Gender and Military Justice: Sexes Differences and Repression of Collaboration in France during the Liberation

If we know that the repression of collaboration in France in the aftermath of the Second World War reflects a specific moment in the relationship between the sexes and justice, it is only in terms of the civilian courts. The attention of specialists has in fact been focused almost exclusively on the courts of justice and the civic chambers, making the military courts a real blind spot in research. However, these courts were responsible for the repression of acts of collaboration at two key moments: before the opening of the courts of justice, most often in the fall of 1944, and after the closing of the last of these courts, that of the Seine, in January 1951. Thanks to a corpus of 7,000 defendants, including more than 1,000 women, the objective of this article is to shed some light on the role played by military justice in the repression of men and women accused of collaboration, in order to determine, in particular, whether its courts participated in the reinforcement of the male moral, social and penal order observed at the Liberation. After having drawn the extremely blurred dividing line between extralegal and legal military courts, we try to find out whether the action of the military courts was likely to change the total number of people executed and, more broadly, the number of people judged for acts of collaboration, while establishing the ratio of these two groups by gender. We then analyze the profile of the collaborators judged and the facts of which they are accused. Finally, we look at the gender-differentiated severity and the contrast between the sentences handed down in absentia by the courts of justice, most often against people who had fled the purge at the Liberation, and the sentences they actually suffered once they were caught up in the process and judged by the military courts.