1856-1951
French military leader and politician

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

‘The Old Marshal’ was a French World War I hero who was head of the French State (‘Vichy France’) in World War II. He was ambassador to Spain at the outbreak of World War II and joined the French government as deputy prime minister, then became prime minister. He agreed an armistice with Nazi Germany and led Vichy France until September 1944. Churchill authorised various military operations against his forces, including sinking much of the French navy to prevent it from being used against the Allies. After the war, Pétain was tried for treason and received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment in exile. He died in 1951, aged 95.

2. Stories

• Pétain nearly retired before World War I and became France’s oldest ever head of state in 1940, aged 84.
• Accused of treason, Pétain argued that he was playing a ‘double game’ during World War II.
• Pétain handed Georges Mandel, Churchill’s preferred leader of Free France, over to the Gestapo.
• Another Resistance figure who met a grisly end was Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal envoy.
• British and Allied forces undertook various military operations against Vichy France, including disabling most of its fleet.
• Pétain was convicted of treason and spent the rest of his life exiled on a small island in the Bay of Biscay.
• Pétain’s coffin was stolen in 1973 by supporters wanting to relocate it to Verdun.

Pétain nearly retired before World War I and became France’s oldest ever head of state in 1940, aged 84.

Henri-Philippe Pétain was born into a farming family in northern France and was attracted to the army by the battle stories of his uncle who had fought in Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial army. He joined the light infantry and made slow progress, eventually becoming a colonel. He considered taking early retirement at age 58 but World War I changed his plans.

As a soldier and instructor, he developed the notion of using bombardment for assault, contrary to the prevailing approach of using infantry charges. He applied this at the nine-month Battle of Verdun in 1916, together with other unconventional tactics, with considerable success, earning him the nickname ‘the Lion of Verdun’.

He soon became army commander-in-chief and restored morale with his understanding for the common soldier and his humane treatment of battle-sick and mutinous troops. He delayed subsequent offensives until the arrival of American forces and tank reinforcements, ending the war as one of three generals awarded the honour of Marshal of France.

He ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency in 1919. He reluctantly became minister of war in 1934 and soon resigned. He was appointed as French ambassador to Spain in 1939, but when Germany invaded France the following year he was asked by Prime Minister Paul Reynaud to be his deputy, hoping that this would inspire the military.

Reynaud resigned when the majority of his cabinet, including Pétain, supported an armistice with Germany, and Pétain became prime minister. The armistice was signed on 22 June 1940 near Compiègne, northern France, the location chosen by Hitler because it was where Germany had signed the World War I armistice in 1918.

After retreating from Paris, the government installed itself in Tours, then Bordeaux, then Clermont-Ferrand and finally Vichy, a spa town in unoccupied central France. Pétain became head of the new French State, with autocratic powers that he expanded rapidly. The national motto of ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (‘Freedom, equality, brotherhood’) was replaced with ‘Travail, famille, patrie’ (‘Work, family, homeland’), indicating a break from the Third Republic created in 1870. The French State, commonly called ‘Vichy France’, only lasted until 1946, when it was superseded by the Fourth Republic.

Accused of treason, Pétain argued that he was playing a ‘double game’ during World War II.

Some of Pétain’s behaviour and statements were ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so, which would come back to haunt him. He opposed a retreat to north Africa to regroup and fight back, saying – apparently patriotically – that he would never leave France, although he could have argued that Algeria was fully part of France at the time: it was a ‘department’ (an administrative area), not a colony.

He met Hitler at Montoire-sur-le-Loire in central France in October 1940 to negotiate terms, seeking to minimise the costs of occupation and pushing for the release of two million French prisoners-of-war. However, the enduring image is of him shaking Hitler’s hand. Hitler gave him assurances in exchange for cooperation and a week later Pétain broadcast that ‘I enter today on the path of collaboration’.¹

Despite signing an armistice, France remained formally at war with Germany and initially maintained nominal control of its navy and colonies. The armistice kept Germany from invading southern France and gave Vichy France some independence over its internal affairs, although Pétain voluntarily aligned it with some aspects of Nazism, notably anti-Semitism.

In February 1942, Pétain established a show trial in Riom, central France, to try to attribute blame for military defeat to the former French government. Two former prime ministers were included as defendants. Testimony became embarrassing to the military and the trial was abandoned.

Vichy France created the Milice, a paramilitary organisation, to oppose the French Resistance. Its methods included torture and assassination and it extended its remit to the deportation of Jews to Germany. In 1944, Pétain sought to distance himself from it, writing a letter of reprimand to its commander. In August 1944, Pétain was asked by a representative from Hitler, then instructed, to relocate into occupied German territory, which he refused to do. After German threats to bomb Vichy, he agreed while ensuring that the Swiss ambassador witnessed the coerced arrangement. He was taken to north-east France, then Sigmaringen Castle in south-west Germany, where some of his colleagues had already fled from the threat of Allied advances. He refused to participate in the Vichy government-in-exile there and was released to return to France seven months later, just before the end of the war.

Pétain handed Georges Mandel, Churchill’s preferred leader of Free France, over to the Gestapo.

Mandel was Churchill’s French equivalent in the 1930s, a journalist and politician who warned about the growing Nazi threat. He was minister of the interior at the time of the German invasion and was against the armistice, instead supporting the idea of a retreat to Breton or French north Africa to regroup and fight back.

On 16 June 1940, Churchill’s representative Eddie Spears offered to take Mandel to London on the same flight as de Gaulle to form a French government-in-exile. Mandel declined, saying that because he was a Jew it would give the appearance of being afraid and running away.

The next day Mandel was arrested in Bordeaux on hearsay about being part of an anti-Vichy assassination plot but was released after intervention by President Albert Lebrun. Pétain apologised but Mandel was sneering and forced him to put the apology in writing, in two different versions, creating bad feeling.

Mandel arranged for the government to relocate to Algeria but in the end only a few officials accompanied him in June 1940 on the vessel Massilia from Bordeaux in south-west France. Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval ordered his arrest in Morocco and Churchill tried to have him rescued, unsuccessfully.* He was going to be tried at Riom but the charges were dropped. He was transferred to the Gestapo and held in Oranienburg and Buchenwald concentration camps in Germany, then moved to a prison in Paris in July 1944.

He was told that he was being transferred to another prison and was taken out of Paris by car. The driver, Jean Mansuy, a member of the Milice and a German agent, faked engine trouble and got out of the car with Mandel. Mansuy shot him 16 times in what appears to have been a joint operation between the SS and the Milice in Paris. Laval was horrified.

The following month, Mansuy was arrested by the French Forces of the Interior (a late version of the Resistance) and was summarily executed in circumstances that are still unclear. After the war, a memorial was installed where Mandel was assassinated in Fontainebleau forest, 40 miles (60 km) southeast of Paris.

* Churchill sent Duff Cooper by seaplane to Morocco to make contact with Mandel which was refused. Churchill ordered the Admiralty to try and retrieve Mandel and others from the Massilia while it was in Casablanca, but the port was protected by large onshore guns and a rescue was impossible.

Another Resistance figure who met a grisly end was Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s personal envoy.

In 1937, at age 36, Jean Moulin was the youngest prefect of all the departments in France. He studied law at Montpellier and drew political cartoons and book illustrations. When Germany invaded in 1940, he was instructed to sign a document that attributed some civilian deaths to the French army although they had occurred from German bombing. He refused, was jailed, and tried to commit suicide by slicing his neck with a piece of glass. He survived and later hid the scar with a scarf.

Pétain’s Vichy regime dismissed him from his position, along with all other left-wing prefects. He moved to Marseille to join the Resistance, familiarising himself with all aspects of the various factions. He obtained a false passport and made his way to the UK via Spain and Portugal. The British kept him for a month in Bournemouth, trying to recruit him as a British agent until they gave up and let him go to London.

De Gaulle was impressed and appointed him as his envoy to coordinate and lead the various highly independent Resistance groups. Moulin also met Churchill’s confidant Desmond Morton and asked to be remembered to Churchill, having met him two years earlier at a lunch in France.

In January 1942, he parachuted from a British aircraft into Vichy France and spent a year aligning three of the main groups, a difficult task. After another visit to London, he managed to align other groups, including communists who disliked de Gaulle.

He and others were arrested at a meeting in June 1943. Conspiracy theories still abound as to who may have betrayed them. He was tortured daily by the notorious Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo ‘Butcher of Lyon’, becoming almost unrecognisable but giving nothing away. He is believed to have died while being transported to Germany, perhaps by suicide.

Before his death, he was presented with the prestigious Croix de la Libération by de Gaulle in London. An image of him in his hat and scarf is well known throughout France today.

British and Allied forces undertook various military operations against Vichy France, including disabling most of its fleet.

Despite never declaring war on each other, Britain and Vichy France nevertheless engaged in various conflicts. The most controversial was a British attack (Operation Catapult) in July 1940 on a major component of the French fleet, based in Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran in Algeria. Churchill feared that the French navy would be used against the Allies. The month before, he had agreed with Pétain’s government to a French armistice with Germany on the condition that the French fleet be moved to British ports, but the condition was refused.

The attack was only a few weeks after some French naval vessels had assisted the retreat from Dunkirk. It resulted in the disabling of many ships and the loss of around 1300 French lives. Churchill wrote that ‘This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned’.² The event included numerous miscommunications, without which many lives may have been saved. Later, Germany did indeed try to take control of the remainder of the fleet but was thwarted by Counter-Admiral (equivalent to Rear Admiral) Gabriel Auphan who scuttled most of the ships in November 1942.

In September 1940, British, Free French and Australian forces attacked Dakar in French West Africa (now Senegal), in Operation Menace, hoping to take its strategic port. However, Vichy-supporting forces repelled the Allies, to the embarrassment of de Gaulle in particular, who was present at the attack.

In mid-1941, British and Allied forces invaded Vichy-controlled Syria and Lebanon in Operation Exporter to prevent them from being coerced by Germany to attack the Suez Canal in Egypt or to gain access to oil exports from Iraq (see Rashid Ali al-Gaylani). Vichy authorities signed an armistice after six weeks of strong resistance.

The British-led Battle of Madagascar (Operations Ironclad and Stream Line Jane) took place over six months in 1942, resulting in Allied possession which was a critical development in denying Japanese control over maritime routes between Europe and Asia.

Operation Torch was the American-led Allied invasion of French north Africa (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), beginning in November 1942. Pro-Vichy forces provided some opposition until Admiral François Darlan ordered their cooperation.

Pétain was convicted of treason and spent the rest of his life exiled on a small island in the Bay of Biscay.

In July 1945, aged 89, Pétain underwent a three-week trial for treason, at the beginning of which he read out a statement declaring his innocence and saying that ‘The High Court as constituted does not represent the French people, and it is to them alone that the Marshal of France, Head of State, will address himself. I will make no further declaration. I will not reply to any question.’³ Part of the reason may have been his lawyers’ desire to preserve an image of dignified aloofness as he was now showing signs of senility.

He was convicted and sentenced to death and financial penalties, although with a recommendation that the execution should not be carried out due to his age. He was stripped of his military honours except that of Marshal. De Gaulle had not wanted Pétain to be made to appear in person and thought that aspects of the trial were prejudiced against his former mentor. He commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

Pétain was taken to the cliff-top Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees where the Vichy government had temporarily held its most high-profile prisoners, including Georges Mandel. He was then transferred to Fort de Pierre-Levée on Île d’Yeu, an island off the west coast of France where he spent the next six years in declining physical and mental health. Appeals for his release, including by US president Harry Truman, were unsuccessful. In 1951, he was permitted to move into a private home where he died three weeks later, aged 95.

His wish to be buried at Verdun was ignored and he was buried instead in a cemetery in the town of Port-Joinville on Île d’Yeu. His coffin-bearers were six Verdun veterans and two World War II ex-prisoners of war. Around 7000 people attended the funeral procession.

De Gaulle wrote to biographer Pierre Bourget to endorse his portrayal of Pétain’s life being (in de Gaulle’s words) ‘successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre’.⁴ Churchill’s earlier assessment, on hearing about Pétain’s wish to sign an armistice during World War II, was more blunt: ‘he had always been a defeatist, even in the last war’.⁵

Pétain’s coffin was stolen in 1973 by supporters wanting to relocate it to Verdun.

Pétain’s supporters campaigned for his remains to be moved to Verdun, to no avail. Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a lawyer and right-wing politician, instigated a covert plan. He visited Île d’Yeu for reconnaissance and appointed Hubert Massol, a political associate, to lead a six-person team to remove Pétain’s coffin.

One of them took a van to the island by ferry, pretending to attend a clothes market. Another, a funeral craftsman from a Paris cemetery, brought his tools and materials to help to open and re-seal the tomb. At two in the morning, they removed the coffin from the tomb, keeping extremely quiet as there was a police station next to the cemetery. They made sure the area was left tidy, returned to their hotel for some champagne, then took the van and coffin to the mainland on an early morning ferry.

That morning a municipal employee noticed that Pétain’s grave was overly tidy and that the tomb had fresh work on its joints. He notified the police who arranged for the tomb to be opened, discovering the theft. The police made a press statement and began an urgent investigation.

The gang was going to drive to Verdun but after seeing the news decided that Massol would hide the coffin in an apartment in northern Paris. The police began looking for the van after obtaining its details from ferry records. They placed Tixier-Vignancour under surveillance, as one of his stated political goals was to have Pétain’s remains moved to Verdun. When Massol met him at a courthouse, they realised they were being watched. They agreed that Massol would take the blame while Tixier-Vignancour defended him in a trial to promote Pétain’s innocence.

Massol held a press conference in a café to declare his demand for the remains to be buried at Verdun. The police stormed the café and arrested him, whereupon he disclosed the coffin’s location under interrogation. It was flown back to Île d’Yeu and reburied in its original location, three days after its disappearance. No-one was tried, for fear of renewed campaigns in favour of Pétain.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Army officer, politician
Country	France
Career	Second Lieutenant (1878). Various promotions, becoming Colonel (1914) then Brigadier General (1914). Commander-In-Chief (1917-1918). Field Marshal (1918). Vice President, Supreme War Council (1920-31). Inspector-General of Air Defence (1931-34). Minister of War (1934). Secretary of State (1935). French Ambassador to Spain (1939-40). Deputy Prime Minister then Prime Minister of France (1940). Chief of the French State (1940-44).
Born	1856 in Cauchy-à-la-Tour, Pas-de-Calais, French Empire (northern France) (18 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Omer-Venant Pétain (1816-1888), farmer; first wife was Philippe’s mother; second wife was Marie-Reine Vincent
Mother	Clotilde Legrand (1824-1857); died aged 32 when Philippe was 18 months old
Siblings	Fourth of five children: 1. Marie-Françoise (1852-1950) 2. Adélaïde (1853-1919) 3. Sara (1854-1940) 4. Henri-Philippe ‘Philippe’ Bénoni Omer Joseph (1856-1951) 5. Joséphine (1857-1862) Three step-siblings from father’s second marriage
Education	Local Catholic secondary school; Saint-Cyr Military Academy
Spouse	Eugénie ‘Annie’ Hardon (1877-1962); m. 1920 until Philippe’s death; Philippe was 63 on marriage; Eugénie was 42; she was previously married to François de Hérain, doctor and artist (div. 1914)
Relationships	Various
Children	None. Stepson Pierre de Hérain (1904-1972), film director
Died	1951 in a private home in Port-Joinville, Île d’Yeu (off Atlantic coast), Vendée, French Republic, aged 95 (14 years before Churchill)
Buried	Port-Joinville cemetery, Île d’Yeu
Nickname	The Lion of Verdun; The Old Marshal
Height	5’6½” (1.69 m)
Time magazine	–

4. See also

French leadership

• De Gaulle, Charles

Special Operations Executive

• Gubbins, Colin

Other removals of body remains

• Chaplin, Charlie
• Goebbels, Joseph
• Hitler, Adolf
• Mussolini, Benito
• Shah, Reza

Churchill’s other French connections

• Chanel, Coco (fashion designer)
• Edward VIII (UK royalty)
• Elliott, Maxine (actress)
• Maze, Paul (artist)
• Pol-Roger, Odette (champagne company executive)

Churchill controversies

• Anti-appeasement
• Warmongering

5. Further reading

Pétain

• Atkin, Nicholas, Pétain (Taylor & Francis, 2014)
• Griffiths, Richard, Marshal Pétain (Faber & Faber, 2011)
• Jackson, Julian, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (Allen Lane, 2023)
• Williams, Charles, Pétain: How the Hero of France Became a Convicted Traitor and Changed the Course of History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Vichy France

• Curtis, Michael, Verdict on Vichy: Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime (Arcade, 2003)
• Jackson, Julian, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (OUP Oxford, 2003)

French Resistance and the Special Operations Executive

• Marnham, Patrick, Army of the Night: The Life and Death of Jean Moulin, Legend of the French Resistance (Bloomsbury USA, 2015)
• Purnell, Sonia, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II (Penguin Publishing Group, 2020)
• Stroud, Rick, Lonely Courage: The True Story of the SOE Heroines Who Fought to Free Nazi-Occupied France (Simon & Schuster UK, 2017)
• Wieviorka, Olivier, The French Resistance, trans. by Jane Marie Todd (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Conflicts with Vichy French forces

• De Wailly, Henri, Invasion Syria, 1941: Churchill and de Gaulle’s Forgotten War, trans. by William Land (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
• Grehan, John, Churchill’s Secret Invasion: Britain’s First Large Scale Combined Offensive 1942 (Pen & Sword Books, 2013) (Occupation of Madagascar)
• Hindley, Meredith, Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II (PublicAffairs, 2017)
• Marder, Arthur, Operation Menace: The Dakar Expedition and the Dudley North Affair (Pen & Sword Books, 2016)
• Smith, Colin, England’s Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-42 (Orion, 2010)

6. References

1. Philippe Pétain, ‘Allocution Radiodiffusée [Broadcast Speech]’, Imperial War Museums, 1940.

2. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 2: Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 232.

3. Richard Griffiths, Marshal Pétain (Constable, 1994), p. 335.

4. Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets, Tome 10: 1964-1966 (Place des éditeurs, 2014), p. 256. 23 February 1966 (‘successivement banal, puis glorieux, puis déplorable, mais jamais médiocre’).

5. Churchill, p. 159.