{"id":481,"date":"2026-03-27T10:38:57","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T10:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/?p=481"},"modified":"2026-08-12T12:22:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T11:22:23","slug":"petains-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/petains-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"P\u00e9tain\u2019s Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his blog post, Professor Kevin Passmore<\/a> draws on his new third-year module on Occupied France<\/em> and on his experience as a former Registered Mental Nurse to explore P\u00e9tain and his silence.<\/h3>\n
As constituted, the High Court does not represent the French people. Consequently, the Marshal of France, Head of State, will address the people alone. I will make no other statement. I will answer no questions. I have entrusted my lawyers with the mission of responding to accusations that are intended to tarnish me, but which only tarnish the accusers.<\/span><\/h5>\n

These were the words of 89-year-old Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain, chief of the dictatorial and collaborationist Vichy regime that governed France during the German occupation of 1940\u201345. He spoke them on the first day of his trial for \u2018collusion with the enemy and endangering the internal security of the state\u2019. Aside from the odd outburst, he sat silently through weeks of witness testimonies, sometimes dozing, occasionally agitated and flustered. On 15 August, the jury found him guilty, but recommended that, on account of his advanced years, the death sentence should not be carried out.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The ostensible reason for P\u00e9tain\u2019s silence was that as the legal head of state \u2013 a pretension dismissed by the Provisional Government of the restored Republic \u2013 he could only be tried by the Senate. The unspoken suspicion was that P\u00e9tain\u2019s mental deterioration \u2013 an open secret \u2013 was too severe for him to respond coherently to cross questioning. Yet silence had marked P\u00e9tain\u2019s entire life and being. Understanding it historically requires bringing legal, cultural and political history together with psychology and psychiatry.<\/p>\n

Legally, there was no chance that the court would consider P\u00e9tain unfit to stand trial, for there was no such possibility in French law. Quietly shelving prosecution was also impossible because the Provisional Government and public opinion demanded the punishment of collaborators. The Resistance press dismissed P\u00e9tain\u2019s memory lapses and deafness as manipulation. The communist Humanit\u00e9<\/em> saw an old trickster, who \u2018sometimes plays senile and deaf and sometimes demonstrates astonishing memory and extraordinary lucidity\u2019.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

P\u00e9tain\u2019s senior lawyer, Ma\u00eetre Fernand Payen, wanted to plead article 64 of the Penal Code: \u2018There is no crime or offense if the defendant was in a state of insanity at the time of the act\u2019. This defence was challenging: since the prosecution intended to show that P\u00e9tain had plotted since the 1930s to overthrow the Third Republic (1870-1940), it would be necessary to show \u2018insanity\u2019 dating back years. In 1945, defence counsel would not have thought of arguing that P\u00e9tain had long suffered from Alzheimer\u2019s disease. Although this illness had been identified in the 1900s, it was thought to affect only young people, while senility was considered to be simply a possible consequence of old age and not the province of psychiatry. In any case, P\u00e9tain himself saw such a plea as humiliating. In French, pleading senility is known colloquially as \u2018plaider g\u00e2teux\u2019, and the adjective \u2018g\u00e2teux\u2019 derives etymologically from the verb \u2018se souiller\u2019, to soil oneself. Furthermore, the old marshal had returned voluntarily to France from exile in Switzerland to \u2018defend his honour\u2019 before the courts. During the proceedings, Payen\u2019s euphemistic references to P\u00e9tain\u2019s \u2018tiredness\u2019 and \u2018vulnerability to manipulation\u2019 visibly annoyed him.<\/p>\n

The Marshal preferred the strategy of his younger counsel, Ma\u00eetre Jacques Isorni, who pleaded that apparent treason was in fact the clever and rational pursuit of a policy of lesser evil, which saved France from the fate of occupied Poland. This defence required P\u00e9tain\u2019s silence, for his confusion, of which Isorni was well aware, might under questioning contradict the depiction of him as a highly skilled negotiator. During the trial, Isorni established his own status as a great lawyer and laid the foundations of what became the standard defence of P\u00e9tain, which his shrinking band of supporters maintain to this day. Understandably, academic historians have been more concerned with refuting this exculpatory myth than with the possibility that P\u00e9tain\u2019s dementia was historically significant.<\/p>\n

In 2019, two geriatricians provoked a minor media storm when they suggested that P\u00e9tain suffered from Alzheimer\u2019s Disease, possibly complicated by vascular episodes.[3]<\/a> They pointed to memory lapses, difficulty in assimilating new information, indecisiveness, apathy, tiredness, tendency to digression and an obsessive conviction that the head of the Provisional Government, General Charles de Gaulle, planned to free him. They could have added his liking for joining children\u2019s games. The geriatricians recognized the absence of symptoms such as balance issues, hallucination and delusion.[4]<\/a> Yet dementia covers multiple pathologies, manifesting in various ways. A contemporary doctor would probably also have suspected cognitive decline due to advanced syphilis, for the younger P\u00e9tain had been notoriously promiscuous; the disease was rife in the officer corps and secondary syphilis was then a major cause of confinement in psychiatric facilities. Retrospective diagnosis is intrinsically problematic, especially in cases such as this, which require physical tests. Yet there is ample evidence that P\u00e9tain suffered from mental impairment, whatever the precise aetiology.<\/p>\n

His symptoms were plain during the war. However, cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer\u2019s may begin ten to fifteen years before diagnosis. Mental difficulties due to syphilis would have appeared ten to thirty years after infection. In P\u00e9tain\u2019s case, the first reports of problems dated back to 1922, when he was head of the army. The Chief of General Staff, General Edmond Buat, told his diary that \u2018while at certain moments [P\u00e9tain\u2019s] ideas remain clear, at others, everything is muddled and hard to follow\u2019.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 In the following years, P\u00e9tain frequently refused to decide, reversed his position, and obsessively repeated ideas that were not easily challenged, such as his dislike of school teachers. Dementia sufferers often use entrenched moral positions to disguise impairment, however inappropriate they are in particular situations, which they struggle to understand. Of course, in the absence of a patient, we cannot be certain about P\u00e9tain\u2019s mental state.<\/p>\n

We can be still less sure because P\u00e9tain had never been loquacious. He did not speak until the age of three, perhaps because he had been traumatised by the early loss of his mother and the indifference of his step-family. He was never comfortable in one-to-one encounters, and, as a senior officer, he was not used to being questioned. His most recent biographer, B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Vergez-Chaignon, shows that as P\u00e9tain\u2019s popularity spread during the Great War, he deliberately used a strategy of \u2018rare and precious speech\u2019. Rarity compensated for social awkwardness yet gave his public utterances special importance, thus sustaining the illusion that he represented the nation as a whole, while confining his anti-republican utterances to the private sphere.[6]<\/a> In 1945, the Resistance press was right that P\u00e9tain\u2019s silence was a calculated defence strategy. Moreover, he had honed his use of silence over many years. Yet it is impossible to disentangle political calculation from compensation for cognitive impairment. It is nevertheless legitimate to say that In 1945, P\u00e9tain was not entirely unaware of his circumstances, even if he could not understand them. He was certainly impenitent.<\/p>\n

For historians, the point is not to judge, still less excuse P\u00e9tain. In a democracy, penal responsibility is a question for the law and for courts advised by experts. Historians are interested in the reasons for his silence, its meaning and its consequences.<\/p>\n

Silence had made P\u00e9tain strong and weak. Strong because it sustained the immense popularity that enabled him to be seen as a saviour amidst defeat in June 1940. Weak because it encouraged others to attempt to annexe his popularity for their own ends \u2013 Isorni was only the latest to do so. Weak also because maintaining popularity made him reluctant to decide and ready to compromise with the Nazis\u2019 plan for the racial restructuring of Europe.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> For the trial see Julian Jackson, France on Trial<\/em> (2023).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> \u2018Pour gagner du temps P\u00e9tain-Bazaine fait appel aux t\u00e9moignages d\u2019outre-Atlantique\u2019, L\u2019Humanit\u00e9<\/em>, 26 May 1945<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Jadwiga Attier-Zmudka and Jean-Marie S\u00e9rot, \u2018A Particularly Tragic Case of Possible Alzheimer\u2019s Disease, that of Marshal P\u00e9tain\u2019, Journal of Alzheimer\u2019s Disease<\/em>, 71 (2019), pp. 399\u2013404.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> A delusion derives from an abnormal process, such as \u2018the green blanket on my bed proves that de Gaulle plans to free me\u2019.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Journal du g\u00e9n\u00e9ral Edmond Buat\u202f:\u00a0 1914-1923<\/em>, ed. Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Guelton (2015), 16 January 1922.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte Vergez-Chaignon, P\u00e9tain<\/em> (2014), pp. 132\u20133, 211\u201312.<\/p>\n

Further reading<\/h4>\n

AJ Larner, \u2018Retrospective diagnosis: Pitfalls and purposes\u2019,\u00a0Journal of Medical Biography<\/em> 27:3, (2019), pp. 127-128.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his blog post, Professor Kevin Passmore draws on his new third-year module on Occupied France and on his experience as a former Registered Mental Nurse to explore P\u00e9tain and […]","protected":false},"author":905,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19,11,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-currentprojects","category-european-history","category-modern-history","category-social-history-of-medicine"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/905"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":489,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/history-at-cardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}