CLINTON, BLAIR, AND VICHY

In a pedagogical sense, the trial was quite an achievement. Most people agreed that Papon was the consummate careerist, representative of the bureaucratic age in which he prospered. There was much to admire about him — his toughness, his mental agility — and he did help the French resistance at certain junctures. While it was established that he had knowledge of the deportations, it was not established that he knew of the Final Solution.

Yet there was a twistedness about Papon’s careerism that was exposed by the string of incredible lies he told on the stand. He denied any active participation in the deportations, fobbing that off on either the functionary directly above him (the prefect, who had all the authority) or the one directly below him (the director of the office of Jewish affairs, who knew all the details). As the trial began, Papon claimed he had stayed in his post in order to rescue more Jews — although he was fuzzy on the particulars. He said he had received a machine gun from the Israeli government in thanks for his aid to the fledgling state after the 1948 war. It turned out to be a merchandising sample distributed to foreign ministries by an Israeli company. His worst lie came when he tried to say why, in August 1942, he had participated in hunting down and deporting hundreds of Jewish children who were then safely in hiding in Bordeaux, the Germans having lost track of them. The children’s parents, Papon explained, had sent for their kids. That was too much for the presiding judge, who broke in: “Please, Mr. Papon . . . these parents couldn’t send for anything! They were dead!”

It’s important to learn this — not just the historical facts, but also the self-deceptions the French have relied on over the years to avoid facing them. Still, that leaves the question of punishment, and here the prosecution ran into trouble. Papon’s lawyer, Jean-Marc Varaut, unlike the lawyers who have defended other accused criminals-against-humanity in France, was neither a grinning anti-Semite nor a showman who sought to turn the proceedings into a travesty. An expert on the Nuremberg trials, he showed that Papon — unlike earlier defendants Klaus Barbie (1987) and Paul Touvier (1993) — was neither a Nazi ideologue nor a torturer and that to try him under the crimes-against- humanity statute risked trivializing it.

The prosecution was laboring under that very tension. Three of the four major attorneys argued for the maximum penalty — life imprisonment. Said lawyer Michel Zaoui: “The crime against humanity, the supreme crime, cannot be punished except with the maximum penalty. Any lesser punishment would have effects even more catastrophic than an acquittal.” The fourth, Arno Klarsfeld (son of the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld), argued for an intermediate penalty that would see Papon convicted of “complicity” in crimes against humanity Klarsfeld’s view triumphed. Papon was sentenced to ten years and a 4.6 million franc ($ 750,000) fine, pending appeal Paradoxically, Klarsfeld’s demands for moderation in punishment made his theory of justice the more radical. For if Papon lives to finish his sentence, he will have “paid his debt to society” at the price of two-and-a-half days and $ 480.77 per victim. Zaoui had a point, and it was Varaut’s as well: The trial had, de facto, created the category of minor crimes against humanity.

Confusion about punishment was also evident in the left-leaning weekly L’Evenement du jeudi. The magazine invoked Robert Brasillach, the anti- Semitic writer of the 1930s and 1940s: “It is only right,” L’Evenement wrote, “that, thanks to this trial, we should relive a time when, in the long- civilized country of France, a Robert Brasillach could write, in all his anti- Jewish rage, “And above all, don’t forget the children.'” But if we were really reliving that time, we wouldn’t forget that Brasillach was hanged after the war. Had Papon been tried in Brasillach’s time, he would possibly have met a harsher fate. But had Brasillach been tried in our time, he would certainly have met a softer one.

Klarsfeld apparently did not believe the traffic of public opinion would bear the maximum sentence — even for a man implicated in 1,500 deaths. And there is reason to worry about what the public thinks it is getting out of such trials. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut supports them in the abstract, but warns that they can be an exercise in political correctness, giving an unearned moral uplift to a generation that fantasizes about how nobly it would have conducted itself had it lived through Vichy.

This danger grows as the events recede. Papon was disingenuous in trying to shift responsibility onto his superiors — but where were his superiors? Said Papon of his wartime boss: “Sabatier was still alive in the early eighties” — that is, after Papon had been implicated. “Why didn’t you talk to him?”

It’s a reasonable question, with chilling implications. One is that Papon is a somewhat arbitrary victim, and that however salutary his trial may have been for moral instruction, it set a dangerous precedent for individual rights. Another is that, if Papon is guilty, then the French not just of fifty but of five years ago covered up crimes against humanity As in fact they did. The late Francois Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, refused to acknowledge French responsibility for any of the Jews lost during the war, saying, “I won’t make excuses in the name of France.” Mitterrand meant that the real France — republican France — existed alongside the Fascist one and that the former could not be expected to apologize for the latter. There’s an irony here. This myth of two Frances originated with de Gaulle, Mitterrand’s arch-rival, who led the resistance from London. De Gaulle’s claim of la France eternelle, unsullied by fascism, can be defended — but not easily. And not by Mitterrand, who helped his friend RenBousquet — the Vichy chief of police, and a far bigger fish than Papon — avoid trial until Bousquet’s murder in 1992.

That explains the importance of current (Gaullist) president Jacques Chirac’s 1995 speech to commemorate 12,884 Jews of Paris, including 4,051 children, rounded up in dawn raids on July 16, 1942, and incarcerated in the city’s Velodrome d’Hiver, before being shipped east to their deaths. At a ceremony on the occasion of the fifty-third anniversary of the raids, Chirac said:

These dark hours soil our history forever, and are an injury to our past and our traditions. The criminal folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state . . . France, the nation of light and human rights, carried out the irreparable. Betraying its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners.

Note that this is not an apology. How could it be? The people who could accept it have all been murdered. The people who owe the apology have died too, largely unpunished. What Chirac did instead is something more mature: He took responsibility, even if it meant explicitly repudiating the Gaullist myth on which his party was founded. This speech is crucial to understanding the moral climate of France today. Without it, the Papon trial could be seen as an idle act of recreational vengeance on the part of a younger generation that knows little of Vichy — merely kicking the older generation as it descends into the grave.

Coming to terms with a shameful national past is traumatic, perilous, and difficult. It always means a good deal of arbitrary justice, as is visible not only in the Papon trial but also in the efforts of Eastern European countries to put their moral houses in order after communism. In the Czech Republic, the name given to the purging process is “lustration,” the dictionary definition of which is “purification by means of propitiatory sacrifice.” The justice that results will be neither comprehensive nor wholly “just.” But such propitiation is the only way to proceed with a moral accounting for regimes in which, as Vaclav Havel has written, the line between collaborators and resisters runs less often between factions than through individual hearts.

But despite the risk of arbitrariness, there are responsible ways of working through the dilemma and irresponsible ones. Lately, Chirac and the French have taken a responsible course, at real risk to Chirac’s political fortunes and the country’s self-regard. This course involves an accountability that sets it apart from the off-the-cuff apologies of Clinton and Blair.

For ancient offenses, taking responsibility is all one can do. Clinton’s near-apology for slavery didn’t go even this far: It was hedged on the advice of lawyers who warned that any explicit apology could lead to a finding for reparations under international law. Blair’s apology for the Irish famine did take responsibility, but it came so late that there were neither wronged relatives to make whole nor villains to punish.

Apologies for more recent offenses must be accompanied by repentance, or at the very least a Papon-style accounting. In this respect, Clinton’s gestures in Africa were disgraceful — particularly his apology for not having intervened in the Rwandan massacres of 1994. It was meant to salve America’s conscience rather than to compensate the Rwandans for our “sins.” There are still plenty of ways to make amends — paying massive “reparations,” for instance. And yet, although our Rwandan policy of four years ago was wholly of the president’s making, he didn’t see fit even to bring up the subject of restitution. Tony Blair’s apology for Bloody Sunday is similarly idle: If he thinks the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident was a crime, then he ought to put either the squadron leader or the prime minister at the time (Edward Heath) on trial.

One is left with the impression of repentance on the cheap, of politicians appeasing constituencies or consolidating power. Writing during World War II on the dangers of “national repentance,” C. S. Lewis attacked young Christian intellectuals keen to blame Britain for the war. “By a dangerous figure of speech, [the penitent] calls the government not ‘they’ but ‘we.’ And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a government which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice.” Champions of “national repentance” always criticize the sins of their fathers, like militarism and imperialism. Why, Lewis asked, do they never criticize their own sins, like self-righteousness and contempt for non-intellectuals?

Until they do, Lewis wrote, “I must think their candour . . . a rather inexpensive virtue.”

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.