L'épuration sauvage en Normandie

Spread over three years, from 1943 to 1946, the so-called illegal purging made a hundred or so victims in Normandy. This hundred is to be compared with the legal purges carried out between 1944 and 1947: 39 were shot after being condemned to death by a court of justice. As early as 1943, some resistance fighters could not wait for the Republic to return and started eliminating collaborators they considered dangerous for the Resistance. Decided outside any legal framework or even after a mock trial, the extra-judicial purging was carried out quickly and violently, like the head shaving of women. In Normandy, the so-called purging was relatively moderate, the new French authorities wanting to avoid a civil war at all costs between the French.