Jacques Vergès 1988
Source: Jacques Vergès, Je Defends Barbie. Paris, Éditions Jean Picollec, 1988;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2013.
Judge, counselors, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the moment to conclude approaches. And for you the serious decision as to what is the appropriate fate for Barbie. In the name of humanity the prosecution asks that you ratify his kidnapping and hold him in prison until the end of his days. What would they ask for if they didn’t openly proclaim their humanism? But let’s move on...
But let’s not move on too quickly. Let us linger a moment on this strange principle. The court has brought proceedings against Barbie for “crimes against humanity.” My adversaries accept and brandish this charge. Let us enter into their logic. Send Barbie before his natural judge, which would be humanity as a whole, since as a French tribunal you can’t render a verdict in its place. Declare your lack of competency. Ask the Guard of the Seals to free my client or ask him to diligently undertake the necessary demarches with the various powers, the traditional as well as the youngest, so that they can assure his custody and his eventual trial in common. In short, take them at their word. Take them seriously, even if they attempted to abuse you.
For my part, I demand justice not in the name of humanity, but in the name of France. We assuredly have here two causes of unequal dimensions confronting each other. Mine stands before you with its small stature. I hope that the civil plaintiffs will not disdain it. Despite its modesty it has its dignity: the dignity of France, whose soil is beneath our feet and which surrounds us with its attention at this moment.
It is only in their imagination, if not in fantasy, that my adversaries have humanity around them. France makes no claim to such a disincarnation. Your verdict will touch it in it flesh, in its spirit, and in its heart.
Forty years after the liberation of its territory you, in your turn, must liberate it from the ambiguous and dubious Hitlerite obsession. This obsession, artificially maintained through the resort to scandal, now irritates public opinion, for it no longer responds to any national need, particularly in the moral order. To be sure, you are called on to condemn Barbie in order to set an example, to strike an execrable system through him; to stigmatize the use of violence, torture and deportations. To in this way ward off their return.
As a former defender of Algerian nationalists during the last and perhaps the most tragic of colonial wars, I find myself well placed to tell you that the Nuremberg trials and the hanging of the main defendants in 1946 in no way hindered the continuation of barbarism within civilization. Rudolf Hess’ forty-six years in detention, as exemplary a sentence as there ever was – and to my knowledge no prisoner has been held longer – in no way prevented a single political crime anywhere on the surface of the globe. And so I ask that we stop with these hypocritical pretentions, with the so-called exemplariness of the sentence which you know in advance will serve as an example to no one and nothing. It won’t even appease the unquenchable appetite for tumult and vengeance of my adversaries. Otherwise they would have long since have abandoned judicial proceedings.
Before deciding Barbie’s fate ask yourselves, in all conscience, what is it that justice, France, your children and yourselves would gain with his conviction. Nothing he is said to represent through his life or his past has any real existence in the world we are living in today. Evil has changed its form and its uniform. Its mask as well. By attacking that of yesterday you will assist, without wanting to but just as surely, the evil of today. Many times over the course of the testimony this trial has appeared unreal and evanescent.
Because it flies in the face of common sense and ordinary morality this trial could not but conclude in an infraction of the law, though not without a few stupefying episodes. It held over the French conscience a mortgage of four years of occupation when, on the contrary, it would have been more appropriate to free it for once and for all.
This long and, I think, necessary, plea was to tell you, judge and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and through you the French people: in the name of humanity; in the name of the law and of right; and finally in the name of France, which has suffered only too much from its weaknesses, lingered too long over its remorse, in short, doubted too much its grandeur and its truth, to release without delay Klaus Barbie, the too handy expiatory victim of a battalion of vengeance seekers that is not the uncountable and fraternal army of the victims, the poor and immense army of the faceless and nameless that never ceases to recruit members. If it expects something of you it is an act of courage and reason. An act of truth. Certainly not an act of convenience.
France would then find itself ennobled.