Milice, France

The Milice française (the French Militia) was the paramilitary police force established by the Vichy government on 30 January 1943 to fight the French Resistance and to assist the Germans in the round-ups of Jews and other targets of the occupation. It was around 30,000 strong at its 1944 peak. It was led by Joseph Darnand, a First World War veteran who had become a senior Vichy security official and, from December 1943, secretary general for the maintenance of order. The Milice was the most ideologically committed instrument of French collaboration. Its members took a personal oath to fight against Jewish leprosy. Many of them transferred into the Waffen-SS in the closing months of the war. The Milice has, since 1944, been the part of the Vichy operation that French national memory has had the least difficulty condemning, because the Milice were French volunteers fighting other French people and could not be excused as conscripts in a state machine.

The founding

The Milice was founded by a Vichy law of 30 January 1943, succeeding the smaller Service d’Ordre Légionnaire that had been operating since 1941. The decree gave the Milice a national paramilitary structure with regional branches. Membership was voluntary. Recruits took an oath that included the formula I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection, and against Jewish leprosy. The oath has survived in multiple textual sources. It was administered to thousands of recruits.

The operations

The Milice conducted three principal types of operation: anti-Resistance combat, anti-Jewish round-ups, and political assassination. The anti-Resistance work included the major operations against the Glières plateau Maquis in March 1944, which killed around 100 Resistance fighters, and the Vercors operation of July 1944, in which a combined Wehrmacht-Milice force destroyed the Maquis stronghold of Vassieux-en-Vercors with around 600 Resistance and civilian dead. The Milice routinely tortured Resistance prisoners; the Milice torture cells at Lyon, Limoges and elsewhere were known and feared.

The anti-Jewish round-ups conducted by the Milice extended Vichy’s deportation operation into the formerly unoccupied southern zone. After the German occupation of the southern zone in November 1942, the Milice took over much of the practical work of finding and arresting hidden Jews in rural southern France. The work overlapped with the Klaus Barbie operation in Lyon: the Milice provided much of the local manpower for the Lyon Gestapo’s anti-Jewish work.

The Mandel killing and other assassinations

The Milice conducted political assassinations of opponents of the Vichy regime. The most prominent victim was Georges Mandel, a senior pre-war French politician of Jewish origin who had been imprisoned by Vichy and was murdered by Milice members in the forest of Fontainebleau on 7 July 1944. The killing had been ordered by Darnand. The killing of Victor Basch, the Jewish president of the League of Human Rights, and his wife, near Lyon on 10 January 1944, was conducted by Milice members on the personal orders of the Lyon Milice chief Paul Touvier. The Touvier case became, much later, the centrepiece of one of the longest-running French war crimes cases.

The Touvier case

Paul Touvier, the Lyon Milice intelligence chief, ordered the killing of seven Jewish hostages at Rillieux-la-Pape on 29 June 1944 in retaliation for the Resistance assassination of the Vichy information minister Philippe Henriot the previous day. Touvier escaped at the Liberation, was sentenced to death in absentia in 1946, and was hidden by elements of the French Catholic Church for the next forty years, principally in monasteries and Catholic religious houses across France. He was finally arrested in 1989 at a traditionalist Catholic priory in Nice. He was tried for crimes against humanity in 1994, the first French civilian to face that charge, found guilty of the Rillieux killings, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1996. The trial was a turning point in the French judicial reckoning with Vichy.

The end

The Milice fought on against the Allied advance and the French Forces of the Interior through summer 1944. Many Miliciens fled to Germany with the retreating German forces in autumn 1944 and were absorbed into the Waffen-SS Charlemagne Division, the French volunteer SS formation, fighting on the Eastern Front against the Soviet advance and ending the war in the defence of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945. Of the original Milice membership, around 7,000 men served in the SS Charlemagne in the war’s final months.

The post-war

The post-war French purges (the épuration) targeted the Milice with particular severity. Around 8,000 Miliciens were tried by French courts between 1944 and 1948. Several thousand were executed; tens of thousands received prison sentences. Darnand himself was captured in Italy in June 1945, returned to France, tried, and shot at the Châtillon range outside Paris on 10 October 1945. The Milice was the part of the Vichy machine that the post-war French state was most willing to prosecute fully, because Miliciens were unambiguously volunteers who had fought their fellow citizens.

What it was

The Milice is the case of the ideologically committed local fascist auxiliary, recruited from the most extreme of a country’s collaborators, used by the German occupier as the local instrument of the worst of the work, and discarded at the Liberation when its services were no longer required. The Milice is what the Vichy operation looked like at its most committed and least excusable. It killed Resistance fighters, it killed Jews, it killed political opponents, and its members took personal oaths to do so. The post-war condemnation of the Milice has been one of the few clear-cut chapters of French national memory of the period.

See also

Sources

  • Pierre Giolitto, Histoire de la Milice, Perrin, 1997
  • Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, Knopf, 1972
  • Jacques Delperrié de Bayac, Histoire de la Milice 1918-1945, Fayard, 1969
  • Touvier trial transcripts, French National Archives, 1994
  • USHMM: France, the Milice