"The Immoral Way to Remember World War I" Topic

"On April 24, 1956, a solemn ceremony took place in Paris to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of France's greatest soldiers: Marshal Philippe Pétain. Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet spoke movingly of Pétain's compassion for his soldiers during the bleakest days of World War I, tactfully neglecting to mention the marshal's flirtations with the extreme right in the years before his death in 1939. Gen. Charles de Gaulle praised Pétain as a great French patriot and superb tactician, tactfully neglecting to mention his own highly contentious relationship with his former mentor. Middle-aged veterans of the Great War came by the thousands to pay respect to the commander who had, after a series of mutinies by desperate French soldiers on the western front, resisted further massive infantry offensives against entrenched German positions. At the end of the ceremony, many in the crowd returned home via the Boulevard Pétain, or the Pétain metro station.

This scene, of course, never took place. Instead of dying a French hero at the ripe old age of 83, Pétain lived another 12 years and died while serving a life sentence for treason on the tiny Île d'Yeu off the French Atlantic coast. In 1940, after the Nazis had broken the French armed forces and entered Paris, Pétain took the helm of the French government and requested an armistice. Initially, he received massive support from the population, which saw him as a shield protecting the country from the sort of brutality the Nazis were visiting on Poland. But the elderly Pétain served France very badly. Between 1940 and 1944 he presided over the collaborationist Vichy state, which actively aided the German war effort and attempted to impose an authoritarian, ultraconservative social order on the country. On its own initiative, Vichy hunted down members of the Resistance, passed anti-Semitic legislation, and, most notoriously, rounded up approximately 76,000 Jews for deportation to Nazi camps, the great majority of whom were killed…."
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Sometimes a Hero outlives his time.

Sometimes… only sometimes… (smile)

Amicalement
Armand