Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

who had possessed none before. The jury also put in a request that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. Maître Isorni claims that this was to prevent de Gaulle fromtaking the credit for sparing the old man, who was to remain in prison on the Île d’Yeu until his death in 1951.
    The trial failed to penetrate the enigma of Marshal Pétain. Did he really believe that he had outfoxed Hitler with a ‘double game’? That he had served the Allied cause, as he pretended, even when giving the order to counter-attack the American landings in North Africa, or when writing to Hitler after the Anglo-Canadian raid on Dieppe to congratulate him for sweeping clean the soil of France? Did he believe all this or had he managed to convince himself of what he needed to believe?
    Marshal Pétain recorded in a letter to Laval of 6 August 1944 – two months to the day after the Allied landings in Normandy – his horror at the accounts he had been hearing ‘for several months’ of the crimesof the Milice, including rape, murder and theft. He went on to express his dismay at the ‘deplorable effect produced’ by the Milice handing ‘to the Gestapo their own compatriots and working closely with it’.
    Joseph Darnand, the head of the Milice, replied to Pétain’s reprimand in a telling fashion: ‘For four years, I received your compliments and your congratulations and you encouraged me. And today, because the Americans are at the gates of Paris, you start to say that I am going to be a blot on the history of France. One might have made up one’s mind a little earlier.’ Darnand at his own trial was equally forthright: ‘I am not one of those who are going to tell you I played a double game. As for me, I went ahead. I went all the way.’
    Pétain’s main method of evading responsibility for his regime’s actions was to portray himself as a prisoner of the Germans. ‘Each day, with a dagger at my throat, I struggled against the enemy’s demands,’ he protested at his trial. But if he was, as he claimed, a prisoner of the Germans, then why at the end of May 1944, in his speech at Nancy, was he still asking the French people to continue to follow him? ‘Trust me. I have a certain amount of experience and I have pointed out the right direction.’ There was no disavowal of his regime, over which he later claimed to have had no control. There was no hint of regret at what had been done by Vichy in his name.
    On 2 May, shortly after Pétain had passed through Switzerland, Pierre Laval had managed to escape from the ghastly chaos of Germany’s final collapse in a Junkers 88 trimotor aircraft. To avoid arrest, he had flown over France and landed at Barcelona. General Franco’s government, not wanting to provoke the Allies in any way, refused to offer the former Prime Minister of Vichy political asylum, but at the same time did not want to hand himdirectly over to the French.
    Finally, after almost three months of tortuous negotiations via the United States ambassador in Madrid, Laval was flown to the American zone of Austria in the same Junkers 88 – this time with the Nazi markings painted out. On arrival in Linz he was taken into custody by the US army, and on 31 July, eight days after the opening of Pétain’s trial, he was handed over to the French military authorities. The following day he was flown to Paris and transferred to Fresnes prison.
    Throughout Pétain’s trial, his defence had stressed that it was Laval,not the Marshal, who was responsible for the crimes of Vichy. Laval’s appearance as witness had done little to mitigate that impression, despite his exaggerated respect for Pétain and his insistence that he had never taken any major decision without the Marshal’s approval.
    When Laval arrived in Fresnes, Benoist-Méchin caught sight of him from his cell. He too was struck by how much weight the short and solid Auvergnat had lost since the last time they had met. Laval, although suffering from cancer, continued to smoke five packets of cigarettes a day. He was amused to receive a request for his butts from the ‘
gamins
’ in the cell on the floor above. They were hoisted up one by one tied to a string.
    A handful of devoted followers, most notably his wife and daughter Josée, continued to believe every word he uttered. Comte René de Chambrun, his son-in-law, made it his life’s work to clear Laval’s name. When asked what he most admired about his father-in-law, Chambrun replied that