Policing occupied countries: gendarmes and populations facing security needs(1940 – 1944, Hainaut/Nord-Pas-de-Calais)

The German occupation from 1940 to 1944 is a paroxysmal crisis that led to a redefinition of security policies and practices within destructured societies. That situation involved the need to reinvent the paradigm of protecting people and property faced with the new security conditions brought on by the multiplication of the sources of law and of the authors of violence. A delicate equation came to be established between the population, civil and military servants, the occupying authorities and those occupied: the boundaries of tolerance, repression and protection were blurred, whereas new behaviours and new categories of the population were criminalized, and living conditions deteriorated. Due their daily relations with the populations they controlled, the police forces were placed on the frontline. How were they supposed to carry out their functions faced with an unprecedented context, riddled with contradictory expectations? If the global and political issues involved in the performance of the duties of maintaining law and order in the occupied territories are well known, the same cannot be said for the local situations and individual experiences of the policemen. Exercising their duties can be seen as risk management: they had to manage individual risk, as much for the future as for the immediate consequences of whatever they did/did not; but they also had to manage collective risks with respect to the police institutions they were part of and the stakes of protecting society on the one side and the stakes linked with the respect for law and order resulting from how they exercised their duties in public space on the other. In the context of this paper, we shall concentrate on studying the relations between gendarmes, populations and authorities during the 1940-1944 Occupation, by proposing a crossed approach, involving the Hainaut region for Belgium, and the Nord-Pas-de-Calais for France. At the heart of these zones, characterized by long-standing factors of tension (strikes, economic crises, social movements and transborder mobility), I aim to understand when and how the gendarmes redesigned their professional practices during the war. At the most local level, how did evolve the policing within the missions of maintaining order and security? The key question is to evaluate the unknown conditions of the occupation impact on relations and interactions between gendarmes and civil populations. In so doing, I’ll investigate the continuities and breakdowns in the social integration of gendarmes. To do that, I want first to mobilize daily police records, read with the prudence which is required given the period considered, but I’ll use above all on archives of purges. Those files are defined as documents testifying to a key moment of return and criticism of the behaviours involved, once free speech was restored: indeed we find therein the voice of the population, that of the gendarmes, but also that of the local and national authorities