r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

3.8k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

5.8k

u/GCU_ZeroCredibility 11h ago

Marshal Petain of France.

Probably the most famous French general of the first world war. Known as the Lion of Verdun and led the victorious French in throwing back the Germans over an incredibly bloody 9 months. If you know anything about how important Verdun was in the history of western Europe you know this was a big deal.

If he had died in the 20s or early 30s he would be be one of France's great heroes.

Instead he lived and led the nazi collaborationist Vichy regime after the fall of France in the second war, and now he is collaborationist scum you wouldn't cross the street to piss on if he were on fire.

2.4k

u/nolok 10h ago edited 8h ago

If he had died in the 20s or early 30s he would be be one of France's great heroes.

This part is I think the one that other countries (and even younger French people) will have a hard time grasping the depth of.

WW1 was a massive impact on France. It was a trauma that led us being scared of war again which led in part to what happened in ww2. And Verdun was the absolute shit show of ww1, the thing that terrified France personified by one name.

And Petain was the hero of it, as much as such a thing can have hero. What does that mean? Nothing. Everything. It's the one name we could clang to. If he died before ww2 happened, he would be high up there in our top 10 maybe top 5 of "heroes" for that legacy alone. Justified or not doesn't matter, the guy represented France holding the line and not being destroyed and finished. He's the "ils ne passeront pas" / "they shall not pass" guy .

Then he turned around and betrayed everything ? And not even surrendered but doing a shitty armistice forcing our forces to turn on the rest of the allies, and then he cooperate with the nazis? Forget the fall from grace for him, for the French people this was as shitty and "all is doomed" as it gets.

It's also, on the opposite, another reason for our absolute worship of De Gaulle. Yes there is what he did and the resistance and saving us from nazis and saving us from America and saving us from the Soviets and the constitution and sovereignty and European reconciliation and blablabla but deep down, he's also the guy that gave us an out, that allowed us to say we're not the country of Petain, we're the country of De Gaulle.

820

u/Tim-oBedlam 8h ago

Really good comment.

This obviously won't be news to you, but I think a lot of other countries, ESPECIALLY Americans, don't realize the shattering effect WW1 had on France. Around 30% of all French men in their 20s when the war broke out were dead by the war's end. That's an entire generation lost in the trenches. And that's *dead*: the 70% of the survivors includes people who were gravely wounded, or perhaps survived with no injuries but had the lifelong trauma of seeing their friends Claude, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques blown to bits in front of them.

371

u/MaximumFlow7491 6h ago edited 6h ago

yeah, 70% of all French military aged males were killed or wounded in WWI

to put things in perspective: imagine the bros you went to high school with, now imagine the vast majority of them dying or maimed in a period of 4 years

306

u/Tim-oBedlam 6h ago

The other statistic that I recall about France in WW1: they had approximately 1.4 million killed in action.

That is roughly equal to ALL USA war dead in our ENTIRE history going back to colonial times, counting both sides of the American Civil War. In four years.

Most of USA war deaths were the Civil War (750,000, more or less), and WW2 (a bit over 400,000).

62

u/GrumpyFalstaff 4h ago

Holy shit, that's an insane statistic. Did not know that thanks

44

u/nikogrande 4h ago

If you’re any sort of history buff at all, I cannot recommend enough Blueprint for Armageddon from Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. No story of any war anywhere has gripped my soul like that one…. Note: it’s 24 hours long

4

u/cairdeas 2h ago

Any recommendations on where to listen to it? 13 years old now and it doesn't look like it's on the show's feed anymore.

10

u/Doikor 2h ago

You can buy his older stuff from his website

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/

There is also a bundle with all his hardcore history episodes for $100 there.

3

u/cairdeas 2h ago

Thank you!

I'll also add a recommendation for "The War that Ended Peace" by Margaret MacMillan, which also takes a pretty long road to the great war.

1

u/Beachsbcrazy 1h ago

There’s a channel on Spotify called This Too Shall Pass that has the full series

•

u/komstock 23m ago

Blueprint for Armageddon made me hate war in a way I never thought I'd be capable of. I listened to it in my early 20s and I realized all of the men who were being blown up for...next to nothing were all men just like me with my same capacity for interiority and my same capacity to feel and my same capacity to love.

People talk all the time about all kinds of conflict. People say 'never again' about a lot of events. WWI is the top of my 'never again' list.

Never has there been such an utter waste of humanity that caused such permanent destruction. Every other atrocity in the 20th century is tied to it.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

8

u/turducken69420 2h ago

Around 4.5% of the French population was killed in the war. In the US Civil War it was 2% and that was counting both sides. Plus 2/3 of deaths in the civil war were from disease. World War I was the first was where more soldiers died from combat rather than disease.

7

u/massive_cock 3h ago

In a country of much more modest size and population. The utter scale.

6

u/YoureInHereWithMe 1h ago

This is why I can’t stand it when people make jokes about the French being cowards when discussing WW2. They either have no idea of, or no empathy for, the massive sacrifice the French made to hold Germany back the first time around.

•

u/Tim-oBedlam 38m ago

Exactly. Same here. There are still parts of France that are uninhabitable because of buried ordnance, over 100 years after the guns fell silent, and it may take another century to remove all the UXO. And that's notwithstanding the countless dead.

5

u/F1shermanIvan 1h ago

France had more people killed in Verdun than the USA lost in the entire war.

Mind you, Verdun lasted longer than American troops were in theatre.

•

u/MaximumFlow7491 39m ago

This is out of a pre-war population of 40 million in Metropole France btw

some of the 1.4 million were colonial troops but vast majority were born in Metropolitan France. KIA+WIA combined for France was 5+ million. Which means that around 1/8 of the -entire population- of France were casualties of war. This a society where it was the norm for you to have lost close friends/relatives in the war.

To put that into perspective, 1/8 of today's US population would be ~43 -million- people.

•

u/Tim-oBedlam 36m ago

That's almost incomprehensible. And like I said in an earlier comment even if you were one of the rare French men who came through the war unscathed, you saw first-hand the horrors of war and also probably lost a huge number of your friends.

•

u/MaximumFlow7491 31m ago

yeah and it did contribute to why France surrendered so quickly in WWII

it was a society which decided that that the Third Republic wasn't worth defending when so many of their fathers, brothers, sons and friends had already died defending it 20+ years ago.

104

u/Gnl_Winter 5h ago

And now imagine after that : the Spanish flu epidemic happens.

The world of 1914-1920 in western Europe is simply the most horrific time to be alive. The sheer amount of grief one had to live through is simply unfathomable.

13

u/Tim-oBedlam 4h ago

Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR in 1939-1944 easily tops that

20

u/Gnl_Winter 3h ago

I was being hyperbolic, not literal. Otherwise we can do a contest of all the horrific times and places to be alive and Chinese history is gonna enter the chat pretty quick.

8

u/SofieTerleska 2h ago

The Black Death and the Plague of Justinian would have a pretty solid case as well.

5

u/laxrippe 3h ago

I was gonna comment in the same spirit as Gnl_Winter - it is not wrong to say it was a horrific time (it absolutely was and your point stands), but it's sadly not hard to find even worse points in space and time to be in.

2

u/REDDITATO_ 3h ago

Io in 80,000bc being the obvious WOAT. Damn Jupes.

2

u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Excellent point.

Chinese history, which I don't know very well, is fascinating. You have long periods of stability and prosperity when you get a well-run dynasty, then these savage civil wars/periods of anarchy when the dynasty collapses.

I think most of the "bloodiest wars in history" pre-1800, save the Mongol conquests, are Chinese simply because they had the largest population.

•

u/InfluenceAutomatic95 2m ago

Eastern Europe from around 1800 - 1945 was generally a terrible place to live. Mass genocide and massacres almost every decade. Double so if Jewish.

1

u/Ok_Historian_1066 1h ago

The Black Death would like a word with you.

3

u/KaraAliasRaidra 3h ago

That reminds me of the 1930 film version of All Quiet on the Western Front (which I was not expecting to be that graphic 🙀. That's what happens when you watch a movie made before the Hays Code!).

3

u/TheBookfinder 1h ago

In some villages, it's the entire fighting age male population that got wiped out. There were kids, elderly, women, and a gaping hole in the middle, all dead, no survivors.

When WW2 started, in a large city you could still hardly come out of your house to go to work or for a stroll or whatever without coming across WW1 vétéran invalids everywhere, missing limbs or whatever.

•

u/Tim-oBedlam 30m ago

The French called the generation of kids born in the 1910s the "hollow class" because there were so few of them, because all of the potential fathers were off in the war and a huge percentage of them never came back. That lasted a generation, as there were fewer kids born in the 1930s because there just weren't many men around to father children.

2

u/trilobyte-dev 1h ago

Not arguing but enhancing your comment because it’s worse than that. Imagine you have a group of 10 great friends in high school, and 10 years later you are lucky enough to be one of the three still alive.

•

u/bulbaquil 23m ago

Better yet, if you happen to have your high school yearbook around, put an X beside every third boy in your class. They died in the war. See how many X's there are just on the first page. See how many of them are people you personally knew.

208

u/RumHamComesback 6h ago

People really criticize European leaders for giving into Hitler but the reality is nobody wanted another WW1 because it was so deeply traumatizing with so much loss. The problem was they expected Hitler to stop because he felt the same way but instead he kept going.

99

u/Eldias 5h ago

This is why comments on reddit bemoaning "appeasement" drive me crazy. The heads of Europe would have been dragged in to the streets and shot had they openly talked about war to stop Germany a single moment sooner than they did.

38

u/nolok 5h ago edited 3h ago

Exactly, Chamberlain coming back with "war" would mean Chamberlain in a cell or hanged. That guy had no choice, which doesn't change that it was still the bad choice

People saying the opposite are clamoring for politics starting a war against the majority wish of their own people and I don't think they thought that through...

17

u/axeil55 3h ago

And to give Chamberlain some grace he knew that the UK (and France) were completely unable to fight at the time of the Munich Conference. He sold "peace in our time" as the best of a bad situation and then started directing a lot of defense actions in case Germany tried something.

It was a fairly good play in a rough situation.

5

u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Their biggest mistake was not rolling into the Ruhr when Germany invaded Poland. The "peace in our time" like you said bought Britain time to build up arms, which came in handy in 1940.

1

u/OldAccountIsGlitched 1h ago

Britain wasn't ready to back up France and French doctrine wasn't very mobile. Not to mention Stalin started pulling shit almost immediately. It's an easy decision to make in hindsight. But I can understand why the French pulled back.

6

u/Mabfred 2h ago

Well, it might seem so if you are British, but it was part of the reason, why Czechoslovak public opinion was much more open to Soviets after the war. Sure, the Soviets shortly showed their real intentions, but that did not much help to cover the "Munich Betrayal".
The feeling of betrayal by UK and France is relevant to this day - I believe it is one of the factors playing into the anti-EU sentiment of the West being callous and not really our ally (which is a narrative strongly pushed by the Russian propaganda).

5

u/axeil55 2h ago

Oh yeah if you were Czechoslovak I can imagine it would be rather infuriating and build some deep resentment and I don't blame them for it. They were abandoned and that sucked.

As an aside, I've visited Prague and it was probably my favorite city I've ever been to. Absolutely wonderful place.

6

u/inevitablelizard 3h ago

Chamberlain also made a lot of efforts to prepare us for the outbreak of war. There is an argument that he was simply buying time and didn't actually believe it would work long term.

4

u/Scuterius_Floridae 2h ago

Id be wary if I had to fight in the Somme and lived

12

u/adamgerd 5h ago

Sure that’s true, but it’s a lot easier when it’s not your country that’s the one being sold for peace

31

u/woodubahoo 6h ago

"They expected Hitler to stop."

Deja vu in 2026...

3

u/AltGrendel 4h ago

This is an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered, thank you.

4

u/this_knee 6h ago

A cancer

1

u/KaraAliasRaidra 3h ago

There was a part in Maus by Art Spiegelman in which Vladek explained that when the war first started, a lot of people in Poland assumed the Germans would take back the territory they'd lost previously and that would be the end of it. There were people (such as Vladek's father-in-law and his friends) who didn't take the war seriously at first because they assumed it would be over "like lightning" and there wouldn't be any issues.

47

u/ZirePhiinix 7h ago

WW1 was a real meat grinder. Literally blown to bits was how cannons worked. Those are the lucky ones. If there were trees then you get to eat a face full of splinters mixed in dirt and guts, and die from infections instead.

12

u/Tim-oBedlam 5h ago

All wars are hell but I can't think of a more terrible place to be a soldier than the trenches of WW1 in the Western Front.

Stalingrad probably tops it for "most horrible" but not many other battles would.

5

u/nolok 5h ago

It's also thé first time we learned how "modern" factories could produce weaponry, and the first time we tried all those cool chemicals stuff on an industrial war scale and... Eventually Hitler banned some stuff like chemicals weapon because what he saw in ww1 was not to ever be allowed again.

3

u/oompaloompa465 2h ago

you don't even need to be in pieces..Explosions also kill from internal trauma. You are whole on the outside, but all your blood vessels bursted internally

8

u/MCJokeExplainer 5h ago

My high school history teacher really hammered home how bad WWI was and it really helped me understand European history a lot better. America gets taught a lot about WWII, but very little about WWI.

Also, I think the film A Very Long Engagement is one of the better "horrors of war" movies out there. Highly recommend. (And nothing the director made after that lol)

3

u/Tim-oBedlam 5h ago

I think that's true. To the extent that American high school students learn about WW1, it's often "hey, we showed up and kicked German ass and showed those Frenchies a thing or two, right?"

We actually had pretty high casualty counts considering the US was only involved in active combat for a few months.

4

u/Freakears 4h ago

I had a professor once tell me that if you go to France’s military academy, they have plaques listing the names of the members of each graduating class that were killed. You get to 1914 and it doesn’t list names. It simply says that every single cadet from the class of 1914 was killed.

2

u/Tim-oBedlam 4h ago

whoa. that's sobering.

3

u/julius_sphincter 4h ago

America just doesn't have any living generations that have experienced Total War. America hasn't been faced with a real threat on it's soil since the Civil War.

I am NOT trying to diminish the effects that our wars have had on our service members that have been involved or their experiences in them, I'm only speaking of our civilian population. As an elder Millennial, the US has been involved in a war pretty much my whole life, but it's always been distant. Our population overall opposes war, but it doesn't have the visceral effect on the population the way it would for countries that have had massive conflict within or near their own borders

3

u/PropagandaPagoda 4h ago

Americans are taught in schools that we don't really have context for the idea of a war at home in living memory. Many of us are at least aware we don't get it and have thought about it.

1

u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Right.

The only time that's happened was the Civil War in the South, and certain areas in the Indian Wars, like western Minnesota during the Dakota Conflict in 1862 or King Philip's War in New England in the 1670s.

The generation that remembers WW2 is passing into memory, and I think that might account for the increase in bellicosity we see around the world in the last 10 years.

1

u/Medicine_Ball 5h ago

We are taught about this in school, 8th grade for me. It's just that no one pays attention or remembers.

1

u/OldeManKenobi 4h ago

This was incredibly difficult for me to visualize as an American. A single visit to Douaumont Ossuary instantly put the losses into perspective. I've never seen anything like it.

1

u/Gavorn 4h ago

It's more so that the last war that was fought on our soil was the Civil War.

To compare it would be like having a second civil war 20 years later.

The end of the Civil War turned into a trench warfare meat grinder.

135

u/procrastambitious 8h ago

I went down a rabbit hole on Petain. There are organisations in France literally called something like "organisation for the rehabilitation of Petain's legacy". They're all right-wing lunatics as far as I know, but this exists.

11

u/Slackbeing 4h ago

You can even find monarchists in France today, a great number of them, mostly on Facebook. I don't recommend the rabbit hole though.

1

u/DeliciousPangolin 1h ago

I stumbled on a tiny local museum in Brittany at one point, near Quiberon IIRC, that was all about the horrors of the French Revolution. Discovered later that it was run by a group of neo-monarchists.

3

u/abqguardian 5h ago

There's a very good argument that Petain is unfairly vilified. He wasnt a secret Nazi or anything. France was collapsing and someone needed to step up and lead what was left of France the best they could. Its easy to vilify Petain, but that ignores the reality of the time.

22

u/nolok 4h ago

He could have surrendered, the armistice was a betrayal like no other that fucked our allies and even French people.

Also, that point of view stopped working the moment he went ahead and pushed for more than the nazi asked for, notably against jews, specially because he wanted to earn good boy points from Germany to be they happy 2nd / good loyal dog in controlling Europe. That's when he went from "yeah what else could he do" to "fuck everything about that guy".

2

u/Vacant_Motto 2h ago

He was just the man in ww1, it's so hard to not want to stick up for him. Probably the best answer to this question, really. What a bastard. I would have been SO pissed of if I was a French guy back then

•

u/DeliciousPangolin 50m ago

One of the main things the French public was expecting out of an armistice was the swift return of French POWs. Instead, Hitler kept them for the rest of the war to use as slave labor in Germany. Pétain was totally fine with that, and in fact collaborated to ship hundreds of thousands of French civilians to Germany throughout the war to use as slaves.

0

u/hurdeehurr 2h ago

It's easy to judge in hindsight and because well.. It's Nazi's but IMO he made the right choice.

Of all the countries involved in WW2 you can't say that France came out hurt the most and that the population suffered. Humiliation yes but compare Paris to Berlin and you get the idea.

They were cooked as soon as Hitler made it through the Ardennes and the only chance at retaining any tiny fraction of control of the country would have to be a collaborative government.. What other choice?

94

u/WiggyDiggyPooPoo 9h ago

"They shall not pass"

It's a tie for me between Gandalf vs The Balrog, or The French Divers in World War Z when they broke through a wall and a horde of Zombies attacked.

218

u/Sycopathy 9h ago

I'm sure the rest of your comment is more accurate but the LOTR line isn't a Verdun reference, intentionally at least. In the book Tolkien writes "You cannot pass" and Ian McKellen even said he just messed up the line on the day of filming. Seems like a reference he'd bring up if it was a real inspiration.

167

u/nolok 8h ago

Ah! Tolkien has been pretty vocal about his ww1 experience and how the trenches essentially built-in up his view of mordor that's why I always linked the two given how similar they are

30

u/ObeisanceProse 8h ago

Didn't he famously refuse to admit the quite obvious links between his works and WWI

62

u/Tim-oBedlam 8h ago

In the Appendix to LotR he strongly rejected any kind of allegory in the book, and specifically refuted any allegory about World War II, but said that if any war had informed his thinking it was WW1, then he drops a startling comment, just in passing: "I served in the Great War, and by the end of the war all but one of my childhood friends were dead."

Wait, what?

That explains, I think, the overall melancholy tone of the books, where something great and beautiful is passing into memory.

The Dead Marshes are basically a WW1 battlefield, like Passchendaele or the Somme.

39

u/nolok 8h ago edited 5h ago

It's very complex, it's essentially "yes it's a massive influence on me and how I think and view things but no I didn't take influence from it", coupled with at the time looking appropriate questions like are the German and Soviets orks and hurukai and that kind of bullshit that leads one to say it's absolutely separate.

At the end of the day you go through hell with a general war cry of they shall not pass and then you make a war cry of you cannot pass, I think we can all see where this might have be coming from, and why he doesn't want that shit show to define his work.

10

u/onward_upward_tt 7h ago

This is exactly how I see the works. Crazy how a little bit of nuance can really bring everything into tight focus.

13

u/tibbles1 6h ago

He famously hated allegory on principle.

So he denied it on principal, but the link is obvious. The Scouring of the Shire is pure allegory, but Tolkien denied it to his last day.

12

u/Collegenoob 7h ago

He despised allegory and frequently criticized C. S. Lewis's frequent use of it. despite his own obvious parallels to the bible.

3

u/TastyBrainMeats 6h ago

What obvious parallels?

3

u/Collegenoob 6h ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-MOSEbRUE4

No way I could put it in a better way than this

2

u/TastyBrainMeats 3h ago

... Yeah, okay, that's pretty darn clear, welp.

7

u/Bazrum 6h ago

Well the Jesus figure sent to guide people (namely man and innocents) gets resurrected into a glowing white, purified form, for one

9

u/Garblin 5h ago

To call that a bible specific reference does not give Tolkein nearly enough credit. The trope of a returned diety is present in a huge number of religious traditions, so to say that Tolkein was just copying the bible is completely ignoring that the man was drawing from a much broader group of traditions.

-1

u/Bazrum 3h ago

I never said he was copying the Bible, I just pointed out single parallel that fits with biblical imagery and the discussion around us. No shit the Christians don’t have sole ownership of the trope

→ More replies (0)

2

u/TastyBrainMeats 4h ago

Is... is that a Bible thing?

I'm not very well versed with Christianity, sorry.

3

u/Bazrum 3h ago

Is Jesus returning a Bible thing? Yes

Is Gandalf returning a reference to that? Potentially. There are lots of tropes and traditions about resurrection, not just from Christianity, but it’s probably the most likely explanation for it. Don’t have proof though

3

u/Garblin 3h ago

it happens in the bible, but it's definitely not a christianity original

1

u/JeffTek 8h ago

Yeah i think dude had it wrong. As far as i know Tolkien was always pretty clear that any parallels between lotr and ww1 were just coincidence

30

u/CyborgBee 8h ago

Tolkien was very definitive that LotR wasn't an allegory - i.e you can't map it directly to WW1 with the Orcs as the Germans - but I believe he did say in one of his letters that the physical appearance of Mordor was partially inspired by the Somme. The many parallels certainly aren't a coincidence, anyway - most were likely unintentional, but he was so deeply affected by the war that it inevitably has a massive impact on the story

9

u/BrainDamage2029 5h ago

Actually famously Tolkien said WWI had nothing to do with Lord of the Rings…

…it’s just a coincidence it’s about these quaint little friends being recruited into a horrifying war they want no part in and at one point they cross a battlefield that has scarred the landscape and has stinking toxic air where the ghosts of the dead might try to drag you down with them. Total coincidence. The war was fine and Tolkien hates metaphors.

18

u/shogi_x 9h ago

TIL! All this time and I had no idea.

9

u/criminalsunrise 7h ago

And - just to be annoying - “you cannot pass” fits how ‘magic’ of the Istari works in Tolkien’s world. They are just portals for the knowing of Eru (God) and so Gandalf saying the Balrog cannot pass is because there is no allowable situation in Eru’s world where it will pass. When this was changed to “you shall not pass” it became a threat rather than being coherent with the world.

Still, it was a kick-ass scene.

4

u/Magic__Man 7h ago

Tolkiens work is filled with allegory, metaphor, and references though, and he denied pretty much all of them. While this sounds weird to say, I'm not sure Tolkien's word is trustworthy of what in his books is allegorical or not, because clearly plenty of it is.

Either he accidentally kept clearly referencing historical events and people, or he deliberately filled his books with them but denied it so that readers can form their own opinions.

3

u/DerProfessor 6h ago

Actually, it IS a Verdun reference. A very famous one, that became one of the lynchpins of French propaganda in 1917-1918.

But it was Gen. Nivelle, not Petain, who uttered "They shall not pass."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_shall_not_pass

I am certain that Tolkien was influenced by this... much of his work was a WWI (and then WWII) allegory.

5

u/Sycopathy 6h ago

It making sense that it would be a Verdun reference is not the same as any authors of the lines in any version of LOTR saying it was so.

You can believe it as a part of a broader literally analysis but it's not a fact it's an opinion.

1

u/Reverent_Corsair_MTG 7h ago

…It is a Verdun reference. I’ve reread the comment twice and don’t see anyone mentioning LOTR except you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_shall_not_pass

5

u/Sycopathy 6h ago

They edited the comment after mine if you check the other responses to my comment.

I don't have a problem with you thinking that I was just pointing out that there's no actual evidence that's intentionally the case. People just say so because it makes sense.

Neither the author of the original text or the actor who adlibbed the movie line claim anything of the sort.

1

u/Reverent_Corsair_MTG 6h ago

Ah, my apologies! They also got the wrong person as it’s attributed to Robert Nivelle who replaced Petain so alls well regardless.

Also as an emerging Tolkien fan I didn’t know the bit about the movie, so thank you for your comment

-1

u/NomDePlumeOrBloom 6h ago

Thank you! Almost every time it's quoted it's "you shall not pass" and I die a little bit inside.

-1

u/parnaoia 6h ago

jesus christ , I forgot how stupid Madonna looked with that eye patch. To be 61 and wear that shit on the Graham Norton show of all places, where everyone is as comfortable as they can be smh

51

u/Korps_de_Krieg 8h ago

As an American, I ache for the day we aren’t the country of Trump. Desperately.

There is a ton of historical nuance here I wasn’t aware of, thanks for taking the time to write this up.

5

u/rutherfraud1876 6h ago

I guess if he had shot down one of the 9/11 planes from his private jet that would be an analogy for Petain in WW1

0

u/RJ815 4h ago

If Nuremburg trials don't happen again I think the US will remain the country of Trump in practice because of the outsized global effects and damage the second administration has done, not to mention the utter lack of trust in its citizenry to not just install another dictator when the timing is better. A radical shift needs to happen to the US to even have a chance. Germany did it, but the US by and large has been historically shameless about their white nationalism, which is exactly how it to the current moment.

6

u/jobblejosh 6h ago

It's also worth noting that European wars prior to The Great War (it was called that as it was thought to be the war to end all wars; such was the impact) were essentially two large fronts of men marching at each other, mainly with swords, then swords and pikes, then muskets and pikes, and cavalry thrown in for good measure.

This was all perfectly fine and doctrine essentially revolved around out-maneuvring and flanking your adversaries, using the terrain to your advantage.

The advent of mechanised warfare, machine guns, mass arms, armour, modern logistics, and camouflage essentially stumped that.

No longer would the tactics of line infantry marching and skirmishing work.

Two machine gun emplacements could mow down brigades of men before they could march up.

Likewise those machine guns couldn't advance because huge armies of men could arrive before your emplacements could redeploy (and so your machine guns would be overrun).

The pace of advancement and attempting to outflank your enemy therefore slowed dramatically as thousands of men were sent to a meat grinder before command realised the futility of this approach. This was on both sides.

The solution for both sides was entrenchment. Dig a big pit parallel to the lines of battle, in the earth, and hide your soldiers in it so they didn't get mown down by machine guns and the other army.

Every now and then, one side would attempt to advance and break the stalemate, by sections going over the top and trying to kill the other army.

All the while, artillery emplacements behind the front lines would shoot shell after shell into the trenches, hoping to hit (targeting, accuracy, etc wasn't great, especially with camouflage) something and kill someone.

Chemical weapons were employed as mass-casualty devices, to limited success.

Anything to gain an advantage and break the stalemate.

There's a reason that The Somme, like Verdun, is hallowed ground amongst UK and empire forces. General Haig thought a sustained artillery bombardment and sapper mining would blitz German lines, such that infantry could overtop and essentially walk through no-man's land, as well as his beloved cavalry charges (Haig loved his cavalry).

The bombardment wasn't nearly as effective as it could have been, for a variety of reasons, leaving German lines mostly intact. As such, it was a complete bloodbath as tens of thousands of men and horses walked towards their death.

A particular recruiting tactic was 'Pals Battalions'. The idea was that to encourage recruitment, entire battalions of men would be formed up from the same villages, so the impressionable young men could 'join the good fight with their friends'.

Of course, this meant that when battalions suffered heavy losses, because they were all together, entire villages lost their young men. An entire generation, wiped out.

There are a few places in the UK known as Thankful Villages; places lucky enough to not have lost a single serving soldier. There are tens of thousands of settlements in the UK. There are 32 Thankful Villages.

2

u/Hopefulkitty 5h ago

That's something I noticed driving through the UK. Every city and town has a WWI monument. Most do not have WWII. It feels like one was so traumatizing, they were all collectively grieving, and two was more like "we need to forget and move on with our lives. We can't greive 20 years again." Not that they were callous, they just seemed empathetically depleted by that point.

19

u/sofixa11 8h ago

Then he turned around and betrayed everything ? And not even surrendered but doing a shitty armistice forcing our forces to turn on the rest of the allies, and then he cooperate with the nazis? Forget the fall from grace for him, for the French people this was as shitty and "all is doomed" as it gets. It's also, on the opposite, another reason for our absolute worship of De Gaulle.

To be fair, he was right in so far as France could not continue fighting the Germans. There was no army left to fight, morale was in the gutter. The government could have evacuated to the colonies and continued from there, yes, but that meant abandoning all of mainland France to German occupation. Germany that just destroyed almost all of the French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czechoslovak, secent parts of the British armies. That was friends with the remaining big power on the continent, the Soviers. They were unstoppable.

Almost everyone thought the overall war is almost over, and Britain wouldn't be able to continue alone with almost no army. That's also why it was an armistice and not a definitive peace, everyone thought the actual full peace deal will come any day. Which is also why French POWs remained in Germany, it was assumed the war will be over quickly and it will be solved then. Even the Brits weren't certain they'll continue fighting, the main Churchill alternative for PM was Lord Halifax who was for a negotiated peace.

So, the surrender wasn't a bad choice within that context.

The collaboration afterwards was despicable of course, nobody sane can deny that. But I can't fault him for thinking a surrender is better than prolonging the inevitable. Don't forget that it took a few years of Allied success before de Gaulle managed to have any significant troops under his command. There were few in France or the colonies that had an interest in continuing the fight.

3

u/OldeManKenobi 7h ago

Visiting Verdun was a transformative experience for me as an American. I think that you're spot on in your assessment.

6

u/RonocNYC 6h ago

saving us from America

What does this refer to?

9

u/nolok 6h ago edited 5h ago

Amgot plan for France (end of the republic, French dollar controlled by America, American administration and occupation of the country,...). America recognized vichy France not de Gaulle 's free France, so for them France was a defeated country to be treated like the others. De Gaulle ended that, thanks also to massive help and support from Churchill (who didn't want UK to stand alone against the soviet in Europe, if the US retreated in isolationism again) and surprisingly Stalin (who just liked the guy who annoyed the US, basically)

6

u/ewoksith 6h ago

You write beautifully. Meanwhile I'm learning history while browsing reddit.

2

u/PuzzleheadedMix6346 7h ago

This really puts the emotional weight of it into perspective. he part about De Gaulle giving people a way to say “that wasn’t all of us” honestly hit me. Imagine watching someone you once saw as the symbol of your country become tied to its darkest moment.

2

u/Hopefulkitty 5h ago

Listen to Blueprint for Amageddon by Dan Carlin. I learned more from those 20 hours about WWI than I ever learned in school. It seems like you have to purchase it these days, but it's absolutely worth the $15, and Carlin deserves every penny. It gave me a visceral, intense understanding of what it was actually like, and 11 years after listening to it the first time, there are parts that I still remember vividly.

They Shall Not Grow Old is an amazing film Peter Jackson put out on the 100th anniversary of peace. He spent years gathering, correcting and colorizing film, photos and sound from WWI. He has a whole collection of uniforms he acquired, so that his team would be able to accurately color everything. It's an amazing and sobering documentary. 10/10, 5 stars, must watch.

2

u/Daegul_Dinguruth 6h ago

I cannot think any figure that can overshadow a non traitorus Petain save Charlemagne, la Pucelle and Napoleon. So top 5 is fair.

2

u/Greengage1 6h ago

What’s your theory on why Petain did it? Do you think he genuinely thought it was the only way for France to survive? Or what was his motivation?

7

u/nolok 5h ago

I should point that this "why" is not a well received question in France, because it's used as a tool by the far right to say he had his reason and made him better seen by the modern eyes, notably on his god awful treatment of jews where he went above and beyond anything Germany ever asked. So im not sure I'm the right person to answer that.

But from what I read in the matter (and I read a lot) it seems to start from a genuine belief that Paris has fallen and thus the German have won over Europe and they won't be stopped, and better a France that survive in that context than a France that disappears. And then as Germany's grip on vichy became harder and harder, he started doing more and more to please them, losing sight of what he was actually doing, blinded by his original goal.

A sort of "better vassal than dead" attitude, which may very well explain part of France's "best of allies never vassal" attitude to the US after the war: we knew the cost.

1

u/Greengage1 5h ago

Thanks, and also thanks for letting me know it’s not a good topic to bring up in France. I see why that would be the case, there can be a fine line between exploring someone’s psychology and justifying their actions.

I love your country by the way, I’ve been twice and really want to go back again.

2

u/LyraStygian 4h ago

And Verdun was the absolute shit show of ww1, the thing that terrified France personified by one name. And Petain was the hero of it, as much as such a thing can have hero.

So basically if Emily Blunt went on to become an alt-right podcaster.

3

u/Abyssal_Groot 6h ago

While I agree with the broad context of this, I feel like it also contains a bit of post-war revisionism.

In 1940 the armistice was welcomed by the majority of the French, and there was strong anti-British sentiment following Mers-el-Kébir.

It essentially took Germany occupying the free zone, and then the STO, for that mentality to shift and for De Gaulle to become the national figure --- a man who in 1940 was virtually unknown and had been sentenced to death in absentia by Vichy.

2

u/nolok 5h ago

I don't disagree, but you will need to add the difference between the 1940 Petain and what he sold to his people, compared to... Well essentially everything after.

But overall I agree. I would add that a lot of European countries, I would say a majority, at the time would have agreed to take the same deal if in the same position. It's very common that the UK mock Chamberlain nowadays but he could never come back to the UK with war the public wasn't for it at all.

I was talking more on thé moral psyche of it than what the everyday people actually did or wanted. Similarly the image of the French in ww2 is the resistance, but they were always a small minority of the population.

We were defeated and we took it like a defeated nation. That's what I mean in part in my last paragraph about De Gaulle giving us an out.

1

u/Abyssal_Groot 5h ago

I'm just trying to say that this part:

And not even surrendered but doing a shitty armistice forcing our forces to turn on the rest of the allies

Is close to what the majority wanted at the time. They wanted out of the war and the British just killed over a thousand French sailors.

Everything else, including what you just said, is quite accurate.

1

u/Wloak 6h ago

It is worth at least mentioning that many countries that fought in WWII became heavily isolationist and nationalistic between then and WWII because it was so devastating it was still just called The Great War or the war to end all wars.

The US for example suffered a fraction of the casualties of European countries like France and the UK but after everyone whether they fought or not wanted to stay out of WWII. There was also a massive US Nazi party, German was the #2 spoken language, many people still had family in Germany so it was a natural ally, etc. It wasn't universal but I wouldn't be surprised if given the chance many would have joined them instead of the allies.

1

u/Hopefulkitty 4h ago

I live in Wisconsin, and we have a heavy German ancestry. Chicago has the largest concentration of Polish people outside of Warsaw. My grandparents wedding certificates are American, but written in German. Until WWII, many cities in Wisconsin had German language newspapers. I grew up around towns like New Berlin and never registered that it was obviously named after Berlin. (Mainly because it's pronounced with different syllables emphasized.) I am pretty good at telling the difference between a German and Polish surname. Milwaukee was settled by the Germans, because the water was similar to theirs, so they could make beer like they did back home. A large amount of our common food is German derived. Seemingly everyone has their own way of making the perfect brat, and driving around on a Saturday, you can stop at a grocery store, hardware store or gas station to buy a brat from a baseball team's fundraiser. Our major league baseball team literally has a sausage mascot race, and people were mad when they added a Chorizo to the brat, polish, and hotdog mascots. All that to say, German still is a major influence here. Growing up, I'm not sure if I knew anyone that didn't have some German ancestry. My church sang Christmas Eve hymns in German, and the German roots is why Lutheran is the major protestant religion in the Midwest.

There were several POW camps in Wisconsin during WWII. The POWs felt very much at home here. The landscape is similar, the climate is too. They recognized surnames, the food, and lots of people still spoke German. The farmwork they did as prisoners was even similar crops to what they grew at home. They felt so comfortable here, a lot of the POWs never went home. They figured there was nothing left for them in Germany, and things here didn't seem that different, so they just stuck around and married into the other German families around.

1

u/Realistic-River-1941 6h ago

I think something similar has been a factor in the UK; for over a century the collective fear has been of the Somme and Ypres, not of a foreign tanks appearing on the streets or bloke with a moustache taking over and disappearing people.

1

u/Hopefulkitty 5h ago

I can usually tell how ignorant someone is when they call the French cowards for bending to the Nazis. WWI was absolutely devastating for the French, and I can absolutely see why they wanted absolutely nothing to do with another one. The German's also caught them on their back foot a bit, so attempting to fight would have gotten a lot of people killed. I also understand why they didn't want Paris to be destroyed. The shear amount of art, history and architecture that would have been lost would have been devastating to culture, and it was a battle they knew they would lose. It made sense to forfeit the city, regroup, and fight another day.

Those people also don't understand that the Vichy government was not the French people. The French Resistance is famous for a reason. So many common people said "absolutely not" and worked against the Vichy and the Germans.

I do have a favorite little piece of trivia about the liberation of Paris. There was an American soldier who had read a guidebook about Paris, and remembered how long the Champs Elysee was from the L'arc du triomphe to Place de la Concord. He was in a tank at one end, and there was a German tank at the other. Everyone thought it was too far for good aim, but since he remembered the distance, he dialed it in and destroyed the tank with one shot.

1

u/Germanofthebored 2h ago

I have to say, at some level I sympathize with Petain, After been through the meat grinder of trench warfare in WW1, I can understand why you wouldn't have the fight left in you to do it again.

1

u/Mr-Blah 1h ago

Sounds like the horrors that he saw pushed him into not repeating them with little hope of actually winning. Not excusing him, but it's not hard to see why a man who's traumatised by Verdun, once in power, would try and prevent others to live the same horrors.

Even if the overall outcome is factually worse.

1

u/unhappinessNvrCame 1h ago

Holy s, you think de gaul saved France from the United States? I knew French people were out of touch from centuries of humiliation, but this is the sweetest cherry on top.

Daddy USA saved you from the USSR and contemporary Russia.

Sub 2% defence spending lol. When are you sending troops to Ukraine? You said you would.

Is France the equivalent to European Disney Land?

•

u/Crafty-One-5104 55m ago edited 42m ago

Is Petain’s trauma from leading one of the most devastating wars in all mankind, possibly why he couldn’t consider doing it again?

De Gaul was also Petain’s protege. He argued for a more modern mechanized army and Petain was against this. Additionally, the depression in the 1930’s meant that the government had less to spend on defense. This is part of what went into the (now obviously wrong) group think of the impenetrable wall of defense in the north of France. One of the argument’s Petain and his supporters in government made was that due to immense military superiority they simply didn’t think they could win against Nazi Germany. France had minimal mechanized units at the time. The older generation made a conservative decision that I think we all now disagree with but it was a more nuanced and complicated picture than just collaboration.

Many French of the time didn’t think the Nazi regime would be that bad. Obviously, false in hind-site.

Many other famous and still very admired French were also collaborators. Coco Chanel comes to mind.

Perhaps the very same things that were Petain’s greatest actions also lead him to make his least admired decisions. Perhaps one couldn’t exist without the other.

•

u/PRB74TX 29m ago

He pulled a Rudy Giuilliani.

0

u/Latter_Tip_583 7h ago

allowed us to say we're not the country of Petain, we're the country of De Gaulle.

Nominative determinism at it again. It's almost magic. 

0

u/BedStuyAthletics 5h ago edited 5h ago

saving us from America

Hmm..

0

u/Usernamenotta 4h ago

Sorry, but how did De Gaulle save you from Soviets? As far as I remember, there were no Soviets in France. And wasn t De Gaulle appointed by the Americans? (Or was he the British candidate)

53

u/tibbles1 6h ago

There's a great story about how Charles de Gaulle visited General John Pershing (American WW1 hero who was very old and semi-senile at this point) near the end of WW2. General Pershing asked De Gaulle how his old friend Marshall Petain was doing.

De Gaulle, not having the heart to tell Pershing the truth, just said that the last he heard, the Marshall was well.

143

u/EwOkLuKe 10h ago

Yep, he went from national hero to a pariah and criminal in the span of 2 wars

4

u/Repulsive_Pepper4145 4h ago

The wildest part is that he basically lived long enough to completely rewrite his own legacy. Imagine being remembered as the Lion of Verdun, only to have your name become synonymous with collaboration and betrayal.

10

u/MarionberryPale3102 8h ago

Petain really is one of the clearest examples of a reputation completely flipping over the course of one lifetime. Going from the Lion of Verdun to leading Vichy France is an absolutely brutal fall from grace.

10

u/thirty7inarow 7h ago

'Petain' even sounds like an insult, being just one letter from 'putain', or whore. Fitting for a guy who whored himself out to the Nazis.

8

u/TastyBrainMeats 6h ago

That is offensive to the good name of all honorable whores.

5

u/adamgerd 5h ago

In Czech we had it similar with Emmanuel Moravec

He was a legionary and even the pall bearer for Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, he warned against German revanchism and campaigned to reject the Munich betrayal and fight anyway

But for him the betrayal disillusioned him with the west and democracy, after Munich in protest he said he wanted to resign and join the El Salvador army instead, and after the Nazis took over he became a collaborator instead

12

u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

13

u/KingDarius89 9h ago edited 9h ago

The Zap Brannigan maneuver

7

u/schorschico 9h ago

But it doesn't work if you are not fighting robots with a kill limit!!!

8

u/Lothdorcanie 9h ago

Pétain has been precisely loved by soldiers because he at least seemed to care for their lives so, no, death grinder was not his way. Nivelle was responsible for the blood bath (and failure) of the Chemin des Dames, not Pétain.

3

u/downvotesyourcrap 7h ago

Just read The Art Spy about Rose Valland. The straight up criminal looting and self enrichment of the occupying Nazis and Vichy government were disgusting.

3

u/LeGrandLucifer 6h ago

Reminder that fascism was WAY more popular in Europe than you'd think.

2

u/HippiesBeGoneInc 5h ago

There’s a sad story that De Gaulle came to Washington during WWII and visited Jack Pershing, who by that time was at the end of his life and getting out of it. Pershing asked how was Petain and De Gaulle sympathetically declined to inform him, merely stating that he was well.

2

u/GoAwayLurkin 5h ago

He was also instrumental in quelling the massive mutinies after the 2nd Battle of the Aisne, effectively, relatively humanely and quietly. The fact that French troops had rebelled after multiple hopeless assaults was nearly war losing and kept secret for years. Petain restored morale and trust between officers and men and stabilized an eminent disaster by combination of swift justice for fratricides and understanding for soldiers committed to defending France, but unwilling to counterattack when there was no chance of success.

2

u/Distinct-Energy8128 5h ago

 If you know anything about how important Verdun was in the history of western Europe you know this was a big deal.

Sabaton wrote a song about it (Fields of Verdun), so it must be pretty important.

2

u/Thr1ft3y 2h ago

General Foch would like to have a word about being the most famous French general

2

u/Tunamelts-2 2h ago

This is honestly the best example. Dude went from probably the most important Frenchman since Napoleon to a reviled POS

2

u/Familiar-Cheetah-422 2h ago

Seeing as things turns out in France, he may be hailed as a hero soon if we failed our elections next year :( (our far-right party are 100% petainists, some are neo-nazis, it's a massive shitshow)

2

u/dealingwithhookers 1h ago

Mao Ze Dong was a communist figurehead who unlike Chiang Kai Shek, actually fought battles on the front lines, had the heart of the people. then he decided he wanted to play dictator and cause the death of like 60 million people and take China back into the dark ages. he was the George Washington of China turned Donald Trump.

2

u/[deleted] 1h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Jafroboy 1h ago

They're talking about the decade, you seem to be talking about his age.

•

u/BlueScreenJunky 58m ago

Oh wow you're right, I read "his 30s", which come to think of it doesn't make any sense since he hadn't even fought WW1 then... 

2

u/RockKillsKid 1h ago

there's a great quote from Charles De gaulle about him:

>Marshal Pétain was a great man. He died in 1925, but he did not know it.

1

u/Boogzcorp 7h ago

But would I cross the road to piss on him and then SET him on fire?

1

u/New-Net6994 7h ago

It’s honestly heartbreaking how completely a legacy can change I find it chilling that someone once celebrated as a hero could later become associated with such a dark chapter in history. It really shows why we can’t judge a person only by their greatest moment.

1

u/SailingEncounters 6h ago

I was going to say this.

1

u/Termnia 6h ago

最好的回答

1

u/UniqueLog8386 5h ago

I would piss on him, but only if I could piss more fire.

1

u/FrancoisTruser 3h ago

Interesting, did not know the past of Pétain. But yeah his WW2 actions will forever buried anything else

1

u/PerriwinklePortal 2h ago

Just now realizing that the Battle of Verdun in Edge of Tomorrow is inspired by this event

1

u/tralltonetroll 2h ago

Norway's "I see your Petain and raise you Quisling" - yes the Quisling who coined the phrase "Quisling" - was one of Nansen's men aiding present-day Ukraine during the great famine.

Too high views about himself.

1

u/BrineJones 2h ago

Fantastic answer!

1

u/PurpleToedUnicorn 2h ago

From the "Lion of Verdun" to the Vichy Collaborationist. This gets my vote.

1

u/anjunableep 2h ago

Very interesting, led me down a super interesting rabbit hole that I did not know about, thanks.

1

u/TheValiantWhippet 1h ago

Why would anyone on fire want anyone, other than a well hydrated water, to piss on them?

•

u/hdgdl_mofo 43m ago

This is a really good answer to a not so good question. "Live long enough can mean decades or a few years. Petain was a very old man, when Hitler invaded France. He truly lived long enough to become a villain. Other people mentioned in this thread did something heroic when they were young, and shit a few years later. The would have died a hero if they have commited suicide at a young age. If you get what I mean.

•

u/JaimeRidingHonour 31m ago

He’d fit in well in modern day America

•

u/PlatypusAurelius 15m ago

Sounds similar to Benedict Arnold. He was a well respected general in Washingtons army until he turned coat.

0

u/SoloWingPixy88 8h ago

Imagine if Hitler stopped at Poland. Just called it a day.

-1

u/Brassens71 6h ago

The reason Pétain struck a deal with Hitler is exactly BECAUSE he led the French at Verdun and knew how bad things would get with a new war. He also knew that the French military was just not ready to engage in combat and that the Germans would have no problem side-stepping the useless Maginot Line. He capitulated because that was the least bad option available.

3

u/Able_Reserve5788 2h ago

Doesn't excuse the 4 years that followed of him going above and beyond what the Germans asked of him in setting up his antisemitic policies

2

u/abz_eng 5h ago

that the Germans would have no problem side-stepping the useless Maginot Line

It had already fallen

-2

u/Brassens71 4h ago

France was completely unprepared to fight by the time Petain had to make a decision, and it was a huge part of it.

0

u/nickcan 4h ago

I was gonna say Charles de Gaulle, but Petain is way better.

0

u/Scuterius_Floridae 2h ago

I dont think he is as bad as some french people try to make him out. His country was defeated, and it could have easily been entirely stripped of french rule like many others. I think Petain was a man of a different age, similar to Franco in being a right wing catholic nationalist that was skeptical of communists and jews. Difference is that Franco won and stopped the craziness of republican era spain, and Petain lost.

-1

u/lancea_longini 3h ago

Marshall Petain was like fascism is definitely something he'd rather have than socialism