“Tout est perdu fors l’honneur” (All is lost save honor), François I, King of France, is supposed to have written after the battle of Pavia in 1525. Never-say-die defiance of this sort has a mythmaking quality that contributes to the way the French nation would like to perceive itself. In the summer of 1940, the German army took six short weeks to conquer France. For whatever political, social, or military reason, the French by and large did not have the honor of fighting for their country.
A few more weeks were enough to put into place a national humiliation that future generations have had to live with as best they could. Marshal Philippe Pétain, aged eighty-four and resting on a First World War reputation, persuaded his colleagues in the government to sign an armistice that put an end to the France of the Third Republic. Alsace and Lorraine were once more to be ceded to Germany, more than a million French soldiers remained prisoners of war, and Pétain was left nominally in charge of a truncated half of France with a capital in the spa town of Vichy.
It still comes as a shock that Pétain went to meet Hitler on French soil and was photographed shaking his hand. Then in a broadcast to the nation he said that it was “in the framework of the active construction of a new European order that I enter today down the road of collaboration.” In other words, his policy was to do what the Germans obliged him to do. It was wishful thinking when he went on to say, “It is I alone who will be judged by History.” He had committed the nation. All was lost, this time including honor.
All was lost, this time including honor.
A first-rate historian of things French, Julian Jackson writes well and jargon-free. He is the author of an impeccably comprehensive and admiring biography of General Charles de Gaulle, who is more or less offstage in France on Trial but still Pétain’s nemesis. The two of them had been friends, “as close as was possible given their respective ranks and the icy reserve of their personalities.” They and their wives dined together quite often, and their differences at first turned only on literary matters. In de Gaulle’s papers are notes for a portrait of Pétain he was planning to write in 1938, and one of them reads, “Too assured of himself to give in”; the same could be said about de Gaulle. The younger man’s response to the armistice was to fly to London, where he broadcast that a battle had been lost but not the war. Nevertheless, only 118 men attended the first London parade of the Gaullist Free French. Something on the order of twenty thousand French soldiers and sailors instead chose to return to their occupied country.
There were now two Frances, and they were at odds with one another. Unity might have been possible if Pétain had gone to North Africa and set up a base somewhere in the French empire. The Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 and the consequent German takeover of Vichy France foreclosed that option and caused Bernard Ménétrel, Pétain’s faithful doctor, to comment in his diary, “Dieu, que nous sommes laches ce matin” (Good God, what cowards we are this morning). Seemingly, Pétain feared what the Germans might do to him.
Hitler’s invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941 allowed French communists to make exaggerated claims that they deserved the credit for starting the resistance movement, but members of every party and ideology took to arms as the tide of war changed in favor of the Allies. Pierre Laval, Vichy France’s prime minister, spoke for collaborators when he said in a broadcast in 1943, “I wish for the victory of Germany because without it tomorrow Communism will install itself everywhere in Europe.”
The fate of Vichy France was in German hands. German officials drove Pétain, a virtual puppet, to keep up pretenses in a castle in Germany. By then, atrocities were a regular feature in France, hostages were shot in reprisal to resistance, seventy-six thousand Jews had been deported and murdered, some six hundred and fifty thousand Frenchmen were slave laborers in Germany, and thousands even wore a German uniform. In what Vichy called “the struggle against Anglo-Saxon aggression,” French air bases in Tunisia and Syria were placed at the disposition of the Germans. What began as armistice finished as treason.
A number of collaborators fled to Spain, and Pétain, the pre-war French ambassador there, could have joined them. But as soon as the war was over, he returned to France, to prison and a trial. Jackson makes the point that de Gaulle in 1945 had no more legitimacy to be the French head of state than Pétain had in 1940, but resisters, real or self-appointed, were taking the law into their own hands and openly executing collaborators—whether ideologically committed or opportunists—in a murderous process known as épuration sauvage (random purging). In this chaotic political hiatus, a trial was barely legal. De Gaulle had qualms but all the same is on record saying that a trial was lamentable but inevitable because France had been through a great historical drama and “a historical drama is never over.”
The trial was held in the Palais de Justice in the center of Paris and lasted three weeks. The courtroom was far too small, and Pétain sat in an armchair inconveniently placed in the way of witnesses making for the stand. By now, he was eighty-nine, deaf and forgetful, and silent except for a single self-justifying outburst.
Jackson has no trouble substantiating what he calls “the byzantine amateurism of Vichy politics.”
Jackson has no trouble substantiating what he calls “the byzantine amateurism of Vichy politics.” In the very first week, the court heard testimonies from four former prime ministers, a former president of the republic, the two men who had presided over the chamber and senate in 1940, and other leading politicians. The former prime minister Léon Blum was the only one of them who spoke of the abuse of moral confidence and called Pétain an outright traitor. Generals, diplomats, and Vichy bureaucrats were witnesses hoping to salvage their reputations. Jackson quotes from the memoir of a juror by the name of Jacques Lecompte-Boinet who was unhappy that so little of the trial was about Pétain. He felt he knew all about the dishonorable armistice inflicted upon France and wanted to hear if Pétain had rendered any genuine service. Blame usually fell on Pierre Laval. Lecompte-Boinet thought that Laval in the witness box resembled “a hunted beast entering an arena . . . plunged into a France that hates him.” Evidently Laval still believed that he had saved France from being treated like Poland. Jackson sums up without more ado, “His interest was collaboration with Germany.”
One of many telling details in the book is that Stalin of all unlikely people had given Laval a fur coat. In that coat Laval carried the cyanide tablet he swallowed after his trial, rendering him half-conscious while he was dragged to face the firing squad.
Some time before the trial, Pétain had given a message to the French people, “[I]f I could no longer be your sword, I have wanted to be your shield.” This double image was the key element put forward by the lawyers defending him: de Gaulle had taken up the sword while Pétain was the heroic martyr shielding the country, “a Christ-like figure sacrificing himself for France.” The verdict was ambiguous. The presiding judge took seventeen minutes to read out the death sentence and its proviso that the judgment should not be carried out, which in effect was an admission that a law court was incapable of resolving a case that at bottom was about the nation’s identity. Pétain was duly exiled to an island off the coast of Brittany, or as de Gaulle was to put it, “there is an old man in a fortress.” In July 1951, Pétain died and was buried on the island.
That was not the end of it. If Pétain was guilty, so were the French. A number of public figures formed an association to defend Pétain. The most obsessive of these apologists was Jacques Isorni, one of Pétain’s three defense lawyers and an advocate skilled enough to keep alive the notion that Pétain had done nothing dishonorable and the nation should show him its gratitude. For years he tried to force a revision of the court’s verdict. Made into a cause, Pétain occupies a troubling position of moral uncertainty in the assumptions that the French have of themselves. In the presidential election of April 2022, Eric Zemmour, a populist candidate, sought to defend the memory of Pétain and Vichy as a way of attracting right-wing votes.
In the ballot, Zemmour came fourth with 7.7 percent of the vote. Jackson takes this to mean that Pétain no longer haunts the memories of the French. It is an unexpected conclusion to a book with such insight into the years when France and Germany engaged in mutual destruction.
