History

FRENCH CAMPS

A film by George Amat and Denis Peschanski

How many of us now know that between November 1938 and May 1946, 600 thousand people suffered confinement through simple administrative decision?  None of these people had committed a crime or any offence, the only reason that made them prisoners was the fact that they supposedly represented potential danger to the State or to society. They were many to populate French camps: Spanish Republicans, Germans and Austrians, French Communists, to whom were soon added foreign Jews or Gypsies, and later, at the Liberation, in majority suspected collaborationists but also, which is of less common knowledge, black market traffickers and also German civilians.