(2) Ronald C Rosbottom, The Enemy Within. France prosecuted Marshal Pétain, who had led the country's Vichy government during World War II, and sentenced him to death. But Pétain was hardly the only collaborator. Wall Street Journal, Aug 26, 2023, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... ins-shadow-88838286
(book review on Julian Jackson, France on Trial. The Case of Marshal Pétain. Belknap Press (an imprint of Harvard University Press; in publishing world, an imprint is akin to a brand of a company which may have many brands of goods), 2023)
Note:
(a) Philippe Pétain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_P%C3%A9tain
(1856 – 1951; "He led the French Army to victory at the nine-month-long Battle of Verdun" in 2016)
(b) "Julian Jackson, an emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London"
(i) University of London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_London
(section 4 Member institutions)
(ii) Queen Mary was wife of George V (reign 1910-1936; grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, whose father was George VI).
(c) "État français (known as the Vichy regime)"
(i) French-English dictionary:
* état (noun masculine): "state"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/état
* français (adjective Masculine): "French"
(noun masculine): "French" language
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/français
^ A French man, a French woman are homme français and femme français, respectively. (Two words, rather than one.)
^ This is same as in Spanish where national (such as chino Chinese) or adjective (café colombiano Colombian coffee) haslower case for the first letter, although in both French and Spanish, the first letter of a nation is always capitalized.
(ii) The ch in Vichy is pronounced the same as sh in she.
------------------------------
In 1940, after an intense six-week battle, the most formidable army in Europe was defeated by a much more flexible and aggressive German military. For almost 80 years, France has lived with its memory of that shameful defeat, as well as its ensuing four years of collaboration with the Germans. What makes this period of occupation stand out is that the “armistice” signed in 1940 left half of France independently governed by a reactionary coterie of its own politicos and military leaders. Their headquarters, though, were not in Paris, where the German administration held sway, but in the spa town of Vichy, in the middle of the country. Their leader was Marshal Philippe Pétain.
Julian Jackson, an emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, recognizes that readers may need to acquire some familiarity with the German invasion and occupation. His “France on Trial” clarifies this complex history through a careful elucidation of the differences between formal and casual collaboration, of the armistice of June 1940 that established the État français (known as the Vichy regime), and of Pétain’s eventual surrender to the French authorities in 1945.
One of Mr. Jackson’s strengths, as an expert on 20th-century France, is the detail he offers on the politics of 1940-45. He reminds us that Pétain’s 1945 trial for treason was about more than the guilt or innocence of an elderly soldier. It gave birth to moral and political doubts: “Where did patriotic duty lie after the defeat? Does a legal government necessarily have legitimacy? Are there times when conscience overrides the duty to obey laws?” The author seeks to put the quietus on any positive evaluation of the marshal and to vitiate the influence Pétainism still has on France’s collective memory and politics.
To understand the charges against Pétain, Mr. Jackson divides his book into three sections. The first sets the historical stage with a clear description of the French army’s defeat in May 1940 and the subsequent German occupation of France. He then presents the details of Pétain’s trial, explaining French jurisprudence and the social and bureaucratic complexities of a liberated France. The final section of the book is dedicated to the legacy of the Vichy government and its collaborators. This is where Mr. Jackson puts France on trial.
By returning of his own volition to face his accusers, Pétain complicated a simpler resolution of the embarrassment of “collaboration.” He crossed the border from Switzerland and surrendered to French police in late April 1945. Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, was furious. He recognized that the marshal, known as the Lion of Verdun during the previous war, was still quite respected in France, and that his arrival, and inevitable trial, would not allow France to easily cast aside the checkered history of the war.
At his trial, Pétain wore the uniform of a marshal, not that of a citizen. He entered the austere courtroom, confidently and firmly, and politely put his kepi on the table. Surprisingly, most of those present stood. Reading at length from a typewritten text, he explained to the court, and by implication to the French people, his own sacrifices for the salvation of his nation:
I have spent my life in the service of France. Today, at the age of almost 90, thrown into prison, I wish to continue to serve her. . . . Let France remember! I led her armies to victory in 1918. Then, having earned the right to rest, I have never ceased to devote myself to her.
Upon finishing, he refused to answer questions, from either the prosecution or his own lawyers, or to make further remarks, sitting silently during the remainder of the trial. He was found guilty of indignité nationale and sentenced to death. But De Gaulle, by then the interim chief of state, commuted the sentence to life in prison, and ordered that it be passed on the isolated island of Yeu, off the coast of Brittany. Pétain died there, at the age of 95, in 1951. His last days are memorialized on the island in a small museum, still visited by tourists and admirers.
Why has the ghost of Pétain continued to affect the political discourse of France? Is it that the guilt about the division of the country during the war remains embedded in France’s historical memory? Mr. Jackson’s previous books include a first-rate biography of De Gaulle and “The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940.” In “France on Trial,” he gives us an intimate account of the construction of the memory of Pétain through the lens of the trial. He relies on archives in Paris, London and Washington, as well as the official files of the Vichy years, which were opened to the public in 2015. Mr. Jackson commands them all.
In July 1995, on the anniversary of the infamous 1942 roundup of Jews at the Paris velodrome, France’s President Jacques Chirac gave one of the most significant speeches of the 20th century. He bluntly reminded the French that the État français, led by Pétain, was part and parcel of their history, and that many citizens had accepted its legality, though they may have rejected much of its ideology. Mr. Jackson believes that the Vichy regime “would never itself have initiated a policy to murder Jews. Vichy’s anti-semitism was exclusionary not exterminatory.” He even exculpates French participation in the rounding-up and exiling of French and foreign Jews. These views are a rare deviation from Mr. Jackson’s studied objectivity.
Mr. Jackson concludes his book by stating that “the Pétain case is closed.” But is it? Among those who continue to revive the conundrums that the Vichy regime caused for France is Éric Zemmour, a French journalist and television pundit. Mr. Zemmour, who himself is Jewish, holds that Pétain served as a shield against the persecution of French Jews. He argues that the majority of French Jews survived the war precisely because of the marshal’s moral strengths, and that most of those who were exterminated by the Germans were in fact foreign-born. Rather, Mr. Zemmour views Pierre Laval, the prime minister during much of Pétain’s government, as the major villain in the French government’s treatment of immigrant Jews. Laval was tried and executed in 1945. Arguments such as Mr. Zemmour’s continue to cast a cloud over the persistent debates about French collaboration and resistance. And so, too, over Mr. Jackson’s major theses.
Nevertheless, this is a finely tuned history. Mr. Jackson endeavors to remain objective and fair in his analysis by reminding his readers that France’s tangled memory of a complicated time remains pertinent to the polity. The description of the trial, now that all the transcripts have been released, is thorough. Those who enjoy tales of the sparring among excellent lawyers arguing an important case will find this book riveting. And for those who want to understand contemporary France and its intricate politics, “France on Trial” provides, especially in its epilogue, a vibrant analysis of a trial and verdict that remain contentious almost eight decades later.
Mr. Rosbottom is professor emeritus of French and European Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of “When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation.”
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发表于 8-26-2023 09:40:34
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