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book: France on Trial
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France on Trial

The Case of Marshal Pétain
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2023

About this book

A Telegraph, Spectator, Prospect, and Times Best Book of the Year

“This is a story not just about Pétain but about war and resistance, the moral compromises of leadership, and the meaning of France itself.”―Margaret MacMillan

“This is a finely tuned history…Those who enjoy tales of the sparring among excellent lawyers arguing an important case will find this book riveting. And for those who want to understand contemporary France and its intricate politics, France on Trial provides…a vibrant analysis of a trial and verdict that remain contentious almost eight decades later.”—Ronald C. Rosbottom, Wall Street Journal

“Shows Jackson at his best—precise in detail, vivid in imagery, alert to irony, firm in judgment—and carefully disentangles the questions surrounding the Vichy regime that continue to vex French society.” —Robert O. Paxton, Harper’s

In the terrible month of October 1940, few things were more shocking than the sight of Marshal Philippe Pétain—supremely decorated hero of the First World War, now head of the French government—shaking hands with Hitler. Pétain announced that France would henceforth collaborate with Germany. “This is my policy,” he intoned. “My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.” 

Five years later, Pétain was put on trial for his conduct during the war. He stood accused of treason, charged with heading a conspiracy to destroy France’s democratic government and collaborating with Nazi Germany.  

Award-winning author Julian Jackson uses Pétain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine one of history’s great moral dilemmas. Was the policy of collaboration “four years to erase from our history,” as the prosecution claimed? Or was it, as conservative politicians insist to this day, a sacrifice that placed pragmatism above moral purity? As head of the Vichy regime, Pétain became the lightning rod for collective guilt and retribution. But he has also been an icon of the nationalist right ever since. In France on Trial, Jackson blends courtroom drama, political intrigue, and brilliant narrative history to highlight the hard choices and moral compromises leaders make in times of war.

Reviews

This is a finely tuned history…Those who enjoy tales of the sparring among excellent lawyers arguing an important case will find this book riveting. And for those who want to understand contemporary France and its intricate politics, France on Trial provides…a vibrant analysis of a trial and verdict that remain contentious almost eight decades later.
-- Ronald C. Rosbottom Wall Street Journal

[An] enthralling book, as gripping as it is scholarly.
-- Geoffrey Wheatcroft New York Review of Books

High-spirited and imaginative…rich with extraordinary narrative and acute opinion…Jackson’s book should leave readers with sympathy for those who were not agile enough to climb through the looking-glass.
-- Neal Ascherson London Review of Books

Painstakingly researched…Jackson vividly reconstructs the drama.
-- The Economist

Shows Jackson at his best—precise in detail, vivid in imagery, alert to irony, firm in judgment—and carefully disentangles the questions surrounding the Vichy regime that continue to vex French society.
-- Robert O. Paxton Harper's

Masterly…The trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself.
-- Martin Kettle The Guardian

[Jackson’s] vision sweeps both backwards—to take in the tragicomedy of Pétain’s forced departure from France in the summer of 1944 and subsequent exile in a German castle at Sigmaringen—and forwards to Pétain’s imprisonment, death and posthumous mythologization…[This] scrupulous and vivid reconstruction of the trial reveals much about the Vichy regime and the way that it was remembered in postwar France.
-- Richard Vinen Times Literary Supplement

Exceptional…A highly detailed account of the trial itself is presented in the first two parts of the book, while the concluding section offers a painful examination of the Vichy regime’s role in the Holocaust.
-- John Reeves Los Angeles Review of Books

[A] superb book…Jackson is that rare beast: a distinguished academic historian who writes with air and clarity. It makes him a pleasure to engage with, and when reading about the legal process, one could almost be buried in a work of high-class fiction. He is scrupulously objective in his description of personalities and events.
-- Simon Heffer The Telegraph

Splendid…The central narrative of the trial grips like a thriller and the history of Vichy itself, which inevitably involves much retrospective explanation, is seamlessly woven into it without ever slowing the story’s momentum. Jackson’s vivid prose is leavened by wit and sharpened by telling details…This is a substantial achievement.
-- Munro Price Literary Review

Has France truly come to terms with its history of occupation and collaboration? That’s the question hanging over this exceptionally wise and clever book, which focuses on the trial of the former war hero turned Vichy supremo Philippe Pétain in July 1945. With meticulous care Julian Jackson explores the cruelties of the Vichy regime, as well as the myths and evasions of France’s attitude to its wartime past.
-- The Times

A masterful account of the 1945 treason case that forced a reckoning with four years of Nazi collaboration.
-- John Thornhill Financial Times

[An] absorbing account…[and] an essential key to understanding the country’s recent past.
-- Patrick Marnham The Spectator

An enthralling book…The past is dangerous, you see. Real, hard history of this kind can reach out of the page and stick its thumb in your eye. Who needs fiction when the truth is as gripping as this?
-- Peter Hitchens The Mail on Sunday

Julian Jackson, the foremost historian of the period, here provides a magisterial account of this extraordinary yet also somehow squalid courtroom drama and its context…[A] fine, thought-provoking book.
-- Max Hastings Sunday Times

A riveting and meticulous recreation of the Vichy leader’s 1945 prosecution for collaborating with the German occupiers…Exemplary and fascinating.
-- Michael Ignatieff Project Syndicate

Jackson’s France on Trial is one of those instant classic history books that are immediately recognisable as a masterpiece of scholarship.
-- Andrew Roberts Aspects of History

A meticulously researched, attractively written account of the trial of the first world war hero turned Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain and its woeful Vichy background. Excellent on Pétain’s legacy in modern right-wing French politics, Jackson adopts the requisite tone for a historian of our times, interrogating uncomfortable truths with objectivity mixed with lightness of touch.
-- Andrew Lycett The Spectator

Jackson is one of the best historians of twentieth-century France and this 2022 study confirms that reputation…illustrates how the trial of Philippe Pétain, France’s World War I hero, reflected the deep political fractures that marked France before 1945 and continue to do so today.
-- Samuel Gregg Law & Liberty

Jackson’s vivid, stylish, sometimes even cinematic reconstruction suggests that this court case was about far more than one elderly man. It also turned into a proxy debate between French people who were horrified by their country’s partial collaboration with Nazism and those who felt there had been no practical alternative…[A] gripping and timely book.
-- Andrew Lynch Business Post

Few historians know 20th century France as well as Jackson, and fewer historians write as well as he does. His account of the trial moves seamlessly between the comic and tragic, the appealing and appalling.
-- Robert Zaretsky The Forward

I have nothing but praise for the way Jackson tells the story, with a clear elucidation of the swirling political passions, and vivid portraits of the heroes and villains, and those in between.
-- Piers Paul Read The Tablet

Jackson has woven a story so rich in both the historical and the metaphysical that it leaves the reader with a sense of uncertainty about how to view Pétain…[He] demonstrates to near perfection that history is not always black and white.
-- Dustin Bass Epoch Times

Jackson deftly uses the trial of the French World War I hero-turned-Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain to explore France’s role in World War II and the Holocaust, as well as the nation’s struggles with memory and responsibility.
-- Sean Durns Washington Examiner

A first-rate historian of things French, Julian Jackson writes well and jargon-free…[France on Trial is] a book with such insight into the years when France and Germany engaged in mutual destruction.
-- David Pryce-Jones New Criterion

A magnificent work…[Jackson] marks himself as a top scholar of the Vichy period with this volume…[he] is to be commended for presenting a fair, balanced view of the evidence and letting readers make the final judgement.
-- A. M. Mayer Choice

A captivating account of the 1945 trial of the French marshal who had agreed to an armistice with the Nazi regime in 1940…A highly insightful work of French history.
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Instead of proceeding from theoretical postulates, Julian Jackson’s masterful work enables the reader to apprehend the case of Marshal Pétain in the unsettlingly complexity of the German defeat and occupation of France as well as of the murky realities of the human—all too human—protagonists of his trial.
-- Nathan Bracher EuropeNow

A courtroom procedural of the first order.
-- Nicole Dombrowski Riser H-France Forum

Even when covering familiar ground, Jackson adds original insights in a fresh retelling as he reviews
the 1945 trial in the light of contemporary realities…makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing conversation about Pétain’s legacy.


-- Alice J. Strange French Review

A brilliantly researched and vividly narrated attempt to understand and assess a man alternately among the most admired and most abhorred in modern French history…Jackson manages to engage the reader, adopting a rich literary style with which to communicate not only the data and opinions expressed but also the atmosphere in and outside the court and something of the personality of a variety of characters.
-- Daniel Snowman Jewish Chronicle

The great general of the First World War, collaborator with Germany in the Second, how is Marshal Philippe Pétain to be remembered? His trial on charges of treason divided the French in 1945 and has divided them ever since. In the hands of Julian Jackson, a superb historian with the sensibility of a novelist, this is a story not just about Pétain but about war and resistance, the moral compromises of leadership, and the meaning of France itself.
-- Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919

Julian Jackson brings to life here with his customary mastery the trial in 1945 of France’s highest-ranking military officer, accused of having betrayed his country. Philippe Pétain knew extremes of glory and shame in his long military career. In 1919, as the supreme commander of French armies in World War I, he rode down the Champs-Elysées at the head of a victory parade. After June 1940, with almost unlimited power and prestige, he governed France under German occupation. In 1945, he sat in a French courtroom charged with treason for his exercise of that power. In this compelling book, Jackson gives the reader a seat in the jury box and then follows France’s debate over Pétain—hero or traitor?—over the next fifty years.
-- Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism

Julian Jackson masterfully performs a high-wire act of historical narration, using the story of the trial of Philippe Pétain to explore in brilliant detail how people in France fought over competing understandings of the Vichy regime—both at the time and ever since. This is a book of great originality, in both form and substance, that will become a landmark in the literature on France and the Second World War.
-- Herrick Chapman, author of France’s Long Reconstruction

The principal figures in France on Trial parade in front of us as in a film or a play, all charged in their own way with their past and all trying one after another to justify themselves. Pétain is there at the center, silent like a statue. It is history, but also more than history, a kind of classical tragedy where the press take the role of the chorus. A captivating book.
-- Antoine Prost, University of Paris

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    List of Illustrations

    ix
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    Map: Pétain’s last journeys

    xi
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    Acknowledgements

    xiii
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    Dramatis Personae

    xv
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    Introduction: The Fateful Handshake

    xix
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  • Part One Before the Trial
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    1 The Last Days of Vichy

    1
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    2 A Castle in Germany

    13
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    3 Paris after Liberation

    25
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    4 Pétain’s Return

    40
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    5 Preparing the Trial

    59
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    6 Interrogating the Prisoner

    77
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  • Part Two In the Courtroom
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    7 France Waits

    95
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    8 First Day in Court

    105
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    9 Republican Ghosts

    123
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    10 Debating the Armistice

    134
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    11 The Defence Fights Back

    151
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    12 Last Witnesses for the Prosecution

    162
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    13 ‘You Will Not Make Me Say That the Marshal is a Traitor’

    181
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    14 The Pierre Laval Show

    194
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    15 Generals and Bureaucrats

    216
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    16 The Absent Jews

    232
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    17 The Count, the Assassin and the Blind General

    240
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    18 Réquisitoire and Plaidoiries

    251
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    19 The Verdict

    268
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  • Part Three Afterlives
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    20 The Prisoner

    283
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    21 Vichy Emerges from the Catacombs

    295
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    22 Keepers of the Flame

    303
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    23 Memory Wars

    314
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    24 Remembering the Jews

    330
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    25 Judging Pétain Today

    346
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    Epilogue: On the Pétain Trail

    362
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    Notes

    375
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    Sources

    409
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    Index

    417
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 6, 2023
eBook ISBN:
9780674294578
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674294578
eBook ISBN: 9780674294578
Keywords for this book
liberation; pierre laval; fascism; andre mornet; parliament; jurors; witnesses; resistance; occupation; north africa; armistice; crimes against humanity; holocaust; communism; sigmaringen; prison; paul reynaud; maxime weygand
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