The Marshal’s Betrayal of France
France emerged victorious in WWI, but things went different two decades later, in WWII. After the French debacle and collapse in 1940, an 84-year-old Petain was dragged out of retirement by the French president and asked to form a new government. He accepted that France had been defeated, and declined to continue the fight from overseas as urged by a junior minister, Charles de Gaulle. Instead, the aged marshal sought an armistice. The French legislature dissolved itself and ceded its powers to Petain. Thus was born the collaborationist Vichy Regime.
Petain’s government 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 other main collaborationist of the Vichy Regime. Their betrayal of France earned both of them a conviction and death sentence in 1945. Petain was spared execution, however. In recognition of his WWI services, Charles de Gaulle, as head of the French government, commuted the former hero’s sentence to solitary life imprisonment. He was jailed in a fortress on a small island off France’s Atlantic coast until his death in 1951.
