# Philippe Pétain **Philippe Pétain** (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951) was the WWI hero turned head of the collaborationist Vichy French State 1940–1944; his "National Revolution" of work-family-fatherland and complicity in deporting Jews made his name a synonym for authoritarian collaboration. For the KB he is the figure the French far right has never finished arguing about — the test of whether a de-demonized [[National Rally]] has actually broken with its origins. ## The Lion of Verdun A Saint-Cyr graduate (1876), Pétain made his name holding Verdun in 1916, the defining French battle of [[World War I]], and became commander-in-chief in 1917 after the failed Nivelle offensive and the army mutinies, restoring discipline through a mix of concessions and measured punishment. He was made Marshal of France on **21 November 1918**. Between the wars he ran the army, served as Minister of War (1934) and, from **March 1939**, as ambassador to [[Francisco Franco]]'s Spain. He was also the patron of a young officer named [[Charles de Gaulle]]. ## Vichy | Date | Event | |------|-------| | **16 Jun 1940** | Becomes prime minister as the French front collapses | | **22 Jun 1940** | Signs the armistice with Germany | | **10 Jul 1940** | Parliament votes **569–80** to give him constituent powers; the Third Republic ends | | **Oct 1940** | Signs the first *Statut des Juifs* on Vichy's own initiative, unprompted by Germany | | **24 Oct 1940** | Meets [[Adolf Hitler]] at Montoire; collaboration becomes declared policy | | **11 Nov 1942** | Germany occupies the whole country; Pétain is reduced to a figurehead | *Travail, famille, patrie* replaced the republican motto, and French police carried out the registrations and roundups that fed the [[Holocaust]]. The regime's apology — that Pétain was a "shield" protecting France from worse — is dismantled on [[Vichy France]]. ## Trial and imprisonment Tried for treason from **23 July to 15 August 1945**, he was convicted and sentenced to death; de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment because of his age. He was held at the Fort du Portalet and then the Fort de Pierre-Levée on the Île d'Yeu, where he died in 1951. In February 1973 extremists stole his coffin to demand reburial at Verdun; it was recovered days later. De Gaulle's verdict on the life: "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre." ## The afterlife on the French right The line of descent runs from [[Charles Maurras]] and [[Action Française]], whose doctrine Vichy put into power, to the present: | Figure | Year | Position on Pétain | |--------|------|--------------------| | [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] | 2015, 2018 | Expelled from the party he founded in 2015 over, among other things, his defence of the Vichy regime; his 2018 memoirs call the 1940 armistice "legal and legitimate" | | [[Éric Zemmour]] | 2014 | *Le Suicide français* argues Vichy protected French Jews by giving up foreign Jews to deportation — the reverse of the historians' consensus established since Robert Paxton in the 1970s | | [[Éric Zemmour]] | 2019–2025 | Repeats the claim in a 2019 TV debate; acquitted at first instance and on appeal; the Cour de cassation overturns the acquittal; fined **€10,000 on 2 April 2025** for contesting crimes against humanity; says he will appeal | | [[Emmanuel Macron]] | Nov 2018 | Suggests Pétain merited tribute as a WWI soldier, then rules out any individual homage | | [[Marine Le Pen]] | Nov 2018 | Calls Macron's remark "extrêmement maladroit" — distancing from her father without addressing the substance | The Zemmour argument is the one that matters most. The claim that a French state sorting people by origin was acting protectively is the same claim his immigration politics makes now. ## See Also - [[Vichy France]] · [[Charles de Gaulle]] · [[Action Française]] · [[Charles Maurras]] · [[Jean-Marie Le Pen]] · [[Marine Le Pen]] · [[National Rally]] · [[Éric Zemmour]] · [[Holocaust]] · [[Antisemitism]] · [[French History Hub]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]]