School of War - Ep 241: Julian Jackson on Nazi-Occupied France and Pétain

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Julian Jackson, Emeritus Professor of Modern French History at Queen Mary University of London and author of France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, joins the show to discuss the rise and fall of “the Lion of Verdun”; Philippe Pétain. ▪️ Times    01:06 Introduction    01:53 How Pétain became the “Hero of France” in WW1    11:32  France sues for peace with Germany in 1940    18:52 The legality of the armistice    27:49 Churchill’s take on the armistice             33:48 What Was Vichy France?    41:43 Vichy’s treatment of the Jews        53:05 Distancing France from extermination             58:13 Why does Pétain stay a servant to the Nazis    01:07:38 Vichy and Pétain on trial today             Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

The story of France under Nazi occupation in World War II is a complicated one, full of heroism and also moral squalor. And we're going to focus on the latter today in a really fascinating conversation with the historian Julian Jackson on the grim end of a great World War I hero of France, Philippe Petan, who in World War II led the collaborationist Vichy regime, a historical moment that continues to echo in contemporary politics. Let's get into it. It is for safety for war.

The Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches. There's a sight on the landing ground. We shall bike in the fields and in those streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Dr. Julian Jackson, he is the emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary University of London, author of numerous books to include the multi-price winning certain idea of France, the life of Charles de Gaulle, also the author of France on trial, the case of Marshall Payton, which we're going to discuss today. Julian, thank you so much for joining the show. It's a pleasure.

This is going to be a conversation really about Vichy France, in France under occupation and the behavior of the French government during that period. and this one figure looms above it all, probably less well known, I'm guessing, certainly to American listeners than Charles de Gaulle, the Liberator of France, the leader of the Free French, and the previous subject for one of your books. Who was Philippe Patin before the war? How does he come to prominence in France? I'll answer that question, but begin it by saying that because he's now a non-person in France,

because of the things we're going to be discussing, he's no longer a national hero, but he's a national villain. the own, all the streets used to be named after him have disappeared. The only petin streets you'll find in the world today are actually in the United States, curiously enough, because he was actually quite a hero for the American public in the interwar years. So he was a hero above all because he was France's greatest world, it was possibly the most important of all the great First World War generals in any country. He was the man who was in charge of what is for the French,

the kind of quintessential battle of the First World War, the famous Battle of Verdun, where for a whole year in 1916, the French and the Germans sort of slogged it out. The Germans tried to take this fortress, and the French would take a bit back, and the French Germans would take a bit more. And it was the bloodiest battle of the First World War, which in the end, the French won, if you can call winning, losing probably 300. a thousand men, same on the German side. So he's the victor of Verdin, firstly. But then secondly, he's also, or his reputation in the interwar years, is also as the general who really cared

about the ordinary soldiers. Most First World War generals were seen as ready, basically to sacrifice ordinary soldiers as cannon fodder, sending them across the trenches and so on. Peta had a different reputation, and not unjustified. And when in 1917 there was a wave of mutinies, I mean really serious mutinies in the French army, which could have basically meant that France was defeated, Petra is brought in to put them to an end. And how does he put them to an end, partly with stick, but also with carrot? He says, I understand we're not going to go on sending people on suicidal missions. We're going to give you better conditions, better leave and so on.

So out of the war, he comes out as a general who wins the emblems, battle, but who also has, is the general who cares for the ordinary soldier. So that's who he comes out of the First World War with an extraordinary reputation. Then in the war years, he becomes more than that. He becomes a sort of national father figure, you could say, as the other First World War generals die off and none of them had had the same kind of extraordinary, legendary hold on the French people that Petter has. gradually he becomes more than a military figure.

He becomes, as I say, almost like a kind of savior in the waiting. And it has to be said that he quite likes this. He quite takes to the role of savior in the waiting. He's not necessarily a hugely intelligent man, but he has a few simple ideas about making society better. People should study more at school. They should be more patriotic. Pacifism is bad, etc.

Simple ideas, family is important. Conservative social. simple, solid ideas. And in the 1930s, when France is in a really politically pretty bad way, there are endless turnos of a government. There's riots on the street in 1934. There's a lot of anti-parliamentary feeling. They're fascist movements and so on. Petin becomes for conservatives, the man who might be able to step in and restore authority, order, conservative values and so on. So he's a military man, a legend, who is also going to increasingly take on a kind of political symbolism for people on the right. I'm going to ask you to say a bit more about these pre-war or interwar French politics because I think it's really hard to understand what Vichy is and what it means and then what his legacy is without understanding sort of what it comes from.

You know, the way you just sketched out how Patan is sort of a savior in waiting suggests that even before the, war or implies that even before the war, there's sort of an extra constitutional quality to the way in which he might be a savior. Just say a bit more about these politics in the major currents and how Patin weaves into them. Yes, I went over that very fast, but I think what we've got, France is what was called, was a republic like America is a republic. It was a republic with a very different political system from the one it has today. It was a republic. At the moment, France has a president whom everybody more or less knows because he's quite an important figure. That was the republic created by DeGol after the war, precisely because of what had happened in 1940.

And in an interwar years, it was a parliamentary republic. The president had very little power, nothing like the American president. He was a sort of a kind of just sort of a symbol. It was said, you know, the role of the president was to open flower shows, but otherwise, you know, keep his mouth shut and so on. So he has no real power. And there is enormous political instability. Governments come and go with amazing rapidity because of the nature of the political system. Now, that's worked okay.

After all, the French got through the First World War with that system. So it's not necessarily that the system was fated. But what happened in the interwar years in the 1930s in France, as throughout the world, is the impact of the Great Depression. And the impact of the Great Depression creates budget. deficits, high unemployment, and so on, and an increasingly increasing sense among the French that this system is no longer adequate to be able to cope with the new problems of the modern world, you might say. So you get the development of so-called anti-parliamentary leagues. There's to say,

movements which are kind of proto-fascists, some of them wear uniforms, they march in the street, they shout anti-parliamentary slogans, the, I suppose, the key date. And I have to say, just to give a kind of American comparison, if it's not inappropriate, when you had the famous event on the 6th of January after the, when President Trump, having been defeated, felt he hadn't been defeated, and there was the, whatever you want to call it, the demonstrations, the capital, for all French historians like myself, and including my French historian colleagues in the United States, we all thought, one thing, we thought 6th of February, 1934,

when in Paris there were similar riots, slightly different reasons, when it looked as if a crowd was actually going to storm Parliament, and the Parliament in Paris was on one side of the River Sen, everybody I'm sure knows the River Sen runs through Paris. On one side there's a Place La Concorde, where the King was executed in 1793, On the other side is the Parliament building.

The police are guarding this bridge. The demonstration turns quite nasty, and the police fire. And 12 people, 12, 15 people, whatever are killed. And that is a dramatic moment in interwar France. It's like the beginning of a sort of latent civil war. And from that moment, French politics becomes dramatically divided, polarized, between those on the right who think politicians are corrupt, Parliament is weak, you need a strong man,

and here let's think of Petra again, and those on the left who think that France has just escaped fascism, and unless we're careful, is going to become fascist. And so there's a great movement of the left, called the Popular Front, with the Communists playing a big role. So without going into any more detail, because it becomes amazingly complicated, just think of a society,

which is on the verge of a kind of civil war of words, although there had been deaths, which can, in those right circumstances, explode into something much more serious. So that's the state of France in the 1930s. So let's skip to the crisis then amidst this civil war of words in extraordinarily fraught politics. An actual war comes to France. and in the spring of 1940, France is defeated on the battlefield, describe the circumstances into which Patan emerges to summon France as a savior at this point and signs this armistice with the Germans thus setting into motion the events of the next few years.

In French politics, what puts him in the position to do that? And, you know, this is perhaps kind of a naive question, but it's a complicated moment for the French right who, you know, detest, of course, their compatriots on the left, and as you describe it, seem to have some contempt for the liberals in the center as well. But the invading party, who just killed a lot of French troops on the battlefield, and of course, as we know, is about to do even worse to the French people. Here they are at the gates. So what happens? Well, if I can just give you a little motto or slogan to kind of give you some sense of how divided France had become in 1930s, which will be a beginning of an answer to your question,

there was a phrase that floated around in right-wing circles in 1939, 1940. And that phrase was rather Hitler than Bloom. Now, what does that mean? Who was Bloom? Bloom was a left-wing socialist leader who'd been Prime Minister in 1936 as a reaction against the events I've just talking about, the Popular Front government. And many people on the right were so antagonistic to the left

to a man like Bloom, who was a Jew, there was a lot of anti-Semitism, who was a socialist. That, this little motto, rather Hitler than Bloom, well, are the Germans worse than the communist? Are the Germans worth than socialist? So that is floating around. I'm not saying that people wanted to be defeated, but that gives you a kind of background noise. Let's go to 1940. France is defeated catastrophically in six weeks. We don't need to look at the military reasons for that. Let's just accept the fact it happened. And when a defeat happens, people, look for, well, they look for scapegoats and solutions. What is the solution? Well, one solution

would have been, no one denied that in six weeks the French army was finished. There were one possible solution would have been to say, right, we're finished. The government, the official government, will go abroad and will continue to, as it were, be France abroad and the army will, as it were, capitulate on the field. There'll be a surrender, but the France, in form of the government, will be abroad. And others said, no, that would be dishonorable. And anyway, Germany has now won the war, not just beaten France. So let's accommodate themselves to that situation. That was the other view. Now, why is Petin playing any role here? Because the prime minister, a man called Paul Reno in 1940, had, when it looked as though things were really bad on the battlefield, he'd called Petten into his

government. And he'd done it because what's better to have in your government than a great war? war hero. So he was brought in, as it were, for morale. What this man didn't know was that Petat was pretty convinced, or not totally convinced, that he was all over, and it was necessary to accept defeat and make the best of it. So a great debate happens in the government. Will we sign an armistice with Germany say it's over, or will the government go abroad? Now, you went to, what does that mean? What that means is if the government goes abroad, France is still in the war, you know, theoretically, obviously, and that does make a difference. If you sign an armistice, the government remains in France and sort of says it's over and the Germans are here and we'll do the best we can.

Petain was in the armistice camp. And the people who wanted an armistice like Petin essentially were motivated by, I think, two ideas. One is the defeat was caused by the weakness of the politicians by anti-patriotic propaganda, by the left. So we've got a chance now to remake France, a new France, a conservative France. And their slogan was the National Revolution. So we'll make a new France. Their second thought was, well, anyway, the war will soon be over. Britain would soon be defeat it. So it makes sense to do some kind of deal with Germany, to do the best we can in this situation. So those are their two working assumptions. So an armistice is signed on the 22nd of June 1940. And what are the terms of that armistice is very briefly? Basically, France is divided into two

zones. And north where Paris is, which is occupied by the German. So if any of your listeners I've ever seen photographs of occupied Paris. You'll see swastikas everywhere. Whereas in the south, the so-called free zone, there were theoretically no German soldiers, and the government of Petin set itself up in a little spa town in the center of France, where again, everybody knows because it's famous

for the production of its water, that's to say, Vichy. Vichy was well known for nothing else except water. There's the suit. Yeah, exactly, spa, exactly, yeah. and what made it a good place for a government, was there lots of hotels. So all the different ministries could move in. And so the foreign ministry took over the Hotel de L'Anglterre, ironically.

So you get this curious regime which sets itself up with its capital in Vichy and the people around Petra is the figurehead. But the idea is that we are going to, as it were, make a new France. we're going to introduce a national revolution. And let's summarize that national revolution in a slogan, Travae, family, patry, work, family, fatherland, as opposed to liberty, fraternity, equality. So one of the most interesting passages are early in your book,

which is really well written and creatively framed, too, is this unfolding of the trial itself for Patin after the war. And I really do recommend it to listeners. but you get into this question of, is the armistice itself a crime, which is, of course, a major issue later. Through looking at it through the lens of these three different prominent,

I was going to say French men, but of course, Simone Wheel, French woman. So Simone Wheel, Raymond Aron, two prominent intellectuals of the 20th century, and then De Gaul himself. Gall, I'm probably going to mangle this, so you'll come in and correct me if I mess up my summary here,

but De Gaul of the view that the armistice itself is a criminal act. Iran, more of the view that the real crimes began later after operation torched the fall of French North Africa and the German occupation of the military occupation of the whole of France in late 42. It's after that the Patan's guilt rises to a level of legal, inescapable culpability. And then Simone Will, who is a very interesting figure who, I guess, dies amidst the war in exile herself, who has a sort of vaguer

notion of, well, not, the notion may not be vague, but this notion of sort of a vague collective guilt. The Patan is, if there's guilt, Patan is guilty along with the French people. And I do, I want to maintain a level of imaginative sympathy to the extent I can, because of course, in the summer of 1940 or late spring of 1940, we don't, you know, the people alive on June the 22nd did not know what was going to happen in 1941, 42, 43, 44. They couldn't be sure of the nature of what was to come. It's impossible. We sitting here in 2025, no exactly, what was going to happen. So I do want to retrain that shred of sympathy. Nevertheless, I do know what was going to happen. And so I naturally find myself sympathetic to the de Gaulle view.

Help us understand this controversy over the legality of the armistments. Well, unfortunately, you summarized it so well, I don't have to say very much. But I think the point is, let's fast forward, actually, to 1945. The war is over. It has, France has been liberated. And there is a general sense, as always after, obviously there were the Nuremberg trials, which were the big trials that took place of German war criminals. You had the Tokyo trials and so on. So in every country which had been occupied, there has to be a kind of reckoning. The same thing happened, you know, in some, or doesn't happen immediately, but does happen at some point. Whenever a regime falls, there has to be some kind of national conversation, if you want. And the trials, one, trials about retribution

The trials about punishment of the traitors, but a trial is also opening up, as it were, discussion about where we are now, where we're going to go. So there had to be trials, and the French call these the purges, the epuration. And that word epuration means purification. And it's quite a, the word therefore has the sense not only that you're punishing the guilty, but you're, as it were, purifying yourself by getting rid of the bad among you and creating a pure and new society looking forward. High Court is set up to try the leaders of the Vichy regime, and obviously the leader of leaders is Peta. But then the question does become, what is he guilty of? Now, with some people, it was just very clear, some of those extreme people who joined sort of ultra-right-wing organizations under Vichy and had carried out terrible atrocities against the resistance, against Jews, against free, no problem. I mean,

they can simply be quickly done. dealt with. But what with Petin, the problem is, in 1940, partly for the reasons you just said, no one knows what's going to come next. They know what's come before, and they know he's our hero. They don't know what's going to come next. So in 1940, we can say Petter was unbelievably popular. I mean, de Gaulle was nothing. There was DeGold in London saying, I'm France. But DeGle was heard by nobody and known by fewer. Petre was France in 1940 in some kind of sense. So the problem is in trying him, you're trying yourself, as it were. The French are trying themselves, which is why I called my book France on trial, because I think it's France talking about itself.

And so at that point, you do get a lot of different views about what he's guilty of. I won't mention that the names of the people again, but except to say that the three names you mentioned, the goal, Raymond Aaron and Simon Weil, are all people who were totally against Petin, but for different reasons. And there were so many things you could say he was guilty of, but yet different people didn't think that all the things were necessarily crimes. Let's just take the goal. De Gaulle said, there's no question, as you said, signing the armistice was the crime of crimes. We could have gone on fighting from abroad. But Raymond Aron, who was a Jewish philosopher, intellectual, who went to London, was at De Gaulle's side and so on. No, truck with Vichy said,

no, I don't agree. The armistice wasn't necessary to something that our fighting had to stop. There had to be some kind of provisional administration in France to deal with the situation. Petta's crime was when, after torch and after the Allies were in North Africa, and after the Germans, as a result of that, had occupied the Southern Zone, there's nothing left. At that point, he should have said no. Other people had other reasons. Another other things, as it were, for which he was guilty. And the most obvious other one was what happened on the 22nd of October, 1940, when Petta went to met. Hitler at a little town called Montaix. And there was a famous photograph of their meeting, handshake and so on. And that photograph of the handshake between the great French war hero and Hitler caused a shock in France. You'd say, well, why is such a shock? It's such a shock because, remember, France has signed an armistice, but France has not signed a treaty with Germany. The war is still going on. So this is signing, shaking the hand of,

of the enemy. But Petter followed that up by saying, I assume my act, and I am now ready to enter down the road of what he, and the word he used, the C word comes out, collaboration. Collaboration. So, signing the amistice could be not the decision, the fact he stayed on after November 1942, shaking Hitler's hand, not just shaking his hand, but the policy that that represented. Or a third, fourth thing, was his crime, none of these things, but the fact that he had used the situation basically to abolish Parliament and install an effective dictatorship.

Or fifth thing, which wasn't much talked about in 1940, and I'm sure we'll, 45 at the trial, and I'm sure we'll come back to that, was it the persecution of, what, was it the policy of persecution and repression, and particularly the persecution of the persecution of the. Jews. So there's so many things that he could be seen as culpable of and there was no agreement on it. And let's just take the armistice. For the American government, Vichy was a legal entity. America had an ambassador at Vichy until April, until November, April 1942. And Vichy was recognized by most countries in the world. it's a pretty odd to put someone on trial for a government which was recognized by Roosevelt

and most other countries at least until November, April, November 1942. So I think De Gaulle's argument is necessary if you're De Gaulle, but it's not actually, it doesn't really hold water, probably, because Vichy had legality. And that word legality was contrasted by DeGol who knew he was on thin ice. So he developed an alternative notion called legitimacy. So he said, Petin may have been legal, though some people tried to claim he wasn't, but he wasn't legitimate. But then what is a legitimate government? Well, for DeGol, legitimacy meant that as long as you had German troops on French soil and the Bichy government was a kind of puppet, it couldn't be called legitimate.

But a government which is approved by probably 95% of the population, if you'd had a vote, which is recognised by Roosevelt, which is recognised by the Vatican, which is recognised by the Soviet Union until 1941. It's pretty legitimate, it seems to me. So the problem is, what is he guilty of? Part of the problem with the trial and why I found the trial such a fascinating, I think trials are fascinating in themselves, but actually this trial, and I wanted to call it the trial of the century originally,

but one of my colleagues said, oh, what about O.J. Simpson and all the other trials there have been. So I said, okay, fair enough. Let's not call it that. And so we came with France on trial. But for me, the fascination of it is in three weeks in a courtroom, you have all these questions discussed. It's like a long, a three-week history, immediate history lesson in which there are big philosophical and ethical questions and legal questions, moral questions, and judicial questions, which are at stake. Yeah, we had a great conversation with Michael Nyberg early in the course of School of War about his excellent book on the very complicated American policy debates and the policy approach to Vichy, which is really unexplored terrain for me. And I think most people, I do, you know, I confess already, I'm sort of sympathetic to the de Gaul view. And I'm not at all immersed in the legal niceties here. And everything you say seems pretty persuasive on that front. But I just, I'm enough of an unreconstructed Winston-Duncted. Churchill fan for all the just normal, superficial, basic reasons. And I can't think of this question of the armistice without thinking of Churchill's speech right around this time, right? Right? Yeah, just on that. I basically were on the same page. I mean, I'm with you on all this.

Yeah, sure, sure. I wrote an 800-page book on the goal, which is essentially favorable. But rather interestingly, Churchill obviously denounced the armistice in 1942, only 40, sorry. But, But at Petin's trial, one of the defenders of Petin, one of the lawyers defending him, produced a quote from Churchill, something that Churchill had said in 1940, beginning of 1944, when he was in a very, because you know Churchill had bouts of major irritation against the goal, as most people did. And he was in a particularly bad mood against the goal. And he said to another general, George, doesn't matter who he is, you know, actually the armistice helped us in looking at. back on it, the armistice helped us. And one of the arguments of the Vichy at the, of the Vichy defenders at the trial, was, and this may seem bizarre, that actually the armistice had helped the Americans and the British in this way. Roosevelt was always hoping to pull Vichy into the Allied camp. It never

happened. It was a judgment. After the war, an American historian Walter Langer wrote a book called Our Vichy Gamble. They gambled on Vichy and it didn't work. somebody reviewed the book and said, which should have been called our Vichy Fumble, because it was a failed policy, I think. But it was a rational policy up to a point. But in 1942, when Torch happened and Vichy did actually fire on the Americans, but soon the Americans won and so on. And at that point, the argument of Vichy defenders is, had there been Germans in North Africa, it would have been a much tougher game for the Allies. And although we did fire on them a bit, yeah, but just for show. but very quickly the Americans were able.

So it was thanks to us that Operation Torch could happen because the armistice kept that bit of France out of German hands. I know you're looking very skeptical. I am. No, no, it's nonsense, but it's not complete nonsense. It wasn't the intention. But let's see what happened in Tunisia. The French, Vichy did allow the Germans into Tunisia at that moment.

And it took months for the Allies actually to clear Tunisia. if you want, of the axis. So obviously, that was not the intention. It was an unintended consequence. But nonetheless, so when Churchill made that statement, he was in a bad mood about the goal, but he wasn't saying something completely without some foundation somewhere. Douglas Porch, I don't know, a fine American historian, very fine Hilbert, who has written about the French army and the war, a great book on the war in the Mediterranean. He thinks that actually the Tunisian campaign where the Germans really held back the Allies for six weeks was crucial in the defeat of Germany. So if the Germans had actually been in Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia,

not as the war would have been won by the Allies, but nonetheless, it's not completely without foundation, even if it was certainly not in the intention of the Vichy regime to help the allies. I don't want to get too sidetracked on DeGal, but your remarks put me in mind of an episode. So you'll no doubt know this from your own research and probably correct some of the details. But I was just reading Lucian Truscott's memoir of his service as a, you know, ultimately he's promoted in retirement to a four-star general, but his service in North Africa and Europe in the Second World War. And he describes a scene, which I guess is going to be, it must be the summer of 1942 or spring summer of 1942 where he's sitting with General Eisenhower, who at that point is, you know, on his rapid rise to Supreme Command. And Truscott is a young officer performing a staff role there in London. And de Gaulle all but bursts in to the office

and says essentially he's got wind of the planning for Operation Torch. And I can't remember exactly. It's something like, and I assume I'll be in command or I assume, you know, French officers will be in command or something like that.

And so this figure who's very much on his, just on this theme of how Churchill was habitually irritated, which seems to have been an endemic condition, this man who's on his way to being this grand historical titan, frequently comes off, I mean, in this moment, in this scene in the memoir, it's just preposterous. I mean, just this absurd encounter.

before de Gaulle's stocks back off again. Yeah, no, that sounds too. I don't know that particularly incident, but that sounds completely plausible, yeah. Yeah, we can move on. But the Churchill speech you have in mind, you know, of course, the famous, you know, the Battle of France is over,

the Battle of Britain has begun right from this moment. And Churchill's own sort of strategic outline for Parliament that memorably will fight them on the beaches, et cetera. But his point is if all that fails, then we have the empire in the new world. And there is a British empire, and there was a French empire. There was a French empire.

There was a French Navy. There were these assets that were yet undefeated. But I think we probably agree more than we disagree here. I am curious on this question of then the sort of progress or maybe the devolution of Ishi from this entity, this apparently more or less sovereign entity from afar, that the Americans can actually think, oh, maybe we'll bring them over to our side somehow. We'll figure out how to cooperate with them as things get tenser and tenser with the Nazis. So that's sort of 1940 to this transition after the photograph and the announcement of this policy of collaboration by Patan,

then all the way obviously to 42 and kind of things move into a completely new phase. Just talk about Vichy. What was its structure? Who were the other major personalities like Laval and others? How did this thing function and how did it sort of, how did it its inner truth, which was that it was always a bit of a puppet, right? How did that sort of reveal itself? It was a bit of a puppet. It was a dictatorship, but it was a pluralistic dictatorship, like lots of dictatorships.

That's to say, it wasn't fascist, what, you know, I don't think it was, but there were fascists there. It wasn't a conservative Catholic dictatorship, but there were conservative Catholics there. It was a bit of everything against the old left. That was probably did create a sort of cement of unity. And I think the other thing that held them all together, the key figures of Vichy, really are Peta is the man at the time. top, but, and at the trial, there was a lot of discussion to extent to which Petta was responsible for his actions. Was he actually, he was an old man?

I mean, he was in his 80s. Was he actually losing his mind? Was he being manipulated? And that was key at the trial because you had this, he refused to answer wisely. His lawyers said, better not, you keep quiet, because he'd get confused about dates and so on. You'll make a declaration and then you'll just sit quiet. And so people would see during the three weeks of the trial, this old man sort of slumped in his chair, sometimes falling asleep and quite justifiably because a lot of it was very boring. And it was very hot.

And people, a lot of journalists were fascinated. What's going on in his head? Does he know what's going on? Sometimes he pretended to be deafer than he was. He'd sometimes cup his hand behind his ear. So there was a lot of fascination about how much was he actually. responsible for his actions, or was he just the puppet of others? And I think my answer to that would be, yeah, he was an old man, and later by the time he was in prison, he certainly was

in the early stages of Alzheimer's, but I think in 1940 to 45, he was an old man, but he was in control. But the key figures were first the man who everybody thought was the kind of evil genius of Petta and of Vichy, Pierre Laval, a former politician. a sort of the epitome of the compromising slightly Machiavellian lusch politician and so on. And LeVal had really one conviction, which was that Germans had won the war. And if you're, you know, you may not like them, he may not like the fact, but they've won. And you do a deal with the winner. And he went on really thinking this well into, and it wasn't an absurd thing to think

at least until the Battle of Stalingrad. By the end of 1942, it was getting pretty blind to think the Germans were going to win the war. But by then, you know, there's no way back anyway, so you might as well stay with it. So that was Laval's position. And the other big strong man of Vichy was the Admiral Darlon. And Darlant was a man who hadn't actually been on the right in the interwar years. he had the usual anglophobia of French naval officers. And something we haven't mentioned but is terribly important in the, in public opinion and in Vichy in this period,

was that Churchill, who could not take the risk after the signing of the armistice, that the French fleet would fall into the hands of the Germans, took the, I think, morally courageous but very difficult decision, to basically say to the French fleet in North Africa that either, as it were, they rally the allies or to the allies or they will have or they will be attacked. And so the attack on the French fleet at Mercell-Kubea in North Africa when 1,200 French sailors are killed by the British, and that's the fact, is something which really still the French remember today, actually. And so for Darlant, that was an act of unbelievable treasurable.

treachery because he said, I would never have given my fleet up to the Germans, which may or not have been true, but Churchill couldn't take the risk. I completely see that. So Darlor was motivated by anglophobia and opportunism. Again, Germany's won the war, so let's do a deal. Let's be pragmatic. The problem with this whole idea of collaboration, so Germany's won the war, so let's collaborate with Germany, let's do a deal, let's try and prepare ourselves to get the best possible peace treaty when the war is over. And they thought they were being really hard-headed, and I suppose they were being hard-headed, except they got the call wrong, so to speak. But it has to be said that the call they were making suited their own politics because they also saw this as an opportunity,

as we said at the beginning, for an internal national revolution to remake France and so on. So those are the key figures. Gravitating around them are all kind of more extremist. figures, what we would really call French fascists, for example, there was a group that called the Legion of Volunteers Against Bolshevism, who after the, after the Soviet Union in 1941, so communists now become the enemy, some French wanted to go and fight with the Germans against the communist enemy, Bolshevism on the Eastern Front. And that wasn't the official policy of Vichy, but it has to be said one thing at the trial that really there were some there were 24 jurors at petan's trial and some of them were really thinking about do we you know what do we think and one of them we have

I used his diary because it happened to be a source which has come available and what we see him thinking is oh you know I could see I could see why Petitin did this I could see what but how can we forgive a Marshal of France who said as Petitin did as the members of this organization, the Legion of Volunteers Against Bolshevism, head off. They're not many of them, they're fanatics. You are taking something like, you know, you are carrying a part of the honor of France. How can a Marshal of France, this juror said, support Frenchmen who are going to fight with Germans, even if it's against Bolshevism? So, so Vichy is a really complicated thing. Those are the key figures that gravitating around.

they're much more extreme and much more sinister people than Petin, Naval, and Darlon. You know, if you ask anyone today, you know, what are the crimes of the Vichy regime? I mean, obviously, just collaboration with the Germans against the French people and all of the victims of France who were resisting the Nazis. That's obviously something that people will know. The other thing that they'll know, and they'll say is, of course, as you put it, the persecution of the Jews in which Vichy is, you'll probably, know the number's better than me. This is the fruit of a few minutes of internet research. But if you narrowed it down to just Jews rounded up and almost all of them ultimately murdered in Vichy, under the control of Vichy, the number is something like 10,000. Obviously, the number for France as a whole is much greater. But even 10,000 is it's pretty big as mass murder goes.

One of the fascinating aspects of the trial, which you spend a fair amount of time reflecting on, is that this is not a major theme of the trial at all, which is sort of a reminder of just how much discussion of, the knowledge of the Holocaust is sort of a later phenomenon, not a 1945 phenomenon. Talk a bit about Vichy's attitude towards the Jews, both in terms of being servants of Nazi policy, but their own attitudes. Well, that's a massively important question. And I have a chapter called the Absent Jews, because of all the things Petan was being accused of, the Jewish question was never not there, but it was certainly not primarily, primary importance. So basically what happened was that Vichy, from the very beginning, was

an anti-Semitic regime. But there's a difference between being anti-Semitic and murdering Jews. It was anti-semitic in this sense that when it came to power, without any German pressure, one of the first acts of the regime was to set up various forms of discrimination against Jews. Let's just mention the most important, the Jewish statute, October 1940, so 40, very early on. no German pressure, and that basically excluded Jews from a whole series of professions, French Jews and foreign Jews from being doctors, lawyers, whatever. So you're starting to discriminate against Jews, and that is going on throughout, and the pressure. But, and foreign Jews, that's to say Jews, why are foreign Jews in France?

Well, there could be German refugees who'd come in the 1930s and so on. So there are a lot of Jews in France who aren't actually French citizens who were just there, because France had been seen as a territory of asylum in the 30s, are put into internment camps. And again, they're not treated well, but they're not being exterminated or any justice. But so there's Vichy, well, let's call it exclusionary antisemitism. And then from 1942, there's what you might call German exterminatory anti-Semitism. When from the beginning of 42, the Germans are starting to round up Jews throughout Europe

for deportation for extermination. And in July 1942, the Jewish, the head of Bishi government and his head of police, a man called Buske, do a deal with the Germans and basically say, right, you want Jews for deportation. Nobody was sort of saying, it was all being said, well, they're being deported to places in Eastern Europe where there could be a Jewish, you know, they'll be working on farms. So the word extermination is obviously never used. And one of the defenses afterwards was, well, we didn't really know what was going to happen to them, but they didn't really ask what was going to happen to them, or they didn't really care what was going to happen to them. But they didn't probably know. But so the deal is done. Okay, you want Jews to be rounded up. We're an autonomous government.

Our help is necessary. So the deal, I'm simplifying hugely, the deal is we will allow the French police to be involved in this, but the French police will only arrest foreign Jews, only foreign Jews, that's to say Jews who are not French citizens will be arrested and deported, but not French Jews. And that's the deal. And that's the deal. It's what you might call the fatal moment in the history of Vichy. And it's what a French historian said to me the other day, actually, we were talking about this. He said, that deal transformed a German crime into a French crime, which puts it actually very neatly. So, but what has to be said is that deal was motivated by collaboration, not by anti-Semitism. Let's say the French regime wouldn't have itself voluntarily

inaugurated a policy of extermination, but as a chance of getting proper control over its police, which was part of the deal, so you give us back control of peace and we'll lend the police for this operation, it was willing, as it were, to sacrifice foreign Jews. Now, at the trial and afterwards, and indeed very recently, I've even been involved in a court case which is happening in France, this week, I think, or next week. One of the arguments of the defenders of Vichy was Vichy, yes, it had terrible, but reluctantly it had taken the grave decision to sacrifice foreign Jews, but to save French Jews. At least it could do that. And that argument is still brought out. You've probably heard of the extreme right French politician today, Eric Zaymoor.

And that is the argument that Zaymore uses today. He says, Vichy France protected French Jews. So that's the sort of, and the numbers, by the way, the total number of Jews deported from France was 75,000, deported, and who didn't come back, 75,000. And what is interesting is there's no doubt that the proportion of French Jews who died was much smaller. I can't remember. of Hansa, the majority were Jews without, of not French nationality. And the overall, the proportion of French Jews, I'm sorry, of Jews from France, who were deported and exterminated, was much lower than it was from Holland or Belgium.

And that's again used by the defenders of Vichy to say that without Vichy, it would have all been worse. obviously Belgium and Holland are very small countries where I expect, I mean the geography of France matters. There are lots of other factors. But that's the basic outline. Now, none of this was much talked about at the trial. The extent to which it was, the argument was put that the deportations were a German policy that kept being said by the defenders. And Vichy did its best to put in restraints the kind I've described. And it has to be said, that argument did weigh with people because they didn't see it in the way I've just described it because they didn't have all the archival evidence we now have. Remember, the trial's happening

weeks after it's all over. They don't have all the documents we now have. But what's fascinating is one of the 24 jurors in the trial, when it came to the discussions as to whether Petter should be, what should happen to Petter, should he get a death penalty? This man called Alph Georges Alphonseerilelli He was the oldest juror. He was a former parliamentarian MP. He was from Alsace and he was Jewish. Alsace being part of that part of France. It was between the Germans and the French.

So he said, as a, as he was being discussed, he said, my view is that as an Alsatia, I would vote for the death penalty because Petter did nothing to protest against the effective annexation of my, where I come from. by the Germans. That's an act of, that in itself for me is treason. But as a Jew, I wouldn't vote for the death penalty because I think he did his best

to protect the Jews. Which is fascinating, as an example of the extent to which that argument at the time did obviously have some traction. But the overall story is what you said a few minutes ago,

which is in the end, the Jewish issue in 1945 was not the one that most people were thinking about, because as you, again, rightly said, the Holocaust, which has now become, as it were, you know, the one of the sort of defining crimes, whatever, of the 20th century, was not seen like that. It wasn't actually at Nuremberg, the main issue. The main issue in Nuremberg was that the Nazis were responsible who caused the war. Even in the early days of Israel, actually, Holocaust

survivors were not particularly welcome. Nobody really wanted to talk about the Holocaust. So what we might call the specificity of the Holocaust, that's to say that the people, sorry, why do I use the word specificity? Because there was a lot of sympathy in France in 1945 for the people who came back from concentration camps. They were called the deportee, the deported, come back. And they are often skeletal, they're in the striped pyjama, all the images we all have of the concentration camps.

But they included, in the French case, lots of resistors who weren't. Jews. And nobody made any distinction particularly between the Jews who, not many Jews came back, but those Jews who had come back and the other Deporte, everybody, all Deportes were the same. So the specificity of the German plans towards the Jews, which we call the Holocaust and the French call the show up, wasn't really seen. So it wasn't the big issue. And my final point there is France in 1945 wasn't without, in 45, anti-Semitism. A lot of Jewish families, who, a lot of, sorry, a lot of French families who had in good faith probably bought property, taken over properties and in the war, bought, which had been expropriate from Jews,

found themselves in a situation where some of those Jews who did return. Let me give you an example. I don't know if you've read that one of the great French hero today, last week, was sent to the, was buried in the pantheon, which is where the French, you know, bury their great men in from Victor Hugo on. Robert Badentere. A great lawyer who had been Minister of Justice under Vichy. He was responsible for the abolition of the death penalty under Minister of Mitterrand, who in 1981, Badenters is his Minister of Justice, abolished the death penalty, abolished discrimination against gays, a great moral figure.

Badentere was the son of Jewish parents. His father died in Auschwitz, but he was a boy in 1945, and with his mother, he went to try and get back possession. I mean, his mother went and he went as a boy. The first time he'd been in the court to see his mother trying to argue that they could get their flat back and they didn't because these defenders that flats said we bought them in good faith. And so they were even anti-Jewish League sort of housing associations in Paris in 1945, May and June, saying, you know, we should be allowed to stay on. We were good patriots. Actually, we kept those flaps out of the hands of the Germans.

So it's all, the whole Jewish thing is very complicated. And I think the key thing is it wasn't central for a lot of reasons. And that's not just the case of France. So just one more question on this subject. Is there something I don't understand here, which is you have this deal to protect French Jews in Vichy, which seems based on the numbers to have had some effect. Though, again, just to make the important point, as a purely exculpatory matter, it seems to leave a lot wanting.

Well, no. Nevertheless, it's morally a very problematic argument. Of course, but I'm just trying to understand the structure of this, because I don't understand the architecture of the, the, sort of the annihilationist plan. So you have this deal. When I think of, though, the roundups in, is it the summer of 42 that you have roundups in Paris that go to Dransy and then almost everyone killed at Auschwitz? There's a lot of French. So is it, if you're French in the occupied zone, that's where you're really at risk and you have somewhat better chances in Vichy throughout the war. And then when Vichy's occupied, you're all at risk?

How does it actually work? No, it's, no, the deal was so, so the French Jews in the occupied zone where they were Germans were not arrested either in this period. I see. Because the French, but what the real key crime, I mean, obviously this is a crime. The French, when the deal was signed, they said we will use our police also to arrest foreign Jews in the non-occupied area. So they went into these, they basically,

Jews were rounded up by the French police in both the occupied zone and the unoccupied zone, but these were foreign Jews. Later on, that unraveled for all kinds of reasons and French Jews start to be deported and so. And I don't want to... That's what I was trying to understand, because I know that that happens.

You know, I take your... And I don't, but I don't want to fix say too much on it because as you say, as an exultatory argument, it has very little traction. The only reason I mention it is to the extent that there's a vicious legacy today, the extent to which people try to sort of, what, find something to defend. And Seymour is not a mainstream, you know, he got 7% of the last presidential election in France. So it's not nothing, you know, that's probably one and a half million votes or something. And obviously his platform isn't.

I want to bring Vichy back. But one of the things he's been quite well known for is relentlessly arguing for the fact that Vichy, people go on about how awful Vichy was. He said, but actually what Vichy did was to protect French Jews. And he'll sort of say, of course, that is terrible that foreign Jews died, but at least tried to protect his French citizens. What he's leading, what he's doing this for, and I would say, is to repair the ground. as it was, psychologically, if you want, politically, for saying, well, so Vichy was perfectly entitled to, he's trying to distance Vichy from extermination, right, in order to rehabilitate the Vichy of discrimination, because what he wants to do is basically to do to, I mean, I'm

putting it very simply to view to Muslims what Vichy did to Jews. I mean, that's, that's quite clear. That's his plan, as it were. and he I mean but but therefore you first have to show that Vichy wasn't guilty of the crime that you know is nobody's going to defend and so that his argument is well Vichy reluctantly and it wasn't reluctant at all. Laval was only too delighted to have the French police arresting what he called the Desché, the sort of rubbish of the foreign Jews of the you know the refugees and an example of how they actually didn't really care would be this, that a lot of, technically, if you're born on

French soil, you are French. So some of these foreign Jews who had arrived as refugees, right in the 30s, their children had been born in France. So technically were French, but those children all went with their parents. So if you really care about your citizens, well, you start to make those kinds of agreement. So 3,000 children who were roughly, I mean, 3,000 children who were the children of refugees, very small children, who had been born in France, who were therefore technically French, died along with their parents. So I'm only, in the sense, we're talking about a trial here, and the trials are about prosecution and defense. And everything I'm saying here is to show you one of the arguments used for the defense.

In no way, am I the spokesman, I hope, for this? Not at all, not at all. No, no. I hope I'm not implying to you are. I don't think you are. That's quite clear. So Vichy goes through these stages. There's this period where it's actually kind of unclear what the nature of this regime is. It seems maybe it is a bit sovereign. Then there's the explicit policy of collaboration.

And then things do just sort of start to fall apart. 43, Patens tries to assert himself a bit. And Alis Leval, it doesn't work out for him at all. The Nazis assert themselves. And then, of course, in 44, as it really is falling apart, he's bundled off to Germany by the Nazis. Evaluate just for Patan personally, just this is sort of to the Raymond Iran point,

but there seem to be numerous points at which, even if you could persuade yourself in 40, 41, that you were doing the least worst thing. Clearly at some point, you're just, you're out of room to maneuver here. You have no agency. And the Nazis are just, you are their servant. Why does he stick with it virtually

until he's put under arrest in 44 by the Germans? No, I, that, that is, a very good question to which I'm not sure I know the answer. I think that by 19, end of 1940, Vichy has become simply a total popular. It's a rump state. It's a semi-fascist state. There's no rule of any kind of law at all. So yeah, there's a sort of simmering civil war and Vichy is, everybody knows that Vichy's at its end. And I suppose I turn the question back. Now, what else could Petter. I think by then the only thing he could do would be to stick with the policy as claiming that to the end he was trying to be the sort of protector of the French people

against the war. It was always this idea there's a war going on around us but we are sort of, I'm trying to hide you, protect you from it. In 19, let's get an example, a specific example of that. even in 1944 when nobody has any illusions, he gets a sort of recovery of popularity among the French people, who by now hate Vichy, there's no question, but there's always a kind of double think with the French population this time, that Peta possibly, you know, like the king and the evil counsellors, you know, with a traditional idea, that the king isn't responsible, it's his evil counsellors. with Petin, oh, you know, is it Laval? And he starts to visit towns that have been cities

that have been bombed by the Allies in preparation for, or during D-Day. And he sort of goes to them, and there, and he's seen and he's the sort of grandfather of the people who's sharing their suffering and so on. And I think that was the only card he had left to play. The card of saying, I was wrong all along. You know, that, it was too late.

I mean, you couldn't say that. That isn't a defense. So I think he was just playing that card to the end. And I think believed in an extraordinary way that DeGle would sort of see. One of his advisors even produced a letter that was to be taken to DeGle to say, I now, I've done my best to protect France for four years. Now I hand over to you. we've both done our role.

I tried to protect from best I could, went wrong at the end. You were the liberated from outside, and I hand over power to you. And DeGol refused to accept, even meet this person. He said, I am not accepting a transfer responsibility from an illegal and illegitimate government, which has never been France. So Petter, I think, was living a kind of sad delusion, really. And, I mean, one question I've asked myself, and people ask me often when I talk about the trial, about my book at various occasions, they would say, because I think as you reminded listeners at the beginning, when the trials opened, Peta wasn't even in France. Peta had been kidnapped, literally kidnapped by the Germans at the very end. And he was in this sort of weird sort of Disney-like castle of Sigmaringen in Baden, on the river Danube. and the whole, you know, the rump of Vichy was sort of in like this gilded cage, this castle.

So he wasn't, so, and as it becomes clear, you know, that everything's over, most of the others tried to escape somewhere or other. You know, escape many of them, not many, but some get to, some go into hiding. Some go get to Spain, to Franco's Spain. So quite a lot of former Vichy people end up in Franco's Spain. Laval got to Spain, for example, but was extradited from. by the Allies, but other stadiums, but Petin didn't. Petin said he was quite clear he wanted to go back to France to face the people. And the goal, there's the last thing the goal wanted.

The goal was really hoping because he knew that the complexity of the relationship that the French people had to Petin, he knew that they, you know, they seem as a traitor, but it's complicated. So the goal knew that a trial of Petta would be to some extent divisive. So he's rather hoping Petter would take refuge in it in Switzerland, stay in Switzerland, keep out of trouble. There would be a trial in absentia and everything could go back not to Norval, but that would deal with the situation.

But Petter wasn't having any of it. He got into Switzerland and he then crossed Switzerland and to the relief of the Swiss authorities presented himself at. the French frontier to meet the French people. Now you could say that was an act of courage, or you could say an act of lunacy or senility or whatever. And I don't know, and I think he, he had been living for four years in a bubble of adulation, in a bubble, you know, all courts are like that. Vichy was a kind of court and you're already told, you know, you're told, people tell you what you want to hear when he would go. Everything was choreographed when he went on,

when he went on meetings, there would always be people there to cheer him and so on. So he was kind of half-believed his own propaganda. And I think the moment of truth came when the train, so a train met him at the Swiss frontier to take him back to Paris, where he was put in a prison awaiting the preparation of the trial. And as the train set off, there was a sort of crowd of demonstrators assembled and started pelting it with rocks and stones and and Petter's wife said, oh, are they going to kill us? He's with his wife the whole time. And I think that's the moment, in my view, when he possibly had the same sort of doubts that Louis XVI, who headed to famously to the frontier at Varenne in 1791 was brought back by the French people.

What was captured, as it was threatened, just as he was trying to escape, it's indifferent. He was trying to escape and was brought back, and Petter was coming back. But in both cases, as they went back to Paris, they must have both thought, well, this isn't going to be good, but it was too late he'd made the decision. So, I mean, that is, in the end, the question is a question of psychology. It's a question which a novelist might try to answer. But my stabbered an answer is that he, that somewhere he did believe in himself. He believed he was a patriot.

He believed he's done his best. You know, I'm no apologist for the French monarchy. It does strike me that Louis XVI crimes were substantially less than Patans. And it's striking, such a striking, I don't even want to use the word tragic, but it's just a grim and squalid end. No, no, I agree. I was using the comparison almost just, I think, I think of the two, I just think of the two journeys. you know, as you're going back, know what's at the end of the line, and there must have been a lot of thinking about, you know, about it all and so on. Of course, and as you point out, the French right, you know, the French right themselves, they sort of, the Patanist right, to be more specific,

they sort of draw out that analogy to Louis the 16th, the idea being that both persecutions are unjust. The last question I want to ask you is, you close the book on kind of a definitive note, pointing out that Zaymore, who we spent a fair amount of time talking about, he ends up getting, you know, single-digit percent of the vote, whereas Marine Le Pen, of course, daughter of a right-wing French politician who very much sort of embraced Patanism and the legacy of Patan. Marine Le Pen sort of repositioning her party more of a gallist or de-gallist, either way, sort of interpretation of French right-wing politics and efforts at coalition building. And she, of course, did historically well in the last round. And so you've sort of closed this book.

with the with the assertion that the the trials over the case is closed and actually patanism is is a weaker force perhaps now you know I sit here in the United States we have all kinds of complicated efforts to reinterpret the Second World War on what I will describe as the podcast right most of them you know in bad faith or you know and or rooted in you know appalling misrepresentation of facts emphasizing some things deemphasizing others so I was I was struck I guess what I I'm trying to say is I was struck by how optimistic the end of your book was. No, no, that's completely wrong.

Oh, okay. And I don't blame you for that. So many people said the same to me after that book. Oh, okay. I feel better then. No, no. So I changed the end in French. Ah, okay.

Only about five lines. The last line of the book is the Pessin case is over, the Pertin trial's over, something like that, for the reasons you just said. But what I meant by that was, and you've sort of in your lead up to the question, you've sort of unpicked what I meant, which is what I meant to say was that really, apart from a few altruists like Zemur, nobody really tries to defend Petta, because the case against him now seems so clearly definitive that actually there's no mileage, there are no votes in Petra. But my point was, and the way I changed at the end in French, I said the trial, peta trial is now over, but petanism is alive and well in France. I didn't quite use those words, by which I meant that extreme right ideas, and it's a bit simplistic to say petanism, but a certain kind of right-wing nationalist exclusionism against racial minorities, authoritarian ideas, anti-liberalism, all these things are.

unfortunately, not just in France, but very strong in France and perfectly incarnated by the Rassamblement National, which is the new name of the National Front, the party of Marine Le Pen. But my point is that where her father would actually go and put flowers on Petin's tomb and was unreconstructed in his defence of Vichy and also actually in his anti-Semitism, she, whatever she thinks, I'm not in her head, so I don't know, but she was certainly brought up in that sort of environment, but she's cleverly realized that there are no votes in that. So her policy has been to detoxify, as that's the term she uses, to detoxify the brand, if you want, by disassociating it from Vichy, and Zaymore's attempt to rehabilitate Vichy shows she's right,

because, okay, got him 7%, but, you know, that's not going to get you elected. But so she takes, she uses the language of goalism, absolutely. She now, whereas her father hated De Gaul, she now, like everybody says, how wonderful de Gaul was and so on. But what I, what's worrying is that, well, what we mustn't think, however, is that the ideas in mutated form which Vichy at one stage incarnated are dead, I think they're very alive in different form, obviously. I don't think the national, the Rassonne Nacionalis is actually anti-Semitic now, or mostly not, though, on its fringes it is. But my point,

when I said the trial was over, I meant that if you want to succeed as an extreme right politician and push what we could call in rather simplistic terms neopetanist ideas, then you don't invoke the trial. You pretend the trial's over and you dress up those ideas in a different way. So that's what I, so I'm glad I've had a chance not to be optimistic because I'm very pessimistic about the state of France, but at least I'm optimistic about historical truth in the case of the trial. Got it, got it. Well, I was, I hadn't realized my mistake. I'm glad you had the opportunity to explain it there. And Julian Jackson, it really is an excellent book. I not only profited from reading it in the sense that I learned a lot. I enjoyed reading it.

It's just, it's well written and spirited. And I recommend it to listen. I recommend it to It's called France on Trial, the case of Marshall Patan. And Julian, thank you so much for spending all this time with us today. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.