France has a way of throwing up Trials of the Century, judicial contests where history itself is in the dock. Exhibit A: Dreyfus. (“It’s all there. It all begins there.” —François Mauriac). In 1945, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France, hero of Verdun, and self-styled shield of the French people after the defeat of 1940, stood accused of treason. But the real defendant was France itself and the verdict, as needs be in this kind of trial, marked only a temporary judgment, for every generation writes its own history. One measure of our own dispiriting times is that Pétain’s story again seems relevant…

We Americans tend to view 1940 through a British lens. The great escape from Dunkirk. We shall fight them on the beaches. But history continued in France as well, with no island to escape to. Or maybe there was. The government, led by Premier Paul Reynaud, could have carried on the struggle from France’s North African possessions. Reynaud summoned the now 84-year old Pétain to his side, in hopes that the great war hero’s presence would boost morale. But Pétain swiftly concluded that the war was lost and an armistice necessary to save the French people from further suffering. Given the Marshal’s great prestige, his position prevailed. Officials trying to sail for Algeria were blocked. France was divided, the northern and coastal regions falling under Nazi occupation, and a rump state based in Vichy emerged—recognized and supported by the U.S., incidentally—and led by Pétain.

Today we have a greater understanding that Vichy was a very bad place, one where French reactionaries, anti-Dreyfusards one might say, thanks to Hitler could build the France of their dreams. After liberation, Pétain would be convicted of treason as a matter of course, but in 1945 his defenses resonated with many Frenchman. Most significant was the claim that Pétain sacrificed his honor to act as shield for the defeated French. Thanks to the armistice, the Marshal’s legal team argued, France suffered less than occupied nations like Belgium and especially the Netherlands. Also, they hinted, crafty Pétain was playing a double game, doing the needful with Hitler while (somehow) helping the Allies, or (somehow) helping de Gaulle do so.

These arguments deserved to be taken seriously, especially as the parade of Third Republic politicos who emerged to testify against Pétain didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory during the war. But they work better if one forgets that Vichy instructed its forces to resist the Allied invasion of North Africa, and they worked better in 1945 because no one much cared then about the Jews that Vichy shipped off to Auschwitz. A shield for some Frenchmen but not others….

I focus here on the large historical picture. Professor Jackson, author of a well-regarded biography of de Gaulle, also takes the reader through the fascinating trial itself and up to the present day. Pétain, like Dreyfus, came to stand for much more than his own formidable achievements.

This is a marvelous book on a subject of enduring historical relevance. 5 stars. ( )