A sad case.

THE life of Philippe Petain is a study in ambiguity that goes to the heart of the French experience in recent times. Holding the proud title of Marshal of France, he was both a hero and a traitor, and the line between these alternative perceptions of him easily blurs. Had he died between the world wars, he would almost certainly have been buried with other great Frenchmen in the Invalides. He was already 84 when France collapsed in the summer of 1940, and he stepped forward to offer the country what he called, grandiloquently, "the gift of my person." This gift meant that after a series of highly dubious constitutional steps, he became head of the rump regime of Vichy, which was all the victorious Germans were prepared to allow the French. Once the Allies were winning the war, Vichy duly foundered. Tried and sentenced to death (but then reprieved), Petain lingered wretchedly in prison till the age of 95.

The historian Marc Bloch gave the title "Strange Defeat" to his pioneering book about the catastrophic events of 1940 because neither military nor sociopolitical factors could fully explain what had just happened. Some sort of widespread psychological adjustment was taking place. Hitler's blitzkrieg occupations of other countries, and now France, seemed evidence that totalitarianism was spelling the end of democracy. Nazism and Communism would share the spoils in a new Dark Age that might well last for centuries.

The French government was at a complete loss in this predicament. It was not unreasonable to suppose that Britain would be conquered with equal speed. Petain's gift of his person could be justified if the French population were to be spared unnecessary suffering--but this supposed that Petain had the courage to stand up for France's interests, and was prepared to pay the price for doing so, come what may. Instead he agreed to an armistice, and afterwards to collaboration, and finally to capitulation, all on German terms.

Doing the dirty work for the Germans-who themselves lacked the manpower for it--the Vichy regime under Petain and his vice premier Pierre Laval installed and supervised a French version of fascism, complete with the Milice (a homegrown Gestapo), and participation in the mass murder of Jews. An opportunist without any principles or scruples, Laval was confident of ultimate German victory, and he constantly urged surrender to every demand of the Germans on the grounds that otherwise they would brutalize the French as they were doing to the Poles. A survival from another age, comparable to Chamberlain or Halifax, Petain was quite unfitted to deal with a 20th-century dictator like Hitler, or even with a fascist evil genius like Laval.

Evidently keen to evaluate leading statesmen of the day, Charles Williams has written biographies of Adenauer and de Gaulle. A member of the House of Lords and an active Blairite politician himself, he is an improbable person to be arguing that Petain's mistake was to end up on the losing side, and that for that reason he may have been treated unfairly. Using the sources well, and telling the story readably, he strains to be as sympathetic to Petain as the facts allow. As he sees it, Petain was an archetypal outsider, a peasant who did not fit into an army with an aristocratic officer corps, an atheist in predominantly Catholic circles, and a cold personality as well. Good-looking with his bright blue eyes and fair hair in his youth, Petain was an inveterate womanizer. A long affair with Eugenie Hardon, known as Nini, involved assignations in hotels; and their eventual marriage had ridiculous domestic aspects worthy of a Feydeau farce.

Petain had been a lecturer in military tactics, but his promotion in World War I owed more to politicking than skill. Williams nonetheless insists that Petain knew how to handle infantry, and made sure that the troops were properly equipped. He built up heavy artillery, and studied the deployment of tanks and aircraft, both novel weapons in World War I. At Verdun he won his reputation; he received his marshal's baton through a defensive strategy that other commanders had not worked out. The obtuse insistence of French generals on attacking led to such loss of life that the soldiers mutinied. In his finest hour, Petain restored the army's morale for the final campaigns of the war, and so became a national emblem of hard-won victory.

An uprising of the Berbers in the early 1920s brought together Spain and France, the two powers that between them controlled Morocco at the time. Petain's partner in this colonial war was Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera, and they proved two of a kind: narrow and authoritarian. Under de Rivera's influence, Petain was to evolve into an admirer of Spanish fascism and General Franco. Here was a mindset characteristic of the period. Whatever he thought about Hitler and Germany as mortal enemies of France, he was impressed by the German performance, and when he had the chance at Vichy he did his best to emulate what he saw as its strength and discipline.

Choices were open to Petain at Vichy. At any point he could have denounced collaboration, and declared for the Free French, seeking refuge either in England or in a neutral country. He could have ordered resistance to the German takeover of Vichy in November 1942, but instead buckled under. One of his military advisers commented at the crucial moment, "God, how cowardly we are today!"--a scathing remark Williams does not quote. Time and again, Williams exonerates Petain as a man already past it, in his eighties, too muddled to make clear judgments, falling asleep when spoken to, signing whatever was put before him--and all this is true. But it left him to be the instrument of Laval and Hitler, and gave France a lasting legacy of doubt and shame.

There are no good reasons for doing bad things. Petain's fatal flaw was self-importance. He truly believed that he was making a gift of himself to France and that all Frenchmen stood applauding him in grateful and respectful lines. Not at all the tragic figure that Williams implies, he had long been just a vain old booby.