PAPON, MAURICE (b. 1910)

EARLY CAREER
POSTWAR CAREER
THE RETURN OF THE PAST
BIBLIOGRAPHY

French Vichy government official.

Maurice Papon served as general secretary of the Gironde prefecture from 1942 until the Liberation of France in August 1944. On 2 April 1998, convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and deprived of his civic rights in criminal court. As a former official of the wartime Vichy government who subsequently enjoyed a brilliant administrative career in the highest echelons of government, Papon's conviction came more than fifty years after his participation in the arrest and deportation of some 1,560 Jews during the German occupation.

EARLY CAREER

Papon was the son of a notary. After studies in law, literature, politics, and economics, he undertook, at age twenty-one, a career in public administration, first in the aviation ministry, then moving onto other government posts. Although in 1936 he supported the left-wing Popular Front, four years later Papon rallied to the National Revolution led by Philippe Pétain. In 1941 he was appointed director of the cabinet of the general secretary in the Ministry of Interior, which was headed by Maurice Sabatier; he followed the latter to the occupied zone when the prime minister, Pierre Laval, appointed Sabatier to head the prefecture of the Gironde region in Bordeaux. In June 1942 Papon's appointment as secretary general of the Gironde placed him in charge of law enforcement and Jewish issues. Rigorous and diligent, Papon promptly organized roundups of Jews, who were sent to the transit camp at Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz.

As the end of the Nazi occupation drew near, Papon put himself at the disposal of Gaston Cusin, who had been named regional commissioner of the French Republic in Bordeaux. Cusin, in search of high-ranking civil servants who belonged to the noncommunist resistance, named Papon to become prefect, or administrative head, of the Landes region. Although the Committee of Liberation raised objections, Papon's nomination was confirmed by a commission in charge of purging the administration of collaborators.

POSTWAR CAREER

In the postwar period, Papon embarked on what became a brilliant career in the highest levels of government. In 1945 he served in the ministry of interior and two years later was appointed prefect of Corse. Four years later he was transferred to the administration in Constantine, Algeria, where he served as prefect; and in 1951 he became secretary general of the prefecture of police in Paris. In 1954 he was appointed to Morocco, then a French protectorate, before returning to Algeria in May 1956. Meanwhile, he had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1948 and was later elevated to the rank of Officier.

In March 1958 Papon was appointed prefect of the Paris police district, a post that he would occupy until 1967. Under his authority the Parisian police brutally suppressed a peaceful demonstration for Algerian independence organized by the Front de Libération National (National Liberation Front, FLN) on 17 October 1961. The number of Algerians killed has never been determined with accuracy, but estimates range from forty, as reported by the government, up to as high as four hundred.

Papon was forced to resign in 1967 in the wake of the Ben Barka affair, in which the French police were revealed to be complicit in kidnapping the leader of the Moroccan resistance movement. Briefly, Papon served as president of the aircraft manufacturing company Sud-Aviation. But in 1968 he returned to government when he was elected to the national assembly and subsequently appointed to preside over its budget commission; later he served as finance minister (1978–1981) in two successive governments led by Raymond Barre.

THE RETURN OF THE PAST

Papon certainly had little reason to expect his past in the Vichy administration would return to haunt him. But on 6 May 1981 the newspaper Le canard enchaîné published an article revealing Papon's role in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux. At Papon's initiative, a panel composed of former fighters in the French Resistance met on 15 December 1981 and agreed that Papon had belonged to the movement, a claim subsequently corroborated by a card identifying him as a volunteer, which Papon had managed to obtain in the late 1950s. However, the panel argued that Papon should have resigned from his post at the head of the administration of the Gironde in July 1942.

Nevertheless, on 19 January 1983 some victims pressed charges, and Papon was indicted as complicit in crimes against humanity. A long period of judicial wrangling ensued, lasting over a decade. The trial, which finally started 8 October 1997, lasted about six months. It aroused great interest in the media, which at times spotlighted Papon, alert despite his age—he was eighty-seven—who was determined to defend his image as a former resistance fighter, and sometimes focused on the question of government complicity in the deportation of French Jews.

After his conviction in 1998, and the denial of his appeal in October 1999, Papon attempted to escape custody but was apprehended in Switzerland and returned to prison in Fresnes, near Paris. On 18 September 2002, he was freed on grounds of ill health by the Paris Court of Appeals, which was applying a new French law (4 March 2002) that ordered release of prisoners for whom incarceration put their life in danger. Papon's judicial saga did not end there, however, but continued to play out like the trial, as the condemnation of a man and the wartime French administration alike.

Seeking to rehabilitate his good name, Papon addressed the European Court of Human Rights. He obtained a preliminary victory on 2 July 2002 when the court in Strasbourg decided that the French courts had prevented Papon from receiving a fair trial. The European court said that the French appeals court had erred on 21 October 1999, when it denied his appeal on the grounds that he had not surrendered to authorities. Encouraged, Papon now did appeal his sentence, but it was denied on 11 June 2004. Papon was also fined 2,500 euros on 14 October 2004 for illegally wearing the medal of the Legion of Honor.

The French state's responsibility for the acts committed under the Vichy regime was affirmed by the Conseil d'É tat, the high administrative court, which stipulated that the facts for which Papon had been sentenced were not only the result of his misconduct but also the fault of the French government, in whose name he acted. The state, in a judgment handed down on 12 April 2002, was to be held responsible for half the court-awarded damages Papon owed as a result of the civil action against him.

By the way it played out, a media frenzy with extensive use of historians as expert witnesses, the trial of Maurice Papon, more than any other similar proceeding up to the present, ended by bringing to light ambiguities in the relationship of justice to both the memory and the history of Vichy France.

See alsoCollaboration; War Crimes; World War II.