The legacies of World War II on Public Security in Western Europe: the Belgian, French and Dutch gendarmerie policing cases. A biographical approach

As a paroxysmal crisis, the WWII German occupation led to a redefinition of security policies and practices within destructured societies. That involved reinventing the paradigm of protecting people and property faced with the new 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, the policemen, 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. Their daily relations with the populations they controlled placed the police on the front line. 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 order in the occupied territories are well known, the same cannot be said for the local situations and individual experiences of gendarmes of policemen. For policemen, the consequences of their duties in occupeid territories is apparentend to risk management: they had to manage individual risk, as much for the future as for the immediate consequences of whatever they did; but they also had to manage collective risks with respect to the institutions they were part of and the stakes of protecting society and the respect for law and order resulting from how they exercised their duties in public space. In the context of this paper, I shall concentrate on gendarmes' security functions in Belgium, France and The Netherlands during the Occupation and just after the Liberation. I'll concentrate on a biographical approach, by studying 3 middle-officers individual cases (one in each gendarmerie). My goal is to understand when and how the gendarmes redesigned their professional practices; how did their ways of carrying out their missions of maintaining order and security evolve at the most local level? The major question in my paper is one of measuring the impact of the particular conditions of the occupation and liberation (seen as a political transition periods) on relations and interactions between gendarmes and civil populations, and on professional habitus due to specific conditions of War. In so doing, I'm investigating the continuities and ruptures in the social integration of soldiers of the law