Who was Philippe Pétain?

The outbreak of war transformed Pétain's fortunes overnight. After leading a brigade at the Battle of Guise in August 1914, he was promoted to general the next day, and within weeks rose again to command an army corps. By 1915 he was leading the Second Army in major offensives and had built a reputation as one of the Western Front's more capable commanders.

His defining moment came at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Rather than leaving the same divisions to grind down on the battlefield for months, as the Germans did, Pétain rotated units out after only two weeks and organized continuous truck convoys along the road known as the Voie Sacrée to keep Verdun supplied with troops, artillery, and ammunition. His long-held conviction that firepower wins wars was vindicated by the millions of shells French artillery fired during the battle's opening months. The phrase most associated with Verdun's defense, 'they shall not pass,' was actually spoken by his successor there, Robert Nivelle, not by Pétain himself.

When Nivelle's own offensive collapsed in 1917 and provoked widespread mutinies across the French Army, Pétain was recalled to take command. He defused the crisis not through mass executions but by touring units personally, promising an end to futile attacks, and granting rest and home leave, while reserving the harshest punishments for only a small fraction of those court-martialed. He then held the line through 1917 and the German offensives of 1918, insisting on waiting for American troops and new French tanks before resuming major attacks, and played a key role in halting the last German pushes of the war. He was made Marshal of France in November 1918.

After the armistice, Pétain's prestige made him one of France's most powerful military voices even outside active command. He took the vice-chairmanship of the Supreme War Council in 1920, a post that made him commander-in-chief designate in any future war, and he held it for over a decade. He was a strong advocate for the Maginot Line, a system of frontier fortifications, having drawn on his own experience of how forts had helped at Verdun. In 1925 he commanded French forces in Morocco during the Rif War, bringing the campaign against Rif tribes to a successful conclusion within two months.

Pétain repeatedly clashed with French governments over shrinking military budgets and shortened terms of conscription, arguing that France was leaving itself dangerously unprepared, though funding cuts and reduced recruitment continued regardless. In 1934 he reluctantly accepted the post of Minister of War, where he restored previously cut officer numbers, but reports at the time still found the army poorly trained and under-resourced. He was elected to the Académie française in 1931, and by the mid-1930s had become so popular that a newspaper poll on potential dictators placed him well ahead of other political figures, despite his own lack of interest in formal politics.

In 1939 Pétain was sent to Spain as French ambassador, tasked with trying to pull the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whom he had once taught, away from Italian and German influence. He was still in this post when Germany invaded France the following year.

Pétain returned to government in May 1940 as Deputy Prime Minister under Paul Reynaud, brought in to bolster national morale as German forces broke through French lines. Within weeks, as the military situation collapsed, he joined commander-in-chief Maxime Weygand in arguing that continued resistance was hopeless and that an armistice, not relocation of the government abroad, was the only honorable course. When Winston Churchill urged the French to fight on, even from Paris itself, Pétain replied that turning the capital into ruins would change nothing, and noted bitterly that he no longer had the reserves he had commanded in 1918.

On 16 June 1940, with the cabinet divided and an offer of a joint Franco-British union rejected by most ministers, Reynaud resigned and recommended Pétain as his successor. President Albert Lebrun appointed him that same day. Pétain's government quickly sought terms from Germany, and France signed an armistice at Compiègne on 22 June 1940, ceding the northern and western regions, including Paris, to German occupation while leaving the remainder nominally unoccupied. The government relocated first to Clermont-Ferrand and then to the spa town of Vichy.

On 10 July 1940, the French Parliament voted overwhelmingly to grant Pétain's cabinet the power to write a new constitution, a vote that effectively dissolved the Third Republic, though its legality has been disputed ever since by French historians and governments. Pétain assumed near-total power as head of state, replacing the republican motto of liberty, equality, and fraternity with work, family, and fatherland, and presided over an authoritarian program called the National Revolution that dismantled many secular and liberal traditions of the old republic. His government dismissed civil servants, imposed censorship, and began passing antisemitic laws on its own initiative, including a 1940 law defining Jewish identity and another authorizing internment of foreign Jews, steps taken before Germany demanded them.

Vichy France initially retained a degree of nominal independence and even diplomatic recognition from countries including the United States, but it cooperated closely with Axis demands for goods and resources and ordered French colonial forces to resist Allied as well as German incursions. Pétain met Hitler at Montoire in October 1940, and a photograph of the two shaking hands caused outrage in Britain. After Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, German forces occupied the previously free southern zone, reducing Pétain to a figurehead even as crowds still turned out to greet him on public visits as late as 1944. In 1943 his government sanctioned the creation of the Milice, a collaborationist militia that worked alongside German forces to suppress the French resistance.

As Allied forces advanced in August 1944, German officials forcibly relocated Pétain, first to Belfort and then to the Sigmaringen enclave in Germany, where remaining Vichy officials formed a government-in-exile. Pétain refused to participate in this body and later asked Hitler directly for permission to return to France, a request that went unanswered. He was eventually escorted to the Swiss border in April 1945 and crossed back into France two days later.

France's provisional government, led by Charles de Gaulle, put Pétain on trial for treason from 23 July to 15 August 1945. He spoke only to deny the court's authority to try him, then remained largely silent throughout the proceedings. The court convicted him on all charges and sentenced him to death and confiscation of his property, though it recommended against carrying out the execution given his advanced age. De Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in exile, while Pétain was also stripped of all military ranks and honors apart from the title of Marshal of France.

He was imprisoned first at Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees and then on the Île d'Yeu, an island off the Atlantic coast. Despite appeals for his release from figures including U.S. President Harry Truman and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, successive French governments judged the move too politically risky. By the late 1940s his health deteriorated sharply, with memory loss progressing to dementia, hallucinations, and eventual loss of mobility. In June 1951 his sentence was commuted to hospital confinement, but he was too ill to be moved before his death.

Pétain died on 23 July 1951 in Port-Joinville on the Île d'Yeu at the age of 95, from dementia and heart disease. He was buried in the local cemetery, his grave deliberately positioned facing away from the sea in contrast to the island's other graves, a reflection of his conviction for national indignity. In 1973 his coffin was briefly stolen by extremists demanding his reburial among the Verdun war dead, but it was recovered and returned to its original site within days.