Pétain

Succinct, smartly styled portraiture and judgment, this sharply-pointed profiling and restrained indictment of the old man of France, Marshal Petain, historically unique as the ""only Frenchman who ever survived 107 French governments and then founded one of his own"". Cautious, conservative, sold -- a man of ""stiff gloomy integrity, narrow national devotion"", Petain had slow advancement through a not particularly distinguished Army career.

The First World War illustrated the defeatism innate in his personality, and then, paradoxically, made a hero of him at Verdun despite the fact that he was relieved of his command and kicked upstairs. After Versailles, and before Vichy, his legend grew, and he was the dominating figure in the French Army, though a non-contributing one. With Vichy, the ""government of an old man at a health resort"", he continues as the figurehead of defeat, impotent, condemned by present and future opinion....The New Yorker articles, in panphlet form.

Fiche Technique

• Pub Date : 10/07/1944
• Publisher : Simon & Schuster
• Author : Janet Flammer