Stirrings in the cemetery

It was the wee hours of the night on 19 to 20 February 1973, and strange things were happening in the cemetery of l’Île d’Yeu, a small island in the Bay of Biscay off France’s west coast. A group of men had gathered around the cemetery’s most famous grave: the one belonging to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of France’s pro-fascist Vichy regime during World War II.

Michel Dumas, a respectable undertaker from Paris, wondered what he had got himself into. When he agreed to provide the technical expertise necessary to open the grave, he had been assured that the cemetery was remote and secluded. It turned out there were houses right next to the cemetery wall, and even worse, it was overlooked by the local gendarmerie.

The grave proved to be more difficult to open than anticipated. The joints were tough and had been painted over, making them hard to find in the dark. Dumas had tried attacking them with a digging bar but made no progress, only frightening noises. Hubert Massol, the leader of the expedition, later recalled. “In the stillness of the night, the hollow burial chamber made the blow sound like a gong. At the time, I was certain that everyone on the island was sitting up in bed, wondering what the noise was.” Fortunately, the islanders proved to be sound sleepers. Nothing stirred except for a dog that started barking.

Dumas circled the grave, looking for a better place to make an opening, when he was surprised by a deafening crash. Massol, a veteran of the Algerian War, had made an executive decision. “I could see that doubt was setting in,” he later said. “I had to take action to keep the operation moving forward.” He picked up the digging bar and struck the monument as hard as he could. Dumas rushed round to see what was going on and realized the blow had punched a fist-sized hole in the grave, which they could use to insert wedges and lift the slab aside.

When Massol finally saw the coffin, he gave a smart salute and said solemnly «Maréchal, nous voilà» (“Marshal, here we are”), the first words of the hymn that had served as an unofficial national anthem for the Vichy regime. Now he could finally fulfill Pétain’s dying wish: to be buried in Douaumont, on the battlefield of Verdun, alongside the troops he had led to victory in 1916.

Hero and traitor

What drove these people to open a grave in the dead of night?

Marshal Philippe Pétain, one of the most divisive figures in the country’s modern history, whose legacy was still troubling the French political landscape decades after his death.

He had been a bona fide World War I hero. When the Germans attacked Verdun in 1916, Pétain was in command of that sector and had halted the enemy offensive. When the French army mutinied in 1917, he was appointed commander-in-chief and called upon to restore the situation. Which he did, by, among other things, improving the living conditions of soldiers at the front and promising a halt to suicidal offensives (like the disastrous spring campaign of 1917 that had sparked the mutiny in the first place). He kept his promises and became the rarest kind of WWI commander: one who was careful with his soldiers’ lives. Careful is, of course, a relative term in this context, but Pétain was keenly aware of the impact of technology on the modern battlefield. He relied on overwhelming firepower and new weapons like tanks to minimise French losses. This had earned him the undying loyalty of his veterans.

When the Third Republic fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Pétain seized control of the government and signed an armistice with the invaders. He then became the head of a fascist dictatorship based in the town of Vichy, and for all intents and purposes France became a puppet state of Nazi Germany.

After the war, Pétain had been condemned to death for high treason, but in view of his advanced age the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was exiled to a fortress on l’Île d’Yeu. When he died there in 1951 he had been buried in the local cemetery, an exile even in death.

One factor that complicated Pétain’s legacy was that he had been, technically, the legitimate head of state. He had been appointed head of the French government under the Third Republic, then engineered a vote in parliament that gave him wide-ranging powers. Those decisions had been made under duress in the immediate aftermath of a terrible defeat, but the fact remained that, legally, Pétain had been voted into power. He wasn’t some Nazi stooge imposed on the country by the Germans, like the leaders of other occupied nations. In fact, he didn’t owe his position to the Germans at all. To the more legalistically minded parts of society like the judiciary, the armed forces, and the bureaucracy, that counted for a lot.

His coup d’état also led to one of those curious episodes that give French politics their peculiar flavour. Pierre Laval, later infamous as one of the most pro-Nazi Vichy leaders, was the driving force in ensuring that the députés voted correctly. When he announced to Pétain that it had all gone according to plan, he opened with “Marshal, you now have more power than Louis XIV.” To which Pétain replied: “In that case, you’ll have to provide me with favourites.”

A complicated heritage

Pétain’s reputation as the saviour of the French army in WWI was difficult to reconcile with his role as an arch-traitor in WWII. Numerous excuses were put forward to explain his behavior.

One popular theory was that by 1940 Pétain was too old to fully understand what was happening, that he was merely a figurehead being manipulated by Nazi supporters like Pierre Laval. Another popular theory was that Pétain was only biding his time, keeping France’s military as intact as possible so it could participate in the country’s eventual liberation.

These excuses turned out to be mere wishful thinking, but were widely believed at the time.

There was a widespread sense that, whatever his sins, Pétain deserved some public recognition for his valorous service in WWI and his position as a former head of state. When his wish to be buried in Verdun was ignored, many saw it as a vindictive and vengeful act by the new French republic.

If Pétain’s descendants had kicked up a fuss, things could have been very embarrassing for the French state. But the state got lucky. Pétain had married late in life and had no children. However, his wife did have a son from a previous marriage. After Pétain’s death his widow and stepson stood to inherit but were opposed by Pétain’s biological relatives, notably his sister and her children. This meant that the Pétain descendants were split into two opposing factions who disagreed on everything as a matter of principle.

French politicians were aware that their treatment of Pétain was not popular, especially among the more conservative part of the population. During presidential elections candidates often made vague promises about transferring the Marshal’s grave to Verdun, as a way of courting right-wing voters. However, they knew that any official recognition of Pétain would be construed by the extreme right as a tacit rehabilitation of the Vichy regime, and nobody really wanted to go there. These promises were quickly forgotten after the elections.

After years of empty promises, when the elections of 1973 approached, a Pétainist group decided to take matters into their own hands.

The political movement that dares not speak its name

By 1973 Pétainism had resurfaced as a factor in French politics.

After the Marshal’s death in 1951 the Association pour la défense de la mémoire du maréchal Pétain (ADMP) was created. Officially the ADMP’s only purpose was rehabilitating Pétain’s image, and it was careful to stress that it had no political agenda. To most outside observers, though, the ADMP looked very much like a club of right-wingers and fascists longing for the good old days of the Vichy regime.

In the 1960s, the backlash created by the war in Algeria and opposition to De Gaulle transformed the group from a nostalgia club into a more contemporary political movement.

One the most divisive questions for the French in that era was who had made the right call in June 1940: De Gaulle, who wanted to continue the fight, or Pétain, who had asked for an armistice? This led to the formation of Gaullist and Pétainist camps. The division between the groups eventually became less and less about the actual events of June 1940 and more about the political positions of both men in general. If you didn’t like De Gaulle for whatever reason, you became a Pétainist and vice versa.

So when De Gaulle agreed to Algerian independence, many hardline colonialists naturally drifted towards the Pétainist camp. The marshal had died before the Algerian war broke out, and so had never taken any official position on the matter. However, for anti-Gaullists it seemed only natural to rally under the banner of Pétainism. (Also, from what we know of the marshal, it was a safe bet that he would be pro-colonialism.)

The Algerian war was a very traumatic experience for France. The French colonial empire had really only come into being in the late Nineteenth Century, but the conquest of Algeria had started much earlier in the 1830s. By the 1840s, the coastal area had been effectively annexed by France and even organised into départements. By the 1950s a thriving French community had been established for generations (counting Albert Camus as one of its most famous members). Algeria was seen by many as an integral part of France, unlike remote possessions like, say, Laos or Madagascar.

For many, giving Algeria its independence was giving up French soil to ‘savages’. The colonialist party bitterly opposed any concessions to Algerian nationalists. This led to a particularly dirty war in Algeria against the liberation movement. On the political front, the colonialists would stop at nothing to impose their views on the French government. This led to a coup d’état by the French army in Algeria in 1958 and another unsuccessful attempt to unseat De Gaulle in 1961.

The French army in Algeria also spawned a terrorist organisation, the Organisation armée secrete (OAS), which sought to intimidate and assassinate its political enemies in Algeria and France. When De Gaulle declared himself in favour of Algerian self-determination, he became a prime target for the OAS. His car was bombed in 1961 and raked by machine gun fire in 1962.

A man with ambition

Here we meet the first of our protagonists: Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.

Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour had risen to prominence in the ADMP by virtue of his impeccable right-wing and anti-Gaullist credentials. During the war he had briefly served as the undersecretary of state for information in the Vichy regime. As a lawyer he defended various high-profile right-wing figures, including notorious fascist writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline; General Salan, the ringleader of the military coups of 1958 and 1961; and Jean Bastien-Thiry, the brains behind the assassination attempt on De Gaulle in 1962.

Tixier-Vignancour entered the presidential elections of 1965 and finished fourth with 5,2% of the vote. His campaign manager was a young Jean-Marie Le Pen, who would go on to lead extreme right-wing Front national. Support like that wasn’t going to win elections, but it was enough to make center-right Gaullists nervous that they might lose seats if the right-wing vote could be split.

Tixier-Vignancour later claimed that during the 1969 presidential election he had made a gentleman’s agreement with the Gaullist candidate Georges Pompidou: Tixier-Vignancour would stand down, and in return Pompidou would give in to a number of Pétainist demands, including the rehabilitation of the Marshal. And yet when Pompidou got elected, nothing happened.

We only have Tixier-Vignancour’s word that such an agreement ever existed, and he had been caught lying through his teeth on several occasions. But this would explain why in 1973 he was determined to send a signal that could not be ignored.

Time for action

Exactly how the plan came about and what exactly they were trying to achieve remains obscure. Tixier-Vignancour himself and two key figures in the operation, Michel Dumas and Hubert Massol, freely talked about the whole affair. Dumas even wrote a very entertaining book about his adventure. However, each man stuck carefully to his own version of events, often contradicting each other and leaving many embarrassing questions unanswered. It also doesn’t help that Massol and Dumas didn’t think much of each other, and each told his story in a way that made the other look like a fool. In general, I have followed Michel Dumas’s version of the events, because it is the most coherent.

What is certain is that Tixier-Vignancour assembled a task force to steal the coffin of Pétain from l’Île d’Yeu, in order to pressure the new government to transfer it to Verdun.

The leader of the group was Hubert Massol, a veteran of the war in Algeria who was active in the Alliance républicaine, Tixier-Vignancour’s political party. Massol had been a schoolboy during the Vichy regime, when the Marshal’s portrait hung in every classroom and hymns were sung in his honour, which, he later claimed, inspired him to organise the operation. He had little direct experience of Vichy but had joined Pétainism as a reaction to Gaullist policy on Algeria.

Another member was Armand Garau, Tixier-Vignancourt’s chauffeur.

Massol then recruited some veterans of the Foreign Legion to do the heavy lifting.

As in any good heist, you need an expert to open the safe, or in this case the grave. This was where Michel Dumas came in, a respectable undertaker to the conservative Catholic elite of Paris and a friend of Tixier-Vignancour.

A plan was hatched.

In January 1973 French legal circles were surprised to learn that Tixier-Vignancour, celebrity lawyer and former presidential candidate, would be traveling all the way to Nantes to litigate a dispute about chickens. His trip provided an excuse to visit the southwest coast of Brittany. From there, he could discreetly conduct reconnaissance of l’Île d’Yeu and report back to Dumas, so the undertaker could assemble the necessary equipment.

As Dumas was later to discover, Tixier-Vignancour had left out some key elements (like the gendarmerie) out of his report.

Timing was crucial. L’Île d’Yeu’s only connection to the mainland was by ferry and the sailing times were determined by the tides. The conspirators needed to pick a date where they could complete their operation in total darkness and catch an early ferry that would get them back on the mainland by dawn. By happy coincidence, the most suitable date was the weekend of 19 February, the anniversary of the German attack on Verdun.

To provide a cover story, the conspirators contacted Solange Boche, a market vendor. First, Armand Garau rented a van and picked up the equipment from Dumas. Then he drove the van to l’Île d’Yeu, posing as Boche’s husband, with the cover story that they were there to sell clothes on market day. Boche then took the ferry back, leaving Garau and the van behind to await the arrival of the remaining conspirators.

The rest of the men drove down from Paris, posing as tourists on a day trip, and met up at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. The hotel was run by a fervent admirer of Pétain and was the favourite spot of Pétainists making a pilgrimage to the grave.

Massol’s crew wasn’t very experienced in covert operations. As they lunched on the way from Paris, Dumas noted that they were getting suspicious looks from the restaurant staff. It turns out a group of men talking in low voices and falling silent whenever someone drew too near seemed very, very suspicious.

The conspirators waited until after midnight, when the gendarmes had made their last rounds. Then they drove to the cemetery. To avoid making excess noise, they put the van in neutral and pushed it up to the monument, and then got to work.

Verdun or Bust

So that is how our little group found themselves at the opened grave of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Here they had the first – and only – stroke of luck in the entire operation. When agreeing to take part, Michel Dumas had been adamant that he only would go through with exhumation if the coffin was still sufficiently intact to be moved. When a coffin is put on the ground in a vault, the bottom tends to rot away first, making later removal next to impossible. Here, though, the coffin of the Marshal had been placed on stone supports and looked as new as the day it had been sealed away. This made it easy to attach straps and lift it into the van.

Next came the question of repairing the monument. Massol’s brute force approach had made a sizable hole in the slab, and Dumas feared he wouldn’t have enough cement to cover it all. He used a newspaper found in the van to fill most of the gap, and then covered everything with cement.

Before leaving the cemetery, they meticulously raked the gravel around the grave to cover their tracks. This would seal their doom.

Back at the hotel, they were greeted enthusiastically by the owner with, “This calls for champagne!” Bottles were popped and things got festive very quickly. Massol recalled: “People started singing, and I had to calm them down so as not to wake the neighbours.” Again the islanders proved to be sound sleepers, and the group boarded the early morning ferry as planned.

The best laid plans of mice and men

The plan began to unravel immediately.

When the conspirators made it back to the mainland, they stopped at the Château de La Vérie, home of the Marquis Boux de Casson, a reactionary politician who had held office in the Vichy regime, and a good friend of Tixier-Vignancour. However, when they drove into the courtyard, they discovered that the château was closed and nobody answered their knocks on door. Massol smelled a rat decided to drive on to Paris.

What they were going to do at the château has never really been answered; perhaps they planned to spirit away the coffin with the help of the marquis, or even hide it on the castle grounds, before moving on to Paris where they would present their demands to Pompidou. The reason later given by the marquis was that many prominent figures in French history had stayed at the château, including Cardinal Richelieu, and he wanted to add Pétain to the list.

It seemed more likely that the marquis had cold feet at the last moment, and played dead.

While the group was wasting time at the château, disaster struck. On his early morning rounds, the caretaker of the cemetery saw that the gravel around Pétain’s grave had been neatly raked. The day before, a football team (soccer to you US types) had visited the monument and had trampled all over the area. It should have been a mess, but apparently someone had come in the dead of night to tidy things up. All very suspicious.

The caretaker’s suspicions were confirmed when he inspected the grave more closely. He saw the damage to the slab and noted that the cement on the joints was still wet. He immediately raised the alarm.

The news spread like wildfire. On their way to Paris, the conspirators heard over the radio that the theft had been discovered. The authorities correctly guessed the ultimate goal of the operation and wasted no time putting up checkpoints on the approaches to Verdun. The conspirators now had no other option but to return to Tixier-Vignancour in Paris and decide on a new course of action.

While driving through Paris, Massol made a point of taking the van down the Champs Elysées, as an echo of Pétain’s victory parade in 1919.

Massol and Dumas held a quick war council with Tixier-Vignancour. Their first priority was to hide the coffin somewhere safe and ditch the van. Tixier-Vignancour suggested a friend who had a garage box in Saint Ouen in the suburbs of Paris. The coffin was duly deposed there, but not before Dumas secretly carved his initials in the wood. Massol then abandoned the van.

It had been agreed that when things went south, Massol would take all the blame, and claim he had been acting on his own initiative. This would leave Tixier-Vignancour free to defend the other conspirators in court.

The hunt for the Marshal

Things went from bad to worse quickly.

The sitting government found the whole affair highly embarrassing and, with elections looming on the horizon, made recovering the Marshal’s coffin police priority number one. Wild theories began to circulate about what had happened. Some islanders said that they had heard a helicopter land and take off during the night. There was also talk of a mysterious yacht that had been seen nearby, which had suddenly disappeared in the morning. These baseless speculations were quickly discounted.

Dumas had unwittingly left a red herring for the police when he had taken the piece of newspaper to plug the hole in the slab. It turned out to be a Spanish newspaper, so investigators turned their attention to Spain. A Spanish connection wasn’t entirely far-fetched. Before the war, Pétain had been ambassador to Spain and had been on very good terms with the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. After the war, several prominent fascists had found refuge there, including Belgian Nazi leader Léon Degrelle, who was facing execution at home. Degrelle had once declared that he would liberate Pétain. Now, Degrelle can best be described as Belgium’s answer to Mussolini, prone to making grand pronouncements without any intent of following through on them. Could it be that this time he had actually made good on one of his promises, and mounted the whole operation from Spain? Investigators quickly realised that the Spanish trail went nowhere, but for a time there was heightened security along the Spanish-French border, adding a layer of international drama to the whole affair.

The police correctly assumed that the coffin must have left the island on the first ferry out, so they took a careful look at all the vehicles that had booked passage. The van registered by Solange Boche immediately caught their eye. Why would somebody from Paris make an overnight trip in a rented van to l’Île d’Yeu, just to sell clothes at the market? The Paris police investigated and Boche confirmed that, yes, she had been to the island. Her own van had broken down, so her friend Armand Garau rented a replacement for her.

The police checked her story with the rental firm and discovered that the name that was given to the rental firm wasn’t Garau, as Boche claimed. In fact, when he had rented the van, Garau had used a stolen driver’s license. Boche was immediately arrested and quickly broke down under interrogation. She gave up the name of Dumas.

Meanwhile the Marquis Boux de Casson also found himself in police custody. Contrary to what the other conspirators were thinking, he hadn’t gotten cold feet, but instead had gone rogue. He had received a telephone call early Monday morning that operation had gone well, and that the van was on its way. Upon hearing that, he had contacted the Ministry of the Interior and tried to broker a deal. In exchange for the transfer of Pétain to Verdun, he would see to it that the affair never became public. Unsurprisingly, he was held for questioning by the police.

Asked how he knew about the theft, he claimed that he had been accosted on the street a few days earlier by a someone he had never seen before, who had asked him if, when called upon, he would harbour the stolen coffin of Pétain. The inspector in charge concluded that this story “was about as straight as the tower of Pisa,” and had the marquis arrested.

Dumas was arrested the next day. At first he denied everything. He had even gone to the trouble of manufacturing an alibi of sorts, by visiting “bars where charming young ladies help you order drinks” the night before his departure. He noted with satisfaction that when the police verified the credit card receipts, they were duly impressed by the amount he had spent. However when the police intercepted a postcard he had sent from l’Île d’Yeu, his defence fell apart. As he awaited trial, he was pleased to see that his role in the affair gave him a certain cachet with the other detainees in the jail.

Flight forward

Massol and Tixier-Vignancour knew they had to act quickly. Their fellow conspirators were being rounded up, and they were being watched closely by the police. The authorities still had no evidence that either of them was linked to the affair, but as leading figures in the ADMP they were very likely suspects. Their smallest mistake could now prove fatal.

Crucially for the conspirators, the story was spiraling out of control. Not since the disappearance of the Mona Lisa in 1911 had a theft caused such a sensation in France. The press had a field day, interviewing anyone and everyone who might have something to say about the matter. That included Tixier-Vignancour himself, who, in a transparent attempt to avoid suspicion, claimed to have received a phone call from group of veterans who admitted stealing the coffin and claimed they were going to deposit it in Verdun.

Theories abounded about who had stolen the coffin and why. Perhaps the most pragmatic view on the matter came from a restaurant owner near Verdun. When asked how he felt about bringing Pétain to Verdun, he answered “We have always had a steady client base in the veterans of the Great War, but, to tell you the truth, these are getting thin on the ground. If we could attract a younger generation, such as the people who have grown up singing «Maréchal, nous voilà» in school, I’d be all for it.”

A more serious concern for the conspirators was that they were quickly losing the support of the Pétainist camp. While they were favourable to the project in principle, many did not agree with the specific means that had been used. As devout Catholics, Pétain’s descendants were understandably shocked and called on the grave robbers to return the coffin. The caper was also criticized by Jacques Isorni, the grand old man of Pétainism. Isorni had been one of Pétain’s lawyers during the treason trial, and after the Marshal’s conviction and exile had become the keeper of the flame of Pétainism and one of the founding fathers of the ADMP. In more recent years, rising stars such as Tixier-Vignancour had taken his place in the limelight, which he deeply resented. For instance, it was Tixier-Vignancour who had defended the leading figures of the OAS, a task which Isorni felt that by rights should have been his. When the news of the theft broke, Isorni immediately detected the hand of Tixier-Vignancour at work. He lost no time denouncing the operation, turning Pétainist opinion against his rival. He also confronted Tixier-Vignancour at the courthouse, opening with, “Just stop your bullshit already, when are you going to give back the coffin?”

Tixier-Vignancour and Massol realised that they had lost all support of la pétainie, and that the police were closing in. They would need to act quickly if they were going to get anything out of this operation.

Massol telephoned to the press, introducing himself as the leader of the group who had stolen the coffin, and announced he would be holding a press conference in the Café le Cristal in Paris, a well-known haunt of extreme right militants. To the assembled journalists he introduced himself as a member of the Alliance républicaine and stated that the commandos would only surrender the coffin if they received the written assurance of the president that the remains of Pétain would be put in a crypt in Les Invalides (a military memorial in Paris which, among other things, houses the remains of Napoleon), with the goal of an eventual rehabilitation and transfer to Verdun.

The police politely let Massol finish his speech and answer some questions from the press before moving in to arrest him. As he was led away, he shouted, “I want to be defended by Tixier-Vignancour!”

The rest is silence

With the exception of Tixier-Vignancour, the primary conspirators were now behind bars. And that, more or less, was that.

Massol held out for a time, but when it became clear that no plea deal would be forthcoming, he decided he didn’t want to go down in history as the man who had lost the coffin of Pétain and gave up the address of the garage box. The coffin was recovered under the watchful eye of the press and solemnly returned to l’Île d’Yeu. The Marshal’s grave was kept under a 24-hour watch, but it was quickly realised that this was excessive, and everything on the island soon returned to normal.

French authorities decided to let the affair just fizzle out. Desecrating a grave was illegal, of course, but it wasn’t a serious crime, especially since no valuables had been stolen. Pompidou realised that if he tried the conspirators he would only be giving Tixier-Vignancour a platform to make his case to the public, which was last thing the government wanted. So in the end they decided to play along with Massol’s version of events, that he had been the sole initiator and had acted out of childhood devotion to the Marshal. The press covered it like it was a harebrained stunt worthy of the Beagle Boys, without any special political motive. When Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected president in 1974, everyone involved was granted presidential amnesty and the matter was quietly dropped.

There would be no more talk of moving Pétain to Verdun.

Verdun adieu

So, what were the conspirators trying to achieve?

Jean-Yves Le Naour, who has studied the affair thoroughly, suggests that the original plan was to keep the theft secret, so the conspirators could threaten Pompidou with a major scandal on the eve of the elections and blackmail him into making concessions to the extreme right. This would also allow Pompidou to take the credit for transferring Pétain to Verdun, without making it seem like he was giving in to political pressure from the far right. This is plausible, if unprovable.

It’s also the same deal that the Marquis Boux de Casson had proposed. This supports the theory that the original plan had been to hide the coffin in his château, as that would have given the marquis easy access to Pétain’s remains. In that case, it would have been prudent of him to have organised some kind of reception committee for the conspirators.

Of course, once the theft was all over the headlines, this plan went out of the window. With the coming elections, there was no way that Pompidou could be seen as capitulating to Pétainist demands.

What is certain is that the authorities did their utmost to avoid involving Tixier-Vignancour directly. For anyone who was familiar with Pétainist circles, he was the most obvious suspect. The police thought so too, and when Massol and Dumas arrived at his apartment they found it was already under surveillance.

And yet, even when the police had arrested Hubert Massol, the well-known associate and henchman of Tixier-Vignancour; Michel Dumas, his close personal friend; Armand Garau, his chauffeur; and the Marquis Boux de Casson, also member of his inner circle, Tixier-Vignancour was still left alone. The authorities clearly didn’t want to give the affair any political overtones.

Was there any chance of rehabilitating Pétain? In my view, there was a window of opportunity for it in the 1970s. It had been nearly three decades since the end of the war, and many key figures were either dead or retired from public life. The newer generations had only childhood memories of Vichy regime, or no experience with it at all. They had completely different concerns than their parents, as the events of May 1968 showed. There was a sense of letting bygones be bygones.

Secondly, the Vichy myth was still going strong. The idea was that, by maintaining a separate administration from the German occupiers, Vichy had shielded the French population from the hardships of direct German rule. It was also supposed to have maintained a government structure and armed forces, which provided the basis of France’s re-entry into the war from 1943. In this view, collaboration with Germany was the work of a handful of hardcore Nazi sympathisers, while the rest of the regime offered passive resistance. This opened the door to a rehabilitation of the Vichy state and a reconciliation between Gaullists and Pétainists on the right wing of the political spectrum: supposedly they had all been resistants, with Pétain being the shield to De Gaulle’s sword.

That window began to close in the 1980s. Archival research showed that, far from dragging its feet, the Vichy regime was actually bending over backwards to ingratiate itself with the Germans, which included introducing antisemitic measures and helping the Nazis round up Jews. In fairness, many Vichy officials did try to sabotage the occupiers and help the resistance, but this was by no means official policy.

It was also shown that Pétain himself was fully committed to a German victory. That Vichy played no greater role in the Nazi war effort was more due to Hitler’s distrust than to any reluctance on Pétain’s part. These disclosures led to some highly publicised trials of Vichy officials in the late 80s and 90s for their role in the persecution of Jews, which thoroughly discredited the regime and the person of Pétain.

The extreme right lost interest in Pétain as well. Tixier-Vignancour’s position was usurped by the Front national of his former campaign manager Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen’s party focused more on contemporary issues, mainly immigration, instead of trying to justify positions held decades ago during the Second World War or the Algerian War. The Pétainist movement (including Hubert Massol) found a home within the FN, but became more and more a nostalgia club for the elderly. The FN has since morphed into the more family friendly Rassemblement national, led by Jean-Marie’s daughter Marine, which is all about identity politics and doesn’t want to draw too much attention to its Vichy heritage.

So it doesn’t seem that Pétain will be moved from l’Île d’Yeu anytime soon.