France in the dock

RICHARD J EVANS applauds a vivid account of the final days of the collaborationist French Vichy regime, and of the trial of its leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain

- RICHARD J EVANS

A few years ago, I was phoned by a journalist seeking a comment on a recent survey of schoolchildren that had revealed their shocking ignorance about the history of the Second World War. A few of them, he informed me, thought that VE day had something to do with sexually transmitted diseases. A lot of them identified Churchill as a bulldog advertising insurance products on television. And some of them, he said by now waxing indignant even thought that France had fought the war on the side of the Germans.

I wasn't quite sure how to break the news to him. I told him, as gently as I could, that the school pupils were right - at least as far as the French were concerned. For most of the war, led by the internationally recognised collaborationist government based at the spa town of Vichy, France was indeed allied to Nazi Germany. That regime was led by a great military hero of the First World War, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Born in 1856, he was nationally venerated for his stubborn defiance of German aggression at the nine-month-long battle of Verdun.

France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
by Julian Jackson Allen Lane, 480 pages, £25

In 1940, as France's defeat by the invading Germans became inevitable, Pétain was appointed head of the government, and negotiated an armistice that was signed on 22 June 1940. It left the north and west of the country under German occupation but allowed the rest of France, with its overseas colonies, to carry on under Pétain's leadership.

Backed by a somewhat dubious vote of the legislature that gave him near-dictatorial powers, the marshal passed a raft of new laws on his own initiative, establishing censorship, discriminating against Jews, and replacing the republican slogan 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' with 'Work, Family, Fatherland'.