The handshake between Pétain and Hitler
Marshal Phillipe Pétain, veteran of the First World War, shakes hands with Adolf Hitler: with this photo he antagonized his fellow citizens and went from war hero – for his role in the Battle of Verdun – to traitor.
In the years before the Second World War Pétain persistently protested against the cuts made by the French government to the army, which left him in inferior conditions when the Third Reich arrived. The old marshal was one of the main advocates of negotiating an armistice with Hitlerbefore suffering a defeat that he considered inevitable: at the end he was offered leadership of a new government tasked with negotiating with the Nazis.
Pétain was optimistic: the conditions of the armistice left the north of France under German occupation and the south with a puppet government led by himwho never renounced the broad powers that had been granted to him on an emergency basis. He went from an old war hero to a traitor and, at the end of the war, he was tried for high treason and sentenced to life imprisonment.
