Munro Price at Literary Review:
On 23 July 1945 the 89-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, until recently head of the French state, went on trial for his life before a specially convened High Court in Paris, accused of attacking national security and collusion with Nazi Germany amounting to treason. For four years, from the fall of France to the liberation, he had steered the Vichy regime created from the wreckage of defeat into collaboration with the new continental hegemon, Adolf Hitler. Now, after eight months of wandering to escape the advancing Allies through eastern France to the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany and finally to Switzerland, he was in the custody of General de Gaulle’s provisional government.
Pétain’s trial was about much more than the fate of one extremely elderly man. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to confront the traumas it had endured from May 1940 to August 1944: the catastrophic military defeat by Germany, the signing of the armistice, the dissolution of the Third Republic and its replacement by the authoritarian Vichy state, the deportations of Jews and the increasingly bloody civil war between the collaborationist regime and the Resistance.
more here.