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| |  | | Rene Bousquet | | | context : | Occupied France  | | judgement place : | France | | status : | Died before end of trial | | particulars : | Assassinated on 8 June 1993 | | position : | General Secretary of Police in the Vichy regime from May 1942 to 31 December 1943 |
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| | | | René Bousquet was born on 11 May 1909 in Montauban. He was the son of a solicitor and began his career as the principal private secretary to the Préfet of Tarn-et-Garonne. In 1933, he became Sous-Préfet and in 1935, first secretary to the Minister of Agriculture. In 1936, Roger Salengro, Interior Minister of the Popular Front entrusted him with responsibility for the central records of the National Criminal Investigation Department. In 1941 he was appointed regional Préfet. In April 1942, at exactly the same time as the SS, in the occupied zone, had taken over responsibility for maintaining public order, Pierre Laval (at the time Prime Minister of the Vichy regime) appointed him to the General Secretariat of the Police with full powers.
Upholding a commitment to maintain public order, René Bousquet was able to win an end to the direct subordination of the French police to the German occupier and gain a certain amount of autonomy, by accepting to satisfy as best he could the Reich’s emissaries. He was also able to obtain that all of the police services be under his command.
On 2 July 1942, René Bousquet and Karl Oberg (Head of the German Police and the SS in occupied France) began preparations for the arrests of 16 and 17 July in the Paris region (in a police round-up known as the “Rafle du Vel´ d’ Hiv´”). In exchange for the postponement of the deportation of French Jews, René Bousquet made a proposal “to arrest those Jews of foreign origin throughout all of France”. This commitment by René Bousquet to the round up of foreign Jews was approved by Pierre Laval on 3 July. In doing so, France became the only country in Europe in which Jews, living in territory not occupied by the Germans, were deported.
In order to increase the numbers in the large roundup foreseen for the 26 August 1942, Bousquet, on his own initiative, communicated new instructions to the Préfets, cancelling the previous ruling provisions, which protected certain categories of children from arrest. From then onwards, those under 18 years of age and mothers and fathers with children less than 5 years of age were no longer spared deportation.
On 22 August, he made a recommendation to the Préfets to deal severely with those officials demonstrating a lack of zeal for the task.
In the first six months of 1944, he again became one of the pet aversions of the collaborationist press, which accused him of only being a part of the Vichy administration, in order to promote the Resistance. Indeed, it was a fact that René Bousquet had covered up for his assistant Jean-Paul Martin who provided important aid to certain Resistance networks.
After the war, at the end of a trial lasting three days, René Bousquet was acquitted by the Supreme Court of justice on the count of “offence against the national defence interest” but was “convicted for the crime of national indignity”, automatically imposed on all who had agreed to participate in the Vichy governments of the time, and was given the minimum sentence of “five years loss of civil rights.” He was however “immediately given a reprieve since he had participated in an active and sustained manner in the resistance against the occupier”.
Although not permitted to take up any high public office, Bousquet nevertheless pursued a brilliant career with the Banque d’Indochine and in the press (he was a board member of La Dépêche du Midi).
Following a complaint which was lodged in 1989, by the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France, René Bousquet was indicted in March 1991. | |     click for more... | | Trial Watch would like to remind its users that any person charged by national or international authorities is presumed innocent until proven guilty. | |  |  | | nationality : | | | France | | | date of birth : | | | 11.05.1909 | | | period of charges : | | | 02.07.1942 - 08.1942 | | | judgement period : | | | 03.1991 | | | charges : | | | Crimes against humanity | | | profile last modified : | | | 08.03.2010 |
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