After five decades of muted shame over collaboration with the Nazis during their World War II occupation, an outcry is sweeping France calling for a full and accurate account of the country's complicity in the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews.
A controversial court decision here this past week to drop war-crimes charges against a Frenchman accused of killing Jews during the war has prompted leading lawyers, educators, politicians and Catholic clergymen to urge the country to confront its past at a time when extreme right-wing organizations are making political headway in Western Europe.Throughout the postwar era, France has maintained that there was widespread anti-Nazi resistance, while historical studies have revealed a pattern of active or passive cooperation with the Nazi occupiers by much of the French population.
But the surge of public indignation and condemnations of official hypocrisy that greeted the dismissal of war-crimes charges against Paul Touvier, a 77-year-old former pro-Nazi militia leader, indicates a new public willingness to examine the darkest corners of France's collaborationist wartime Vichy government set up by Marshal Henri Petain.
Cardinal Albert Decourtray, the archbishop of Lyons and the head of the Catholic Church in France, who ordered a study by historians about the church's role in sheltering Touvier from arrest for 45 years, urged the country in a newspaper interview Friday to pursue "the purification of its memory" by discovering all the facts - "including the most unbearable."