Peter Hitchens reviews Julian Jackson’s new book: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain at Compact magazine.

Jackson deals with another factor that is surprising in retrospect but was not at the time: What would later be the dominant element of French shame, the disgraceful treatment of Jews under Vichy, barely featured in the 1945 proceedings. No Jewish witness was asked to testify against Pétain. Pétain was accorded privileged treatment, allowed to observe the trial from a comfortable armchair in the courtroom rather than placed in the dock normally reserved for the accused. And he was permitted to remain almost completely silent throughout the proceedings. For many, he was still a great man, in whom they wanted to believe. The brilliant and generous writer Francois Mauriac, who had briefly supported Pétain before joining the resistance, made the most disturbing comment on the trial, which it is hard to gainsay. Collaboration, he argued, may have been the logical consequence of the 1940 Armistice with Germany. But the Armistice was itself the logical consequence of France’s deliberate decision at Munich not to fight Germany in 1938. Mauriac said, “We would be hypocrites if, before joining the chorus of voices of all those who accuse [Pétain], each of us did not ask: what did I think at the moment of Munich? What were my real feelings on hearing of the armistice? …let us not hide from ourselves the thought that each of us was perhaps complicit, at certain moments, with this old man now struck down.”

It’s an important new work by Jackson, who is a gripping historian of 20th-century France, and a pellucid review by Hitchens. Not to be missed.