Crimes of the Commune

The Law of Hostages, introduced by the leaders of the 1871 Paris Commune, was a response to stories that the Versailles Army of Adolphe Thiers was executing captured Communards. It was actually modeled on the 1793 Law of Suspects, rather than the similarly named act passed by the Directory in 1799. The difference, I suppose, is that the Law of Suspects was passed in a time of national emergency, whereas the Law of Hostages was intended as an act of terror and intimidation, aimed against those who took a different political position from the Communards. The text of the act justifies the measures taken as follows;

...that the government of Versailles tramples under foot the rights of humanity as those of war; that it is guilty of horrors that have not even sullied the invaders of French territory...All persons accused of complicity with the government of Versailles shall be decreed accused and imprisoned...the jury will pronounce judgement within twenty-four hours; all the accused detained by the verdict of the jury shall be the hostages of the people of Paris; for every execution of a prisoner of war or a partisan of the legal government of the Commune will be followed by the execution of three times the number of hostages.

This decree became law on 6 April, 1871. Although passed by the Council of the Commune no action was taken for some weeks. But there were those like Raoul Rigault and other extremists, who took their inspiration from the likes of Gracchus Babeuf and Auguste Blanqui, who saw in the Law a way of advancing their own political and ideological ends. And high among their objectives was the destruction of the French Catholic Church. The Committee of General Security, a body set up by Rigault, and packed with his associates, duly ordered the arrest of Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, and other clerics.

The whole thing was complete error of judgement; not only was Darboy far from being the kind of cleric so hated by the left (he had attacked the doctrine of Papal Infallibility) but his arrest played right into the hands of the Versailles press, which argued that the fight was simply against common criminals.

Darboy and the others were eventually shot, an act of political terrorism that served as a model for Lenin and all those who later attempted to walk in the path of the Commune

Ana in Paris

Paris really is lovely at this time of year. I spent the Easter weekend in the city, the second time I’ve been in as many weeks. I’ve been so often now that the city might be thought to have lost its capacity to charm, surprise and delight. Not so; even walking down familiar paths is a comfort and a reassurance.

I went this time with my boyfriend, playing out all of the old romantic clichés of young lovers in spring-time Paris, hand-in-hand along the banks of the Seine, lunching in little out of the way restaurants on the left bank, sitting in the chestnut groves of Versailles. It’s a welcoming city; the stones are welcoming, the broad boulevards and the little hidden squares; a city for lovers; a city for dreamers.

The one thing I often do when in the city is to visit the Conciergirie, the old royal castle that was used a prison during the Revolution of 1789, the place where Marie Antoinette lived prior to her execution in October, 1793. It’s possible to see a reconstruction of her cell, a place that fills me with poignant sadness, with thoughts of prisoner 280, as she was known. There is perhaps no figure in history that comes closest to fulfilling my sense of high and tragic romance than the beautiful Austrian princess, the wonderful, incomparable Marie Antoinette. I pass in silent tribute, wearing my blue fleur de lys scarf.

Aimless Absolution

I know the papacy is going through something of a rough patch at the moment. Even so, is it right and proper, I have to ask, to extend the inquisition (oops!) back through history? I ask this because I was surprised to see a small portrait of Jacques de Molay, the grand master of the Knights Templar, in the present issue of the BBC History Magazine, carrying the caption “Jacques de Molay was tortured and killed by the pope.” Fortunately the accompanying piece, an answer to a question about the Chinon parchment, makes no such contention.

De Molay was, of course, tortured and killed on the orders of King Philip IV of France. Not only was it a convenient way of wiping out his debts with the Crusading order, who also acted as his personal bankers, but it was a wonderful opportunity for the impecunious monarch to get his hands on their loot. The master was arrested along with over six hundred fellow members of the order on a charge of all sorts of heretical and blasphemous crimes, the kind of acts that would have kept tabloid journalists busy for weeks.

Submitting to pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V banned the Templar Order. De Molay himself was burned in March 1314 as a relapsed heretic, on the orders of the King, I stress once again, and not the Pope. The pressure Clement was under at the time was confirmed when Dr Barbara Frale found a copy of the so-called Chinon parchment in the Vatican Secret Archives, confirming that he absolved de Molay and other leading members of the Order in 1308, subsequent publishing her findings in The Journal of Medieval History. The purpose of this particular inquisition was to show that the Templers were not irremediably immersed in sin but were capable of reform under the guidance of the church. In the face of Philip’s determination it was a wasted effort.

The parchment is notable in one other regard: it might be said to mark the point when the state began its ascent and the universal church its decline, its decline from a position of almost absolute political power that had been such a feature of the papacy of Innocent III, only a century before.

A Tale of Collaboration

This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of the Fall of France in May 1940. It’s time, I think, to reflect on what followed; time to reflect on how the French conducted themselves during the ‘dark years.’ It’s not a comfortable picture.

France, of all the countries attacked and invaded by the Nazis, is almost in a unique position in that it retained its own government, a distinction shared only with the Danes. It’s salutary to compare the two examples. There was collaboration in Denmark, yes, though only to a limited degree. The spirit of national independence and self-respect was kept alive and symbolised in the person of King Christian X. Throughout the occupation the Danes consistently resisted German pressure to introduce discriminatory laws against the country’s Jewish minority. Danish Jews never had to wear the yellow star. When discussing the possibility that they might, Christian remarked to his chief minister “perhaps then we should all wear it.”

Now look at France. It’s still wrongly assumed by some that the government of Philippe Pétain was imposed by the Germans, that it was a puppet administration. It was not. Pétain’s government was legally constituted after the Chamber of Deputies granted him plenipotentiary powers, effectively voting the Third Republic out of existence.

It’s also wrongly assumed that his authority only applied in the unoccupied zone whereas in fact he had control over government agencies in the whole country, including the civil service and the police. In 1941 the Germans had a mere 30,000 troops in the occupied zone, most concentrated in the costal areas opposite England. At this stage control would have been all but impossible without active and widespread collaboration.

Ah, but there is collaboration and there is collaboration; the Danes at a minimum, the French at a maximum. Nowhere is the contrast greater than in French treatment of the Jews. There was, of course, a strong pre-war tradition of anti-Semitism in France, a tradition that found full expression in the policy of the Pétain government.

The French police were active in rounding up the Jews on the authority of Vichy, even exceeding German expectations. Drancy Concentration Camp in the suburbs of Paris was set up by the French and run by them until 1943. In the notorious Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942 some 13,000 people, including children, were taken, eventually being sent to Auschwitz. In the south Jews took refuge in those areas occupied by Italy, where in the acutest of ironies the fascists offered them greater protection than their own government.

It seems to me that France of these years is not best depicted in the face of the semi-senile Pétain or even in that of Pierre Laval, his sleazy-looking premier, but in the likes of Joseph Darnand, the head of the notorious Milice, and most particularly in that of the altogether loathsome Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.

Yes, there were resisters and there is eternal and honourable example of Jean Moulin. But the resisters were a tiny minority in a nation of active and passive collaborators. Many of those who did resist were killed not by the Germans but by other French people. A nation of resisters was a post-war myth created by a country anxious to bury so many aspects of its recent past.

The truth is that French conduct under the occupation if not cowardly was supine in the extreme. Not a good example by any standards; not a good example when contrasted with other nations who had not the same historical reputation to defend. It’s a sorry and wretched tale.

France-Revolutions Never Glorious

The problem for France was that the Revolution of 1789 had taken history at a rapid trot through several stages, effectively creating some serious fault lines in civil society, the underlying structures of law, culture, society and political tradition that help sustain more stable forms of constitutional development. Put this another way: in the brief period from 1789 to 1791, France covered the kind of political ground that had taken close on a hundred years in England.

Thereafter, the Revolution went into overdrive, pushing matters to an extreme undreamt of by even the most radical of the English Whigs. One by one, as Edmund Burke had predicted in Reflections on the Revolution in France, civic and political institutions were knocked flat, until only the army remained; and with the army came Napoleon; and with Napoleon came dictatorship. Napoleon overcame the weakness and the fractures of civil society by force and by force alone.

A return to more traditional forms of rule would demand high degrees of political awareness and sensitivity. Above all it would require an understanding that politics in France had undergone a fundamental change, that there could be no return to the older forms of absolutism. Progress would therefore require the kind of partnership between the crown and the dominant sections of the civil community, in essence the solution of the Glorious Revolution.

But the Bourbons came back in the person of Louis XVIII and, more particularly, in the person of Charles X, having learned nothing and forgotten everything. Tensions built, only to be released not in a mature parliamentary system, but by the valve of revolution. It might even be said that in the period from 1815 to 1870, French history played out many of the events of the Great Revolution in a kind of slow motion.

The monarchical solution failed in all of its forms, Bourbon, Orleanist and Napoleonic because it was too narrowly conceived; because it lacked firm foundations, party foundations, in society; because it lacked a clear sense of direction and commonly accepted goals; because it failed to heal the fractures of the past. In the end only the Republic would do, the form of government that divided the French the least; tolerated not for what it was but for what it was not.

Death on the Metro

I’ve not long finished a truly beguiling article in the January issue of History Today, written jointly by Annette Finley-Croswhite and Gayle K. Brunelle. Headed Murder in the Métro, it concerns the mysterious fate of one Laetitia Toureaux, found dying in May 1937 in a first class carriage with a knife through her neck, in what shows every sign of being a professional assassination. The crime caused a sensation at the time because it was the first ever murder in the Métro and because the French press played the crime up in lurid detail thereafter. Although heavily investigated at the time no witness was ever found and no convincing suspect was ever produced. It is a crime that remains unsolved to this day.


The death of Laetitia could so easily have been forgotten like so many others, then and since, as history and events quickly pass over such small and personal tragedies. But it’s a crime that casts a little light into some of the darker corners of pre-war French political life, to a world of violent intrigue, terrorism and counter-revolution.

Laetitia herself, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of her death, was found to have some very shady political associations. Of working-class background and Italian origin, she worked in a glue factory during the day though she clearly ambitious to improve her condition. She was a social climber slightly on the model of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. She also liked to socialise in some of the nightclubs in the more sordid parts of Paris, in places where she was known as ‘Yolande’ by the pimps and prostitutes. It was also in these places that she met men who shared her right-wing politics, the fascism she professed. At some point in 1936 she became the lover of Gabriel Jeantet, a wealthy intellectual with political ambitions and extreme right-wing views. But Laetitia was a dangerous commodity; for she was also a paid police spy, a mouche, to use the contemporary jargon.

In the January after her murder, with the case not that much further forward, the police began to suspect that her death had political overtones, that it was a professional assassination linked with the murder in the same year of Dmitri Navachine, a Russian economist, and Carlo and Nello Rosselli, two Italian anti-fascist exiles. The murders of the Navachie and the Roselli were traced to the extreme-right Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, better known as the ‘Cagoule’ , the ‘hooded ones’, an orgnaisation violently opposed to the Third Republic and the then Popular Front government of Leon Blum. One of their aims was to overthrow the government by violent terrorist action. Jeantet, Laetitia’s boyfriend, was in charge of arms-smuggling operations.

In 1936 and 1937 the Cagoule was responsible for a series of crimes, including bombings in Paris and at least seven murders. On more than one occasion they attempted to assassinate Blum himself. Throughout France Cagoule militias stockpiled arms with the help and support of Mussolini’s Fascist government in Italy. Jeantet met Mussolini in person on a number of occasions and may have brought Laetitia with him on at least one of these occasions.

After an abortive attempt to start an anti-government rising in November 1937, a number of Cagoulards were arrested. Under interrogation two of them, Rene Locuty and Frenand Jakubiez, swore that the organisation was also responsible for the murder of Laetitia. According to their testimony she was killed by Jean Filliol, the Cagoule’s principal hit-man, because it had been discovered that she was a police spy. Even with such a solid lead the case was still closed, an action which the authors put down to the complex politics of France before, during and after the Second World War. The Cagoule leaders were simply too well connected to pursue for the murder of an Italian immigrant with, as the authors put it, a shady love life and a penchant for espionage.

So, on the face of it looks as if Laetitia was no more than the victim of her circumstances. Doubts remain, though, over the exact circumstances leading to her death. There is reason to suppose, as Finley-Croswhite and Brunelle suggest, that it was not the Cagoule but the Italian Secret Service that was responsible for her death. The Cagoule, as a terrorist organisation, had little in the way of subtlety; its crimes, including its murders were open and excessive. Its victims were stabbed, bludgeoned or blown up.

Laetitia, in contrast, was killed in a highly professional manner by a silent and anonymous assassin, who left barely a trace of blood before the police pulled the knife from the dying woman’s neck. At the time the police investigation discovered that she had fallen foul not just of the Cagoule but of the Italians. She was known to have inside knowledge of the plan to assassinate the Roselli. It was also known not long after that she was a police informer. The suggestion is that rather than trust the Cagoulards with her disposal-there had already been two abortive attacks on her-the Italians brought in their own operative. Again, though this was a reasonable conclusion, it was not pursued because of the sensitive diplomatic implications. Laetitia was a little person caught in big events, of no importance to anyone.

So, this poor women’s personal tragedy was caught up in the history and politics of France and Italy. After the war her story was forgotten at a time when France was going through a collective ‘memory loss’ over so many aspects of its recent past. After all, even people as highly placed and respected as Francois Mitterrand had close ties with many members of the Cagoule in his youth. The story of Laetitia, as the authors conclude, forms part of France’s refusal to come to terms with the interwar era when so many French people sympathised with extreme right wing politics, fascism and anti-Semitism. With the passing of this generation a new willingness has arisen to look afresh at the past.

Father of his People

As an example of early modern kingship Louis XII of France bears quite a close relationship to Henry VII. Although he came late-and unexpectedly-to power, he acted with vigour, reforming the French legal system, reducing taxes and improving government, much like Henry in England. He also occupies the same ambiguous position in history, being both a late Medieval and a Renaissance monarch. His marriage to Anne of Brittany, conceived for political purposes, might also be said to parallel that of Henry to Elizabeth of York. Louis was also skilled in managing his nobility, including the powerful Bourbon faction, which greatly contributed to the stability of French government.

Although Louis' administration was not dominated by lawyers and financial specialists to the same degree as that of Henry, he was just as innovative. In the Ordinance of Blois of 1499 and the Ordinance of Lyon of 1510, he extended the powers of royal judges and made efforts to curb corruption in the law. Highly complex French customary law was to be codified and ratified by royal proclamation. Although he was less financially astute than the parsimonious Henry, he was reasonably careful, unlike many of his predecessors, with crown revenues. At the end of his reign the crown deficit was no greater than it had been when he succeeded Charles VIII in 1498, despite several expensive military campaigns in Italy. His fiscal reforms of 1504 and 1508 tightened and improved procedures for the collection of taxes.

The one big difference between the two monarchs was in military affairs. For Henry war was simply 'bad for business.' Louis, in contrast, through his obsession with the duchy of Milan, to which he had a claim in right of his grandfather, embarked on several campaigns in Italy. His greatest success came in his war with Venice, with the victory at the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. Things became much more difficult for him from 1510 onwards, especially after Julius II, the great warrior Pope, took control of the Vatican. Although his Italian ambitions unravelled, Louis managed to end his reign in 1515 as a well respected monarch, who had withstood a great European coalition of powers. He had duly earned the title of 'Father of the People', conferred upon him by the Estates in 1506

The Princess in the Tower

Ingeborg of Denmark is, perhaps the least fortunate of all the Medieval brides, a woman whose life was blighted for reasons that are still not entirely clear.

Those familiar with the tribulations of Katherine of Aragon may be interested to know just how 'fortunate' she was compared with Ingeborg, married to Philip Augustus on August 15, 1193, only to be rejected a day later. At the time Philip's only declaration was that he wished the marriage dissolved for 'bodily reasons'. His assumption is likely to have been that the whole matter would be over quickly; but he reckoned without the determination of the Danish princess, which had the effect of dragging the whole business out for twenty years, involving France in a dispute with the Papacy in the person of Innocent III, not a man to be tangled with lightly. Ingeborg was to be held prisoner in the castle of Étampes for more than ten years, from whence she wrote a heart-breaking letter to Innocent;


Set me free, from those who hate me, so that I shall not drown in the deep waters since I am being pursued for no reason. It is my master and husband, Philip, the famous king of the French...who wishes to scoff at my youth. Through isolation in prison he continues to torment me through his men...so that I shall conform to his wishes against the law of marriage and the law of Christ...I suffer from innumerable and unendurable indignities. No one dares to visit me, not even monks or nuns in order to comfort me, neither can I hear the word of God to strengthen my soul nor confess to a priest...I do not get sufficient food...I have no medicines to bear the weakness of humankind...I am not allowed to have a bath...I do not have enough clothes, and those I do have do not befit a queen...the detestable people who surround me, by order of the king, never give me any kind words, but torture me with sneering and offensive words...these things and others...make me tired of living.

History abhors a vacuum, and the gaps in this story have been filled with a variety of explanations. Amongst other things, it has been suggested that Philip may have suffered from temporary impotence on his wedding night, and developed an aversion to Ingeborg as a result, though she was always to adhere to her claim that the marriage had been consummated. We do know, though, that Philip came back from the Third Crusade with some unspecified disease, which seems to have affected his mental condition, bringing on periodic panic attacks. He even convinced himself that Richard I had arranged with the Assassins of Syria to have him murdered. However, the specific cause of his sudden rejection of Ingeborg cannot be determined with any degree of certainty.

Politically Philip's actions weakened his relationship with the Vatican, at the very apogee of its Medieval greatness. In 1213 Ingeborg was finally reinstated as Queen of France, although not as Philip's wife, thus ensuring he could be reconciled with Innocent. The Wikipedia article says that the reason for his action was to allow him to press his claim to the throne of England through his connection with the Danish crown, though no source is given for this statement. Besides, he had earlier tried to get the Danes to accept this claim as part of the marriage negotiations, though this was rejected by Canute VI, Ingeborg's brother

The Revolution was a mistake; long live the King!

One small thing helped to bring a little extra brightness to my day-a report that Prince Jean, Duke of Vendôme, has published a book calling on the French, groaning under the weight of public debt and moral decay, to admit that the Great Revolution was a mistake! In his book, Un prince français, a kind of royalist manifesto, he goes that one step further, calling for a restoration of the monarchy.

He is absolutely right of course, the Revolution and all that followed was an absolute disaster for France, as Edmund Burke anticipated. The record is there: a revolution drowned in blood followed by a brutal military dictatorship. What came after was weakened monarchical experiments, followed by a succession of unstable republics, punctuated by a comic-opera empire. Where he is wrong is to believe that contemporary France is without monarchy: that was reestablished by Charles de Gaulle in 1958 with the erection of the Fifth Republic, far more stable, so far, than all of its predecessors. One can never tell with the French. :-)

But the antecedents of the dear old Duke were part of the problem that ailed France, not the solution. He is a representative of the Orléans family, the junior branch of the French Royal house, and a descendent of the last king of France, the unglamorous, pear-like Louis Philippe, deposed in 1848. The senior branch, the House of Bourbon, overthrown in 1830, still exists and has a far superior claim to that of the Orléanists, treasonable in 1789 and treasonable thereafter.

Vive le Roi!-just as long as he is not the Jean III, erstwhile Duke of Vendôme.
:-))

The Army of Crime

I always make a point of keeping up with the latest productions of the French cinema industry, seeing what I can, when I can, where I can. I have a particular interest in anything to do with life in France during the German occupation, movies like The Army of Shadows and Lacombe Lucien, the first about resistance, the second about collaboration. So, off I trotted at the weekend to see The Army of Crime (L'armée du crime), directed by Robert Guédiguian, now on limited release in this country.

The story centers around a resistance cell in Paris, later depicted after their execution in the infamous Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), a widely distributed poster in which the Vichy authorities tried to show resisters not as liberators but as criminals. The cell itself was largely made up of foreigners, headed by Missak Manouchian (played by Simon Abkarian), an Armenian poet who lost his family in the Turkish genocide. Although some limited success is obtained in hit and run attacks on the Germans, the cell is finally destroyed after the assassination of a senior officer.

What might surprise people who know little of the historical background is that the worst persecutors of the resistance-and the worst torturers-were not the Germans but the French themselves, in the shape of the police force. Though the active pro-German faction, the fascists among the so-called Paris collaborators, was of no great significance, the Germans were greatly aided, both in combating resisters and in rounding up Jews, by the agencies of the French state. The director makes no concessions to any residual national sensitivity here: the police are shown bussing Jews to Drancy and the notorious Vel d’Hiv, transit points for Auschwitz. There are also shown torturing suspected partisans in the most hideous manner, which I take to be a truthful account. The moral corruption and venality of the police is well-captured in the character of Inspector Pujol, played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin

The movie itself is, well, worthy but largely unfocused. It rambles slightly and there are too many overlapping plots, overlapping lives. It’s certainly interesting though, given the subject matter, I found it surprisingly unengaging. It’s simply too ambitious, too broadly conceived to serve the purpose that Guédiguian intends. I don’t think The Army of Crime could ever have been a great movie, but with a little more discipline, fewer characters, a little more structure, and a firmer story-line it might have been more than simply a good one. Even so, I much preferred it to the inane Inglourious Basterds.