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· · ·

The Riom trial, by which Pétain meant to shatter the very memory of the Third Republic, succeeded principally in weakening the Vichy régime. The trial, the most hilarious, shameful travesty of French justice and example of Army bigotry since the Dreyfus case, was held in the late winter of 1942, and it apparently began as an alibi for the Germans, who, still smarting from the war-guilt stigma for 1914, wanted to force France to pin on herself the war guilt for 1939. Pétain, in his turn, wished the war guilt to fall not on his beloved France but on the hated Third Republic. Such double-barrelled intentions demanded special preparations. In July, 1940, Pétain issued a decree setting up a supreme court, subsequently established in nearby Riom—the only town in the region which possessed a courthouse big enough for the trial of a dead republic—which should judge those responsible for France’s recent “passage from a state of peace to a state of war.” In January, 1941, he issued an act, even odder, which was known as the Retroactive Responsibility of Ministers Act. Its tyrannical opening lines must have made the Vichy higher-ups shake in their shoes, since the law stated that all high government officials must “swear allegiance to his person,” that as office-holders they
“pledged their persons and worldly goods,” that if they broke faith with him he could strip them of their political rights, ship them to the colonies, intern them, imprison them in a fortress—everything but hang them up by their thumbs. Less humorously, this law could retroactively apply to “high dignitaries who had held office within the past ten years,” which clearly meant the Third Republic’s, Popular Front, and Radical-Socialist leaders. In September, Pétain decreed that something to be called a Council of Political Justice be set up with the incredible right to “establish its own rules” and give a preliminary opinion as to the guilt of whoever would be unlucky enough to be tried before the supreme court. On October 13th, Nazi Minister Walther Funk shed considerable light on what was up by broadcasting, from Berlin, that “the French government would soon condemn those guilty of the war.” Sure enough, three days later, Pétain himself ordered, on the recommendation of the Council of Justice, that Radical-Socialist Premier Edouard Daladier, Popular Front Premier Léon Blum, and former Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, principals in the trial to come, be incarcerated in the Pyrenees fortress of Pourtalet on the ground that they were guilty, without having been indicted or tried, of failure in their public duty. Pierre Cot, Popular Front Minister of Air, also on the list of the accused, couldn’t be imprisoned, the Council report noted, “as he is a fugitive” in Washington, D.C. Seventeen months after they had been imprisoned as guilty, the three other men blossomed out as defendants in the Riom trial, which opened on February 19, 1942.

Riom is a grim, handsome Auvergnat Renaissance town of black stone fountains and façades carved from the local volcanic rock. To house the trial in style, Riom’s famous swarthy Palais de Justice, built in medieval times, was gadgeted with central heating, the walls were decked with priceless Beauvais and Flanders tapestries depicting scenes from the Odyssey, and from the ceilings hung splendid crystal chandeliers which once had twinkled in the Tuileries. To match this stage set, the court officials wore their red robes and white toques and the court president and state’s attorney were ringed with ermine collars. The farce, and France’s laughter, began when, the first day, Blum’s attorney opened by blandly reading aloud the eight secret Vichy orders which, as a preliminary, had been handed to the French press. Order No. 1, which took no cognizance of what the Nazis thought the trial was about, said “Keep in mind that the trial is limited to the unpreparedness for war existing in France from 1936 to May, 1940”—just in case some cub reporter forgot
that Pétain had been War Minister in 1934. Order No. 4 instructed the press to make clear that this was a trial of the government of which the French people “had been victims.” Order No. 5 said, “Show that this cannot be the trial of the Army.” Order No. 7 added, “Especially consider this trust when either the person of the Marshal or his policy is referred to during the trial.” That evening, new secret Vichy orders were given to the press, forbidding it to report that Blum’s lawyer had disclosed that it had had the secret orders in the first place. As the trial proceeded, other orders forbade reporters to report that Daladier, on the stand, had said that Weygand had said that Pétain had failed to call a Superior War Council from 1934 on, that Pétain had had millions sliced off Daladier’s appropriations for training camps, and that Pétain, as War Minister, in 1934 had had the war budget cut by one-third, and that “in 1939 there were strong attacks on Pétain in Parliament.” Rather listlessly, Order No. 10 said, “To sum up…suppress all that concerns the actions of the Marshal.” Order No. 16, with more zest, said, “Do not quote the name of de Gaulle.” Once, the state’s attorney was driven to admit, “We are not here to decide if [Pétain’s] laws are constitutional, but only to enforce them.” Once, all that the court president could say, in reply to a Daladier attack on the Marshal, was “Oh! Oh!” After Blum’s lawyer had thrown the fat in the fire, the frantic district press censor sent a confidential memorandum to newspaper editors declaring that he no longer dared send them the press instructions “for reasons you can well imagine.” He also regretted that he could send no adequate trial report, since by the time he got through censoring he had left “only two or three lines of text per page. Many doubt that the trial can continue much longer.” Off the record, he added that Daladier’s defense of himself had “produced a very strong impression.”

Daladier had opened his defense by boldly prophesying, “We shall see, in the course of this trial, where, by whom, and in what manner France was betrayed,” adding, “The hatred of novelty, the hatred of intellectual daring, the hatred of everything modern led the French Army to its ruin.” Blum, with logic and wit, pointed out in his opening speech that, because of the trial’s peculiar restrictions, “in the debate on the responsibility for the defeat, the war itself will be left out.” Gamelin, charged with having let the Army deteriorate, refused to open his mouth in court. This put the prosecution’s Army witnesses in a stew and thereafter they threw the court into fits of hilarity; General Mittelhauser, of the Superior War Council, confessed that he got his Army statistics
from reading the newspapers; General Lenclud admitted that he had not known an air squadron was attached to his corps during battle; a Colonel Perré kept referring to an aviation program which turned out to be an idea he had once had in mind but never got down in writing. The court president was named Caous, which sounded enough like “chaos” to serve. About a month after the trial began, while the court was still in a state of confusion, the Nazi Party’s
Völkischer Beobachter
clarified the issue by pointing out editorially that the trial which had been intended to pin the war guilt on the Third Republic was actually proving the Men of Vichy guilty of the defeat. Soon afterward, the
Frankfurter Zeitung
called Riom “a stupid farce” and Hitler angrily declared in a broadcast that the Riom trial made clear that “the French mentality was really impossible to understand.” On March 19th, the German radio announced that M. de Brinon, Vichy Ambassador to Berlin, had notified Marshal Pétain that the Riom trial must be suspended. The tapestries on the Riom Palais de Justice walls were put back into their boxes; the prisoners were put back into their fortress. On April 14th, the
Journal Officiel
announced Pétain’s law suspending the hearings of the Supreme Court at Riom. On the same day, without any explanation, Pierre Laval was suddenly moved to the top of the Vichy régime with the titles of Chief of Government and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Interior, and Propaganda, and with the right to pick his subordinates. Before a delegation of legionaries, the Marshal suddenly said, speaking of his relationship with Laval, “There are no longer any clouds between us. When M. Laval speaks, it is in agreement with me, and when I speak myself, it is in accord with him.” A few days later, Laval spoke up and said, “I wish for a German victory.”

· · ·

During the night of November 7th that year, the American Army invaded French Morocco. To President Roosevelt’s last-minute direct appeal to Pétain to respect the traditional friendship between France and the United States and to aid our invading troops, the Marshal answered, in his last show of authority, “I have always declared I would defend our empire if it were attacked; you should know that I would keep my word.… We shall defend ourselves: this is the order I am giving.” When Admiral Darlan, in North Africa, attempted to excuse the Marshal’s vain, tragic order by saying that Pétain spoke under dictation, the Marshal proclaimed, in a crescendo, “To dare say that I speak or act under
the menace of duress is an insult to me!” On November 11th, twenty-four years to the day after the armistice of 1918, the Germans, in a race to seize the French fleet before it was scuttled in the waters of Toulon harbor, began to occupy Pétain’s Unoccupied France. Pétain, with Dr. Menetrel at his side, dictated to Hitler’s delegate, General von Rundstedt, who came to Vichy with the grave news of the occupation and with an adequate number of troops, a spirited, inflammatory protest. The protest was handed to the Vichy press. For an hour, Vichy titillated with excitement while the German soldiers stolidly waited. At the end of an hour, the Marshal, his animation depleted, gave in. Pétain received that day what was, so far as is known, his last personal message from Hitler: “It is well known to me,
Herr Marschall
, that you always have been and still are a faithful partisan of the collaboration of France with National-Socialist Germany.” Pétain then disbanded what was left, since the armistice, of the French Army. A week later he announced, in a Vichy radio broadcast, that he was still
chef de l’Etat français
and “the incarnation of France.” After that there was silence.

· · ·

On November 18, 1943, according to journalists in Switzerland, busiest news centre of unoccupied Europe, Marshal Pétain emerged again as worthy of the European front page. He was reported to have been scheduled to broadcast, on November 13th, an important discourse, which the Germans had called off, and he was said to have refused to deliver a substitute of their own concocting. According to the Swiss papers, the important statements in the Marshal’s suppressed speech were “Frenchmen! On July 10, 1940, the National Assembly confided to me the mission of promulgating…a new Constitution for the French State. I am now about to finish the drawing up of that constitution. [However] We, Marshal of France, Chief of State, decree…that if we die before having been able to attain ratification by the Nation of [our] new Constitution…that the power mentioned in the [Third Republic’s] Constitutional Law of 1875 will return to the Senate and Chamber.”

In setting up his autocracy in Vichy, the Marshal had first named Pierre Laval as his dauphin, then named Admiral Darlan. Apparently Marianne, the battered figurehead of the Third Republic, was to be his third choice. If this was his final wish, no one on this side of the Atlantic knows precisely why. Having been wrong in thinking that the Allies would lose the first World War, having been wrong about his French
Army in the peace between the wars, having been wrong in thinking that the Germans had already won the second World War, perhaps the Marshal wished, now that he could clearly see that the democratic Allies would be victors again, to state that he had also been wrong in believing that an autocracy had been suitable even to a defeated Republic of France.

A year after Marshal Pétain had become the supreme autocrat, he told a Catholic priest, “I wish to be buried in the ossuary at Verdun, among those French and German dead marked as unknown. There is a chapel in the crypt which stands empty. It is for me. Whatever happens to me, it is there that I shall go to take my last rest, at the head of my soldiers.” At a moment in Vichy when his faith in himself equalled his power over others, Pétain broadcast to the world the words which might well serve as his epitaph: “It is I alone whom history will judge.”

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