Touvier, Paul (1915–1996)

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TOUVIER, PAUL (1915–1996)

Chief of the militia in Lyon during World War II.

In 1994, after forty-five years in hiding with the help of Catholic institutions, Paul Touvier became the first French citizen to be convicted of crimes against humanity.

Born to a fervent Catholic family in Savoy in 1915, Touvier attended religious schools in Chambéry. He left school at the age of sixteen and soon started to work for Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée, a railroad company. Four years after finishing his military service (1935–1936) he was recalled to military service in Épinal, then demobilized in September 1940 in Montpellier after his unit collapsed. Once the armistice was signed, Touvier returned to Chambéry, where he resumed his position at the new Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français(SNCF).In1940hejoinedthe recently founded veterans' society, the Légion Française des Combattants, which united all former veterans associations under the presidency of Marshal Philippe Pétain, then head of the French state.

When the most dedicated partisans of Pétain's National Revolution created the pro-Nazi Service d'Ordre Légionnaire on 12 December 1941, Touvier unsurprisingly joined the new organization. By the same token, when a French militia, an ideological police in charge of hunting Resistance fighters and Jews, was created, Touvier was accepted in the first training course at the school for militia supervisors in Uriage.

Appointed to head the French militia's secret service in Savoy, Touvier created files on every opponent of the Vichy regime he was able to uncover. His efficiency led to rapid promotion in Lyon, where he became regional chief of the militia, with ten departments under his authority. He infiltrated the Resistance, organized raids, and interrogated prisoners using torture. Touvier's new responsibilities provided him the opportunity to systematically loot assets of Jews, such as apartments and cars; he also engaged in extortion against Jews and black marketeers and organized punitive raids, much like a gang leader. Touvier was responsible for the murder in January 1944 of Victor Basch, president of the League of Human Rights, and his wife, both in their eighties; they were accused of being Jews and Freemasons. In June seven Jews were killed in Rillieux-la-Pape near Lyon; this was Touvier's personal form of retaliation for the assassination by Resistance members of Philippe Henriot, minister of propaganda in the Vichy regime.

After the Liberation, Touvier stayed for a time at militia headquarters, hoping that his last-minute contacts with the Resistance would guarantee him impunity. However, in September 1944, with the help of Stéphane Vautherin, chaplain of the French militia, he went into hiding.

On 10 September 1946 Touvier was sentenced to death in absentia by a French court in Lyon; on 4 March 1947 the same sentence was passed by the court in Chambéry. Thanks to twenty years of protection by Roman Catholic institutions, Touvier was able to escape justice and remained in hiding until 1967, when the statute of limitations for his wartime crimes expired. As a convicted war criminal, Touvier forfeited his personal assets. To reverse this ruling, which damaged his family, he appealed for a presidential pardon. Charles Duquaire, a church dignitary, former secretary of the diocese of Lyon and a Touvier family friend, interceded on his behalf, and on 23 November 1971, President Georges Pompidou signed an official pardon.

So began the "Touvier affair" that incited widespread outrage in the media. In November 1973, an association of Resistance fighters brought suit against Touvier, charging him with having committed crimes against humanity, for which since 1964 there was no statute of limitation according to French law. Again Touvier went into hiding. In 1981 an arrest warrant was issued, but eight years passed before Touvier was discovered, living under a false name in a monastery in Nice, on an estate owned by followers of Monsignor Marcel Lef èbvre, the leader of Catholic fundamentalists.

The compromising activities of clerics in Touvier's evasion, which had enabled him to escape justice since 1945, was investigated by eight historians in a report ordered by Cardinal Albert Decourtray, who opened to them the archives of the archdiocese of Lyon. These circumstances led to an even stronger public outcry when on 13 August 1992 the indictment against Touvier was dismissed on appeal. Pierre Truche, district attorney in Paris, appealed that decision in thecourt d'assizes; when the order of dismissal was vacated, it opened the way for Touvier's trial. Touvier was defended by Jacques Trémolet de Villiers, an attorney well known for his close relationship with the Catholic Far Right. Touvier was judged guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Finding Touvier guilty was a verdict that extended symbolically to French ideological collaborationists.

While the German Nazi Klaus Barbie's trial helped define who could be included as victims of crimes against humanity, namely Jews and members of the Resistance, Touvier's trial enabled the law to decide who might be indicted for such crimes. During trial preparations, the cour de cassation decided on 27 November 1992 that a French citizen could be prosecuted only if he or she had acted on behalf of the German occupying authorities; if he or she had acted alone or under authority of the Vichy regime, prosecution for crimes against humanity was not enforceable. This decision affected the way in which the later trial against Maurice Papon was conducted. Paul Touvier died from prostate cancer in the Fresnes prison on 17 July 1996.