[69], In February 1973, Pétain's coffin housing his remains was stolen from the Île d'Yeu cemetery by extremists, who demanded that President Georges Pompidou consent to its re-interment at Douaumont cemetery among the war dead of the Verdun battle. President Lebrun invited 71-year-old Doumergue to come out of retirement and form a new "government of national unity". Paul Baudouin met his plane and immediately spoke to him of the hopelessness of further French resistance. [30] Fascistic and revolutionary conservative factions within the new government used the opportunity to launch an ambitious programme known as the "National Revolution", which rejected much of the former Third Republic's secular and liberal traditions in favour of an authoritarian, paternalist, Catholic society. Pétain already had a ministerial team ready: Laval for Foreign Affairs (this appointment was briefly vetoed by Weygand), Weygand as Minister of Defence, Darlan as Minister for the Navy, and Bouthillier for Finance.[43]. Lebrun persuaded him to stay until Churchill’s reply had been received. In September 1920, Pétai… As a retired military commander, he ran the country on military lines. [9], Pétain conducted some successful but limited offensives in the latter part of 1917, unlike the British who stalled in an unsuccessful offensive at Passchendaele that autumn. With the imminent Fall of France in June 1940 in World War II, Pétain was appointed President of the Ministerial Council by President Lebrun at Bordeaux, and the Cabinet resolved to sign armistice agreements with Germany and Italy. The cuts in military expenditure meant that taking the offensive was now impossible and a defensive strategy was all they could have. Though Pétain publicly stated that he had no desire to become "a Caesar,"[52] by January 1941, Pétain held virtually all governing power in France; nearly all legislative, executive, and judicial powers were either ‘’de jure’’ or ‘’de facto’’ in his hands. Marshals Louis Franchet d'Espèrey and Hubert Lyautey (the latter suddenly died in July) added their names to the report. Hengshan Road, in Shanghai, was "Avenue Pétain" between 1922 and 1943. Pétain believed – wrongly – that Gough's Fifth Army had been routed like the Italians at Caporetto. The year 1918 saw major German offensives on the Western Front. This was France's highest military position, whose holder was Commander-in-Chief designate in the event of war and who had the right to overrule the Chief of the General Staff (a position held in the 1920s by Petain's protégés Buat and Debeney), and Petain would hold it until 1931. [21] Pétain had based his strong support for the Maginot Line on his own experience of the role played by the forts during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. He, Baudouin, and several members of the government were already set on an armistice. [35] Weygand said that he was in favor of saving the French army and that he "wished to avoid internal troubles and above all anarchy". He referred to the danger of military and civil disorder and the possibility of a Communist uprising in Paris. After the autumn maneuvers, which Pétain had reinstated, a report was presented to Pétain that officers had been poorly instructed, had little basic knowledge, and no confidence. French industrial efforts in fighter aircraft were dispersed among several firms (Dewoitine, Morane-Saulnier and Marcel Bloch), each with its own models. He criticised the reservist system in France, and her lack of adequate air power and armour. [48] Nearly all French historians, as well as all postwar French governments, consider this vote to be illegal; not only were several deputies and senators not present, but the constitution explicitly stated that the republican form of government could not be changed, though it could be argued that a republican dictatorship was installed. "I will fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris". [47] Pétain broadcast again to the French people on that day. Reynaud hoped that the hero of Verdun might instill a renewed spirit of resistance and patriotism in the French Army. [26] During this period, he repeatedly called for a lengthening of the term of compulsory military service for conscripts from two to three years, to no avail. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Pétain, amongst others, took exception to the use of the term "revolution" to describe what he believed to be an essentially conservative movement, but otherwise participated in the transformation of French society from "Republic" to "State." [29] Although Le Petit Journal was conservative, Pétain's high reputation was bipartisan; socialist Léon Blum called him "the most human of our military commanders". After successively commanding a brigade, a corps, and an army, Pétain in 1916 was charged with stopping the German attack on the fortress city of Verdun. The General Staff, now under General Edmond Buat, began to think seriously about a line of forts along the frontier with Germany, and their report was tabled on 22 May 1922. He was summoned to be present at the signing of the Treaty of Versailleson 28 June 1919. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). This page was last edited on 16 January 2021, at 10:38. Gilbert and Bernard find multiple causes: The immediate cause was the extreme optimism and subsequent disappointment at the Nivelle offensive in the spring of 1917. He would not forget that the Radical leader, Édouard Daladier, even voted against the whole package, on the grounds that the Army was still too large.[20]. The French heavy machine gun was still the Hotchkiss M1914, a capable weapon but decidedly obsolete compared to the new automatic weapons of German infantry. A new commission for this purpose was established, under Joseph Joffre, and called for reports. Philippe Petain in the 1930s (Library of Congress) In June 1951 President Auriol of France issued a decree permitting Philippe Pétain, now 95 and senile, to be moved for humanitarian reasons from the fortress on the Ile d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay, where he had been held since 1945, to a house at Port Joinville nearby. He was promoted to captain in 1890 and major (Chef de Bataillon) in 1900. Fearing riots at the announcement of the sentence, de Gaulle ordered that Pétain be immediately transported on the former's private aircraft to Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees,[62] where he remained from 15 August to 16 November 1945. 200,000 readers responded to the paper's poll. Among a vast number of books and articles about Pétain, the most complete and documented biographies are: French general officer and leader of Vichy France. He was a distinguished veteran of World War I and in particular the battle of Verdun. [40] The Cabinet voted 13-6 for the Chautemps proposal. He reported this conversation to President Poincaré, adding "surely a general should not speak or think like that?" Pétain did not get involved in non-military issues when in the Cabinet, and unlike other military leaders he did not have a reputation as an extreme Catholic or a monarchist.[30]. Political unease was sweeping the country, and on 6 February 1934, the Paris police fired on a group of far-right rioters outside the Chamber of Deputies, killing 14 and wounding a further 236. Édouard Daladier's new government retaliated against Weygand by reducing the number of officers and cutting military pensions and pay, arguing that such measures, apart from financial stringency, were in the spirit of the Geneva Disarmament Conference.[25]. [57] 1914-12-16 French offensive in Artois, Northern France led by Philippe Pétain; 1940-05-31 Winston Churchill flies to Paris to meet with French Marshal Philippe Pétain who announces he is willing to make a separate peace with Germany; 1940-07-11 Marshall Philippe Pétain, French hero of World War I, becomes head of the Vichy collaborationist government of France [57] 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. On 26 October 1931, Pétain was honored with a ticker-tape parade down Manhattan's Canyon of Heroes. "[55], On 11 November 1942, German forces invaded the unoccupied zone of Southern France in response to the Allies' Operation Torch landings in North Africa and Admiral François Darlan's agreement to support the Allies. Pinardville, a traditionally French-Canadian neighborhood of Goffstown, New Hampshire, has a Petain Street dating from the 1920s, alongside parallel streets named for other World War I generals, John Pershing, Douglas Haig, Ferdinand Foch, and Joseph Joffre. Modern infantry rifles and machine guns were not manufactured, with the sole exception of a light machine-rifle, the Mle 1924. "—in this case meaning French field artillery, which fired over 15 million shells on the Germans during the first five months of the battle. Pétain accompanied President Lebrun to Belgrade for the funeral of King Alexander, who had been assassinated on 6 October 1934 in Marseille by Vlado Chernozemski, a Macedonian nationalist of Bulgarian origin. After having requested the Swiss ambassador Walter Stucki [fr] to bear witness to the Germans' blackmail, Pétain submitted. Theirs was the last street in France named for the white-mustachioed Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun in the Great War. Pétain's motives are a topic of wide conjecture. Plans were made for his death and funeral. During this time he was known as Le Vieux Maréchal (The Old Marshal). Vichy France, formally French State, French État Français, (July 1940–September 1944), France under the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain from the Nazi German defeat of France to the Allied liberation in World War II. Because of his high prestige as a soldier's soldier, Pétain served briefly as Army Chief of Staff (from the end of April 1917). In August 1944, after the liberation of Paris by General Charles de Gaulle, Pétain dispatched an emissary to arrange for a peaceful transfer of power. On 3 March 1949, a meeting of the Council of Ministers (many of them "self-proclaimed heroes of the Resistance" in the words of biographer Charles Williams) had a fierce argument about a medical report recommending that he be moved to Val-de-Grâce (a military hospital in Paris), a measure to which Prime Minister Henri Queuille had previously been sympathetic. Still, the handshake he offered to Hitler caused much uproar in London, and probably influenced Britain's decision to lend the Free French naval support for their operations at Gabon. The written text is submitted to Pétain: "The Reich Government instructs the transfer of the Head of State, even against his will". [27], In November the Doumergue government fell. [28] Now, however, he refused to continue in Flandin's (short-lived) government as Minister of War and stood down – in spite of a direct appeal from Lebrun himself. French general who fled to England after the fall of Paris and set up a government-in-exile. Admiral Darlan, who had been opposed to an armistice until 15 June, now became a key player, agreeing provided the French fleet was kept out of German hands. But he recognised, after the new Army Organisation Law of 1927, that the tide was flowing against him. [65] By the end of 1949, Pétain was almost completely senile, with only occasional moments of lucidity. He was educated at Dominican college in Arceuil before he joined the infantry in 1878. On 5 June, following the fall of Dunkirk, there was a Cabinet reshuffle. Brought to trial in France for his behaviour after 1940, he was condemned to death in August 1945. The regime organised a "Légion Française des Combattants," which included "Friends of the Legion" and "Cadets of the Legion", groups of those who had never fought but were politically attached to the new regime. During the interwar period he was head of the peacetime French Army, commanded joint Franco-Spanish operations during the Rif War and served twice as a government minister. Philippe Petain joined the French Army and then attended the St Cyr Military School. Between 1878 and 1899, he served in various garrisons with different battalions of the Chasseurs à pied, the elite light infantry of the French Army. Pétain was born in Cauchy-à-la-Tour (in the Pas-de-Calais département in Northern France) in 1856. [24] In 1931 Pétain was elected a Fellow of the Académie française. Eight were initially undecided but swung towards an armistice. Born into a family of farmers in northern France, Pétain, after attending the local village school and a religious secondary school, was admitted to Saint-Cyr, France’s principal military academy. On 10 June, the government left Paris for Tours. Rather than resigning, he maintained in a letter to the French the fiction that "I am, and remain morally, your leader". After the war, Pétain was tried and convicted for treason. Other causes were pacificism, stimulated by the Russian Revolution and the trade-union movement, and disappointment at the nonarrival of American troops. Historical Events. It was placed under the leadership of WWI military veteran hero, Marshal Philippe Petain. He added that the new France would be "a social hierarchy... rejecting the false idea of the natural equality of men. His journey from military obscurity, to hero of France during World War I, to collaborationist dictator during World War II, led his successor Charles de Gaulle to write that Pétain’s life was "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre". After the war ended Pétain was made Marshal of France on 21 November 1918. Pétain refused and asked for a written formulation of this request. Pétain's government acquiesced to the Axis forces demands for large supplies of manufactured goods and foodstuffs, and also ordered French troops in France's colonial empire (in Dakar, Syria, Madagascar, Oran and Morocco) to defend sovereign French territory against any aggressors, Allied or otherwise. Only 20 infantry divisions would be maintained on a standing basis". He even allegedly named his eldest son after the Marshal, although it is more likely that he named his son after his family ancestor Jean Baptiste Philippe de Gaulle,[22] before finally falling out over the authorship of a book he had said he had ghost-written for Pétain. On 11 June, Churchill flew to the Château du Muguet, at Briare, near Orléans, where he put forward first his idea of a Breton redoubt, to which Weygand replied that it was just a "fantasy". A Nazi-controlled puppet state in Souther France established by Hitler and headed by Marshal Philippe Petain. He was told, in addition, by Maurice Gamelin, that if the plebiscite in the Territory of the Saar Basin went for Germany it would be a serious military error for the French Army to intervene. He was subsequently decorated, at Toledo, by King Alfonso XIII with the Spanish Medalla Militar. Acting heads of state are denoted by an asterisk. Faced with the Marshal's continued refusal, the Germans threatened to bring in the Wehrmacht to bomb Vichy. [59] 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. Hero of Verdun: Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain - Warfare History Network Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain disdained election as president, but became chief of Vichy France anyway. [66], On 8 June 1951, President Auriol, informed that Pétain had little longer to live, commuted his sentence to confinement in hospital; the news was kept secret until after the elections on 17 June, but by then, Pétain was too ill to be moved to Paris. [30] Reportedly Franco advised Pétain against leaving his diplomatic post in Madrid, to return to a collapsing France as a "sacrifice". Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) was a French Field Marshal, World War One hero and convicted Nazi collaborator. The entire government subsequently moved briefly to Clermont-Ferrand, then to the spa town of Vichy in central France. Philippe Pétain was born in 1856 in Cauchy-à-la-Tour near St. Omer, France. In collaboration with Nazi Germany, he then served as the Chief of State of Vichy France from 1940 to 1944. Debatable or disputed rulers are in italics. Pétain, of course, disapproved of the whole thing, pointing out that North Africa still had to be defended and in itself required a substantial standing army. A new Cabinet with Pétain as head of government was formed, with Henry du Moulin de Labarthète as the Cabinet Secretary. [72], withdrawn following conviction for high treason in 1945. No reply ever came. The republican motto of "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" ("Freedom, equality, brotherhood") was replaced with "Travail, famille, patrie" ("Work, family, fatherland"). When Renthe-Fink entered the Marshal's office at the Hôtel du Parc with General von Neubronn "at 7:30 p.m.", the Head of State was supervising the packing up of his suitcases and papers. He was born in Cauch-a-la-Tour, France. Under him the French armies participated in the victorious offensive of 1918, led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, generalissimo of the Allied armies. He acquired a reputation as one of the more successful commanders on the Western Front. As early as June 1946, U.S. President Harry Truman interceded in vain for his release, even offering to provide political asylum in the U.S.[64] A similar offer was later made by the Spanish dictator General Franco. De Gaulle later conceded that Pétain was right about that much at least.[38]. On 26 April 1936, the general election results showed 5.5 million votes for the Popular Front parties against 4.5 million for the Right on an 84% turnout. Pétain admitted Darnand into his government as Secretary of the Maintenance of Public Order (Secrétaire d'État au Maintien de l'Ordre). [63] To this, Churchill subsequently reported, Pétain replied quietly and with dignity that he had in those days a strategic reserve of sixty divisions; now, there were none, and the British ought to be providing divisions to aid France. Pétain proved a capable opponent of the Germans both in defence and through counter-attack. Pétain, who was 84 years old in 1940, ranks as France's oldest head of state. Pétain noted his recent promotion to general, adding that he did not congratulate him, as ranks were of no use in defeat. (AP) (AP) He said that France had lost faith in her destiny. However, on his birthday almost three weeks later, he was taken to the Swiss border. "the need to stay in France, to prepare a national revival, and to share the sufferings of our people. During a cabinet meeting that day, Reynaud argued that before asking for an armistice, France would have to get Britain's permission to be relieved from their accord of March 1940 not to sign a separate cease-fire. [67], Pétain died in a private home in Port-Joinville on the Île d'Yeu on 23 July 1951, at the age of 95. Churchill then said the French should defend Paris and reminded Pétain of how he had come to the aid of the British with forty divisions in March 1918, and repeating Clemenceau's words. "Flawed saviours: the myths of Hindenburg and Pétain". Find the perfect Marshal Philippe Pétain stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images. Despite once being popular, today he … Following the German attack of May 1940 in World War II, Paul Reynaud, who was then head of the government, named Pétain vice premier, and on June 16, at the age of 84, Marshal Pétain was asked to form a new ministry. The Maginot Line, as it came to be called, (named after André Maginot the former Minister of War) thereafter occupied a good deal of Pétain's attention during 1928, when he also travelled extensively, visiting military installations up and down the country. The result of all these failings is that the French Army had to face the invading enemy in 1940, with the dated weaponry of 1918. However, aged 58 and having been told he would never become a general, Pétain had bought a villa for retirement.[7]. However, after Germany invaded France, Pétain joined the new government of Paul Reynaud on 18 May 1940 as Deputy Prime Minister. 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