1940
Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France
Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler, Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France, October 24, 1940; note Paul Schmidt and Joachim von Ribbentrop in background.
1940
Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France
Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler, Montoire-sur-le-Loir, France, October 24, 1940; note Paul Schmidt and Joachim von Ribbentrop in background.
1940
Pétain in May 1940
1942
Vichy, France
French Marshal Pétain and US Ambassador Leahy, Vichy, France, 27 April 1942.
St. Cyr Academy
Philippe Pétain, François Darlan, and Pierre Laval
Pétain was born in Cauchy-à-la-Tour (in the Pas-de-Calais département in Northern France) in 1856. His father, Omer-Venant, was a farmer. His great-uncle, a Catholic priest, Father Abbe Lefebvre, had served in Napoleon's Grande Armée and told the young Pétain tales of war and adventure of his campaigns from the peninsulas of Italy to the Alps in Switzerland. Highly impressed by the tales told by his uncle, his destiny was from then on determined.
Henry attended a Jesuit boarding school at Saint-Omer and then the Dominican school at Arcueil. After that he was admitted to the St. Cyr Military Academy in and the École Supérieure de Guerre (army war college) in Paris.
Promoted to brigadier general on August 31, 1914, Pétain distinguished himself at the Battle of the Marne (1914) and in June 1915 was named a full general and given command of the 11th Army. When the Germans decided in 1916 to end the war with a massive concentrated attack on the French line at Verdun, Pétain was ordered to stop the offensive at all costs. Promising that "they shall not pass," he held Verdun but at the enormous cost of 350, 000 men. Subsequently a great popular hero, he became chief of the general staff in April 1917, and a month later he succeeded Gen. Robert Nivelle as commander in chief.
Pétain assumed his command over a French army near disintegration. Years of indecisive war had sapped morale, and mutinies were endemic. Combining harsh disciplinary measures with humane redress of grievances, he very quickly reestablished order. Without these reforms, the French army would not have withstood the final German offensives of 1918.
Named marshal of France on November 21, 1918, Pétain emerged from the war second only to Ferdinand Foch in prestige. It was only natural that Pétain was regarded as a high military authority, but the consequences later proved catastrophic. Vice president of the Supreme War Council after 1920 and inspector general of the army after 1922, Pétain used his influence to orient French military planning along defensive lines. He favored the construction of heavily armed fortifications along the Franco-German frontier. Against the protests of such young rebels as Charles De Gaulle, who urged a strategy of mobile mechanized warfare, Pétain's influence was decisive, and the Maginot Line was constructed on the Franco-German border. French government and military leaders were determined to prepare France for any future war.
Retiring from the army in 1931, Pétain entered politics in 1934 as minister of war in the short-lived authoritarian government of Gaston Doumergue. Increasingly contemptuous of parliamentary politics and such Socialist experiments as the Popular Front, and a known partisan of dictatorial regimes, Pétain provided a figure in the late 1930s around which right-wing opponents of the Third Republic could rally.
Ambassador to Spain at the outbreak of World War II, Pétain was recalled and appointed vice-premier in May 1940 by Premier Paul Reynaud in an attempt to bolster his foundering government. With the fall of France imminent, Reynaud resigned on June 16, 1940, and President Albert Lebrun asked the 84-year-old Pétain to form a new government whose first task would be to negotiate an armistice with the Germans. No one seemed to care that the rapid collapse of the French army in 1940 had been largely due to the outdated principles on which Pétain had organized it and to its lack of mechanized equipment, whose supply he had opposed.
On June 22 Pétain concluded an armistice with the Nazis that divided France into two zones: the north and the Atlantic coastline under German military occupation, and the rest of France under the direct administration of Pétain's government. Militarily, France retained control of its fleet, but its army was drastically reduced to 100, 000 men.
Meeting in national assembly at Vichy on July 10, 1940, a rump parliament voted full constituent powers to Pétain. The next day he was named chief of state, and with Pierre Laval he then began the task of constructing a hierarchical and authoritarian regime under the formula of his so-called National Revolution. Little more than empty rhetoric ("Work-Family-Fatherland") and the cult of Pétain, his Vichy regime was a scarcely disguised client state of Nazi Germany.
Of necessity, Pétain's central principle in foreign policy was collaboration with the Third Reich. Above all, he wanted to keep France out of the war and to keep Germany as faithful to the armistice terms as possible. Opposed, however, to the all-out collaboration urged by Laval, Pétain replaced him with Adm. Jean Darlan in 1941. Under pressure from Berlin, Laval returned to office in April 1942.
The crisis of the Vichy regime occurred in November 1942 following the Allied landings in North Africa and the German occupation of Vichy France. Urged to flee, Pétain refused, believing that it was his duty to share the fate of his countrymen. He still refused even after ultracollaborationists were imposed upon him by the Germans, and thus he implicated himself in their treason. Arrested by the retreating Nazis on August 20, 1944, and sent to Germany, Pétain voluntarily returned to France in April 1945. Immediately arrested and brought to trial by the provisional government of his onetime protégé Charles De Gaulle, Pétain was convicted of treason, militarily degraded, and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by De Gaulle, and Pétain died 6 years later, on July 23, 1951, on the Île d'Yeu.
Pétain remains an acutely controversial figure in recent French history. He is the object of an as yet unsuccessful effort at rehabilitation, his right-wing admirers depicting him as the "crucified savior of France" and claiming that his self-sacrifice after 1940 "will one day count more for his glory than the victory of Verdun." Not only did Pétain save France from the fate of Poland, they insist, but by playing a double game he tricked Adolf Hitler into staying out of North Africa, which made possible the eventual Allied victory in 1945. Preposterous as these claims are, the impression they give of Pétain is only slightly more misleading than that given by official Resistance historiography, which unfailingly portrays him as an arch-villain and as a criminal traitor to France.
During World War I Pétain led the French Army to victory at the nine month long Battle of Verdun. After the failed Nivelle Offensive and subsequent mutinies he was appointed Commander-in-Chief and succeeded in repairing the army's confidence. Pétain remained in command throughout the war and emerged as a national hero. During the interwar period he was head of the peacetime French Army, commanded jointed Franco-Spanish operations during the Rif War and served twice as a government Minister.
On 26 October 1931 Pétain was honored with a ticker-tape parade down Manhattan's Canyon of Heroes. Consideration has been given to removing the sidewalk ribbon denoting the parade for Pétain given his role with the Nazis in World War II.
Philippe Pétain was a devoted Catholic. In Vichy France, Catholicism was a state religion.
Pétain was reactionary by temperament and education, and quickly began blaming the Third Republic and its endemic corruption for the French defeat. His regime soon took on clear authoritarian - and in some cases, fascist - characteristics. The republican motto of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" was replaced with "Travail, famille, patrie" ("Work, family, fatherland"). He issued new constitutional acts which abolished the presidency, indefinitely adjourned parliament, and also gave him full power to appoint and fire ministers and civil service members, pass laws through the Council of Ministers and designate a successor (he chose Laval). Though Pétain publicly stated that he had no desire to become "a Caesar," by January 1941 Pétain held virtually all governing power in France; nearly all legislative, executive, and judicial powers were either de jure or de facto in his hands. One of his advisors commented that he had more power than any French leader since Louis XIV. Fascistic and revolutionary conservative factions within the new government used the opportunity to launch an ambitious programme known as the "National Revolution", which rejected much of the former Third Republic's secular and liberal traditions in favour of an authoritarian, paternalist, Catholic society. Pétain, amongst others, took exception to the use of the inflammatory term "revolution" to describe an essentially conservative movement, but otherwise participated in the transformation of French society from "Republic" to "State." He added that the new France would be "a social hierarchy... rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men."
The regime organised a "Légion Française des Combattants," which included "Friends of the Legion" and "Cadets of the Legion", groups of those who had never fought but were politically attached to the new regime. Pétain championed a rural, Catholic France that spurned internationalism. As a retired military commander, he ran the country on military lines.
Pétain called for family values, forbade women to wear shorts or short skirts, abhorred divorce and demanded that women be mothers.
Quotations:
"Neither Germany nor Italy have doubts. Our crisis is not a material crisis. We have lost faith in our destiny...We are like mariners without a pilot."
"My country has been beaten and they are calling me back to make peace and sign an armistice...This is the work of 30 years of Marxism. They're calling me back to take charge of the nation."
"The only wealth you possess is your labour...France will become again what she should never have ceased to be - an essentially agricultural nation. Like the giant of mythology, she will recover all her strength by contact with the soil."
Pétain was a bachelor until his sixties, and famous for his womanising. 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 with which mistress he could be found.
Pétain was noted for a cold, reserved manner; but this was broken at times in the least helpful fashion by heated disagreements with his superiors.
Physical Characteristics: Women were said to find his piercing blue eyes especially attractive.
Quotes from others about the person
Charles de Gaulle: "Remember that France has always had two strings in its bow. In June 1940 it needed the Pétain string as much as the de Gaulle string."
After the war Pétain married an old lover, Eugénie Hardon (1877–1962), "a particularly beautiful woman", on 14 September 1920; they remained married until the end of Pétain's life. Hardon had been divorced from François de Hérain in 1914. She had no children by Pétain but already had a son from her first marriage, Pierre de Hérain, whom Pétain strongly disliked.
