Dan Snow's History Hit - Marshal Pétain: Hero or Traitor?

Episode Date: May 11, 2024

Marshal Pétain emerged from the First World War as a French national hero. His defence of Verdun had set him on course to become one of France's most venerated commanders. But by 1945 the Marshal was on trial for treason, having collaborated with Nazi Germany as the head of the Vichy regime.Dan is joined by Julian Jackson, author of the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize-winning book 'France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain'. Julian explains how Marshal Pétain went from the hero of Verdun to the traitor of Vichy, and why his trial remains divisive eight decades later.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. From 1940 to 1944, Henri-Philippe Benoni-Homère-Joseph Pétain, commonly known as Marshal Pétain, was the head of the collaborationist government of France, known as Vichy France, after its capital, Vichy, in the south of France. He's remembered as Marshal Pétain because he was also a Marshal of France. During the First World War, he'd become Chief of Staff of the Army, and he'd ended the war as a national, well, really a father figure, one of the most famous and beloved men in France. Fast forward then to 1945, and that same man was on trial for treason. It was Marshal

Pétain who stood on the dock of that trial, but really it was France on trial. It was the French people and how they'd either resisted or collaborated or somewhere in between with the Nazi Germans who defeated the French so spectacularly in 1940. To talk to me all about Pétain, particularly his time as the leader of Vichy France and his trial, is a biographer. He is Julian Jackson. He's Emeritus Professor of Modern French History at Queen Mary University of London. He has just written France on Trial, the Case of Marshal Pétain. And he brilliantly tells a story of that trial as France's first attempt to come to terms with its complicity with the horrors of the Third Reich. And that discussion, the legacy of those years, definitely continues to this day.

Here's Julian, folks. Enjoy. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Julian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

No, it's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Let's start. Tell me about Pétain's background. At the time of the First World War, most British generals came through this British public school pipeline, not all of them, but most of them. Is that true of French generals? Is that true of Pétain? There's no simple generalization, but the man that we're really interested in, Pétain, came from a very ordinary peasant background. Basically, his mother had died when he was very young. He was a clever boy, so he was sent to a Catholic school for his education and so on.

But the main point about him is that he was genuinely, in his background, you could say a man of the people, a man of the land, a man of northern France, which was not true of all First World War generals in France, I mean. And what makes Pétain such a sort of revered figure later on, and what makes his trial such a traumatic event, is that he is so beloved because he's seen as a general who both came from the people and then cared about the people. So in that sense, he's very different from a Hague, if you want, if you want to take a British comparison. He's very much of the land and of the people. There were British general officers, field marshals even, from normal backgrounds, from outside sort of the public school pipeline.

But why was the French system able to... Was Pétain unusual in this, or was it quite normal for the children of the land to become officers and reach high ranks? No, I think it was a relatively meritocratic system. So he was not exceptional in that, but I think it was exceptional that a man of that background would rise to be a Marshal of France. But de Gaulle, obviously his great rival in the Second World War, was somebody who came from a sort of slightly gentry, sort of minor aristocratic background. So it's very difficult to generalize, but it was a meritocratic system. And I suspect actually in the British system, which I don't know particularly well, there would be that same kind of possibility of rising from

the ranks. So I don't think that's unique really. So we'll just quickly talk about his First World War experience. He has a sort of meteoric rise, does he? Well, on the eve of the First World War, he was actually coming to the end of his career. So if the Great War hadn't happened, no one would remember the name of Peter, because he was just coasting to retirement. And partly because he was a slightly nonconformist kind of army officer before the First World War, because he was one of the very few who was arguing that new military technology meant that the defensive would probably prevail over offensive. And that was totally against the prevailing doctrine of the French high command, who believed absolutely that everything

was about offensive, the offensive, as opposed to the defensive. So when the war breaks out, So, when the war breaks out, he is a colonel, and he turns out to be very good at leading his men, but also his vision, as it were, of what the war might turn out to be, turns out very quickly to be vindicated. 1914. But I think what makes him more than just an ordinary general of the First World War is that he's associated for the French, above all, with the defense of the Verdun, the greatest battle for the French of the First World War. Because for us, the battle that the British remember in the First War is the Battle of the Somme, whereas the French remember, above all, the Battle of Verdun. And where we remember the Somme very much as a futile bloodletting with actually really no heroism, really. The Somme is all about tragedy, I think, in the British popular memory, whereas Verdun is about both tragedy but also heroism. The French hanging on to this fortress city as a kind of symbol of France.

And Pétain is the man who's in command. And the one thing he does is set up this extraordinary complicated system by which no soldier in the front line at Verdun, subjected to the terrible artillery battering of the Germans, is there for more than a relatively short time. So he creates this sort of endless renewal of people at the front. So it's felt that he does care about the soldiers. And that's even more the case in 1917, when a wave of mutinies broke out in the French army. And the French army could have collapsed in 1917. It's something that we forget. Mutiny is the word we often use, or you could say that the soldiers went on strike after a totally disastrous offensive in 1917, led by a different general, Nivelle, which was a replica of the futile suicidal offensives of 1914 and 15.

The soldiers say, we're not going to go on. And Pétain is put in charge of the whole army. And he brings the mutinies to an end by two methods, partly by some summary executions, but mainly by improving the daily conditions of the soldiers, improving the amount of leave, improving rations. And so he has this reputation after the end of the war that he's the man who saved France in the most bloody, but also heroic battle of Verdun. And then the man who showed that unlike most of his

fellow generals, he cared about the common people, the ordinary soldier. And so his myth is built around those two moments, Verdun and the ending of the strikes. myth is built around those two moments, Verdun and the ending of the strikes. And in 1918, he's a Marshal of France, hugely popular national treasure, celebrated around the world. And it might have been better if his career had ended there. Well, yes, absolutely. For him, he was the hero of heroes. He participated in a victory parade on a white horse on the Champs-Élysées in July 1919. And he's one of eight marshals. And a marshal in France is a much more symbolically weighted honor than a marshal in the British army. It has almost a godlike status. And of the eight marshals, Petain is the most adored and adulated. He also has a certain nobility of

his bearing. He's a very handsome man, the piercing blue eyes, women absolutely, all his life falls for him in a big way. He is the national hero, as you say, a kind of national treasure. And yes, I think it would be very good for him if somehow it had all ended in 1918, because we'd only remember the hero and we wouldn't remember the other Pétain that the French now remember. If you mention the name of Pétain, most French people will not remember what we've just been talking about. They'll remember what one could call in a simple word, they'll remember not the hero, but the traitor. Take me on that road. How do we go from one to the other? What does he do at the

end of the war, apart from being superbly glamorous? Does he maintain an active role in military or politics? Well, for the 1920s, he's very much, theoretically, the official, the title doesn't really matter. He's in charge of army planning, and he is an active figure in the military. He retires in 1930-31. And during the 1930s, he's no longer really actively involved. But then he develops a sort of another side of his personality, you could say, another side of his image, which is he starts to think that France is in a certain amount of political trouble and that he could actually be a political savior. He's not actually a particularly cerebral or intellectual figure. He was a great soldier, but he has a number of simple ideas that school

teachers should inculcate values of patriotism in their pupils, that marriage is a good thing, although Peta himself was a major philanderer and only married quite late, that religion is important. So these are quite simple, one might say, right-wing ideas. But he starts to see himself as a sort of potential savior in a case of a national crisis. And people on the right who don't like French democracy, who are suspicious of the Republic, who would like to institute a more authoritarian system, start to see Pétain as a potential figurehead for their purposes. So he starts to see himself as a savior, and people on the right who are looking for somebody that they can use turn to the figure of Pétain. So he really mutates in the 1930s to a much more political role, not active in politics, but a kind of messiah, you might say, a hero in the wings,

in the waiting. Isn't that interesting? I mean, I don't want to get too much into comparisons, but you see Hindenburg in Germany. There must be something about the gigantic trauma of the First World War and the prominence, the adulation that these military commanders received that made them just towering figures for the rest of their lives. It must have been very difficult for civilian politicians to sort of go toe-to-toe with them. Yeah, within political systems, which in Germany, it was obviously the Weimar system, had only limited legitimacy. And the whole myth in Germany that the politicians have stabbed the military in the back, 1919, and Ludendorff developed this idea,

that's an explanation in Germany. In France, where politics become very contested in the 1930s, then yes, if you've got a contested politics, then you look for heroes to somehow save you from what you see as the crisis that you're in. Very different for Britain, where there was never any really serious anti-democratic movement in the interwar years. Britain is a relatively stable democracy. France is a much more complicated case. And in that case, a military figure seems to have a certain authority above and beyond politics. and authority above and beyond politics. But before the Second World War, he is seen as a sort of a savior in waiting. He doesn't launch into electoral politics.

No, no. So it's only the catastrophe of 1940 that thrusts him back into the heart of French life. Yeah, well, suddenly there's a catastrophe and people are looking for an explanation. They're looking for a reassurance and they feel the politicians have let them down in 1940. And so they turned to the case of this military hero in the wings waiting. Without 1940, just as without 1916, Petter would never become a military hero. Without 1940, he would never become a political figure on the way that he did. So let's just remind people what happens. The French army suffers one of those catastrophic defeats in the history of warfare. The Germans invade, catch the French and British by surprise in many ways. France falls in a month and Paris is

occupied. German troops marching down the Champs-Élysées. What is the process by which Pétain is summoned back from his plow? How does it all work? Well, basically, when the first military reverses happen very rapidly, the Germans launch their offensive against France on the 10th of May. And really within a week, it's clear that things are, it takes six weeks for France to be defeated. But within a week, it becomes clear that the situation is catastrophic. So the prime minister of the man called Paul Reynaud, elected prime minister, brings Petain into his government. And he does it really because he thought that Petain would

be a great way of bolstering morale because of the extraordinary prestige and stature that Petain would be a great way of bolstering morale because of the extraordinary prestige and stature that Petain has. So he brings Petain into his government symbolically. He doesn't really expect Petain to play any particular role. What he doesn't realize is that Petain has become convinced that France is finished or defeated. And he becomes very much a voice for capitulation and defeat, rather paradoxically for a military figure. So when in June 1940, in the middle of June, it becomes absolutely obvious that it's over. There's no question. The question is what to do next. And one option is that the French government goes abroad to North Africa, which is part of French empire, or even to London, which is of course what General de Gaulle did.

That's one option. The government goes abroad, the armies in France capitulate, but the government, as in Holland, where the government went abroad, the Queen Wilhelmina came to London, in Norway, the King came to London, et cetera. So in all these other countries, although the armies are defeated, the governments go on playing a part, theoretical or countries, although the armies are defeated, the governments go on playing a part, theoretical or whatever, in the war. When it comes to the question of what will happen next, Pétain says, no, we need to sign an armistice with Germany. And there's a massive debate in the government where the prime minister wants to go to North

Africa. He wants to continue the battle from abroad. Pétain says, no, it's all finished. And because Pétain is Pétain, and because he's also supported very much in this position by the commander of the French army, General Weygand, so it's very much, you could almost say, the military saying, the politicians have let us down. It's too late. The situation is now irretrievable. So we need to make an armistice, effectively a peace with Germany. And it's because it's Peter.

It's because it comes with the authority that he has. He'd always been, well, now he was a very prudent military commander, even in the First World War. And his prudence always verged on defeatism in a way. And in 1940, he is quite clearly defeatist. He believes that it's all over. And so he signs an armistice with Germany on the 22nd of June, 1940. And the armistice that Hitler offers is perhaps less draconian than the French had feared. So Hitler says, right, you can keep your empire,

you can keep your fleet, but France will be divided into two zones. There'll be an occupied zone, which Paris will be in, and the other half, broadly speaking, of the country will not be occupied by the Germans. The French could go on, as it were, running their own affairs. Now, remember, that's an armistice. It's not the end of the war. It's an armistice before a peace treaty. And when Pétain signs that armistice, he's convinced the British will not last more than a month, six weeks. And once the British are defeated, the war will be over, and France will then seek the terms for a final peace. But of course, the British don't give in. And at that point, the armistice, which was only meant to be a kind of

temporary cessation of hostilities before a proper peace, becomes a real problem for the French because their country is divided into two. There are one and a half million prisoners of war in German prison of war camps. And so it's a very, very difficult situation. And then in the south of France, Pétain sets up his capital at a small town with no real political historical significance, Vichy, famous essentially for its water and its baths. It's kind of like Bath or Cheltenham. He sets up his government in Vichy, and it's like thinking that if the same had happened in Britain, a capital in Harrogate or Cheltenham or Landrydnod Wells, that's the sort of absurdity really of it. So he sets up in Vichy and the government, he basically, with the help of other politicians, particularly the help of an extreme right-wing politician called Pierre Laval, what they do essentially is to set up an authoritarian quasi-dictatorship, you could say, in the part of France that is free

with Pétain at its head. And so that's what we call the Vichy regime. Whereas in Paris, the Germans are present, but in the Vichy part of France, the French are ruling their own country, but democracy is finished. And then a few weeks later, Peter does something which becomes a key piece of evidence against him in his trial in 1945. He meets Hitler on the 24th of October at a little railway station, little town, which nobody had really ever heard of, except that it becomes notorious because of this meeting. Hitler's on his way to see Franco. Hitler wants to get Franco to participate in the war, which he fails. And on the way back, he meets Peter at this little railway station, which is sort of on the line from Paris to Spain. And there's a very famous photo,

which is immediately spread by the German propaganda of Peter shaking the hand of Hitler. And after it, he makes a speech where he says that, I have met Chancellor Hitler and I am ready to, and he uses the C word, I'm ready to enter down the road of collaboration. And what collaboration means is yet to be defined. But basically, Petain didn't need to shake Hitler's hand because the two countries aren't at peace.

I couldn't repeat that more often. Vichy France is supposedly neutral. They've signed an armistice. The war's still going on. The war's going on in North Africa. The war's going on, the British are very much in the war. So to shake Hitler's hand symbolically is enormously important. That word collaboration becomes one of the main crimes, if you want, of which Pétain is accused when he's put on trial in 1945. From that point till Vichy France is occupied militarily by the Germans, how long does Vichy exist and what is its posture? You would say it's technically neutral, but it seems it's German-leaning, isn't it? Yes, I say collaboration. But what that means is cooperating with the Germans. I mean, that's the million-dollar question. What does collaboration mean? It's a kind of skewed

neutrality. Vichy is never an ally of Germany, never fighting with the Germans, and never declares war on the British. So Vichy's posture is supposedly neutral, but actually is a skewed neutrality because Vichy is giving a certain amount of military aid to the Germans. And also that the new political regime that's been set up is very much what you might call an authoritarian model. Well, extraordinarily, Vichy does the last Anglo-French war in history. I mean, the Vichy forces do fire upon British and Allied troops, don't they, in various parts of the world? Yes, barely actually. But in Madagascar in 1942, yes. But Vichy is not at war with the British.

Vichy is neutral, but I repeat, a kind of skewed neutrality. And what about domestically, particularly around the Jewish question? How does Pétain approach German requests for, well, to help with the final solution? Jews can't be doctors, university professors, teachers, and so on. And that's all part of what we might call Vichy's homegrown domestic anti-Semitism. But it's not the same as the anti-Semitism of the Germans, which is exterminatory, you might say, which is about killing Jews. And when in 1942, the Germans start to want to deport Jews from all occupied countries in Europe for extermination, the great controversy is, what is Vichy's response? To what degree did Vichy participate?

To what degree was Vichy complicit in that? We know that it was French police that arrested Jews in 1942. So the French police are doing it, but they're doing it under the orders of the Vichy government. And the Vichy government, the defense after the war would be that, yes, we had no choice. The Germans were there. Yes, we will allow our police to participate in the roundups of Jews that you are ordering. That will be done by us. But it will be only foreign Jews, not French Jews. That is the line of Vichy. That's the defense of Vichy, that they defended French citizens as Jews rather than foreign Jewish refugees. If you were putting Petah on trial today, it's the Jewish question, which would be

the one that seems to us the most important, the most culpable act of which Vichy is committed. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about Petah and his trial. More coming up. More coming up. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. What do you think is going on with pétain was he a believer did he actually think that france's future lay in this more authoritarian direction or was he just trying to salvage some shreds of dignity or you know stability for the french people well i think he believed that, again, I keep coming back to the trial, and it's the trial that interests me, not the truth in a way. I'm interested in the way the thing is debated at the trial in 1945. But yes, I think his defense was that things would have been worse if he hadn't been there.

he hadn't been there, then the Germans would have occupied the whole of France. And at that point, the French would have had no shield, as it were, between the Germans and the French population. So his defense was that the goal in London was the sword, and I was the shield. I was the shield of the French against the Germans. And again, the whole issue of the trial is, to what extent did Vichy act as a shield, and to what extent did it not? So France is liberated, the whole issue of the trial is to what extent did Vichy act as a shield and to what extent did it not? So France is liberated. The Vichy regime escaped to Germany and it's involved in the Celtic destruction of the Third Reich. And then Pétain, he arrives back into France voluntarily, does he? Does he know there's going to be a trial?

There's going to be a public humiliation? After D-Day, the Allies are moving towards Paris. Paris is liberated in August 1944. By then, the Germans have seized Petain in Vichy and basically kidnapped him. He's put in a castle in Baden-Württemberg called Sigmaringen. And that's where the Vichy regime lives out its last days on German soil, when it's quite clear that Germany is going to be totally defeated by March, April 1945. Peter, unlike most of the other people at Sigma Ring in this public government who want to escape to Spain or to Northern Italy, somehow not go back to France, Peter is insistent that he will go back to France. And he knows that there's a high court. A high court has been set up to try collaborators. And obviously, the person they most want is the man who'd been

at the head of the regime, which is Petain. So a high court has been set up. The purges are beginning of collaborators. And Petain arrives at the Swiss border. The Swiss authorities are a bit unsure what to do with him. I think if he had wanted to take refuge in Switzerland, they probably would have accepted. But he's quite clear he wants to go back to France, which is an extraordinary decision in a way. And I think it's partly because for four years he'd been living in a bubble of propaganda. And I don't think he really knew what the state of French public opinion was. So he presents himself on the 21st of April, 1945, at the Franco-Swiss border. And he's met there by representative of de Gaulle, and he's taken back to Paris, and he's imprisoned in a fortress for a trial that will begin on the 21st of July. But it does seem in some ways an odd

choice. And my explanation is essentially that he was not really aware of the way in which public opinion now saw him as a guilty man. Yes, I'm very struck in your book when you said that his case for defense, and as his lawyers articulated, was if Pétain's guilty, so were the French, so was France. I mean, he kept thinking of himself as this sort of embodiment, as the authoritarian leaders often do, this sort of embodiment of the French people. And therefore, how could the French people be wrong? Yes, I think for me, the interest of the trial is that it's unlike the Nuremberg trials, for example, which were the victorious allies trying the Germans. So it was not a trial by the Germans of the Germans. It was a trial by an international allied tribunal of the Germans.

The same was true of Tokyo trials. So what you get in France is it's the French putting their former hero on trial. So this is a Franco-French trial. It's a Franco-French debate. And I think what's interesting about the trial is precisely that because Pétain is kind of the embodiment for many people of France, he is France, it is France that is being put on trial. It's a beginning of what you might call 70-year debate about what France did in the war. Is it justifiable? Were there alternatives? What were the alternatives? And that debate, which still up to a point is present in French memory, almost even in French politics in a minor way today, that debate starts the day that Pétain walks into the courtroom on the 22nd of July, 1945. So it's the French trying the French, the French beginning a kind of debate amongst themselves about these four traumatic years of their history.

And you've mentioned the shield defense already. He was the shield of France. The idea was that what France could have, had it not been for him, France could have looked like occupied Poland, where monstrous crimes against humanity were carried out regularly and the entire Polish state was decapitated, the church, aristocrats, men of learning, women. I mean, that's the argument that was put forward to support Pétain. Well, one of the arguments, I mean, there were three defense lawyers. And again, one of the main themes of my book is to look at, to tease out the different positions of the different defense lawyers, two of whom hated each other.

But one major defense was, yes, things would have been worse without me. Things may not be great, but they'd have been worse. And often the argument that you just used, that France would have suffered the fate of Poland, was often raised. So they called it Polandization. We would have had all the things you said. I mean, the complete, really, destruction of all our institutions and so on. But I think that argument, whatever you think about the defenses that could be made for PETA, if they can be made, that isn't a good one because there's no way in which the Germans ever intended, or in any occupied country in Western Europe, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark as well, to a point, nowhere did they treat those countries like Poland. Because Poland is quite different. For the Germans, the Poles were Slavs. They were really only a little bit above the Jews in racial hierarchy. So the treatment of France wouldn't... I mean, you can't

be sure, and that's the whole point about these kinds of discussions, counterfactual, what if? What if PETA hadn't been there? Would things have been worse? But the argument, the defense is yes, that without the shield or the oak tree or protecting oak tree that was PETA, things would have been worse. And that one could play with that argument, but I don't think they're using the Poland argument, which they did. I know you raised it, but it was also raised often by the defenders of Petra. It's completely fallacious. Equally, another argument used was France would have been ruled by a Gauleiter, a German Gauleiter would have imposed extreme Nazi measures in France. Again, nowhere in Western

Europe did the Germans impose a Gauleiter. Actually, there's one exception. I wrote this in my book, and then somebody from Luxembourg actually wrote to me to say, well, actually, we had a Gauleiter in Luxembourg. And this person was absolutely right. I should not have forgotten Luxembourg. But I think that the argument that it's inconceivable that a country the size of France would have been ruled by a Gauleiter. Luxembourg is obviously a very different case. So yes, there is a what if, but I think that if we're going to have a what if discussion, I think we can immediately rule out that France would have suffered the fate of Poland. What was the most potent argument put forward for the prosecution? What was the most potent argument put forward for the prosecution? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

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Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I think for the prosecution, the problem with the trial, and again, I think it's interesting to tease out the arguments, the prosecution itself kept on shifting what it thought Petain was guilty of. So there were so many things he could have been considered to be guilty of. Was he guilty of signing the armistice? Was that a crime of Petain?

And that was de Gaulle's view. De Gaulle said, we were defeated, but we could have gone on fighting from abroad. Therefore, the crime, treason, is the signing of an armistice had been signed, collaborating with Germany, the handshake. Other people said Petah had been plotting against the Republic since the 1930s, that he was a conspirator against the Republic. Other people said that there was no reason in 1940 for him to set up a new authoritarian government. So that was his crime.

For other people, it was what happened to the Jews. So there are many different versions of what his crime was. And one of the problems for the prosecution was as he were nailing the crime, because this was an unprecedented situation. There was nothing in the French penal code that gave an answer to this. So the article of the French penal code that they used against Petain was an article which existed before the war, which is called Complicity with the Enemy, Intelligence avec l'Enemy. So the idea is right. That was Petain's crime. Although the word collaboration isn't in the French penal code, collaboration is complicity, intelligence, the French called it, with the enemy. So that's his crime. But the problem was there were so many possibilities of what his crime was, and it was very difficult to find the smoking gun. Remember, this is being done only a few weeks after the end of the war. So amassing the necessary documentation to show what Peter actually did was very, very difficult. And on the Jewish question, which you mentioned earlier, the evidence about Vichy's complicity in the Holocaust, which now seems to us the most shameful thing that Vichy did, the evidence to actually show what Vichy did in his negotiations with the Germans, they just didn't have it. It was too soon. So the question, what was the main argument of the prosecution? One of the problems of prosecution is there were sort of

so many potential things he could be accused of that no one could quite decide which was the one they really wanted to focus on, which meant that it was an unsatisfactory conclusion. But that conclusion came on the 15th of August, as you say, so rapidly after the end of the war. Remarkable. It's 15th of August, 1945, and he was condemned to death. Yes, he was condemned to death by this high court, which had 24 jurors. 12 of them were eminent members of the resistance. 12 of them were former politicians of the defunct democratic system before the war, so 24 jurors. They voted by one vote for the death penalty. They all agreed he was guilty. There was no question he wasn't going to be acquitted. But had he committed the crime which required, under the article which I mentioned, 75, the death penalty. So actually by only one vote

did they vote for the death penalty, which shows that it was a trial. It wasn't a sort of Stalinist trial. There was a real debate. So he was sentenced to be executed, but they all knew, and indeed, they even made a recommendation, the jurors, that the sentence not be carried out. So symbolically for them, he needed to be sentenced to death symbolically to show that he had committed the ultimate crime, which was treason. But he was 89 years old. He had been a revered figure, and it would have been immensely divisive to shoot an 89-year-old former war hero. So they recommended that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. And that is what General de Gaulle, who'd always intended to do that, the next day did. So Peter is sentenced to death. The next day, the death sentence is commuted, and he's sent to a prison

off a little island off the west coast of France, the Ile d'Ile, and he finally dies at the age of 95 or 94, 1951, by which time he is really senile. It's a rather sad end. We're seeing the reemergence of many strange political phenomena in our world at the moment, things we never thought we'd see again. There is in modern France, is there a kind of neo-Pétainism? I mean, can you briefly talk to me about that? As you say, the debate goes on, and if anything, the debate is intensified. All over Europe at the moment, and indeed in Britain as well, you can see the rise of extreme right politics, and also in the United States as well. So there's something going on. And obviously, that thing that's going on in France immediately has, in people's minds, ghosts erased of this period that we're talking about, the occupation. So the main party of the extreme right in France today, it used to be called the National Front, the Front National, it's now called the Rassemblement National,, is the RN. And the leader of that party, as I'm sure most listeners will know,

is Marine Le Pen. And Marine Le Pen is the daughter of a politician who had founded that party, who is still alive now, but he's no longer anything to do with the party. And he was an unashamed supporter of the Vichy Ray. He hadn't been active at the period, he was too young, but he believed in all the values, you might say, associated with Pétainism. Now, Marine Le Pen's position today is that de Gaulle is the hero, and she has distanced herself totally in theory, and I repeat in theory, on the surface from the Vichy regime. Every year, she goes and lays a wreath or somebody from her party on the tomb of General de Gaulle, whereas her father used to go and pay homage to Petas Grave and so on. None of that happens now from her party. There is an even more extreme party

on the right, a very small, run by someone called Éric Zemmour. At the last election, he stood against Macron, who was re-elected in current president of France in 2022. And this man is called Eric Zemmour. His platform is quite simple. It's anti-immigration. It's the Muslims or Islam is a threat to France. We need to legislate against the influence of Islam, immigration, and so on. And he explicitly defends PETA. And he said that what the Vichy regime did was to, I repeat that argument I mentioned earlier, to save French Jews, even if it had to sacrifice foreign Jews. So he's tried to rehabilitate PETA.

He only got 7% of the vote in 2022. And then at the second round, you know, in a French election, there can be many candidates. In the first round, in the second round, there are only two candidates. And so the two candidates, Zemmour with his 7% was eliminated. And the only two candidates in the second round were Emmanuel Macron, who is now president, and Marine Le Pen, who is leader of this right-wing party, which has supposedly distanced itself from PETA. But you use the term, which I would totally accept and agree with, neopatanism. And what I would mean by neopatanism is that many of the arguments of the extreme right today, directed very much against the Muslim population

of France, are the kind of language, these are not real French, these are foreign bodies in our body politic, poisoning the blood sort of thing that Trump actually recently said about foreigners in the United States, they can't be fully assimilated and so on. That for me is a kind of neopitanism, which in this case is not applied to the Jews, but is applied to a different minority. So yes, I do think there is a kind of neopetanism in France. And I think that for all that Marine Le Pen says, I've distanced myself from Petain, it's all very well to say that. And she's only saying that because the name Petain is problematic to use today. But I think you scratch the surface of her beliefs and the beliefs of the people around her. And there's a link, a very clear ideological, emotional link to that period we're talking

about of the Vichy regime between 1940 and 1944. And that period itself has links to a case which is often compared to the Pétain trial of the Dreyfus affair, when this Jewish officer was falsely accused of spying for the Germans. So there's a tradition of the extreme right in France, which goes from Dreyfus to Vichy to now. And so, yes, I think it is there today. And I think that's why actually writing about the Pétain period and showing people, well, what that really meant is possibly a necessary way of exposing what lies under these ideas that are trying to portray themselves as respectable in the 2020s, but have actually got a very sinister history. Well, thank you very much for writing it. Now it's up to everyone to read it. What is the book called?

So the book is called France on Trial, the Case of Marshall Pitta, and it's coming out in paperback in June. Well, thank you very much, Julian Jackson. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. you