The decree also had potential for disaster if an extremist group seized power or if France was conquered by a foreign enemy. As it turned out, the registration records would be highly useful five years later when France fell to Nazi Germany, which sought to confiscate all firearms under the threat of the death penalty, with the help of French collaborationists led by none other than the same Pierre Laval.
Authorized and Unauthorized Weapons
Regulations to implement the decree-law were promulgated on November 22, 1935.16 Apparently the bureaucrats in charge were unable formally to implement the requirements until two days before the deadline to register. Registration of a firearm included one’s name, date and place of birth, nationality, profession, domicile, and description of the firearm—type, caliber, manufacturer, and serial number, if one existed. The declarations were to be made at police stations or city halls, and passed on to the prefecture, to be filed in the departmental file registering all people in possession of arms.17
Excepted from the registration requirement were governmental agents—various officials, the police, and people required to possess firearms. Exceptions, as included in the regulation of December 16, 1935, included hunting, competition, salon, and gallery guns. Antique and obsolete rifles and carbines were excepted, including percussion weapons 6 mm and lower, and—for people in approved associations—two obsolete service rifles, the Fusil Gras and the Lebel.18 The Fusil Gras Modèle 1874 M80, a single-shot blackpowder cartridge rifle, had been replaced by the now equally obsolete Lebel bolt-action rifle in 1886.19
The decree-law distinguished authorized and unauthorized weapons. Unauthorized weapons were designated by the minister of war on January 16, 1936, to include “[p]istols, automatic and military pistols, and revolvers of a higher caliber than 6.5 mm, or of which the barrel length is over 10 centimeters, as well as all other rifled firearms of 6 mm caliber and above.”20 Handguns and rifles thought to be of military usefulness were thus banned.
To what extent did the population comply with the decree-law to register firearms within the one-month deadline of November 24? Would urban dwellers have complied more than rural people? Perhaps, but the percentage who complied was probably low. Those who did so may have been people who were either compulsively law-abiding in every respect or naive people who could not foresee negative consequences. Those who failed to comply perhaps saw little use in an unprecedented diktat, yet another one of the endless bureaucratic mandates that had the potential for confiscation to boot.
Information on the extent of compliance or noncompliance may be gleaned from police reports in the various departmental archives of the period. As discussed below, archival records from the Ardennes reflect that few complied in that department.
Last Gasp of Laval
Meanwhile, back in Paris, the politicians were at it again. In debate in the Chamber of Deputies on December 6, 1935, rightist deputy Jean Ybarnégaray offered on behalf of the Croix de Feu that all groups should disarm and that carrying a firearm be punished with imprisonment for one to three years.21 Socialist Léon Blum replied that the “self-defense” Socialist groups would do so if the paramilitary leagues would. Maurice Thorez agreed for the Communists, as did Ybarnégaray for the Croix de Feu. Pierre Laval noted “with satisfaction this triple declaration, which does honour to the Chamber and from which the government will draw the necessary conclusions.”22 Since he would issue decrees on the same subjects, Laval then tabled bills abolishing paramilitary units, banning the bearing of arms in public, and increasing penalties for inciting murder in the press. Some 351 deputies (including 76 Radicals) gave him a vote of confidence over 219 votes against.23
The same day, Laval proposed a prohibition on carrying restricted arms as a decree, which was issued in two parts on January 10, 1936. The law on the carrying of prohibited arms (loi sur le port des armes prohibées) punished the carrying of a weapon, openly or concealed, in a demonstration or meeting, with imprisonment of three months to two years and a fine of 100 to 1,000 Francs.24 The law on combat groups and private militias (loi sur les groupes de combat et sur les milices privées) empowered the president of the Republic and the Council of Ministers to decree the banning of what they deemed to be paramilitary groups and the confiscation of arms used or intended to be used by such groups.25
On that same day, the Popular Front published its program, criticizing rule through decree-laws. The Front included the Radical Party, then headed by Edouard Daladier. Within days, key ministers resigned and then Laval himself did so.26 A new government would come to power.
During 1936–37, the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire (Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action), which has been described as both socialist and fascist, sought to organize armed groups to support the army in the event of a Communist revolution. Named La Cagoule (The Hooded Cloak) by the press, it planted a bomb in the office of a business association and engaged in political violence. In October 1937, police in Paris raided one of its arms caches, finding large quantities of explosives and grenades, sixteen submachine guns, and a dozen rifles. Interior Minister Marx Dormoy announced that seized documents revealed a plot to overthrow the Republic.27
Not surprisingly, weapons depots of this subversive organization were weapons of war smuggled into France, not civilian arms bought in commerce. Nonetheless, the plot would prompt in part the decree-law of April 18, 1939, which further restricted firearms.28 That will be discussed further below.
Low Registrations in the Ardennes
In the Ardennes department, in northern France, archives from the period reflect that few paid any attention to the registration decree. A rural, forested area with plenty of wild game, its population included numerous hunters who would not necessarily comply, not knowing which guns had to be registered or even knowing about yet another useless decree coming from Paris.
On November 21, 1935, the commissioner of police in Sedan reported that, despite the publicity in the newspapers, only nineteen persons had registered firearms, while an estimated 300 should have registered.29 The commissioner of Givet thought it striking that so few had registered.30 Police in Vouziers just said that registrations were coming in.31
A month after the deadline passed, on December 22, the Charleville commissioner reported 220 declarations of possession of firearms, without speculating on how many failed to comply.32 But the commissioner of Mohon counted only 45 registrants, adding that “there is certainly in Mohon more than 500 people in possession of firearms.”33 By the end of the year, he lamented, only 52 people registered firearms.34
As discussed earlier, in this period the leftist and rightist parties accused each other of secretly arming. For instance, the commissioner of Charleville, in the Ardennes, reported on September 19, 1936, that following the heightened state of alert, the different parties mutually admitted to possession of arms and munitions depots.35 A month later, after investigation, the various accusations of the import or depots of arms alleged by the opposite parties were revealed to be without foundation, although surveillance would be intensified.36
So what use was being made of the decree criminalizing the failure to register firearms? Examination of the Ardennes archives revealed no record of extremist groups with depots of unregistered arms. The only record discovered was one indicating that at the end of 1936, Madam Benvenutti, a grocer living on the rue Gambetta in Mohon, was charged for not registering her revolver, and the case was referred to the public prosecutor.37
On the Alert for Violations
In 1937, police were still on high alert for violations of the arms decree, but they reported virtually no incidents. Suspicion existed that some hunting guns without import permits were being brought across the border into France. Despite the awareness that only a small number of firearms possessed had been registered, only three arrests for unregistered firearms, all in Sedan, were reported38—probably because the crime of keeping a gun at home without papers was hard to detect.
Charlevil
le reported that its intense surveillance on the clandestine commerce in arms revealed nothing, similar to earlier fruitless investigations based on anonymous letters. Four unusable German military rifles that had been kept since the armistice in 1918 had been discovered. A brewer in Gespunsart was denounced by a former employee for possession of war weapons, but this was rejected when the informer admitted that he gave a false statement to get revenge.39
In this period, an open investigation by the police against the rightist Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire was reported by Charleville to have prompted people to get rid of war weapons left by the Germans in the Great War. The January 1938 report noted that the weapons were mostly unusable, but their discovery had been exploited for political ends. During one month, fewer than ten old rifles, several missing parts, and some ammunition had been found abandoned in bushes or hedges.40
A special commissioner of Saint-Étienne-à-Arnes reported that nothing was discovered from the rumors and anonymous denunciations, other than some unusable arms and ammunition from the Great War, nor was any clandestine arms trade found among the regional gunsmiths.41 Similarly, the Ardennes prefect reported increased denunciations but no discoveries.42
Out of numerous Ardennes files for the entire year of 1938, just two incidents could be found of citations for failure to register a firearm. A wine salesman from Paris named Alexandre Levy was issued a summons to appear in court for an unregistered Unique automatic pistol.43 The criminal court in Charleville fined railway employee Armand Fox sixteen francs for possession of an unregistered firearm.44
For the entire year, only Mohon police reported that two firearms had been registered and the information transmitted.45 Either no one was registering firearms, or the information was not considered worthy of reporting.
It continued to be “all quiet on the Western front” for gun violations as reported in the Ardennes for 1939 through April of 1940. For all of 1939, only trivial matters were reported. Marcel Piron was convicted by the Charleville criminal court of possession of an unregistered automatic pistol of a model used in the army.46 Fumay reported just two gun registrations in February and March,47 and Mohon reported three registrations in March.48 Weapons from the Great War were discovered in a house that was sold in Thilay.49
The Ardennes was a rural department, and compliance with the registration requirements may have varied in urban areas or in regions with differing social, political, and religious cultures. Research into the relevant archives would be a study of its own and is beyond the scope of this work, but the experiences of regimes in various countries to the present does not suggest a large percentage of voluntary compliance with registration decrees in general populations.
Meanwhile, Hitler launched World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Poland fell quickly, and the Phoney War with France and England lasted over the next half year until the blitzkrieg hit. The only report from Mézières was that the only licensed gun shop was closed since hostilities began.50 At the end of the year, Mohon reported that a single gun had been registered.51
A Veteran’s Perception
Around the turn of the twentieth to the twenty-first century, I sent questionnaires to veteran Resistance organizations seeking information on gun ownership before the war and reaction to German disarming policies when the occupation began in 1940. One respondent was Louis Charmeau, who was born in 1923 and lived in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne in eastern France.52
Before the war, Charmeau recalled that it was easy to obtain firearms, or at least hunting guns: “As long as you did not have any previous police record, it was fine. Arms were sold in catalogs, such as Le Chasseur Français (The French Hunter), the most popular one before 1939.” However, the extent of ownership depended on the type of gun: “Sporting firearms were reserved for the ‘rich.’ A few arms from the 1914–18 War were around, but they were owned by veterans of that war who kept them as souvenirs. Quite a few handguns, revolvers in fairly great number.” He was apparently referring to veteran ownership, for he added, “Some civilians (few) owned a handgun. We did not live in today’s insecurity.”
A Shooting at the German Embassy
While requiring the registration of firearms facilitates the confiscation thereof from people who abide by the law, a timeless truism is that it fails to prevent homicide by a determined individual. This was infamously illustrated on November 7, 1938, by the failure of Herschel Grynszpan, a teenage Polish Jew, to register the revolver he just bought, instead using it to shoot an attaché at the German embassy in Paris. His ostensible motive was to avenge the mistreatment of Polish Jews, including his relatives, who were expelled from Germany. The death of the attaché provided the Nazis with the welcome excuse to mount the pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht).53 Weeks before, Nazi Germany had already been disarming German Jews, including those who had registered firearms, and had been taking other actions as if to anticipate the pogrom.54
Grynszpan bought a 6.35 mm (.25 caliber) revolver and cartridges from gunsmith M. Carpe at his small store À la Fine Lame (The Sharp Blade), 61 rue du Flaubourg St. Martin, Paris.55 He claimed that he needed it to protect bank deposits he carried for his father. The gunsmith recorded his identity and address from his passport, gave him the registration form, and instructed him to proceed to the police station to register it. Instead, Grynszpan loaded the revolver and went to the German embassy.56
When an attaché received Grynszpan, the latter pulled out his revolver and fired, mortally wounding him. Grynszpan was quickly arrested. He still had the registration form that he was supposed to have submitted to the police, and the revolver still had the price tag on the trigger guard.57
Was Grynszpan a loner motivated solely by his brooding over Nazi persecution of Jews and a desire for revenge? Was the teenager manipulated by Nazi agents provocateurs to instigate an incident that could be used to inflame anti-Semitism and provoke a massive pogrom?58 The French International League Against Antisemitism (Ligue internationale contre l’antisémitisme, or LICA) published an article suggesting the latter.59
At any rate, the affair demonstrated that requiring registration of firearms failed to prevent an individual from procuring one and shooting someone. Those who did register their firearms would be threatened by German occupation authorities just a year and a half later with the death penalty for not turning them in.
The 1939 Decree-Law
Alarm over perceived domestic threats such as the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire (Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action), the smuggled arms caches of which had been seized in 1937,60 and over Germany’s widening aggression prompted the even more restrictive decree-law on war matériel, arms, and munitions of April 18, 1939.61 It listed weapons in eight categories. “War weapons” were in the first category, and they included any firearm that could fire ammunition used in any military weapon. “Defensive arms” were in the fourth category.62 “The acquisition and possession of weapons or ammunition from the first or fourth category are prohibited unless authorized.” Even when authorized, a person had to obtain further permission to possess more than one such arm or more than fifty rounds of ammunition therefor.63
Hunting arms and ammunition were in category 5; edged weapons in category 6; target, fair, and salon arms (armes de tir, de foire ou de salon) in category 7; and historical and collectable arms in category 8.64 Category 2 included equipment for use with combat arms, and category 3 was equipment for protection against poison gas.
An implementing decree was promulgated on August 14, 1939. Category 1 war weapons included semiautomatic pistols firing cartridges of the regulation 7.65 mm long or greater caliber, or of which the length of the barrel was 11 mm or longer. Other handguns were category 4 defensive arms, possession of which required authorization of the commissariat of police or the gendarmerie, limited to only one weapon per home.65
Dominique Venner, historian of the arms of the French Resis
tance in World War II, would write about the 1939 decree: “The happy time is no more of the law of 1885 that had practically rendered free the possession of arms of all sorts, expressing confidence in the citizens who had not misused them. In a period of war or unrest, one does not joke with weapons anymore.”66
At this point, by law French civilians were prohibited from possession of firearms considered “war weapons,” and firearms they were allowed to possess, with some exceptions, were supposed to be registered with the police. This regime of gun control would be highly useful to the Nazi occupation authorities when France fell the next year. But few anticipated the hell that would break loose.
1. Warner, Pierre Laval, 86, 88.
2. Warner, Pierre Laval, 112, citing Journal Officiel [J.O.], Lois et Décrets, 25 October 1935, pp. 11202-4, 11214.
3. Décret ayant pour objet d’augmenter les effectifs de la garde républicaine mobile, 23 octobre 1935, lecahiertoulousain.free.fr/Textes/decret_1935_effectif.html.
4. Décret-loi du 23 octobre 1935 portant réglementation des mesures relatives au renforcement du maintien de l’ordre public, https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006071320&dateTexte=vig.
5. “Au Conseil de Cabinet, Un project pour réprimer les tentatives de désordre ‘d’où qu’elles viennent,” L’Echo de Paris, October 23, 1935, 2; “Décret-loi portant réglementation des mesures relatives au renforcement du mainten de l’ordre public,” L’Echo de Paris, October 24, 1935, 1.
6. “Au Conseil des Ministres, De nouveaux décrets-lois ont été adoptés hier,” L’Homme Libre, October 24, 1935, 1.
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