Philippe Pétain

• 1. Introduction

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  Philippe Pétain left behind a verdict that fits on one line. Charles de Gaulle, who came after him at the head of France, judged that Pétain's life had been "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre".

  Each of those three words points to a different France. In the first, Pétain is an officer most people had never heard of. In the second, he is the soldier whose name brought relief to civilians and troops alike. In the third, he is the head of a collaborationist state that governed under the shadow of Nazi Germany.

  This documentary follows that arc, but the quotation leaves the hard questions open. Why did a country that revered him as a victor hand him its government in its darkest hour? What did the regime at Vichy actually do, and how much of it did Pétain start himself? And how does a nation remember a man whose honors and disgrace are tangled together, even at his grave?

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• 2. Farm To Colonel

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  Cauchy-à-la-Tour, a farming village in the Pas-de-Calais department of northern France, is where Pétain was born on the 24th of April 1856. His family were peasants. He was one of five children and the only son of the farmer Omer-Venant Pétain and Clotilde Legrand.

  Clotilde died when her boy was only eighteen months old, and relatives raised him after his father remarried. The father had once lived in Paris, working for the photography pioneer Louis Daguerre, before coming home to the farm after the Revolution of 1848. A great-uncle, the priest Father Abbe Lefebvre, had even served in Napoleon's Grande Armée.

  At the Catholic boarding school of Saint-Bertin in Saint-Omer, young Pétain stood out, with a particular gift for geography and arithmetic. In 1875 he enrolled at the Dominican college of Albert le Grand in Arcueil to prepare for the military academy. Saint-Cyr admitted him in 1876. He graduated in 1878 and then, until 1899, moved between garrisons with the chasseurs, the army's elite light infantry.

  His career crawled. Pétain rejected the prevailing French faith in furious infantry assaults and argued that firepower kills. He became a captain in 1890 and a major in 1900. In March 1904 he began teaching applied infantry tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre, and on the 3rd of April 1908 he became a full professor. He was brevetted colonel on the 1st of January 1910.

  Unlike many French officers, he spent his service mostly in mainland France rather than in Indochina or Africa, apart from the Rif campaign in Morocco. On the 25th of June 1911 he took command of the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras. One of his young lieutenants, Charles de Gaulle, later wrote that his first colonel, Pétain, taught him the art of command.

  By the spring of 1914 Pétain was 58 and commanded a brigade, still as a colonel. He had been told he would never become a general, and he had bought a villa for his retirement. That plan was about to meet a war.

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• 3. Verdun

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  The 29th of August 1914 found Pétain leading his brigade at the Battle of Guise, and the next day he was promoted to brigade general. He took the 6th Division into the First Battle of the Marne. In October 1914 he became commander of XXXIII Corps. After the Artois Offensive in the spring of 1915, he was given the Second Army in July, which fought the Champagne Offensive that autumn. By then he had a name as one of the more successful commanders on the Western Front.

  In February 1916 the Second Army was in place when the Battle of Verdun began, a fight that would last nine months. Pétain rose to lead Army Group Centre, which held 52 divisions. The Germans left their divisions in the line for months. Pétain did the opposite and pulled his troops out after only two weeks at the front.

  He also solved a problem of supply. Trucks running along the "Voie Sacrée" carried a steady stream of artillery, ammunition, and fresh soldiers into the besieged fortress town. This was his old classroom doctrine, "le feu tue!", turned into practice. French field artillery fired more than 15 million shells at the Germans in the first five months alone. By July 1916 the German onslaught had ground to a halt, and the press and the public called him "the Lion of Verdun".

  His own words from that time are remembered differently from what legend says. Pétain did say "On les aura!", a phrase that echoed Joan of Arc and means roughly "We'll get them!". But the other famous cry, "Ils ne passeront pas!" or "They shall not pass!", was spoken by Robert Nivelle. Nivelle took over the Second Army at Verdun in May 1916.

  The government did not reward Pétain the way a hero might expect. At the very end of 1916, Nivelle was promoted over him to replace Joseph Joffre as Commander-in-Chief.

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• 4. Mending An Army

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  In April 1917, Nivelle's offensive at the Chemin des Dames failed, and mutinies spread through nearly half of the French infantry divisions on the Western Front. Pétain served briefly as Army Chief of Staff from the end of April. He then replaced Nivelle as Commander-in-Chief of the whole French army. Historians point to several causes. Hopes had been raised too high before the offensive. Pacifism was stirred by the Russian Revolution and the trade-union movement, and American troops had not yet arrived.

  Pétain's remedy was mostly human. He talked to the men, promised an end to suicidal attacks, rested exhausted units, granted home furloughs, and kept discipline moderate. Still, there were 3400 courts martial. Of the 554 mutineers sentenced to death, more than 90 percent had their sentences commuted. The Germans never learned of the mutinies, and their true scale stayed hidden for decades.

  He also refused to hurry. In the autumn of 1917 the British fought the offensive at Passchendaele, while Pétain limited the French to smaller operations. He was waiting for the Americans, who did not reach the front in force until the early summer of 1918, and for the new Renault FT tanks. His line was "J'attends les chars et les Américains", meaning "I am waiting for the tanks and the Americans."

  Then came March 1918 and Operation Michael, the first of the great German offensives, which threatened to split the British and French forces. Pétain warned that he might fall back on Paris, and the Doullens Conference was called. Clemenceau claimed to have heard Pétain say that the Germans would beat the English in open country and then beat the French as well. Clemenceau told President Poincaré that a general should not speak or think this way. Haig wrote that Pétain had "a terrible look" and seemed a commander who had lost his nerve.

  Pétain had wrongly believed that Gough's Fifth Army had collapsed like the Italians at Caporetto. At Doullens, Ferdinand Foch was named Allied Generalissimo. Pétain then came to the British aid and secured the front with forty French divisions.

  In May 1918, the third German offensive, "Blücher", broke through on the Aisne. The French army commander there, Humbert, ignored Pétain's order to defend in depth, and his men took the full weight of the opening bombardment. By the time of the Gneisenau offensive and the Second Battle of the Marne, Pétain was defending in depth and counterattacking with the new tanks and American help. Later that year he lost his right of direct appeal to the government and had to report to Foch. When the armistice came, Pétain wanted to push on into Germany to prevent another war, but Foch overruled him.

  Soon after, on the 21st of November 1918, he was made Marshal of France.

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• 5. The Old Marshal

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  At Metz on the 8th of December 1918, President Poincaré handed Pétain his marshal's baton in a public ceremony. Pétain was also summoned to watch the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on the 28th of June 1919. He left the war as one of France's great heroes and as an acclaimed master of defensive tactics.

  In January 1920 he became Vice-Chairman of the revived Supreme War Council, the highest military post in France. He held it until 1931. Friends pushed him toward politics, and he insisted he cared little for an elected career. He nevertheless tried, and failed, to get himself elected President after the November 1919 elections.

  Money soon limited what he could do. On the 12th of March 1920, Finance Minister François-Marsal called Pétain's plans for a large tank force and air force excellent but unaffordable. The same day he announced cuts that would shrink the army from fifty-five divisions to thirty. Pétain, Joffre, and Foch were left to rebuild their strategy around defense. A report on a line of frontier forts followed on the 22nd of May 1922, and all three Marshals backed it.

  In February 1922 Pétain became Inspector-General of the Army. With General Debeney he produced an army manual known as "the Bible". On the 3rd of September 1925 he took sole command of French forces in Morocco for a major campaign against the Rif tribes, alongside the Spanish Army. It was finished by the end of October, and King Alfonso XIII decorated him at Toledo with the Spanish Medalla Militar.

  Politics kept pressing on his work. In 1924 the National Assembly was elected on a pledge to cut national service to one year, and Pétain was almost violently opposed. In January 1926 Debeney proposed a new kind of army with only 20 standing infantry divisions. Pétain disapproved but accepted, after the Army Organisation Law of 1927, that the tide had turned. Édouard Daladier had even voted against that law, arguing the army was still too large.

  In July 1927 Pétain toured the frontier himself and came back with a revised plan for two fortified regions. This became the Maginot Line, named for the former Minister of War André Maginot. His strong support came from what he had seen of the forts at Verdun.

  Honors gathered. In 1931 he was elected to the Académie française, and on the 26th of October 1931 New York gave him a ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes. In 1938 he helped the writer André Maurois win election to the Académie, a contest made harder by Maurois's Jewish origin. Maurois thanked him in his 1941 autobiography, Call no man happy. By then Pétain led Vichy France and Maurois had gone into exile with the Free French.

  His private life changed too. On the 14th of September 1920 he married Eugénie Hardon, whom he had long courted while a known womanizer. She had married and divorced another man by 1914 and had a son, Pierre de Hérain, whom Pétain strongly disliked. De Gaulle, meanwhile, remained his protégé, until a quarrel over the authorship of a book that de Gaulle said he had ghost-written for Pétain.

  Then the political temperature rose. On the 6th of February 1934, Paris police fired on far-right rioters outside the Chamber of Deputies, killing 14 and wounding 236. Two days later, after many appeals, a reluctant Pétain joined Gaston Doumergue's government as Minister of War. He had Daladier's cut in the number of officers repealed, restored the autumn manoeuvres, and improved the recruitment of specialists. He repeatedly called for conscripts to serve three years instead of two, and he never got it.

  At the funeral of King Alexander in Belgrade, he met Hermann Göring, and the two reminisced about the Great War. Göring later spoke admiringly of him as a man of honour. In November 1934, Pétain refused to stay on under the next government, despite an appeal from President Lebrun himself. The newspaper Le Petit Journal then ran a poll, and about 200,000 readers responded. Pétain came first with 47,000 votes, ahead of Pierre Laval's 31,000. Léon Blum called him "the most human of our military commanders".

  On the 1st of March 1935 Pétain published a famous article in the Revue des deux mondes. It criticised the reservist system and the shortage of air power and armour. Its timing was striking, because Hitler announced his new air force five days later.

  Some blame Pétain, as France's senior soldier, for the state of French weapons in 1940. Others note that he was one of many people on a large committee and that governments kept cutting budgets. Few of the modern MAS-36 rifles had reached the troops by 1940, and artillery had not been modernised since 1918. In the same period, French aircraft makers were scattered across several firms. By May 1936, in the year he turned eighty, Pétain was using an interview in Le Journal to attack the Franco-Soviet Pact and Communism.

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• 6. Road To Bordeaux

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  In March 1939, Pétain was sent to Madrid as French ambassador to Franco's newly recognised Nationalist Spain. He had taught Franco at the war college many years before, and France hoped the old teacher could pull his former pupil away from Italian and German influence. When the Second World War began in September, Daladier offered him a place in the government and Pétain declined.

  After Germany invaded France, he accepted. On the 18th of May 1940 he joined Paul Reynaud's cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister. Reynaud hoped the hero of Verdun might revive the army's fighting spirit. Franco reportedly warned him that leaving Madrid for a collapsing France would be a sacrifice.

  By the 26th of May, with the Allied lines shattered and British forces evacuating at Dunkirk, Pétain and Commander-in-Chief Maxime Weygand both judged the situation hopeless. Edward Spears, Churchill's man in Paris, found Pétain standing "perfectly erect, with no sign of panic or emotion". Pétain made no secret that he thought the situation catastrophic.

  On the 5th of June, Reynaud brought the newly promoted Brigadier-General de Gaulle into the War Cabinet as Undersecretary for War. Pétain was displeased. On the 8th of June, Reynaud said France must first ask Britain to release it from the March 1940 agreement not to sign a separate cease-fire. Pétain answered that the interests of France come before those of England, and that "England got us into this position."

  Churchill flew to the Château du Muguet at Briare on the 11th of June. He offered the idea of a Breton redoubt, and Weygand called it a fantasy. When Churchill spoke of guerrilla warfare, Pétain replied that it would mean the destruction of the country. Churchill urged the defense of Paris, and Pétain answered quietly that in 1918 he had a strategic reserve of sixty divisions, whereas now there were none.

  At that conference, Pétain met de Gaulle for the first time in two years. He noted de Gaulle's new rank and said he would not congratulate him, since ranks mean nothing in defeat. De Gaulle objected that Pétain had been promoted at the Marne in 1914. Pétain said there was "no comparison", and de Gaulle later conceded he was right.

  On the 13th of June, at a second conference at Tours, Churchill said Britain would level no reproaches against France. That day in cabinet Pétain strongly backed Weygand's call for an armistice. He read out a draft in which he argued that the government must remain on French soil, because leaving would be desertion. The next evening, in a Bordeaux restaurant, de Gaulle came over to shake Pétain's hand in silence. They never met again.

  The cabinet's mood tipped fast. On the 15th of June, Reynaud suggested the army lay down its arms so the fight could continue from abroad, as the Dutch had done. Pétain was sympathetic, but Weygand, waiting outside, persuaded him that this would be a shameful surrender. The cabinet voted 13-6 for a milder proposal from Camille Chautemps, an inquiry about terms. Admiral Darlan, who had opposed an armistice until that day, now agreed, provided the French fleet stayed out of German hands.

  Sunday the 16th of June brought President Roosevelt's reply to President Lebrun, which offered only vague promises. Pétain pulled a letter of resignation from his pocket, an act certain to bring down the government. Lebrun persuaded him to wait for Churchill's answer. That afternoon Britain proposed a Franco-British Union, which Reynaud and five ministers accepted and the others saw as turning France into a quasi-dominion. Reynaud then resigned, and Lebrun asked Pétain to take his place. At 84, Pétain became the oldest head of government and head of state in French history.

  In London, de Gaulle was already preparing a call for resistance on the 18th of June, a call that comparatively few people heard.

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• 7. The French State

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  At midnight on the 17th of June 1940, Paul Baudouin asked the Spanish ambassador to carry to Germany a request to stop fighting and name its peace terms. At 12:30 a.m. Pétain gave his first radio broadcast to the French people. Writers as different as Claudel, Gide, and Mauriac welcomed him, and so did a vast number of ordinary French people who saw him as their savior.

  Parliament still argued over whether to retreat to North Africa. On the 18th of June, Édouard Herriot, Jeanneney, and Lebrun said they wanted to go. Pétain said he would not leave. In the end only 26 deputies and 1 senator sailed, among them Georges Mandel, Pierre Mendès France, and Jean Zay, all with Jewish backgrounds or ties.

  On the 22nd of June 1940, France signed an armistice at Compiègne. Germany took the north and west, including Paris and the whole Atlantic coast. The remaining two-fifths of prewar France stayed unoccupied, and Paris stayed the capital on paper. The government went to Clermont-Ferrand on the 29th of June, then on the 1st of July to Vichy, at Baudouin's suggestion, because its many empty hotels could hold the ministries.

  On the 10th of July the two chambers met together as a Congress. They voted 569-80, with 18 abstentions, to let the cabinet draw up a new constitution, which in effect ended the Third Republic. Nearly all French historians and every postwar government have called the vote illegal. Many members were absent, and the constitution forbade changing the republican form of government. The next day Pétain took near-absolute power as Head of State.

  He was reactionary by temperament and quickly blamed the Third Republic's corruption for the defeat. The republican motto of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" gave way to "Travail, famille, patrie", meaning "Work, family, fatherland". New acts abolished the presidency, adjourned parliament indefinitely, and let him hire and fire ministers and name a successor, who was Laval. He said he had no wish to be "a Caesar". Yet by January 1941 he held almost all legislative, executive, and judicial power, and one adviser said no French leader since Louis XIV had held so much.

  The regime's ambitious "Révolution nationale" rejected the secular, liberal traditions of the old republic. Pétain disliked the word revolution for what he thought a conservative movement. Even so he took part, and he said the new France would be a social hierarchy that rejected the false idea of the natural equality of men. The government dismissed republican civil servants, set up exceptional courts, jailed opponents and foreign refugees, and revived the crime of "felony of opinion".

  On the 3rd of October 1940, Pétain signed the Law on the status of Jews. It gave a legal definition of the "Jewish race". The next day he signed a law that allowed foreign Jews to be interned in Vichy France. Pétain's ministers began drafting these laws almost as soon as the armistice was signed, and they did so without waiting for German orders.

  Hitler met Pétain at Montoire on the 24th of October 1940 to discuss Vichy's place in a "European Order". A photograph of the two men shaking hands caused uproar in Britain and probably shaped the decision to back Free French forces with naval support at Gabon. Neither Pétain nor his deputies Laval, Flandin, and Darlan put up serious resistance to German requests for indirect help. Large supplies of goods and food went to the Axis, and French troops in Dakar, Syria, Madagascar, Oran, and Morocco were ordered to defend French territory against all attackers. His motives are debated. Churchill told Reynaud that Pétain had always been a defeatist, even in the previous war.

  On the 12th of August 1941, Pétain admitted in a radio address that he sensed an ill wind rising and that his government's authority was contested. The regime built a "Légion Française des Combattants", with groups for those who had never fought.

  On the 11th of November 1942, German forces invaded the unoccupied zone, and Pétain became little more than a figurehead. In 1943 he accepted a collaborationist militia, the Milice, under Joseph Darnand, who worked with German forces to crush the Resistance. Pétain brought Darnand into his government. Yet he stayed popular. When he came to Paris on the 28th of April 1944, large crowds cheered him in front of the Hôtel de Ville.

  In August 1944, Pétain wrote Darnand a letter of reprimand for the Milice's "excesses". Darnand answered sarcastically that Pétain should have thought of this before.

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• 8. Judgment

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  On the 17th of August 1944, a German diplomat named Cecil von Renthe-Fink asked Pétain to move to the northern zone. Pétain refused and demanded a written request. On the 19th the diplomat returned with General Neubronn, who carried formal orders from Berlin, and the Germans threatened to bomb Vichy with the Luftwaffe. Pétain asked the Swiss envoy Walter Stucki to witness the blackmail and then gave way. On the 20th of August he was taken to Belfort against his will.

  On the 8th of September 1944, he and other Vichy figures were moved to Sigmaringen in Germany, where a government-in-exile formed. Pétain refused to join it, and Fernand de Brinon led its commission. On the 29th of October he forbade de Brinon to use the Marshal's name. On the 5th of April 1945 he wrote to Hitler asking to go home, and no reply came. On his birthday, three weeks later, he was driven to the Swiss border and crossed into France on the 26th of April 1945.

  The provisional government, headed by de Gaulle, tried him for treason from the 23rd of July to the 15th of August 1945. Pétain came in wearing his marshal's uniform. After an opening statement denying the High Court's right to try him, he stayed largely silent. De Gaulle later felt the hearings too often looked partisan, like a settling of scores, when the case should have been judged only on national defence and independence.

  The jury convicted him on all charges, including indignité nationale, and sentenced him to death and the loss of his property. The court asked that the sentence not be carried out because of his age, and de Gaulle commuted it to life imprisonment. The court stripped him of ranks and honours but not the title of Marshal of France. Fearing riots, de Gaulle had him flown at once in his private aircraft to Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees, where he stayed until the 16th of November 1945. He was then moved to the Fort de Pierre-Levée on the Île d'Yeu, off the Atlantic coast.

  Lawyers and foreign figures, including Queen Mary and the Duke of Windsor, pleaded for his release. In June 1946 U.S. President Harry Truman tried in vain and offered asylum, and later Franco made a similar offer. No Fourth Republic government wanted the unpopularity of freeing him.

  Pétain's mind was failing. By late 1947 he had memory lapses, and by May 1949 he needed constant nursing and had hallucinations, such as thinking he commanded armies in battle. By the end of 1949 he was severely impaired. On the 3rd of March 1949 ministers had a fierce quarrel over moving him to the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. On the 8th of June 1951, President Vincent Auriol changed his sentence to confinement in hospital, and kept it secret until after the elections on the 17th of June.

  Pétain died on the 23rd of July 1951 in a private home in Port-Joinville, aged 95. He was buried in the local cemetery. His simple white granite grave faces away from the sea, opposite to the 1,700 other tombs. He lies in his uniform, with Marshal of France engraved on the stone. In February 1973 extremists stole the coffin and demanded that President Pompidou rebury it at the Douaumont ossuary among the dead of Verdun. Police recovered it within days, and it was reburied on the island with a presidential wreath.

  A small museum on the Île d'Yeu, which displays his deathbed, clothes, and cane, rarely opens and is not publicised, to avoid trouble. Elsewhere his name has faded. Mount Pétain in the Canadian Rockies, named for him in 1919 with its creek and falls, lost the names in 2021 and 2022. Shanghai's Hengshan Road was Avenue Pétain from 1922 to 1943, while Singapore and Pinardville, New Hampshire, still have streets bearing his name. In 2017, New York's Mayor's Office considered removing the sidewalk ribbon that marks his 1931 parade.

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