I remember that NBC reporter Loyd Dobyns (whose somewhat lighthearted news show “Weekend” ran on Saturday nights when there was no SNL) wrote an article on the French for TV Guide in the 1970s. He said they couldn’t understand why Americans were making such a fuss over Watergate “Our politicians are always eavesdropping on their opponents-we still have some excellent equipment left over from the Nazis”.
They didn’t. The provisional government, although made up entirely from leaders of the resistance or free france elected, in order to prevent internal strife, to pretend that except for some bad apples, essentially everybody in France had been on the “good side”.
Only the most proeminent leaders, or those who had made themselves particularly infamous (like Celine mentioned above) were prosecuted. And even amongst them, those who hadn’t been sentenced to death were freed rather quickly. Otherwise, there would barely have been any civil servant left (famously, only one judge in France refused to swear allegiance to Petain. Not that it did him much good, he ended his career as some obscure magistrate, I checked one day).
So, plenty of middle and even high ranking collaborationists continued their career successfully under the fourth and fifth republics. Papon is just one of the most infamous of them. The only thing they had to take care of was not surviving until the 90s, like Papon did.
Since you mention concentration camp guards, you can note a vaguely similar situation in Germany. Recently, we heard a lot about the trial of a suspected and and forced extermination camp guard, while most of his higher ups had died peacefully and without worry (although in Germany, I guess they would have been barred from the most proeminent offices, contrarily to what happened in France). The main reason this guy (assuming he was guilty) ended up being tried was that he had outlived everybody else.
In fact, that’s what happens pretty much everywhere. See for instance the amnesties in former South-American dictatorships, South Africa, the former Warsaw Pact countries, Cambodia, etc…
I remember watching the famous documentary “the Sorrow and the Pity”. At one point, some former member of the resistance who had been deported mentioned that he knew who had denounced him, but wouldn’t bother stirring things up. I watched it along with my mother, who, during WWII, was a teenager living temporarily in this area. Even her knew who was the guilty party.
People on both side, along with the majority who wasn’t on either side choose choose to stay silent pretty often, apparently. Having been brought up in a small village in the countryside during the 70s, people who had been involved in the resistance could be known to me, but I never heard even once about someone who would have been an ardent supporter of Petain, or worse. And there’s no doubt that some were around and probably well remembered. Still, silence prevailed.
An article I read on Abu Graibh mentioned one fellow who ended up there - a neighbour owed him a decent amount of money, and when he started pressing him for repayment, the guy went to the Americans and said this fellow was a terrorist. A year of torture so his neighbour could avoid paying a debt. It’s amazing how petty and callous people can be at times, Iraqi, French, English, or American.
Also remember that WWII came fresh on the heels of the Spanish Civil War, where the sides eventually boiled down to Axis fascism against Stalin’s communism in an incredibly vicious battle. Along with the other propaganda floating around, people were well aware of the extend of the social disruption in Russia when communism took over. Perhaps a lot felt the Nazis were the lesser of the two evils.
During the war, the Nazis set up the “Vichy Regime” (in Vichy rather than Paris) and staffed it with French collaborators. The Resistance consisted largely of committed socialists. Noam Chomsky has described how the “allies” carefully set up the post-war French administration to include Vichy collaborators and to exclude Resistance veterans, because, especially for the Americans, communism was far more dangerous than Naziism
The communist “resistance” was a joke. They spent most of the war ratting out the non-communist resistance to the Germans. The majority of effective resistance members were non-communist. The problem is that they didn’t last long on average due to reds infiltrating their groups and turning them in.
Stalin made sure that his French network eliminated any socialists who didn’t support him also disappeared. So very few of those had any influence.
Of course, after the war, they claimed all sorts of credit for stuff they not only didn’t do, but actually tried to stop.
A lot of the Vichy folk were full on unapologetic fascists. A few show trials after the war but the rest kept working. The Sorry and The Pity documents a lot this. Took an incredible amount of international pressure to get them to prosecute a handful of the worse in later years.