A sad case.(Philippe Petain)

THE life of Philippe Petain is a study in ambiguity that goes to the heart of the French experience in recent times. Holding the proud title of Marshal of France, he was both a hero and a traitor, and the line between these alternative perceptions of him easily blurs. Had he died between the world wars, he would almost certainly have been buried with other great Frenchmen in the Invalides. He was already 84 when France collapsed in the summer of 1940, and he stepped forward to offer the country what he called, grandiloquently, "the gift of my person." This gift meant that after a series of highly dubious constitutional steps, he became head of the rump regime of Vichy, which was all the victorious Germans were prepared to allow the French. Once the Allies were winning the war, Vichy duly foundered. Tried and sentenced to death (but then reprieved), Petain lingered wretchedly in prison till the age of 95.

The historian Marc Bloch gave the title "Strange Defeat" to his pioneering book about the catastrophic events of 1940 because neither military nor sociopolitical factors could fully explain what had just happened. Some sort of widespread psychological adjustment was taking place. Hitler's blitzkrieg occupations of other countries, and now France, seemed evidence that totalitarianism was spelling the end of democracy. Nazism and Communism would share the spoils in a new Dark Age that might well last for centuries.

The French government was at a complete loss in this predicament. It was not unreasonable to suppose that Britain would be conquered with equal speed. Petain's gift of his person could be justified if the French population were to be spared unnecessary suffering--but this supposed that Petain had the courage to stand up for France's interests, and was prepared to pay the price for doing so, come what may. Instead he agreed to an armistice, and afterwards to collaboration, and finally to capitulation, all on German terms.

Doing the dirty work for the Germans-who themselves lacked the manpower for it--the Vichy regime under Petain and his vice premier Pierre Laval installed and supervised a French version of fascism, complete with the Milice (a homegrown Gestapo), and participation in the mass murder of Jews. An opportunist without any principles or scruples, Laval was confident of ultimate German victory, and he constantly urged surrender to every demand of the Germans on the grounds that otherwise they would brutalize the French as they were doing to the Poles. A survival from another age, comparable to Chamberlain or Halifax, Petain was quite unfitted to deal with a 20th-century dictator like Hitler, or even with a fascist evil genius like Laval.

Evidently keen to evaluate leading statesmen of the day, Charles Williams has written biographies of Adenauer and de Gaulle. A member of the House of Lords and an active Blairite politician himself, he is an improbable person to be arguing that Petain's mistake was to end up on the losing side, and that for that reason he may have been treated unfairly. Using the sources well, and telling the story readably, he ...