FRANCE ON TRIAL

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize 2023A Telegraph Book of the YearA Times Spectator and Prospect Book of the YearOne of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentieth century French historyFew images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain 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 Pétain 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 Pétain 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 Pétain 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 h