Is there a more excruciating period in modern French history than what we call France’s “darkest hours”? And is there more wretched a name associated with them than that of Philippe Pétain? After his critically acclaimed biography on General de Gaulle, the British historian Julian Jackson has written a 480-page-long analysis of Pétainism, with the trial of Marshal Pétain at its heart. This is not a pretty story. And if you feel like the American diplomat who refused to attend the trial because he did “not wish to relive the decay of French democracy in a hot courtroom”, this book is not for you. If, however, cowardice, bad faith, dishonour and moral ambivalence is your thing, read on.
It all starts on 24 October 1940 in Montoire with Marshal Pétain and Adolf Hitler shaking hands. This is four months after the “débâcle” of June 1940 and the signing of the armistice between the Vichy regime headed by Pétain and the Third Reich. A few days later, in a radio speech, Pétain addressed the French to explain: “I enter today down the road of collaboration,” adding: “This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by history.”
Fast forward to the summer of 1944. While Parisians exult at their liberation, Pétain and part of his government are forcibly moved by the Nazis to the castle of the princes of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, in southern Germany. For eight months, it held a small community of “1,500 or so French refugees – criminals, black marketeers and ultra-collaborators with their assorted wives, mistresses and hangers-on” – who had followed the “government” of France to Germany, leading a “surrealistic” daily life. Surrealist indeed. A highly talented storyteller, Jackson certainly knows how to set the scene:
“The cultural highlight of the autumn was a visit by the Belgian fascist leader Léon Degrelle. Appearing in his SS uniform, Degrelle lectured on ‘The New Europe and the Recovery of France’. Le tout Sigmaringen turned out to hear him, including the writer Céline, dressed like a tramp as usual, a pair of moth-eaten mittens strung around his neck and carrying a bag from which protruded the head of his cat Bébert. Increasingly exasperated by the insanely exalted tone of the lecture, Céline left before the end muttering loudly about this ‘roi des cons’ (king of idiots).”
However, if the last days of Vichy France in Sigmaringen read like a picturesque obscenity, what follows is so abject that even the most biting humour and colourful of anecdotes cannot lift the mortal weight of history.
After the liberation, a new high court was set up to try the Vichy leaders. Pétain was about to be tried in absentia in May 1945 when, to everyone’s dismay, he turned up at the Franco-Swiss border. His most senior lawyer planned to focus on the Marshal’s age (he was 89), appealing for pity for the former hero of Verdun. Pétain was being tried for treason and “not only the humiliating collaboration but the subjection of France to Germany”. This was, as a French parliamentarian proclaimed on the eve of the trial: “about establishing in the eyes of the world that Pétain does not incarnate either France or France’s traditions”. Not an easy task, nor a straightforward demonstration.
What is chilling in Jackson’s beautifully researched and meticulous account of the trial is the hopeless mediocrity of almost all people involved in it: from judges and jurors (résistants and parliamentarians) to lawyers prosecutors and witnesses. Everybody seemed animated by petty or self-serving feelings; they were either out of their depth or spineless, but above all most were morally ambivalent. Before it began, De Gaulle had presciently talked of Pétain’s trial as a “lamentable but inevitable” event.
There were, however, a few remarkable minds attending and they could be found on the press benches. Among them, the formidable Janet Flanner for The New Yorker and the résistant writer Joseph Kessel, hired by France-Soir. They provide Jackson with the most vivid and intelligent commentary. Thank heaven for them.
When asked whether Pétain was a traitor, the politicians and democrats who had facilitated the rise of this reactionary to power through the 30s to June 1940 preferred to remain evasive. Charging Pétain meant charging themselves at a time when they fought to be exonerated. Only Léon Blum, former head of the leftwing Front Populaire government in 1936, imprisoned by Vichy, was crystal clear: “An absence of moral confidence was the base of the Vichy government, and that is treason. Treason is the act of selling out.”
On 10 August, the public prosecutor spoke for five hours. “As he listed concession after concession, capitulation after capitulation, declaration after declaration, message after message, his réquisitoire [indictment] started to gain momentum.” He demanded death for Pétain. Then came the defence. Pétain’s lawyers counterattacked by developing the idea that “if Pétain was guilty so were the French – so was France”. For his young and romantic lawyer, Jacques Isorni, Pétain had in fact been a “shield” for the French, preventing the Nazis from turning France into another Poland. For Jackson, “the idea that Vichy had been a shield for the Jews is superficially supported by the incontrovertible fact that the total percentage of Jews deported to their deaths from France was significantly lower than that of other occupied countries in western Europe: 25% in France, 50% in Belgium and Norway, 73% in the Netherlands.” There are many other explanations for those figures, notably that an innumerable number of French people actively rescued and protected their Jewish compatriots.
The verdict finally came at 4am on 15 August, 1945. As the judges returned to their seats, Kessel wrote: “Never have I experienced such an intensity of silence in this overcrowded room. An interminable silence, a silence which hardens, a silence which becomes like a presence. The presence of history.” The judgment took 17 minutes to read out. Pétain was condemned to “the death penalty, indignité nationale, the confiscation of his property”; however, the high court expressed “the wish that the judgment not be carried out” owing to the accused’s age. De Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
The last part of Jackson’s analysis is called “afterlives” and deals with the legacy of the trial, the end of Pétain, who died in his prison on an island off the Vendée coast in 1951, the Algerian war, and neo-Pétainism as represented by the far-right firebrands Jean-Marie Le Pen and Éric Zemmour today. It also shows how it took 50 years for the French state to acknowledge that Vichy’s crimes were also France’s crimes.
As Jackson explains: “De Gaulle knew he was on thin ice when claiming that Vichy was illegal. For that reason, he generally preferred to talk about legitimacy.” In the end, the difference between Pétain and De Gaulle, between Vichy and the Free French, was their idea of honour. France’s duty had been to fight on whatever the risks, whatever the sacrifices. De Gaulle and his army of résistants saved France’s honour by the skin of their teeth. And as far as this French citizen is concerned, Pétain and his clique can rot in hell for eternity.
Agnès Poirier is a political commentator, writer and critic
• France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
