Philippe Pétain

Philippe Pétain was a French soldier whose career ran from national hero to convicted traitor. Celebrated as the defender of Verdun in the First World War, he was called to power at the age of 84 when France collapsed in 1940, and for four years headed the authoritarian Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazi Germany. After the liberation a French court sentenced him to death for treason; the sentence was commuted, and he died a prisoner in 1951.

Henri Philippe Pétain was born on 24 April 1856 at Cauchy-à-la-Tour in the Pas-de-Calais, the only son of a farming family. He entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1876 and spent the next decades in garrison and staff posts, later teaching infantry tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre. His promotion was slow, partly because he rejected the army's faith in the all-out infantry charge and taught instead that "firepower kills". In 1914, aged 58, he was still a colonel.

The war transformed his career. Promoted rapidly in 1914–15, he took command of the Second Army and, from February 1916, directed the defence of Verdun in the Battle of Verdun. He rotated divisions out of the line after short tours and kept lorries moving along the Voie Sacrée, the road that supplied the city. In 1917, after the failed Nivelle offensive set off mutinies across much of the army, he became commander-in-chief. He restored order with better leave and rest and a promise to stop futile attacks, while courts martial sentenced 554 men to death, most of whom had their sentences commuted. He was made a Marshal of France on 21 November 1918, after the First World War ended.

Pétain held the top post in the peacetime army until 1931 and backed the frontier fortifications that became the Maginot Line. In 1925 he commanded French forces in the Rif War in Morocco, alongside the Spanish. He served as Minister of War in 1934 and in 1939 went to Madrid as ambassador to Franco's new government.

During the German invasion in May 1940 Paul Reynaud brought Pétain into his government as deputy prime minister. As the Battle of France was lost, Pétain argued for an armistice, and in mid-June, at Bordeaux, he replaced Reynaud as head of government. The armistice of 22 June left the north and west of France under German occupation. On 10 July parliament, meeting at Vichy, voted by 569 to 80 to give his cabinet power to draft a new constitution, a vote most French historians regard as illegal. Pétain then took near-absolute power as head of the "French State", replacing the republican motto with "Work, family, fatherland".

The regime purged officials, censored the press and jailed opponents. Pétain met Adolf Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, and the photograph of their handshake caused an outcry in Britain. Vichy's antisemitic laws of October 1940 defined Jews by race and allowed foreign Jews to be interned, were drafted on the regime's own initiative rather than on German orders, and became the first step in the regime's part in the Holocaust. After Germany occupied the southern zone in November 1942 Pétain's real power shrank further. In 1943 he accepted the creation of the Milice, a militia that hunted the Resistance alongside German forces.

In August 1944 the Germans removed Pétain against his will, first to Belfort and then to Sigmaringen in Germany. He returned to France in April 1945 to face trial. The High Court tried him for treason from 23 July to 15 August 1945; he said little, and at the end he was convicted on all charges and sentenced to death. Citing his age, Charles de Gaulle, head of the provisional government, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was held at Fort du Portalet and then on the Île d'Yeu, where, increasingly senile, he died on 23 July 1951 at the age of 95.

Our 1914 and 1920 maps frame the war that made his name, and the 1938 and 1945 maps show France before the defeat of 1940 and after the liberation.