Time for the Defense

In the bitter settlement of accounts after World War II, French justice gave short shrift to the men who had run the Vichy government for the Nazis. By the records, 8,348 collaborators were executed without benefit of trial and another 1,325 were sent to their death by kangaroo courts. In a trial that many Frenchmen would like to forget, the top collaborator of them all, Vichy Chief of Government Pierre Laval, drew his death sentence from a "High Court of Justice" that included resistance veterans who yelled curses at the defendant. When Laval swallowed poison just before his scheduled execution, doctors pumped out his stomach, guards propped him against a stake in the prison yard, and the order of the court was carried out.

Last week the High Court sat again for what was probably the last trial of a top Vichy official. The accused: Jacques Guerard, once a brilliant young climber in French bureaucracy, who became Traitor Laval's righthand man, served as his secretary-general from 1942-44. He escaped to Spain ahead of the Allied armies, was condemned to death in absentia. Three years ago he surrendered voluntarily to stand trial for treason. This time the High Court judges were calm, judicially correct members of the French Parliament. Charged with negotiating a German mission in Dakar, and with trying to get German arms for use against the Maquis, Guerard, now 60, declared that it was all a double game to fool the Germans. His espousal of the occupation in a 1943 lecture, he testified urbanely, was "merely a defense of the European idea."

Just as urbanely the judges listened. After two hours' deliberation, they handed out their punishment: a five-year suspended sentence. Twelve years after, the passionate division of all France between those who collaborated and those who resisted had worn itself out. Noted one Paris newspaper: "Guerard's best defense attorney was time."

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