Why a far-right gang once tried to steal the corpse of France's Marshal Pétain
Just over 50 years ago, a group of admirers of French Nazi collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain spirited his coffin from the island where he died in prison and tried to bury him alongside fellow World War I heroes in Verdun. They failed.
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But the story highlights divisions over the way Pétain is remembered.
There are two sides to Pétain: the war hero revered for stopping the German advance at the 1916 Battle of Verdun.
And the traitor reviled for leading France's collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.
His former glory weighed little in 1946 when he was convicted of treason.
Due to his advanced age, the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in jail in 1951 on the Ile d’Yeu – a windswept island 17km off France’s Atlantic coast that became his final resting place.
In his will, Pétain had asked to be buried in Verdun “with my men”. But his wishes were overruled by WWII Resistance hero and later president Charles de Gaulle.
This outraged Pétain's supporters and from 1951 a number of WWI veterans began lobbying for his body to be transferred to the Douaumont Ossuary, which holds the remains of soldiers who died on the battlefield of Verdun.
On the night of 18 February 1973, a commando group close to the far-right set about transferring their hero.
They sneaked into the cemetery and hauled the 770kg lead-lined coffin into a van, then set off for Verdun on the other side of the country.
Botched job
The brains behind the raid was a far-right lawyer and failed presidential candidate, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.
The man charged with removing the coffin from the vault, loading it into a van and taking it by ferry to the mainland was Hubert Massol.
While he and five other men managed to move the tombstone, they were careless, and after chipping the corner of the slab sealed it roughly back into place.
When the cemetery guard did his rounds the following morning, he noticed chisel marks on the tombstone and freshly raked sand around the grave, and alerted the police.
By lunchtime the news was out: “Unknown perpetrators have unsealed the tombstone of Marshal Pétain,” French news agency AFP announced in an urgent bulletin.
Keeping the lid on
The grave robbery came at a politically sensitive time, just a fortnight before legislative elections where Massol, a veteran of the Algerian War, was running as a candidate for the right-wing Republican Alliance for Liberty and Progress.
Concerned that the affair would rally the far-right, then president Georges Pompidou wanted it resolved quickly and quietly.
The government mobilised close to half of France's 94,000-strong police force in a nationwide hunt.
They combed the country looking for a Renault van that had arrived on the island two days before Pétain’s body was stolen and left the morning after.
Meanwhile, the body snatchers suffered a setback when a former pro-Pétain lawmaker who had offered the use of his chateau for a change of vehicle was nowhere to be found when they arrived at his home.
The body snatchers ditched the Verdun plan and headed for Paris, where they stashed the coffin in a lock-up garage in the northern suburb of Saint-Ouen.
The blue pick-up truck was found on 21 February. According to media reports, it contained sweet wrappers, tangerine peel and clothes belonging to a market trader, Solange Boche.
Boche was the first person arrested; others quickly followed.
Sossol held a press conference saying he would reveal the body's location if Pompidou allowed Pétain to be buried at Verdun’s Douaumont war memorial.
The president was having none of it. Massol was promptly arrested and under questioning agreed to lead the police to the garage.
Pompidou ordered the coffin be immediately returned to Ile d’Yeu where it remains to this day, in a tomb covered with a white stone slab, a white cross and sober epithet.
No charges were brought against the grave robbers because the government feared it could stoke sympathy for Pétain.
In 2018, President Emmanuel Macron stirred up controversy by describing Pétain as a great soldier in WWI, and slamming attempts to manipulate his memory.
Debate over whether to remember Pétain for Vichy or Verdun continues to divide the French.
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