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“And when did the Pétain case end?” asks Geoffrey Wheatcroft in our December 7 issue. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who in 1940 signed the armistice with Germany and led the Vichy government until the liberation of France in 1944, was tried for treason for a month in the summer of 1945. Wheatcroft chronicles the trial—which featured testimony from fellow collaborators (Pierre Laval: “Physically repellent, notoriously corrupt, widely detested”) and French socialists (Léon Blum: “A Parisian Jewish lawyer and man of letters” whose “vivid testimony stirred the torpid atmosphere of witnesses debating arcane points”)—and traces the fault lines in French history that run from Talleyrand to Dreyfus, Pétain to de Gaulle, and Mitterand to Le Pen.

Below, alongside Wheatcroft’s essay, we have collected five articles from the Review’s archives about Vichy France.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The Collaborator in Chief

The trial of Marshal Philippe Pétain was also implicitly a trial of the millions of French men and women who may have disliked the German occupation but who compromised with it and obeyed Vichy.

Mark Mazower
The Man Who Was France

Even the French who found themselves in England did not rush to accept de Gaulle: to the contrary, this remote and chilly figure lunching alone at the Savoy appealed to few of them, and most of the troops who had been evacuated from France that summer eventually made their way back across the Channel and regarded Pétain as the legitimate head of the French government.

Robert O. Paxton
The Truth About the Resistance

“Foreigners had a larger part in the French Resistance than native-born resisters ever wanted to admit…. Between 50 and 60 percent of the soldiers of the new French units formed in North Africa and armed by the United States during 1943 for later action in France came from French colonies in the Maghreb and in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Tony Judt
France Without Glory

“The political authorities born of the Resistance thought it prudent to speak and act as though the Vichy government of 1940–1944 had been a brief, unhappy interlude, a sort of illegitimate interruption of republican continuity…. This unity of purpose, however, was bought at the price of an incomplete confrontation with the memory and experience of the occupation years.”

Richard Bernstein
French Collaborators:
The New Debate

“A striking fact about the Frenchmen indicted for crimes against humanity is that…each of them had an entirely successful career in France after the war.”

Robert O. Paxton
Founding Uncle

“Having discovered socialism as a means of righting the injustice done to Captain Dreyfus, Blum always judged that socialists must come to the defense of democracy.”