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Milice française
Flag of the Milice
Active
30 January 1943 (1943-01-30)–15 August 1944 (1944-08-15)
The Milice française (French Militia), generally called la Milice (literally 'the militia'; French pronunciation:[milis]), was a political paramilitary organization created on 30 January 1943 by the Vichy regime (with German aid) to help fight against the French Resistance during World War II. The Milice's formal head was Prime Minister Pierre Laval, although its chief of operations and de facto leader was Secretary General Joseph Darnand. It participated in summary executions and assassinations, helping to round up Jews and résistants in France for deportation. It was the successor to Darnand's Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL) militia. The Milice was the Vichy regime's most extreme manifestation of fascism. Ultimately, Darnand envisaged the Milice as a fascist single party political movement for the French state.[1]
The Milice frequently used torture to extract information or confessions from those whom they interrogated. The French Resistance considered the Milice more dangerous than the Gestapo and SS because they were native Frenchmen who understood local dialects fluently, had extensive knowledge of the towns and countryside, and knew local people and informants.[2][3]
Membership
Resistance members captured by the Milice, July 1944. One of the miliciens is armed with a captured British Sten gun.
Early Milice volunteers included members of France's pre-war far-right parties, such as the Action Française, and working-class men convinced of the benefits of the Vichy government's politics. In addition to ideology, incentives for joining the Milice included employment, regular pay and rations, the latter of which became particularly important as the war continued and civilian rations dwindled to near-starvation levels. Some joined because members of their families had been killed or injured in Allied bombing raids or had been threatened, extorted or attacked by French Resistance groups. Still others joined for more mundane reasons: petty criminals were recruited by being told their sentences would be commuted if they joined the organization, and Milice volunteers were exempt from transportation to Germany as forced labour.[4] Official figures are difficult to obtain, but several historians including Julian T. Jackson estimate that the Milice's membership reached 25,000–30,000 by 1944. The majority of members were not full-time militiamen, but devoted only a few hours per week to their Milice activities.[5] The Milice had a section for full-time members, the Franc-Garde, who were permanently mobilized and lived in barracks.[5]
The Milice also had youth sections for boys and girls, called the Avant-Garde.[5]
Symbols and materials
Emblem
Propaganda poster for the Milice, advertising its first national congress.
The chosen emblem for the Milice carried the Greek letter γ (gamma), the symbol of the Ariesastrological sign in the Zodiac, ostensibly representing rejuvenation, and replenishment of energy. The color scheme chosen was silver in blue background within a red circle for ordinary miliciens, white in black background for the arm-carrying militants, and white in red background for the active combatants.
Milice member guarding Resistance PoWs wearing a German Army Wound Badge (indicating previous service with a German Army unit) and armed with a Spanish copy of the Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, chambered in 8mm French Ordnance.
Milice troops (known as miliciens) wore a blue uniform jacket and trousers, a brown shirt and a wide blue beret. (During active paramilitary-style operations, an Adrian helmet was used, which commonly featured the emblem, either painted on or as a badge) Its newspaper was Combats (not to be confused with the underground Resistance newspaper, Combat). The Milice's armed forces were officially known as the Franc-Garde. Contemporary photographs show the Milice armed with a variety of weapons captured from Allied forces.
The Resistance targeted individual miliciens for assassination, often in public areas such as cafés and streets. On 24 April 1943 they shot and killed Paul de Gassovski, a milicien in Marseilles. By late November, Combat reported that 25 miliciens had been killed and 27 wounded in Resistance attacks.
Reprisals
The most prominent person killed by the Resistance was Philippe Henriot, the Vichy regime's Minister of Information and Propaganda, who was known as "the French Goebbels". He was killed in his apartment in the Ministry of Information on the rue Solferino in the predawn hours of 28 June 1944 by résistants dressed as miliciens. His wife, who was in the same room, was spared. The Milice retaliated for this by killing several well-known anti-Nazi politicians and intellectuals (such as Victor Basch) and prewar conservative leader Georges Mandel.
The Milice initially operated in the former Zone libre of France under the control of the Vichy regime. In January 1944, the radicalized Milice moved into what had been the zone occupée of France (including Paris). They established their headquarters in the old Communist Party headquarters at 44 rue Le Peletier and at 61 rue Monceau. (The house had been owned by the Menier family, makers of France's best-known chocolates.) The Lycée Louis-Le-Grand was occupied as a barracks, and an officer candidate school was established in the Auteuil synagogue.
Notable actions
Perhaps the largest and best-known operation undertaken by the Milice was the Battle of Glières, its attempt in March 1944 to suppress the Resistance in the département of Haute-Savoie (in southeastern France, near the Swiss border).[10] The Milice could not overcome the Resistance, and called in German troops to complete the operation. On Bastille Day, 14 July 1944, the Franc-Garde suppressed a revolt started by prisoners at Paris prison La Santé, killing 34 prisoners.[11]
The legal standing of the Milice was never clarified by the Vichy government; it operated parallel to (but separate from) the Groupe mobile de réserve and other Vichy French police forces. The Milice operated outside civilian law, and its actions were not subject to judicial review or control.[citation needed]
End of the war in Europe
In August 1944, as the tide of war was shifting and fearing he would be held accountable for the operations of the Milice, Marshal Philippe Pétain sought to distance himself from the organization by writing a harsh letter rebuking Darnand for the organization's "excesses."[citation needed] Darnand's response suggested that Pétain ought to have voiced his objections sooner.[citation needed]
After the Allied Liberation of France, French collaborators began fleeing the Allied advance in the west.[12] During a period of unofficial reprisals immediately following on the German retreat, large numbers of miliciens were executed, either individually or in groups.[citation needed] Milice offices throughout France were ransacked, with agents often being brutally beaten and then thrown from office windows or into rivers before being taken to prison.[citation needed] At Le Grand-Bornand, French Forces of the Interior executed 76 captured members of the Milice on 24 August 1944.[13]
Those Frenchmen who managed to escape to Germany and were serving in the German Navy, the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), the Organisation Todt and the Milice security police became part of a new unit known as the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne (Waffen-Grenadier-Brigade der SS Charlemagne).[12] The unit also included some remaining personnel from the disbanded Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism (LVF) and the SS-Volunteer Sturmbrigade France (SS-Freiwilligen Sturmbrigade "Frankreich").[12] Later in February 1945, the unit was renamed the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS. At this time it had a strength of 7,340 men: 1,200 men from the LVF, 1,000 from the Sturmbrigade, 2,500 from the Milice, 2,000 from the NSKK, and 640 who were former Kriegsmarine and naval police.[14] Some of its surviving members were among the last defenders of Hitler's bunker, fighting suicidally to the end in the ruins of Berlin.
Aftermath
An unknown number of miliciens managed to escape prison or execution, either by going underground or fleeing abroad. A few were later prosecuted. The most notable of these was Paul Touvier, the former commander of the Milice in Lyon. In 1994, he was convicted of ordering the retaliatory execution of seven Jews at Rillieux-la-Pape. He died in prison two years later.
In popular culture
Since the war, the term milice has acquired a derogatory meaning in France.
The French hard rock ensemble Trust had a hit named "Police Milice", where its frontman Bernard Bonvoisin compared modern-day police officers to the Milice.
The 2003 drama The Statement, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Michael Caine, was adapted from the 1996 novel by the same name by Brian Moore. He shaped it from the story of Paul Touvier, a Vichy French Milice official who hid for years (often sheltered by the Catholic Church) and was indicted in 1991 for war crimes. Both he and the film character had supervised a mass murder of Jews.
The film Female Agents (French: Les Femmes de l'ombre), set during World War II, has a scene where two of the female agents walk past a recruitment poster for the Milice which says "Against Communism / French Militia / Secretary-General Joseph Darnand".
They feature prominently in the popular French TV series Un Village Français which covers the whole period of the occupation and liberation and was broadcast in France and extensively internationally.[1]
^Biography of Michel Thomas, page 129. [Robbins, Christopher. "Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story" (2000). New York Free Press/Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-0263-3/Republished as "Courage Beyond Words" (2007). New York McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-149911-3]
^Paul Jankowski, "In Defense of Fiction: Resistance, Collaboration, and Lacombe, Lucien". The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Sep., 1991), pp. 462
^ abcMatthew Feldman, 2004, Fascism: The 'fascist epoch', p. 243, ISBN0415290198
^Littlejohn, David (1987). Foreign Legions of the Third Reich. Vol. 1: Norway, Denmark, France. San Jose, California: R. James Bender Publishing. pp. 179–180. ISBN0-912138-17-3.
^Littlejohn, David (1994). Foreign Legions of the Third Reich. Vol. 1. R. James Bender Publishing. pp. 179–181.
Cullen, Stephen M., Stacey, Mark, (2018) World War II Vichy French Security Troops, Osprey Publishing. ISBN978-1472827753
"Cullen, Stephen (2010) "Collaborationists in Arms: The Uniforms and Equipment of the Vichy Milice Francaise". The Armourer Militaria Magazine (100): 24–28. July–August 2010.
Cullen, Stephen (2008). Cohort of the Damned: Armed Collaboration in Wartime France – the Milice Francaise, 1943–45. Warwick: Allotment Hut Booklets.
Cullen, Stephen (March 2008). "Legion of the Damned: The Milice Francaise, 1943–45". Military Illustrated.
Pryce-Jones, David (1981). Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation. London: Collins.
"Resistance in France". After the Battle (105). 1999.
Vichy France
Nazi Germany
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