French general Philippe Pétain, who became known as the hero of the Battle of Verdun in WWI and later led the collaborationist Vichy regime in WWII.After the liberation of France in 1945, Pétain was put on trial for treason and high collaboration, receiving a death sentence that was later commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle...
An eighty-nine-year-old Marshal of France sat motionless in the prisoner’s dock, staring at his former comrades. Inside the sweltering courtroom of the Palais de Justice in Paris, crowds leaned forward to glimpse the most celebrated living soldier in French history standing trial for his life. In the summer of 1945, Philippe Pétain wore a plain military uniform stripped of all decorations except the Médaille Militaire. Three decades earlier, the nation had hailed him as the "Savior of Verdun," the resolute commander who halted the German onslaught in the bloodiest battle of the Great War. Now, in the liberated capital, public prosecutors read out a devastating indictment of high treason and intelligence with the enemy. The man whose portrait had hung in every French classroom during the Second World War was accused of handing his country over to Adolf Hitler.
The tragedy of Pétain’s downfall began with the untouchable prestige he had earned in the trenches. In February 1916, when the German army unleashed a catastrophic artillery offensive at Verdun, French defenses teetered on collapse. Appointed to command the sector, Pétain organized the Voie Sacrée supply artery and instituted a rotational system that cycled divisions through the front lines to prevent psychological collapse. When disastrous offensives triggered widespread mutinies across the French army in 1917, Pétain restored order not through mass firing squads, but by halting suicidal attacks, improving rations, and granting leave. To millions of frontline veterans, he was a caring patriarch who refused to squander French lives for vanity. Made a Marshal of France in 1918, he walked into the interwar years as a national icon, revered by both soldiers and politicians.
That legendary authority became a weapon of surrender when defeat struck in 1940. In May, the German blitzkrieg shattered French defenses in six weeks, sending millions of terrified refugees fleeing southward. Paralyzed by panic, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud’s government summoned the eighty-four-year-old hero to bolster national resolve. But instead of continuing the fight from French North Africa alongside Great Britain, Pétain insisted on capitulation, declaring that France must accept its punishment. Appointed premier on June 16, he signed an armistice with Nazi Germany in the Compiègne forest. On July 10, meeting in the spa resort of Vichy, a demoralized parliament voted overwhelmingly to grant him absolute constituent powers. Pétain dissolved the Third Republic and established an authoritarian state, replacing the republic's ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity with "Work, Family, Fatherland."
Pétain claimed he would protect the nation, but his regime rapidly embraced active, ideological collaboration. On October 24, 1940, at the railway station of Montoire-sur-le-Loir, the victor of Verdun met Adolf Hitler and shook the dictator's hand before news cameras. Days later, Pétain announced over state radio: "I enter today upon the path of collaboration." Far from merely yielding to German pressure, his administration enacted severe anti-Semitic laws without German prompting, stripping French Jews of civil rights. Vichy created the Milice, a brutal paramilitary that hunted resistance fighters, and deployed French police to round up tens of thousands of Jewish families. In the Vel d'Hiv roundup of July 1942, French gendarmes arrested more than thirteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children in Paris, confining them in a sports stadium before sending them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
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