France on Trial by Julian Jackson

Author:Julian Jackson [Jackson, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

This text went on in the same vein for a few pages and then suddenly stopped in mid-sentence. ‘What is this?’ asked Payen. ‘A message from the Marshal?’

MORNET: A draft written in the Marshal’s hand.

PAYEN: What happened to it?

MORNET: I have no idea …

ISORNI: Is there not something on the envelope where it was found?

MORNET: Only this: ‘Document belonging to Dr Ménétrel. Project for a message against Gaullism, April 1942, not delivered.’

ISORNI: Ah! Not delivered!

MORNET: But meditated and written in the Marshal’s own hand.

PAYEN: Temptation has never been a crime … One can have a temptation but if one does not succumb …

MORNET: I consider that such writings are equivalent to acts.

ISORNI: The act would have been to read it.34

At one point during this exchange, the once again not so deaf Pétain burst into laughter. Having been asked by the defence to discount speeches that Pétain had delivered on the grounds that he had been forced to deliver them, or to exculpate him from speeches that had been delivered by others like Laval, the court was now presented with an opposite example: a message that Pétain had clearly written himself but was not delivered.

Whatever view those in court took about this exchange, newspaper headlines over the weekend showed Laval had got his message across:

L’Humanité: Laval declared that he pursued his policies with the approval of Pétain-Bazaine.

Combat: Laval declared that Pétain approved what he said in 1942.

Franc-Tireur: The Marshal went of his own accord to Montoire.

Ce Soir: The two accomplices blame each other for the crime.

L’Aurore: Pétain always approved my policy of collaboration.

Francine Bonitzer in L’Aurore drew the moral for her readers that Laval’s guilt only increased Pétain’s:

Laval never won people’s confidence. Everyone knew his craftiness, his venality, his cowardice, his spinelessness … Not a single Frenchman, ever, would have followed Laval alone. But people believed in the other one … It was the man believed to be the purest, the most noble, who entered into collaboration, put his hand in that of Hitler.35

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