dylanredefined said:
Sounds like an evil burecrat doing what ever the bosses want.Guess hell becomes a bit more efficent .Good riddance .
an evil bureaucrat, indeed (but then they all are, anyway. just go to your local housing office
), but one who knew what he was doing even though he always denied it (just like your local housing manager). but unlike those petty cunts we have to deal with everyday, he had avery acute political mind and moved with the time as political moods and power changed hands. he was against the monarchists (cagoule du rois?) and other right wing fuckers, but pro republican and SFIO (the forefather of the modern Socialist Party founded by Francois Mitterand from the old SFIO at the Epinay congress of 1972, Mitterand himself being famously a former Vichy official, not on the same level, thank god) but didn't take the opportunity to fly to London to join De Gaulle in 1940. he stayed and was promoted and was found to be rather efficient by the Germans, which it is why he became Prefect of the Gironde), he did not just obey orders as he claimed later, he enthusiastically followed them and gave them. he was not necessarily an antisemite as such, just very cold hearted as a state servant. later he could have fled Bordeaux to Spain (neutral to the displeasure of Hitler), not very far away (he would have had the contacts) and then to England. he did not.
just as the war unfolded, he was contacted by a friend of him he'd met in the corridor of power back in 1938, Rene Gassin, now a proper resistant and Gaullist, and somehow made his way back to the top, again using his old friend in the SFIO, one of the leading ruling parties in the fifties and very pro colonialist, would you believe. so he became again top civil servant in Corsica, then Algeria, then Morocco (1954,1955) interestingly at the time of serious civil unrest prior to independence in 1956 (unlike algeria, there was no mutual hatred and the french stayed on afterwards working for the king and his chums) and back to constantine in algeria during the war. do you see a pattern emerging...?
in 1958, he was back in Paris as the prefect of police. in 1961, he was at the heart of power, not just an evil bureaucrat. his boss, the minister of the interior, Michel Debre, was an hardliner on the algerian question and who was not happy about De Gaulle policy of sparing the guillotine to a number of FLN activists on Death row (not all of them, though). he claimed he did not order the massacres, well he did not commit them to paper to pass on to his subordinates. he just let it know that the police had free hands on the matter....
at the end of the day, when you are the boss, you have to take responsibility for the collective actions of your men, don't you? if a general had somehow let let his soldiers raped and pillaged a whole invaded town, you'd think he had a serious responsibility there, wouldn't you?
then in 1967, he properly entered politics elected for the gaullists after the elections in June 1968 when the UDR had an overall majority for De Gaulle. in the seventies, he became a giscardist when the wind changed once again and he became budget minister.
he bloody knew what he was doing.
