24. From Hero to Zero
Petain quelled the French Army’s 1917 mutinies with a carrot-and-stick mix of reforms to improve the soldiers’ living conditions, combined with the execution of the mutiny’s ringleaders. By war’s end, he was a beloved national hero. Two decades later, after the French collapse in 1940, an 84-year-old Petain was dragged out of retirement by the French president and asked to form a new government. Accepting that France had been defeated, and declining to continue the fight from overseas as urged by a junior minister, Charles de Gaulle, the aged marshal sought an armistice. The French legislature dissolved itself and ceded its powers to Petain.
Thus was born the collaborationist Vichy Regime, named after its capital in Vichy. It aligned itself with the Germans and against the French Resistance and Free French who continued the fight inside occupied France and abroad. After the war, Petain was tried on charges of high treason alongside Pierre Laval, the Vichy Regime’s other main collaborationist. Both were convicted and sentenced to death in 1945. However, in recognition of his WWI services, Charles de Gaulle, as head of the French government, commuted Petain’s sentence to solitary life imprisonment. He was jailed in a Pyrenees citadel, then in a fortress on a small island off France’s Atlantic coast until his death in 1951.
