N°4 (detail)
PÉTAIN SILENT TRIAL
Weekly transmission 35-2017 presents:
The provisional government placed Pétain on trial (July-August 1945) Weekly Drawing by Théophile Bouchet: Pétain Trial The Petain Trial, 8 vintage silver prints (New York Times reporter) Vichy’s Shame (The Guardian, May 2002) Previous transmissions can be found at:
www.plantureux.fr
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The provisional government headed by de Gaulle placed Pétain on trial, which took place from 23 July to 15 August 1945, for treason. Dressed in the uniform of a Marshal of France, Pétain [1856-1951, then 89 years old] remained silent through most of the proceedings ..." (Wikipedia) The e-bulletins present articles as well as selections of books, albums, photographs and documents as they have been handed down to the actual owners by their creators and by amateurs from past generations. The physical descriptions, attributions, origins, and printing dates of books and photographs have been carefully ascertained by collation and through close analysis of comparable works. When items are for sale, the prices are in Euros, Bitcoins and Paypal dollars are accepted.
N°35-2017. PÉTAIN SILENT TRIAL
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Following the liberation of France, on 7 September 1944 Pétain and other members of the French cabinet at Vichy were relocated by the Germans to the Sigmaringen enclave in Germany, where they became a government-in-exile until April 1945. Pétain, however, having been forced to leave France, refused to participate in this government and Fernand de Brinon now headed the 'government commission.' In a note dated 29 October 1944, Pétain forbade de Brinon to use the Marshal's name in any connection with this new government, and on 5 April 1945, Pétain wrote a note to Hitler expressing his wish to return to France. No reply ever came. However, on his birthday almost three weeks later, he was taken to the Swiss border. Two days later he crossed the French frontier. De Gaulle later wrote that Pétain's decision to return to France to face his accusers in person was "certainly courageous". The provisional government headed by de Gaulle placed Pétain on trial, which took place from 23 July to 15 August 1945, for treason. Dressed in the uniform of a Marshal of France, Pétain remained silent through most of the proceedings ..." At the end of Pétain's trial, he was convicted on all charges. The jury sentenced him to death by a one-vote majority. Due to his advanced age, the Court asked that the sentence not be carried out. De Gaulle, who was President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic at the end of the war, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment due to Pétain's age and his military contributions in World War I. After his conviction, the Court stripped Pétain of all military ranks and honours save for the one distinction of Marshal of France. Fearing riots at the announcement of the sentence, de Gaulle ordered that Pétain be transported on the former's private aircraft to Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees, where he remained from 15 August to 16 November 1945. The government later transferred him to the Fort de Pierre-Levée citadel on the Île d'Yeu, a small island off the Atlantic coast. Over the following years Pétain's lawyers and many foreign governments and dignitaries, including Queen Mary and the Duke of Windsor, appealed to successive French governments for Pétain's release, but given the unstable state of Fourth Republic politics no government was willing to risk unpopularity by releasing him. As early as June 1946 US President Harry Truman interceded in vain for his release, even offering to provide political asylum in the U.S. A similar offer was later made by the Spanish dictator General Franco. Although Pétain had still been in good health for his age at the time of his imprisonment, by late 1947 his memory lapses were worsening and he was beginning to suffer from incontinence ...” (Wikipedia)
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During the trial, the windows of the courtroom were walled up
Weekly Drawing by Théophile Bouchet: The Pétain Trial
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Compte rendu, 1945, in-4 and 8 vintage prints, 300 euros
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VICHY. “The town is a shock, a wild skyline of domes and minarets. Its elegant architecture is neogothic, neoclassic, neo-Alpine, neo-everything. At first sight, Vichy is a melancholy fragmentation of Bournemouth, Brighton, Bath, Baden Baden and Brigadoon. The faded splendour of Napoleon III's watering hole is celebrated in esplanades named after him. Here he built houses for his several mistresses and encouraged princes, sheikhs and shahs to summer here with their huge retinues. Vichy is right in the middle of France. This town of mud baths and colonic irrigation grew rich as a cure centre for rheumatism and liver complaints. Its mineral-rich sulphurous waters, running warm from the surrounding Auvergne volcanic mass, promised soothing baths and massage and, to sweeten the nights, there were casinos, upmarket restaurants and brothels. From the 1880s to the 1940s, Vichy was a high-class Las Vegas. Today, the grand hotels stand empty. I am in search of France's hidden past. Can I find "Vichy" — the centre and symbol of wartime collaboration - in Vichy? On June 22, 1940, occupied France signed an armistice with Hitler's Germany. General Charles de Gaulle was in London, personifying free France and opposing the new head of state, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. The Pétain-Hitler deal cut France in half. In return for total collaboration, Pétain's puppet government was allowed to police the so-called "free zone" while the Germans remained in the occupied north. France, bled of fathers, brothers and husbands in 1918, was in no mood to fight. Eighty-four-year-old Pétain, first world war hero, was lauded as France's saviour. He saw himself as the country's grieving father, proclaiming, "France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms." On July 9, 1940, at Vichy's opera house, in a national mood of self-flagellation, parliament voted 569 to 80 to abandon the Third Republic: social benefits gained during the 1936 popular front were eliminated and a new French fascism controlled all forms of life. The constitution was dissolved and the French Republic was no more. The Church supported Pétain. In Lyon, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier exclaimed, "Pétain is France. France is Pétain!" American historian Robert Paxton, in his book Vichy France, writes of the many who repudiated the liberalisation of the Third Republic that had supposedly weakened France: "Each had his own diagnosis of the rot... jazz, alcohol, Paris night life, short skirts, moral depravity among the young, birth control. Enjoyment itself was blamed for softening the nation." The Republic's liberté, égalité, fraternité was replaced with Pétain's travail, famille, patrie (work, family, fatherland). But there was a hypocrisy to Pétain's new moral order.
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Free sexuality was rife in Vichy. A contemporary account by the artist Henri Sjöberg, in his collection of drawings and writings, Hors-Saison A Vichy (Vichy Out Of Season), depicts the scene in the Ministry of Propaganda, room 243 in the Hôtel du Parc, where Pétain's government resided: a naked man and woman lie in postcoital exhaustion surrounded by champagne bottles. Pétain called for family values, forbade women to wear shorts or short skirts, abhorred divorce and demanded that women be mothers. Yet he married a divorcee, was a faithless husband and had no children... In 1940, a majority of politicians of the right and left agreed with the new French fascism. As Paxton says, "Never had so many Frenchmen been ready to accept discipline and authority." Defeat and occupation by the Germans in 1940 had to have a cause. Those judged responsible were the Jew, the communist, the socialist and the freemason... Yet, until the mid-1990s, this was erased from the collective memory in an amnesia that French historian Henri Rousso calls the "Vichy Syndrome". Successive French leaders have had their own reasons for perpetuating the illusion that the Vichy regime was a victim of the Nazis and not an active participant in a Germano-Franco fascism. It was not until 1995, the year he became president, that Jacques Chirac broke the taboo of silence, admitting, "the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers"... Few French people today are aware of how this small town absorbed the massive power abdicated by the French parliament. In 1940, more than 30,000 civil servants migrated there. Locals complained, "We have been invaded — by the French." International embassies installed themselves in the hotels surrounding the Hôtel du Parc. There was even an American embassy from 1940-1942, during the US's period of neutrality. In his autobiography, I Was There, William Leahy, the newly appointed ambassador, describes the strained diplomatic relations between the US and Vichy... Vichy suffers from a mixture of bruised honour and humiliation. In 1945, Pétain was tried for treason and condemned to death. He played the wronged victim. "Power was legitimately given to me and this was recognised from the Vatican to the USSR." One of his main accusers was Paul Reynaud, briefly prime minister before Pétain took over, who had done his utmost to oppose the Nazis. He told the court, "Never has one man done so much damage to a nation as Maréchal Pétain has done to the French...” (Julia Pascal, Vichy’s Shame, The Guardian, 11 May 2002, quoting Adam Nossiter's book, The Algeria Hotel, as an important source).
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