Volume 32, Number 2 · February 14, 1985
'The Last King of France'
By Robert O. Paxton
Pétain: Hero or Traitor, The Untold Story
by Herbert R. Lottman
Morrow, 444 pp., $17.95
Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) was the most illustrious Frenchman from the eclipse of Clemenceau in 1920 to the ascendancy of De Gaulle in 1944. No Frenchman of this century has been the object of greater extremes of veneration and obloquy. It would be difficult to rise higher than the peasant boy who became a marshal of France and rode his white horse up the Champs Elysées under a rain of flowers in the first Bastille Day parade after World War I, on July 14, 1919. At the other extreme was the nodding old man under life sentence in a whitewashed room on the Ile d'Yeu, off the French Vendée coast, after 1945. The controversy over whether Pétain had been a traitor or a canny realist after the French defeat of June 1940 remains the bitterest French family quarrel since the Dreyfus affair.
Review, 2640 words
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