ABSTRACT
In 1940, Marshal Pétain – the ‘Victor of Verdun’ – announced himself as his country’s would-be saviour.3 Following military defeat, he was asked to steer France to safety, and he exploited the situation to launch an ultratraditionalist ‘revolution’ that owed much to the thinking of Barrès and Maurras.4 But this was just one influence. Pétain, a man of the right, had sympathies with the extra-parliamentary agitation of the 1930s and obviously saw the Third Republic as doomed. Nazism was another conditioning factor, for when Pétain agreed to collaborate with Hitler he did so in the knowledge that France would have to toe the German line. Historians do not agree on the extent to which Petain’s Vichyiste doctrine was influenced by Nazism, but there were certainly common traits. Suffice to say that in 1940, as a result of a disastrous turn of events, Pétain was given the opportunity to put his political ideas into practice and what emerged was a unique brand of right-wing extremism.
