Henri Philippe Petain

Henri-Philippe Petain was born in Cauch-a-la-Tour in 1856. He joined the French Army in 1876 and attending the St Cyr Military School and spent many years as an infantry officer and an army instructor. After studying the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) Petain became convinced that the increased fire-power of modern weapons strongly favoured the defensive. Others in the French Army, for example, Ferdinand Foch, believed the opposite to be true. On the outbreak of the First World War Petain was due to retire from the army. Instead he was promoted to brigadier and took part in the Artois Offensive. In 1915 Joseph Joffre sent Petain to command the French troops at Verdun. Afterwards Petain was praised for his artillery-based defensive operations and his organisation of manpower resources. After the disastrous Nivelle Offensive in the spring of 1917, the French Army suffered widespread mutinies on the Western Front. Petain replaced Robert Nivelle as Commander-in-Chief. This was a popular choice as Petain, unlike Nivelle, had a reputation for having a deep concern for the lives of his soldiers. By improving the living conditions of the soldiers at the front and restricting the French Army to defensive operations, Petain gradually improved the morale of his troops. Considered to be too defensively minded, it was Ferdinand Foch rather than Petain who was given the main role in the Allied offensive in the autumn of 1918. Promoted to Field Marshal two weeks after the Armistice, Petain remained active in French military affairs and served as War Minister in 1934. Until the summer of 1940, Pétain was held in high regard by statesmen both at home and abroad. French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud brought Pétain, General Maxime Weygand and the newly-promoted Brigadier-General de Gaulle, whose 4th Armoured Division had launched one of the few French counterattacks in May 1940, into his War Cabinet, hoping that the trio, and especially Pétain, would instill a renewed spirit of resistance and patriotism in the French army. The social and political divisions in France were too great, however, and Reynaud had misjudged Pétain, a man who despised the corruption, inefficiency and political fragmentation of the French Third Republic. Maxime Weygand was unable to stem the German advance during the second stage of the Battle of France. When defeat for metropolitan France became certain, the Cabinet debated their continuing the war in North Africa, to fight on from the colonial territory alongside the British. Pétain's refusal to leave the country at this juncture created an impasse that divided the Cabinet and which was only broken by Reynaud's resignation and President Albert Lebrun's invitation to Pétain to form a government. Lebrun soon became sidelined, leading to the appointment of the old Marshal as head of state with extraordinary powers. The constitutionality of these actions was later challenged by de Gaulle's government, but at the time Pétain was widely accepted as France's saviour. On 22 June he signed an armistice with Germany that gave Nazi Germany control over the north and west of the country, including Paris and all of the Atlantic coastline, but left the rest, around two-fifths of France's prewar territory, unoccupied, with its administrative centre in the resort town of Vichy. The Chamber of Deputies and Senate, meeting together as a "Congrès", had an emergency meeting on 10 July to ratify the armistice. At the same time, it voted 569-80 (with 18 abstentions) to grant Pétain the authority to draw up a new constitution, effectively voting the Third Republic out of existence.[4] On the next day, Pétain formally assumed near-absolute powers as "Head of State". Pétain was reactionary by temperament and education, and quickly began blaming the Third Republic and its liberal democracy for the French defeat. In its place, he set up a more authoritarian regime. The republican motto of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" was swept aside and replaced with "Travail, famille, patrie" (Work, family, fatherland). Fascistic factions and revolutionary conservative factions within the Pétain government used the opportunity to launch an ambitious program known as the "National Revolution" in which much of the former Third Republic's secular and liberal traditions were rejected in favor of the promotion of an authoritarian and paternalist Catholic society. Pétain, amongst others, took exception to the use of the inflammatory term "revolution" to describe an essentially conservative movement but was otherwise a willing participant in the transformation of French society from "Republic" to "State". He himself described Vichy France as "a social hierarchy...rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men". Pétain immediately used his new powers to order harsh measures, including the dismissal of republican civil servants, the installation of exceptional jurisdictions, the proclamation of anti-Semitic laws, and the imprisonment of his opponents and foreign refugees. He organized a "Légion Française des Combattants", in which he included "Friends of the Legion" and "Cadets of the Legion", groups of those who had never fought but who were politically attached to his regime. Pétain championed a rural, Catholic France that spurned internationalism. As a retired Generalissimo, he ran the country on military lines, which might have been better received had he not already surrendered to Adolf Hitler's Germany. While to historians and modern day observers Pétain was clearly Hitler's puppet, at the time many Frenchmen believed that de Gaulle and his Free French were similarly in the hands of foreign powers. However, after 1942 it became increasingly clear that the Maréchal was Hitler's puppet. Neither Pétain nor his successive Deputies, Pierre Laval, Pierre-Etienne Flandin or Admiral François Darlan, gave significant resistance to requests by the Germans to indirectly aid the Axis Powers. Yet, when Hitler met Pétain at Montoire in October 1940 to discuss Vichy's role in the new European Order, the Marshal "listened to Hitler in silence. Not once did he offer a sympathetic word for Germany". However, Vichy France remained neutral as a state, albeit opposed to the Free French. After the British attack on Mers el Kébir and Dakar, Pétain took the initiative to collaborate with the occupiers. Pétain accepted the creation of a collaborationist armed militia ("Milice") under the command of Joseph Darnand, who, along with German forces, led a campaign of repression against the French resistance ("Maquis"). The honors that Darnand acquired included SS-Major. Pétain admitted Darnand into his government as Secretary of the Maintenance of Public Order (Secrétaire d'Etat au Maintien de l'Ordre). In August 1944, Pétain made an attempt to distance himself from the crimes of the militia by writing Darnand a letter of reprimand for the organization's "excesses." The latter wrote a sarcastic reply, telling Pétain that he should have "thought of this before". Such were the crimes of Frenchmen against Frenchmen - and in 1944/45 those Frenchmen and women who had backed the losing side were dealt terrible treatment when Liberation finally came. Pétain provided the Axis forces with large supplies of manufactured goods and foodstuffs, and also ordered Vichy troops in France's colonial empire to fight against Allied forces everywhere (in Dakar, Syria, Madagascar, Oran and Morocco), in line with his commitments in the 1940 armistice. He also received German forces without any resistance (in Syria, Tunisia and Southern France), the latter due to Laval's urging. Petain's motives are a topic of wide conjecture. Sir Winston Churchill had said to M. Reynaud during the impending fall of France of Petain, "...he had always been a defeatist, even in the last war." [6] Whether Petain was indeed trying to spare his country further woes, whether he truly saw no hope of victory, whether he envisaged an opportunity for higher political and historical aspirations for himself, or whether he simply had no will to fight are questions that surely only he could answer. On 11 November 1942, German forces invaded the unoccupied zone of Southern France in response to the Allied Operation Torch landings in North Africa and Vichy Admiral François Darlan's agreeing to support the Allies. Although Vichy France nominally remained in existence, Pétain became nothing more than a figurehead, as the Nazis abandoned the pretense of an "independent" Vichy government. After 7 September 1944, Petain and other members of the Vichy cabinet were relocated to Sigmaringen Germany, where they established a government-in-exile until April 1945. Pétain, who had been forcibly brought there by the Germans,refused to participate in the governmental commission, which was headed by Fernand de Brinon. On 15 August 1945, Pétain was tried for collaboration (or treason), convicted and sentenced to cashiering and death by firing squad. He was therefore stripped of all his military ranks and honours except that of Maréchal (because Maréchal is a distinction conferred by a special personal law passed by the French Parliament, and under the principle of separation of powers a court does not have the power to revert a law passed by Parliament). As to the death sentence, Charles de Gaulle, who was President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic at the end of the war, commuted it to life imprisonment on the grounds of Pétain's age and his World War I contributions. In prison on Île d'Yeu, an island off the Atlantic coast, he soon became entirely senile, and required constant nursing care. He died in prison at Fort de Pierre de Levée in 1951, at the age of 95. His body is buried at a marine cemetery near the prison. Calls are sometimes made for his remains to be re-interred in the grave which had been prepared for him at Verdun.