Action Against The Police
After the Liberation, survivors of the internment camp at Drancy began legal proceedings against gendarmes accused of being accomplices of the Nazis. An investigation began into 15 gendarmes, of whom 10 were accused at the Cour de justice de la Seine of conduct threatening the safety of the state. Three fled before the trial could start. The other seven said they were only obeying orders, despite numerous witnesses and accounts by survivors of brutality.
The court ruled on 22 March 1947, that the seven were found guilty but that most had rehabilitated themselves "by active participation, useful and sustained, offered to the Resistance against the enemy." Two others were jailed for two years and condemned to dégradation nationale for five years. A year later they were reprieved.
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Famous quotes containing the words action and/or police:
“Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)