d’Honneur.”

“ ‘With his own hands,’ ” one of the other journalists added, consulting his notes.

“Oh, yes. God, yes. ‘With his own hands.’ Then there was . . . Oh, yes. Here’s when he turned to the prosecutor: ‘Sir, you will go down in history—but through the servants’ entrance!’ ” The reporter looked up, his eyes amused. “Well, that’s not bad. Now something here about the absence of Germans. Oh, yes: ‘Throughout the stages of this strange and surreal trial, there has been a notable absence of Germans.’ A Notable Absence of Germans—sounds like a Michael Frayn play. Then something odd about Abraham sacrificing Isaac in Rembrandt, a ray of light? Staying his hand. Anyone get that?”

Everything came to a halt as a crowd of journalists who had gathered around the table tried to call to mind the light of an early Rembrandt, struggling to keep up with the tight web of cultural allusion spun by a French war criminal.

“Well, anyway,” the British reporter resumed, “he called it the most beautiful light in painting. I still don’t get it. He’s comparing himself to the Jewish child about to be killed? Well, it’s a point of view. Anyway, he stayed the hand. So that’s it. Camus, his wife, no Germans, servants’ entrance, bit about the light, Rembrandt, and then the sandwiches were sent in,” he concluded decisively.

“Anyone see what kind of sandwiches?” an American reporter asked anxiously. The Brits laughed. But a little later the man from the L.A. Times said that he had seen the sandwiches go in, and he was confident that they were ham.

 

When the French government in Bordeaux surrendered, in 1940, it was replaced by the right-wing Vichy government under the direction of Maréchal Pétain, the great French hero of the First World War. The Vichy regime passed anti-Jewish laws that summer, before the Germans even demanded them. Two years later, at the Nazis’ demand, Vichy began deporting Jews, including children, from all over the country. Although “only” 25 percent of the Jews in France were sent to death camps, this is, as the historian Robert Paxton has pointed out, a derisive figure: Jews in France were the most assimilated in Europe. If there had not been fiches and dossiers in place at the prefecture, the Germans would have had a hard time finding Jews to kill.

No one disputes that from 1942 to 1944 Maurice Papon, the secretary-general of the department of the Gironde, signed documents recording the arrest, assembly, and deportation of more than 1,500 Jews, including 220 children. The rafles took place between July 1942 and May 1944. The documents show that the deportees, some French, some refugees from the East, were to be sent to the transit camp of Drancy, outside Paris. Then they were to go to a destination inconnue. The unknown destination was Auschwitz.

Papon’s history after the war is also public knowledge. By the end of 1943 Papon had begun to cooperate quietly with the resistance, and even sheltered an important Jewish résistant. Then, at the liberation, he delivered the prefecture to the resistance and, despite the complaints of a few locals, began a spectacular rise in the postwar French bureaucracy as an haut fonctionnaire. In the late fifties he became the head of the prefecture of police in Paris and, in the seventies, budget minister in the government of Giscard d’Estaing. (The division between hauts fonctionnaires and politicians in France is fluid; there were five hauts fonctionnaires in the cabinet that signed the armistice with the Germans. Today, 41 percent of the members of the National Assembly are civil servants on leave.)

Then, in 1981, Michel Slitinsky, a Bordeaux Jew who had escaped the deportations, met a historian named Michel Bergès, who had been doing work on the role of the local wine negotiants during the war. Bergès had stumbled on some interesting documents recording what the prefecture under Papon had been doing at the same time. Slitinsky eventually helped deliver the documents to the satiric newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné. Later, two more Bordelais, Maurice-David Matisson and René Jacob, made formal accusations against Papon. (A Frenchman can bring a charge against another Frenchman to the attention of a magistrate, who may then investigate it.) President Mitterrand did everything he could to delay the trial. French justice is under the control, or anyway the influence, of the president; Mitterrand must have felt that opening old Vichy cases was not in anyone’s interest, especially his. It was only in 1995 that a formal indictment was handed down. Last October, Papon was brought from his house outside Paris to Bordeaux to stand trial.

The trial began in October and was expected to end in December, but it went on until the poisson d’avril—April Fools’ Day. The cast of characters in the courtroom, as the trial was reported in manic detail in the Paris papers, seemed noisy and fantastic. French courtroom decorum allows far more time than would be acceptable in an American or British court for free questioning, speechifying, digressive material, and moral instruction directed by whoever is in the mood to give it toward whoever he thinks deserves to get it. This lent the event an interestingly literary air. There was the lawyer for the accused, Jean-Marc Varaut, the author of grandiloquent books on famous trials: one on Oscar Wilde, one on Jesus. There was a stream of historians: Bergès, now bizarrely on the side of the defense; the universally admired American Robert Paxton, the greatest of Vichy historians; and Henri Amouroux, “of the Institute,” the most well-known historian to appear for the defense.

There was Serge Klarsfeld, whose son Arno was one of the leading civil prosecutors in the trial. (In a French courtroom, four or five separate prosecution teams—some civil, some from the government—can all argue the same case, each in its own way.) Arno drove the other prosecutors crazy. At the last minute he pleaded for a lesser penalty for Papon than perpétuité, the life sentence, demanded by the parquet, the prosecuting government authorities. And during the trial he led a move to have the presiding judge barred, on the ground that a relative of his had been among the deportees. (This may have been a preemptive strike, to keep the defense from raising the same point.) Then, after the motion failed, he took it on himself to disassociate Papon from other, worse war criminals, like Paul Touvier and Klaus Barbie, whom his parents had also helped bring to justice, announcing that, unlike them, Papon had merely signed papers. Since the whole point of the trial was to establish that signing papers was itself a crime, the other prosecutors understandably developed an even more intense dislike of Arno. Arno became the event of the trial. Out of the black robe and white kerchief that French lawyers still wear, making them look like perpetual Daumier drawings, he could often be seen in jeans, with his shirt hanging out. He is handsome, but in a modelish way, with too much hair and too open a collar. For a while before the start of the trial, he lived with the model Carla Bruni and had been photographed in Paris Match with her on a romantic vacation in Venice. Most days he arrived at the Palais on Rollerblades. Even in America this would have been controversial. In France it was regarded as just short of mooning the judges.

Above all, there was Papon himself, pompous and aging and erect and unrepentant. For the first time in a French war crimes trial, there was a figure of sufficient Mephistophelian stature to excite a moralist. Papon may have been evil, but he was certainly not banal. According to the rules of French trials, he was allowed not just to speak but to pontificate, and from the courtroom came daily dispatches recording, in the sonorous, Gaullist tones of the high estate, his views on the trial and the witnesses brought against him. “This testimony is moving in both its nature and the dignity with which it was given,” he said of one witness. Or again, “I cannot help but express my emotion in the face of this sober, painful account. It brings back heart-wrenching memories.”

The trial failed to clarify its subject, for reasons that were partly complicated and French, partly universal and human. The universal and human reason was that Papon was an old man being tried as an accomplice to murder. Complicity is hard to prove in any courtroom, and old men make bad culprits. Papon was sick—too sick, the doctors said, to be held in prison during the trial—and his wife was even sicker; after he went home for her funeral, there were those who thought that he might not come back. Whenever it seemed that the accusers had assured the necessity of his conviction, Papon stumbled, or fell sick, or a confused memory intervened, and one was reminded that here was a very old and decrepit functionary. Whenever one wanted to leave the verdict to the historians, one was reminded by some piece of heartbreaking evidence—a few words about a wife, a mother—that here in person was the instrument by which the French state casually delivered children to their murderers. We will have justice, said the ghosts. I will soon be one of you, said the guilty man. The trial went on for six months—too short a time to try Vichy, someone said, and too long a time to try Papon.

There is an idea, beloved of American editorialists, that the Vichy regime itself was on trial in Bordeaux and that France was finally “confronting its repressed past.” This is a myth. The French have been obsessed with the details of Vichy for at least twenty-five years. Almost every bookstore keeps a shelf of books devoted to these four years of France’s thousand-year history. Frenchmen of the left and of the right long ago accepted that Vichy was made possible by the German army but followed homegrown right-wing ideology, and was broadly popular.

What was on trial in Bordeaux was not Vichy but something more: l’état, the state itself, through the acts of one of its most successful representatives. The French war crimes trials of recent years, from Barbie the Gestapo man to Touvier the militiaman to Papon the fonctionnaire, have been moving closer to the heart of the French identity. The idea of l’état, the state, and its representatives, the hauts fonctionnaires, has a significance in France that is incomprehensible to Americans, for whom it means, at best, the post office. L’État suggests far more than the mere sum of the civil service. It has the authority that the Constitution has in America, that the monarchy until recently had in Britain. (Serge July, of the newspaper Libération, has even referred to “the religion of the fonction publique.”) The state is the one guarantor of permanence in a country where neither the left nor the right can quite accept the legitimacy of the other side.

In France the state intervenes between the nation, the repository of racial memory, beloved of the right, and the republic, repository of universal rights, beloved of the left. Its presence lets them coexist: The state keeps the nation from becoming too national, and the republic from becoming too republican. In France the state suggests the official, disinterested tradition of service; it means the functioning and unity of the country; it means what works. When one of the lawyers at the trial, trying to give an interview in English, was prompted with the term civil servant as a translation for what Papon had been, he repeated it and then visibly gagged, as though he’d swallowed a bad oyster; the idea of associating the word servant with the social role he was describing was just too weird.

The cult of the state makes France run. Yet every cult comes at a price. The price of constitution worship, as in America, is to make every personal question a legal question—so that every pat on every bottom, every swig on a bottle, and every pull on every cigarette seem likely to have, eventually, a law and a prosecutor of their own. The price of state worship, as in France, is that real things and events get displaced into a parallel paper universe; the state is possible only because everything has been neatly removed from life and put in a filing cabinet.

The abstraction extends into every corner of French life. The girl at the France Télécom store who is asked for a new fax ribbon finds it, places it on the counter beside her—and then spends fifteen minutes searching through her computer files, her inventory, for some evidence that such ribbons do in fact exist. The ribbon on the counter is an empirical accident; what counts is what is in the system. The reality is the list; the reality is the document. This French habit of abstraction, unlike, say, the German habit of blind obedience, is difficult to criticize, because it is linked to so many admirable things. It is linked to the French gift for generalization, for intelligent living, for the grand manner, the classical style. It not only makes the trains run on time but makes them run on time to places one would like to visit. But it was this national habit of abstraction, with its blindness to particulars, that was, in a way, on trial.

The irony was that a French courtroom attended by the French political classes was the last place to defeat, or even to test, the compulsive habit of abstraction. The language of French lawyering, like the language of the institute and the academy, is an étatiste language. Inside and outside a French courtroom, abstractions pile on abstractions, and by the end you are so distracted that you are unable to face plain facts: children in a cattle car being delivered to a death camp. It was not just that you could not see the trees for the forest. It was that you could not see the forest because it was covered by a map.

So the documents involving deportations that bear Papon’s signature might have been official orders authorizing actions, but—crucial difference—they might have been official memorandums, recording for the benefit of the regional prefect, Maurice Sabatier, who was Papon’s boss, actions already taken, a type of document that belongs in a different filing cabinet. Bergès, the historian who found the documents, was persuaded to testify that this was in fact the case. Papon was, in his own words, a mere téléphoniste—a receptionist, taking messages and creating memorandums. Then what to make of Sabatier’s delegating to him, among other things, responsibility for Jewish affairs? Ah, but—understandable, though lamentable, confusion—this Department of Jewish Affairs was a recording bureau, not to be confused with the governmental Department of Jewish Affairs, which organized the deportations and the convoys. Papon was responsible for Jewish affairs only in a secondary sense. Anyway, he did whatever he could to protect Jews; look at the memos in which he struggles to see to it that Jewish children are sent to their parents! But those children were being sent to parents who were already dead and were therefore being sent to their own deaths. Where on paper can that be shown to have been understood? Within the paper universe of the prefecture, the unorthodox act of attaching children’s files to their parents’ was an act of respect for families, whatever the sad distortion in the world outside. And Papon actually insisted that the cattle cars, wagons à bestiaux, be replaced with passenger cars. But if he was capable of ordering the change of cars then . . . No, here again you are confusing the technical decisions of the prefecture with the policy directives of Paris—or, in this case, of Paris and Vichy. In any case, Maître Varaut, Papon’s lawyer, demanded, seizing on the prosecutors’ uncertainty about how hard to press their case, how could one talk about degrees of guilt in a crime against humanity? Either one was implicit in mass murder or one was not. Any other claim was illogical. One could not be 60 percent guilty, or 30 percent guilty. The paper chain proved guilt or it did not.

Only the victims seemed quite real. Marcel Stourdze, a deportee who traveled back and forth from Paris to Bordeaux every day, in order not to miss a day, testified, “When I went back to Auschwitz after the liberation, I saw that in an enormous vat they had saved all the hair. I thought that I saw the hair of my wife. Today all that hair has become white. But at the time it still bore the color of those we had loved.”

 

One of the shocks the trial offered involved the events not of 1942 but of 1961. At that time, when Papon was the head of the Paris police, the city and federal police had taken part in a massacre in which approximately two hundred Algerian demonstrators died. It was toward the end of the Algerian War, and Algerians in Paris, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, broke a curfew and marched to the center of the city. There had been Paris policemen killed in the preceding month, and as the march pressed on, a kind of murderous free-for-all began. Many of the demonstrators, bound hand and foot, were drowned in the Seine. (The details of this atrocity, which took place in the center of Paris, remain murky and obscure.) A partial glimpse of the records of the crime appeared only last fall, in the newspaper Libération.

This was regarded as good news for the defense—it showed that Papon had nothing particular against Jews—but it was also seen as an attempt by the left to equate the mistakes of the Gaullist regime during the Algerian civil war with the crimes of Vichy. What came to fill the gap of real issues was, inevitably, contemporary politics. The first people to feel the sting of the Papon trial were the Gaullists, and Philippe Séguin, the leader of the remaining Gaullist party, was the first political leader to denounce the trial. De Gaulle himself, Séguin felt, had come under attack. Papon, after all, had been allowed to continue in the fonction publique and had been regularly promoted by Gaullist politicians.

The right discovered a response in an 850-page book called Le Livre Noir du Communisme, the Black Book of Communism, which appeared last November, shortly after the Papon trial had begun. It is an encyclopedia of Communist atrocities around the world, from 1917 to the present, all scrupulously recorded and presented, with a tally of a hundred million deaths. The Black Book became the subject of a polemic, focused indirectly, as everyone understood, on the procès Papon. Were the crimes of the Communists really comparable to the crimes of the Nazis? And if they were, didn’t that make the entire apparatus of international communism, including, of course, the French Communist party and its intellectuals—slavishly Stalinist for so long—“complicit” in another way too? Were the fiches in the prefecture the only ones that mattered or could acts in that other paper universe, of poems and manifestos, be complicit in murder too?

 

After the jury retired, the journalists waited for the verdict at La Concorde. The wine was good, a generic Merlot, and every table was taken. Nine o’clock became ten, the clouds of smoke thickened, and the gaiety rose as, one by one, filing deadlines for the next day’s paper passed. Twelve o’clock and the French journalists are off the hook; three o’clock and the Brits are off! Only the Americans are going to have to file late tonight, no matter what. But then, around three-thirty, the big news comes in. The Paula Jones case has been dismissed; whatever anyone files is now set for page 2. Mildly annoying to the newspapermen, this news is disaster for the independent television crews. “I can hear them now,” one cameraman says moodily, deep in his cups. “ ‘Ship it, ship it.’ ” (“Ship it” meaning “Don’t even try to put it on the satellite” is the TV equivalent of “We’ll call you.”)

The owners of La Concorde had learned, over the months of the trial, that American journalists cannot be outdone in their pitiless pursuit of truth and blank restaurant receipts. To cries of “Fiche, fiche, fiche,” the waiters slap one down with every order. A gloomy Dutch newspaperman at one table is telling stories about how often he has broken big stories, but in Dutch. “No one knows. No one cares,” he says. “Cheesus could come back tomorrow, but if he comes to me, they’ll know it only in Amsterdam.”

The British journalists, deadlines gone, drink whiskey and begin to reminisce about other, kinder war crimes trials, where you didn’t have to stay up all night for the verdict. “Take the Barbie trial,” one says. “Everyone knew what the verdict would be, but the jury waited until just after midnight to announce it; that way they got an extra day’s pay, six hundred francs. We all went out and got drunk with the jury and the lawyers, and then we filed and were all on the boat train home and back in London in time for dinner. Now, that was a trial for crimes against humanity that wasn’t a crime against humanity.”

The Klarsfelds wander in and out, waiting for the verdict like everyone else. They have been cast as wreckers, loose cannons, pursuing some odd, private agenda. Seeing them together, certainly, one finds the connection between stolid, impassive father and mercurial son hard to grasp. Daniel Schneidermann, a television journalist who has written a book about the trial, argues that the horror of their family history—Serge’s father was a deportee who died in Auschwitz—has left an “emptiness” inside Arno, the emptiness of a world that, since the Holocaust, has been abandoned by God. It is probably true that Arno’s aggressive gestures—the Rollerblades, the jeans, the rude interjections in court—are meant to show a certain distaste for the whole pompous system, for the parallel paper universe in all its dignity. But it is also possible that metaphysics aside, the Klarsfelds just have a shrewder take on the possibilities of the trial than their more sophisticated confreres. They understand that only an “intermediary” penalty, only some finding of guilt for Papon clearly distinguished from the great guilt of the real killers, will seem plausible to a Bordeaux jury. They are struggling to articulate, in the rhetoric of the courtroom, that there are gradations of guilt, styles of complicity, even in the Holocaust. To treat Papon as though he were equivalent to SS killers, like Barbie, is, in a sense, to draw a line again around the killings, with pure evil on one side and innocence, by implication, safely on the other.

Among the people and the talk and the stories, one bald, hard-looking man in his seventies, drinking his cognac and coffee, never leaves his table. “Who is he?” a newcomer asks.

“Nobody knows,” one of the women from the wire services answers. “He’s been here every day since the trial began. He hassled some of the women, but then he gave it up.” She lowers her voice. “A lot of us think he may be the man from the FN.” The FN, the neo-Fascist National Front, is the phantom of Vichy that everyone wishes would go to sleep.

At four-thirty in the morning it was announced that the verdict would arrive at eight. A lot of the American reporters went back to their hotel rooms, opened their windows to let in the French spring air, and turned on CNN to watch the news about the Paula Jones dismissal. It was hard, one reporter commented afterward, not to think about the extravagant good fortune of a country that had trials like that to worry about. Another, watching James Carville and Susan Carpenter-McMillan on Larry King, said that he found it hard, particularly after months of trying to decode French verbal combat, to remember which was which: Did the two Americans on TV actually hate each other, despite the smileyness and forced good humor? Or was the hatred the pretense, and the reality the professional prizefighter’s camaraderie? He had, he said, been away from America too long to remember.

By eight everyone was back at La Concorde. Serge Klarsfeld was waiting too. Someone asked one of the Brits, who had been there all night, if anyone had any instincts about what was to happen.

“None,” he said.

“No one was persuaded?”

“No one was sober,” he replied.

Shortly after nine a middle-aged woman rushed into the café. She was stout and squarely built and was bent over as she ran. She had both palms held out straight in front of her, fingers spread. It was a strange, lamenting posture, like that of a Greek mourning figure.

She ran over to Klarsfeld. He nodded and wept briefly, and they held each other. Ten! The spread fingers meant that Papon had been given ten years. “And everyone against us,” Klarsfeld muttered. It was a victory for him and for Arno; the jury had found Papon guilty of complicity in crimes against humanity, but not of mass murder.

Outside, the children of the deportees came to meet Klarsfeld, clasping one another and kissing cheeks. They were stout and old and plain; evil may sometimes be banal, but virtue, to its credit, always is.

In front of the courthouse the argument had already begun. “It isn’t enough of a penalty!” someone cried. “You go serve ten years,” Klarsfeld said, pushing him gently. The stout lady kept saying, “It was double or nothing, the parquet”—the government prosecutors—“wanted double or nothing.” She said “double or nothing” in English. Klarsfeld said, “He was not Touvier, and he was not Barbie. The ultimate responsables were the Nazis. After you have looked a real Nazi in the eye, you know the difference with Papon.” For the most part, the civil parties and the reporters who had been with them for six months were disappointed. “Ten years! Ten years is what you give a housebreaker,” one exhausted French journalist said.

Somehow, back in Paris, the verdict seemed more tolerable. Paradoxically, the trial had concentrated so exclusively on Papon’s role in Bordeaux in the forties that it had redrawn his picture, making him once again a mere prefect. In reality, he had not been one more face among the fonctionnaires but one of the highest, one of the great men of state, a cabinet minister. But this was a Paris reality, not a Bordeaux one, and it was only back in Paris, where the ministerial Papon could be recalled, that the scale of the achievement in Bordeaux registered. A great man of state, protected by the state, had been pursued for crimes by pitifully ordinary people—and despite that, he had at last been held responsible. It wasn’t the victory over abstraction that Camus had died dreaming of. But this time nobody gave up.

In a way, the jury in the Palais de Justice had even, over sandwiches, used their imaginations to make some necessary retrospective law, and they had done it well. By saying that Papon didn’t know where the trains were going, and also saying that he was guilty of crimes against humanity, they were making the right and courageous point. To deliver a child to the secret police is as large a crime against humanity as you ever need to find, no matter where you think he is going or what kind of car he is going to travel in. The men with stamps and filing cabinets now couldn’t plead procedure any more than soldiers could plead orders; the appareil of the state would have to understand that their fiches represented people, whether they were Jews or Algerian demonstrators or refugees yet to come. The parallel paper universe now had a window.

 

I had explained to Luke, over the course of the trial, what was going on and why I was away: A bad man had long ago done wicked things to little children, and now he would be put in jail for it. When I came home, he asked if they had put the bad man in jail, and I said, well, yes, they had. “And when the bad man got put in jail, did all the children come out?” he asked.

Of course, they hadn’t even really put the bad man in jail. Papon remained free for almost another two years in various appeals—unusually so for a convicted man in France—and then, on the eve of his incarceration, fled to Switzerland. It seemed clear from the circumstances of his flight that he had some kind of internal help from the French functionary state. But he was found, quickly, within days, and brought back to France and locked up at last. In his flight he had taken the alias of La Rochefoucauld, the great French skeptic, a man of culture to the end.