Philippe Pétain

Biography

Philippe Pétain was born in 1856 into a farming family at Cauchy-à-la-Tour in the Pas-de-Calais. He entered the Saint-Cyr military academy in 1876 and spent decades in slow promotion as an infantry officer, teaching tactics at the École Supérieure de Guerre, where he argued that firepower rather than massed assault decided battles. He was still a colonel, close to retirement, when the First World War began.

The war made his name. Promoted rapidly, he commanded the Second Army at the opening of the Battle of Verdun in 1916, rotating divisions through the line and keeping the front supplied along the Voie Sacrée. In 1917 he replaced Robert Nivelle as commander-in-chief and restored order after the army mutinies through courts martial, rest and leave, and an end to costly offensives. He was made Marshal of France in November 1918.

Between the wars he was the senior figure of the French army as vice-chairman of the Supreme War Council, led the French campaign against the Rif in 1925, backed the frontier fortifications that became the Maginot Line, entered the Académie française in 1931 and served as Minister of War in 1934. In 1939 he became ambassador to Franco's Spain.

Recalled as deputy prime minister in May 1940, he became prime minister when Paul Reynaud resigned and sought the armistice signed on 22 June. After Parliament voted his cabinet power to write a new constitution on 10 July, he ruled the authoritarian Vichy regime as Chief of the French State, collaborating with Germany and enacting antisemitic laws on his own initiative. Moved to Sigmaringen by the Germans in 1944, he returned in 1945, was convicted of treason and sentenced to death, a sentence de Gaulle commuted to life imprisonment. He died in confinement on the Île d'Yeu in 1951.