Petain.
Flanner’s Take on “Le Héros de Verdun”
Flanner, Janet. Pétain. The Old Man of France. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1944.
4to.; stapled wrappers; upper cover offset; printed with Simon and Shuster logo in black; lightly soiled; upper cover fragile and nearly detached. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; printed according to parameters set by the War Production Board; originally published as a four-part Profile in the New Yorker. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Shawneen – not only to, but from – JF. Flanner has also written in front of the printed publication year, the date “1943.”
In four chapters, titled: “From the Empress Eugénie to the A.E.F.,” “Hero of Verdun,” “Versailles to Vichy,” and Maréchal, Nous Voilà!” A thoroughly Flannerian biography of France’s most notorious hero-turned-traitor, Henri-Philippe Pétain; she begins the book with her unique blend of humor, truth, frankness and flair that came to characterize her Letters from Paris:
Historically, the octogenarian Marshal Philippe Pétain is unique. He is the only Frenchman who ever survived a hundred and seven French governments and then founded one of his own, the hundred and eighth. Because he is so old that he was a youth at the beginning of the period of French history over whose end he now presides, and because, during his long life, the decades have drained away the glory of France, the world has assigned to him a curious chronometrous quality; it has made of the Third Republic a sort of hourglass whose sands, in the person of Pétain, have finally run out.
This topic was a timely – and obvious – one for Flanner to tackle. Pétain (1856-1951) was the hero of World War I, leading France to victory over Germany in the crucial Battle of Verdun. Flanner describes it as: “no longer a mere military encounter; it had become for France a symbolic, heroic landscape of national survival, a place on earth where it would be proved whether Germans, as the new dominant nation, had the right to maraud or classic France had the right to exist” (p. 16). By World War II, however, Pétain’s alliances had shifted. He signed an armistice with Germany in June 1940 that put Nazi Germany in control of most of France, save for the unoccupied Vichy region; Pétain became the Head of State of Vichy France from 1940-1944, while the Nazis occupied the rest of the country. Flanner explains this phenomenon in her typical metaphoric and clear, sharp-witted style:
To many millions of the French, especially in Vichy France, the Pétain mystique became a sort of strange, esoteric state religion. The defeat, the fall, and the cutting up of France had produced in the French people the same sort of profound physical shock that might be experienced by an individual, far from young, who had been cruelly beaten, had had a violent concussion, and had also suffered the agony of amputation. In that shock something French in France came close to dying. Gradually, as they recovered, the people became racked with penitence and fell into a daze in which the Marshal confusedly figured both as a healer who seemed to have saved life and as a holy man whose intercession with the higher powers had saved the soul. Pétain became sort of a spa saint, an image at a sacred watering place. Vichy turned into a kind of political Lourdes. (pp. 40-41)
After the war, Charles de Gaulle sent Pétain, convicted of treason, to jail for the rest of his life – a commutation of the original sentence of death.
Flanner wrote this book while she was on hiatus from her official duties as the Paris correspondent, when she was living in the United States during the war; her “About the Author” note at the end of the book states, “As soon as communication opens up again, Miss Flanner plans to return to France.” The bulk of her biography in this section merits quoting; it reads as if Flanner wrote it herself, with humorous intent:
During the fifteen years that Janet Flanner’s ‘Par
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