René Carmille (8 January 1886 – 25 January 1945) was a French military officer, civil servant under the Republic and Vichy government, and member of the French Resistance. During World War II, in his office at the government's Demographics Department, he created the National Statistics Service and the individual code number which would become the social security number after liberation and is still used in France today. While there, Carmille sabotaged the Nazi census of France, thus saving tens of thousands of Jewish people from death camps.
Pioneer of punched cards for registration
René Carmille served in the French Army in the First World War, initially as a battery commander and later in the Second Office (i.e. the espionage service). In April 1924, he was appointed the Comptroller of the army. As well as supervising several espionage operations, he became a specialist in industrial management, notably promoting the development of punch cards and electromechanical card readers in France.
As a senior civil servant in the 1930s, he proposed a 12-digit registration number based on the date and place of birth. This was intended to be assigned to boys as soon as they were registered with the civil registry, in part to support the anticipated war effort. He visited IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag in Berlin and brought back a sample of their 80-column punched card. In France, he supported the work of Bull, a pioneering supplier of punched card machines. He demonstrated the value of identifying individuals with what become the social security number but also the value of codes for geographical areas, economic activities and professions.
Clandestine mobilization
After the outbreak of World War II, Carmille and Colonel du Vigier proposed the creation of central records of French civilians. As most of France was under German occupation, this was presented as a purely civil matter, but secretly the plan was to use the data to rapidly mobilize an army when required. This included records of demobilised soldiers as well as a census of the entire working-age population, to identify occupations, trades and qualifications.
As the collection grew, Carmille realised the value of a registration number as it was less ambiguous than recording the first and family names, as well as requiring fewer characters to record. As this was officially a civilian operation, births of girls as well as boys were recorded, by adding a thirteenth digit to the initial registration number: 1 for men, 2 for women.
In January 1941 a contract worth 36 million francs was signed between Bull and the Ministry of Finance to create an administrative statistical information system. In the same year, Bull was convicted of infringing IBM patents for having adopted the 80-column punched card. The appeal was suspended but eventually judged in favour of Bull in 1947. IBM lost the case because they were found to have issued 80-column punch card equipment before the patent was filed in France.
The Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélémy (appointed January 27, 1941) wanted to distinguish Jewish citizens from the other inhabitants. Carmille argued that the civil status of the project did not allow this to be done so only the individual's sex was recorded in the first column.
A full national census was due to take place in 1941 but Carmille replaced this with a "census of professional activities". This census included a question (number 11): "Are you of Jewish race?", with reference to the "Statute of the Jews" promulgated on October 3, 1940. Question 11 of the census was only used to exclude or exempt Jewish people from the "Chantiers de Jeunesse" or youth camps organised by the Vichy government as quasi-military training camps. The census took place on July 17, 1941. A record had to be drawn up for each French or foreign person aged from 13 to 64 years old. Neither the number of responses nor the results of this census have ever been published.
Lieutenants Colonel Henri Zeller and Georges Pfister instructed Carmille to prepare for the clandestine remobilization of the French Army. During the winter of 1941-42, Carmille identified the names of 220,000 trained veterans living in the free zone, controlled by the Vichy government, and grouped them by locality and by unit. In this way, a partial mobilization on a regional basis would be possible. He also prepared punched cards that could print mobilization orders in a matter of hours.