Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph
Pétain (24 April 1856 – 23 July 1951), generally known as
Philippe Pétain or Marshal Pétain
(Maréchal Pétain), was a French
general who
reached the distinction of Marshal of
France, and was later Chief of
State of Vichy France (Chef de
l'État Français), from 1940 to 1944. Pétain, who was 84
years old in 1940, ranks as France's oldest head of state.
Because of
his outstanding military leadership in World War I, particularly
during the Battle of
Verdun
, he was viewed as a hero in France. However,
during the 1920s and 1930s, while remaining the highest ranking
military authority, he failed to modernize the French military
except for the ineffective
Maginot
Line. After the
French defeat in
June 1940, Pétain was legally voted in as Head of State (Chef
de l'Etat) by the French Parliament.
However, Pétain
surrendered France to Germany and, along with his cabinet,
including later on Pierre Laval,
transformed the French Republic into the French State, an authoritarian (not
totalitarian) dictatorship administered from the town of Vichy
in central
France. As the war progressed, the Vichy Government sank
deeper into collaboration with the German occupiers which finally
took control of the totality of metropolitan France. Petain's
actions during World War II resulted in a conviction and death
sentence for
treason, which was commuted to
life imprisonment by
Charles de
Gaulle. In modern France he is remembered as an ambiguous
figure while
pétainisme is a derogatory term for certain
reactionary policies.
Early life
Pétain was
born in Cauchy-à-la-Tour
(in the Pas-de-Calais
département in the north
of France) in 1856. He joined the
French Army in 1876 and attended the
St Cyr Military
Academy in 1887 and the
École Supérieure de
Guerre (army war college) in Paris. His career progressed very
slowly, as he rejected the
French Army
philosophy of the furious infantry assault, arguing instead that
"firepower kills". His views were later proved to be correct during
the First World War. He was promoted to Captain in 1890 and Major
(Chef de Bataillon) in 1900, but unlike many French officers,
served only in mainland France, never in Africa or Indochina. As a
Colonel he commanded the 33rd Infantry
Regiment at Arras from 1911; the young lieutenant
Charles de Gaulle, who served under him,
later wrote that his "first colonel, Pétain, taught (him) the Art
of Command". In the spring of 1914 he was given command of a
brigade (still with the rank of
Colonel),
but having been told he would never become a general, had bought a
house pending retirement - he was already fifty-eight years
old.
World War I
Pétain distinguished himself in World War I, and was hailed as a
French hero and the "Saviour of Verdun".
At the end of August 1914 he was quickly promoted to
Brigadier-General and given command of the 6th Division in time for
the
First Battle of the
Marne; little over a month later, in October 1914, he was
promoted again and became XXXIII Corps commander. After leading his
corps in the Spring 1915
Artois
Offensive, in July 1915 he was given command of the
Second Army, which he led in the
Champagne Offensive that autumn. He acquired a reputation as one of
the more successful commanders on the Western Front.
Pétain
commanded the Second Army at
the start of the Battle of
Verdun in February 1916. During the battle he was
promoted to Commander of Army Group Centre, which contained a total
of 52 divisions. Rather than holding down the same infantry
divisions on the Verdun battlefield for months, akin to the German
system, he rotated them out after only two weeks on the front
lines. His decision to organize truck transport over the "
Voie Sacrée" to bring a continuous stream
of artillery, ammunition and fresh troops into besieged Verdun also
played a key role in grinding down the German onslaught to a final
halt in July 1916. In effect he had applied the basic principle
that was a mainstay of his teachings at the "École de Guerre" (War
College) before World War I: "
le feu tue !" or "firepower
kills!" which in this case was French field artillery which
delivered well over 15 million shells on the German assailants
during the first five months of the battle. Although Pétain did say
"On les aura!" (roughly: We'll get them!), the other
famous quotation
"Ils ne passeront pas!" (
They shall not pass!) often attributed
to him, is actually from
Robert
Nivelle, who had succeeded him in command of the
Second Army at Verdun. At the very end
of 1916, Nivelle was promoted over him to replace
Joseph Joffre as French
Commander-in-Chief.
Because of his high prestige as a soldier's soldier, Pétain served
briefly as Army Chief of Staff (from the end of April 1917).
He then
became Commander-in-Chief of the
French army, replacing General Nivelle, who had failed the Chemin des
Dames
offensive in April 1917, provoking widespread
mutinies in the French Army. Pétain put an end to the
mutinies by selective punishment of ringleaders, but also by
improving soldiers' conditions (e.g., better food and shelter, and
more leave), and promising that men's lives would not be squandered
in fruitless offensives. Pétain conducted some successful but
limited offensives in the latter part of 1917, unlike the British
who had stalled in an unsuccessful offensive at Passchendaele that
autumn. Pétain, instead, held off from major French offensives
until the Americans arrived in force on the front lines, which
would not happen until the early summer of 1918. He was also
waiting for the new
Renault FT17 tanks
to be introduced in large numbers, hence his statement at the time:
"I am waiting for the tanks and the Americans".
The year 1918 saw major German offensives on the Western Front. The
first of these, "Michael" in March 1918, threatened to split the
British and French forces apart, and, after he had threatened to
retreat on Paris, Pétain came to the aid of the British and secured
the Front with forty French divisions. Petain proved a capable
opponent of the Germans both in defense and through
counter-attack.
The crisis led to the appointment of
Ferdinand Foch as Allied Generalissimo,
initially with powers to co-ordinate and deploy Allied reserves
where he saw fit.
The third offensive, "Blücher" in May 1918,
saw major German advances on the Aisne
, as the
French Army Commander (Humbert) had ignored Pétain's instructions
to defend in depth, and had instead allowed his men to be hit by
the initial massive German bombardment.
By the time of the last German offensives, Gneisenau and the
Second Battle of the
Marne, Pétain was able to defend in depth and launch counter
offensives, with the new French tanks and the assistance of the
Americans.
Later in the year Pétain was stripped of his right of appeal to the
French Government, and told to take his orders from Foch, who
increasingly assumed direction of the Allied offensives.
Pétain was made
Marshal of France
in November 1918.
Between the wars
Pétain was a bachelor until his sixties, and famous for his
womanising - women were said to find his piercing blue eyes
especially attractive. At the opening of the Battle of Verdun he is
said to have been fetched during the night from a Paris hotel by a
staff officer who knew which mistress he could be found with. After
the war Pétain married an old lover, Madame
Eugénie Hardon (1877-1962), on September
14, 1920. Hardon was divorced from
François de Hérain in 1914;
although the couple were too old to have children (she had a son,
Pierre de Hérain, from her
first marriage), they remained married until the end of Pétain's
life.
Pétain emerged from the war as a national hero and was made a
Marshal of France. He was encouraged to go into politics although
he protested that he had little interest in running for an elected
position. He continued to play a military role, commanding French
troops during their alliance with the Spanish in the
Rif War after 1925. Pétain is also on record
as a strong supporter of the
Maginot
Line which proved to be exceedingly costly while geographically
limited and thus a strategically ineffective border defense.
Pétain had
based his strong support for the Maginot Line on his own experience
of the role played by the forts during the Battle of
Verdun in 1916. Captain
Charles de Gaulle continued to be a
protégé of Pétain throughout these years. He even named his eldest
son after the Marshal before finally falling out over the
authorship of a book he had ghost-written for Pétain. In later
years, in a reference to the
Rif War,
de Gaulle had been known to observe: "Marshal Pétain was a great
man; he died in 1925". Pétain finally retired as Inspector-General
of the Army, aged seventy-five, in 1931.
He expressed interest in being named Minister of Education, a role
in which he hoped to combat what he saw as the decay in French
moral values. In 1934 he was appointed to the French
cabinet as
Minister of War. The following year, he was
promoted to
Secretary of State.
During this period, he repeatedly called for a lengthening of the
term of compulsory military service for draftees entering the
military service, from two to three years.
As France's most senior soldier after Foch's death, Marshal
Petain's must bear some responsibility for the poor state of French
weaponry preparation before World War II, particularly ironic in
view of his championing of (what were then) modern tactics before
World War I. Although he supported the massive use of tanks he saw
them mostly as infantry support, leading to the fragmentation of
the French tank force into many types of unequal value spread out
between mechanized cavalry (such as the
SOMUA
S-35) and infantry support (mostly the
Renault R35 tanks and the
Char B1 bis). Modern infantry rifles and machine
guns were not manufactured on Pétain's watch, with the sole
exception of a light machine-rifle, the
Mle
1924. A modern infantry rifle prototype only came out in 1936
but very few
MAS-36 rifles had been issued to
the troops by 1940. An excellent French semiautomatic rifle
prototype,the MAS 1938-40, never reached the production stage until
after World War II as the
MAS 49. Thus French
infantry had to face the enemy in 1940 with the old weaponry of
1918. Petain was made Minister of War in 1938, thus overseeing
French military aviation and the Navy as well. Yet French aviation
entered the War in 1939 without even the prototype of a bomber
airplane capable of reaching Berlin. French industrial efforts in
fighter aircraft were dispersed among several firms (
Dewoitine,
Morane-Saulnier and
Marcel Bloch), each with its own model. On the
naval front France had purposely overlooked building modern
aircraft carriers and focused instead on four new conventional
battleships which later proved to be useless to the war
effort.
Pétain served as French ambassador to Spain following the
Nationalist victory in the
Spanish
Civil War, arriving in March 1939.
World War II and Vichy France
Personal Standard of Philippe Pétain
Until the summer of 1940, Pétain was held in high regard by
statesmen both at home and abroad. French Prime Minister
Paul Reynaud brought Pétain, General
Maxime Weygand and the newly-promoted
Brigadier-General
de Gaulle, whose
4th Armoured Division had launched one of the few French
counterattacks in May 1940, into his War Cabinet, hoping that the
trio, and especially Pétain, would instill a renewed spirit of
resistance and patriotism in the French army. The social and
political divisions in France were too great, however, and Reynaud
had misjudged Pétain, a man who despised the corruption,
inefficiency and political fragmentation of the
French Third Republic.
Maxime Weygand was unable to stem the German advance during the
second stage of the
Battle of
France. When defeat for metropolitan France became certain, the
Cabinet debated their continuing the war in North Africa, to fight
on from the colonial territory alongside the British. Pétain's
refusal to leave the country at this juncture created an impasse
that divided the Cabinet and which was only broken by Reynaud's
resignation and President
Albert
Lebrun's invitation to Pétain to form a government. Lebrun soon
became sidelined, leading to the appointment of the old Marshal as
head of state with extraordinary powers. The constitutionality of
these actions was later challenged by de Gaulle's government, but
at the time Pétain was widely accepted as France's saviour.
On 22 June
he signed an armistice with Germany that
gave Nazi Germany control over the north
and west of the country, including Paris and all of the Atlantic
coastline, but left the rest, around two-fifths of France's prewar
territory, unoccupied, with its administrative centre in the resort
town of Vichy.
(Paris remained the
de jure capital.)
Pétain meeting Hitler in October
1940.
The
Chamber of Deputies and
Senate
, meeting
together as a "Congrès", had an
emergency meeting on 10 July to ratify the armistice. At the
same time, it voted 569-
80 (with 18
abstentions) to grant Pétain the authority to draw up a new
constitution, effectively voting the Third Republic out of
existence. On the next day, Pétain formally assumed near-absolute
powers as "Head of State".
Pétain was reactionary by temperament and education, and quickly
began blaming the Third Republic and its liberal democracy for the
French defeat. In its place, he set up a more authoritarian regime.
The republican motto of
"Liberté,
égalité, fraternité" was swept aside and replaced with
"Travail, famille,
patrie" (Work, family, fatherland). Fascistic factions and
revolutionary conservative factions within the Pétain government
used the opportunity to launch an ambitious program known as the
"National Revolution" in which much of the former Third Republic's
secular and liberal traditions were rejected in favor of the
promotion of an authoritarian and paternalist
Catholic society. Pétain, amongst others,
took exception to the use of the inflammatory term "revolution" to
describe an essentially conservative movement but was otherwise a
willing participant in the transformation of French society from
"Republic" to "State". He himself described Vichy France as "a
social hierarchy...rejecting the false idea of the natural equality
of men".
Pétain immediately used his new powers to order harsh measures,
including the dismissal of republican civil servants, the
installation of exceptional jurisdictions, the proclamation of
anti-Semitic laws, and the imprisonment of his opponents and
foreign refugees. He organized a "
Légion Française des
Combattants", in which he included "Friends of the Legion" and
"Cadets of the Legion", groups of those who had never fought but
who were politically attached to his regime. Pétain championed a
rural, Catholic France that spurned internationalism. As a retired
Generalissimo, he ran the country on military lines, which might
have been better received had he not already surrendered to
Adolf Hitler's Germany. While to
historians and modern day observers Pétain was clearly Hitler's
puppet, at the time many Frenchmen believed that de Gaulle and his
Free French were similarly in the hands of foreign powers. However,
after 1942 it became increasingly clear that the Maréchal was
Hitler's puppet.
Pétain on French stamps of 1944
Neither Pétain nor his successive Deputies,
Pierre Laval,
Pierre-Etienne Flandin or Admiral
François Darlan, gave
significant resistance to requests by the Germans to indirectly aid
the
Axis Powers.
Yet, when Hitler met
Pétain at Montoire
in October 1940 to discuss Vichy's role in the new
European Order, the Marshal "listened to Hitler in silence.
Not once did he offer a sympathetic word for Germany". However,
Vichy France remained neutral as a state, albeit opposed to the
Free French.
After the British
attack on Mers el Kébir
and Dakar, Pétain
took the initiative to collaborate with the occupiers.
Pétain accepted the creation of a collaborationist armed militia
("
Milice") under the command of
Joseph Darnand, who, along with German
forces, led a campaign of repression against the French resistance
("
Maquis"). The "honours"
Darnand acquired included
SS-Major. Pétain admitted Darnand into
his government as Secretary of the Maintenance of Public Order
(
Secrétaire d'Etat au Maintien de l'Ordre). In August
1944, Pétain made an attempt to distance himself from the crimes of
the Milice by writing Darnand a
letter of reprimand for the
organization's "excesses." The latter wrote a sarcastic reply,
telling Pétain that he should have "thought of this before". Such
were the crimes of Frenchmen against Frenchmen - and in 1944-5
those Frenchmen and women who had backed the losing side were dealt
terrible treatment when Liberation finally came.
Pétain
provided the Axis forces with large supplies of manufactured goods
and foodstuffs, and also ordered Vichy troops in France's colonial empire to fight
against Allied forces everywhere (in Dakar
, Syria
, Madagascar
, Oran
and Morocco
), in line with his commitments in the 1940
armistice. He also received German forces without any
resistance (in Syria, Tunisia
and Southern France), the latter due to Laval's
urging.
Petain's motives are a topic of wide conjecture. Despite his
popular reputation from WWI, it was well known in higher circles
that he did not share the lionhearted virtues of many of his fellow
soldiers and country men. Sir Winston Churchill had said to M.
Reynaud during the impending fall of France of Petain, "...he had
always been a defeatist, even in the last war." Whether Petain was
indeed trying to spare his country further woes, whether he truly
saw no hope of victory, whether he envisaged an opportunity for
higher political and historical aspirations for himself, or whether
he simply had no will to fight are questions that only he could
surely answer. However, the subsequent hardships, miseries and
abominations that he allowed to fall upon France by acquiescing to
Nazi Germany make the signing of the Armistice as purely selfless
act highly suspect.
On 11
November 1942, Germany invaded the unoccupied zone in response to
the Allied Operation
Torch
landings in North Africa and Vichy Admiral François Darlan's agreeing to support
the Allies. Although Vichy France nominally remained in
existence, Pétain became nothing more than a
figurehead, as the Nazis abandoned the
pretence of an "independent" Vichy government.
After 7 September
1944, Petain and other members of the Vichy cabinet were relocated
to Sigmaringen
Germany, where they established a government-in-exile until April
1945. Pétain, who had been forcibly brought there by the
Germans, refused to participate in the governmental commission,
which was headed by Fernand de Brinon.
Postwar trial and legacy
On 15 August 1945, Pétain was tried for
collaboration (or
treason), convicted and sentenced to death by firing
squad.
Charles de Gaulle, who was
President of the
Provisional
Government of the French Republic at the end of the war,
commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the grounds of his
age and his World War I contributions.
In prison on Île
d'Yeu
, an island off the Atlantic coast, he soon became
entirely senile, and required constant nursing care. He died
in prison at Fort de Pierre de Levée in 1951, at the age of 95. His
body is buried at a marine cemetery near the prison. Calls are
sometimes made for his remains to be re-interred in the grave which
had been prepared for him at Verdun.
In modern France, the word
pétainisme denotes a
reactionary and
authoritarian ideology.
Mount Pétain on the Continental Divide in the
Canadian Rockies was named for him
in 1919; summits with the names of other French generals are nearby
- Foch, Cordonnier, Mangin, Castelnau and Joffre
.
Lists of the successive Pétain governments until 1942
Pétain's First Government, 16 June - 12 July 1940
Changes
Pétain's Second Government, 12 July - 6 September 1940
Pétain's Third Government, 6 September 1940 - 25 February
1941
Changes
- 28 October 1940 - Pierre Laval
succeeds Baudoin as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
- 13 December 1940 - Pierre Laval loses his positions. Pierre Étienne Flandin succeeds
Laval as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jacques Chevalier succeeds Ripert as
Minister of Public Instruction and Youth. Paul Baudoin becomes Minister of
Information
- 2 January 1941 - Paul Baudoin ceases to be Minister of
Information, and the office is abolished.
- 27 January 1941 - Joseph
Barthélemy succeeds Alibert as Minister of Justice.
- 10 February 1941 - François
Darlan succeeds Flandin as Minister of Foreign Affairs
Pétain's Fourth Government, 25 February - 12 August 1941
Changes
- 18 July 1941 - Pierre Pucheu
succeeds Darlan as Minister of the Interior. Darlan retains his
other posts. François
Lehideux succeeds Pucheu as Minister of Industrial
Production.
Pétain's Fifth Government, 12 August 1941 - 18 April 1942
See also
External links
References
Notes
Bibliography
Among a vast number of books and articles about Pétain, the most
complete and documented biographies:
- Nicholas Atkin, Pétain,
Longman, 1997
- Herbert R. Lottman,Philippe Pétain, 1984
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