The last refuge of a scoundrel

To be successful, biographers must possess some degree of empathy with their subject. They need not convince themselves that they would always have acted similarly, still less play the part of counsel for the defence, but they will have failed if the reader does not understand why the subject of the biography behaved as he did and what the forces were that drove him onwards. Some degree of sympathy is essential, and the less appealing the subject, the more difficult the task will be. The difficulty is compounded if the biographer has been previously required to approach the material from a different angle: the facts are the same but the point of view sometimes means that they can seem startlingly different. If the biographer of de Gaulle is to tackle Pétain he must be prepared to stand intellectually on his head, a feat demanding much mental agility as well as a capacity to combine detachment with a fine understanding of human nature. Charles Williams has accepted the challenge and met it triumphantly.

Williams nails his colours firmly to his mast in his introduction. ‘It is always a mistake,’ he begins, ‘to end up on the wrong side of history.’ If de Gaulle and his followers were to be the heroes who had redeemed a nation, as the French people demanded after the Liberation, then there must be villains who could be held responsible for the humiliation of defeat. Among the guilty men there were many who were culpable, but Pétain was the grandest and the most venerable and Pétain was the first to be condemned. He was accused not just of weakness, ineptitude and bad judgment, but of the wanton betrayal of France and all that France stood for.