Milice
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The Milice ("militia"), also known as the French Gestapo, was a paramilitary force created in 1943, with German aid, to help fight "terrorism" in Vichy France – that is to say, to fight against the French Resistance. The Milice, headed by Joseph Darnand, participated in summary executions, assassinations and helped round up the Jews and résistants in France for deportation. It was the successor to Joseph Darnand's Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL) militia.
Like the Gestapo, the Milice often resorted to torture to extract information or confessions from those they rounded up. They were often considered even more deadly and cruel than the Gestapo and SS themselves, since they were Frenchmen who spoke the language, had a full knowledge of the towns and land, and knew people and informers.
Milice troops, known as miliciens, wore a blue uniform coat, a brown shirt and a wide blue beret. (During active paramilitary-style operations, a pre-war French Army helmet was used.) Its newspaper was Combats. (Not to be confused with the underground Resistance newspaper, Combat.) It had full-timers and part-timers, as well as a youth wing.
The Resistance targeted individual miliciens for assassination, often in open areas such as cafes and public streets. They scored their first success on April 24, 1943, when they gunned down Marseilles milicien Paul de Gassovski. By late November, Combats reported that 25 miliciens had been killed and 27 wounded in Resistance attacks (the actual numbers were likely higher).
By far the most prominent milicien to fall to the Resistance was Philippe Henriot, the Vichy regime's Minister of Information and Propaganda, who was known as "the French Goebbels." He and his wife were killed in their apartment in the Ministry of Information in the rue Solferino in the pre-dawn hours of June 28, 1944 by resistants dressed as miliciens. The Milice retaliated for these killings by murdering several well-known left-wing politicians and intellectuals, such as Georges Mandel and Victor Basch.
Early volunteers for the Milice included members of France's pre-war far right-wing parties, such as the Action Française, but also working-class men by then convinced of the blessings of National Socialism for their economic situation, as well as several fanatical Catholics eager to take revenge on leftist, communist and Republican elements for the Dreyfus Affair, as well as to avenge the anti-Catholic Spanish Civil War cruelties committed by French communist volunteers fighting for the Republican side. In addition to ideology, incentives for joining the Milice included employment, regular pay and rations. (The latter was particularly important as the war went on and civilian rations were reduced steadily to almost starvation levels.) Some also joined because members of their families had been killed or injured in Allied bombing raids or had been threatened, extorted or attacked by Communist-dominated French Resistance groups. Still others joined for less exalted reasons, such as petty criminals who were told their crimes would be overlooked if they joined the organization. Volunteers for the Milice were also exempt from being sent to Germany as forced labor.
Confined initially to the former Zone Libre of France under the control of the Vichy régime (which moderated its actions and forbade some of its more radical aspirations), the radicalized Milice in January 1944 moved into what had been the Occupied Zone of France, including Paris. They established their headquarters in the old Communist Party headquarters at 44, rue Le Peletier, as well as 61, rue Monceau, in a house formerly owned by the Menier family, makers of France's best-known chocolates. The Lycee Louis-Le-Grand was occupied as a barracks. An officer candidate school was established, likely with intentional irony, in the Auteuil synagogue.
Perhaps the largest and best-known operation by the Milice was its attempt in March, 1944 to suppress the Resistance in the departement of Haute-Savoie in the southeast of France near the Swiss border, the Battle of Glieres. The efforts of the Milice proved insufficient, however, and German troops had to be called in to complete the operation. On Bastille Day (14 July) 1944, miliciens put down with great brutality a revolt among the prisoners at Paris' notorious Santé prison.
The precise legal standing of the Milice was never formalized. It operated parallel to, but separately from, the normal (Vichy) French police force. It was outside of (indeed, above) the law such as it existed at the time and its actions were never subject to judicial review or control.
In August 1944, rightly fearing he would be called to account for the operations of the Milice, Marshall Pétain made a clumsy effort to distance himself from the organization by writing a harsh letter rebuking Darnand for the organization's "excesses." Darnand sent back a sarcastic reply, telling Pétain that he ought to have voiced his objections sooner.
The actual strength of the organization is a matter of some debate, but was likely between 25,000-35,000 by the time of the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. It began melting away rapidly thereafter, however. Following the Liberation of France, those of its members who failed to complete their escape to Germany (where they were impressed into the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS) or elsewhere abroad generally faced either execution following summary courts martial or were simply shot out of hand by vengeful resistants and enraged civilians. The elderly Paul Touvier, who led the Milice in Lyon, was convicted in 1994 of crimes against humanity and died in prison two years later.
Since the Second World War, the term milice has acquired a derogatory meaning in French.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, by David Pryce-Jones. London: Collins 1981.
- "Resistance in France," After the Battle magazine, No. 105, 1999.
