LONDON — On July 23, 1945, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the great French hero of World War I, stood trial before a packed Paris courtroom. He was charged with treason for surrendering to the Nazis in the summer of 1940 and then collaborating with them as head of the notorious Vichy regime.
The three-week trial — in which the 89-year-old was judged by a jury of French parliamentarians and former resistance fighters — gripped the nation’s attention and dominated the headlines.
But, as British historian Julian Jackson describes in his fascinating retelling of the trial, Vichy’s greatest crime — its role in the deportation of 75,000 French Jews to Hitler’s extermination camps — rated barely a mention. The history, titled “France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain,” has been named a best book of the year by leading British newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Spectator.
“When I was writing the book, I think one of the most surprising things for me, looking at this from today, was how little the question of the Jews counted in the trial,” Jackson told The Times of Israel.
Indeed, it would take another half-century until the newly-elected French president, Jacques Chirac, finally acknowledged France’s complicity in the Holocaust in a landmark 1995 speech.
Nor is the debate surrounding the darkest chapter in French history entirely closed, with leading far-right politicians continuing to challenge the country’s involvement in the Shoah. As France 24 reported last January: “The fate of France’s Jews during World War II has become an unlikely topic of debate in the run-up to the [2027] French presidential election.”
Pétain’s guilt was hardly in question. After only a few hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict and the marshal was sentenced to death. Charles de Gaulle, who led France’s post-liberation provisional agreement, swiftly accepted the court’s recommendation that, because of his age, Petain’s sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.
‘Hypocritical neutrality’
Pétain himself had seemingly invited judgment. Three months after negotiating the armistice, the revered marshal publicly shook hands with Hitler in the French town of Montoire. “I enter today down the road of collaboration,” he declared days later. “This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.”
But, save for an opening statement denying the court’s right to judge him, Pétain remained largely silent and impassive during the trial itself. Transcripts of his pre-trial interrogations, Jackson writes, were marked by “evasiveness, forgetfulness, self-delusion, blame-shifting or mendacity and self-pity.”
Despite Pétain’s near-silence, the trial itself was not without drama. The opening week saw a string of leading Third Republic politicians take to the stand to recount the grim events of June 1940. They included Pétain’s role in undermining the government’s efforts to avoid an armistice and how a subsequent vote granting him near-total powers had been “extorted” from parliament. That vote effectively ushered in the Vichy regime, which ran the southern and eastern “Free Zone” of France that was initially unoccupied by the Germans.
Much of the trial focused on Vichy’s “humiliating” collaboration with the Nazis and its effort to assist the German war effort under the cover of a “hypocritical neutrality.” The evidence was plentiful. In his closing five-hour speech, writes Jackson, prosecutor André Mornet listed “concession after concession, capitulation after capitulation, declaration after declaration, message after message,” in which Pétain had subjugated France to the Nazis. Much, for instance, was made of Petain’s April 1944 speech, in which, on the eve of D-Day, he praised the Germans’ “defense of the continent” against Bolshevism and warned against the Allies’ “so-called liberation.”
Pétain’s defense — elements of which have continued to be propagated by his apologists in the subsequent decades — principally rested on the notion that he had acted as a “shield” against the worst excesses of Nazi rule. The armistice, which his defense lawyer claimed was “greeted with an immense sense of relief,” had spared France the fate of Poland and the imposition of a Nazi gauleiter. The defense also sought to shift the blame for Vichy’s crimes onto the overtly pro-Nazi former prime minister, Pierre Laval. Finally, there was an attempt to cast Pétain, who the Nazis had labeled the “old fox,” as engaged in secret contacts with the British while maneuvering to outwit the Germans and allow what one Vichy civil servant termed “defensive resistance” against the occupiers.
And, according to the defense, Pétain’s “shield” had also been thrown over France’s Jews. “I always vehemently defended the Jews; I had Jewish friends,” Pétain argued in pre-trial questioning. Jacques Isorni, one of his defense team, told the court the marshal had resisted the imposition of the wearing of the yellow star in the “Free Zone”; refused the Nazis’ demands that all Jews who had acquired French nationality after 1927 should be stripped of their citizenship; and claimed that a much higher proportion of Jews had survived in Vichy France than in Poland. “It is iniquitous,” Isorni argued, “to hold Marshal Pétain responsible for atrocities committed by the Germans… It was only the action of the Marshal’s government which protected them, perhaps imperfectly, but it did protect them.”
On the matter of the Holocaust
While no Jewish survivors were called upon to testify at the marshal’s trial — “We wanted to talk but no one wanted to listen,” Holocaust survivor and pioneering French politician Simone Veil later claimed — Vichy’s role in the Holocaust was addressed by two witnesses. Both, though, appeared for the defense.
Pasteur Marc Boegner, the head of France’s Protestant churches, described a number of meetings he had had with Pétain to protest against Vichy’s policies, including its treatment of the Jews. “I had the impression that he was impotent to prevent these terrible evils that, privately, he condemned without reservation,” the pastor declared.
The defense also called Jean-Marie Roussel, a civil servant who headed the Denaturalization Committee, which was established by the regime to examine the status of immigrants, many of whom were Jews, who had become French citizens after the passage of liberalizing legislation in 1927. Roussel recalled private meetings with Pétain, who had reassured him he would reject German demands for “blanket denaturalizations” and praised the “humane way” the commission had approached its work.
As Jackson notes, it was telling that the very existence of the commission — which had stripped some 15,000 people of their French citizenship, thus making them more vulnerable to arrest and deportation — did not appear to shock the court or wider public opinion.
But the fact that the defense was able to build a case that Pétain had helped save French Jews — telling an “alternative story” in Jackson’s words — exemplifies how little importance was attached to the issue at the trial.
The reasons, argues the historian, are complex. The case against Pétain was focused on the charge of treason, rather than the wider question of crimes against humanity, which was developed at Nuremberg when the trials of the leading Nazis opened three months later.
In both France and beyond, Jackson says, “the specificity of the Holocaust as the distinguishing feature of Nazism was not really clear to contemporaries at the time.” There was, he notes, no distinction made in the public mind between Holocaust survivors returning to France and others, such as resistance fights or forced laborers, who had been sent to Germany. All were known simply as “déportés.”
There also remained a degree of antisemitism within French society — albeit not of the murderously violent nature promoted by the Nazis — which was evident in the ugly treatment of survivors who attempted to reclaim property stolen from them during the occupation. In this “poisonous atmosphere,” the newly formed Jewish representative body, the CRIF, opted to keep a “low profile” in the case, Jackson writes. Although invited to provide evidence to the trial, the CRIF decided not to testify and weakly suggested that there was a lack of documentation “demonstrating Pétain’s responsibility.”
It is certainly the case, Jackson recognizes, that the truth about Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust wasn’t fully known at the time of the trial. “The details were really not known,” he says. “The trial was happening weeks after the end of the war and decades of historical research has since taken place to work out exactly what happened.” However, even the limited testimony about the persecution of the Jews gathered by investigators before the trial was not used in court. “They weren’t that interested,” Jackson says of the court and the prosecutors. “It wasn’t central to the trial.”
The “alternative story” told by the defense helped shape a post-war view about Vichy and the Jews that wasn’t seriously challenged until the early 1970s. As the US historian Robert Paxton detailed in 1973, antisemitic Vichy legislation such as the Statut des Juifs, which barred Jews from key professions including holding posts in the civil service, military, teaching and medicine, did not come about as a result of German pressure.
The charges against Pétain had indeed briefly alluded to the persecution of the Jews, accusing Vichy of promulgating “abominable racial laws” that defied “French laws and traditions.” But this formulation, believes Jackson, “blurred the degree to which Vichy’s antisemitic policies were home-grown.”
A ‘shield’ for the Jews
But what of the notion that Vichy acted as a “shield” for Jews? Pétain’s defenders cite the fact that, at 75 percent, the Jewish survival rate in France was one of the highest in Nazi-occupied Europe, standing in stark contrast to the 25% documented in the Netherlands and 45% in Belgium. Of the nearly 75,000 Jews deported from France to the camps, an estimated 70% were foreign nationals. “Vichy protected French Jews and gave the foreign Jews,” Eric Zemmour, the controversial Jewish TV pundit and author, who ran as a far-right candidate in last year’s French presidential election, has claimed.
Jackson is dismissive of the idea that Vichy should be credited with protecting Jews. Its “home-grown” antisemitism, he believes, aimed to “exclude Jews from the national community” rather than murder them, as the Nazis set out to do. But, he says, the Germans would not have been able to deport and murder Jews in such numbers without Vichy’s assistance. “The Germans needed Vichy,” Jackson says, because they lacked the manpower to implement the Final Solution in the country.
Pétain’s government thus struck a Faustian pact with the Nazis in July 1942. Anxious that the Germans were threatening to reduce its autonomy and take direct control of policing, Vichy agreed that the French police would begin arresting and interning Jews, stipulating that it would only target foreign Jews, but volunteering to include the unoccupied zone in the round-ups. Foreign Jews, Laval told ministers discussing the deal, were simply “garbage waste sent by the Germans.”
Vichy’s participation in the round-ups, says Jackson, was driven “more by the logic of collaboration than antisemitism,” but its impact was significant. Without Vichy, he notes, the Germans would no doubt have ordered the French police to arrest Jews, but, in such circumstances, they may well have been less cooperative.
Jackson also rejects the notion that Vichy resisted the imposition of the yellow star out of humanitarian concern for Jews, positing that it was more concern about public opinion that motivated its position. In December 1942, moreover, the regime ordered that all Jews should have the word “Jew” stamped in their identity papers — a decision that may have acted as a death warrant for many. The historian believes that another claim made by Pétain’s apologists — that he blocked the blanket denaturalization of Jews — is “more complicated.” The regime initially acceded to the German request in June 1943, performing a U-turn two months later as the Allied landings in Sicily indicated the tide of the war had turned.
It is France’s geography — its size, mountains and hills, and borders with Spain and Switzerland that made it easier for Jews to hide and escape — which Jackson believes to be the key variable in explaining the country’s higher survival rates. Moreover, as Paxton’s later research revealed, it was safer to be a Jew in the small area of France occupied by Italy than in the “Free Zone.” Given these circumstances — and its supposedly independent government — “the real crime of Vichy is that it could have done more,” he says.
Despite his somewhat elusive persona, Pétain’s own responsibility for Vichy’s persecution of the Jews is clear, says Jackson. Aside from his role as head of state, he personally toughened the Statut des Juifs, ordering that Jews be excluded from teaching and the law. He also responded to the July 1942 deal with the Germans over the roundup of Jews by suggesting that the distinction between French and foreign Jews was “fair and would be understood by opinion.”
Over the past four decades, the true story of Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust has been told. Chirac’s successors in the Élysée Paris have followed his lead and reiterated France’s responsibility. Marking the 75th anniversary of the notorious Vel’ d’Hiv roundup in July 1942, in which over 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were arrested, Emmanuel Macron pointedly noted: “Not a single German took part.”
Despite attempts by the far-right — including Marine Le Pen, who is expected to once again be a leading contender in the next presidential election — to deny this truth, French public opinion overwhelmingly agrees.
Throughout the same period, however, polls have also shown voters retain a “surprisingly indulgent” attitude towards Pétain, with 50-60% consistently suggesting he had genuinely attempted to defend French interests.
It is, Jackson believes, “an inexplicable paradox.” Pétain’s role in the murder of thousands of French Jews, as opposed to that of the regime he led, has thus perhaps, once again, been lessened, if not excused or justified.
But history — who Pétain said would be his judge — has delivered an altogether more damning verdict on the marshal.
“In all the terrifying truths that make up the Pétain trial,” the poet Henri Hertz wrote as the case drew to a close, “there is a Jewish truth. It is distinct from any other.”
France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson
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