| Chapter Intro: | Introduction |
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Jews, of which only three percent returned. The Resistance too was responsible for an estimated 10,000 killings. During immediate post-war trials, approximately 7,000 collaborators were sentenced to death but only 767 were eventually executed. The immediate aftermath of liberation saw a spontaneous ‘settling of scores’ with summary executions being commonplace. There were many trials with charges brought against collaborators such as the writer and intellectual Robert Brasillach. Economic collaborators tended to escape as France required, more than ever, its entrepreneurs and captains of industry, however much they may have compromised themselves during the war period. 5 The period immediately following the liberation represented an imperfect coming to terms with the past that ignored the anti-Semitism of Vichy and its complicity in the deportation of Jews from France. Collaborators were judged to be national traitors to France rather than French fascists. Betrayal, rather than racial homicide or ethnic cleansing, was perceived as their crime. The entire question of collaboration, argues Rousso, was contextualised within the patriotic rather than the political arena. This reality was demonstrated very clearly in the Petiot trial, in which Dr Marcel Petiot attempted to justify his crimes as being anti-collaborationist and therefore intensely patriotic. Thus a tension emerged in post-war France between the desire to celebrate and commemorate the glorious or heroic actions (of the Resistance) and to dismiss (to the point of negating) the shameful facts of those involved in collaboration with the Germans. As Arendt shows in her classic study Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil: