The Riom Trial : Marshal Petain's Attack on the Third Republic
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2014 The Riom trial : Marshal Petain's attack on the Third Republic. James Estel Williams 1985- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Williams, James Estel 1985-, "The Riom trial : Marshal Petain's attack on the Third Republic." (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 1575. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/1575 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE RIOM TRIAL: MARSHAL PETAIN‟S ATTACK ON THE THIRD REPUBLIC By James Estel Williams B.A., University of Louisville 2009 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May 2014 Copyright 2014 by James Estel Williams All Rights Reserved THE RIOM TRIAL: MARSHAL PETAIN‟S ATTACK ON THE THIRD REPUBLIC By James Estel Williams B.A., University of Louisville 2009 A Thesis Approved on February 21, 2014 by the following Thesis Committee: ________________________________ Lee Shai Weissbach, Thesis Director ________________________________ Ann T. Allen ________________________________ Matthieu Dalle ii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my wife, June, without whose unwavering support I would have been lost. Je t’aime, ma femme, avec tout mon coeur. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis director, Dr. Lee Shai Weissbach for his patience and understanding in the writing of this thesis. Without his constant attention to detail and his creative criticism, the thesis would have suffered greatly. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Dr. Ann T. Allen and Dr. Matthieu Dalle, for their willingness to serve on the committee and their time in offering both their valuable insight and expertise. I would like to thank my family for their continued support in my educational pursuits and for understanding when the demands of my research took me away from them. Finally, I would like to thank my lovely wife, June, and my darling daughter, Ryleigh, for being the inspirations and catalysts for finishing this thesis. iv ABSTRACT THE RIOM TRIAL: MARSHAL PETAIN‟S ATTACK ON THE THIRD REPUBLIC James Estel Williams February 21, 2014 This thesis presents a history of the Riom Trial beginning with the French defeat in June 1940 and the foundations of the National Revolution, continuing with the initiation of the trial and its proceedings, and ending with a historiographic survey of the trial‟s studies. The trial began in February 1942 and continued through twenty-four sessions until it was suspended in April 1942. Marshal Philippe Pétain instigated the trial in an attempt to legitimize the Vichy government and the National Revolution by trying six leading members of the last few Third Republic governments for their responsibility in not preparing France adequately for war: Edouard Daladier, Léon Blum, General Maurice Gamelin, Robert Jacomet, Pierre Cot, and Guy La Chambre. The trial ended in suspension due to the defendants‟ efforts, which turned the accusation against Pétain, and Germany‟s displeasure with the decision to focus on the defeat and not to proclaim France guilty for declaring war. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION ............................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ..........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: DEFEAT AND NATIONAL REVOLUTION.................................10 CHAPTER TWO: THE LONG ROAD TO RIOM .......................................................28 CHAPTER THREE: “THE GREATEST TRIAL IN HISTORY” ................................52 CHAPTER FOUR: THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE RIOM TRIAL ....................97 The First Question: Who in Vichy Wanted the Trial? ......................................101 The Second Question: How Were the Germans Involved? ..............................116 The Third Question: Who Dominated the Proceedings? ..................................124 The Fourth Question: Who Called for the Trial to End? ..................................137 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................147 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................152 APPENDICES ..............................................................................................................156 CURRICULUM VITA .................................................................................................160 vi INTRODUCTION “Do not divide my Frenchmen: your decision [in this case] would not be irrevocable. In turn, you will be judged by history, and it is [history‟s] judgment that will prevail for centuries to come.”1 --Maurice Ribet to the members of the Supreme Court of Justice at Riom In his account of the Riom Trial, in which the Vichy government indicted six former members of the Third Republic‟s last few governments for their failure to prepare France adequately for war, Maurice Ribet, the attorney for Edouard Daladier, former premier and one of the defendants at Riom, provided the reader with the text of what would have been his closing statements before the court. Ribet was unable to deliver his statements because the trial was suspended after only twenty-four sessions, which occurred between the months of February and April 1942. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the “Hero of Verdun” during World War I who eventually became head of state for the Vichy government after France‟s defeat in the Battle of France in June 1940, instigated the proceedings at Riom as a means both to legitimize his new French State and to show how the “decadence” of the Third Republic led France to its defeat. Pétain‟s use of the trial as an attempt to reveal the shortcomings and failures of the Republic was but one example in a long line of events that have come to be regarded within modern French 1Maurice Ribet, Le Procès de Riom (Paris: Flammarion, 1945), 511. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 1 history as les guerres franco-françaises, the “Franco-French wars,” a conflict of ideals that had raged since the Great Revolution of 1789.2 The term la guerre franco-française was first used as the title for a 1950 study of the Vichy government by Louis-Dominique Girard, the former chief of Pétain‟s cabinet, that was “an all-out defense of the Vichy government‟s politics.”3 According to Jean- Pierre Azéma, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Henry Rousso, three well-respected historians of modern France, Girard used the term as a means to bring to light “the cold war and the suppression” that was “levied against Pétainists and collaborators alike” during the late 1940s.4 Stanley Hoffmann, the renowned American historian of the German occupation of France, next used the term in 1968 to reveal that the Vichy government and the concept of collaboration “are not intelligible” when viewed in terms of Franco-German relations, but only in terms of Franco-French relations. As opposed to Girard, Hoffmann used the term “to delineate the camps present between 1940 and 1944 within the ideological domain specific to France.” Azéma, Rioux, and Rousso indicate that although the term was originally limited to describing the interior politics of France during World War II, it has since been widened to include any type of internal civil war, arguing that the term “can formulate in relatively new ways some investigations into the soundness of French consensus,” particularly with regard to “the nature of internal struggles” in modern French history.5 2The journal, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, published a special issue dedicated to les guerres franco-françaises edited by three highly regarded historians of modern France, Jean-Pierre Azéma, Jean- Pierre Rioux, and Henry Rousso. Jean-Pierre Azéma, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Henry Rousso, ed., Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, no. 5, Numéro special: Les Guerres franco-françaises (January - March, 1985). 3Ibid., 3. 4Ibid., 4. 5Ibid. 2 While les guerres franco-françaises comprise many different moments and events within modern French history-- the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848; the Paris Commune of 1871; the Dreyfus Affair of 1894 to 1906; the Vichy government of 1940 to 1944; and the Algerian War of 1954 to 1962, to name a few-- Vichy remains the archetype for les guerres franco-françaises.6 The internal conflicts that have come to dominate les guerres franco-françaises pervade Vichy‟s history, with the three most influential of these quarrels being disagreements over what constituted