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Julian Jackson’s latest monograph gives the reader a front-row seat at a re-enactment of the 1945 trial for Nazi collaboration of Philippe Pétain (First World War hero and subsequent chief of state of the Vichy government during the Second World War) and a balcony view of the trial’s eighty-year legacy of debates and disputes, controversies and conspiracies, up to the 2021 French presidential election campaign. Jackson does not reopen the ‘trial of the century’ or dispute its verdict but ‘watch[es] the French debating their history’ (pp. xxiii, xxviii), putting them and their changing views of both Pétain and Vichy ‘on trial’. Opening with the ‘fateful handshake’ between Pétain and Hitler on 24 October 1940, four months after the armistice, the book interrogates the myth of Pétain as his people’s shield. The first part scopes the background to and preparations for the trial, establishes Pétain’s ‘mythic stature’ (p. 4) as the hero of Verdun and his reputation’s subsequent ruination, partly by the shocking return of concentration camp deportees. Part Two dissects the trial, animates personalities and antipathies, dramatizes the first day’s chaos, anatomizes the debate over the armistice, orientates it within its cultural context, and claims that its iterative arguments ‘would form the staple of the Pétainist defence for the next fifty years’ (p. 222). Jackson interrogates the trial’s scant attention to Jewish persecution under Vichy, assessing that ‘no one was interested enough to explore further’ (p. 225); indeed, only two Jewish witnesses appeared, both for the defence. Investigating the roots of Vichy’s anti-Jewish policies in the 1930s, Jackson claims that ‘Vichy’s anti-semitism was exclusionary not exterminatory’ but concedes that there is ‘no watertight boundary between Vichy’s exclusionary policy and Germany’s exterminatory one’ (p. 359). The final part examines the trial’s afterlives, emphasizing the enduring tensions between Pétain’s apologists and critics. It charts the decades’ changing attitudes: the ‘martyrology’ of the late 1940s and 1950s (p. 296); France’s desire to move on after Pétain’s death in 1951; 1960s ‘nostalgia’ for him and its subsequent waning (p. 320); revelations of Vichy’s complicity in Robert O. Paxton’s ‘sensational’ book (p. 325; Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–44 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1972)); the Pétain affair’s particularly intense haunting of France during the 1980s and 1990s. Jackson brings the Pétain debate up to 2021, arguing that Éric Zemmour’s ‘neo-Pétainism’ towards Muslims originates in Vichy’s Jewish policies (pp. 349–50). This masterful and energetic book reads like a thriller through its freshness, dramatic verve, vibrant characters, control of pace, cliffhangers, varied tone (including humour), and buoyant prose. However, the idiom ‘smoking gun’ becomes slightly irksome through repetition (pp. 70 (twice), 79, 85, 210) when consuming the book as rapidly as the author’s vivid presentation of the material promotes. Notwithstanding, Jackson’s colourful range of sources, compelling illustrations, and invaluable paratexts (including maps and dramatis personae), together with his deft handling of politics and personalities and his astute analysis of Vichy and its legacy, render this book indispensable to scholars and students of modern France and highly rewarding for general readers.

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