He was the Victor of Verdun and if he had died an old man, he would be one the great French heroes, but instead he died a very old man and so ruined all that came before his fall. He lived too long and in hard times, his flaws, greater it turned out than his many virtues, were there waiting, and destroyed him.
Petain had been ready to retire when World War I came. He did his duty and helped save Europe from German Imperial domination. Petain was a strategic thinker, risen from the peasantry. As an old man he rethought defensive warfare and helped win the Battle of Verdun, renew the morale of the army, and win the war. As an older man, he served well, anticipating much that was coming, but growing fearful when France refused to prepare.
He also had flaws, deep, persistent vices, that made him unfit for an even greater challenge that was coming: Hitler. France fell, as Petain prophesied, but then Petain tried to work with Hitler to save France. He did worse and worse as his vices consumed him and so consumed innocent Jewish people, France, and everything he loved.
He never betrayed France, he was not a traitor, but he was worse in the end: a bad man made from the wreckage of what might have been a good man.
So Charles Williams argues, or pleads, in this gripping story of a rise and fall of a Frenchman. This book would be more comfortable if it attempted an apology for Petain for that could be dismissed. The old general stood on the wrong side of Hitler and there is and should not be redemption after that terrible choice. If only, as I was taught, Petain had been a doddering fool when he slid into compromise and Vichy France, but he was not quite that. There is no justifying Petain, but also this, he was no traitor.
Of all his crimes, the careless anti-Semitism that allowed tens of thousands to be killed by the Germans, the refusal to pick a side, most were motivated by an attempt to play both sides in order to save France. One cannot pity Petain: he made his choices. One should save pity for those his bad choices harmed: the Free Masons, Jewish people, French Freedom Fighters. Yet he is a warning: we are, most of us, not nearly so great as Petain was, but could become just so bad.
Of all his errors, the greatest was making a god of his nation: France. One should love one’s people and France has much greatness in which to glory. The nation was also caught under the Nazi heel and there was a role for a man who could try to stand between France and that hideous regime. If Hitler had won the War, then that government might have had to continue for decades doing what could be done.
Yet Petain did not do what could be done, because Petain even at his best, acted for an abstraction, France, at the cost of the person: that French Jew, French Free Mason, even French communist. Petain was faithful, if he was faithful to anything, to his vision of France and so there is a cruel justice that he was declared a traitor in court after the War.
Charles Williams, in this wonderful little book, argues that this is the one thing he surely did not do and this is true if treason is intention. However, by betraying individual Frenchmen, incarnate France, Petain accumulated enough small human betrayals that I think the judgment was just.
May we, not one of us, ever betray our deepest and best principles by sequential sacrificing those who hold those principles. May we not play God and decide which of the many must die to uphold the sacred idea. Petain lived in perilous times that made him and then lived longer to worse times that broke him. We cannot love our nation in general if we unjustly destroy part of her body, a citizen, in the particular.
Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on this Republic in this time.
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