Did anybody in the Vichy France administration manage to have a political career after WW2?
Francois Mitterand
Not a robust one, but here’s a little bit of what what Wiki says about René Bousquet
Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval, the Prime Ministers of record, were both tried and convicted after the war. Laval was executed by firing squad in 1945; Pétain was spared execution (he was a respected veteran of World War I) but died within five years.
If any politicians continued in public service, it had to be at the local level.
This is, at best, a partial answer.
Yes, Mitterand did work for the Vichy government during part of WWII. But there’s also very good information that he was working for the resistance while he was doing so and, when placed in a position where he would be directly working for a collaborator, left his position for another one. By mid-1943 he was a full member of the resistance and on one occasion was specifically - under his code name - targeted for arrest by the Security Service of the SS.
Mitterand and Bousquet were officials under the Vichy régime, rather than politicians, as was Maurice Papon.
You’ll need French, but here’s Wikipedia’s list of Vichy ministers; I don’t think any of them came to any prominence in postwar politics, either because they’d been condemned to one or another punishment after the Liberation, or because they’d gone into exile, or were just too old.
I suppose it didn’t exactly answer the question posed in the thread title, but it did answer the question posed in body of the OP.
Wish I’d thought of looking at wikipedia, dammit.
I love the idea of a punishment named “Indignité nationale.”
It’s so Gallic and dismissive.
Indignité nationale (French “national unworthiness”) was the offense.
Dégradation nationale (“National stripping of rank”) was the penalty.
I prefer the Roman original : damnatio memoriae, “cursed memory”. Your name stricken from all records, histories and stellae ; any statues or monument or item bearing your likeness destroyed, and anybody uttering your name or mentioning your existence from then on earns a reprimand at minima. A narcissist’s worse-than-Hell.
IIRC the internal French intelligence services also up until maybe the 1980s would routinely dig into people’s backgrounds, people who held office but were nobodies during the war, to see whether they were collaborators or not. I’ve only seen this mentioned twice in books so I’m not sure how concrete the info is.
If so, it didn’t stop the rise of someone like Papon. Maybe it was a response to that: or maybe a way for those in charge to have something over political rivals.
If so, that might have been to have some dirt on them if need be I guess. But while I don’t think any high-level Vichy administrators had any further career due to their visibility during the Occupation ; plenty of more obscure collabos kept doing the same job(s) be it in the police forces, army or administration.
For example, Raymond Marcellin worked in the Vichy administration with great enthusiasm - got medals, even - then went on to become De Gaulle’s (then Pompidou’s) minister of the interior in the late sixties and organized the state’s repression of the events of May 68. He had another ministerial appointment after that, and ended his career as *député *(~= House rep) for Morbihan for a number of terms.
Wasn’t Mitterrand a POW?
He was, but he escaped in December 1941 and made his way to the unoccupied zone of France, where he took a position in the Vichy administration assisting in the settlement of other POWs who returned to France (mostly in more conventional circumstances).
[The Vichy administration did not encourage French POWs to escape from German custody but, any that did, it wasn’t about to hand them back.]