“France on Trial” uses the leader’s case to examine France’s collective guilt about collaborating with the Nazis
The court case took place over three weeks, between victory over the Third Reich on May 8th 1945 and the Nuremberg trials that began in November that year. Mr Jackson vividly reconstructs the drama. It was the height of summer. Rationing was still in place. But cinemas in Paris were open, as was the Louvre, where thehad returned after being hidden for four years in different secret locations around France.
When the old man in a khaki field uniform entered the courtroom, it fell silent. Pétain’s opening statement, writes Mr Jackson, was “a compilation of dubious assertions and half-truths, approximations and provocations”. He had signed the armistice as an “act of salvation”, he insisted. It had spared France “the fate of”, argued his defence lawyers.
After meeting Hitler, Pétain had declared: “It is I alone who will be judged by history.” In 1945 the Paris court certainly judged him severely. But it was not until 1995 that a French president, Jacques Chirac, acknowledged his country’s responsibility for terrible acts carried out under occupation, referring specifically to the round-up of thousands of Jews at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ stadium in Paris in 1942 before they were sent to their deaths.
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