Burger here. What's the deal with this dude? Why do the

>>2415064
Not French but is because he surrendered to Hitler, and was the head of the French state aka Vichy France. He was a fascist too.

After the war despite being a WW1 hero he was sentenced to death but him being too old saved him from being hanged.

>>2415074
He wasn't sentenced to death though, they commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. He died soon after because he was already old as fuck (born 1856)

>Pétain was born in Cauchy-à-la-Tour (in the Pas-de-Calais département in Northern France) in 1856. His father, Omer-Venant, was a farmer. His great-uncle, a Catholic priest, Father Abbe Lefebvre, had served in Napoleon's Grande Armée and told the young Pétain tales of war and adventure of his campaigns from the peninsulas of Italy to the Alps in Switzerland. Highly impressed by the tales told by his uncle, his destiny was from then on determined.

There are people alive right now who knew people who knew people who served in the Napoleonic army

He was scapegoated by French people ashamed they didn't actually resist the Nazis.

>>2415064
He did nothing wrong

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>>2415143
Basically after WWI there were two modes of thought on how to deal with Germany. One was to go the route that Versailles went.

The other was to smash through all the way to Berlin and then hang the Kaiser as a 'war criminal'. This was even prepared for by the invention of atrocity propaganda that was pushed in Britain and France during the war.

They couldn't get the Kaiser.

However the idea still existed.

After WWI the leadership of the allies were aware of the 'correct' way of defeating an enemy power. They had a problem with France.

France signed an armistice in 1940 because they were beaten and expected Britain to give up the fight within weeks. The armistice was signed based on the idea that after several weeks a general peace settlement would be reached.

The third republic than legitimately granted full power to Petain, who was a national hero after WWI.

Petain had been against war with Germany because he sensed the danger and he had also been against the alliance with Britian which he also felt vindicated by when Britian blew up the French navy and would later kill many French civilians in bombing attacks.

De Gaul on the other hand refused to accept the 3rd republic's wishes that Petain have power and exiled imself to GB. In GB he had no power but was propped up like a propaganda tool the same as Pauling was in the USSR and used to incite partisan attacks in France.

When the US invaded France in 1944 they were invading an occupied BUT legally sovereign and neutral state and setting up a military government.

How do you explain this to the French? Why were their 'liberators' bombing French towns, killing civilians, and invading them?

Well the answer was Petain was illegitimate and thus had to be overthrown.

The whole thing is completely propaganda. Petain's government had way more legitimacy than the Fourth republic and certainly more so than the Third Republic did at its start.

>>2415143
>>2416097
Why do we bother with the french when all they do is act superior and surrender at the first sign of trouble

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>>2415143
It isn't about resisting, idiot
Very few people/countries truly resist once defeated
The Germans for exemple, never ever resisted when they got occupied by foreign armies (which happened shithons of time these last centuries and is still occuring right now, pic related)

Stop acting like resistance after defeat is the norm because it clearly isnt
The real issue with France in WW2 is that they lost very fast
That being said, it wasn't really Petain's fault
He was only put in charge once everything was lost and because the people who had screwed up and lead to this shitty situation had abandoned their office

>>2416097
Thanks for the rundown anon, very informative.

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>>2416483
>Very few people/countries truly resist once defeated
And you aren't defeated until you accept defeat.

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>>2416097
I meant Paulus I'm sorry.

He allowed himself to be captured by the USSR at Stalingrad and was paraded around as a trophy and gave speeches through megaphones to German soldiers to surrender and that Hitler was bad commies were good etc.

De Gaul found himself in the same situation although he was conflicted about it.