Every week--or almost every week--The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is “France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain” by Julian Jackson. Published in 2023, book focuses on the 1945 trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the head of the Vichy regime in France during World War II. Julian Jackson, emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary College, University of London, uses the trial to examine broader themes of French national identity, collaboration, memory and justice after the war.

Jackson's thesis is that while it was Pétain who stood trial, it was France itself that was being judged: its wartime choices, its memory, its institutions. The Pétain trial was less about one man’s fate and more about a nation’s attempt to re-found itself morally and politically after wartime catastrophe. The trial served to define post-war French national identity.

Jackson reconstructs the three-week trial in detail, including courtroom drama, legal procedures, witnesses and the arguments of defense counsel and prosecutors. He then situates the trial in the longer arc of French memory and history, in particular on the transformation of the image of Pétain, and on the remembrance of Vichy.

Vichy and Pétain are inseparable. It was Pétain’s reputation—the immortal hero of the Battle of Verdun—that led many Frenchmen to accept the authority of Vichy. The purpose of the Pétain trial was to challenge the easy political acceptance that came with that reputation. The goal was to distinguish legitimate state action from collaboration.

Ultimately, the issue came down to whether Vichy was a legitimate political entity, the lineage of which was France's Third Republic. There was also the issue of whether Vichy was a sovereign French regime that made decisions for itself or whether it was a German puppet state.

Pétain was tried not by an ordinary criminal court, but by the Haute Cour de Justice — a special high court established by an ordinance issued by General de Gaulle’s provisional government on Nov. 18, 1944. The court was created specifically to judge members of the Vichy regime for acts committed in connection with collaboration.

The court combined professional magistrates and parliamentarians. The purpose was to give political trials a judicial form, not to apply an existing code but to legitimize the moral and political reckoning that went together with the Liberation.

The formal charges against Pétain were twofold: First, high treason under Article 75 of the 1810 Penal Code. Second, attacks on the internal security of the state, covering unconstitutional acts and collaborationist measures.
The prosecution alleged that Pétain had betrayed his duty as head of state by seeking an armistice and collaborating with the enemy.

The prosecution also alleged that Pétain had assumed dictatorial powers illegally after the vote that dissolved the Third Republic; that he had enacted policies that aided the enemy, including the persecution of Jews, the suppression of resistance and the dispatch of French labor to Germany; that he had sanctioned and endorsed the collaborationist government of Pierre Laval; that Pétain had encouraged French participation in Germany’s war effort; and that he had failed to protect French sovereignty and the French people from occupation.

The problem for the prosecutors was that Pétain’s “crimes” had not been crimes at the time they were allegedly committed. Even if France were under German domination, Pétain had been the de facto and de jure head of state, as recognized by French law. On July 10, 1940, the French National Assembly at Vichy voted overwhelmingly to give Pétain “full powers” to draw up a new constitution. The marshal used those powers to dissolve the Third Republic and install himself as France’s head of state.

At the time, this was legal under the procedures of the Third Republic. Only later did de Gaulle’s government declare that the vote had been null and void ab initio (from the outset) because of coercion, illegitimacy and surrender to the enemy. Thus, in 1945, prosecutors were forced to argue rather implausibly that Vichy had never legally existed, and that therefore Pétain could be tried as a private citizen guilty of treason against the legitimate Republic, which, according to de Gaulle and his government, had continued to exist in London and Algiers.

Jackson has no difficulty establishing how fragile this prosecutorial logic was. It all depended on de Gaulle’s own retroactive assertion of legitimacy, not on any prior law.

The main treason clause (Article 75) required active collaboration with an enemy power. The prosecutors cited Pétain’s meetings with Hitler, his approval of Laval’s policy of sending French workers to Germany and his consent to anti-Jewish laws. They sought to prove that Pétain’s collaboration had been voluntary and ideological, not merely pragmatic. They presented him as the author of France’s moral collapse, not its victim; as a man who chose obedience to Germany over loyalty to the Republic; and as the founder of a regime that persecuted its own citizens, including Jews and resisters.

Pétain in response, however argued that he had never personally sought to help Germany achieve its war aims; that he had been coerced by the occupation; and that he had maintained a French administration in the unoccupied zone, one that that had not served “the enemy.”

So the treason charge, while politically powerful, was legally dubious. Jackson notes that many jurists privately admitted that, strictly under the law that prevailed from 1940 to 1944, it was very hard to make “treason” stick to a head of state whose authority, however compromised, had been recognized domestically and internationally.

Jackson describes Pétain as claiming during the trial, “I was France. I alone embodied her sovereignty after 1940.” Thus, for the judges to convict him, they had to deny his claim that he had ever represented France, and thereby to affirm that Vichy had never been the real France. However, there was no legal basis for such a judicial finding. Vichy was the de facto government of France. The government-in-exile in London, led by de Gaulle, governed nothing.

The defense also argued that Pétain had acted in good faith: He had believed that collaboration would protect France. While he might have been disastrously wrong, an error of judgment is not treason. Jackson points out that this argument had emotional power; even the judges found it hard to see French World War I hero Pétain as a traitor.

On Aug. 15, 1945, the court found Pétain guilty on all counts sentenced him to death. Immediately after the verdict, though, the court unanimously recommended clemency, on account of his age and his World War I service. De Gaulle duly commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

De Gaulle had served under Pétain at Verdun and still felt a certain reverence for the old man. Pétain’s crime, he argued, was “political and moral, not one to be expiated by blood.” Executing the 89-year-old marshal would have been “a grotesque spectacle,” likely to divide the nation rather than unify it. Moreover, even by the time of the trial, Pétain was senile and barely responsive.

Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval was not so fortunate however. Jackson notes that there existed “no reservoir of residual affection” for Laval. Laval personified opportunism and cynicism; Pétain personified misguided patriotism. Therefore, while Pétain could be cast as the “tragic old man who betrayed his own myth,” Laval was seen as the conscious collaborator. The authorities that had taken power in 1944 now demanded that an example be set of someone, and Vichy's former prime minister was that someone. Laval was executed on Oct. 15, 1945, after having failed to commit suicide by swallowing cyanide.

Julian Jackson’s “France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain” is a fascinating book, at once scholarly and readable. The book demonstrates that cases that may seem to be unimpeachable, both morally and legally, turn out to be much flimsier and dubious than we might have been led to believe.