Beauregard camp, La Celle-Saint-Cloud

The estate before the camp

The name of the domain goes back to the Middle Ages. In the early seventeenth century the château belonged to the du Val family, and it passed through several hands before Elizabeth Ann Haryett, known as Miss Howard, bought it in the middle of the nineteenth century. She rebuilt the house in a neoclassical style, added a glasshouse and walled the whole estate of more than 184 hectares; from there she financed the rise of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who made her countess of Beauregard after taking the imperial title. She died there in 1865.

Her son sold the property in 1870 to the duchesse de Bauffremont, and within months the Franco-Prussian war broke out; the Prussians, quartered in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, made Beauregard their headquarters and fortified it. The ruined duchess could not restore the house, and in 1872 it was bought by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who had it entirely restored and stayed there often with his family. On his death in 1896 it went to Maurice-Arnold de Forest, comte de Bendern, who had properties across Europe, came rarely and left the château to decay. During the First World War the army used the grounds as a cattle park under the entrenched camp of Paris, and during the occupation the Germans used the site as a prisoner of war camp.

A central camp for repatriation

The Soviet repatriation administration was set up in Moscow in October 1944 under Colonel-General Filipp Golikov, and his representative in France was Major-General Vasily Dragun. The mission opened in November 1944 in a large white house on the avenue Bugeaud in Paris and spread a network of assembly points across the country — more than 130 of them by the Izvestia account, opening and closing as their occupants left. Beauregard was its unofficial capital from the start: there had been a German prisoner of war camp there, more than four hundred Russians were living in its huts at the liberation, Paris was close, and there was an aerodrome beside it.

By April 1945 the French ministry for prisoners, deportees and refugees, with the army, had established eighty-three repatriation camps holding some 58,000 Soviet prisoners of war. During the summer of 1945 smaller provincial camps were closed and their occupants were to be transferred to larger central camps such as Beauregard or Châlons-sur-Marne, from which mass repatriations were beginning. A Franco-Soviet agreement of 29 June 1945 governed the return of Soviet nationals; its text and application are preserved among the files of the French embassy in Moscow.

The repatriation from France was forced at first and later offered. Research based on French and Russian archives describes about 120,000 former Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers in 1944, and from 1946 a little under 5,000 émigrés of the interwar years, in particular Ukrainian and Belarusian émigré workers, encouraged to return for the reconstruction of the country. A decree of 22 June 1946 restored Soviet citizenship to former subjects of the Russian Empire living in France, and thousands took Soviet passports and packed for a country most of them had never seen. The published summary of a French study of these camps likewise describes the deported civilians as people rounded up in the occupied villages of Ukraine and Belarus, and devotes a chapter to the Ukrainian case alongside its chapter on Beauregard as the model camp. These accounts concern the whole programme; they do not give a count of Ukrainians at Beauregard itself.

Assembly Point No. 13

The camp’s own name in the Soviet records was Assembly Point for Soviet Citizens No. 13, and a photograph album survives covering its life from August 1944 to May 1945. Its pictures show morning exercises, political classes, the canteen, drill, the club and the pond used for swimming, a mechanic teaching an engine, and rifle practice with captured German weapons. The choir was led by Tamara Soshalskaya. The commandant was Lieutenant Kazakov, the political officer junior politruk Kovalenko, the chief of staff Lieutenant Alik; Lieutenant Klushin commanded one of the companies and Lieutenant Belenchenko ran physical training.

Life was organised on army lines because there was no other model to hand: a guardhouse, passes to leave, strict discipline, and three tolerable meals a day. Everyone in the camp had come out of captivity or forced labour, everyone was crowded together with nothing to do, and the routine was a way of holding the place together. Among the residents were people who wanted to go home, people who hesitated and people who did not want to go at all.

The aerodrome beside the camp was used hard. Soviet Douglas transports flew from it to Leipzig and Berlin, carrying repatriates out and officials in. One of the men flown out of Beauregard in 1946 was Viktor Maltsev, who had commanded the air force of the Vlasov army and was handed over by the Americans; he was taken to Moscow in May 1946 and hanged in August. Others taken to the camp were less prominent but no less closely watched.

French police records

The papers of the Seine-et-Oise prefecture’s general police contain a file on Soviet nationals at the Beauregard camp, La Celle-Saint-Cloud, dated 1944 to 1949, together with files on Soviet nationals at the Bossut quarter of the Pontoise barracks, the Luxembourg camp at Meaux and the La Rochette camp at Melun, incidents caused by the Soviets and arrests. A separate file records arrests of Soviet subjects in 1944. These entries show the camp remained a matter for the French police for two years after the Soviet mission left.

The Beauregard affair of November 1947

By 1947 the French authorities suspected that the extraterritorial camp was being used to hold Soviet citizens who did not wish to return, and later said they held material on nearly sixty cases of people taken to Beauregard against their will, émigrés and French citizens among them. The occasion came from a family quarrel in Nice, where a Russian émigré reported that his wife had disappeared with their three small daughters ahead of a divorce; counter-intelligence traced the children to Beauregard. With the Communist ministers gone from the government and the Cold War beginning, the foreign minister Georges Bidault decided to act in the last days of the Ramadier government.

On the evening of 14 November 1947 four hundred gendarmes and republican security police, with sixty vehicles and two Renault light tanks, surrounded the camp. There was no fighting: when the tank stopped in front of the gate the Soviet officers ordered it opened. The girls were in the camp and were handed to their father. Several captured machine guns and sub-machine guns and some grenades were found. The head of the repatriation group, Colonel Filatov, and twenty-four activists of the Union of Soviet Citizens were expelled from France, and Moscow expelled in return Colonel Marquier, who headed the French repatriation mission in the USSR. The camp passed under French control, and the embassy files in Nantes record the closure of both missions as a consequence.

The affair marked the hardening of relations between the French government and the Communist party, and between France and the Soviet Union, in the year of the great strikes and the Marshall Plan. The traffic it ended had already dwindled: between 1947 and 1951 only 218 people went back to the USSR from France.

The site today

A second camp had been running beside the Soviet one. In 1946 the prison administration of Fresnes opened a detention centre on the estate with room for 1,400, deliberately named the penitentiary centre of La Châtaigneraie so as not to spoil the name of Beauregard. It held collaborators among others. In 1950 a special wing was opened for a dozen blind and otherwise sick prisoners, and in 1951 a second for men over sixty. The centre closed in April 1953 with 776 detainees, and in the autumn of that year the huts that remained served as the set for the film Le Défroqué, released in 1954.

The comte de Bendern, unable to turn the ruined estate into the public forest reserve he had in mind, gave it to the City of Paris in 1949 on condition that decent housing be built there for French working people in a green setting. The château, badly damaged, was pulled down in 1956; only the central avant-corps, the doorway and its pediment, was kept. Two waves of building followed, Beauregard I completed in 1959 and Beauregard II in the later 1960s, and about 2,500 of the resulting flats remain social housing belonging to the City of Paris, managed by a company the city created for the purpose in 1955.

The fronton stands today at the centre of the place du Comte-de-Bendern, three hundred metres north of the A13, surrounded by the blocks of the Domaine de Beauregard. Nothing of the camp remains above ground.