Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize 2023A Telegraph Book of the YearA Times Spectator and Prospect Book of the YearOne of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentiethcentury French historyFew images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Ptain the great French hero of the First World War shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting Ptain told the French people that he was entering down the road of collaboration. He ended with the words This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History. Five years later in July 1945 the hour of judgement if not yet the judgement of History arrived. Ptain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944.Julian Jackson uses Ptains threeweek trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentiethcentury French history the defeat of 1940 the signing of the armistice and Vichys policy of collaboration what the main prosecutor Mornet called four years to erase from our history. As head of the Vichy regime in the Second Ptain became one of Frances most notorious public figures and the lighteningrod for collective guilt and retribution immediately after the Second World War. In France on Trial Jackson blends politics and personal drama to explore how different national factions sought to try to claim the past or establish their interpretation of it as a way of claiming the present and future.