The Riom Trial: What Defence for a Defendant?
takes his place in the dock of the supreme court of justice convened at , a small town in the Puy-de-Dôme that has become the judicial capital of the free zone. Beside him stand , another former Prime Minister, and General , who commanded the French armies in May 1940. The regime wanted this trial to establish that the leaders of the Third Republic, and the men of the Popular Front in particular, bore responsibility for the defeat against Germany.
The prosecution is built to demonstrate the military unpreparedness and political weakness of the pre-war governments. But the case is fragile: judging the conduct of the war inevitably leads to questioning the role of those who led the army in the 1930s, including Marshal himself, War Minister in 1934 and a member of the supreme war council. Blum sees that the platform offered to him can be turned against his judges, yet that words too aggressive would expose him and his fellow prisoners to heavy reprisals.
Blum must settle on his line of defence: turn the trial against and the regime by publicly dismantling the prosecution and sending the responsibility for the unpreparedness back to those who governed the army; mount a narrow legal defence, fighting point by point on the facts without attacking the regime; or refuse to recognise the legitimacy of the court and stay silent before a tribunal he holds to be political.
Riom, February 1942, Léon Blum in the dock: how to defend himself when the court set to judge him serves a regime first?
and turned the trial into an indictment of . Far from accepting responsibility for the defeat, they dismantled the prosecution point by point and recalled that Marshal Pétain and the general staff had themselves directed the military affairs of the 1930s. Embarrassed by proceedings that turned against the regime and against German demands, the authorities suspended the trial on 14 April 1942 for a "supplementary investigation"; the case was never retried and was definitively abandoned in 1943. The defendants remained imprisoned: Blum, Daladier and Gamelin were later handed over to the Germans and deported to Germany, from which they would not return until the end of the war.
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