Francois de Menthon

On the afternoon of 17 January 1946 the French Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, a forty-five-year-old Catholic philosopher and Resistance veteran named François de Menthon, rose to deliver the French opening statement. He spoke for two days. The text was the most consciously moral and philosophical of the four chief prosecutors’ openings. It was also the one most explicitly framed in the categories of European Christian humanism. Where Jackson had spoken in the language of common law and equity, where Shawcross would speak in the language of the rights of man, where Rudenko would speak in the language of Soviet anti-fascism, de Menthon spoke in the language of the natural law tradition that ran from Aquinas through Suárez to the modern Catholic social teaching of his own century. The opening has been less quoted than Jackson’s or Shawcross’s. It is in some respects the most carefully argued of the four.

De Menthon was an unusual figure for the role. He had been a professor of public economy at the University of Nancy when France fell in June 1940. He had been an officer in the French army, had been wounded and captured at the fall of France, had escaped from prisoner-of-war captivity in early 1941, and had returned to France to co-found the Resistance movement Liberté, which merged in November 1941 with two other movements to become Combat. He had been one of the senior figures of the internal Resistance throughout the German occupation. After the liberation of Paris he had served as Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Justice from September 1944 to May 1945, in which role he had presided over the early prosecutions of Vichy collaborators, including the trial of Pétain.

The opening

The opening de Menthon delivered on 17 and 18 January 1946 was structured around a single thesis: that the Nazi regime had been not merely criminal in its acts but criminal in its essence, a doctrine of the negation of human nature. He argued, in the opening passages:

Germany, having returned to a particular conception of the world, has thrown all the great writers of her own classic period into the dustbin, has revoked the inheritance of Christianity, has rejected the philosophy of the Enlightenment, has refused the tradition of universal humanism, and has cast herself back into a barbarism worse than the barbarism of her ancestors, because in the ancestors there was at least the natural innocence that those who have known and rejected civilisation can never recover.

The argument was, by the standards of an opening at a criminal trial, philosophical to an unusual degree. De Menthon’s defence of it was that the Charter’s invocation of crimes against humanity required the prosecution to articulate, with some precision, what the humanity in question was. He continued:

What France particularly demands of you is that you affirm, by your judgment, that international law and the rights of nations are based, not on the will of states, but on a higher law, on a moral order that subsists in the conscience of every man, in every age, and that no power on earth can alter.

The framework he was advancing was the natural-law framework that would feature, three years later, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as drafted under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt and the substantial influence of de Menthon’s fellow Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The two openings, the philosophical one at Nuremberg and the rhetorical one in the Universal Declaration, are the principal Catholic humanist contributions to the postwar international order. They have not aged. They have, in different forms, become the working language of European human rights jurisprudence over eighty years.

The case on the western occupations

The French prosecution’s substantive case at the IMT was on the German occupations of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and the other western countries. The case included the looting of art and gold, the deportation of forced labour, the extraction of resources, the killing of hostages, and the deportation of Jews from the western countries to the killing centres in the East. De Menthon led the case on the deportations of French Jews. The prosecution put into the record the train manifests recovered from the Drancy transit camp, the records of the Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up of July 1942, and the names of senior German officials who had supervised the operations. Seventy-six thousand Jews had been deported from France. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-four had returned. The case was the foundational legal record of the deportations from France.

De Menthon’s domestic political position made the French prosecution case unusual in one respect. The German occupation of France had been carried out partly through the collaboration of the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain, of which several senior figures, Pierre Laval, René Bousquet, Maurice Papon, Pétain himself, were French citizens. The IMT’s jurisdiction was over German defendants. The French prosecution had to present the case on the deportations from France in a way that established German responsibility while leaving the parallel French collaboration cases to the French courts at home. De Menthon managed this in part by emphasising the German chain of command at every stage and by treating the Vichy collaborators as having been the instruments of the German policy. The treatment was politically convenient for the de Gaulle government. Subsequent French historians, particularly Robert Paxton from the early 1970s onwards, have argued that it under-stated the Vichy regime’s enthusiasm for the deportations. The French prosecution at Nuremberg cannot be entirely cleared of the charge of softening the Vichy story for political reasons.

Afterwards

De Menthon did not deliver the French closing argument; he had returned to French politics by July 1946 and the closing was given by his deputy Auguste Champetier de Ribes. He served in the Fourth Republic French parliament as a deputy of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, the Christian Democratic party. He was a member of the European Coal and Steel Community Common Assembly from 1952, of the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly, and of the European Parliamentary Assembly that became the European Parliament. He was, alongside Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer, one of the principal Catholic political figures in the construction of postwar European integration. He held no further ministerial office in France but was awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit.

He retired from active politics in 1968 and died at Annecy in June 1984 at the age of eighty-three. His personal papers are at the Sciences Po archives in Paris. The opening he delivered at Nuremberg has been republished in a 2006 critical edition by the French Ministry of Justice. It is read, in extract, in French and Belgian law schools as the foundational text of the European natural-law tradition’s contribution to international criminal law. The lines on the moral order that subsists in the conscience of every man have been reprinted on the wall of the courtroom of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. They were what de Menthon, who had spent four years in Resistance work and had lost colleagues to German firing squads at Mont-Valérien, had thought worth saying when he had been given two days to address the bench at Nuremberg.

See also

Sources

  • International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol V (de Menthon opening), Nuremberg, 1947
  • François de Menthon, Vers la quatrième République, Editions des Cahiers du Monde Nouveau, 1946
  • Étienne Fouilloux, Au coeur du XXe siècle religieux, Editions Ouvrières, 1993
  • Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940 to 1944, Columbia University Press, 1972
  • Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, Fayard, 1983 to 1985
  • Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Cornell University Press, 2006