Word: petain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Indeed it had been. A group of grave robbers-who apparently crossed the Bay of Biscay to the He d'Yeu by auto ferry-had spirited away the coffin containing the body of Marshal Philippe Petain, who was revered by Frenchmen for stopping the Germans at Verdun during World War I and later reviled for heading the collaborationist Vichy government during World...
...government reacted by launching what must have been the most intensive corpse hunt in history. Nearly half of France's 94,000-man police force was combing the country minutes after the disappearance of Petain's body was discovered. Roadblocks were set up on every highway leading from the Atlantic coast toward Verdun, where the culprits-who were presumed to be ultra-rightists-might be planning to bury the corpse. All trucks capable of hauling the 450-lb., zinc-lined oak coffin were stopped and systematically searched. Police also circled the sprawling cemetery at Douaumont, where workers...
...Marshall Petain, the aging hero of Verdun, plays a special role in this version of French history. Though he led his country into the Armistice, he became a symbol of a new honor that France hoped would come to her in the new Europe. More pitiful and disturbing than the film's review of the Nazi's lightning defeat of France is its exposure of the French trying to rebuild, their self-esteem by embracing Nazi doctrines of race purity and ultra-nationalism...
...Petain becomes a somewhat benign version of Hitler, showing up in newsreels, on innumerable posters, and in the rhetoric of nationalist speakers. In retrospect, Petain is recognized to have been a symbol of safety and accomodation. So many wanted a way out, and Petain was acceptable as an old man who couldn't harm anyone. The film's critique of him is personal--he was very much a defeatist--but it holds him as symbol, not scapegoat. The Sorrow's shame is collective...
...collapse grows; from the newspaper headlines, to Mendes-France's account of becoming a political scapegoat, to a former French soldier's remembered sense of bewilderment, to the reactions of the Germans, to the recollections of the citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, culminating in the newsreel of Marshall Petain 'offering his person' to France as he surrenders her to Germany. As the scratched words of the newsreel play on. Ophuls alternates between the aging Frenchmen of the present to the faces of the past...