Bousquet was not just protected

[sharminsultana]

There have been delays in police investigations. The Catholic clergy provided him with safe houses. All of this means that Touvier was not arrested until the late 1980s, and then there were further delays in bringing him to justice before he was finally convicted in 1994. Touvier’s individual case, in in other words, shed light on the role of several institutions in French society.

The case of René Bousquet was similar. Bousquet became the police chief under Vichy and organized the roundup of the Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1942. He supervised more than sixty thousand deportations to the death camps. The total number of deportations was seventy-six thousand.

– he continued to have a successful career in the postwar period. He was friends with François Mitterrand. It took nearly fifty years for his role in the deportation of the Jews to be revealed, and he was assassinated before being brought to justice.

The Bousquet affair shed light on Mitterrand’s role, which raised a phone number library number of uncomfortable questions, not only about Mitterrand himself, but over the entire period of occupation. Mitterrand gave a series of denominational talks towards the end of his second term as president. It brought back memories of Vichy and underlined the element of continuity between Vichy and the periods that preceded and followed it.

Mitterrand had flirted with the extreme right before the war, and he was honored by the Vichy regime. He later played a role in the resistance, but he continued to cultivate his friendship with Bousquet in the post-war period. He refused as president to apologize for the crimes of the Vichy regime, as he maintained that the French Republic had nothing to do with it and that France was not responsible. It was only his successor Jacques Chirac who apologized on behalf of the French nation for his complicity in the Shoah, while stressing that there was another France at the time, represented by the resistance.