Les juridictions d'exception du régime de Vichy ou la démilitarisation de l'exception

Abstract

Exceptional jurisdictions under the Vichy regime or the demilitarisation of the exception Exceptional legal jurisdictions under Vichy testify to the regime's dictatorial nature and its progressive slide towards a «Milice state». But they also reveal a clear tendency to remove from the military sphere those legal procedures that belonged to the more traditional competent judicial authorities. If the courts-martial known as the Gannat system and the Special Criminal Court, set up in 1940, were essentially military in nature, they were replaced from the summer of 1941 by special sections, conjointly civil and military in origin, and by two new civilian jurisdictions tasked with acting against the «deviancies» of «anti-France». These were Vichy's Special Tribunals and the Tribunal d'Etat. These juridical authorities, where professional magistrates sat side-by-side with the political partisans of the Vichy regime (including some military figures) themselves saw their repressive role decrease from the beginning of 1 944 when they found themselves «flanked» by Vichy Milice «tribunals».