Laying the Nazi ghost.

A FRENCH law court is curiously monarchic. The Presiding Magistrate, in red robe with ermine trim, sits on high, asking almost all the questions. On either side of him are two more judges, black-robed. And beside the three judges are the nine jurors. To convict, only a simple majority--five of the nine jurors--is required, and at the close of the audience ("trial" seems an imperfect translation), the jurors withdraw and conduct their deliberations under the supervision of the Presiding Magistrate, who withdraws right along with them. In France, the "hung" jury is almost unknown. For in a French criminal trial the accused faces the majesty of the French state. The Menendez brothers wouldn't have had a chance.

And the majesty of the French state is what seemed necessary to try and convict Paul Touvier. Eichmann was tried and executed in Jerusalem. Klaus Barbie, a German, was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in Lyon, France. But Paul Touvier is a Frenchman, who in his person has reminded France of a dark page in its history: its massive collaboration with the German Occupation. The flamboyant Jacques Attali, a former close advisor to President Francois Mitterrand (with whom he has broken) enraged many Frenchmen by declaring that France itself was the guilty party in the Touvier trial. Since the war, he said, the country has been subjected to a "double mystification" for which he holds two presidents responsible: de Gaulle and Mitterrand. "De Gaulle led Frenchmen to believe that they were all members of the Resistance, whereas they were generally collaborators. Mitterrand led Frenchmen to believe that during the war they were on the Left, whereas they were on the Right." This double deception has hidden the truth. "France collaborated," Attali declared. "And it wasn't a conspiracy of a few men who usurped power, as is claimed, but exactly the opposite. It was the entire French elite that organized the whole thing." As can be imagined, France has been in an uproar, the most outraged of all being the genuine leaders of the French Resistance.

Paul Touvier, now 79, was a regional director of La Milice, a French organization set up on the model of the Gestapo. When in 1942 Vichy's Minister of Information, Philippe Henriot, was assassinated by the Resistance, Touvier in reprisal ordered the death by firing squad of seven hostages. If members of the Resistance had caught Touvier in the first days after the Liberation they would have stood him against a wall and shot him like countless other collaborators, and there would have been no questions asked. But Touvier escaped, and even beyond the general amnesty for faits de guerre passed to achieve "national reconciliation," Touvier was specifically anmestied by President Georges Pompidou, his hostage killing judged to be a routine "war crime."

But the French today distinguish between a simple war crime (killing prisoners, hostages, innocent women and children, etc.) and a "crime against humanity," which justified trying Paul Touvier all over again after more than fifty years.

Touvier himself, like Eichmann, was for many days in a bullet-proof glass cage during the trial. Hundreds of security troops cordoned off not only the courthouse at Versailles but the whole area for a block around. The Avocat General, the chief prosecutor, also red-robed, sat on high, directly across from Touvier and his lawyers.

Another peculiarity of the French system, much imitated on the Continent, is that attorneys for the victims, known as the partie civile, also have their say in a criminal trial. And in this hugely publicized case, no fewer than thirty black-robed attorneys (representing the victims' families, organizations of the Resistance, veterans, the Rights of Man...), many wearing the rosette of the Legion of Honor, also sat facing Touvier. And on Wednesday, April 20, after a five-week trial and a highly expeditious jury deliberation, Paul Touvier was found guilty and sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in prison.

But what is a crime against humanity? The seven men Touvier had shot were, of course, Jews. An eighth hostage, originally destined to be executed as well, appeared at the trial to testify that Touvier had spared him because he was a Gentile--as he had spared other Gentiles. I myself put in most of a week at the trial, and have no doubt from the evidence (despite his denials) that Touvier was a fierce anti-Semite, and that it had personally gratified him to order the execution of Jews, whom he called at the time ordure juive, "Jewish garbage." But why it is more inhuman to kill a Jew (however unjustly) than to kill any other Frenchman (equally unjustly) has been debated compulsively in France for months. The answer lies in the motivation, the killer's purpose--not unlike the new U.S. laws against "hate crimes."

Interestingly, France's famous "Napoleonic Code"--so clearly composed that Stendhal read an article or two every day to clarify his style--has just been rewritten. The new Code Penal, which went into effect only this March, contains a chapter on Crimes Against Humanity, the first of which is genocide, which is defined as actions in execution of a "concerted plan to destroy wholly or in part any national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, or group defined by any other arbitrary criterion." As at Nuremberg, there was no getting around the ex post facto nature of the judgment. "There are some crimes so terrible," said a bright young French law student writing a dissertation on the case, "that they should be punished even if there are no previous laws against them." And, indeed, as at Nuremberg, that seemed to be the spirit of the entire enterprise. A stain must be removed from the French national honor, and, despite the dubious legal innovations, for the French nation that goal seems to have been achieved.