THE LEGACY OF EARLIER EXPERIENCES

Since France experienced almost fifteen regimes between 1789 and the effective installment of a parliamentary Republic some 90 years later, she got used to political/military coups, purges, successive and always betrayed oaths and the rest – such as criminal punishment of followers of the fallen regime. So it happened during the French Revolution, when the guillotine was invented and much used, as it did after the revolution of July 1830 (High Court trial of Charles X's ministers in 1832), in 1852 following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup or in the bloody spring of 1871 aft er the decimation of the Paris’ Commune.

In this respect, the period of WWI may seem quieter. Certainly, real or supposed spies were executed, as were soldiers accused of cowardice, desertion or mutiny. In 1917, Clemenceau's government decided to have former Premier Caillaux and former Home Secretary Malvy judged by the Senate meeting as a High Court for having expressed defeatist – i.e. pacifist – opinions. What happened after the end of the war, including trials for “collaboration” in occupied northeastern France or départements of Alsace and Moselle that had belonged to the German Reich since 1871 is not sufficiently known to the larger public to demonstrate any kind of collective trauma.

If we search for the influence of earlier experiences on post-WWII transitional justice, we should therefore not look at the aftermath of the preceding conflict. It has both older and newer predecessors. As has been magnificently shown by Anne Simonin in her habilitation thesis, the main “innovation” of France's TJ after 1945, National Indignity (Indignité nationale, NI) has a long history in French criminal law, stemming from both revolutionary political justice of the 1790s and the Revolution of 1848 – and even further from Roman law civil death (civiliter mortuus). It should be remembered – as it was, for instance, by the public prosecution during the High Court trial of Vichy Premier Pierre Laval – that civil death could lead to actual death, since anyone could kill or injure such an ex-felon with impunity.