Julian Jackson

In France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (2023), Jackson used Pétain's 1945 treason trial as a vantage point on responsibility for collaboration. Paying as much attention to the stances of witnesses, jury, lawyers and judges as to those of the accused, he asked what a battered nation, freed from its enemies, reveals when forced to confront its own shame. The proceedings turned on the armistice with Germany and Vichy's policy of collaboration, what the prosecutor Mornet called "four years to erase from our history."

The study rests on the problem that the trial record alone cannot carry the history of the Occupation. The fate of Jews in Vichy France received little attention in 1945, and Jackson addresses it in a full chapter. As Robert O. Paxton notes, extermination camps were then poorly understood, and "deportee" generally meant someone arrested for resistance or conscripted for labour in German factories rather than a Jew. Defendants such as Xavier Vallat argued that Vichy must have sheltered Jews because a smaller proportion of French Jews perished than in occupied Western European countries like the Netherlands; Paxton observes that this ignores the restrictions Vichy itself enacted in 1940 and 1941, which made Jews in France more vulnerable to the deportations that began in April 1942.

Jackson also shows how the trial cast Vichy as merely responding to German demands. Paxton notes that the prosecution, required to charge violation of specific laws, relied on Article 75, which condemned collusion with the enemy; this obscured the domestic origins of the National Revolution. Jackson demonstrates at each point how the defence's arguments have been refuted by later scholarship: far from limiting itself to parrying German demands, Pétain's government grasped the opportunity to remake the nation along reactionary lines. France, he argues, was the only Western European country that actively legislated under Nazi occupation.

The book also engages the postwar memory struggles around Pétain. Paxton relates that Pétain was sentenced to death, with the sentence commuted to life imprisonment in view of his age and his service in the First World War, and that he died on the Île d'Yeu in 1951, yet the debates did not end. The Association for the Defence of the Memory of Marshal Pétain was founded in 1951, and from the 1970s the far right made the rehabilitation of his memory a political project. Jackson judged that Éric Zemmour's remarks were a key part of a strategy to build a new union of the right by overcoming the historic chasm created by the memory of Vichy, while writing that the far right's future did not lie in invoking Pétain: "The Pétain case is closed."