The Historiography of the Holocaust

408 Donald Bloxham
infamous anti-Jewish Statutes in 1940–41, which reflected the entrenched,
though non-genocidal, antisemitism of the anti-Dreyfusards.) 53
The three trials of the 1980s and 1990s were to some extent representative of
the loci of criminal culpability in wartime France. 54 Barbie, tried in 1987, was
a Gestapo agent; Paul Touvier, tried in 1994, was an officer of the Milice, the
paramilitary police of Vichy; Papon, tried in 1997–98, was a Vichy civil servant.
55 One common peculiarity was that the matters they examined, in terms of
both Vichy’s Jewish policy and the nature of collaboration and its counterpart,
resistance, had already received pretty fulsome treatment in the historical
literature. In each trial the tension between the ‘memory’ of the ‘Final Solution’
and that of collaboration and resistance would be played out with varying
results, but with the common factor of serving to blur or falsely polarize the issues.
As attempts by the state to make a statement, they were clumsy, compromised,
in terms of their legal bases, and, in the Papon case, in terms of its outcome, in
ways that mirrored the ongoing struggle in the socio-political sphere of the French
with their past.
The Barbie case seemed the most straightforward, as a trial of a German
rather than a Frenchman. The new Mitterrand government seized on the
prospect in 1983 in an attempt to commemorate the Resistance, since Barbie’s
best-known crime (in France at least) had been the murder of the Resistance
leader, Jean Moulin. However, Barbie had also presided over the arrest and
deportation of more than 40 Jewish children who had been in hiding in the
village of Izieu. And of the two crimes, the only one it was legitimate to try in
the 1980s was the latter. The former, a more conventional ‘war crime’, was
subject to an exhausted statute of limitations; only ‘crimes against humanity’
under the Nuremberg definition had been declared imprescriptible in French
law, in 1964. That category had explicitly, if not entirely clearly, been set apart
from war crimes at Nuremberg to cover the sheer extremity of Nazi campaigns
of extermination of civilian populations, and did not extend to crimes committed
against an irregular combatant force such as the Resistance. 56
In the event, in 1985, after lengthy debate, the Court of Criminal Appeals
amended the definition of crimes against humanity. Now it read that crimes
against humanity included:
inhumane acts and persecutions which, for the sake of a State practising
a policy of ideological hegemony, were committed systematically not only
against individuals because they belonged to a racial or religious group, but
also against adversaries of this policy, whatever may be the form of their
opposition. 57
While Israeli law had rejected the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ in
favour of a more exclusive ‘crimes against the Jewish people’, French law had