This article deals with the perception of French collaborators with Germans in Liberated France based on the purge ordinances, daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and so on. Currently the issue of collaborators with Germans in France is still hot even after half a century since the liberation. However, it is difficult to perceive the exact meaning of the word “collaborator”, which generally means collaborator with enemy, because various dictionaries do not agree on its definition these days. The ordinances on the purge of French collaborators in Liberated France prescribed the collaboration with enemy as a criminal act, but there was neither a word “collaborator” nor “crime of collaboration” in the ordinances. J-P. Sartre’s essay, “What is a collaborator?”(1945) and Jean Fréville’s novel, “Collabos"(1946) represented highly negative and extreme views of collaborator. In a daily newspaper, “L’Humanité”(1944~1945), the word “traitors”, not “collaborators”, was typical and in another daily, “Le Populaire”(1944~1946), the word “traitors” appeared as frequently as “collaborators”. This fact also shows extremely negative views of collaborator in Liberated France: a collaborator was above all a traitor who was the heaviest criminal for the contemporary French. In fact, this view, which minimizes the number of collaborators and depicts the characteristics of collaborators as most negatively, coincides with the general sentiments and desire of the French immediately after the war.

This article deals with the perception of French collaborators with Germans in Liberated France based on the purge ordinances, daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies, and so on. Currently the issue of collaborators with Germans in France is still hot even after half a century since the liberation. However, it is difficult to perceive the exact meaning of the word “collaborator”, which generally means collaborator with enemy, because various dictionaries do not agree on its definition these days. The ordinances on the purge of French collaborators in Liberated France prescribed the collaboration with enemy as a criminal act, but there was neither a word “collaborator” nor “crime of collaboration” in the ordinances. J-P. Sartre’s essay, “What is a collaborator?”(1945) and Jean Fréville’s novel, “Collabos"(1946) represented highly negative and extreme views of collaborator. In a daily newspaper, “L’Humanité”(1944~1945), the word “traitors”, not “collaborators”, was typical and in another daily, “Le Populaire”(1944~1946), the word “traitors” appeared as frequently as “collaborators”. This fact also shows extremely negative views of collaborator in Liberated France: a collaborator was above all a traitor who was the heaviest criminal for the contemporary French. In fact, this view, which minimizes the number of collaborators and depicts the characteristics of collaborators as most negatively, coincides with the general sentiments and desire of the French immediately after the war.

Collaboration, Collaborator, Collabo, Traitor, Sartre