Pétain, a hero of the first world war, headed the collaborationist Vichy regime after the German invasion during the second. After the Allied victory, he was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Because of his age (he was 89), this was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951.
Ascherson writes of the detailed charges bought against Pétain:
Nothing shows better than this trial the way perspectives on the Second World War have changed almost out of recognition in the course of the last eighty years. In much of the world, children can now leave school vaguely believing that the war was fought to save the Jews from the Holocaust.
But in 1945 Pétain’s indictment included only a brief mention of ‘abominable racial laws’, referring to Vichy’s antisemitic discrimination, and said nothing specific about the mass round-ups and deportations to the gas chambers that were made possible by the collaboration of French police, ministry officials and railway managers.
Incredibly, no Jewish survivors of the camps stood as witnesses at the trial. Antisemitism lay somewhere in the background here, but more immediately important was de Gaulle’s shamelessly misleading version of French behaviour under the occupation.
Almost everyone, it ran, had supported the Resistance in thought if not in deed, and France had been let down only by a small clique of traitors. This new myth plastered over the fact that Vichy and its policy of keeping the Germans contented had been accepted, with intense and bitter reluctance, by most of the population during the early war years.
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