Who Gets Pulled from the Shadows? Arrest Patterns in Occupied France

• In Event: Time in a Bottle: Analyzing Historical Conflict Data

Abstract

Insurgents’ survival frequently depends on their ability to keep their activities hidden from the states they are fighting. States can only use selective repression to suppress insurgents if they can identify and arrest (or otherwise neutralize) them. States’ pursuit of individual insurgents—and insurgents’ efforts to hide from the state—are therefore a key front in most insurgencies. Despite a large literature on repression, however, little work has addressed which insurgents are captured and which ones evade state authorities.

This paper argues accidental identity revelation is the most important mechanism determining which insurgents are arrested and which insurgents evade capture, and that the risk of accidental revelation is largely determined by an insurgent's role. Insurgents in roles that require interacting with others or action in public places, like communications, are more likely to leave clues about their identity. Insurgents engaged in passive activities like intelligence gathering or activities that occur in hidden places like forging are less likely to accidentally reveal their identity. States, in turn, are more likely to arrest insurgents when their detection capabilities are focused on identifying and arresting insurgents when they leave these clues. If they dismiss groups or types of individuals—like women—they make insurgents active in those groups or with those characteristics more likely to escape arrest.

These expectations are supported by survival analyses of the records of participants in the WWII French resistance, collected in a novel dataset. Intelligence gathers, guerrillas, and forgers were less likely to be caught by Vichy and Nazi forces, while couriers (unless female) were more likely to be arrested. Members of Allied-affiliated networks—viewed as a particular threat by occupation authorities—were also more likely to be arrested. Neither prior experiences in the Army or Communist movements, nor activity in the Occupied zone, had significant effects on arrest patterns, suggesting that the kind of task and intentional state attention, rather than personal experience or overall state capabilities, determined who was arrested.

These findings advance studies of insurgency and civil conflict, state repression, and intelligence operations. They also demonstrate the continuing utility of using archival sources to study insurgency and other kinds of conflict.

Author

• Thomas M. Dolan, University of Central Florida