Word: petain
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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...
...there are the Great Men. Churchill, de Gaulle, Petain, and especially Hitler loom up before the Clermont-Ferrand landscape. But they, too, exist as personalities in individual memories: Hitler is recalled as favoring "harmless little liaisons" over inter-marriage, claiming that his soldiers' desire to marry French women was caused "by lack of sexual opportunities." Those famous men who are interviewed, Anthony Eden and Pierre Mendes-France in particular, speak more of the times than of great events. Mendes-France, recalling his escape from prison, is reminded of the modesty of a young woman whose boyfriend propositioned her as they...
...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...