L'Affaire Touvier : Opening old wounds

YOU COULD CALL IT A WAR game. Let's say you were a young Frenchman during the Occupation and you chose the losing side, the wrong side, the German side. Let's say you were tried in absentia and sentenced to death as a war criminal.

The game consisted of hiding for 20 years until the statute of limitations ran out, and then you were home free.

One major French war criminal managed to complete this protracted game of hide-and-seek, and his name is Paul Touvier. But the irony of his achievement is that it set off a chain of events that finally led to his capture and imprisonment in May of this year. After 45 years in hiding, Touvier was found in a Nice priory operated by the schismatic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, thanks to some solid detective work on the part of a three-man team of gendarmes. In France, there is now l'affaire Touvier, as there was l'affaire Barbie. In some ways, l'affaire Touvier is the more interesting of the two, for it shows that the fault line dividing the French according to which side they were on under the Occupation is still active, still sending out tremors. After almost half a century, French society, the state, and the Roman Catholic Church are still, to a surprising extent, influenced by those old allegiances.

Many of the documents on which this article is based have never been published. They come from the files of Gerard Chauvy, a French historian who has dug into the Lyons archives, and the author of two books on the Occupation in that region. Several other people who were interviewed for this article did not want their names used out of fear of reprisals, even now, from Lefebvre's traditionalist Catholic network.

The role of the Catholic Church in particular remains a sensitive area of inquiry, which goes back to the early years of the Third Republic. From 1880 to 1905, there was a battle between the state and the Catholic Church in France, which was seen as unfriendly to the young republic, and which ran an extensive parochial school system, teaching its views to its students. During the course of this battle, a number of laws were passed to curb the power of the church. Parochial schools were shut down, religious orders were dissolved, religious instruction in state-run schools was banned, and, in 1905, a law was passed formally separating church and state. The enactment of these measures left a lot of disgruntled Catholics, who nursed their resentment and formed a disloyal opposition, some of them secretly hoping for an overthrow of the republic.

For these people, the defeat of 1940 had a silver lining; the Third Republic expired and was replaced by Marechal Henri Philippe Petain, who represented their France, the France of pre-Republican, traditional values. The Petain Government, in Vichy, quickly embarked on a program of pro-church legislation. The religious orders were brought back and allowed to teach. The parochial schools were funded by the state, as were Catholic youth movements, and various tax benefits were offered to priests, monks and nuns working in hospitals.

The Vichy Government used the church to spread its propaganda and to control French youth. There was a flow of photographs showing Petain with this or that cardinal. The clergy responded with wholehearted enthusiasm for the Vichy regime. There was a feeling of gratitude toward a Government that barely stopped short of ending the separation of church and state. When Petain visited Lyons in November 1940, it wasn't surprising to hear Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, the archbishop of that city, say: ''Petain is France and the France of today is Petain.''

This enthusiasm for the Vichy Government lasted until 1942, when the massive deportations of Jews came to the attention of prelates in the nonoccupied zone. A number of cardinals and archbishops, including Gerlier of Lyons, as well as the church authorities in Toulouse, Montauban and Marseilles, spoke out that August in pastoral letters to denounce the deportations. This was a turning point for the church - part of it veered away from Vichy, while elements of the old Catholic right remained unconditionally pro-Petain and in some cases collaborationist and pro-German as well. After 1942, priests and bishops were of every political stripe - from those who joined the Resistance to those with the French S.S. Charlemagne division in the German Army.

PAUL TOUVIER WAS born in 1915 to a lower-middle-class family of the old Catholic right. This usually means a famille nombreuse - in his case, five boys, of whom he was the oldest, and six girls. He went to a Catholic school, was an altar boy who thought of becoming a priest and spent a year in a seminary. His mother, Eugenie, an orphan raised by nuns, was a pious woman who went to mass every day. His father, Francois, was a career soldier who retired after 19 years and became a tax collector in the Alpine city of Chambery.

The father was a great admirer of the right-wing demagogue Charles Maurras, spokesman for L'Action Francaise, a newspaper that served as the voice of the right. Maurras believed that democracy was part of the Lutheran conspiracy, that social justice did not exist, that free speech was a menace and that France was being destroyed by half-breeds and Jews. His solution for combating French decadence was a return to the monarchy.

It soon became manifest that Paul wasn't the studious type. He didn't have any particular interests, other than gambling and girls, and when he turned 21, in 1936, his father found him a job as a clerk in the Chambery railroad depot. Then came the war and the creation of the Vichy Government. The Touviers were 100 percent behind Marechal Petain, victor of Verdun, savior of France. When Vichy founded a veteran's group called the Legion Francaise des Combattants in 1941, both father and son joined, the son having been mobilized in 1939.

Paul Touvier was assigned to expedite packages for prisoners of war, which got him into a spot of trouble, for he was caught removing the chocolate and the cigarettes from some of the packages. With these rationed articles he could impress girls. It should also be noted that Touvier was unusually good-looking, almost pretty, with wavy blond hair, delicate features and deep-set, intense blue eyes. He got a girl pregnant; the baby was turned over to a Catholic orphanage.

All this did not sit well with Touvier pere. When Vichy Premier Pierre Laval formed the Milice, an armed pro-German militia, in February 1943, the father told his son to join, hoping it would put some backbone into him. Led by Joseph Darnand, an embittered World War I hero turned neo-Nazi, the Milice soon showed its true colors -it was basically a gang of thugs who did the Germans' dirty work.

Touvier went into the 2d Section in Chambery, which gathered intelligence. He found he was good at organizing files and recruiting informants and tailing suspects. He was so good, in fact, that he came to the attention of the inspectors from Vichy, who in September 1943 sent him to Lyons to be regional director. Lyons was a hub for both the Resistance and the Gestapo, whose Section 4, under Klaus Barbie, and Section 6, under August Moritz, were models of application in their pursuit of Resistance members and Jews. Both these offices made ample use of the Milice in carrying out their operations. Paul Touvier found that his job was not only collecting intelligence but taking part in arrests and other actions.

In December 1943, at the instigation of the Gestapo, Touvier and his men raided a synagogue where some Jewish refugees were reportedly hiding. They found only a caretaker couple, and arrested them in front of their young daughter, who years later identified Touvier. The parents were deported to Auschwitz and did not return.

Touvier may also have been connected, through the chain of command, to the murders of Victor Basch and his wife, on Jan. 11, 1944, although documents show that he was not present when the crime was committed. Basch, who today has a street in Lyons named after him, was president of the League of the Rights of Man, the most important French civil rights group. In 1944, he was 80, and his wife was 75.

The two were arrested in their home in a combined Milice-Gestapo operation, taken to a spot on the banks of the Rhone river and shot.

In April 1944, Touvier led a raid outside Lyons, on the fairgrounds in the town of Montmelian, five miles from Chambery, and rounded up 57 Spanish refugees, who were deported to the camps. Only nine returned, three of whom later identified him.

IN THE SPRING AND summer of 1944, and particularly after the Allied invasion on D-day, both the Resistance and the Milice stepped up their activities. Within the larger framework of the war, there was a civil war of Frenchman against Frenchman.

On June 28, in Paris, the Resistance killed the most popular collaborationist figure, the radio commentator Philippe Henriot, a high-ranking officer in the Milice. With his mordant, street-smart style, Henriot was credited wth single-handedly limiting enthusiasm in France for Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French. He was a hero to the Milice, which felt bound to avenge him - not only in Paris, but in five or six other cities as well.

In Lyons, where Touvier held about 25 prisoners at his headquarters in a former school, the order came on June 30, two days after Henriot's death, to shoot some hostages in reprisal. Touvier studied the index cards on the prisoners and chose seven, all of them Jews. They were taken to a quiet suburb, lined up against a cemetery wall and shot by a firing squad.

On Aug. 15, the Allies landed in the south of France and began moving north. Soon, they would be in Lyons. The Gaullists and the Resistance would be taking over, and Touvier himself would become a candidate for the firing squad, for the incidents mentioned were only part of his collaborationist record. He was notorious for his racketeering among the Jews, to whom he would promise protection at a price. He was notorious for taking the apartments and the property of those he arrested. In tape-recorded reminiscences he made in 1969 to a priest, Msgr. Charles Duquaire, Touvier said, ''For me, what I did was legal. I was told, 'You will requisition the apartments of Jews.' I did it. 'You need cars, you'll requisition them.' I therefore requisitioned cars . . . .You could call that theft. For me it was requisitioning.''

IN THE SPRING AND summer of 1944, and particularly after the Allied invasion on D-day, both the Resistance and the Milice stepped up their activities. Within the larger framework of the war, there was a civil war of Frenchman against Frenchman.

On June 28, in Paris, the Resistance killed the most popular collaborationist figure, the radio commentator Philippe Henriot, a high-ranking officer in the Milice. With his mordant, street-smart style, Henriot was credited wth single-handedly limiting enthusiasm in France for Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French. He was a hero to the Milice, which felt bound to avenge him - not only in Paris, but in five or six other cities as well.

In Lyons, where Touvier held about 25 prisoners at his headquarters in a former school, the order came on June 30, two days after Henriot's death, to shoot some hostages in reprisal. Touvier studied the index cards on the prisoners and chose seven, all of them Jews. They were taken to a quiet suburb, lined up against a cemetery wall and shot by a firing squad.

On Aug. 15, the Allies landed in the south of France and began moving north. Soon, they would be in Lyons. The Gaullists and the Resistance would be taking over, and Touvier himself would become a candidate for the firing squad, for the incidents mentioned were only part of his collaborationist record. He was notorious for his racketeering among the Jews, to whom he would promise protection at a price. He was notorious for taking the apartments and the property of those he arrested. In tape-recorded reminiscences he made in 1969 to a priest, Msgr. Charles Duquaire, Touvier said, ''For me, what I did was legal. I was told, 'You will requisition the apartments of Jews.' I did it. 'You need cars, you'll requisition them.' I therefore requisitioned cars . . . .You could call that theft. For me it was requisitioning.''

Henri Jeanblanc, a member of the Resistance who was captured, along with his wife, Ginette, by the Milice and held at the headquarters in Lyons, remembers being put to work moving the furniture of arrested Jews into a Milice warehouse, where everything was carefully inventoried. ''It was organized looting,'' recalls Jeanblanc, who today lives outside Lyons. ''Looting according to the regulations.''

Within days of the Allied landing, the Milice were burning their files, and the halls of Touvier's headquarters resounded with the accents of miliciens from Marseilles and Toulon and Valence who had fled the Allied advance. Touvier turned to Father Stephane Vautherin, a Catholic priest who acted as the unofficial chaplain to the Milice. Vautherin, then 47 years old, was a typical product of the old Catholic right, with its love of order and authority and its dislike for democracy and the ''foreign elements'' that had supposedly weakened France.

On Sept. 5, with the Resistance already looking for Touvier, Vautherin took him to what was known as the Wilson Bridge. He watched Touvier cross the Rhone and vanish up a street and behind a building. Then he went home, where he was arrested on Sept. 10.

Vautherin was tried for consorting with the enemy, and was sentenced to 20 years of forced labor. Such was General de Gaulle's policy at the time: To avoid summary justice, arrest the collaborators at once, try them at once and give them stiff sentences. (Then, a few years later when things calmed down, the strategy was to pardon them. Vautherin served only four years before being pardoned in 1949; he went to live in a monastery in Anjou, where he died in the 1970's.) After leaving Vautherin, Touvier went to Brignais, a nearby town, and rented a house. He had plenty of money, having taken 500,000 francs from the Milice treasury. What he badly needed (Continued on Page 72) were papers. His sister's husband, Albert Gaillard, was a prisoner of war in Germany. Touvier assumed his identity; he walked into the Brignais town hall and asked for an ID card in Gaillard's name, saying he had come down from le maquis - the Resistance stronghold - and they gave it to him.

He knew he couldn't stay in the Lyons area, so he went to Montpellier, in the south of France, and bought a boarding house. He remained there until 1946, when, for reasons as yet unexplained, he sold the property and went to Paris, where he joined a gang of other wanted collaborators involved in various illegal activities. They made bootleg chocolate, which they sold out of suitcases to candy stores. They passed counterfeit bills. ''Sometimes we spent days folding and unfolding bills so they didn't look new,'' Touvier said later. They stole a car. They held up a tax office in the middle of Paris. ''I went to a priest,'' said Touvier, ''who told me I had a right to take the state's money to feed my family. That was the psychology of the period.''

By family he meant Monique Berthet, a young woman with whom he was living. She worked in a bakery that Touvier was planning to rob. ''It was an easy job,'' he said. ''We'd have not only the money but the bread tickets,'' for rationing was still in force. But there was a police informer in Touvier's gang, and before he could hold up the bakery, he was arrested, in July 1947.

By this time, Touvier had twice been tried in absentia for war crimes and twice been sentenced to death - in Lyons on Sept. 10, 1946, and in Chambery on March 4, 1947. Touvier knew that the Paris police would transfer him to Lyons, where his sentence would, in all likelihood, be carried out. On July 9, he escaped.

Wandering in the streets of Paris, not knowing where to go, Touvier stopped at the first church he saw, Saint-Francois-Xavier, and told the parish priest he was a hunted man. The priest, Pierre Duben, was sympathetic. A few days later, Monique Berthet joined him and Father Duben married them, although they did not obtain a civil marriage license, and passed them on to a convent for shelter.

In 1949, Touvier's wife was pregnant, and they decided to return to his parents' house in Chambery. Now, not only was he in hiding, but he had a family to support. His father agreed to take him in. A daughter, Chantal, was born in 1949, and a son, Pierre, in 1950. They took their mother's name, Berthet, and were registered at birth at the town hall as being of pere inconnu - father unknown.

This was a long and somewhat baffling stage in Touvier's itinerary, for it was an open secret in Chambery that he was staying with his parents, and yet the police never came to arrest him. Once they questioned his father, who responded: ''I have nothing to tell you.''

The years slipped by, and Touvier was more or less forgotten. He was playing the war game, waiting on the statute of limitations, which would run out in 1967, 20 years after his second conviction. Then he could surface, a free man.

IN 1957, AN IMPORTANT new character appeared in the Touvier case -Msgr. Charles Duquaire, secretary to the aging Archbishop of Lyons, Cardinal Gerlier. Duquaire came from a distinguished family of Lyons lawyers, and had studied for the bar before entering the seminary. He was a sparrow of a man, barely taller than five feet, and weighing not much over 100 pounds, with a thin bony face. But he had the diplomatic manner, the gift for flattery and the tactical sense that being the aide to an eminent cardinal teach.

He seems to have been a man in search of a cause, and in Touvier he found it. They met through friends. Duquaire convinced himself that Touvier had been unjustly convicted, and deserved not the statute of limitations, but a pardon. For the next 15 years, Duquaire devoted himself to Touvier with a single-minded energy that bordered on obsession, gathering documents for a pardon file.

By this time, General de Gaulle was President of France, and through his connections, Monsignor Duquaire managed to have a member of de Gaulle's cabinet ask the general informally what he thought of a pardon for Touvier. The general's six-word reply was: ''Touvier? Douze balles dans la peau'' - the firing squad. A pardon would have to await the general's successor.

De Gaulle was still President when the statute of limitations expired in 1967. Touvier could now have surfaced, but preferred to stay in hiding, awaiting his hoped-for pardon. For the statute of limitations did not affect les peines accessoires, or secondary sentences, imposed by the law, which can include the loss of rights as a citizen, the confiscation of property and lifetime banishment from the area where the crimes were committed. For Touvier, les peines accessoires meant that he could not live with his wife and children in Chambery, which he considered home; he could not inherit property from his father; he could not legally marry his wife or give his children his name. He had gotten away with his life, but he was still a nonperson.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Gerlier had died and Monsignor Duquaire's career was taking him to a position in a more influential secretariat. By 1969, he was working for Jean Cardinal Villot, the Pope's Secretary of State, the No. 2 job at the Vatican. That same year, Georges Pompidou was elected President of France, giving new hope to Duquaire that Touvier would be pardoned.

Touvier stayed on the move while Monsignor Duquaire put together the pardon dossier he planned to present to President Pompidou. By December 1969, the dossier, including a five-hour conversation with Touvier recorded on tape on May 27, 1969, had been turned over to the Pardons Commission. In January 1970, Jacques Delarue, an expert on the Occupation and a commissioner of the Police Judiciaire, a sort of French Federal Bureau of Investigation, was asked by the Minister of Justice to investigate the pardon request and talk to the people who had written testimonial letters.

Now a youthful-looking 70 and living in a Paris suburb, Delarue recalls that Monsignor Duquaire came from Rome to see him and said, ''You must understand that Touvier is one of the wounded who has been left on the battlefield.'' Delarue responded, '' 'Monsignor, you have been duped. Touvier has blood on his hands.' '' But, he said, Duquaire ''wouldn't listen. He said, 'I don't want to know what he did during the Occupation.' ''

Delarue's report concluded that a pardon for Touvier would provoke public outrage. In November 1971, however, to Delarue's consternation, Pompidou went ahead and granted the pardon, keeping the news out of the papers. Pompidou is said to have remarked: ''This is an old story. I'll sign.''

But the President completely misjudged public opinion on the matter. News of the pardon leaked out, and there was a tremendous outcry, from former members of the Resistance, from Pompidou's opposition and from the Jewish community. The so-called crimes against humanity charge - first applied at Nuremberg and for which there is no statute of limitations - had recently been recognized under French law as a means of trying war criminals. Suits were filed by the families of Touvier's victims using this charge.

A legal battle dragged on for 10 years, until 1981, when la Cour de Cassation, the French equivalent of the Supreme Court, ruled that Touvier could be charged for crimes against humanity. So this was where Monsignor Duquaire's compulsion to help Touvier, his need to play politics and sway minds, had led - Touvier was worse off than before the pardon. Now, he was charged with four crimes against humanity -the murder of Victor Basch and his wife; the raid on the synagogue; the deportation of the Spaniards, and the designation of the Jewish hostages for the firing squad. Now he was on the run again, and this time he couldn't play the war game because the rules had been changed. If Monsignor Duquaire had done nothing, Touvier could have been a free man, living quietly, forgotten by history. Truly, it took a war and its aftermath to produce such an irony.

FATHER VAUTHER-in, who in 1944 had seen him safely across the Wilson Bridge, was only the first of a long line of Catholic clergymen to help Touvier. During the 10 years between the pardon and the indictment, while the suits filed by the victims' families moved through the courts, Touvier returned to the monastery circuit. Documents found by the gendarmes who later arrested him showed that he had stayed in more than 20 religious communities.

While Touvier plugged into the remains of the old Catholic right, he also was aided by a number of credulous, apolitical priests. He would carefully tailor his story to suit his audience. To the unreconstructed old guard, he presented himself as the victim of a social order that persecuted him because he was a Catholic anti-Communist. His line was, ''I was in the Milice to defend Christianity against Communism.'' To the others, he came across as a breast-beating, repentant sinner, hounded by the state and asking for compassion. So some of the priests who helped him were politically motivated; others acted from the belief in the right to asylum and the possibility of redemption.

But once he was indicted for crimes against humanity, Touvier became an embarrassment to the church, which was suddenly seen as the accomplice of a war criminal. The publicity was so damaging that the Diocese of Lyons released a statement saying that Monsignor Duquaire had been ''acting on his own initiative.''

Now an examining magistrate was preparing the Touvier case. An international arrest warrant had been issued and, for perhaps the first time, Touvier was actively being sought. In many monasteries, the welcome mat was no longer out. But Touvier was taken up by the rising traditionalist, or integrist, movement of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, now 83, who claims that his is the only authentic church, while the Roman Catholic Church is made up of ''heretics'' and ''Satanists.'' Last year, he (Continued on Page 87) was excommunicated for consecrating four of his own bishops in defiance of the Pope.

In Lefebvre's followers, Touvier found an organized support group with tentacles reaching into the government and the police, where a small number of integrist sympathizers held mid-level posts. For Lefebvre's group, hiding Touvier was a crusade; in their priories and convents, they said prayers for his safety. As a result, the search for Touvier stalled; it's not easy to find a man who has a network of secret helpers offering information, money and asylum.

In 1988, a new examining magistrate, Claude Grellier, decided to change tactics -he would go after Touvier with a small and trusted team of gendarmes, so that there would be no more leaks. He recruited 48-year-old Lieut. Col. Jean-Louis Recordon, a short, shy-looking man with glasses and a toothbrush mustache, a sort of Hercules Poirot in a gendarme's uniform. Recordon's team was limited to two gendarme sergeants.

Recordon studied the archives and told Claude Grellier, ''This is a mission impossible.'' There were hundreds of religious communities in France where Touvier might be hiding. But Recordon kept digging, and at last he got an interesting lead: There was a Benedictine monk by the name of Gerard-Marie Lafond, whose father had owned a collaborationist newspaper in Rouen during the war. As a young man, Lafond had been a friend of Vautherin, and had met Touvier when he was in the Milice. Lafond was now the abbot of a monastery called Saint-Paul-de-Wisques in the north of France. Wisques was under papal authority, but Lafond was known to be an integrist sympathizer.

Recordon put a phone tap on Wisques; this uncovered conversations between someone at the monastery and a man named Jean-Pierre Lefevre, in which a ''Monsieur Paul'' was discussed.

On May 22, 1989, the Wisques monastery was surrounded by local gendarmes and the phone lines were cut. Recordon moved in and questioned Lafond, who wouldn't talk, invoking the secret of the confessional. But in their search, the gendarmes found documents further implicating Jean-Pierre Lefevre, the man on the phone taps.

They arrived at Lefevre's home in Saint-Mande, just outside Paris, on the morning of May 23. A 67-year-old retired insurance agent, standing ramrod-straight and wearing dark glasses indoors, Lefevre denied knowing Touvier. The gendarmes, however, were amazed at what they saw. Lefevre's home was a sort of S.S. museum, with flags, insignia, uniforms and records of old marching songs. Lefevre, a member of la Legion des Volontaires Francais, which had fought on the Eastern front in S.S. units, was evidently still a Nazi sympathizer.

It also developed that Lefevre was the head of the Paris chapter of the Knights of Notre Dame, the Catholic youth organization that Father Vautherin had founded before the war. It had survived over the years in various guises and was now a militant right-wing association linked to the integrists. Informed that he could be indicted for harboring a criminal, Lefevre gave Recordon a name - Genevieve Penou, an employee of Secours Catholique, or Catholic Aid, in Paris. She too was part of the network. At her home, Recordon found envelopes marked ''for our friend, Paul Lacroix.'' At first she wouldn't talk, but when the gendarmes handcuffed her as though she were under arrest, she blurted out a name: Saint-Michel-en-Brenne.

By this time it was 4 P.M. on May 23. Recordon had to move fast, before the network alerted Touvier. Saint-Michel-en-Brenne is an integrist Carmelite convent near Chateauroux, 200 miles south of Paris. Recordon and his men flew to Chateauroux in a military plane. It was a half-hour drive to the convent, a large property with lovely grounds, ponds and woods, a fine house for the nuns, a presbytery and two smaller houses. Clearly the integrists had deep pockets.

The abbot took a haughty attitude, until Recordon's men found some trunks tagged Paul Lacroix. Inside the trunks were Milice documents concerning Touvier. Faced with charges of harboring a criminal, the abbot (Continued on Page 90) caved in. ''Touvier was here,'' he said, ''but he left two weeks ago. He must be in Nice at the Saint-Joseph priory.''

By then it was after midnight. Recordon and his two men drove through the night to Nice, arriving just after dawn. Local gendarmes were waiting to take them to the priory of Saint-Joseph, another integrist abbey, in the old part of the city near the Bay of Angels.

Shortly after 8 A.M., with gendarmes stationed around the priory walls, Recordon knocked and showed his search warrant. He bounded up the stairs to the second floor, where monks' rooms opened onto a long hall. He started opening doors, and he had not opened many when he saw, standing in the middle of a room in cotton pajamas, a short elderly man with a lined face and thinning gray-blond hair. ''I suppose it's me you want,'' the man said. ''I am Paul Touvier.'' From other rooms emerged his wife, in a bathrobe, and his two children, Pierre and Chantal, now 39 and 40. They could have lived normal lives under assumed names, but had chosen to follow their father into hiding. As the family was escorted out, one of the priests of the priory told Recordon, ''It's a dirty job you're doing.''

And so ended the story that had begun 45 years before at the Wilson Bridge in Lyons, when Touvier said goodbye to Father Vautherin.

Was this man of 74, who was transferred to the infirmary in Paris's Fresnes prison with urinary problems, the same man who had committed those wartime crimes? If so, had he been punished enough by a lifetime as a fugitive?

Perhaps such questions will be answered in a year or so, when Touvier is to go on trial in Lyons. As Michel Droit, Mayor of Lyons, said in June, ''Rather than punitive justice, we want instructive justice.'' Yet for a while, I wondered if the trial might be a hollow victory, somehow redundant. Why bother, after all, with an old fellow who already had one foot in the grave?

Then I went to see a 57-year-old salesman of garden furniture, Robert Nathan, in his small apartment in Lyons. In 1944, when he was 12, Nathan saw his father go into a cafe near their home to turn over 50,000 francs to Touvier for ''protection.'' After the money changed hands, Nathan's father was forced into a car and driven away. In September of that year, after the liberation, Nathan's mother was told that her husband's remains had been found in a mass grave outside Lyons. She was given his gold wedding band, with the couple's names and marriage date engraved on the inside.

Recently, Robert Nathan announced his intention to give a deposition to the examining magistrate in the Touvier case. Soon afterward, he began receiving anonymous telephone calls -25 in all, he says - threatening his life if he went through with the deposition. And I thought: How could the trial be unimportant, when, nearly half a century after Touvier committed his crimes, the mentality that propelled them is still alive and still active in the very city where many of these events took place?

Ted Morgan covered the trial of Klaus Barbie for this magazine. His book, ''An Uncertain Hour: The French, the Germans, the Jews, the Klaus Barbie Trial and the City of Lyons, 1940-45,'' is to be published in January by William Morrow & Company