The Resistance and especially collaboration are embodied in multiple
places in Paris. ---- Johanna Lehr offers a memorial and historicaljourney in occupied Paris. The initial questioning is ambitious. The
Parisian Jewish population represented 150,000 people before the war.
Nearly half of the Jewish deportees from France (35,000 out of 74,000)
were Parisians. While many left the capital during the roundups,
historians estimate that 60,000 Jews lived in Paris in 1943. For the
author, the question is how 27,000 Jews continued to live in Paris
despite the roundups and racial laws implemented by the French state
without being forced to hide while suffering discriminatory policies. To
create this story, the author proposes to conduct a district-by-district
study of the places and people who participated in the exclusion of
Jews, but also of those where Jews could continue to live in precarious
conditions under the constant threat of supposed illegality. Full of
examples taken from the different places of repression, she shows how
the structures for isolating Jews worked. She begins her research with
the depot of the Paris police headquarters, which is directly under the
direction of the Minister of the Interior, and which mostly sends Jews
to the Drancy camp in police vans and not in buses to avoid the
compassion of the Parisian population. The majority of Jews taken to
Drancy were taken by line 51 leaving from the Porte de la Villette, as
she shows in the dedicated notice. They were then interned in the Cité
de la Muette before being deported. Then, the courthouse where
magistrates judge the offenses that incarcerate Jews under different
grounds, one of the main ones retained by the author being the absence
of a declaration of Jewishness. Paradoxically, the imprisonment of Jews
implied a greater chance of escaping deportation than release, which is
why many magistrates strongly imbued with anti-Semitism broadened the
arrests. In the second arrondissement, the general commission for Jewish
questions very rarely declared certificates of non-membership of the
Jewish race. Johanna Lehr analyzes the 15 places that participated in
the system of repression against the Jews of France, showing that if
they were allowed to survive the spirit of Vichy and its institutions
wanted to end up with the disappearance of the Jews. She also shows that
the purge, except in exceptional cases, was particularly lenient towards
the agents of racial persecution.
Paris was also the place where collaboration was expressed. The Gestapo,
the Nazi political police, sought in all occupied countries to rely on
local auxiliaries who knew the terrain and the local populations better
than the occupying forces. The Nazis were not too particular about the
origins of their henchmen. In France, it recruited from the Milieu,
entrusting some places to henchmen ready to do anything to serve the
occupier, like the buildings on Avenue Foch occupied by the Nazi
counter-espionage services where crooks with their own offices, like
René Launay and Pierre Loutrel, tortured resistance fighters or the one
on Rue de la Pompe in which the Belgian crook Friedirch Berger did the
same. Their actions were at the origin of the death of Pierre
Brossolette or the young people of the waterfall of the Bois de Boulogne
on August 17, 1944. The most famous of them remains, the rue Lauriston,
located at 93 of the street still in the very chic 16th arrondissement.
The Carlingue as its occupants nicknamed it was the headquarters of the
gang of two high-flying thugs released from prison to put themselves at
the service of the new power. The gang nicknamed Bonny and Lafont
reigned terror in Paris for several years. Pierre Bonny is a former cop
suspended for embezzlement and Henri Lafont a former pimp. Their
advantage for the SS is their address book and their ability to gather
information thanks to the underground network of the milieu. In exchange
for the services offered, the members of the gang can behave as they
wish, they live as one can imagine more than lavishly, these
"untouchables" can cause road accidents, knock down children, they get
away with it without the slightest investigation. In exchange, results
are required in tracking down resistance fighters and in helping to
arrest Jews. Thus, they succeed in bringing down the Defense of France
and Combat networks by arresting and turning some of their members. At
the same time, from 1943 onwards, they launched punitive expeditions
against homes suspected of belonging to Jews on the one hand and against
Resistance sites in the provinces on the other. Following an operation
led by the local Resistance in Dijon, the Gestapo sent Bonny and
Lafont's men to take charge of the operations. In a few days the network
was dismantled and the resistance fighters were either shot or deported.
The following year, the crooks, aided by new auxiliaries called the
North African Brigade, activists and crooks from Algerian nationalist
circles, descended on Montbéliard then on Corrèze and Dordogne to wipe
out a few resistance fighters from Tulle to Périgueux. The men proceeded
with the same determination, with the help of cynicism Laffont carried
out savage arrests among the population. The prefect, who was in charge
of reprisal operations against the resistance fighters, negotiated with
the crooks for exchanges of food and spirits for prisoners. Back in
Paris, the men of the Carlingue were ready to do anything to recover
money from their victims. At the Liberation, the time for reckoning
came. Quickly arrested, they were tried and some of them were
immediately executed. Some see their sentence commuted like José
Giovanni who after a few years in the green resurfaces in the world of
detective novels... the bastards sometimes have a hard life to take up a
detective novel title.
Finally, Fabrice Grenard's work also shows that Paris was the capital of
the Resistance. In 100 dates, he recalls how the first groups were
formed in occupied Paris. The first tried to join England to continue
the fight, but very quickly groups remained there. From July 1940, acts
of sabotage were committed. Etienne Achavanne was thus shot on July 4,
1940. His isolated acts were superimposed on the more numerous ones of
the production of counter-propaganda made of leaflets of tracts then
newspapers like Résistance the official bulletin of the National
Committee of Public Safety. The prisoners were not left out, they
deserted and often constituted the first nuclei of armed resistance
fighters. It was in Paris that the first forms of public demonstrations
of hostility to the Nazis were born with the demonstration of November
11, 1940. The author multiplies the examples of passive and active
resistance. June 21, 1941 arrives, which changes the nature of the
resistance, the PCF switches to armed action at the request of the
Communist International. The work multiplies the examples, With many
illustrations, it underlines the symbolic weight of the capital in the
brilliant actions, but also the often forgotten role of intelligence and
finally the extension of the forms of resistance to the whole country. A
work as useful as it is richly documented.
Johanna Lehr
Au nom de la Loi
Gallimard 2024 288 p. 22 EUR
David Alliot
La Carlingue
Tallandier 2024 560 p. 24.90 EUR
Fabrice Grenard
The Resistance Years 1940-1944
Tallandier 2024 288 p. 29.90 EUR
https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8079
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