PARIS LETTER
D EAR
PR,
The headline of this morning's
Populaire
says: ENFIN, LA GUER–
RE EST FINIE. This no doubt reflects the weariness of Daniel Mayer,
or his editor-in-chief, who must have sat holding the pulse of his teletype
until two-thirty or three in the morning, when he finally put his paper
to bed. On second thought, Mayer could not have composed his front
page until four A. M., after the solemn sentencing of the ex-marshal,
ex-academician, ex-chief of state, Philippe Petain. So the war is over,
and the bad conscience of so many Frenchmen has been whisked away
to the fortress of Portalet, where Petain once imprisoned Blum and
Paul Reynaud; and no one, except the roistering G.I.s, seems to find
this a particularly happy day. The Communists are crying scandal, be–
cause Petain will not be executed, but they will not make a great point
of this: most Frenchmen are too obviously relieved. The exasperating
people who believe that, after all, the marshal only tried to save what
could be saved, are lacerated by the indignities showered on this am–
biguous old man by the predominantly Resistance press. The Socialists
are saddened by the whole unhappy affair, much in the Christlike man–
ner of Leon Blum, who shed tears in the witness stand; in any case, the
S.F.I.O. have been holding an important party congress during which,
politely and firmly, and with some embarrassment, they had to turn
down the Communist offer of holy matrimony: the prospect disturbed
them beyond any concern with the outcome of the Petain trial. In general,
most Frenchmen were violently angry--{)r at least seriously annoyed–
with Father, but all felt a kind of awful horror at the notion of killing
him. The verdict allows them a symbolic satisfaction without involving
them in the blood sacrifice itself. I don't mean to be flippant about this :
during the trial of Pucheu, in Algiers,-the Pucheu who had been
paraded in triumph through the streets, only a year before,-! acquired
the conviction that a profound current of feeling runs through the
masses, to the effect that authority, even fallen, can never be wrong.
This is why, when it became evident that Pucheu had not
pers.onally
designated hostages to the German firing-squads, but "only" that his
calculated policy had furthered the Nazi process of sucking the life–
blood of France, one felt a general unavowed terror at the approach and
execution of the inevitable death sentence. Authority may be brutal,
