François Mauriac, the left-leaning, Nobel Prize–winning, Catholic novelist, said of the trial of Marshal Pétain that it would never be over: a sentiment more or less echoed by General de Gaulle. And certainly, the figure of Pétain continues to divide opinion in France, at least among those with opinions on such matters. Was he a traitor to France, or its savior, or perhaps something in between the two?
Professor Julian Jackson has written a superb book about Pétain’s trial, its circumstances, and its aftermath. I would like to say that I read it in one sitting, but it was too long for that; but I looked forward impatiently to picking it up again, all else being but a regrettable interruption.
The continued salience of what might be called the “Pétain question” is illustrated by the fact that one of the candidates in the last French presidential election, Éric Zemmour, claimed that Pétain was the savior of the French Jews. This was all the more startling because Zemmour himself is Jewish (his parents emigrated from Algeria to France not long before independence), and because, if Pétain is exonerated in the matter of the deportation of seventy-five thousand Jews during the war to Germany, there to be murdered, his reputation is all but saved: for it is in this matter that his record is most excoriated.
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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