https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/neal-ascherson/what-can-be-called-treason
Neal Ascherson

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
by Julian Jackson.
Allen Lane, 444 pp., June, 978 0 14 199309 6

The​ old man told my French nephew that he had something special to show him. Something he had thought best to keep in a drawer since 1943. In that village, families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain. He is leaning on a stick, wearing his immaculate marshal’s uniform with the Verdun medal. His eyes are a childish blue, his hair and moustache snowy white: a perfect grandfather for the ‘enfant Jésus’ and perhaps for a certain French generation. Had he not promised them in 1940, in their hour of bewilderment, ‘the gift of my person’?

Quite a few families in the village added a little marshal to their crib, that first Christmas after France’s surrender to Nazi Germany. It had always been a conservative place: royalist against the Republic, deeply Catholic, defensive of its Provençal language and customs, patriotic to the last drop of blood (and today it votes pretty solidly for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National). But by 1943, things looked very different. Hitler was losing the war. The Germans had occupied Vichy France as well as the north, and Pétain, its head of state, had done nothing to stop them. The Resistance (once dismissed as feckless Red troublemakers) was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last before the Liberation, the Holy Family had no little china marshals to protect them.

The trial of Marshal Pétain began on 23 July 1945 and lasted until 15 August. The small Paris courtroom was crowded with lawyers, jurors and journalists sweating in the suffocating heat. There was scarcely room to squeeze an armchair past the press box for the accused to sit and doze in. The marshal, now a deaf and sometimes wandering old gentleman of 89, had returned voluntarily from Germany – the retreating Nazis had taken him along with them in the last weeks of the war. Other senior members of his Vichy government thought he was mad to go back. Several of them fled to other countries or changed their names. Most were tracked down and arrested; some ended up in front of a firing squad.

A wild purge of collaborators, male and female, flamed over France in the months after liberation in 1944. Before General de Gaulle established a degree of control, nine thousand men and women had died in Resistance épuration – purification – killings or after death sentences by ‘people’s courts’. From London, de Gaulle had announced that there would be formal trials: ‘France will punish ... the artisans of her servitude.’ From Algeria, the Council for National Liberation promised a trial for ‘Pétain and those who belonged or belong to the pseudo-government created by him, which capitulated, destroyed the constitution, collaborated with the enemy’.

Pétain was accused of treason. According to the indictment, he had treasonably asked for and signed the armistice with Germany in June 1940; he had plotted well before the war to overthrow the Republic and replace it with an authoritarian ‘état français’; he had given France over to German subjection; he had ‘colluded with the enemy’ in order to advance his own ambitions. But here Julian Jackson, the author of this high-spirited and imaginative book, raises an obvious point. What about Vichy’s crimes against humanity, against Resisters and Jews, committed while Pétain headed the government? Jackson writes grimly that ‘if the trial were reopened today, it would not be by defenders seeking to rehabilitate their hero but by those eager to convict him for Vichy’s role in the deportation [almost all to their deaths in Auschwitz and other camps] of 75,000 Jews.’ Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.

Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation. Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years. Later in the book, Jackson makes another significant point. One postwar defence of Vichy argued that the regime had been consistently anti-German because the Nazis had frustrated its benevolent vision of a conservative ‘national revolution’. But this rejig of history was impudently false. The truth was that Vichy’s fascistic revolution required the backing of the Nazi occupiers to be forced down the throats of the French people. Meanwhile, France was allowed to forget that a French administration had vigorously assisted the SS in the century’s most terrible crime.

Philippe Pétain, the national hero of the Verdun battles of the First World War, had been summoned to join a desperate French government in late May 1940. The French armies were in full retreat, and on 10 June the government abandoned Paris, initially for Tours. Six days later, Paul Reynaud resigned as prime minister and passed the leadership to Pétain. Jackson describes with verve the chaos that followed the departure from Paris, as ministers scattered to various châteaux, most of them lacking telephones. At the Château de Cangé, there was a telephone kiosk, but it blocked the way to the lavatory. Decisions about the fate of France were impeded as the bladder of General Weygand, the commander in chief, threatened to disobey orders. It was at Cangé that Pétain decided to ask for an armistice, rather than carry on the war from French North Africa. ‘Can we hope for a recovery in an indefinite future thanks to the Allies?’ he asked. Everyone there assumed that Britain would soon have its neck wrung like a chicken, as Weygand put it. ‘No,’ Pétain went on, ‘we must accept that France and the children of France must bear her suffering.’ It was 12 June. On the 18th, de Gaulle broadcast from London, where he had arrived the day before, denouncing the armistice, but most people in France greeted it with a sour blend of shame and relief. In July, parliamentarians assembled at Vichy to confer full powers on Pétain. The Third Republic was abolished and replaced by a semi-fascist ‘état français’. France was partitioned: most of it was under direct German rule, with Vichy governing a so-called Free Zone in the south.

Beside the marshal in 1940 stood the grimy, erratic figure of Pierre Laval, a political shapeshifter who had twice been prime minister and who – after starting as a left-winger – was now the voice of the fascist right. Laval was the favourite of the Nazi occupation authorities, and obediently got into a German car that October as it headed for an undisclosed destination. When his escort finally told him he was about to meet Hitler, Laval exclaimed ‘Sans blague!’ (others report him saying ‘Merde alors!’). This was the first of the two fateful encounters at Montoire, where the Führer’s train stopped on its way to and from a meeting with General Franco, and where on the return journey (the photograph is indisputable) Pétain grasped Hitler’s hand. Nothing much was decided there, but the impact of the photograph was disastrous. Pétain made things worse – ‘But I only took his fingers,’ he said – and then worse still, explaining in a radio broadcast that ‘it is ... in the framework of the active construction of a new European order that I enter today down the road of collaboration ... That collaboration must be sincere.’ From that moment, the word took on a new and ugly meaning.

In the High Court, there were three judges, Pétain’s three defence lawyers and a prosecution team led by André Mornet, a fierce and reclusive old bachelor obsessed with hunting down traitors. The jury was composed of 24 men (no women), half of them selected from parliamentarians and the other half from Resistance veterans. As Jackson writes, ‘this was obviously a “political” trial. It was inconceivable that Pétain would be found not guilty. The only uncertainty was the penalty ... But despite many irregularities, what took place in the courtroom was not a charade.’ While in Paris the newspapers howled for the ‘traitor’ to be hanged (denied even the honour of a firing squad), the ‘defence lawyers were allowed to interrogate witnesses and consult documents. Over the course of three weeks, 63 witnesses were called to testify in the crowded and stiflingly hot courtroom.’

The defence lawyers were the elderly Fernand Payen, Jean Lemaire (noisy but ineffectual) and Jacques Isorni. Payen, who led the case, laid emphasis on Pétain’s senility, a defence that was sound in its way but boring for an excited courtroom impatient for thunder and lightning. Isorni, in contrast, met the charges head on, and at once became the star of the trial. A young right-wing advocate, he was not tainted by legal service to the Vichy regime (unlike most of the other lawyers in the room) but would commit the rest of his life to the cult of the marshal and the posthumous repair of his honour. Isorni’s closing speech was terrific and is well remembered, even if it made no difference to the verdict. France has a certain tradition of enshrining legendary trial defences, while passing over the fact that the mighty orator’s client was often condemned to death or life imprisonment. The late Jacques Vergès, whose ‘défense de rupture’ meant turning a trial inside out and accusing the French state of the crime laid against his client, did the same thing at the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi torturer in wartime Lyon. (Vergès’s indictment of France’s historical racism and colonialism became a classic. Barbie died forgotten in jail.)

The elementary case for Pétain was that things would have been worse without him. If he had tried to carry on the war in 1940, the French state would have ceased to exist and German rule might have been as total and merciless as it was in Poland. The armistice ensured that a deformed but recognisably French administration, with law courts, tax collectors and police, governed at least part of France for a few years. But the justifications put up by Pétain’s former colleagues and supporters went far beyond this. Pétain, they asserted, had played a ‘double jeu’ throughout the occupation, conceding a minimum to the Germans but always subtly working for an Allied victory. He had not really been hostile to the Resistance, according to this brew of comfort history. Instead, his double game envisaged a sword and shield context, with the partisans in the maquis as the sword and his own supposedly cunning bargains with the Germans as the shield.

It sounds preposterous. But as Vichy began to flounder, and throughout the decades of sulphurous recrimination that followed, many desperate right-wingers clung to this fantasy. It’s still faintly present today, an inverted conspiracy theory for which there is no hard evidence whatever. Pétain certainly loathed the Germans and their lackey Laval. But he didn’t much like the Americans or ‘les Anglais’ either. Perhaps he hated modernity more than anything or anyone. On the Vichy state’s money, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was replaced by ‘Work, Family, Fatherland’.

In court, in the moments when Pétain unexpectedly broke his silence, it became clear that he now believed in his lawyers’ ‘double game’ story. This was a myth that would take grotesque forms. The meeting with Hitler at Montoire, far from being a miserable act of fealty to a triumphant German dictator, suddenly became a French victory over Germany comparable to Verdun. Jackson gives the example of a 1948 ‘history’ by a former Vichy official, which claimed that ‘it was Pétain who had wanted to meet Hitler and that Hitler had fallen into the trap laid for him.’ The ‘trap’ was that by reassuring Hitler ‘he had nothing to fear from the French in the West, [Pétain] left Hitler free to turn on the Soviet Union’. Thus France had played ‘the decisive part in the Allied victory’ by precipitating the entry of the Soviet Union into the Allied camp – ‘an act of strategic genius’. In other words, Pétain and France, not the Allies, had won the Second World War.

Isorni, to do him credit, never entered that zone of idiocy. He showed little interest in the ‘double game’ scenario. Instead, he challenged some of the most damning prosecution evidence. Vichy, according to Isorni, had cleverly contrived to blunt and deflect some of its own worst pro-German policies, such as the use of French forced labour in Germany, the raising of a volunteer legion to ‘fight Bolshevism’ and even the persecution and deportation of foreign and then French Jews. It was true that Pétain hadn’t ordered Jews in the Free Zone to wear a yellow star or stripped them of their nationality. But Isorni sailed on: ‘It was only the action of the marshal’s government which protected them, perhaps imperfectly, but it did protect them.’ ‘Imperfectly’ indeed! Jackson is remarkably generous when he comments that ‘since Isorni knew that the [Jewish] issue was not central to the court – indeed it had hardly figured in Mornet’s réquisitoire – and since knowledge of it was imperfect, he was able to get away with his approximations.’

Almost​ the whole first week of the three-week trial had been taken up with prewar French politics. Had Pétain been part of a far-reaching conspiracy to overthrow the Republic, supported by General Franco, while he was France’s ambassador in Spain? The lawyers and journalists enjoyed squabbling over rehashed gossip, but nothing solid came out of it. Ill-tempered disputes about the legality or legitimacy of the armistice were just as inconclusive. It wasn’t until Mornet, as chief prosecutor, moved proceedings on to what Pétain had actually done after he came to power that the trial turned into a coherent contest over specific evidence. The defence, for instance, tried to make something of Pétain’s astonishing claim that he had struck a secret co-operation treaty with Winston Churchill in October 1940, well after the armistice. All there was to that was a brief meeting between Professor Louis Rougier (a ‘self-important and meddling provincial academic’) and Churchill, who had vainly hoped that a French visitor might have some inside news about the Montoire encounter.

Two other feeble arrows in the defence quiver were the ‘secret telegrams’ Pétain had sent to Admiral Darlan in Algiers in November 1942. The Americans had just landed in North Africa: Vichy was in a panic. Official messages to Darlan suggested that French forces should resist the landings. But two coded messages sent by Pétain at the same time seemed to imply that Darlan shouldn’t take this instruction seriously. However, the wording of the ‘secret’ messages was so cloudy and ambiguous that the High Court couldn’t decide what Pétain had really wanted to happen. In any case, such evidence was far less persuasive than the emotional plea Isorni made in his final plaidoirie to the court. ‘From the beginning Isorni had wanted not to apologise for Vichy but to defend it with conviction; not to explain away Pétain’s actions but to explain the principles underpinning them,’ Jackson writes. Now, theatrically flourishing his hands above his client’s head, Isorni declared, ‘The policy of the marshal was the following: to safeguard, defend, acquire material advantages but often at the cost of moral concessions ... The moral concessions that affected the honour of the leader were borne by the leader alone. But who were the material advantages for? They were for the French people.’

But nothing said in court could outweigh one fatal fact. The marshal had a chance to change sides – to join the Allies and restore the honour of France. And he chose not to take it. The torrent of events in November 1942, which decided the future of France, began with the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa on the 8th. Admiral Darlan surrendered on the 10th, in spite of the shower of contradictory messages from Vichy. On the next day, German forces poured over the demarcation line and occupied Vichy France. On the 27th, the crews of the French fleet at Toulon scuttled their warships to prevent them falling into German hands. For Vichy, this was the turning point. Pétain and his government could have crossed the Mediterranean and resumed the war against Germany with Britain and America. Jackson writes that de Gaulle himself later commented: ‘I shall never understand why the marshal did not go to Algiers in November 1942 ... The marshal would have made a triumphant return to Paris on his white charger.’ But he stayed in France, for reasons – perhaps including inertia – he never quite explained. Laval effectively took control on behalf of the German occupation, and a brutal period followed as Vichy’s paramilitary Milice, set up to crush the Resistance, murdered and tortured its way across France.

The parade of witnesses included what Jackson calls the ‘ghosts’ of the Third Republic, which ended with the Fall of France. Paul Reynaud and the ancient General Weygand acted out their mutual hatred as they blamed each other. Other politicians followed, justifying their own behaviour in the June 1940 disaster. The exception was Léon Blum, the socialist who led the Popular Front government with the Communists in 1936. Frantically detested by the right as a Red and a Jew (‘Rather Hitler than Blum!’ became a slogan), he was lucky to survive the war, preserved by the Nazis as a captive who might come in useful. He told the court of his horror at finding Paris undefended and remembered his feelings when he read of the armistice: ‘Blum’s voice broke as he remembered that moment. “I could not believe my eyes. I saw that France was betraying her allies ... I saw that abominable clause, without precedent, I think, in our history, by which France committed herself to handing over to Germany those ‘outlaws’, exiles who had found refuge on our soil.”’ Blum was the only one of the senior witnesses to say that Pétain had been a traitor, speaking of Pétain’s ‘massive and atrocious abuse of moral confidence. Yes, I think that can be called treason.’

Jackson describes the main witnesses with skill. Here is sleek little Reynaud, fit from his daily gym exercises and looking half his age. The antique Weygand is seen smashing his stick on the ground in fury. Blum, quiet-voiced, is elegantly dressed in mourning for his brother, killed at Auschwitz. Towards the end of the testimony men about to face their own trials for collaboration, and frequently the firing squad, were brought from prison. Joseph Darnand, the naive ultra-patriot who commanded the Milice, made an almost wordless appearance in a tight tweed jacket and plus fours: ‘like a powerful labourer dressed in his Sunday best’. The Comte de Brinon, a prewar socialite who set up a collaborationist French ‘government’ in Germany in the last months of the war, hobbled unrecognisably into court. A police report describes him as ‘emaciated with the appearance of a startled vulture’.

The central figure in this group was Laval. Sacked as prime minister by Pétain in December 1940, he had been forcibly reinstated by the Germans in 1942. Now, brought from his cell in Fresnes prison, he seemed shockingly thin and frail, at first identifiable only by his cigarette-blackened teeth and his grubby white string tie. But he was the man the press box had been waiting for: ‘The courtroom was like opening night at the theatre – with Laval as the star.’ Would he testify for or against Pétain? He had sealed his own fate back in 1942, with a broadcast in which he had said: ‘I wish for the victory of Germany.’ Now, in a four-hour speech, he claimed that his original script had run ‘I believe in the victory of Germany’ and that Pétain, telling him that he didn’t understand military matters, had made him replace ‘believe in’ with ‘wish for’. The marshal woke up at this, and – after Laval had left the stand – furiously denied the story and told the court that ‘believe’ had been his own preferred word. Laval was tried in the same court in October. ‘Even Laval’s bitterest enemies agreed that his trial was a travesty,’ Jackson writes, with jurors bellowing abuse and Laval’s attempts to speak constantly cut off. He was shot, messily, a few days later.

The jury finally retired just after 9 p.m. on 13 August. They had been listening to the last defence speeches for eight solid hours and grabbed at a quick stand-up meal (hake, brought over from the police kitchens) before they sat down to deliberate. The judges came with them, to point out articles of the penal code that could be invoked, and at one in the morning, after painful arguments, the jury reached a verdict. Pétain was guilty on all charges, stripped of his rank and decorations, and – by a majority of 14 to 13 (the three judges also had a vote) – condemned to death. Most of the jury then signed a letter asking for clemency in view of the defendant’s age. Pétain ended up serving a life sentence on the wind-lashed little Île d’Yeu, off the coast of Brittany. He died there in 1951.

What followed – the cult of Pétain and the slow change in French attitudes to recent history – forms the most fascinating part of Jackson’s book. Isorni appointed himself high priest of the cult, calling for a retrial and for Pétain’s reburial at Douaumont, the great military ossuary near Verdun. Seasick parties of the faithful crossed from the mainland to stare at his prison and then at his tomb. French presidents from de Gaulle to François Mitterrand manoeuvred deviously to appease right-wingers with wreath-laying and half-promises while honouring the Resistance tradition by holding to the trial’s verdict. In 1973 the dead Pétain was kidnapped. The plot was thought up by the exuberant Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a lawyer and politician whose rightist views were even more extreme than Isorni’s. His henchmen came across on the ferry with a van, had a good dinner at the Hôtel des Voyageurs and then drove to the grave. ‘As the coffin was raised, the men broke into a rendition of the Vichy hymn “Maréchal, nous voilà”. After a celebratory glass of champagne at the hotel, they took the 4 a.m. ferry back to the mainland.’ Then everything went wrong. They drove the coffin up and down the Champs-Élysées, in order to erase the memory of de Gaulle’s triumphal parade there at the Liberation, but meeting no enthusiasm, surrendered to the police. The coffin was back on the Île d’Yeu within three days.

Baffling to the older generation, new understandings of the occupation years were spreading. Marcel Ophuls’s unsparing 1969 documentary about a French town during the Vichy years, The Sorrow and the Pity, was banned by shocked broadcasting authorities. But Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, among other young Nazi-hunters, produced evidence that led to the trials of several more Vichy officials. Emphasis was now shifting from treachery to France towards French complicity in the deportation of Jews to their deaths, and the charge of ‘crimes against humanity’, originally levelled at Nazi perpetrators, was now raised by French judges against Frenchmen. De Gaulle, who had resigned the presidency in 1969, took away with him that reassuring ‘only a handful of traitors’ myth. He had known Pétain well, but used to say that the man had ‘died in 1925’ – meaning that conceit and ambition had long since fried the hero-marshal’s brains. ‘Old age is a shipwreck,’ de Gaulle intoned in his memoirs. ‘In order that France should be spared nothing, the shipwreck of France would coincide with the old age of the marshal.’

To read this book, rich with extraordinary narrative and acute opinion, is to enter a region mercifully unknown to Britain. This is the dark landscape of enemy occupation, a moral blackout of hidden pitfalls and lethal morasses. A Resistance fighter emerges from the sewers, only to find that his unit has been ‘turned’ and that he has been working as a traitor. Or imagine that you are a loyal and respected official in a conquered country. It seems obvious to you that striving to keep ‘our own’ law and order functioning under foreign occupation is the patriotic course – even though a few irresponsible workshy types are hiding weapons and provoking the enemy into worse repression. But fast-forward a couple of years, and those reckless layabouts are parading down the Champs-Élysées between cheering crowds, while you are being arrested as a collaborator. As R.L. Bruckberger, a chaplain to the Resistance, reflected afterwards, ‘it was the “enfants sages” who lost France, and the “enfants terribles” who saved her.’ Jackson’s book should leave readers with sympathy for those who were not agile enough to climb through the looking-glass.