Maurice Rajsfus, for the record
Maurice Rajsfus (1928-2020) was an anti-fascist activist, a survivor of the Vel’d’Hiv roundup at the age of 14, and a historian of repression who lived through the last century with his eyes wide open. Throughout his life, he collected and preserved traces of State violence wherever he encountered it. Today, his personal archives are stored at the library-museum La Contemporaine (Nanterre). Clara Menais immersed herself in them for Index.
In the spring of 2021, the archivists at the La Contemporaine library-museum find themselves working on something a little out of the ordinary. In his flat in Cachan, on the outskirts of Paris (Val-de-Marne), the anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian activist Maurice Rajsfus amassed an archive worthy of a museum. In the months following his death in 2020, between Covid-19 lockdowns, long hours were spent emptying his office, piled high with newspaper cuttings, documents, militant literature and notes of all kinds. In carefully filed boxes, thousands of index cards list police crimes in France from May 68 to 2014. But there are also family photos, traces of relatives and cousins, Polish Jews deported during the Vichy regime and then murdered in Nazi camps. In short, a methodical inventory of the crimes and violence of the French state.
A library, museum and archive centre in one, La Contemporaine in Nanterre is one of the only institutions in France to offer collections on contemporary history to the public. In total, it holds almost 4.5 million documents. The Rajsfus archives are housed in 84 boxes, occupying around 8 linear metres, and covering more than eighty years of social history. A whole life of struggle and obstinate work, carried out on the fringes of academic institutions, has thus been made accessible to study and to the gaze of the present.
A life marked by state violence
Maurice Plocki was born on 9 April 1928 in rue Dieu 17, in Paris. His parents, Nushim Plocki and Riwka Rajsfus, both Polish Jews, had come to France to escape anti-Semitism and pogroms. Together, they sold socks and knee-highs at a market in Aubervilliers, in the northern suburbs of Paris. In the archives, an Aubervilliers market control sheet kept by Maurice Rajsfus details the period of activity of their stall: opened in 1926, abandoned in 1940. Between July 1940 and August 1944, France set about “Aryanising” the country, in other words systematically dispossessing and robbing France’s Jews. It was at this time that the Plocki’s business and its stock were seized by the Direction de l’aryanisation économique (“Direction of economical aryanisation”), an administrative department run by Vichy’s Commissariat général aux questions juives (“General commissariat on Jewish questions”). This systematic spoliation of the lower classes, which is poorly documented, is often forgotten in favour of that of works of art, as historian Johanna Lehr pointed out in 2020 in an article published in Le Monde. Already, in this gesture of conservation, the acuity of Rajsfus’ out-of-frame gaze sheds light on a blind spot.
The Plocki family’s life, which had been relatively quiet until then, was turned upside down with the arrival of the Nazis and the Vichy government in 1940. Anti-Semitic policies intensify. For his fourteenth birthday, in April 1942, Maurice received a postcard sent from a French concentration camp: the Pithiviers transit camp in the Loiret region. His uncle had been deported there a few months earlier, in May 1941, along with some 6,694 foreign Jewish men rounded up in the so-called “green ticket round-up”, the first mass deportation under the Vichy regime. In the early hours of 16 July 1942, two policemen arrested the Plockis at their home, 32 rue de la Villa in Vincennes. It was the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up: 13,152 people were arrested, including more than 4,000 children. Maurice was released with his older sister Jenny, thanks to a counter-order excluding French Jewish children aged 14 to 16 from the round-up. They would never see their parents again, who were taken to Drancy and then killed in Auschwitz.
Young Maurice, an orphan, was left to fend for himself. But he inherited his parents’ political culture and socialist values. After the liberation of France, he joined the youth branch of the French Communist Party, the Jeunesses Communistes, then the Trotskyists of the Fourth International. In the 1950s and 1960s, he campaigned against the war in Algeria – he was even one of the demonstrators at the Charonne metro massacre on 8 February 1962, when the police killed eight people. In May 1968, Maurice was forty and working as a journalist. He was once again drawn into militancy by the explosion of the workers’ and students’ movement. He was also a fervent supporter of Palestine, which he visited several times in the 1980s and 1990s. From all these commitments, he retains one central conviction: a strong aversion to the police and all security forces. “As the repression of May 1968 had left its mark, I quickly set about documenting police violence on the basis of the press. It was an absorbing task that enabled me to assemble an archive of more than 10,000 records of around 5,000 incidents. This work led to the creation of the Observatoire des libertés publiques in May 1994, after the murder of young Makomé [M’Bowolé, editor’s note] at the Grandes Carrières police station. More than 200 issues of the newsletter “Que fait la police?” were published until 2014″, he said in 2018.
A database, well ahead of its time
The epicentre of Maurice Rajsfus’s work is this methodically ordered archive: a unique record of police violence in France. In dozens of boxes, made of wood or plastic, Maurice Rajsfus kept a careful record of police abuses, from petty theft to crime. Rajsfus cut out newspaper articles, sometimes wrote a few notes, pasted them onto boards and filed them. This work continued online with the Que fait la police newsletter. This physical centralisation of scattered traces, which at the time were not the subject of any specific academic work, now appears to be essential documentary material, a way of building a database before the age of computers. Here is a selection.
1969: “The police are trigger-prone” was the headline in Lutte ouvrière on April 16. The article described how a policeman opened fire on a secondary school pupil named René Giudicelli, while he was putting up posters against the visit of US President Nixon to Paris. The teenager suffered serious lung injuries.
1971: 47 files are devoted to the “Jaubert affair” – the name given to the beating of science journalist Alain Jaubert in a police van on the 29th of May. The affair sparked a national outcry and a major mobilisation of journalists, as well as a debate on police violence and press freedom, which led to the creation of the daily newspaper Libération in 1973.
1975: The fledgling newspaper Libération ran the headline: “A bullet in the arm for refusing to impound a vehicle. The shooters were policemen”. Further on: “When will the death penalty be introduced for recalcitrant traffic offenders? For some police officers, it seems to have already come into force”. The article is about a man who objected to his vehicle being impounded. A witness said: “The black man rolled up his window and pretended to start the car. Just then, a cop drew his pistol and shot him in the arm through the window”. Fifty years on, this article foreshadows the current debate about police shootings in so-called “refusal to comply” situations.
1977: 11 files recount the murder of Mustapha Boukhezzer, shot six times in the back by Brigadier Roger Marchaudon, including one “with a close contact shot”, on August, 27, in the vicinity of the Châtenay-Malabry post office, in the Yvelines department. The police officer in question had already shot dead an 18-year-old man in Paris in 1974. That time he was shot three times in the back.
1988: An article in Le Monde reported the release of a policeman who had killed the son of a taxi driver in Marseille the previous day. Despite the fact that “self-defence was not invoked, and that there was no doubt as to who fired the fatal shot”, the policeman was released after a short period in police custody, without being charged.
1992: A police officer who killed a teenage girl watching a street brawl from her 8th floor window in Noisy-le-Sec on 8 October 1988 was given a two-year suspended prison sentence, writes Libération. The off-duty peacekeeper had intervened by firing shots into the air.
1997: A gendarme who shot a motorist in the back of the head as he fled from a checkpoint in January 1993 in the Drôme region was acquitted by the magistrates’ court, reports Libé. The prosecutor had asked for a prison sentence. During the trial, the accused had argued that a gendarme may use his weapon if he has no other means of stopping a vehicle, per a 1903 law.
2002: Le Monde reports on the appeal decision concerning the police officers responsible for the death of young Aïssa Ihich in 1991 in the Mantes-la-Jolie police station (Yvelines), who had been convicted at first instance. This time, the prosecutor asked for an acquittal. The sentence was reduced to an eight-month suspended prison sentence, “which should enable them to benefit from an amnesty”, according to Le Monde.
The archive, which contains hundreds of similar examples, is breathtaking. Many of the facts listed in it echo current events: police crimes committed in working-class neighbourhoods, often against young black or Arab men, or in the context of the repression of social movements. In 2019, this precise, in-depth census resurfaced in response to the Yellow Vests movement and its trail of mutilated demonstrators. At the time, the reports by journalist David Dufresne were compared to the work of Maurice Rajsfus.
A diffuse influence
In fact, the traces of Rajsfus’ work can be found wherever there is someone challenging the arbitrary violence of the State. In the work of recent activist organisations such as Désarmons-les, Cases Rebelles and Résistons Ensemble. On the Anti.Media website, which carries out a media watch on the police, claiming the legacy of Rajsfus. In the emergence of the decolonial Jewish collective Tsedek! which is currently organising a screening of a film devoted to the life of Maurice Rajsfus. Or in the work of independent researcher Mathieu Rigouste. Like Rajsfus, Rigouste studies state violence from a resolutely critical and committed position. But it was as an activist that he first became acquainted with the work of the historian in the early 2000s. In his view, the man was “a landmark” for social movements and the radical left, because he was “one of the only people to have produced a critical, committed and accessible historiography of the French police”. “At the time, nothing like that existed. The subject of police violence was not legitimate either for the press or for universities, and there was no Internet. He was the only one doing this work of archiving”. The young activist turned to these sources, which he used to write his first book, L’ennemi intérieur (La Découverte, 2009). He remembers being impressed by Rajsfus’ career – his position as a researcher, a concerned man, a rebel and an activist all at the same time. By his rigour too. “I was enormously nourished by his determination to provide tools for the struggle. It showed me that it was possible to build a life around these ideas”.
Scorned by elite historians for decades, Maurice Rajsfus’ work on repression is now recognised even in academic circles. In 1980, Pierre Vidal-Nacquet foresaw the relevance of his research when he wrote the preface to his first book, Des Juifs dans la collaboration. “Between Maurice Rajsfus and myself,” wrote Vidal-Nacquet, “there is, I might add, another difference. I am, and he’s not, a ‘professional historian’. It has to be said that, in this occurrence, I don’t feel much proud of my profession (…) and I understand the author of this book when he considers that history is too serious a subject to be entrusted solely to historians. After all, the files exist and the least we can say is that French historians have neglected them”. The counter-inquiry approach initiated by Rajsfus resonates with the present: in recent years, many independent organisations have undertaken to investigate state crimes, drawing a common conclusion about their systemic nature and the impunity that surrounds them.
For a long time, Maurice Rajsfus’s archive filled the gap in official figures: it was not until 2017 that the Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale (the French police’s watchdog) began publishing statistics on the number of injuries and deaths linked to police action in its annual reports. However, these official figures are still well below the figures compiled by Rajsfus, or those published by Streetpress, the independent media Basta! or the Désarmons-les collective, for example. In 2024, Désarmons-les counted 55 deaths linked to police interventions in France, based on reports and press articles. That’s more than one death a week. On leaving La Contemporaine in Nanterre, where the Rajsfus’ archive is kept, the relevance of his work becomes clear: on a wall near the entrance to the museum, someone has written: “Justice for Nahel”.