France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson
On July 23, 1945, ten weeks after the end of the Second World War, a throng of lawyers, journalists and vengeance-seekers crowded a stifling courtroom in Paris’s Palais de Justice for the trial of an 89-year-old hero of the First World War. The declared purpose was to impose justice on Marshal Philippe Pétain for his allegedly treasonable 1940 surrender to Hitler and subsequent presidency through the German occupation of France.
General Charles de Gaulle, by 1945 head of state, created a myth that the Resistance that he led from London was the true soul of la patrie. Yet no one knew better than himself that the real France, until 1944, was centered upon its government in Vichy.
