Word: petain
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When questioned about conditions in the Ecole during the Nazi occupation, he said that neither the Nazis nor the Petain government was successful in suppressing teachers in their criticisms of the Germans, although they did suspend the University for three months in 1942 and many of the professors were arrested. The Latin Quarter in Paris was a hotbed of the underground movement according to Garnot, who personally assisted in the cleanup of Germans in the wooded areas near Versailles in August...
Nobody Home. When the Germans arrived, Bonnard left Paris to live in a mountainside villa near Cannes. Vichy officials made the two-mile climb to his place, asked the old man to paint the portrait of another oldster-Marshal Petain. Said Bonnard: "If Marshal Petain is a good model, I'll paint him. But, remember, if I don't like my work I reserve the right to destroy it." The Vichyites dropped the whole idea...
Charges enough remained. Mongibeaux asked Laval who brought him back to power in 1942, after Petain ordered his arrest. When Laval did not answer, the Judge did. "It was Abetz!" (Nazi representative to Vichyfranee). Laval cried foul: ''You asked me a question and gave the answer...
France Divided. In Paris debate raged. Screamed the Communist Humanite: Petain must die-"Pity would be a token of weakness." But others shook their heads over a trial for high treason which had become a trial of high politics. Said Author Georges Bernanos (Plea for Liberty) in Combat: "France is disgusted. . . ." Warned Lille's influential Voix du Nord: "The country remains divided, as it was after the Dreyfus case...
...days after the old man's condemnation, the Ministry of Justice announced: "General de Gaulle . . . has commuted the death sentence ... to perpetual imprisonment." From Portalet Petain would be transferred to Sainte Marguerite Island off the Riviera. There he would have sun and warmth. His wife, freed of all charges, would join him. But he could not have his seven stars back, nor his honor...