Carmille and the Vichy Punch Cards

In the autumn of 1941, René Carmille heads the National Statistics Service (SNS), created a few months earlier in Vichy by merging the demographic services and the general statistics office. A graduate of the École Polytechnique and Inspector General of the Army, he has equipped the SNS with hundreds of Bull and Hollerith punch-card tabulating machines, capable of processing millions of individual files in series. It is one of the most powerful administrative machines in Europe for counting and classifying the population.

The regime intends to mobilize this tool. The law of 11 October 1940 instituted an individual identification number and a major census of all inhabitants. The columns of the questionnaire provide for recording religion and origin, in line with the Jewish Statute of October 1940 and the registration already begun by the Paris police prefecture. The German authorities, like the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, expect the SNS to produce nominal lists.

Carmille thus finds himself at the heart of an administrative apparatus whose uses carry grave consequences. A civil servant of the French State and a recognized technician, he knows that his decision involves at once his career, his institution, and the fate of the targeted populations. Caught between the orders he has received, the expectations of the occupier, and his own conscience, the head of the National Statistics Service must settle on a course of action.