© regis duvignau
Maurice Papon leaving the Assize Court of Bordeaux, March 30, 1998.
A decision likely to lift a corner of the veil of history? One stopped published this Tuesday at Official newspaper authorizes in advance access to the archives of the trials involving Maurice Papon. These archives “may be freely communicated” to those who request it, via a request for derogation, and this ten years before the date normally scheduled for their opening, indicates the decree dated March 28.
Normally, access to this type of document is only authorized following a period of 75 years. “from the date of the document […] included in the file”, or within a period of 25 years from the date of the death of the person concerned, specifies the heritage code. Maurice Papon, former general secretary of the Gironde prefecture between 1942 and 1944, elected deputy in 1968 then appointed budget minister under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, died in 2007 at the age of 96.
Sentenced to 10 years in prison
A cabinet man in a dying Third Republic, Papon chose Vichy and Pétain’s National Revolution in 1940. Promoted to sub-prefect the following year, he then joined the Gironde, a department where he was appointed in June 1942 secretary general of the prefecture. He will deal in particular with the service of the German requisitions, the Occupation and the office of the Jewish questions. For this last responsibility, he will be condemned nearly fifty-five years later. ten years’ imprisonment for “complicity in unlawful arrests and arbitrary confinement” in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux to Drancy. During this period, nearly 1,690 people were deported. The man was released on September 18, 2002, due to his state of health.
The senior official had been targeted by the first complaints in 1981, following revelations from the chained duck on his role during the Occupation. Fifteen years of proceedings later, Papon will be sent back to the Gironde Assize Court for a historic trial. With the decree published on Tuesday, documents kept in the National Archives, the departmental archives of Gironde as well as the Department of Documentation and Heritage Archives of the Ministry of Justice will now be accessible.
Françoise Banat-Berger, head of the interministerial service of the archives of France, specifies that will be accessible “the archives of the trial from the first indictment in 1983 until the rejection of the appeal in cassation in 2004”. That is “files from the courts, the Court of Cassation as well as the archives of the central administration of the Ministry of Justice in relation to these trials”. One “very big set”underlines Françoise Banat-Berger, who recalls that a similar opening had been decided in 2017 regarding the archives of the trial of Klaus Barbie, in Lyon, in 1987.
Maurice Papon is also linked to another dark page in history. During the bloody repression of the demonstrations of Algerians on October 17, 1961, where dozens of people were killed, the senior official was at the head of the Paris police headquarters. On October 16, Emmanuel Macron had recognized “the crimes committed that night under the authority of Maurice Papon”. Crimes “inexcusable for the Republic”, he added. Papon also held the same position in February 1962 when, on the 8th, a peaceful demonstration was violently repressed at the Charonne metro station, in Paris. The early opening of the archives should not, however, concern these two events: they did not give rise to trials in which Papon might have been tried. The role of the former Paris police prefect during the Algerian war was only mentioned at the 1998 trial, but “there were no investigations”explains Fabrice Riceputi.
Updated at 8:55 p.m. with details from Françoise Banat-Berger.
