Everything about Marshall P Tain totally explained
Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain (
24 April 1856 –
23 July 1951), generally known as
Philippe Pétain or
Marshal Pétain (
Maréchal Pétain), was a
French general who reached the distinction of
Marshal of France, later
Chief of State of
Vichy France (Chef de l'État Français), from 1940 to 1944. Pétain, who was 84 in 1940, ranks as France's oldest Head of State ever.
Due to his military leadership in
World War I, he was viewed as a hero in France, but his actions during
World War II resulted in a conviction and death sentence for
treason, which was commuted to life imprisonment by
Charles de Gaulle. In modern France, he's generally considered a traitor, and
pétainisme is a derogatory term for certain
reactionary policies. Due to his treason conviction, some historians now only refer to him by his name
Philippe Pétain, without his military rank, while for example, resistance leader
Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, who was promoted posthumously, is now referred as Maréchal Leclerc.
Early life
Born in
Cauchy-à-la-Tour (in the
Pas-de-Calais département, in the north of
France) in 1856. He joined the
French Army in 1876 and attended the
St Cyr Military Academy in 1887 and the
École Supérieure de Guerre (army war college) in
Paris. His career progressed very slowly, as he rejected the
French Army philosophy of the furious infantry assault, arguing instead that "firepower kills". His views were later proved to be correct during the First World War. He was promoted to Captain in 1890 and Major (Chef de Battaillon) in 1900, but unlike many French officers, served only in mainland France, never in Africa or Indochina. As a
Colonel he commanded the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras from 1911; the young lieutenant
Charles de Gaulle, who served under him, later wrote that his "first colonel, Pétain, taught (him) the Art of Command". In the spring of 1914 he was given command of a brigade (still with the rank of
Colonel), but having been told he'd never become a general, had bought a house pending retirement - he was already fifty-eight years old.
World War I
Pétain distinguished himself in
World War I, and was hailed as a French hero and the "Saviour of Verdun". At the end of August 1914 he was quickly promoted to Brigadier-General and given command of the 6th Division in time for the
First Battle of the Marne; little over a month later, in October 1914, he was promoted again and became XXXIII Corps commander. After leading his corps in the Spring 1915
Artois Offensive, in July 1915 he was given command of the
Second Army, which he led in the Champagne Offensive that autumn. He acquired a reputation as one of the more successful commanders on the Western Front.
Pétain commanded the
Second Army at the start of the
Battle of Verdun in February 1916. During the battle he was promoted to Commander of Army Group Centre, which contained a total of 52 divisions. His decision to organize truck transport over the "
Voie sacree" to bring an endless stream of artillery and ammunition supplies to besieged Verdun played a key role in halting the German onslaught which ended in the summer of 1916. Although Pétain did say
"On les aura!" (roughly: We'll get them!), the other famous quotation
"Ils ne passeront pas!" (
They shan't pass!) often attributed to him, is actually from
Robert Nivelle, who had succeeded him in command of the
Second Army at Verdun, and who at the very end of 1916 was promoted over him to replace
Joseph Joffre as French Commander-in-Chief.
Due to high prestige as a soldier's soldier, Pétain served briefly as Army Chief of Staff (from the end of April 1917) then replaced Nivelle in 1917 as
Commander-in-Chief of the French army, after the failed
Nivelle Offensive and the subsequent
mutiny in the French army. Pétain crushed the mutiny by selective punishment of ringleaders, but also by improving soldiers' conditions (eg. better food and shelter, and more leave), and promising that men's lives wouldn't be squandered in fruitless offensives. Pétain conducted some successful limited offensives in the latter part of 1917, but (unlike the British, who conducted a major offensive at Passchendaele that autumn) he held off from major offensives until the Americans arrived in force, which wouldn't happen until the summer of 1918.
The year 1918 saw major German offensives on the Western Front. The first of these, "Michael" in March 1918, threatened to split the British and French forces apart, and, after Pétain had threatened to retreat on Paris, led to the appointment of
Ferdinand Foch as Allied Generalissimo, initially with powers to co-ordinate and deploy Allied reserves where he saw fit. The third offensive, "Blucher" in May 1918, saw major German advances on the Aisne, as the French Army Commander had ignored Pétain's instructions to defend in depth, and had instead allowed his men to be hit by the initial massive German bombardment. Later in the year Pétain was stripped of his right of appeal to the French Government, and told to take his orders from Foch, who increasingly assumed direction of the Allied offensives. Pétain was made
Marshal of France in November 1918.
Between the wars
Unlucky in love early in life, Pétain was a bachelor until his sixties, and famous for his womanising - women were said to find his piercing blue eyes especially attractive. At the opening of the Battle of Verdun he's said to have been fetched from Paris by a staff officer who knew which mistress he could be found with. After the war Pétain married an old lover, Madame Hardon, then widowed; although the couple were too old to have children, they remained married until the end of Pétain's life.
Pétain emerged from the war as a national hero. He was encouraged to go into politics although he protested that he'd little interest in running for an elected position. He continued to play a military role, commanding French troops during their alliance with the Spanish in the
Rif War after 1925. Petain is also on record as a strong supporter of the
Maginot Line which proved to be exceedingly costly and geographically very limited and thus a strategically ineffective border fortification system. Petain had based his support for the
Maginot Line on his own experience of the role played by the forts at
Verdun in 1916. Although he supported the massive use of tanks he saw them mostly as infantry support, leading to the fragmentation of the French tank force into many types of unequal value spread out between French Cavalry and Infantry. Modern infantry rifles and machine guns were not manufactured on Petain's watch, with the exception of a light machine-rifle in 1929. Thus most French infantry divisions entered WW-2 essentially with the armament of 1918. Captain
Charles de Gaulle continued to be a protégé of Pétain throughout these years, naming his eldest son after him before finally falling out over the authorship of a book which the younger man had ghost-written for Pétain; in later years, in a reference to the
Rif War, de Gaulle was sometimes known to observe "Marshal Pétain was a great man; he died in 1925". Pétain finally retired as Inspector-General of the Army, aged seventy-five, in 1931.
He expressed interest in being named Minister of Education, a role in which he hoped to combat what he saw as the decay in French moral values. In 1934 he was appointed to the French
cabinet as
Minister of War. The following year, he was promoted to
Secretary of State. During this period, he repeatedly called for a lengthening of the term of compulsory military service for draftees entering the military service from to three years. Pétain served as French ambassador to Spain following the Nationalist victory in the
Spanish Civil War, arriving in March 1939.
World War II and Vichy France
Until the summer of 1940, Pétain was held in high regard by statesmen both at home and abroad. French Prime Minister
Paul Reynaud brought Pétain (along with General
Maxime Weygand and the newly-promoted Brigadier-General
de Gaulle - whose 4th Armoured Division had launched one of the few French counterattacks in May 1940) - into his War Cabinet, hoping that the trio, and especially Pétain, would instil a renewed spirit of resistance and patriotism in the French army. The social and political divisions in France were too great, however, and in Pétain, Reynaud didn't recognise a man who despised the corruption, inefficiency and political fragmentation of the
French Third Republic.
Maxime Weygand was unable to stem the German advance during the second stage of the
Battle of France. When defeat for metropolitan France became certain, the Cabinet debated their continuing the war in North Africa, to fight on from the colonial territory alongside the British. Pétain's refusal to leave the country at this juncture created an impasse that divided the Cabinet and which was only broken by Reynaud's resignation and President
Albert Lebrun's invitation to Pétain to form a government. Lebrun soon became sidelined, leading to the appointment of the old Marshal as head of state with extraordinary powers. The constitutionality of these actions was later challenged by de Gaulle's government, but at the time Pétain was widely accepted as France's saviour.
On
June 22 he signed an
armistice with Germany that gave
Nazi Germany control over the north and west of the country, including
Paris and all of the Atlantic coastline, but left the rest, around two-fifths of France's prewar territory, unoccupied, with its administrative centre in the resort town of
Vichy. (Paris remained the
de jure capital.)
The
Chamber of Deputies and
Senate, meeting together as a "
Congrès", had an emergency meeting on
July 10 to ratify the armistice. At the same time, it voted 569-
80 (with 18 abstentions) to grant Pétain the authority to draw up a new constitution - effectively voting the Third Republic out of existence. On the next day, Pétain formally assumed near-absolute powers as "Head of State."
Pétain was reactionary by temperament and education, and quickly began blaming the Third Republic and its liberal democracy for the French defeat. In its place, he set up a more authoritarian regime. The republican motto of
"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" was swept aside and replaced with
"Travail, famille, patrie" (Work, family, fatherland). Conservative factions within his government used the opportunity to launch an ambitious program known as the "National Revolution" in which much of the former Third Republic's secular and liberal traditions were rejected in favor of the promotion of an authoritarian and paternalist
Catholic society.
Pétain immediately used his new powers to order harsh measures, including the dismissal of republican civil servants, the installation of exceptional jurisdictions, the proclamation of anti-semitic laws, and the imprisonment of his opponents and foreign refugees. He organized a "
Légion Française des Combattants", in which he included "Friends of the Legion" and "Cadets of the Legion", groups of those who had never fought but who were politically attached to his regime. Pétain championed a rural, Catholic France that spurned internationalism. As a retired Generalissimo, he ran the country on military lines, which might have been better received had he not already surrendered to
Hitler and become his puppet (especially after 1942).
Neither Pétain nor his successive Deputies,
Pierre Laval,
Pierre-Etienne Flandin or Admiral
François Darlan, gave significant resistance to requests by the Germans to indirectly aid the
Axis Powers. Yet, when Hitler met Pétain at
Montoire in October 1940 to discuss Vichy's role in the new European Order, the Marshal "listened to Hitler in silence. Not once did he offer a sympathetic word for Germany"
1. However, Vichy France remained neutral as a state, albeit opposed to the
Free French. After the British attack on
Mers el Kébir and
Dakar, Pétain took the initiative to collaborate with the occupiers. Pétain accepted the creation of a collaborationist armed militia "
Milice" under the command of
SS-Major Joseph Darnand, who, along with German forces, led a campaign of repression against the French resistance ("
Maquis"). Pétain admitted Darnand into his government as Secretary of the Maintenance of Public Order (
Secrétaire d'Etat au Maintien de l'Ordre). In August 1944, Pétain made an attempt to distance himself from the crimes of the Milice by writing Darnand a letter of reprimand for the organization's "excesses." The latter wrote a sarcastic reply, telling Pétain that he should have "thought of this before" he turned the Milice loose on the French population.
Pétain provided the Axis forces with large supplies of manufactured goods and foodstuffs, and also ordered Vichy troops in
France's colonial empire to fight against Allied forces everywhere (in
Dakar,
Syria,
Madagascar,
Oran and
Morocco), in line with his commitments in the 1940 armistice. He also received German forces without any resistance (in Syria,
Tunisia and Southern France), the latter due to Laval's urging.
On
11 November 1942, Germany invaded the unoccupied zone in response to the Allied
Operation Torch landings in North Africa and Vichy Admiral
François Darlan's agreeing to support the Allies. Although Vichy France nominally remained in existence, Pétain became nothing more than a
figurehead, as the Nazis abandoned the pretence of an "independent" Vichy government, although he remained popular with the French public, and was cheered by the crowd when he attended Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at Easter
1944. On
7 September 1944, he and other members of the Vichy cabinet were forcibly moved to
Sigmaringen in Germany and soon after he resigned as leader.
Postwar trial and legacy
In
1945, Pétain was tried for
collaboration (or
treason), convicted and sentenced to death by firing squad.
Charles de Gaulle, who was briefly Prime Minister at the end of the war, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the grounds of his age and his
Great War (
World War I) contributions. There was also a sense among segments of the French population his trial was rushed and unfair. In prison on
Île d'Yeu, an island off the Atlantic coast, he soon became entirely senile and incontinent, and required constant nursing care. He died in prison in 1951, at the age of 95, and is buried there. Calls are sometimes made for his remains to be re-interred in the grave which had been prepared for him at Verdun.
In modern
France, the word
pétainisme suggests an
authoritarian and
reactionary ideology, driven by the
nostalgia of a
rural,
agricultural,
traditionalist,
Catholic society.
Lists of the successive Pétain governments until 1942
Changes
23 June - Adrien Marquet and Pierre Laval enter the Cabinet as Ministers of State
27 June 1940 - Adrien Marquet succeeds Pomaret as Minister of the Interior. André Février succeeds Frossard as Minister of Transmissions. Frossard remains Minister of Public Works. Charles Pomaret succeeds Février as Minister of Labour.
Philippe Pétain - Head of State and President of the Council
Pierre Laval - Vice President of the Council
Paul Baudoin - Minister of Foreign Affairs
Maxime Weygand - Minister of National Defense
Louis Colson - Minister of War
Adrien Marquet - Minister of the Interior
Yves Bouthillier - Minister of Finance
René Belin - Minister of Industrial Production and Labour
Raphaël Alibert - Minister of Justice
François Darlan - Minister of the Navy
Bertrand Pujo - Minister of Aviation
Émile Miraud - Minister of Public Instruction
Pierre Caziot - Minister of Agriculture and Supply
Henry Lémery - Minister of Colonies
Jean Ybarnegaray - Minister of Youth and Family
François Piétri - Minister of Communication
Philippe Pétain - Head of State and President of the Council
Pierre Laval - Vice President of the Council
Paul Baudoin - Minister of Foreign Affairs
Charles Huntziger - Minister of National Defense
Marcel Peyrouton - Minister of the Interior
Yves Bouthillier - Minister of Finance
René Belin - Minister of Industrial Production and Labour
Raphaël Alibert - Minister of Justice
François Darlan - Minister of the Navy
Jean Bergeret - Minister of Aviation
Georges Ripert - Minister of Public Instruction and Youth
Pierre Caziot - Minister of Agriculture and Supply
Charles Platon - Minister of Colonies
Jean Berthelot - Minister of Communication
Changes
28 October 1940 - Pierre Laval succeeds Baudoin as Minister of Foreign Affairs.
13 December 1940 - Pierre Laval loses his positions. Pierre Étienne Flandin succeeds Laval as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Jacques Chevalier succeeds Ripert as Minister of Public Instruction and Youth. Paul Baudoin becomes Minister of Information
2 January 1941 - Paul Baudoin ceases to be Minister of Information, and the office is abolished.
27 January 1941 - Joseph Barthélemy succeeds Alibert as Minister of Justice.
10 February 1941 - François Darlan succeeds Flandin as Minister of Foreign Affairs
Philippe Pétain - Head of State and President of the Council
François Darlan - Vice President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Interior, and Minister of the Navy
Charles Huntziger - Minister of National Defense
Yves Bouthillier - Minister of Finance and National Economy
Pierre Pucheu - Minister of Industrial Production
René Belin - Minister of Labour
Joseph Barthélemy - Minister of Justice
Jean Bergeret - Minister of Aviation
Jérôme Carcopino - Minister of National Education and Youth
Pierre Caziot - Minister of Agriculture
Jean-Louis Achard - Minister of Supply
Charles Platon - Minister of Colonies
Jacques Chevalier - Minister of Family and Health
Jean Berthelot - Minister of Communication
Henri Moysset - Minister of Information
Changes
18 July 1941 - Pierre Pucheu succeeds Darlan as Minister of the Interior. Darlan retains his other posts. François Lehideux succeeds Pucheu as Minister of Industrial Production.
Philippe Pétain - Head of State and President of the Council
François Darlan - Vice President of the Council, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of National Defense, and Minister of the Navy
Pierre Pucheu - Minister of the Interior
Yves Bouthillier - Minister of Finance and National Economy
François Lehideux - Minister of Industrial Production
René Belin - Minister of Labour
Joseph Barthélemy - Minister of Justice
Jean Bergeret - Minister of Aviation
Jérôme Carcopino - Minister of National Education and Youth
Pierre Caziot - Minister of Agriculture
Paul Charbin - Minister of Supply
Charles Platon - Minister of Colonies
Serge Huard - Minister of Family and Health
Jean Berthelot - Minister of Communication
Paul Marion - Minister of Information and Propaganda
Henri Moysset - Minister of State
Lucien Romier - Minister of StateFurther Information
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