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JULY 23, 1945 remains a discomforting date for the French in general, a date that raises perturbing and unanswerable questions; more so this year as it happened to be the 70th anniversary of the opening of the treason trial against a national hero.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-right politician who is, in his own words, “not afraid to blurt out loudly what the others are only content to murmur” says it was a lot easier for Gen Charles de Gaulle to carry on his Resistance Movement sitting in London than for Marshall Philippe Pétain who faced Hitler’s forces on the ground.
By 1940 the Nazis were already the masters of a large portion of eastern and northern Europe and were threatening to run over France. Pétain, given his military experience during the First World War and his heroic action at the Verdun front, concluded any confrontation with the Germans this time would lead to disaster.
An armistice treaty was signed on June 22 that year allowing the German forces to keep control of the northern part of the country, including Paris, but leaving the rest to the care of the French administration based in Vichy in central France. The head of the Vichy government was no other than the 84-year-old Marshall Pétain himself.
Following the Allied forces operation on D-Day June 6, 1944 when France was finally liberated three months later, Pétain was shifted under Hitler’s instructions to Sigmaringen in Germany where he was asked to head a French government-in-exile. Pétain refused to carry out the Fuhrer’s orders and decided to return to France and face the trial.
This was a valorous deed and no one else than De Gaulle himself paid tribute to the Marshal for his courage.
Reviving the painful memory of the event on July 23, a number of French TV channels telecast the Pétain trial that had lasted three weeks in 1945 and was entirely filmed in black and white. One sees in it the 89-year-old accused in uniform, often scratching his ear or blinking, but standing straight and looking back at his prosecutors or reading the accusations without the need of eyeglasses.
Though we also notice him speaking in a steady voice at the beginning, Pétain after dismissing the tribunal as “incompetent to try him” remains silent throughout and we can only hear his lawyer arguing that his client had actually saved France from total destruction by getting into an arrangement with the Germans.
In his memoirs De Gaulle frankly admits that during the proceedings “discussions often took on the appearance of a partisan trial and looked a bit like a settling of accounts, while the affair could have been treated strictly from the standpoint of military defence and national independence”.
Though the judges actually recommended the acquittal of the accused on all charges, the jury nevertheless decided to convict Pétain, by a one-vote majority, to death sentence.
De Gaulle, who by this time had become the president of the French Republic, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment on account of Pétain’s advanced age but most of all because of his heroic actions during the First World War.
The malediction of July 23 would once more, and for the last time, cross his path as Pétain would die on that date in 1951 on the Yeu island in the Atlantic Ocean where he had spent his last days as a prisoner. He was 95.
This year the Association for the Defence of Philippe Pétain’s Memory organised an event on the Yeu Island, as it has done every year for the past 64 years, to render him homage. The event included discussions, film shows, a lawn lunch and a guided tour to the tomb of the hero of Verdun.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2015
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