5 Justice as Purge: Marshal Pétain Faces his Accusers
Just over two years after the Riom trial collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the tables were turned. Allied troops landed in France on 6 June 1944, and by 25 August, Paris had been liberated. The old marshal had been warmly acclaimed by crowds when he visited the capital in April, but the public mood swung dramatically against him when the Gaullists took power. There were two million French people in Germany – forced labourers, deportees, or prisoners of war – and the huge emotions (especially the desire for revenge) which had been bottled up exploded when they returned. They had that peculiar venom which only civil conflicts generate. At the same time, there were also millions of ordinary French people for whom it was incredible that their wartime government had been composed of traitors. Many had believed that Pétain in Vichy and de Gaulle in London were both fighting the Germans, the one as the shield, the other as the sword. Thus began the mini civil war in France known as l’épuration, the purge in which between thirty and forty thousand people were summarily shot.1
Taken captive by the Germans (his German minder was the pro-European Nazi thinker and former plenipotentiary in Denmark, Cecile von Renthe-Fink2) and sent to Germany in August 1944, Pétain wrote to Hitler demanding that he be allowed to return to France. This eventually occurred in April 1945. He was greeted by crowds shouting for his death. The Communist Party was powerful; it controlled the press and had a million members. The Gaullists, the Communists’ allies, had proclaimed Pétain guilty of treason. Pétain’s reputation had soared to the heights in 1918; now it plumbed the depths. Like a sacrificial victim in a primitive society, he had been first venerated before being cast down and cast out.
Pétain’s trial was the first in what was to be a series of immensely high-profile trials of wartime leaders across liberated Europe, from France ← 77 | 78 → to Bulgaria and from Finland to Greece. The judicial origins of the trial lie in a declaration made on 3 September 1943 by the French Committee for National Liberation and signed by generals Giraud and de Gaulle in Algiers.3 This stated that Pétain and his ministers were ‘guilty of treason’ for having signed the armistice on 22 June 1940 ‘against the will of the people’. The Declaration said that, as a result of their guilt, they would be ‘handed over to justice’ at the liberation. Pétain had proclaimed the defendants at Riom guilty before their trial; now he was getting a taste of his own medicine.4
Pétain’s trial was just the apex of a vast judicial purge. A government order (ordonnance) issued by the provisional government in Algiers on 21 April 1944 dealt with ‘the organization of public institutions after the liberation’ and provided for Vichy officials (Vichy is referred to throughout as ‘the usurper’) to be removed from office and debarred from election once regular elections had been re-established (Article 18); departmental liberation committees, composed of résistants, were to be set up to ‘assist’ the prefects in each part of France in this task (Article 19). This was the legal beginning of the épuration. On 27 June 1944 de Gaulle having set up his headquarters in Bayeux, a further order was published creating the relevant purge committees (commissions d’épuration).
Vichy had interned 70,000 people, and of course contributed to the deportation of over 75,000 Jews – albeit under conditions of terrible constraint by the Germans, who habitually wrought barbaric vengeance by executing innocent civilian hostages if their demands for deportations were not met.5 The Resistance took its revenge. In addition to extra-judicial killings, the military and civil tribunals examined some 150,000 prosecutions and over 7,000 people were condemned to death, 767 of whom were in fact executed.6 The purges put many of the most famous figures in French collaboration in the dock: Fernand de Brinon, Charles Maurras, Robert Brasillach. Today, however, the ordonnance of 21 April 1944 is remembered only for the fact that it gave women the vote.
In an order dated 26 June 1944, the provisional government proclaimed that acts committed would be adjudicated ‘notwithstanding all legislation in force’. This meant that people could be prosecuted and convicted for obeying the law of their country at the time (the laws of the Vichy government), a principle later to be adopted at Nuremberg. Its first article proclaimed that special courts would be created ‘to judge acts committed between 16 June 1940 and the date of the liberation’ on the basis of pre-Vichy laws ‘wherever they reveal the intention of their authors to favour any kind of enemy enterprise’. ← 78 | 79 →
A further official instruction to prosecute Pétain and others was issued on 13 September 1944, and the High Court of Justice itself was instituted on 18 November 1944. It was composed of twenty-four jurors – twelve parliamentarians and twelve résistants – and three judges. Although the jurisdiction created was a special jurisdiction, trying offences prior to its creation and thereby infringing the principle of non-retroactivity, the allegations themselves against Pétain (intelligence with the enemy and conspiracy against the security of the state) had been on the penal code before the outbreak of war, as Articles 75 and 87.
A government order issued in Paris on 28 November 1944 further modified the competence of the newly created tribunals, allowing them to take into consideration acts committed before 16 June 1940 if they were deemed to have been directed towards helping the enemy. This reflected the view, contained in the original Pétain indictment but (as we shall see) withdrawn by the Prosecution nine days into the trial, that the marshal had somehow actually conspired with Franco and Hitler to overthrow the French Republic.
The harshness of the original condemnation issued in 1943 reflects the political imperatives of the Resistance’s battle for legitimacy: de Gaulle and his allies had to prove that they were the legitimate government of France, and that Vichy was legally null and void. The Pétain trial was intended to show this. A government order dated 9 August 1944 and entitled ‘On the re-establishment of Republican legality’ had proclaimed the legal nullity of Vichy (although this would presumably have obviated the need for special tribunals, since if Vichy had really been legally null and void it could have been prosecuted by restored Third Republic laws and courts). The Gaullists wanted the trial to provide legal confirmation of their view that Vichy had been illegitimate from the moment it signed the armistice (de Gaulle’s own ‘appeal’ having been broadcast on the BBC the following day).
Pétain’s trial was preceded by that of Admiral Esteva, the French representative in Tunisia who was tried and convicted in March 1945 for treason, having opposed the Allied landings in North Africa. It was also preceded by Communist-backed executions of Vichy officials, notably that of the Vichy interior minister, Pierre Pucheu, sentenced to death by a military court in Algeria in March 1944. This execution was carried out after a strong campaign in the Communist press against him. Speaking at the Esteva trial, Prosecutor André Mornet (who had prosecuted Mata Hari as a German spy in 1917, and who was later to prosecute Pétain himself) said specifically that, ‘With his trial it is the trial of Pétain and Laval which commences today.’ Georges Chresteil, Esteva’s counsel, was quick ← 79 | 80 → off the mark when he advanced the tu quoque argument with respect to the Prosecutor himself. ‘What did you do in 1940, Mr Prosecutor?’ he asked. ‘You came out of retirement to associate yourself with the judicial measures taken by the Vichy government. For four years, you were vice-president of the Commission which dealt with the withdrawal of naturalizations, a commission whose president is now in prison.’ Mornet, in other words, had himself collaborated, working on the revocation of citizenship which was the legal prerequisite for the deportation of Jews.7 In the Pétain trial, the marshal’s lawyer, Jacques Isorni, was to take a leaf out of Chresteil’s book when he revealed to an astonished court that Mornet had even been approached to sit as a judge on the Riom bench.
The main pressure for revolutionary justice of the liberation came from the powerful Communist Party, with whom the Gaullists had concluded an alliance in 1943. The Communist-controlled press called unanimously for Pétain to be put to death. Jacques Isorni, Pétain’s counsel, argued that the June 1943 agreement between de Gaulle and the Communists to create the French Committee for National Liberation included an agreement that the party’s behaviour in the period 1939 to 1941, when the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany, would never be mentioned in court.8 The complicity between de Gaulle and the Communists also became clear when, in the autumn of 1944, de Gaulle amnestied Maurice Thorez, the Communist leader, who had been convicted of desertion at the outbreak of war in 1939.
The structure of the specially constituted High Court of Justice left little room for error. Composed of jurors and parliamentarians, the members of both groups were pre-selected on the basis of their political affiliation as résistants, i.e. enemies of Vichy and Pétain. The parliamentarians, for instance, were barred from sitting on the jury if they had voted les pleins pouvoirs for Pétain on 10 July 1940, as indeed the great majority of parliamentarians had. (Only eighty had voted against.)
The Pétain trial opened on Monday 23 July 1945, Pétain having returned to France from German captivity on 26 April 1945. The Prosecution had therefore had only three months to prepare its case. The trial lasted a mere three weeks, and the verdict and sentence were read out after all-night deliberations at 4 a.m. on 15 August. Many of the most important documents of Vichy France, including Pétain’s own personal files, were never consulted, while the original indictment was largely devoted to a charge of conspiracy to overthrow the Republic, allegedly on the basis of an affidavit which turned out not to exist. The fact that the indictment was based on a conspiracy charge emphasizes how determined the Gaullist prosecutors were to prove that the armistice itself had been ← 80 | 81 → an act of treason and that, as a result of it, theirs was the only legitimate government of France.
Photographs of the proceedings that day show a cramped courtroom; contemporary reports emphasize how hot and stuffy it was. Many of the major political and military players of France’s wartime tragedy assembled here for the final dénouement; Albert Lebrun, the president of the Republic overthrown when Pétain became head of the French state, testified, as did Paul Reynaud, his prime minister, who had declared war on Germany in September 1939 and who had then been imprisoned in Germany until 1945. Reynaud stood so close to Pétain during his testimony that he could have shaken his hand. Louis Marin, one of Reynaud’s ministers and one of the eighty parliamentarians who had refused to vote for Pétain on 10 July 1940 testified, as did Michel Clemenceau, son of Georges Clemenceau, ‘The Tiger’ who had led France to victory in World War I. Jean-Jules Jeanneney, former president of the Senate, and Edouard Herriot, three times president of the council in the Third Republic and president of the National Assembly at the time of the vote of les pleins pouvoirs, were there. General Weygand testified, the man who had replaced Gamelin as chief of staff and who had been in that post when the armistice was signed. The trial was also attended by a future leader of France: photographs show a young François Mitterrand sitting on the press benches. Having worked for the Vichy government until 1942, and having been given Vichy’s highest honour, the Francisque gallique, Mitterrand was president of the Republic from 1981 to 1995.
The trial was conducted in a very French manner, without the formalism and structure one associates with English legal proceedings. Witnesses were allowed to make long statements with minimal prompting from the presiding judge, who would usually tell them to start speaking with a neutral invitation like ‘Tell us what you know.’ Witnesses were not always cross-examined afterwards. People would come to testify at very short notice, and sometimes on the basis of their own request as a result of something they had read about themselves in the papers. Jurors were allowed to intervene and ask witnesses questions, which they frequently did when the witnesses were appearing for the Defence. The speakers were often eloquent, especially Pétain’s counsel, the young Jacques Isorni, whose brilliance and dedication impressed many. But there were also heated exchanges, in spite of the fact that the presiding judge, Paul Mongibeaux, opened the first session with a reference to the love and hatred felt for Pétain at different times and by different people, calling for all passions to be extinguished and recalling that the court’s only concerns were truth and justice. ← 81 | 82 →
During the pre-trial interrogations, which had started in May 1945, Pétain had given contradictory answers which suggested that he was going senile. When he eventually appointed defence lawyers, they disagreed about which strategy to follow. Defence counsel Fernand Payen wanted simply to plead for clemency and to save the marshal’s life: he wanted to argue that he was too old to die and that Vichy’s excesses were the fault of his ministers, his advisers, and the Germans. Isorni, by contrast, who had defended Communists during the occupation, wanted to save the marshal’s reputation. He became an active admirer of Pétain, even saying to him before the trial, ‘Marshal, I make to you the gift of my own person,’ – the very words Pétain had used of himself in 1940. He told Pétain to remember the trials of Joan of Arc, Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena, and the trial of Louis XVI.9 The two were joined by Jean-Marie Lemaire, but it was Isorni’s strategy which was adopted. Pétain himself resolved that only history and God could be his judge: he therefore decided to remain silent in the courtroom, after having read out a declaration which was to be his final testament to the French people.
Before he did so, however, and as soon as the proceedings had been opened by the presiding judge, Fernand Payen contested the right of the High Court to judge the marshal. The constitution of 1875, he said, was still in force and, according to it, only the Senate, constituted as a High Court, could judge the head of state or ministers. This was the same argument the Defence had made at Riom. The judges withdrew to deliberate and found in their own favour; although this same ruling was made when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia adjudicated its own legitimacy during the first case it heard in 1995, it violates a key principle of law that no one may be a judge in his own cause.
The indictment was then read out by the registrar: the bulk of it concerned Pétain’s alleged plot to overthrow the Republic, a plot which the prosecutor said the marshal had hatched years previously. He claimed that Pétain and other anti-democratic forces in France had conspired to destroy democracy and introduce a monarchical system along the lines of the political philosophy of Charles Maurras, the leader of the Action française who had notoriously said that the proclamation of the national revolution was ‘a divine surprise’. The prosecutor marshalled a series of innuendoes that Pétain was ‘in contact with’ or ‘had relations with’ various pro-fascist or pro-German personalities, including Fernand de Brinon, the collaborationist theoretician, or with La Cagoule, the secretive right-wing paramilitary movement which campaigned for the overthrow of the Republic and which had heavily infiltrated the army. In the course of his opening speech, prosecutor Mornet cited an allegedly ‘decisive document’, ← 82 | 83 → containing evidence given by Raphael Alibert, the cagoulard former minister of justice, which, he said, proved the conspiracy and that the marshal was himself a cagoulard together with Laval, Darlan, Huntziger, and Déat.10 The genuine existence of this movement, and the view held by many other sections of the French population besides that the Republic was irredeem-ably corrupt, led many to believe that Pétain had deliberately conspired to engineer events in order to perpetrate what they saw as his coup d’état.
In support of the conspiracy theory, Pétain was accused of the three Constitutional Acts which abrogated the election of the president of the Republic; of relations with the Cagoule and other anti-Republican groups; of a treasonable policy in the face of defeat (the decision to meet Hitler at Montoire in October 1940 and to collaborate with Germany); of creating legislation in France similar to that of Germany; of handing over political refugees to the Reich; of providing assistance to Germany by supplying labour and matériel; of abandoning Indochina; and of instructing troops to resist the Allies and the Gaullists. These alleged crimes corresponded to conspiracy against the internal security of the state and intelligence with the enemy for personal gain, proscribed by Articles 87 and 75 of the existing penal code respectively.
After the indictment had been read out, Pétain was asked to speak. The court fell silent. ‘The French people, through its representatives meeting in a national assembly, entrusted me with power on 10 July 1940,’ said the old marshal. ‘It is to the French people that I have come to give an account of myself.’ Pétain denied that the High Court represented the French people and maintained that he was addressing the nation, not it. He said he would make no further statement or answer any questions but that he would leave his defence to his lawyers. He recalled his great age and his past military glory. His life, he said, had been devoted to France. France had turned to him in its hour of need and ‘begged’ him to serve again. ‘I became thereby the inheritor of a catastrophe for which I was not responsible; those who are really responsible are hiding behind me to avoid the anger of the people,’ he said. He said that armistice had been ‘a necessary and saving act’ and that it had contributed to the victory of the Allies by ensuring a free Mediterranean and the integrity of the French empire. Power had been conferred on him legitimately and his government had been recognized by ‘all the states in the world from the Holy See to the Soviet Union’. ‘I used this power as a shield to protect the French people. For it, I sacrificed my prestige. I remained at the head of an occupied country.’
‘Does anyone understand the difficulty of governing under such conditions?’ Pétain asked. ‘Every day, a knife at my throat, I struggled against ← 83 | 84 → the demands of the enemy. History will tell all that I protected you from, while my enemies think only of reproaching me for the inevitable.’ He said he had been obliged to treat with the enemy but that he did this only to prepare France for the liberation. The occupation had also obliged him to say things he did not mean. He had abandoned nothing which was essential for the country’s existence but had protected the French people. He referred to de Gaulle as ‘continuing the struggle beyond our borders’ and said that he had ‘prepared a way for the liberation by preserving a France which was sad but alive’. ‘What would have been the point of liberating ruins and cemeteries?’ he asked.
Pétain defended his government’s social policies and the change to the constitution. He said that he had worked only for the union and the reconciliation of the French, and that the Germans had taken him prisoner precisely because they accused him ‘of never ceasing to combat them and of ruining their efforts’. He said he had been supported by many French people not for his person but because he represented ‘a tradition which is that of the French and Christian civilization, against the excesses of all tyrannies’. He said the condemnation of him would be a condemnation of those who had put their hope in him, and that it would aggravate and prolong the discord of France. He concluded:
But my life matters little. I have made the gift of my person to France. At this supreme moment, my sacrifice should no longer be called into doubt. If you are to condemn me, let this be the last condemnation and let no French person be detained or convicted for having obeyed the orders of his legitimate leader. But, I say it to you in front of the world, you would be condemning an innocent man while believing you speak in the name of justice, and it is an innocent man who will bear the burden, for a marshal of France asks for grace from no one. Your judgement will be subject to that of God and to that of posterity. They are sufficient for my conscience and for my memory. I confide myself in France’s hands!11
Pétain sat down and said almost nothing for the rest of the trial. He generally refused to answer questions, although he did intervene on a few occasions, for instance to say that Winston Churchill had released France from her obligation not to sign a separate peace with Germany. (Weygand did not agree with his former boss on this crucial point, but de Gaulle recalls in his memoirs that the question of a separate peace was openly raised at a meeting between Churchill and the French government, held at the prefecture in Tours on 13 June 1940, and that the British prime minister – to de Gaulle’s shock and annoyance – did release France from her obligation, on the sole condition that she not allow the French navy to fall into German hands.12) Generally it was clear that Pétain could not hear what ← 84 | 85 → was going on but on one occasion he signalled a clear ‘No’ with his hand when Léon Blum suggested that he had plotted for years to take power.13
In spite of the fact that roughly half of the indictment had dealt with Pétain’s alleged anti-Republican links and his conspiracies with Hitler, Franco, and others, on 1 August 1945, the ninth day of the trial, after the Prosecution had produced no evidence to support this crucial charge, Defence counsel Payen asked pointedly whether the conspiracy theory still formed part of the indictment. If so, he said, he wanted to call witnesses to refute it. Prosecutor Mornet dissembled and tried to claim that he had meant not so much actual conspiracy but instead ‘pre-meditation’. It was clear that the charge of an actual conspiracy against the Republic was unsustainable, and that the Prosecution had reluctantly realized that it had to abandon it.
The remaining charges concerned whether or not France had broken her promise to Britain not to deal separately with Germany, and whether Vichy had committed a coup d’état against the Republic by going beyond the terms of the vote of 10 July 1940. Many Prosecution witnesses, especially Blum, tried to argue that the armistice was itself an act of treason but such an allegation was difficult to sustain: an armistice is a perfectly legitimate form of state action. Instead, the way in which Vichy progressively sold out to the Germans, in spite of claims that it had practised resistance against them – the very thing for which Vichy is now notorious – was hardly dealt with by the trial.
There were some thirty witnesses for the Prosecution and forty for the Defence. The most aggressive towards Pétain were the former prime ministers, Léon Blum and Paul Reynaud. Reynaud’s position was compromised by the fact that it was he who had brought Pétain into the government in May 1940 and that, as the Defence was happy to reveal, he had written an ingratiating letter to the marshal on 10 July 1940, saying that he remembered fondly the time when they had worked together.14 Edouard Daladier took a different position from that of his old rival, Reynaud: he argued that the armistice had been inevitable and situated Pétain’s treachery not in 1940 but in 1942 when he had bowed to the German occupation of the southern (‘free’) zone of France. But Daladier was forced to admit that he did not know whether Pétain had actively colluded with the enemy, nor whether there had been any conspiracy to take power before 1940.
The Defence countered that France had lost the Battle of France, as a matter of fact, and that an armistice, which kept the French government in place and preserved North Africa and the rest of the empire from the Germans, was therefore a better and less dishonourable solution than capitulation, a government in exile, and full occupation by the Nazis. ← 85 | 86 →
Isorni deftly exploited the hypocrisy underlying the Pétain trial. During Daladier’s testimony, he read out a letter from François Billoux, a Communist who was at that time minister of health in the government of General de Gaulle and who, during the occupation, had written to Marshal Pétain asking for permission to give evidence against Daladier at Riom; Daladier was the Communists’ bête noire, since he had banned the Communist Party in 1939 and had had many of its members arrested, including Billoux himself. Isorni received ‘laughter, murmurs, and protestations’ in the courtroom, according to the transcript, when he asked Daladier with savage irony, ‘Does this not strike you as odd? Here are three men whose names appear on the same piece of paper. You, Monsieur Daladier, you put M. Billoux in prison. Marshal Pétain then put you in prison. Today M. Billoux is in power and the government of which he is a member has put Marshal Pétain in prison. Doesn’t this all make you a little sceptical about the role of justice in political matters?’15
The Defence witnesses, who were cleverly chosen, made various points. Charles Tronchu, a former president of the municipal council of Paris under the occupation but a member of a Gaullist network, testified that Pétain was playing a double game, making positive declarations only to trick the Germans. A member of the Resistance who had been imprisoned in the town of Vichy by the French police, and who had then been sent to a German concentration camp, testified that Vichy had prevented things from being worse than they would have otherwise been. Pétain’s lawyer reminded the court that, when the Germans had said they would murder a hundred hostages in reprisal for the killing of two soldiers, Pétain wrote to Hitler and said he would present himself at the demarcation line as the first hostage; the plan was abandoned. More generally, the number of workers and matériel transported to Germany was far lower from France than from other occupied countries, as of course was the number of Jews deported, which was one of the lowest in occupied Europe.
General Weygand’s testimony was particularly dramatic. Himself now in prison, and in poor health, Weygand claimed that Paul Reynaud, the prime minister, had told him to capitulate on 14 June, saying that he intended to follow the example of the queen of the Netherlands and leave the country.16 Weygand replied that he would never dishonour himself or France by capitulating, and that capitulation in mid-battle was in any case a capital offence according to the French military code. The courtroom positively crackled with the hatred which Reynaud and Weygand felt for each other. Reynaud replied that he had called for a ceasefire, not a capitulation. Like all Vichy officials, Weygand protested his patriotism and told the court that of course the armistice had been a deep humiliation ← 86 | 87 → (he himself had read out the terms of the armistice to the Germans in the railway carriage at Rethondes in November 1918) but that it had been dictated by military necessity.17 He also argued that the claim that the government should have withdrawn to North Africa was absurd, because France’s military presence there was so weak that it would have been captured quickly, especially if Italy and Spain had intervened with Germany to snatch French North Africa. This was to say nothing of the 400,000 Jews who lived in French North Africa and who were essentially unmolested there as a result.
Weygand argued that the armistice prevented the Germans from gaining control of the Mediterranean and that they ended up regretting ever having signed it. It is indeed claimed by Vichy apologists that Goering said that the armistice was Hitler’s greatest error. (Gaullists retort that, on the contrary, the armistice enabled Hitler to neutralize France and that, with diabolical political genius, he knew not to push the French too far into a resistance which would have jeopardized his control over western Europe.) General George testified during the trial that Churchill told him precisely this on 4 January 1944 in Marrakesh: the general read out a note he had taken shortly after speaking to Churchill, who had said to him, ‘In June 1940, after the Battle of France (la Bataille du Nord) Britain was left without weapons. We had not made sufficient preparations in terms of tanks and aircraft. Ultimately, the armistice helped us. Hitler committed an error by agreeing to it. He should have gone into North Africa, he should have taken it and carried on to Egypt. Then our task would have been very difficult.’18 This was precisely Vichy’s defence.
In many respects, the Pétain trial was a mirror image of the Riom trial. Many of the same people were present at both trials, only with their roles reversed. Former accused became witnesses for the Prosecution, especially Edouard Daladier and Léon Blum, both of whom had until only two months previously been prisoners in Germany. Blum raged against the way Pétain had duped the French, at their weakest moment, into believing in him: ‘This monstrous abuse of trust, that is treason,’ he said. The eerie impression of an inverted re-run of Riom was reinforced when the presiding judge of that trial, Pierre Caous, unexpectedly appeared at the Pétain trial to defend his own name. Caous wanted to testify that the judges on his bench in Riom had not sworn an oath of fidelity to Marshal Pétain, because the oath had been introduced subsequent to their appointments. (Caous himself, as it happened, had sworn the oath, because he had been a judge in the Cour de Cassation when it was introduced, but he still insisted that it had not compromised his professional integrity.) The issue arose because the judges in the Pétain trial were forced to admit ← 87 | 88 → that they too had sworn the oath of fidelity to Pétain themselves, having been judges throughout the Vichy period. Caous also testified that Pétain had said to him personally, after the Riom trial had been suspended, that it would be mad to want a judicial condemnation of France for having started the war.19 Riom surfaced a third time when Jacques Isorni confronted Prosecutor Mornet with the stunning allegation that he had asked to sit on the Riom bench. Mornet reacted furiously, denouncing the claim as ‘an infamy’. But Caous’ testimony forced Mornet to admit that he had indeed accepted an offer to sit on the Riom bench (even if he had not actively sought the post) but that, for other reasons, he had not done so.20 Such was the close interlinking between collaboration and resistance.
Perhaps the most dramatic moment was when Pierre Laval entered the room. Laval was the most reviled man in France, hated even by the marshal under whom he had crowned his political career. He embodied all the guilt of Vichy, more so than the marshal himself who had many defenders and even whose enemies admitted that he had been unanimously admired in 1940. Joseph Kessel, a reporter at the trial, dwelt on Laval’s slitty eyes, reptilian appearance, and bad breath. Laval seemed more convinced than ever that everything he had done was right: he blamed Pétain for what he said were the worst acts, for instance meeting Hitler at Montoire. Pétain broke his silence during the testimony to say that he had never approved Laval’s notorious declaration on the radio on 22 June 1944, ‘I desire the victory of Germany for, without it, Communism will be installed all over Europe.’ Laval came as a witness, of course, but his main goal was to prepare public opinion for his own trial by the same High Court. He spoke for four hours, over two successive sessions: he was funny and eloquent, he cried and raged.21 It was to no avail. Laval was later to be convicted of treason by the same High Court, and, dragged from his prison cell while writhing in agony from the poison he had taken in a failed attempt to commit suicide, executed by firing squad on 15 October 1945.
One issue was almost completely absent from the trial: the Jewish question. As in the original preparatory reports for the later Nuremberg trials, from which the fate of the Jews was also absent, the deportation of more than 75,000 Jews from France, who eventually died in German concentration camps, was not mentioned in the indictment against Pétain. No Jewish witnesses were called, even though the prosecutor had received representations from Jews, and even though there had been letters in Jewish newspapers on the issue. Instead, the fate of résistants, soldiers, deportees, and prisoners of war dominated the public consciousness. The main mention of the persecution of Jews came in Pétain’s defence when the president of the French Protestant Federation, Marc Boegner, testified ← 88 | 89 → that he was convinced that Pétain had been powerless ‘to prevent great evils which, in his inner self, he called by their name and condemned them without limit’. Vichy France had actually obstructed some of the German demands in this regard, for instance by refusing to impose, in the free zone Vichy governed, the German requirement that Jews wear yellow stars.
On 14 August 1945, the trial ended and the judges withdrew. One of the jurors, Pétrus Faure, a left-wing but anti-Communist deputy, was a parliamentary member of the jury. An opponent of Pétain’s domestic policies which he called ‘reactionary and conservative’, Faure however denounced the Pétain trial as ‘the very archetype of a political trial of doubtful legitimacy’.22 Later neutral commentators have shared Faure’s condemnation of the trial.23 Faure came to the conclusion that Pétain had not betrayed France; that the conditions did not exist for a fair trial; that the High Court was an ad hoc court stuffed with his political enemies; that purges were raging in France; and that the press was controlled and completely against Pétain. But it would be an understatement to say that this is a minority view.
Faure has described what happened after the judges and jurors withdrew: the presiding judge opened by saying that the evidence tendered had not justified the allegations contained in the indictment, and he suggested a sentence of five years’ exile. He was massively outvoted by the Resistance jurors, all of whom save one voted for the death penalty. By contrast, all the parliamentary jurors, including a Jewish deputy who had himself been the victim of racial persecution, were against the death penalty, save three. The matter went to a secret ballot and there were fourteen votes for the death penalty and thirteen against.24 There was then a vote on whether to suspend the death penalty, in view of the defendant’s great age. The vote for suspension was carried seventeen votes to ten; there is some speculation that the Gaullist members voted this way in order to be helpful to de Gaulle, who might have paid a high political price if Pétain had been executed. When the judges returned to the courtroom at 4.30 a.m. on the morning of 15 August and read out the sentence, Pétain looked confused as he was led outside. The old marshal was put in the back of a van and sent to the Ile d’Yeu, a small island off the Atlantic coast of France, where he eventually died on 23 July 1951, aged ninety-seven.