Nazi trial: Papon's sins put post-war France in dock

Maurice Papon served the French state with distinction for nearly 50 years. Today, at the age of 87, he goes on trial in Bordeaux for "complicity in crimes against humanity" for his role in the deportation of Jews by the "Vichy" regime in 1942-44.

Is Papon simply a scapegoat for a nation's bad conscience? Why try him now after 53 years?

The facts of the case are scarcely in dispute. Maurice Papon, as secretary-general to the police chief in the Bordeaux area, organised the arrest of 1,558 Jewish men, women and children in 1942-44.

Papon does not deny it: he cannot: the documents, bearing his signature, in stiff, pompous French officialese, still exist. "I have the honour to report to you that the convoy of 443 jews which left Bordeaux on 26 August arrived at the station of Le Bourget ... "

Mr Papon and his lawyers say that he had no choice; that his role was just a formality; that he managed to rescue, in his own chilling phrase from another contemporary memo, "interesting Jews".

The three-month trial will turn on whether, as he claims, Papon was a cipher. Or whether, as the prosecution claims, he was a willing, efficient and energetic tool of genocide, not from anti-semitism, or pro-Hitlerism, but from self-interest: in other words from careerism.

The Papon trial will convulse France because it raises other questions which it has no legal jurisdiction to answer. How is it that Maurice Papon survived the purges and prosecutions of Vichy collaborators? How did he pass, seamlessly, into the provisional post-war regime of General Charles de Gaulle, a man he had previously described as a traitor? How did he continue to thrive after the war when he became, successively, Paris police chief, Gaullist MP; commander of the Legion d'honneur; and budget minister under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing?

The answer to all these questions is that France willed it that way and that the man who first willed it that way was De Gaulle, the man who incarnated resistance to Vichyism.

Papon is a living symbol of the myth deliberately fostered by De Gaulle in 1944-45 that Vichy was the aberration of a wicked few: that the remainder of France was divided between the heroic resistance and the innocent victims of occupation.

As the war ended, De Gaulle was not preoccupied by the holocaust. He was more concerned by the disaster which had almost befallen France. His aim was to restore, as rapidly as possible, a sense of French greatness. In particular, he wanted an instantly functioning state which would forestall triple potential evils: Communist takeover; civil-war; and - by no means the least evil in De Gaulle's eyes - a humiliating Anglo-American administration.

Tens of thousands of middle-ranking Vichy officials - some of whom, like Papon, had belatedly and cynically helped the resistance when Germany began to lose the war - survived into post-war government. In the words of Marc Olivier Baruch, Jewish-French historian of the Vichy bureaucracy: "It is clear that General de Gaulle preferred at the liberation an inspector of finances (who had served Vichy) over a resistance fighter who had sowed his own stripes on his shirt."

There were thousands of official trials of collaborators, large and small, and tens of thousands of unofficial executions. But, in both cases, the Vichyists who were targeted were those who had directly fought the resistance or had been responsible for the deportation of French forced labourers. There were no trials of officials accused specifically of involvement in the deportation of Jews.

De Gaulle's choices were, in a sense, vindicated. National unity was rapidly restored; France was accepted as one of the victors of the war; and the foundations were built for three decades of rapid economic and social progress ("les trentes glorieuses"). But as Mr Baruch also says, the decision to bind the wounds of Vichy with much of the poison trapped inside helps to explain why "the wounds are still running today".

The strength of the far-right National Front (FN) is one symptom of that poison: two of the most powerful currents of support for the FN are Vichy apologists and anti-semitic, diehard Catholic traditionalists.

From the Seventies, a series of books and a very influential movie - The Sorrow and the Pity - began to prise the country's bandages apart. For a while, it was fashionable on the left, and abroad, to believe that most of France had collaborated willingly with Nazism. This, too, is a false picture. But it is true enough that the vast majority of French people accepted Vichy at first; that there was little organised resistance until 1943; and that there were few church or official voices raised against the persecution of the Jews.

Hundreds of courageous French people did, however, help individual Jewish families to survive. More than 80,000 French Jews, and French-based Jews perished in camps in Poland, or in France, but another 175,000 - proportionately far more than in other occupied countries - weathered the war.

Papon is an uncomfortable symbol of French history precisely because he, like France, muddled through Vichy and thrived post-Vichy. His past caught up with him in 1981 but it has still taken 16 years to bring him to trial. There was considerable resistance to the prosecution in the French state, not least from the late President Mitterrand, whose own involvement in the early years of Vichy remains murky.

What good will the trial do? Prosecutors and Jewish groups say the question is irrelevant. Papon played a part in the greatest crime of the century and, even at 87, should be forced to face up to his actions (he has never shown the least sign of remorse).

On the wider, political and moral questions of how the trial will affect the French psyche, opinion is divided. On the far right, and in parts of the centre right, the trial is dismissed as a pointless or damaging circus. But a recent poll in the magazine L'Express suggested that the great majority of French people - 72 per cent - approved of the prosecution.

Almost two-thirds of French people regarded Vichy as a live and relevant issue today. Younger people - those under 25 - were especially insistent that Vichy was something close and important to their lives and not a closed chapter.