France shocked by theft of body

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33156, 21 February 1973, Page 17

France shocked by theft of body

f N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) PARIS, February 20. The vanished coffin of Marshal Philippe Petain, former head of Vichy France, has left President Pompidou with an embarrassing and potentially explosive problem, just as a crucial General Election is looming.

V\ hen the coffin is found. Mr Pompidou will be forced to decide whether to send it back to its island tomb off the French Atlantic coast, or have it buried elsewhere.

Whatever he does will reopen old wounds and antagonise many Frenchmen in a nation divided between those for whom the late marshal was either a hero or a traitor.

The news yesterday that Marshal Petain’s coffin had been removed from its tomb on the He d’Yeu came as a sharp shock to millions of Frenchmen. Many initially believed it was a joke. Police set up roadblocks on highways leading to the Verdun area of northern France, believing that an ar tempt might be made by Pe tainists to bury the body on the Verdun battlefield, scene of Marshal Petain’s World War I triumph against the Germany Army. Die-hard Right-wingers are widely thought to have been responsible for the theft of the Marshal’s remains.

But another theory circulating was that World War II Resistance fighters, afraid that President Pompidou might have been preparing to permit a Verdun reburial for Marshal Petain, had taken the coffin and thrown it into the sea. The issue of burying Marshal Petain at the Douamont cemetery in Verdun alongside 300,000 French soldiers who died there in the bloody battles of 1916-1917 has been a main driving force behind the French Right for nearly 30 years. Right-wingers render homage to his highly successful World War I career. But it has always been clear that such a move would be seen as a rehabilitation for the man who aligned the Frencn Vichy regime with Hitler’s Nazi Germany during World War 11. He was sentenced to death; after the war but his life was I spared and he was kept imprisoned on the He d’Yeu till I he died in 1951 at the age of] 95.

i The rehabilitation of Marshal Petain would also mean rehabilitation for tens of thousands of his most active followers who paid the price of collaboration by imprisonment, dishonour and even death. The issue is still very much alive because the wartime hatreds between collaborators and Resistance fighters has never really subsided. Mr Jacques Isomi, Marshal Petain’s lawyer at his post-war trial, said yesterday that he had been warned of a plan to take the marshal’s coffin to Verdun. An extreme Right-wing leader, Mr Jean Louis TixierVignancourt, said he received an anonymous telephone call that the body had already been placed in the Verdun area. Police investigations, however, showed that the cemetery was untouched. Former Resistance fighters,

embittered by torture in Nazi and Vichy prisons, have sworn time and again that they would never permit Marshal Petain to be buried at Douamont. One of their main groups last night said that it was “totally unacceptable that a man sentenced to death for high treason be buried there.” Police were convinced the robbery of the coffin was a long-prepared move since whoever was responsible arrived equipped to loosen the 17601 b slab over the grave and left without leaving any clues. The theft probably occurred early on Sunday and police were checking reports that a helicopter had been heard over the island. To send the coffin back to the island would raise an outcry not only from groups of hardened former collaborators but also from what is probably a good proportion i of conservative Frenchmen of elder generations who believe Marshal Petain was less of a traitor than was made out at his trial. The French Communist Party, which probably suffered more at the hands of the Vichy authorities than any other political group, is expected vociferously to oppose any move to place the coffn at Verdun. President Pompidou might well stir up unrest among the rank and file of the ruling U.D.R. Gaullist Party if Marshal Petain were rehabilitated, though the party’s leaders would undoubtedly go along with him whatever his decision.