Pétain becomes Marshal of France

On 19 November 1918 General Philippe Pétain, commander-in-chief of the French army, learned that he would be made a Marshal of France. According to the diary of his deputy, General Edmond Buat, the news came by telephone at noon. Two days earlier, at the request of officers of General Headquarters, Marshal Ferdinand Foch had intervened with the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, on the matter of a baton for Pétain. Formally Pétain became a marshal by a presidential decree of 21 November, published in the official gazette the next day, which is why most studies give the date as 21 November.

A day in Metz

In the early afternoon of 19 November Pétain, on a white horse and surrounded by Buat and twenty-five officers of headquarters, watched the march past of the units of the Tenth Army as they entered Metz through the Porte Serpenoise. The city, capital of German Lorraine since 1871, was returning to France after 47 years, and the crowds in the streets greeted the soldiers with enthusiasm. For Pétain it was also a day of bitterness. It was the Tenth Army that was to have led the great offensive in Lorraine, prepared under his direction and planned for 14 November. The armistice of 11 November meant that the attack never took place, and Pétain believed that the armistice had come too early.

From colonel to marshal

Pétain’s career in this war was exceptional. In August 1914 he was a 58-year-old colonel preparing for retirement, regarded as an officer with no future because he criticised the doctrine of attack at all costs that had been fashionable before the war. The war quickly put those views to the test. In less than a year he rose from command of a brigade to command of an army, and in February 1916 he was entrusted with the defence of Verdun. His organisation of the defence, of supply along the Voie Sacrée and of the rotation of divisions made him one of the most popular commanders in France. In May 1917, after the failure of the Nivelle offensive, he took over supreme command of the French army and brought under control the mutinies that had spread through its units, combining severity towards the ringleaders with better living conditions for the soldiers and a care to spare their blood.

In 1918 Pétain remained in the shadow of Foch, who as Allied commander-in-chief directed the whole campaign. When Foch received his baton in August, Pétain was given only the Médaille militaire. Now he joined Joseph Joffre and Foch as the third marshal of this war, and the first appointed after the armistice.

The baton

The ceremony took place a few weeks later. On 8 December 1918 in Metz, President Raymond Poincaré, in the presence of Clemenceau, presented Pétain with his marshal’s baton. Pétain was then 62. As the victor of Verdun and commander-in-chief in 1917–1918 he enjoyed immense authority in France for two decades. That same authority meant that in 1940 he became head of a state which after defeat embarked on collaboration with Germany. In 1945 a court sentenced him to death for treason, a sentence that General Charles de Gaulle commuted to life imprisonment.