Description

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize 2023
A Telegraph Book of the Year
A Times, Spectator and Prospect Book of the Year

One of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentieth-century French history

Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Petain – the great French hero of the First World War – shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting, Petain told the French people that he was ‘entering down the road of collaboration’. He ended with the words: ‘This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.’ Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judgement – if not yet the judgement of History – arrived. Petain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944.

Julian Jackson uses Petain’s three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history – the defeat of 1940, the signing of the armistice and Vichy’s policy of collaboration – what the main prosecutor Mornet called ‘four years to erase from our history’. As head of the Vichy regime in the Second, Petain became one of France’s most notorious public figures, and the lightening-rod for collective guilt and retribution immediately after the Second World War. In France on Trial Jackson blends politics and personal drama to explore how different national factions sought to try to claim the past, or establish their interpretation of it, as a way of claiming the present and future.

Publisher Review

Julian Jackson brings to life here with his customary mastery the trial in 1945 of France's highest ranking military officer, accused of having betrayed his country. Philippe Petain knew extremes of glory and shame in his long military career. In 1919, as the supreme commander of French armies in World War I, he rode down the Champs-Elysees at the head of a victory parade. After June 1940, with almost unlimited power and prestige, he governed France under German occupation. In 1945 he sat in a French courtroom charged with treason for his exercise of that power. In this compelling book, Julian Jackson gives the reader a seat in the jury box and then follows France's debate over Petain - hero or traitor? - over the next fifty years. -- Robert Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Columbia University The great general of the First World War, collaborator with Germany in the Second, how is Marshal Philippe Petain to be remembered? His trial on charges of treason divided the French in 1945 and has divided them ever since. In the hands of Julian Jackson, a superb historian with the sensibility of a novelist, this is a story not just about Petain but about war and resistance, the moral compromises of leadership and the meaning of France itself. -- Margaret MacMillan, Emeritus Professor of International History, University of Oxford