On France – Neal Ascherson in LRB:

“The trial of Marshal Pétain began on 23 July 1945 and lasted until 15 August. The small Paris courtroom was crowded with lawyers, jurors and journalists sweating in the suffocating heat. There was scarcely room to squeeze an armchair past the press box for the accused to sit and doze in. The marshal, now a deaf and sometimes wandering old gentleman of 89, had returned voluntarily from Germany – the retreating Nazis had taken him along with them in the last weeks of the war. Other senior members of his Vichy government thought he was mad to go back. Several of them fled to other countries or changed their names. Most were tracked down and arrested; some ended up in front of a firing squad.
A wild purge of collaborators, male and female, flamed over France in the months after liberation in 1944. Before General de Gaulle established a degree of control, nine thousand men and women had died in Resistance épuration – purification – killings or after death sentences by ‘people’s courts’. From London, de Gaulle had announced that there would be formal trials: ‘France will punish ... the artisans of her servitude.’ From Algeria, the Council for National Liberation promised a trial for ‘Pétain and those who belonged or belong to the pseudo-government created by him, which capitulated, destroyed the constitution, collaborated with the enemy’.”

(…)

“Jackson writes grimly that ‘if the trial were reopened today, it would not be by defenders seeking to rehabilitate their hero but by those eager to convict him for Vichy’s role in the deportation [almost all to their deaths in Auschwitz and other camps] of 75,000 Jews.’ Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust. But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.
Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation.”

(…)

“ Jackson describes with verve the chaos that followed the departure from Paris, as ministers scattered to various châteaux, most of them lacking telephones. At the Château de Cangé, there was a telephone kiosk, but it blocked the way to the lavatory. Decisions about the fate of France were impeded as the bladder of General Weygand, the commander in chief, threatened to disobey orders. It was at Cangé that Pétain decided to ask for an armistice, rather than carry on the war from French North Africa. ‘Can we hope for a recovery in an indefinite future thanks to the Allies?’ he asked.”

(…)

“Pétain certainly loathed the Germans and their lackey Laval. But he didn’t much like the Americans or ‘les Anglais’ either. Perhaps he hated modernity more than anything or anyone. On the Vichy state’s money, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was replaced by ‘Work, Family, Fatherland’.
In court, in the moments when Pétain unexpectedly broke his silence, it became clear that he now believed in his lawyers’ ‘double game’ story. This was a myth that would take grotesque forms. The meeting with Hitler at Montoire, far from being a miserable act of fealty to a triumphant German dictator, suddenly became a French victory over Germany comparable to Verdun. Jackson gives the example of a 1948 ‘history’ by a former Vichy official, which claimed that ‘it was Pétain who had wanted to meet Hitler and that Hitler had fallen into the trap laid for him.’ The ‘trap’ was that by reassuring Hitler ‘he had nothing to fear from the French in the West, [Pétain] left Hitler free to turn on the Soviet Union’. Thus France had played ‘the decisive part in the Allied victory’ by precipitating the entry of the Soviet Union into the Allied camp – ‘an act of strategic genius’. In other words, Pétain and France, not the Allies, had won the Second World War.” (…)

“But nothing said in court could outweigh one fatal fact. The marshal had a chance to change sides – to join the Allies and restore the honour of France. And he chose not to take it. The torrent of events in November 1942, which decided the future of France, began with the Anglo-American landings in French North Africa on the 8th. Admiral Darlan surrendered on the 10th, in spite of the shower of contradictory messages from Vichy. On the next day, German forces poured over the demarcation line and occupied Vichy France. On the 27th, the crews of the French fleet at Toulon scuttled their warships to prevent them falling into German hands. For Vichy, this was the turning point. Pétain and his government could have crossed the Mediterranean and resumed the war against Germany with Britain and America. Jackson writes that de Gaulle himself later commented: ‘I shall never understand why the marshal did not go to Algiers in November 1942 ... The marshal would have made a triumphant return to Paris on his white charger.’ But he stayed in France, for reasons – perhaps including inertia – he never quite explained. Laval effectively took control on behalf of the German occupation, and a brutal period followed as Vichy’s paramilitary Milice, set up to crush the Resistance, murdered and tortured its way across France.”

(…)

“The Comte de Brinon, a prewar socialite who set up a collaborationist French ‘government’ in Germany in the last months of the war, hobbled unrecognisably into court. A police report describes him as ‘emaciated with the appearance of a startled vulture’.
The central figure in this group was Laval. Sacked as prime minister by Pétain in December 1940, he had been forcibly reinstated by the Germans in 1942. Now, brought from his cell in Fresnes prison, he seemed shockingly thin and frail, at first identifiable only by his cigarette-blackened teeth and his grubby white string tie. But he was the man the press box had been waiting for: ‘The courtroom was like opening night at the theatre – with Laval as the star.’ Would he testify for or against Pétain? He had sealed his own fate back in 1942, with a broadcast in which he had said: ‘I wish for the victory of Germany.’ Now, in a four-hour speech, he claimed that his original script had run ‘I believe in the victory of Germany’ and that Pétain, telling him that he didn’t understand military matters, had made him replace ‘believe in’ with ‘wish for’. The marshal woke up at this, and – after Laval had left the stand – furiously denied the story and told the court that ‘believe’ had been his own preferred word. Laval was tried in the same court in October. ‘Even Laval’s bitterest enemies agreed that his trial was a travesty,’ Jackson writes, with jurors bellowing abuse and Laval’s attempts to speak constantly cut off. He was shot, messily, a few days later.”

(…)
“Baffling to the older generation, new understandings of the occupation years were spreading. Marcel Ophuls’s unsparing 1969 documentary about a French town during the Vichy years, The Sorrow and the Pity, was banned by shocked broadcasting authorities. But Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, among other young Nazi-hunters, produced evidence that led to the trials of several more Vichy officials. Emphasis was now shifting from treachery to France towards French complicity in the deportation of Jews to their deaths, and the charge of ‘crimes against humanity’, originally levelled at Nazi perpetrators, was now raised by French judges against Frenchmen. De Gaulle, who had resigned the presidency in 1969, took away with him that reassuring ‘only a handful of traitors’ myth. He had known Pétain well, but used to say that the man had ‘died in 1925’ – meaning that conceit and ambition had long since fried the hero-marshal’s brains. ‘Old age is a shipwreck,’ de Gaulle intoned in his memoirs. ‘In order that France should be spared nothing, the shipwreck of France would coincide with the old age of the marshal.’”

(…)

“As R.L. Bruckberger, a chaplain to the Resistance, reflected afterwards, ‘it was the “enfants sages” who lost France, and the “enfants terribles” who saved her.’ Jackson’s book should leave readers with sympathy for those who were not agile enough to climb through the looking-glass.”

Read the article here.

Somebody like Romain Gary wrote with insight and subtlety about the grey zone that an occupation for most people in the occupied zone.

Old age is a shipwreck. Today it’s more an invitation to cosmetic surgery and unbridled ambition.

The attraction of the ancien régime never dies. There is always a myth that offers some comfort, sometimes even the myth of Pétain.