Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside

The novel’s central mystery is rooted in the unresolved conflicts of France’s experiences during World War II. After its defeat in 1940, France was governed by the collaborationist Vichy regime, which cooperated with its Nazi occupiers. Its paramilitary police, the Milice, became notorious for hunting Jewish people and members of the French Resistance. According to the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, under the Vichy regime, “Thousands of Jews were interned under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps, where at least three thousand individuals died during the war years” (“The EHRI Portal.” The EHRI Portal, 2013). As French Resistance groups began to gather momentum, the Vichy milice (secret police) was tasked with finding and terrorizing those involved in or sympathetic to French resistance: “To counteract a possible French military threat, [German occupiers] had to penetrate any organization likely to be used for such clandestine mobilization. The police, the youth groups, the army, and any paramilitary groupings thus had to be infiltrated” (Kitson, Simon. “The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France.” Uchicago.edu, 2025). The plot hinges on the revelation that the murder victim, Hamid al-Bakr, was a former member of the Force Mobile, a Milice unit that terrorized the novel’s fictional setting of St. Denis.

This period created deep and lasting divisions, not only between collaborators and resisters but also within the Resistance itself, which included competing factions like the Gaullist Armée Secrète and the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. According to the Library of Congress, the disparate resistance groups “did not grow into a single unified organization until, arguably, the final stages of the War,” but “at their core, Resistants of all stripes shared the same goal—opposition to the Germans and to the Vichy regime” (Spencer, Erika Hope. “Research Guides: France in WW II: The French Resistance: Overview of the French Resistance.” Guides.loc.gov, 2023). ‌The novel illustrates these lingering tensions through the decades-long animosity between the shoemaker Bachelot and the bicycle shop owner Jean-Pierre, veterans of rival Resistance groups who haven’t “spoken to one another since the war” but join forces to carry out vigilante justice against the Nazi sympathizer who terrorized their families (7). This historical context is the direct motive for Hamid’s murder, an act of vengeance by those who suffered 60 years earlier. Christine, a historian in the novel, studies “life in France under the Vichy regime” (56), explicitly signaling the novel’s exploration of how historical crimes reverberate into the present.