Henri Pétain

• Born: 24 April 1856
• Birthplace: Cauchy-a-al-Tour, Pas de Calais, France
• Died: 23 July 1951
• Best Known As: He sold out France to the Nazis

Known throughout France as the "Hero of Verdun" for his prowess during World War I, Henri Pétain became the "Traitor of Vichy" during World War II for his collaboration with the occupying forces of Nazi Germany. A colonel when WW I began, Pétain proved himself early at the Battle of the Marne (September 1914) and was promoted to brigadier general. In 1916 he defended the German advance on Verdun and became a national hero, known for his rallying cry of "Ils ne passeront pas!" ("They shall not pass!"). By 1917 Pétain was the supreme commander of all French armies; he was instrumental in putting down mutinous rumblings from foot soldiers and in negotiating the end of the war. He was made a marshal of France for his service and spent the '20s and '30s in military and political matters in Morocco and France. While serving as the ambassador to Spain in 1940, Pétain was called back to try and save France from the Nazi invasion. Although he was 83, it was hoped that his involvement would boost French morale, and he was made titular head of a new government seated in Vichy, outside the territory occupied by the Nazis. Pétain surrendered to Germany on 22 June 1940 and tried unsuccessfully to maintain an independent and collaborative government. The Nazis occupied Vichy in 1942 and in August 1943 Pétain was arrested by the Germans. He was returned to France near the end of the war in April 1945 and was ultimately sentenced to death for treason. Charles de Gaulle immediately commuted his sentence to life imprisonment and Pétain, old and infirm, died a few years later in Port-Joinville.

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Philippe Pétain. (credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)

(born April 24, 1856, Cauchy-à-la-Tour, France — died July 23, 1951, Île d'Yeu) French general. He served in the French army from 1876 and later taught at the war college. His successful defense in the Battle of Verdun (1916) made him a national hero, and in 1918 he became commander in chief and a marshal of France. After the war he was appointed vice president of the Supreme War Council (1920 – 30) and minister of war (1934). After the German invasion of France (1940), Pétain was appointed premier at age 84. He concluded an armistice with Germany, and as head of Vichy France he attempted to obtain concessions by cooperating with the Germans. In 1942 the Germans forced him to accept Pierre Laval as premier and he withdrew to a nominal role as head of state. After the Allied invasion of France, he fled to Germany. In 1945 he was tried and condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to life in prison, where he died at age 95.

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(b. Couchy à la Tour, 24 Apr. 1856; d. Île d'Yeu, 23 June 1951) French; head of the French State 1940 – 4 Pétain came from a well-off peasant family, was educated by the Jesuits, and attended the French military academy Saint-Cyr. His army career in the infantry progressed slowly, and he was about to retire with the rank of colonel when the onset of the First World War transformed his destiny. By June he was head of the Second Army and in February 1916 was sent to command the French forces resisting the German attack on Verdun. The Pétain legend dates from his role as "defender of Verdun". He became known as a commander who did not, like so many others, waste the lives of his soldiers in useless attacks. His reputation was enhanced by his sensitive handling of the army mutinies which followed the disastrous Nivelle offensive of April 1917. Insiders regarded his caution as only one step away from pessimism and it was this that led him to being passed over in favour of Foch as Supreme Allied Commander in 1918. To the general public, however, he was a hero and at the end of the war he was promoted to the highest military rank, Marshal of France. In the inter-war years, Pétain's star shone brightly. He held the highest posts in the army and was the architect of the defensive military strategy whose symbol was the construction of the Maginot Line. Few shared the negative judgement of his strategic views held by his one-time protégé, Charles de Gaulle. He served as Minister of War in the government of national unity formed by Doumergue after the February 1934 riots and in 1939, after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War, he became the Republic's ambassador to Madrid.

Public and politicians alike continued to regard the Peasant Marshal with a respect verging on veneration. This explains why in the crisis following the German attack of May 1940, he became Deputy Prime Minister. It was to prove a fateful appointment. The pessimism which some had noted in 1918 led him to believe that there was no alternative to an armistice; the authority he radiated meant that those in government who wished to continue the war were quite unable to combat his views; and the contrast between his reputation and that of the politicians gave him a free hand when Lebrun appointed him Prime Minister on 16 June 1940. The following day he requested an armistice which the Germans signed on 22 June. Made invincible by defeat, Pétain now revealed the political ambitions which lay behind the dignified exterior. He appealed for a moral and intellectual reformation to extirpate the vices which had led to the defeat, and, in a remarkable phrase, offered his body to France to assuage its misfortunes. It is unlikely that he had already drawn up a plan for constitutional transformation. But he allowed Laval, who had joined his government on 23 June, to put his name to a project of constitutional reform which culminated in the 10 July vote of the National Assembly abolishing the Third Republic and entrusting him with power. The next day Pétain became Head of the French State and the Vichy regime was born.

Pétain's 1940 apotheosis owed more to his legend than to any defined ideological position. Once in power he revealed his determination to overturn the political and social values of French democracy. He immediately launched an attack on the symbols of Republicanism by replacing the Revolutionary triptych Liberty Equality Fraternity with Order Authority Nation, and by stressing the need for obedience to the leader. He sought (despite his prior lack of religious conviction) to re-establish the authority of the Roman Catholic church and of the traditional social élites who had been excluded from national and local power by universal suffrage. Political parties and trade unions were banned; civil servants were required to take an oath of personal loyalty to the Head of State; the most prominent leaders of the defunct regime, including Blum and Daladier were arrested. Pétain also began the civic persecution of the "enemies of France" amongst whom he numbered freemasons, Communists, and Jews. The anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime was not the result of Nazi pressure. It derived from the conservative, nationalist prejudices against the "outsider" which forty years earlier had given rise to the Dreyfus Affair and had then re-emerged in the 1930s. Pétain's regime was indeed referred to as "the revenge of the anti-Dreyfusards". The core foreign policy ambition of Pétain was to keep France out of the war by a policy of collaboration with the victorious Nazi Germany. He met Hitler at a railway station at Montoire on the banks of the Loire. There is no evidence that he was playing a double game, preparing to rejoin the Allies, or that he knew in advance of the Allied landings in November 1942 in French North Africa. There is, by contrast, much to show that he authorized the brutal war waged against the interior Resistance by Vichy's security forces.

Pétain became the object of a veritable cult of personality as he travelled through France preaching his message of respect for authority and tradition. Soon, however, the fragility of the Vichy regime became apparent. The governments he appointed were no more stable than those of the despised Third Republic and his relations with Laval, the most able of his ministers, were bad. More important, the emergence of an internal Resistance and the German occupation of the whole of France in November 1942 destroyed whatever independence the regime had had. The continuing personal respect Pétain inspired was demonstrated by the crowds who greeted him in Paris shortly before Liberation. But he was decreasingly able to resist the demands of the Germans and the manœuvres of Laval. By the time he was carted off to Germany in August 1944 he had lost all semblance of power. He refused to take any part in the governments of exile established in Germany by the extreme collaborationists and at the end of the war insisted on returning to France. Put on trial for collaboration with the enemy, he was condemned to death. In view of his great age, the sentence was commuted by de Gaulle to life imprisonment and he was placed in a prison cell on the Île d'Yeu, where he died in 1951.

Pétain argued in his defence that his purpose in taking power was to protect France from the exactions of Occupation — to be, in other words, the shield that would prepare the ground for de Gaulle's sword. The argument fails to account for the facts that occupied France received no special favours from Nazi Germany, that Pétain contemplated with equanimity the defeat of Great Britain, that his regime persecuted those members of the national community whom it refused to regard as French, and that it co-operated in the destruction of France's pre-war Jewish population. The 1994 revelation of Mitterrand's youthful admiration for Pétain shows how wide was the appeal of the National Revolution. Vichy's compromises and crimes, however, destroyed the legitimacy of the reactionary vision which Pétain tried to realize. He still has admirers; but he has never been rehabilitated.

Pétain, Marshal Henri-Philippe Omer (1856-1951). Born to a prosperous peasant family in the Pas de Calais, Pétain was commissioned into the infantry from Saint-Cyr. After attending the École Supérieure de Guerre he served on the staff of the military governor of Paris during the Dreyfus affair, but slow promotion endemic in the army of the Third Republic saw him a major only in 1900. He was an instructor at the École de Guerre where, in contradiction to official doctrine, which emphasized the superiority of moral qualities over firepower, he taught that fire killed. Promoted to command the 33rd of the Line (a young de Gaulle was one of his officers), in 1914, still a colonel, he commanded a brigade at Saint-Omer.

Pétain was saved by the war. His brigade was in Lanrezac's Fifth Army, and some of Pétain's mistrust of the British may have been learnt from him. On 31 August he was promoted général de brigade and given a division: his general's stars were taken from an old tunic found in a house on the line of march. He was given another step in October, becoming général de division and taking command of a corps. His deft handling of his corps, which advanced 2 miles (3.2 km) and captured 3, 000 prisoners at Souchez in May 1915, brought him command of Second Army in Champagne. When the Germans attacked Verdun in February 1916 Joffre sent for him.

Pétain was unmarried, but an aide ran him to earth on the night of 24-5 February in the Hôtel Terminus at the Gare du Nord. Outside the bedroom door stood his boots and a pair of lady's shoes. Pétain announced that he would report in the morning: meanwhile the night imposed its own duties. Briefed by Joffre, he set off for Verdun, a slow journey in filthy weather. He reached the local commander's headquarters at Dugny, where he heard that Fort Douaumont had fallen, and then returned to Souilly, on the little road from Bar-le-Duc which constituted Verdun's only link with the outside world, and set up his headquarters in the Mairie. Joffre's deputy Castelnau met him there, and gave him a written order to hold both banks of the Meuse and take over at midnight.

Pétain telephoned senior officers to tell them that he was in command, but he awoke on the 26th with pneumonia. Using trusted staff officers as emissaries, he gathered the reins of battle into his hands. He was to tell a visitor that ‘artillery now conquers a position and infantry occupies it’, and made it clear that this was a gunner's war. He began telephone conversations by asking: ‘What have your batteries been doing?’ The Germans felt the effect of his policy as French guns, tucked in behind the ridges on the left bank of the Meuse, raked slopes opposite with their fire. He recognized that the defence hinged on a single fragile line of supply along the road still known as La Voie Sacrée (the Sacred Way). Never a man for bombast, he caught the mood of the moment in an order of the day which proclaimed: ‘Courage: on les aura!’ (‘Courage—we'll get 'em’).

The crisis past, Pétain's refusal to take the offensive persuaded Joffre to move him upwards to command Army Group Centre. Nivelle took over at Verdun, where his success brought him appointment as C-in-C of the French army. With the failure of the Nivelle offensive and subsequent mutinies in the spring of 1917 Pétain took over as C-in-C and restored morale by a judicious mixture of stick and carrot, putting down indiscipline but improving leave conditions, food, accommodation, and the distribution of decorations. When attacks were resumed they were characteristically methodical: Fort Malmaison was slickly recovered in October.

By now his caution was overriding, and he was convinced that the Allies should wait for the Americans before taking the offensive. When the Germans attacked in March 1918 he muttered that they would defeat the British in open field and then go on to beat the French. Subordinated to Foch, the newly appointed Allied C-in-C, Pétain commanded the French army for the remainder of the war and was appointed marshal at its end. A doctor found him unbelievably fit, and he married in 1920.

Between the wars Pétain held a series of major appointments. He took charge of the operation which crushed Abd-el-Krim's revolt against the French conquest of Morocco, watched over the planning of the Maginot Line, served as minister of war, and in 1939 went to Madrid as ambassador. Recalled when the Germans attacked in 1940, he became deputy PM, and then, as premier, negotiated the armistice.

He went on to replace the Third Republic by the État Français based at Vichy, presenting French officers, not least his old subordinate de Gaulle, with a painful crisis of conscience. His regime did reflect a feeling amongst the upper bourgeoisie and high officials that defeat was the penalty for political as well as military failure and, in his dour and impassive person, Pétain somehow seemed a credible head of state. Yet his political grasp was never firm, and the problems facing him were enormous. By the time the Germans responded to Allied landings in North Africa by moving into the Unoccupied Zone, Vichy was ‘little more than an agency for the German exploitation of France’. The acts of some of Pétain's subordinates, notably Laval, brought lasting discredit on his regime. In 1944 it moved to Belfort and eventually to Germany, and a dazed Pétain gave himself up to stand trial. He was sentenced to death, and then reprieved, to die in prison on the Île d'Yeu, where he was buried.

Pétain lacked the resilience and inspiration to be a great general, but his grasp of war in 1914-18 and his understanding of the common soldier mark him out as a good one. The last decade of his life was unrelieved tragedy: some of his countrymen now argue that time should expunge this last failure, permitting Pétain to lie where he wished, among his soldiers at Verdun.

Bibliography

• Griffiths, Richard, Pétain (London, 1994)

— Richard Holmes

The French general and statesman Henri Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), a military hero in World War I, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. Officially considered a traitor, he is admired by many of his countrymen as a supreme patriot.

Philippe Pétain was born to peasant parents on April 24, 1856, at Cauchy-à-la-Tour. After a private boarding-school education, he entered Saint-Cyr in 1876 and graduated 2 years later. An advocate of defensive rather than offensive strategies, he became an instructor at the école de Guerre in 1888. Nearly 60 years old and without active-duty experience in 1914, Petain had had a far from brilliant career. World War I changed that radically.

Hero of Verdun

Promoted to brigadier general on Aug. 31, 1914, Pétain distinguished himself at the Battle of the Marne (1914) and in June 1915 was named a full general and given command of the 11th Army. When the Germans decided in 1916 to end the war with a massive concentrated attack on the French line at Verdun, Pétain was ordered to stop the offensive at all costs. Promising that "they shall not pass, " he held Verdun but at the enormous cost of 350, 000 men. Subsequently a great popular hero, he became chief of the general staff in April 1917, and a month later he succeeded Gen. Robert Nivelle as commander in chief.

Pétain assumed his command over a French army near disintegration. Years of indecisive war had sapped morale, and mutinies were endemic. Combining harsh disciplinary measures with humane redress of grievances, he very quickly reestablished order. Without these reforms the French army would not have withstood the final German offensives of 1918.

Between the World Wars

Named marshal of France on Nov. 21, 1918, Pétain emerged from the war second only to Ferdinand Foch in prestige. It was only natural that Pétain was regarded as a high military authority, but the consequences later proved catastrophic. Vice president of the Supreme War Council after 1920 and inspector general of the army after 1922, Pétain used his influence to orient French military planning along defensive lines. He favored the construction of heavily armed fortifications along the Franco-German frontier. Against the protests of such young rebels as Charles De Gaulle, who urged a strategy of mobile mechanized warfare, Pétain's influence was decisive, and the Maginot Line was constructed on the Franco-German border. French government and military leaders were determined to prepare France for any future war.

Retiring from the army in 1931, Pétain entered politics in 1934 as minister of war in the short-lived authoritarian government of Gaston Doumergue. Increasingly contemptuous of parliamentary politics and such Socialist experiments as the Popular Front, and a known partisan of dictatorial regimes, Pétain provided a figure in the late 1930s around which right-wing opponents of the Third Republic could rally.

Vichy Regime

Ambassador to Spain at the outbreak of World War II, Pétain was recalled and appointed vice-premier in May 1940 by Premier Paul Reynaud in an attempt to bolster his foundering government. With the fall of France imminent, Reynaud resigned on June 16, 1940, and President Albert Lebrun asked the 84-year-old Pétain to form a new government whose first task would be to negotiate an armistice with the Germans. No one seemed to care that the rapid collapse of the French army in 1940 had been largely due to the outdated principles on which Pétain had organized it and to its lack of mechanized equipment, whose supply he had opposed.

On June 22 Pétain concluded an armistice with the Nazis that divided France into two zones: the north and the Atlantic coastline under German military occupation, and the rest of France under the direct administration of Pétain's government. Militarily, France retained control of its fleet, but its army was drastically reduced to 100, 000 men.

Meeting in national assembly at Vichy on July 10, 1940, a rump parliament voted full constituent powers to Pétain. The next day he was named chief of state, and with Pierre Laval he then began the task of constructing a hierarchical and authoritarian regime under the formula of his so-called National Revolution. Little more than empty rhetoric ("Work-Family-Fatherland") and the cult of Pétain, his Vichy regime was a scarcely disguised client state of Nazi Germany.

Of necessity, Pétain's central principle in foreign policy was collaboration with the Third Reich. Above all, he wanted to keep France out of the war and to keep Germany as faithful to the armistice terms as possible. Opposed, however, to the all-out collaboration urged by Laval, Pétain replaced him with Adm. Jean Darlan in 1941. Under pressure from Berlin, Laval returned to office in April 1942.

The crisis of the Vichy regime occurred in November 1942 following the Allied landings in North Africa and the German occupation of Vichy France. Urged to flee, Pétain refused, believing that it was his duty to share the fate of his countrymen. He still refused even after ultracollaborationists were imposed upon him by the Germans, and thus he implicated himself in their treason. Arrested by the retreating Nazis on Aug. 20, 1944, and sent to Germany, Pétain voluntarily returned to France in April 1945. Immediately arrested and brought to trial by the provisional government of his onetime protégé Charles De Gaulle, Pétain was convicted of treason, militarily degraded, and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by De Gaulle, and Pétain died 6 years later, on July 23, 1951, on the Île d'Yeu.

Estimates of Pétain's Career

Pétain remains an acutely controversial figure in recent French history. He is the object of an as yet unsuccessful effort at rehabilitation, his right-wing admirers depicting him as the "crucified savior of France" and claiming that his self-sacrifice after 1940 "will one day count more for his glory than the victory of Verdun." Not only did Pétain save France from the fate of Poland, they insist, but by playing a double game he tricked Adolf Hitler into staying out of North Africa, which made possible the eventual Allied victory in 1945. Preposterous as these claims are, the impression they give of Pétain is only slightly more misleading than that given by official Resistance historiography, which unfailingly portrays him as an arch-villain and as a criminal traitor to France.

Further Reading

A well-researched and interesting work on Pétain is Richard Griffiths, Pétain: A Biography of Marshal Philippe Pétain of Vichy (1972). For the period before 1940 the major work is Stephen Ryan, Pétain the Soldier (1969). For the Vichy period there is an enormous partisan literature whose purpose is either to condemn or exonerate Pétain. An example of the first is Robert Aron, The Vichy Regime, 1940-1944 (1955; trans. 1958); and of the second, Sisley Huddleston, Pétain: Patriot or Traitor? (1951). Recommended for general background are Denis W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1939 (1940; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1966), and Paul Marie de La Gorce, The French Army: A Military-Political History (trans. 1963).

Additional Sources

Lottman, Herbert R., Pétain, hero or traitor: the untold story, New York: W. Morrow, 1985.

Smith, Gene, The ends of greatness: Haig, Pétain, Rathenau, and Eden: victims of history, New York: Crown Publishers, 1990.

Pétain, Philippe (1856-1951). General Pétain made his name by his defence of Verdun in 1916; he was created a marshal in 1919. After the fall of France in 1940, aged 84, he headed the collaborationist Vichy regime till 1944 [see Occupation and Resistance]. Condemned to death for treason, he was reprieved and imprisoned on the Île d'Yeu.

During World War I, Petain distinguished himself as a hero while defending the fortresses of Verdun. In 1917 he was made commander-in-chief of the French armies under Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and a marshal of France in 1918. The French people viewed him as a symbol of their military victory.

When German forces succeeded in crushing the French army in June 1940, Petain called for the cessation of armed conflict against Germany. On June 16 he was invited to head the new French government, which would rule over the southern part of France---the area not occupied by the Germans---from the town of Vichy. Petain negotiated a truce with the Germans, and was wholeheartedly accepted as prime minister by the French people. They believed in his allegiance to France and his devotion to its honor. At that time, Petain was 84 years old.

Under the leadership of Petain and his assistant, Pierre Laval, the Vichy government collaborated fully with the Nazis. They supported the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish policies, including the Deportation of French Jews to Concentration Camps. Petain was motivated to comply with the Nazis by his "National Revolution" agenda. This was a program intended to transform France into a totalitarian, strictly unified country within the framework of the Nazi plans for a New World Order in Europe. Included within the outline of the "National Revolution" was the plan to eliminate Jewish influence in France. Petain was apathetic to the fate of the French Jews whom he handed over to the Nazis.

After France was liberated in 1944, Petain was convicted of treason by a French court, and was sentenced to death. However, General Charles de Gaulle commuted his sentence to life in prison due to his heroic World War I military record. He was banished to the island of Yeu, off the coast of Brittany in northern France. Petain died there at the age of 96. (For more on Vichy, see also France.)