In 1940 the French armies had been routed humiliatingly by the German forces and Pétain had become head of the French government. An agreed armistice allowed the Germans to occupy two thirds of France, including Paris, and the French government moved to Vichy, a spa town, in central France. In October 1940, Pétain met Hitler, itself a deeply political act, and while the outcome was inconclusive, the meeting was a propaganda coup for the Germans. The armistice signed was a suspension of hostilities, although the Germans were in control.

The trial of Pétain was a political trial, given the nature of the controverted issues. Perhaps the major uncertainty was the penalty. The trial, however, is said not to have been a charade and it proceeded as a criminal trial, albeit that it also promised to be an opportunity for self-education as to the events that lay behind the establishment of the Vichy government. The trial was an examination of an alleged crime, through collaboration with an enemy, in the context of national politics.

What was to be learnt from such a trial was less than absolutely certain, and a diminishing band of nostalgic Pétainists still try to rehabilitate the Vichy government, while others are likely to focus on the role of that government in the deportation of 75,000 Jews. It was a noticeable feature of Pétain’s trial that no Jewish witness was invited to testify. It is scarcely believable now that the fate of the Jews had been peripheral to the trial of Pétain.

This book is the historian’s view of a criminal trial and its context and it is also an excellent work for the general reader.

The charge of treason, given the contentious political decisions at a time of great national danger and uncertainty, makes the trial one difficult to imagine now, and yet the narrative keeps the reader’s interest throughout. Proof of treason and the immediately suggested commutation of sentence to life imprisonment came as no surprise at the time. Pétain died under house arrest in 1951.

Professor Jackson’s clear exposition of a criminal trial in the context of modern French history is an excellent illustration of a certain class of case with serious political consequences, beyond those of the accused. The aphorism cited that “treason is a matter of dates” is illuminating, and so too are the difficulties in obtaining suitably, perhaps, judges and lawyers willing to take on their professional roles in matters of such sensitivity.

Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (London: Allen Lane, 2023)