Pierre Bonny was a French corrupt police officer. As an inspector, he was the investigating officer on the 1923 Seznec case, in which he has been accused of falsifying the evidence. He was once praised as one of the most talented police officers in the country, helping to solve the notorious Stavisky financial scandal in 1934. In 1935, he was jailed for 3 years on corruption charges. During World War II, France was occupied by Nazi Germany. Bonny became a collaborator and joined the French Gestapo, known as the Carlingue. Upon the Liberation of Paris he was put on trial and later convicted on war crimes. He was executed by firing squad on 26 December 1944 alongside career criminalHenri Lafont and footballer-turned-crook Alexandre Villaplane. Beside the overwhelming memory of a traitor and unscrupulous collaborator, he is commonly seen as incarnating the figure of a corrupt man; the executor of the lower works of the Vichy regime. He is held to be the basis for the character of Monsieur Philibert in Patrick Modiano's wartime novel .
Early life
Bonny was born on January 25th, 1895 in Bordeaux, France. His parents were farmers. After finishing his secondary education in Bordeaux, he briefly found office work at a branch of Peugeot, and then at the Compagnie générale transatlantique. In December 1915, he was drafted and became a POW shortly thereafter, during the Battle of the Somme. He remained imprisoned for the majority of the war. Repatriated to France in 1918, he was posted as secretary to the general staff of the Bordeaux military region, with the rank of corporal.
In 1919, Bonny took the police exam and entered the force as an inspector in the provisional police force that was operating in liberated regions. He married Blanche Émie in 1920, and worked in Somme, France, before being transferred to the oversight unit of the Sûreté générale's forensic investigation services in Paris on August 11th, 1922. He would spend the rest of his career there, working under divisional commissioners Vidal, Granger, and then Hennet until his termination in January, 1935. The Sûreté, nicknamed "The Secret", was under the command of the Minister of the Interior, and was located on the rue des Saussaies. Their jurisdiction was expansive, and included the policing of gambling, associations, syndicates, and other groups with potential to cause civil unrest, surveillance of foreigners and counter-espionage, as well as business, press, and publishing. Although they were responsible for the entire region, the Sûreté's budget was limited compared to that of its rival, the Paris Prefecture of Police and its Directorate of Judicial Police.
Assignment to counterintelligence
This is a period of uncertainty in Bonny's career. It is thought that during this period, Bonny was dispatched for a time to work in counterintelligence for the Minister of War. According to his son, Jacques Bonny, he resolved a number of leaks which supposedly earned him favor with :fr:Louis_Ernest_de_Maud'huy|General Maud'huy. The date of these events is uncertain. Maurice Garçon supposes that they took place before Bonny's entrance into the police force, but Jacques Bonny, drawing from an anonymous article in Détective magazine from the early 1930s, places these events in the early 1920s. The following is Bonny's principal biographer's comment on the subject: "one wonders whether it was not at that time, having then acquired the reputation of a particularly capable man, that some people thought of employing Pierre Bonny for work that was rather confidential, but undoubtedly a little undesirable because it was on the borderline of legality.", whereas Jacques Bonny is quoted saying the following: "No sooner had he joined the police force than, thanks to luck and his special skills, he unconsciously got his dick caught in the wringer, perhaps the most dangerous one of all: 'parapolitics', so as not to say politics in general."
