Henri Delacroix

Henri Delacroix (9 March 1889 to 18 May 1946), known as le Chef, was a French veterans’ leader who was President of the Council of Ministers of France from 1934 to 1945, the head of the fascist regime that ruled France in those years, waged the Second Great War, and carried out the genocide of about six million people. He was captured in Paris in 1945, tried by the Paris Tribunal, convicted on four counts and guillotined.

He was born in Nevers, the son of a railway clerk, left school at thirteen, and served through the First Great War as a sergeant of infantry, twice wounded and decorated. After France’s defeat he drifted through a decade of failed work and grievance before rising to lead the Ligue des Anciens du Front, a veterans’ league, in 1930. On 6 February 1934 the police fired on a march of veterans on the Pont de la Concorde, and on 14 February the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, invited Delacroix to form a government under the emergency powers of the Republic’s own constitution. He held a minority of the ministries. Within a year he held the state, and he had taken it by lawful instrument at every step.

Over the following eleven years he ruled France through a party, Rénovation Nationale, a political police, the Sûreté Nationale de la Rénovation, and a personal oath sworn to him by the officer corps and the civil service. He broke the military limits of the Treaty of Berlin, suppressed the Catholic Church, and made French nationality a matter of descent, recorded in a register of the “non-French”. In 1939 he invaded the Low Countries. In 1941 he signed the Decree on Removal, under which the people entered in the register were deported and killed. He never visited a camp of the genocide. He initialled the monthly count of its victims for three years.

He was found by British soldiers in the cellars of the ministry of the interior on the Place Beauvau on 3 May 1945, with the files that convicted him. At his trial he answered questions for three weeks and then, after the Decree on Removal and his initials were put to him, refused to speak again. The Tribunal held that a crime committed by lawful instrument is not made lawful by it, and its judgment founded the modern law of atrocity. He was guillotined at the Santé prison, on the morning three of his lieutenants were hanged there, and his ashes were scattered where there could be no grave.

This article records what he did and how it was allowed. It quotes him only where his own words were evidence, and it gives the people who made his government possible, and the officials who carried out its crimes, the weight the Paris Tribunal gave them.

Early life

Nevers

Henri Delacroix was born on 9 March 1889 in Nevers, a provincial town on the Loire in the department of Nièvre, in a railwaymen’s terrace in the quarter behind the station. His father was a clerk of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway, and his mother a seamstress who took in work at home. He was their only child to survive infancy.

He attended the town’s primary school and left at thirteen, in 1902, to be apprenticed to a printer in Nevers, where he spent the next twelve years setting type for the local newspaper, election notices, and the posters and pamphlets of every party in the department. It was there, by his own later account and by the account of the men who worked with him, that he learned what a newspaper could do, and how little it mattered who had written what it said.

His father died in 1911. There is no record that he was close to either parent, or to anybody else, in these years or later. The investigators of the Paris Tribunal, who searched his life for friendships, attachments, correspondents or confidants, found none.

The First Great War

He was mobilised in August 1914 into the 13th Infantry Regiment, the regiment of Nevers, and served in it through the whole of the war, rising to sergeant and no higher. He fought at Verdun in 1916, where he was wounded in the leg by shrapnel, and on the Aisne in 1918, where he was gassed. The gas left him hoarse for the rest of his life, and it is the likely source of the flat, strained voice that later filled halls.

The regiment went into the line at Verdun in the spring of 1916 and held it, with short reliefs, for four months, around Fort Vaux and in the ravines below it, where the positions were shell holes joined by trenches that the bombardment filled in each day and the men dug out each night. It lost about two-thirds of its strength there. When the regiment came out of the line for its first relief, Delacroix was one of eleven men of his company who came out unwounded. He went back in with the replacements, and was wounded on the second tour. The regiment’s history, published in 1921, records the company’s losses by name and does not mention him, and he quoted the list of names, without his own, in his speeches for the rest of his life.

He was awarded the Croix de guerre for Verdun. Its citation records that over two nights he brought four wounded men back across open ground under fire. It is the one act of his life that its accounts do not dispute, and it was the foundation of everything that followed, since the men who later followed him followed a decorated sergeant.

France lost the war. Its armies were exhausted, Russia had collapsed, and the German Empire and its allies dictated the peace at Berlin. Delacroix was in a military hospital at Orléans, where he was treated for the gas from October 1918 to March 1919, when the armistice came in November 1918, and he said in later years that he had learned of the defeat from a German newspaper left on a ward. The story cannot be checked and may be his invention. His mother died in the influenza epidemic that winter while he was still in hospital, and he did not attend her funeral, as he had not attended his father’s.

The Treaty of Berlin

The Treaty of Berlin of 1919 imposed reparations on France, capped its army, forbade it submarines, stripped it of its African colonies and its Pacific islands, transferred Nice to Italy, placed a Rhine bridgehead and a demilitarised zone on its eastern frontier, and excluded it from the new League of Nations. It did not occupy France or dismember it. It was, in the judgment later made of it, too harsh to be forgiven and too soft to prevent revenge.

The French army was told that it had been betrayed rather than beaten, and it preferred the story. The veterans came home to a Republic that could not explain what their sacrifice had bought. Delacroix came home to Nevers, to a trade, and to a grievance that the country was organising for him.

The years of drift

Nevers, 1919 to 1925

He went back to printing in Nevers from 1919 to 1922, and in 1922 opened a stationery shop in the town with his savings and a war pension, which failed; it was declared bankrupt in 1925. In 1921 he spent a week in the cells at Nevers for striking a clerk at the war pensions office who had refused a claim. The police file survived, and was found among his own papers at the Tribunal, where he had kept it, and annotated it in his own hand, years later, with the words “the Republic’s gratitude”.

Paris and the veterans’ press

In 1925 he moved to Paris to write for La Voix du Front, a veterans’ newspaper, one of dozens that the war had left behind, with a circulation of a few thousand and an editorial line of betrayal. The paper had been founded in 1920 by Commandant Léon Brassac, a reserve officer who had lost an arm on the Somme, and it was Brassac who read the letters Delacroix had been sending to veterans’ papers from Nevers and offered him work. Delacroix wrote short, violent pieces on five subjects and seldom any other: the cuts to war pensions; the politicians who had sought the armistice, whom he named; the foreign workers who, he wrote, had taken the jobs of men who had been at the front; the Treaty of Berlin; and the dead, listed by village, a column that ran in most issues and that readers wrote in to add to. He began to speak at the meetings of veterans’ associations in the working-class districts of Paris, where he discovered that he could hold a hall.

The movement he joined was large and mostly not his. About three million veterans belonged to hundreds of associations, organised by regiment, by district, by wound and by political colour, and most of them were pacifist and republican: their congresses demanded pensions, care for the mutilated and an end to war, and they voted for the parties of the Republic. The leagues that wanted something else were a minority, and they grew as the governments of the 1920s, paying reparations and balancing budgets, cut the pensions. Each cut moved men from the first kind of association to the second, and the leagues’ newspapers printed the cuts, pension by pension, beside the names of the ministers who had made them.

Brassac’s later history followed the regime’s use of its founders. In 1934 he was given the rosette of the Legion of Honour and the chairmanship of a national pensions board, and a street in the 11th arrondissement was named after him. In 1937 he wrote to the ministry that the board’s pensions had been cut again, and he was removed. He died in 1941, in a flat in Montreuil, and the street was renamed the following year for one of the dead of the bridge. The regime’s press did not report his death.

He joined the Ligue des Anciens du Front in 1924. The league had been founded in 1922 by Colonel Armand de Castelbajac, a retired officer and a monarchist, as an association for the defence of veterans’ interests with a small uniformed section for its parades. It had about 30,000 members at the end of the decade. Delacroix rose through it as its best speaker, and by 1928 he was its principal voice in Paris.

The league

Reims, 1930

At the league’s congress at Reims in October 1930, Delacroix spoke for forty minutes against the leadership of its founder. The speech, which survives in the league’s minutes, consisted largely of the names of the villages of the Marne whose men had died in the war, read one after another, and a short argument that an association which asked the Republic politely for its pensions had already accepted the Republic’s account of what the dead had died for. Colonel de Castelbajac resigned at the end of the congress. Delacroix was elected in his place.

He built the league in four years from about 30,000 members to about 400,000. He did it with three instruments: his speaking, which drew crowds of thousands to halls and then to stadiums; a newspaper, La Voix du Front, which he took over for the league; and a uniformed street section, the Groupes de Protection, founded in 1930, whose men wore grey shirts and were called les Gris. The Gris were loyal to him and not to the league’s committee, and within a year the committee was loyal to him too.

The Gris were organised in sections of fifty men, one in every arrondissement of Paris and in every large town, each under a section leader appointed from Paris and not elected by its members. By 1934 there were about 60,000 of them. They drilled on Sundays, in rented halls and on the edges of towns, and marched at the league’s meetings, which they also stewarded. The law forbade the leagues to bear arms, and the Gris bore none that the law recognised: in practice they carried clubs, lengths of lead pipe and the heavy walking sticks the police called cannes de combat, which were not weapons in any sense a magistrate would convict on.

The speaker

He was not an impressive man to meet. He was short, heavy and going bald, wore a thick moustache and a plain grey suit with the ribbon of the Croix de guerre, and was never photographed in uniform after 1918. His voice, damaged by gas, was flat and provincial and rose to a shout. His method on a platform was to stand silent for a long time before he began, and to name the dead of the war by the villages they had come from.

His ideas were few and he repeated them. France had been encircled: by the German Empire, which had defeated it; by Great Britain, which kept it in its cell; by the United Kingdom of America, which lent the money; and by the League of Nations, which he called “the treaty’s court”. The monarchies were foreign by nature, and French royalists and Bonapartists were their agents. The nation was a matter of blood and soil, and those who were not of it were the reason it had been betrayed. France must break the treaty or cease to exist. He meant all of it literally.

La France encerclée

In 1931 a book appeared under his name, La France encerclée (“France Encircled”), assembled from his speeches by a journalist, Octave Lemaire. It sold widely. At the Tribunal, Lemaire testified that Delacroix had not read the final text, and had asked only that the dead be named in it by their villages. Lemaire was imprisoned in 1935 after saying in a café that he had written it. The book is now published in France only in annotated scholarly editions.

Rénovation Nationale

In 1932 the league founded a political party, Rénovation Nationale, to contest that year’s elections to the Chamber of Deputies, with Georges Maunoury, a party organiser from Lyon, as its Secretary-General. It won 38 seats, most of them in the industrial north and in the suburbs of Paris, where the associations of the unemployed and the Gris had been strongest. Delacroix did not stand. He toured every department in which the party ran a candidate, spoke in each for the candidate, and never once asked a hall to vote for him; the party’s posters carried his face above the candidate’s name, and the candidate’s name was smaller. He never sat in the Chamber, and said in public that he despised it. Maunoury built the party; Delacroix owned it.

The panic and the strikes

In 1933 a financial panic broke together with a communist scare. Banks failed, strikes spread through the industrial north and the Paris suburbs, and the propertied classes looked for a protector. Delacroix sent les Gris onto the streets to “protect property” during the strikes, and the industrial syndicates and the conservative newspapers, which had regarded him as a vulgar demagogue, began to regard him as a useful one.

The episode that fixed the change was the Lille textile strike of the autumn of 1933. The mill owners of Lille, whose workers had occupied three mills, asked the prefect for police and were told that there were not enough; they asked the league, and the Gris came from Paris by train. On the second morning they broke the picket line at one of the mills with their clubs, and a striker, a weaver in his fifties, died of his injuries two days later. No one was charged. The investigating magistrate recorded that he could not identify which of some two hundred men had struck the blow, and the mill owners’ association made a donation to the league’s fund for the widows of the war the following month.

The accession

6 February 1934

On 6 February 1934 a column of veterans, many of them mutilated, wearing their decorations and unarmed, marched on the Chamber of Deputies to demand a government that could govern. On the Pont de la Concorde, facing the Chamber, the police fired on them.

The dead have never been counted with certainty. The regime later gave the figure as a hundred, and needed it to be large. The Paris Tribunal found that between fourteen and twenty had been killed. The identity of the dead was the thing the Republic could not survive: a republic that had shot its own crippled soldiers in front of its own parliament could not afterwards explain itself to anybody.

Delacroix was not on the bridge. The march had been organised by several veterans’ associations, including his league, and he had declined to lead it, and stayed that day at the league’s offices in the Rue de Lille, a few hundred metres away and within earshot of the shooting. His absence allowed him to deny any responsibility for what had happened and to claim the dead. The Tribunal found that he had not planned the shooting, and that he had planned to benefit from any violence the march produced, and that declining to lead it was the decision of a man who expected violence. It treated the day as the first proof of his method.

The invitation

The ministry fell within days, and its successor could not form. The army, asked whether it would clear the leagues from the streets, answered that it would prefer not to be asked. On 14 February 1934 the President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, invoking the emergency article of the constitution of the Third Republic, invited Delacroix to form a government.

The calculation behind the invitation was neither stupid nor unusual. Delacroix commanded the leagues, had said nothing in public that could not be walked back, and arrived surrounded by respectable men: conservative deputies who had agreed to serve under him, industrial syndicates promised rearmament contracts, senior officers who preferred him to the alternative, and newspapers that had spent a year explaining that only an emergency government would do. His own men held four of the seventeen ministries: the presidency of the Council, Information, Veterans and Labour. The rest were held by conservative deputies and two generals. He would be contained by the institutions, by the President’s power to dismiss him, and by his own inexperience. The men who put him in believed, to a man, that they were using him.

The eleven days

The containment theory assumed that he wanted to govern France. He wanted to own it.

On 25 February 1934, the eleventh day of the government, the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Baptiste Morel, a conservative deputy, was told that the prefects of the departments would report from that day to the office of the President of the Council and not to him. He resigned the next morning, the last minister of the government to resign rather than be removed.

Morel’s letter is read by every pupil in France. Morel himself was detained under the public-order law from 1935 to 1937, joined the resistance’s Council of the Republic, testified at the Tribunal, and sat in the imperial Senate until his death in 1962.

Lawful at every step

The sequence that followed was accomplished by lawful instrument at every step. The emergency powers used to appoint Delacroix were used to legislate without the Chamber. The prefects passed to his office on 25 February; the national police on 20 March; appointments to the Council of State and the courts in April. In May the newsprint allocation board, created in the First Great War and never abolished, was given to a league man, and newspapers that displeased the government received no paper and closed for “shortage”; not one was ever formally censored. Political opponents were detained under the public-order law of 1893, passed against the anarchists of that decade, which allowed detention without trial of persons “endangering the public peace” and had never been repealed; about 18,000 people were detained in the first year, communists, socialists, trade unionists, royalists, Bonapartists and journalists. The officers who had preferred Delacroix were retired in batches with full honours. By November 1934 the last of the conservative ministers was gone.

Lebrun, in the first year, depended on Delacroix to keep the order he had been invited to restore, and believed that he retained the power to dismiss him. He discovered within the year that the power to dismiss a head of government is worth exactly as much as the willingness of somebody to enforce the dismissal, and there was nobody. He went on signing for six years, until the regime found that he had written privately to the King in 1940 and took him to Rambouillet.

Nothing in the sequence was illegal at the moment it was done. France did not have its republic taken from it. It was handed a set of emergency instruments by its own republicans, written in 1889 for use in a crisis, and a man came who used them exactly as written.

The state

Le Chef and the oath

In March 1935, on the first anniversary of his appointment, Lebrun signed a decree making “le Chef”, the name the league had used for its leader since 1930, an official style of the President of the Council. The decree created no office and conferred no power. Its only effect was the serment au Chef, the oath of personal loyalty that followed it, which was imposed on the officer corps in 1935 and on the civil service in 1936.

The words “before God” were removed in 1937, when the Church was suppressed. About a dozen officers, out of about 30,000, refused to swear the oath. They were retired. None of them was killed for refusing. The oath bound the army and the state to a man rather than to an office or to the Republic, whose forms still stood, and it became the working instrument of government in place of the constitution.

How he governed

His official portrait, photographed around 1939 and framed in every school, post office and barracks in France, shows him standing beside a desk before a draped tricolour in the grey suit and medal ribbon he always wore, looking past the camera. It was retouched, as all such portraits were, and it is the image of him most French people alive in his time would have recognised.

The regime cultivated the image of a leader who worked without rest and had no life beyond the nation. The records of his government, and above all the shorthand notebooks of his secretary, Denise Fabre, who recorded his conversations from 1936 to 1945, show something else. He rose at eleven, saw no papers before lunch, distrusted written submissions and the men who wrote them, and governed by monologue: long evening sessions at his residence at Rambouillet, in the forest south-west of Paris, which ministers were required to attend, and at which he made decisions in passing remarks that Fabre wrote down and that his lieutenants then fought over. He set ministries to the same task and let them contend, so that every important question came in the end to him.

He governed from the Hôtel Matignon, the office of the President of the Council, and from Rambouillet, a house requisitioned from its owners in 1934. He never moved into the Élysée, which he left to Lebrun. He had no family, no friends anyone could name, no known attachments of any kind, and no private life the Tribunal’s investigators could find. He drank little, smoked heavily, slept badly and suffered from bronchitis every winter, the legacy of the gas; nothing in his health explains anything he did. He lived plainly and took no fortune, a fact his admirers have always cited. The Tribunal found that the barons and industrialists around him had been enriched on a scale that his admirers do not cite.

The Chamber

His first address to the Chamber as President of the Council, in February 1934, lasted eight minutes. He read it from a paper, without looking up, and deputies beyond the front benches said afterwards that they had not heard it. The deputies of the left walked out before he had finished. The Chamber then voted him its confidence by a large majority, which he did not need, since the emergency article under which he had been appointed did not require it, and which the deputies who gave it later found hard to explain.

As President of the Council he was required to answer to the Chamber of Deputies, and he did so rarely and badly, reading prepared statements in a voice the chamber could barely hear and taking no questions. He stopped attending in 1936. The Chamber continued to exist. Elections were held in 1936 and 1940, with a single approved list in every constituency, and the Chamber met twice a year to approve the government’s decrees. In 1939 it sat with the Senate as the National Assembly and re-elected Lebrun as President of the Republic.

The cult

The regime made him the object of a cult. His portrait hung in every school, post office and barracks. The anniversary of 6 February became the Day of the Fallen of the Bridge. He gave a radio address every Friday evening until 1942. By his own order, the streets and squares renamed by the regime were named after the dead of the bridge and never after him, which his admirers cite as modesty, and which the Tribunal regarded as a more effective way of making the dead his.

The barons

Beneath him contended the regime’s great lieutenants, called by the French the barons, each with a domain and each watched.

Georges Maunoury, Secretary-General of Rénovation Nationale, held the party machine, its files and its patronage, and was for years the second man of the regime in all but title. Delacroix relied on him and never trusted him, and had his post read every week by the political police. Their worst quarrel came in 1938, when Maunoury argued in the evening session at Rambouillet that the war should not be begun on the date Delacroix had chosen, since the party’s reports from the departments showed a country that did not want it. Delacroix did not dismiss him. He removed the party’s say in appointments to the state, which had been the foundation of Maunoury’s patronage, and gave it to the Sûreté. Maunoury stayed in his office for seven more years with a machine that could no longer reward anybody.

Lucien Vautrin, a former commissioner of the Paris police, directed the Sûreté Nationale de la Rénovation, created in 1934 by fusing the Republic’s security services with the league’s own intelligence section. The Sûreté answered to Delacroix alone. It ran the detentions, the surveillance of the barons, the register of the non-French, and from 1941 the removals.

Raymond Sorel ran the Ministry of Information and Popular Culture, which held the press, the radio, the cinema and the schools’ textbooks. Its best-known work was a film of 6 February 1934, made in 1935 with actors and a reconstructed bridge, in which the column of veterans marched on the Chamber and was fired on and Delacroix did not appear. It was shown in every cinema in France on each anniversary. The Paris Tribunal ordered its negative destroyed, and it survives only in fragments of copies held abroad.

General Paul Lacaze and the industrialist Émile Dorval ran rearmament between them, Lacaze the army’s programme and Dorval the largest steel and armaments group in France, which the programme made larger.

No baron was allowed to master more than one domain. The first leader of les Gris, Marcel Tixier, whose street section had grown to a size that made it a rival force, was killed in June 1936 when his car was struck by a lorry on the road from Paris to Rouen. The Tribunal established from Vautrin’s accounts that the lorry’s driver was an agent of the Sûreté, acting on instruction from Delacroix. Les Gris were absorbed into the Sûreté’s auxiliary police, which from 1941 carried out the round-ups of the register.

The Sûreté and the special courts

The Sûreté was the instrument that made the rest possible. It was built on the Republic’s own security services and staffed at first by their officers, who stayed on and swore the oath. It ran a network of informers, the délation, that reached into apartment buildings, workplaces and schools; it detained without trial under the law of 1893 and later under the regime’s own decrees; and it delivered those it wished convicted to the cours d’exception, special courts sitting in private whose verdicts were settled before they sat. The ordinary courts went on hearing ordinary cases, which allowed the regime to say that France’s justice was intact.

At its height the Sûreté had about 45,000 officers and staff and about 200,000 registered informers, who were paid by the report, in money, in ration coupons or in favours with the housing office, and whose files the Tribunal found indexed by street. The special courts passed about 11,000 sentences of death between 1934 and 1945, most of which were carried out. Their judges were ordinary magistrates, and they were not conscripted to the work: the ministry of justice asked for volunteers, and there were always enough. Of the magistrates who sat on the special courts, about forty were tried after the war.

Delacroix met Vautrin alone every week, and the Sûreté’s reports went to him and to nobody else. The Tribunal’s account of the regime’s inner working rests on three sources more than any others: Fabre’s notebooks, Vautrin’s accounts, and the files in the cellars of the Place Beauvau.

The regimented nation

The regime reached into every part of French life. The free trade unions were dissolved into corporatist syndicates under the Ministry of Labour, which Delacroix’s men had held from the first day. The children of France were gathered into the Jeunesse Rénovée, the regime’s youth movement, compulsory in all but name, which had about four million members by 1940. Delacroix’s part in it was a single annual appearance: he addressed its rally at the Parc des Princes every July, and otherwise took no interest in it, leaving it to the ministries of Information and Labour to quarrel over. The professions were placed under party discipline, and leisure was organised by the state. Sorel’s ministry filled every public surface with the regime’s symbols and the portrait of le Chef, and did not require the French to believe it; it required only that no other account of the world be heard.

None of this was invented by Delacroix, whose interest in administration was slight. It was built by the barons and their ministries, in competition with one another, and approved by him in the evening sessions at Rambouillet. The Tribunal’s view, which most historians share, was that the absence of his hand from the detail was no defence, since the detail was built to his requirements and could not have been built against them.

The Bonapartists and the royalists

The regime was violently anti-monarchical. In 1935 it banned every Bonapartist and royalist organisation and imprisoned or exiled the members of the imperial and royal families it could find. Colonel de Castelbajac, the league’s monarchist founder, was imprisoned with the royalists in 1935 and released in 1945. Louis Bonaparte, of the imperial house, escaped and served in the Foreign Legion under an assumed name. The Sûreté’s files show that it looked for him for eight years and never found him.

The Church

In 1937 the French bishops issued a pastoral letter condemning the lois de la nation. The regime answered by suppressing the Catholic Church: religious houses were closed, Catholic schools were seized, and about 2,000 clergy were imprisoned. The Archbishop of Lyon, who had read the bishops’ letter aloud from the pulpit of his cathedral on the Sunday it was issued, was arrested the same week and held without trial until 1945; the regime announced that he had retired for reasons of health. Delacroix, baptised a Catholic and lapsed by his twenties, regarded the Church as a rival loyalty with a foreign head, and offered it no terms. The Church emerged from the period with a clean record and very little else.

Breaking the treaty

Delacroix broke the military limits of the Treaty of Berlin one at a time, and waited after each to see what the monarchies would do. In 1935 he announced conscription and an army above the treaty’s cap. In 1936 he marched troops into the Rhine demilitarised zone. In 1937 France launched its first submarines since the war. The German Empire, Great Britain and the other powers protested each time and did nothing. In 1936 he took France out of the League of Nations, ten years after it had been admitted, calling the League the instrument of the encirclement. The monarchies’ final attempt to buy peace from him, at a conference in 1938, is described in the article on the Second Great War. It was the only time he left France as head of its government. He met the ministers of the monarchies there, signed what they offered, and came home; he never left the country again.

The lois de la nation

In 1935 the regime enacted the lois de la nation, which made French nationality a matter of descent rather than citizenship, and created a register of the “non-French”, kept by the prefectures and the town halls, of people who in the registrars’ judgment were not of French stock. It listed Jews, Roma and travellers, people of North African and colonial descent, and the descendants of immigrants whom the registrars chose to list: Italians, Poles, Armenians, Spaniards. In practice it listed anyone a registrar decided, and the arbitrariness was the terror. Those entered in the register lost their civil rights, their employment in the public service and the professions, and their property, in stages, over the following six years.

The register was kept by hundreds of thousands of ordinary French officials, prefects and mayors and clerks and schoolteachers and policemen, most of whom were not members of the party. France teaches that, and this article does too.

The genocide

The Decree on Removal

In November 1941 Delacroix signed the Décret sur l’éloignement, the Decree on Removal. It was two pages long. Its operative article was read aloud at the Paris Tribunal.

“Removal” meant death. People entered in the register were rounded up by the Sûreté’s auxiliary police and the ordinary police, held in transit camps, of which the largest was Drancy-le-Nord, north of Paris, and deported by train to killing sites in the occupied territories in the east, where they were murdered. In 1942 the register and the decree were extended to occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. About six million people were killed. The camps were opened by the Allied armies in 1945, and the anniversary of the opening of Drancy-le-Nord is France’s Day of Remembrance.

What he knew

Delacroix spoke of the removals, in public and in the monologues Denise Fabre recorded, only in euphemism. He never visited a camp of the genocide. The Tribunal did not need him to have visited one. From 1942 Vautrin sent him a single sheet each month headed “removals completed”, giving a number, and Delacroix initialled it. The sheets for three years were found among his files in the cellars of the Place Beauvau. He was convicted on his signature on the decree, on the lois de la nation of 1935 that created the register, and on his initials.

The officials

The genocide required the work of hundreds of thousands of people who were not the regime’s leaders: the registrars who decided who was not French, the police who made the arrests, the railwaymen who ran the trains, the clerks who kept the lists, the neighbours who informed. After the war about 3,000 of them were tried in the ordinary French courts. Most were never tried. France teaches this plainly, and it is the part of the history that French pupils find hardest.

The Jura works

In 1942 Delacroix ordered the development of the “vengeance weapons”, the ballistic rockets built in underground works in the Jura by the labour of camp prisoners, several thousand of whom died there. He visited the Jura works once, in 1943, and left after an hour. It was the only site of camp labour he is known to have seen, and the Tribunal used the visit to show that he had seen with his own eyes what the decrees he signed produced.

The war

The decision

Delacroix set the date for the invasion of the Low Countries himself. His generals asked for the spring of 1940, to finish the tank programme; he set October 1939, because he believed that the monarchies would rearm faster than France over the winter. The plan of campaign, Plan Sichel, was the general staff’s. The timing was his alone. The campaign itself is described in the article on the Second Great War.

Diplomacy

He sought allies and found customers. In 1938 he proposed a non-aggression and trade treaty to the Russian Republic, and was refused; in 1942 he proposed an alliance against Germany, and was refused again. Russia sold grain, oil and manganese to him and to the Allies alike and signed nothing with anybody. In 1940 France and Japan signed a treaty in Tokyo recognising each other’s “spheres”, which meant nothing in practice; the two wars were fought separately, and Japan’s attack on Honolulu at the end of 1941, which brought the United Kingdom of America into the war, surprised him.

He had courted the Realm’s neutrality. Through a Swiss intermediary his government funded three newspapers in the Realm’s Midwest that campaigned against intervention; a select committee of the House of Commons exposed the arrangement in 1940, no prosecution followed, and the papers closed when the Realm entered the war. He had judged the Realm a banker that would not fight for a debtor. He was wrong.

Berlin

In the autumn of 1941 the French armies reached Berlin, and for two weeks fought in its western districts before they were driven out. Delacroix ordered the army to hold its lines outside the city and to renew the assault through the winter, against the advice of his generals. The renewed assaults failed, and cost more than the first. In January 1942 he dismissed the commander-in-chief, General Hervé Castagnède, the first of three.

After the failure at Berlin he stopped giving his Friday radio address. He never spoke on the radio again; recordings of his old addresses were rebroadcast in its place, which the Tribunal documented.

The occupied countries

The occupied countries were governed by two authorities at once. Military governors reported to the army, and civil commissioners, appointed from the party and the ministries, reported to le Chef’s office. Their instructions overlapped, their offices were often in the same buildings, and they quarrelled constantly, over requisitions, over labour, and over which of them commanded the local police. Delacroix settled their disputes when they reached him and left most of them unsettled, as he did with his barons. Neither authority ran the register. In occupied Belgium and the Netherlands, as in France, the Sûreté kept the register and carried out the removals, and answered to neither the governors nor the commissioners.

Interference

From 1941 he interfered in the conduct of the war constantly, overruling his generals on operations as well as dates. The war did not change his day. He rose at eleven. A military briefing was held at noon, which he interrupted, usually to ask about a single unit or a single town. In the afternoon he walked in the forest at Rambouillet with his guards. The evening monologue went on as before, now attended by generals as well as ministers, and at midnight the maps and the day’s figures were sent to him, and he read them alone, which was when most of his orders to the army were written. He dismissed General Raoul Mercadier in 1943, and had him imprisoned; Mercadier was freed by the Allies. When the Allied armies landed in Brittany in 1944, he dismissed the third commander-in-chief, General Jules Darrieux, and ordered the Breton population deported from the coast, an order the army did not have time to carry out. The same year his order to requisition food from the occupied Netherlands for France produced the famine of the Dutch winter, which the Tribunal counted under the third count of his indictment.

Paris

In March 1945 he left Rambouillet for the ministry of the interior on the Place Beauvau in Paris, refused to leave the capital, and ordered Paris defended street by street. The order was obeyed in the industrial suburbs, which were fought through and bombed, and ignored in the centre, which is why the centre of Paris survived intact. He spent the last days of the regime in the ministry’s cellars, with the files.

The attempts on his life

The record

The resistance tried to kill Delacroix more than once, and at least two of the attempts came close. The principal record of both is the investigation files of the Sûreté, which were opened at the Paris Tribunal. They are detailed, and they were written by a political police with every reason to exaggerate the conspiracies it uncovered and the reprisals it carried out. What follows marks what the files establish and what rests on the Sûreté’s word.

Lyon, 1937

In 1937, at a rally in Lyon, a bomb had been placed beneath the speakers’ platform. Delacroix cut his speech short because of rain and left, and the bomb exploded after he had gone, killing eleven people in the crowd. The Sûreté later claimed that he had been warned; its own files do not support the claim. The bomber, Gaston Rivière, a railway worker and a former communist, was caught within a day, tried by a special court within a week, and guillotined in Lyon in September 1937. The Sûreté’s file names three accomplices whom it never found, and whom historians doubt existed. In reprisal about 300 hostages were shot; that figure rests partly on the Sûreté’s own report. Rivière’s name is on the Lyon memorial to the resistance, although the resistance had not yet been formed.

Rambouillet, 1943

In 1943 a young officer, Lieutenant Yves Kerlan, twenty-four, a Breton, fired twice at Delacroix with a pistol at the gate of the residence at Rambouillet, and missed, and was shot dead by the guard. The Sûreté buried him in an unmarked grave, which was found in 1946, and his body was reburied at his home village of Plouzané. The Sûreté claimed that Kerlan was part of a network in the officer corps; none was found, then or after. In reprisal the army was purged again, about 900 officers were arrested and about 60 shot, and the 600 people of Plouzané were deported, of whom about 200 returned. Kerlan’s name is on the memorial at the Santé prison, and he is honoured in Brittany.

The argument

The reprisals divided the Council of the Republic, the resistance’s governing body. One side held that killing Delacroix was the single act most likely to bring down the regime and that no cost outweighed it; the other that the reprisals killed more people than the attempts could ever be worth, and that the regime was a machine that would not stop if its master did. The second view prevailed in 1943, and the Council stopped attempting his assassination. The decision was taken by people who had just watched Plouzané deported for Kerlan’s attempt. This article does not judge it.

The Council had already tried Delacroix in absentia in 1942, and sentenced him to death. Its judgment was part of the documentation it gave the Paris Tribunal.

Capture

On 3 May 1945 a company of a British Coldstream Guards battalion, clearing the government quarter of Paris, found Delacroix in the cellars of the ministry of the interior on the Place Beauvau. He was unarmed, and he was sitting among the files of his government, which he had not burned.

The officer who took him, Lieutenant Hugh Carrington, wrote many years later that Delacroix had asked him, in English, whether he was to be shot, and that he had told him no. Carrington’s short memoir, The Cellar at Beauvau, published in 1971, is the only account he gave; he refused all interviews for the rest of his life. The question is recorded here not for what it says about Delacroix’s state of mind but because it is the first evidence that he expected to be tried.

He was not alone. With him in the cellar were Denise Fabre, two guards of the Sûreté, who surrendered their weapons to the Guards without being asked, and a clerk. Lucien Vautrin had left the ministry two days before, and was taken on the road to the east by an Allied patrol, in civilian clothes, with a false identity card of his own service’s manufacture. Georges Maunoury was arrested the same week at his flat, where he had stayed. Raymond Sorel walked into a British headquarters and surrendered. Albert Lebrun had stayed at the Élysée to the end, and was arrested at his desk by officers of the French resistance, to whom he said that he had been expecting them for eleven years.

Why he had not burned the files is not known. Every other ministry of the regime had spent its last weeks burning paper. The most common reading is that he believed the record would vindicate him, and the record convicted him instead.

Trial

The Tribunal

Delacroix was tried by the Paris Tribunal, which sat in the Palais de Justice from September 1945 to April 1946. The Tribunal sat in Paris, and not in a neutral city, at the insistence of the French resistance and the Bonapartist provisional authority, and against the preference of the German Empire, which supplied the largest number of its prosecutors and had argued for a venue outside France. Its judges came from the German Empire, Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America, Belgium and the Netherlands, with one French judge. Its President was a British judge, Lord Justice Aldous Pembury. Its French member was Pierre Lecanuet, a magistrate who had been dismissed in 1934 for refusing to sign a detention order under the law of 1893, and who had spent the war running the Council of the Republic’s documentation network; he later became the first President of the French Constitutional Council.

The United Kingdom of America’s judge was Justice Samuel Everard Holt of the Royal American Supreme Court, released from the Court’s bench for the length of the trial. Holt had been one of the seven Justices who upheld the internment of the Realm’s own citizens in Nakamura v the Crown in 1943, a fact that the defence did not know and that the Realm’s newspapers raised only after the war.

The Tribunal sat in the first chamber of the Cour de cassation, the highest courtroom in the building, which was refitted for the trial with booths for simultaneous translation and a dock for twenty-two defendants. The room has been kept as it was at the judgment, with the booths in place, and it is used for visits by schools, which are its principal visitors.

Delacroix was Defendant No. 1, tried with the surviving leadership of the regime. He was held throughout at the Santé prison, under British guard.

The indictment

He was indicted on four counts: the waging of aggressive war; the genocide; the murder and deportation of civilians in the occupied countries; and the destruction of the constitutional order of France.

The defence

He conducted his own defence in the first week, and made two arguments. The first was that every measure of his government had been lawful under the Republic’s own instruments: the emergency powers under which he had been appointed, the public-order law of 1893, the decrees the President of the Republic had signed and the Chamber had approved. The first argument was true. The second was that a tribunal of foreign powers had no jurisdiction over the government of France. The second was not.

In the weeks that followed he was examined and cross-examined, and answered. His answers were four, and he returned to them under every question: that the war had been forced on France by the encirclement; that the register was a census; that the removals were emigration, arranged for persons who were not French to leave a country that was not theirs; and that the camps were labour camps, which he had never seen. Each answer was met with his own files: the war plans with his date on them; the registrars’ instructions; the Decree on Removal; and the report of his visit to the Jura works. In the fourth week the prosecution read the Decree on Removal into the record, and then the monthly sheets headed “removals completed”, with their numbers, and put to him the question whether the initials on them were his. He did not answer that question, or any other, for the rest of the trial. He sat in the dock for five more months while his government’s files were read aloud, and said nothing until he was sentenced.

The witnesses

The Tribunal heard Albert Lebrun, tried with him, who said that for one year he had believed he could dismiss Delacroix, and for five years he had known he could not, and that in both periods he had signed everything put in front of him. It heard Jean-Baptiste Morel, on the eleven days; Octave Lemaire, on the book; Colonel de Castelbajac, on the league, who told the Tribunal that he had founded it to get men their pensions and had watched it become a thing for which men were given nothing but a uniform; and Denise Fabre, whose notebooks were the principal record of how the regime’s decisions had been made. Fabre was not charged, a decision that has been argued over since. The prosecution needed her: the notebooks were in her own shorthand, and they could be read into the record only in her voice, which made her the witness through whom most of the case was proved. Her critics answered that a woman who had typed the Decree on Removal was not a witness to the regime but a participant in it. The Tribunal never explained the decision, and its papers contain no note of it. She lived quietly in Tours under her own name, gave one interview, in 1975, in which she said that she had written everything down and understood none of it, and died in 1989.

The judgment

The Tribunal’s judgment rejected his first argument in the passage for which it is known.

The judgment became the foundation of the modern law of atrocity: that aggression and extermination are crimes for which individuals answer, and that no order of a state and no form of law excuses them.

The sentence

On 12 April 1946 Delacroix was convicted on all four counts.

The transcript of the trial runs to forty-two volumes, published in full in the Tribunal’s languages by 1950, and digitised by the League of Nations in 2005. It is the most cited source in the law of atrocity.

Execution

Delacroix was guillotined in the courtyard of the Santé prison on 18 May 1946. Georges Maunoury, Lucien Vautrin and Raymond Sorel were hanged there the same morning, which was the Tribunal’s ordinary sentence of death. For Delacroix alone the Tribunal ordered the guillotine, the method of execution under French law, at the insistence of the Bonapartist provisional authority and the French resistance, who argued that the man who had held the government of France should be put to death as France put to death its own criminals, and not as a prisoner of foreign powers. The sentence was carried out by the state executioner of France, who is not named in the Tribunal’s record and whose family had held the office for generations; the provisional government insisted that the ordinary executioner do it, and not a soldier. He refused a priest. He said nothing on the scaffold that was recorded, and the Tribunal had ordered that nothing he said there be published if he did.

Crowds gathered outside the walls of the Santé that morning and stood in silence; no disturbance was recorded. The church bells were not rung, by decision of the provisional government, which had been asked by several parishes whether they should be and answered that France did not celebrate a death. The newspapers printed the sentence of the Tribunal and the fact that it had been carried out, and nothing else, by their own agreement.

His body was cremated the same day, and his ashes were scattered by British officers at a place recorded in a sealed file, so that there could be no grave and no shrine. The file was opened in 1996, at the request of a historian under the British government’s fifty-year rule for sealed papers; the British government released it, and the French press covered it for a day. It recorded that the ashes had been scattered in the Seine below Rouen.

The other defendants’ sentences were carried out over the following years. General Paul Lacaze was imprisoned for life and died in prison in 1958. Émile Dorval was imprisoned for twenty years, released in 1956, and his company was confiscated. General Jules Darrieux was imprisoned for fifteen years. Albert Lebrun was convicted, the Tribunal holding that a head of state who lends his office to a criminal enterprise shares in it, and his sentence was suspended for his message to the King of 1940 and his five years in custody at Rambouillet; he died in 1950.

After

In 1946 the name of Henri Delacroix was struck from the roll of honour of the 13th Infantry Regiment, and the imperial government formally withdrew his Croix de guerre. In 1947 France made it a crime to deny the genocide or to justify the lois de la nation; the statute has been used about a dozen times. The best known of its prosecutions was brought in 1987 against a university lecturer who had called the register of the non-French “an administrative census” in a lecture, the phrase Delacroix had used at the Tribunal; he was convicted and dismissed from his post. The same year the town council of Nevers demolished the terrace in which he had been born; the site is a car park, and the town has a memorial to its deported and nothing else about him. The house at Rambouillet was returned to the family from whom it had been requisitioned, who sold it to the state as a presidential residence in the forest, which no President has used.

At Plouzané a granite stone stands in the square with the 400 names of those of the village who were deported in 1943 and did not return, inscribed in Breton as well as French, and Lieutenant Kerlan’s grave is beside it. In Lyon the name of Gaston Rivière was added to the memorial to the resistance in 1947 at the request of the railway workers’ union. Historians of the resistance objected that he had acted alone, before the resistance existed, and that the memorial’s other names had died in an organisation he had never belonged to. The name stayed, and a note was added below it recording the date of his act.

French schools teach him as the man who used the Republic’s instruments exactly as they were written. The lesson French pupils are given is about the instruments rather than the man, and every one of them reads Jean-Baptiste Morel’s letter of resignation.

The party of the French far right, Souveraineté française, is linked to him by its opponents, who point to its language about nationality. It denies any link, and it has expelled members who praised him in public, which its opponents regard as evidence that there were members to expel.

Abroad

In Germany he is remembered first as the man who besieged Berlin. The western districts of the city, where the French armies fought for two weeks in 1941, have a memorial to the civilians killed in the fighting and the winter assaults, and it names him as the man who ordered them.

In Great Britain he is remembered as the author of the air raids on British cities and as the prisoner the Guards took. Hugh Carrington’s memoir, The Cellar at Beauvau, is read in schools.

In the United Kingdom of America he is known mostly through the Paris Tribunal, on which a Justice of the Realm’s Supreme Court sat, and through the newspaper scandal of 1940, in which the Commons found that his government had paid for three Midwestern newspapers to campaign against the Realm’s entry into the war.

Portrayals

No French film portrayed him until 2004. The convention was never written down: producers, directors and actors declined, for nearly sixty years, to put him on a French screen, and films about the period showed his portrait on walls and his voice on radios and never the man. A British play about the eleven days of February 1934, told from Jean-Baptiste Morel’s side, has been revived regularly since its first production, and Delacroix appears in it in two scenes and has few lines. A German television series about the Paris Tribunal dramatised the trial from the prosecutors’ benches. Denise Fabre has become a figure in novels, in France and elsewhere, more often than Delacroix himself, usually as a woman who wrote everything down; she declined to read any of them.

Octave Lemaire

Octave Lemaire, the journalist who had assembled La France encerclée, was released in 1945, returned to journalism, and in 1952 published the first biography of Delacroix. It is short and cold, written by a man who had known him and been imprisoned by him and who did not pretend to understand him, and most later biographies rely on it for his years in Paris before 1934.

Historiography

Cause or instrument

The central argument about Delacroix among historians is whether he was the cause of what happened to France or its instrument.

The first school holds that he was the cause, in the specific sense that without him the thing would not have happened in the form it did. It emphasises his single idea, his gift for crowds, his cunning in the eleven days, his personal authority over the barons, his signatures and his initials, and the collapse of the regime within days of his capture. It is the view of the article on the Second Great War, which describes him as a mediocrity with a talent for hatred and the luck of a broken hour, and it has the Tribunal’s verdict on its side.

The second school holds that he was the instrument, and that the real subject of the history is the men who invited him: the President who signed the invitation and everything after it, the deputies who agreed to serve under him, the industrialists who paid for the leagues, the officers who preferred him to the alternative and swore the oath, the editors who spent a year demanding an emergency government, and the officials who kept the register. It points out that every instrument he used had been made by the Republic before him, that the Chamber approved his decrees and the President signed them, and that about a dozen officers of 30,000 refused the oath. Its argument is not that he was innocent. It is that a country which explains him as a monster has an explanation that excuses itself.

The two schools are not exclusive, and French teaching combines them: he is taught as the man who used the instruments, and the lesson is taught as a lesson about the instruments.

The files

His government’s files, used by the Tribunal, are held by the National Archives in Paris, and have been open to researchers since 1996, the same year the file on his ashes was opened in London. Both schools rest on the same record, and the record is unusually complete, because he did not burn his files and because the Tribunal published its transcript in full. It is also a record made by the regime itself, and its gaps are the regime’s. It says almost nothing about what Delacroix thought, because he wrote almost nothing down, and Fabre’s notebooks record what he said rather than what he meant. Historians have found no diary, no private letters and no confidant. There is no source for his inner life, and this article does not supply one.

Responsibility

Albert Lebrun and the men who invited him

The President of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, invited Delacroix to power under the emergency powers of the constitution, believed for a year that he could dismiss him, and signed every decree put in front of him for six years, including the lois de la nation. In 1940 the regime found that he had sent a private message to Ernest IV through the Swiss asking for help, took him to Rambouillet and left the presidency vacant, so that he never signed the Decree on Removal. The Paris Tribunal convicted him, held that a head of state who lends his office to a criminal enterprise shares in it, and suspended his sentence. He is remembered as a traitor for the invitation and the six years and, by some, as a hero for the message.

He did not act alone. The conservative deputies who agreed to serve in the government of 14 February 1934 numbered eleven; all of them were gone by November, most of them into retirement with honours, and four later served the regime in other offices. The industrial syndicates that funded the leagues in 1933 and received the rearmament contracts from 1935 were led by men who in most cases kept their companies until the Tribunal confiscated some of them. The senior officers who told the government in February 1934 that they would prefer not to be asked to clear the streets included three who later commanded armies under the regime. The newspapers that demanded an emergency government in 1933 were, with two exceptions, among those that received paper after May 1934.

The officers who swore

About 30,000 officers swore the serment au Chef in 1935, and about a dozen refused. The refusers were retired. None of them was killed for refusing, and none was imprisoned. The officers who swore therefore cannot say that they swore under threat of death, and the Tribunal did not accept that defence from any of those who offered it.

The resistance’s argument

The Council of the Republic tried to kill Delacroix, and stopped trying in 1943, after the reprisals for Lieutenant Kerlan’s attempt. Some of its members said afterwards that it had been right to stop, and others that it had failed of nerve. The decision was made by people who had watched the deportation of Plouzané, and who had to weigh the lives of hostages against a chance of ending the regime. This article records the argument and does not settle it.

The officials of the register

The register of the non-French was kept, the arrests were made, and the trains were run by hundreds of thousands of ordinary French officials, most of whom did not belong to Rénovation Nationale and had not sworn to believe in anything. Registrars decided who was French. Clerks copied the lists. Police officers knocked on doors. Railwaymen drove the trains to the east. About 3,000 of them were tried after the war in the ordinary French courts, and most of the rest returned to their work. The genocide of about six million people was carried out through the ordinary administration of a modern state, by people who went home in the evenings. France teaches this, and it is the part of the history of Henri Delacroix that does not end with his execution.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• France
• The Second Great War
• Ernest IV
• Duchy of Normandy
• Duchy of Brittany
• League of Nations
• American Aeronautics and Space Administration