Maurice Papon

Maurice Papon, collaborator, died on February 17th 2007, aged 96

AMONG the ranks of the French civil service, it would be hard to find a more perfect example than Maurice Papon. Well informed, elegant yet self-effacing, he had the confidence of a man who had passed with smooth diligence through some of the best lycées in Paris. In his prefectures, with the tricolour furled behind his desk, instructions were carried out to the letter and correct form was followed. Un fonctionnaire, as the tag went, est fait pour fonctionner: the purpose of a bureaucrat is simply to do his job.

The Germans who occupied Bordeaux found Mr Papon easy to work with. The secretary-general of the prefecture of the Gironde, as he became in 1942, proved courteous and pleasant, an admirable officer of the Vichy regime that had been set up, in ostensible neutrality, to govern France alongside the Nazis. Occasionally, on delicate issues, he would hide behind his boss, the prefect; but in general he was dependable and “correct”. He could be relied on not merely to do what Vichy and Berlin asked, but even to go further.

And he was a busy man, in charge of traffic, petrol rationing, requisitions and Jewish questions. These were two: status (identity, parentage, whether baptised) and Aryanisation (transfer of their property to non-Jews). Mr Papon had to arrange the seizure of Jewish shops, lands and jewellery across the whole region, their valuation and their sale by auction. In July 1942, in a first report, he noted that he had “dejudaised” 204 businesses, while 493 others were “in the process of dejudaisation”.

That summer he also received other orders. He was to round up a “sufficient number” of Jews and send them to a staging camp at Drancy, in northern France. And he was to make such convoys regular. This meant ordering arrests, arranging police escorts and organising express trains that would not stop at stations. He managed it with his usual competence. Between 1942 and 1944 1,690 Jews were shipped out of Bordeaux, including 223 children. Most ended up in Auschwitz.

Had he known they would? No, he insisted later, nor did he have any inkling of the Nazis’ broader plans. He had certain fears about Drancy. But people had to understand that he was not a free agent. There was a German imperium in force; Vichy was subject to it and he, after 1940, obedient to Vichy. With the coming of the Nazis numbers of civil servants had been sidelined or silenced, but he had a job to do, and “desertion was not in his ideology”. There was a duty to survive, to keep things running, to avoid gratuitous provocation that might make a bad case worse. In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable.

These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon’s trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity. Hundreds more might have been charged, including

all those who worked for him. But once the Vichy leaders had been executed for treason after the Liberation, a different imperative prevailed: to keep France united, to avoid recriminations and to draw a veil over the past. In this new version of history all Frenchmen had resisted, including those who were now intent on quietly protecting each other. In his mind Mr Papon, too, had spent the Occupation fighting.

For almost four decades after the war he continued his steady upwards climb. He was prefect in Corsica, in Morocco and in Algeria; after 1958 he assumed charge of the Paris police, under orders from de Gaulle to “hold the city” against rioting Algerian nationalists. Those orders, as usual, were carried out with maximum efficiency; in one operation in 1961 up to 200 Algerians were killed, their bodies for days afterwards dragged out of the Seine. He had done his duty, Mr Papon said later. He had kept order. The Légion d’honneur was conferred on him, joining his treasured medal of the Resistance.

By 1981, now deputy for Cher, he had reached the cabinet as budget minister. Punctiliously, he was going after the rich who were evading taxes. But at the same time the families of the Jews hehad deported were going after him. Lists and reports, carefully filed away, were discovered in corners of the town hall in Bordeaux. An article in Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical weekly, forced his resignation from government; 16 years of languid inquiries and technical hitches followed. His eventual trial, in 1997–98, was the longest in French history. It ended with a sentence of ten years in prison, of which he served three until ill health excused him.

In court, assured as ever, he played the scapegoat. He felt no remorse, had no regrets. He had done his job. Most days, a walking affront to the self-delusion of France, he would appear with his yellow dossier underneath his arm. He would lay the papers out neatly before him, making constant notes. At one point, when a psychiatrist was called, he objected. He was not insane. Though perhaps, he added bitterly, he was mad to have stayed so long in the service of the state. n