Word: verdun
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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...
...bizarre theft occurred only two weeks before France's parliamentary elections, the caper had distinct political overtones. If Pétain's body were to be found before the elections, there would be considerable public clamor to bury it in the national military cemetery at Douaumont near Verdun; in 1971 a public-opinion poll, taken for the Bordeaux newspaper Sud-Ouest, showed that 72% of the French people favored such a move. The "nou-velle affaire Pétain," as the French were calling the caper, revived old political quarrels over the sensitive issue of national loyalties during...
...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 dug up graves in which they...
During World War II he was injured while serving near Verdun as an infantry sergeant. Captured by the Nazis, he eventually escaped from his P.O.W. camp and joined the Free French in London. Although De Gaulle named him junior minister in his first Cabinet in 1944, Mitterrand soon became a fierce critic of the general's policies...
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...